mshron

One of Aaronson's arguments in the article boils down to the idea that running a full universe simulation (without cheating) on a universe with the same physics as ours may just not be possible computationally; it seems physically plausible that you need a universe to compute a universe.

If that's true, then the simulators would need to be running in a different kind of universe than ours... in which case "ancestor simulation" doesn't really make sense.

I can't speak for FaceTime, but I've found much better success with all of these platforms if everyone in the meeting is wearing headphones. A lot of the latency is from echo cancellation, and that turns off if there's no echo.

At my last company, I let everyone on my team expense comfortable headphones with a boom mic, and it made a huge difference on Google Meet. I've found Zoom to be similar. I can't speak to Slack's latency issues.

I'm also a big fan of Tuple[0] (the pair coding app) for extremely low latency screen sharing / pair coding and that was a huge advantage too.

[0] https://www.tuple.app

Eh. I studied math at an elite university with a lot of people who ended up at these secretive quant hedge funds. They're undeniably brilliant, and as per GP also extremely motivated and hard working (brilliance alone doesn't cut it!).

They're also heavily dependent on collaboration with others, availability of data, the existence of the right tools, and so on. Unlike in comic books, raw intelligence alone doesn't get you very far. But put a bunch of very smart people together for a decade+ with a lot of money on their hands and you can definitely make magic happen.

Not OP but in my experience it’s more likely to Just Work with fewer glitches and at a higher video resolution. I’d like to get away from Zoom but with consulting work it’s the only thing I’ve found that typically works with clients on the first try and with the fewest artifacts.

Some of us do! Check out a whitepaper on that exact point:

https://ai.objectives.institute/whitepaper

It’s weird to have been working on a paper for almost a year and have it launch into this environment, but uptake has been good. My hope is that we will continue to see more nuance around different kinds of alignment risks in the near future. There’s a wide spectrum between biased statistical models and paperclip maximizing overlords, and lots bad but not existentially catastrophic things for the public to want to keep a pulse on.

Higher interest rates mean that investors can earn money by buying bonds, which are lower risk. Riskier investments (stocks, real estate, cryptocurrencies) are less attractive to investors as a result, unless they can provide even more return to compensate for the risk, which is unlikely.

I can't speak for the Japanese restaurants, but I had surprisingly delicious salmon nigiri just from a Seattle grocery store chain. Great flavor, and very inexpensive. I think it was a platter of 12 nigiri for what I'd expect to pay for a supermarket salmon maki in New York. This would have been at a QFC around 2015.

It sounds like you have a good path on your technical skills, so I'm going to suggest something else: take some humanities classes. Pick topics outside of technology that interest you, and learn how to communicate about them. Take as many seminar discussion and writing-heavy classes as you can. Hopefully they are there even at a technical university.

From a career perspective, programming skill is relatively easy to come by. Programming AND speaking AND good writing will put you on a better career path. You won't get stuck after a job or two when you know the tools of the trade but not how to handle things outside the compiler.

But also, just as a person who has to make it in this world, it's good to have more ways of understanding people and systems around you. Humanities students are enriched by taking science and math classes, and getting a new way of seeing things. Technical undergrads who learn to tolerate ambiguity and learn some history are rounder humans.

If you liked this article, the book Lost in Thought[0] also references Bennet and goes into more depth on why spending some of your time learning for its own sake leads to a more fulfilling life.

I’d love more content like this on hn. Done right, tech jobs can afford a lot of leisure, and we don’t have generally good guidance from our culture on how to spend leisure time in a fulfilling way.

[0]https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691178714/lo...

Yeah, and this is per week data, not per year too. So one year of being unvaccinated is equivalent to 17 years of car crash risk.

Table 1, in the linked XLS file for data through 24 September. You can see that it was originally closer to 0.1 (50x protection against death) but it's gone up to 1.1 over the last few months, I'm guessing as immunity has started to wear off.

Look all the way over at "Second dose", the age-standardized mortality rate is 1.1 per 100,000 vs 5.4 per 100,000 for the unvaccinated. 5x protection against death.

Douglas Coffin carves headstones? Score another win for nominative determinism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

Yes, they're both Cory Doctorow

Note that this explains _why_ Cory Doctorow gets a new laptop every year... which was one of the central mysteries of the article currently at #1 on HN, "The Framework is the most exciting laptop I've ever used."[0]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28606962

Warby Parker | Data Engineer, Software Engineer (Data) | Full-time | REMOTE (or New York, NY)

Warby Parker's Data Infrastructure team’s mission is to ensure timely, accurate, and reliable access to data across the company. Our team designs and builds Warby Parker’s data systems and we work closely with Data Engineers, Data Scientists, and other Engineers to increase access data across the organization. In this role, you’ll play a key part in building, scaling, and maintaining our data infrastructure, and your work will impact nearly every employee across the organization.

* https://boards.greenhouse.io/warbyparker/jobs/2582228

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out to chris.bleakley@warbyparker.com

I highly recommend anybody getting into R to skip the base language (which indeed is ancient and full of gotchas) and go straight for the Tidyverse[1]. You can always go back in and learn how to do things the old way later.

Over the last decade, the R community has largely standardized around tools like dplyr, ggplot, tibble, purrr, and so on that make doing data science work way easier to reason about. Much more ergonomic. At my company we switched from using Python to using R for most analytical data science work because the Tidyverse tools make it so much easier to avoid bugs and weird join issues than you get in a more imperative programming environment.

[1] https://www.tidyverse.org/

At least in California wildfires, houses often burn down from random hot embers landing on the roof, not necessarily a giant whoosh of flames engulfing everything. Could be the same here.

Warby Parker | Engineering Manager, Data Engineering | New York | https://www.warbyparker.com

Warby Parker is looking for an Engineering Manager to join our Data Engineering team and play a key part in building, scaling, and maintaining our self-service reporting processes.

