tachyonbeam

I believe you, and I would rather live in a larger town myself. However, I think that on this front, Canada compares very well to the US, France, the UK, Brazil, China, and Japan (known for its xenophobic culture), to name a few places. No place is perfect, but we have it better here than a lot of other places, on many fronts.

Nice baiting there Jcowell, well played. No country in the world is perfect. Canada is still near the top of the list when it comes to safety and quality of life.

It's true that many first nations people struggle. Canada is taking steps to help them (see accelerated vaccination of native communities) and I sincerely wish them all the best. However, dismantling the police probably isn't going to undo things that happened several centuries ago.

In fact, I am no sociologist, but I would surmise that telling cops that all of them are bastards and exposing them to budget cuts will probably make them behave with less kindness, not more. ACAB is the opposite of constructive. In my opinion, it's a toxic message with the potential to make things worse for everyone, first nations included.

All of that being said, I'm 100% in favor of body cameras that are always enabled, and stricter limits on weapons use by police.

Here in Canada we've had BLM protests, "defund the police" and "ACAB". I don't really understand. As far as I'm concerned Canada is about as close to a utopia as you can get on this planet. We have one of the lowest crime rates in the world. I'm pretty sure if we "defunded the police", things would only get worse.

AFAIK, the "defund the police" chant was supposed to be in response to American police forces buying army vehicles and gear. That is not a thing in Canada. I also get the general impression that whoever came up with "defund the police" has anarchist inclinations. It's basically doublespeak. They keep saying that "defund the police" only means "reform the police", but what they actually want is to dismantle the police, which is exactly what "defund the police" sounds like.

Maybe we could build laptop cases out of carbon fiber and get the best of both worlds? Or at least make laptop cases easier to open for servicing, with standard screws and no plastic clamps.

It seems a lot of the marketing for PC cases and hardware is targeted at young teenage boys 10-16. I wanted to buy a computer case for my mom, and I couldn't find an affordable one without a window on the side.

IMO it can look nice if it's done subtly. I definitely don't want fast animated LEDs on my computer, I think that would just make it harder to concentrate.

But this would force your laptop to be a whole 1.8cm thick! Unthinkable!

The original promise of bitcoin was that it would actually be useful as a currency, for buying stuff. Now that this hasn't panned out, and the problems preventing BTC from being used as a currency fail to be addressed, advocates have shifted the narrative to "bitcoin is digital gold".

IMO, if the Netherlands bans bitcoin, they will also ban other similar cryptos that could actually be used as currencies. That negatively impacts the crypto markets for sure. It's not just about bitcoin.

Would such a ban be hard to enforce? Sure, but not everyone feels comfortable doing things that could land them huge fines or even jail time. I certainly don't.

Gold is used as a store of value because it's been universally recognized as valuable for thousands of years, in almost every culture. Would you really trust your life savings to bitcoin if we're in a climate where more and more countries are banning it? That would make redeeming your digital gold increasingly more illegal and difficult. Crypto bans definitely erode the "digital gold" proposition as well IMO.

The evolution of organisms that gene mishmash (aka sexual reproduction) is thought to be the result of an ongoing arms race between gene sequences that "try" to stay unchanged (in higher level species) and gene sequences that "try" to "free ride" (from viruses etc.)

Sexual reproduction means your species has a very large gene pool, and individuals with new combinations of genes can be produced very quickly. That's not just an advantage against viruses. It's also very useful for adapting rapidly and competing against other species when your environment changes. New threats (and new opportunities) show up all the time, be it dwindling or changing availability of food, climate change (e.g. new ice age), new predators or new preys, and also a group of individuals migrating to a new region of the world with a different climate.

It's like taking a random byte sequence from some binary, shoving it randomly into another, and the new binary gets useful new features.

If you think about it for a moment, our genetic code is kind of designed to work that way.

You get half of your genetic code from your mom, the other half from your dad, and somehow, all of these genes "just work" together. It's kind of miraculous when you think that there are very many genes that encode how your brain works, and how your liver works, your muscles, etc. Somehow, provided the baby can be born, a mishmash of genes from two different individuals almost always works out.

Isn't the US already a net exporter of oil at the moment?

We all need to transition to renewable energy. It's not good for Canada to become more invested in the oil economy, just as electric cars, trucks and renewables are starting to boom. It's neither good for you environmentally or economically if you have a 10+ year horizon.