Our ideal candidate is a great collaborator with the technical chops to own the evolution of our systems and ensure the best experience for our users. We're looking for someone who can advocate for excellent software development practices and nurture and develop those practices in the team.

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Gold-backed currencies are, similarly, a historical aberration. They only came into being around the 1870s!

States have picked all kinds of units for accounting and tax purposes for literally millennia. Wheat, silver, wool, gold. They adjusted standard weights and measures all the time to manage their debts and the economy. Fiat is the historical norm, going back about five thousand years.

Separately, some governments have made coins out of various things for a little over two thousand years. And separately still, people have traded gold throughout history as a commodity.

But it's just not true that gold and silver were de-facto money somehow until 1971.

Agreed that Docs, Drive, GSuite are all a real enterprise businesses

YouTube though is video ads, and Maps is local ads. I think that reinforces the author's point.

(Open source projects like Tensorflow, Flutter, K8s are nice spin-offs but they're not going to command the same amount of attention or resources as revenue-generating products.)

Don't try to time the market. Read a book like "All About Asset Allocation", recognize that every time feels unique but it's really not, and choose a mix of assets that reflect your risk and reward profile. It's not rocket science.

If you've got 10+ years, keep it mostly in stocks. If you need it sooner, keep it mostly in bonds. Trust in the power of compound interest.

Prefer assets that have a logical reason to go up based on history, not fancy. Businesses and governments pay back bonds from their revenue. Businesses are worth more over time from improvements in efficiency and scale which raises the stock market. Stay away from assets that are basically speculative (gold, crypto, oil, metals, real estate). History shows that speculative investments tend to just track inflation over time, but since they're noisier people can find all kinds of short term patterns to justify investing. Don't fall for it.

Just going to place this here, before people start talking about "platforms" and "publishers" despite neither of those terms being actually in Section 230

"Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act"

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...

I am genuinely baffled how Scott Alexander's post has turned into hundreds and hundreds of comments on cancel culture, as if it was anything near the #1 reason why he'd be in danger if his name was revealed.

Being famous is dangerous in every era, doubly so in an era where anybody unhinged basically has access to the same level of information you used to need a private investigator to get.

Tim Ferris said it well: "The point is this: you don’t need to do anything wrong to get death threats, rape threats, etc. You just need a big enough audience." [0]

The focus should be on the Times threatening to out him for no good reason, not his personal reasons for wanting to stay anonymous.

[0] https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/

Can a mod put [2018] in the title?

That's one causal path, but I don't think it's the only one.

Crises can also lead to pressure on politicians, who pass laws that have an impact even after the crisis is over, sometimes even good ones. The PATRIOT Act isn't the only bill quickly passed out of fear.

Consider the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which ended redlining, and made it through partly out of fear of further rioting after MLK's assassination. That's a big deal, even if no politicians were voted out.

(I assume this is posted because of the preamble on legal realism and George Floyd, which I'm addressing.)

I just finished _Team of Rivals_, an excellent history of Lincoln and the Civil War. Specifically, the political and administrative side of the war, with a lot less focus on the military aspects.

Something that really popped out at me from the book is how often public opinion is in a feedback loop with the law. Both the formal bits and the realist bits.

I think Levine is right when he says that the law is, more-or-less, what the people with tear gas do. But what the people with tear gas can get away with is partly determined by where public opinion is. And even if the laws about restricting police and military actions are often worthless, other laws matter. Like budgets, and procurement rules. Police can't fire tear gas if they can't buy it.

There's no shortcut, but not all is hopeless. Don't give up.

Skill up in the humanities. Pick topics outside of technology that interest you, and learn how to communicate about them. Take as many seminar discussion and writing-heavy classes as you can.

From a career perspective, programming skill is relatively easy to come by. Programming AND speaking AND good writing will put you on a better career path. You won't get stuck after a job or two when you know the tools of the trade but not how to handle things outside the compiler.

But also, just as a person who has to make it in this world, you need more than one frame of reference to make sense of things. Humanities students are enriched by taking science and math classes, and getting a new way of seeing things. STEM undergrads who learn to tolerate ambiguity and learn some history are rounder humans.

Yeah, people can take things too far. There are definitely safe ways to go to a store, if the store is taking precautions. I'm not so sure about indoor restaurants right now in the US, but I guess you could make a case for it.

On the other hand, I can see why being gaslit for a few months would make lots of people neurotic. The sky was really falling for awhile before anybody in power in the US seemed willing to acknowledge it. Personally, I've lost a lot of faith in our public health departments to have the freedom to tell it like it is, or to have the budget to do anything about it. Being in New York City for the last few months probably doesn't help.

The mainstream news didn't really seem to think it was a huge deal mid-February.

I have to disagree, or maybe we have a different idea of what is mainstream. The New York Times front page was making a big stink about the coronavirus in Wuhan as early as mid-January. By mid-February they were already quoting experts in European countries telling people to be prepared for a pandemic.

Even then, what was anybody really able to do to prepare?

For me, more critical than stocking up on anything, was just more time to adjust to the new reality and grieve for what would be lost. I cancelled a number of trips ahead of time, and correctly called that our office wouldn't reopen in two weeks as it had originally been planned to do. I think it's just made the adjustment easier.

Do you have any recommendations for good monthly magazines that do this well?

The Economist is solid, and in the last few years they added professionally recorded audio versions of their content available in tandem with the digital edition that drops every Thursday. It's like a podcast, except fact checked and with a good sense of perspective. I put it on when I'm cooking or cleaning. I'm also a fan of the Financial Times's Big Read (their weekly magazine stories) and they too put those out in audio form.

When I have more time, I like reading Harpers, the Atlantic, and the NY Times magazine.