Is that how it works in Singapore? I know in China you lease land from the government for 50 or 100 years. I do think it's important to be open to ideas, and I think there probably ought to be redistribution of wealth, particularly when it comes to land ownership. That has to be balanced with some minimum set of rights so that people can't be randomly evicted because people in power want that land, and that when people are evicted, they receive fair compensation.

IMO we should probably reduce taxes on house builders. Maybe even give them tax exemptions. Do what we can to increase supply.

Speculators wanting to buy a house, redo the kitchen, and mark up the price 20% 6 months later though? We could just let older, unrenovated houses be cheap. That opens up deals to new home buyers. You can redo the kitchen after buying the house if you really care. You don't need some middle man to do it and mark up the house.

I edited my comment, I had written "permanent resident", when what I actually meant was just "resident".

Maybe? They are a luxury for the upper middle class, and you could easily rent one the same way you rent an airbnb. Those holiday homes do need to belong to someone though, so I suppose it makes no sense to outright ban own multiple homes, but we could structure it so that resale is more highly taxed, particularly resale after a short time (i.e. people "flipping" properties).

Yes I agree, I meant residency requirement, requiring that people live in a country for at least 6 months before buying a house, which could be done on a work or student visa.

I agree that we need to stop treating houses as investments, because they're a basic fundamental need everyone has.

IMO, the problem could be fixed by having stricter laws prohibiting people who aren't residents from owning homes in another country. The requirement to become a resident is only to live in a country for over 6 months out of the year. Before that, you can just rent. We could also do things like limit the number of houses a person can own, and tax every house sale based on capital gains (even primary residences).

However, another problem we have is that interest rates are too low, and there isn't enough construction. Those are harder problems to solve. I really think we should build more, but we'd need denser construction as well. What do you do if you need land to build and there's already a house there, or someone already owns the land? Maybe it's kind of silly to have this idea that a person can "own" a piece of this planet we all live on, but we probably don't want to live in a communist country where the government owns every home and everyone is renting either.

As for interest rates, this is driven by our current economic policy and money printing. Maybe there's a way to somehow detach the interest rate used for mortgages from that in other areas. Surely, the government could print stimulus money and direct it where it's needed without interest rates being artificially controlled? The main problem with these near-zero interest rates is that they completely kill the free market. We keep zombie companies alive and we allow people to speculate on home prices endlessly. That's not natural. In a "true" free market, there's a natural equilibrium between offer and demand, both home prices and rents will fluctuate but they will balance out. My ex's parents bought a home in the 1970s, they only had high school education and were both making minimum wage. Said home is now worth over a million and out of reach of anyone not making 200K+ household income.

I would say you can make your text easier to understand by a large audience by avoiding very rare words that many people don't understand, and sticking to common phrasings. That will make text compress better for sure. I'm sure you get literary brownie points for using 10 different words that mean pretty much the same thing in different contexts, but you should never do that in an engineering textbook, for instance.

That's how I organized my work in grad school. I basically worked when I felt like it. Some weeks that was 80 hours, others just 20, following the natural flow of my motivation. I went for errands in the middle of the day, took time to cook, parties, but also worked late nights and weekends when it felt right. I slept on a shitty futon and ate a lot of ramen noodles, but it sure felt nice to be able to work at my own pace and sleep as much as I needed, yet still manage to publish more than anyone else in my lab.

It's not necessarily the "have nots" who jump on the bandwagon. Many of these mob inciters are clearly middle class or upper middle class. I've even seen news anchors participate, people who earn several hundreds of thousands a year. In some cases, it may have to do with crab mentality. Wanting to pull someone down who has more than them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

However, if you look at the way James Damore was taken down, or that woman who made a stupid joke at the airport, these people weren't particularly rich compared to their peers. I think that had more to do with wanting to silence dissenting voices and kick someone while they're down, never giving them an opportunity to defend themselves or to have an open discussion.

There's a perception in the DL field that encoding things into rules is bad, and that symbolic AI as a whole is bad. Probably because of backlash following the failure of symbolic AI. IMO the ideal is somewhere in the middle. There are things you want neural networks for, and there are also things you probably want rules for. The big advantage of a rule-based system is that it's much more predictable and easier to make sense of.

It's going to be very hard to engineer robust automated systems if we have no way to introspect what's going on inside and everything comes down to the neural networks opinion and behavior on a large suite of individual tests.

The issue today is that all these rules are hard-coded, and the programs need to be rewritten and redeployed every time the laws change.

The programs are probably not being rewritten from scratch. I would argue that: the laws are, or basically should be, unambiguous code, as much as possible. If they can't be effectively translated into code, that signals ambiguity, a potential bug.

IMO a part of the problem here is that you have a misunderstanding on the part of deep learning people. They look at radiology, and they say "these people are just interpreting these pictures, we can train a deep learning model to do that better".

Maybe there's a bit of arrogance too, this idea that deep learning can surpass human performance in every field with enough data. That may be the case, but not if you fundamentally misunderstood the problem that needs to be solved, and the data you need to solve radiology, for instance, isn't all in the image.

Somewhat related: another area where DL seems to fail is anything that requires causal reasoning. The progress in robotics, for instance, hasn't been all that great. People will use DL for perception, but so far, using deep reinforcement learning for control only makes sense for really simple problems such as balancing your robot. When it comes to actually controlling what the robot is going to do next at a high level, people still write rules as programming code.

In terms of radiology and causal reasoning, you could imagine that if you added extra information that allows the model to deduce "this can't be a cancerous tumor because we've performed this other test", you would want your software to make that diagnosis reliably. You can't have it misdiagnose when the tumor is on the right side of the ribcage 30% of the time because there wasn't enough training data where that other test was performed. Strange failure modes like that are unacceptable.

When I went to high school, I remember having to take philosophy schools, and we went into the art of debate, etc. How to argue about different viewpoints without getting emotional, respecting your opponent, proper protocol for discussion.

Liberal values used to mean being tolerant of different view points, being open minded, being kind, respectful, and being aware of the dangers of censorship. We were given banned books to read (e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird). It makes me sad that, as a society, we seem to be losing such values.

I think most people just have a tendency to to repeat dogma they are exposed to, based on the groups they belong in. If you join any group anywhere, be it people who practice yoga, the burning man crowd, or an online forum about programming, you'll find that there's a hierarchy, with some individuals who are highly regarded by the group, you might call them thought leaders. The individuals at the top have certain beliefs, and most people in the group will echo those beliefs as dogma everyone should believe in, and try to suppress dissenting views.

I've always viewed work as means to an end, and that end is getting paid to take care of my family

For most of us, it's also something we're being forced to do for 40-50 hours a week. We spend the best, more productive hours of the prime years of our lives working. So it might as well be something engaging.

People we would rather not be around, I agree. I unfortunately have to deal with some of these online as well though. Ideally this is something that can be discussed with one's manager so that we are no longer forced to work with said people.

As an outsider: what was the problem with integer division?

Working remotely will never be as good for communication IMO. You can set up weekly one-on-ones over your favorite videoconference platform, but there's just so much you can't see being physically separated from your coworkers.

At my previous job, I would bond with my teammates over lunch talking about random things, bouncing ideas, and I feel like we really were a team. We trusted each other. At my new, 100% remote job, sometimes my colleagues are just tuned out, and I have no idea why. I can ask them over our weekly videochat, but it's just not the same. We don't have the same level of trust. I can't read their body language. We can't just have a random 5 minute chat over coffee. Brainstorming online has also proven to be really ineffective. It works really well over lunch, with no stress and no expectations, but planning a brainstorming meeting really can't offer that.

IMO remote work is very weird and dehumanizing. You might feel differently. I know it works for some people, but I really feel like the cohesion in my team is nowhere near as good. Yet I feel like if we were in the same office in person we'd be doing much better.

My ideal balance is 4 days of in-person work and one remote day per week, with flexible working hours.

Same. I lost a small but nonzero amount when a fraudulent crypto exchange went bust. There's a reason FDIC protection exists. This is going to be unpopular, but the value proposition for cryptos isn't there yet IMO. It's either "get rich quick" or "buy drugs online". It really isn't "convenient way to transfer money" yet. I'd rather invest in companies that are actually doing something useful. The value of those seems generally less likely to evaporate overnight. Why would I want to own dogecoins when I can own shares of companies that are changing the world?

Can't wait for the time when i wont be allowed to access a website because I have unsigned drivers running...

If that happens, it will create a market opportunity for websites without DRM or such checks. If you fuck with the ergonomics, you necessarily always create a market opportunity for competitors IMO. That being said, I also would rather use open computing platforms where I can easily install whatever OS, drivers, hardware or userland software I please.

There's an option to limit data sharing as well.