throw149102

Made me think of Markov chains, and the PageRank algorithm. We should construct causal graphs, then give each of them 1/n weight and iterate over the casual weight splitting out, until the Markov chain reaches a steady state. Then you know what is important causally and what isnt.

One of the major problems of modern-day life is that we are constantly bombarded with indicators of our status - in particular how low it is compared to the elites.

You might think that you could merely escape this by getting of social media, but in reality it's in the physical world too. Every single advertisement is trying to create a void in the viewer, in an attempt to get you to purchase their product. Every billboard, every TV ad, every time you walk into a supermarket... Even if ads don't work on you 99% of the time, the 1% that filter through to your subconscious can really wreck you.

John D. Rockefeller might have been poor compared to our times, in the same way that Julius Caesar or Genghis Khan was. But they didn't have the constant reminder of all the ways they were lacking. The average Roman soldier was 5'5", and I doubt many of them felt short. I've heard stories of men getting leg-lengthening surgery to go from 5'10" to 6'0", which if you don't know is an agonizing procedure of slowly getting your bones pulled beyond their maximum ability to stretch, which takes weeks or even months to even get back to being able to walk.

The all-too-easy answer to this is to just say "Well, comparison is the thief of joy, so just don't compare yourself". But if you want to compete in the job marketplace, or to be considered on dating apps, or just in general to participate in society it's almost a necessity to compare yourself to your peers. Obviously we should all be like the Buddha and not be drawn to comparison but it's a hell of a lot easier to do that when you're the guy on top.

I don't think I've ever found a single person, in real life or online, who never compares themselves to another person. So we should accept that equality in status (and not just in pure-stuff) is an essential ingredient to a happy, functional society.

Anyone have any recommendations (books, courses, videos, etc.) on learning LISP? I've been intrigued by it and want to integrate it into a game I'm building as a development tool but not sure where to start on learning the language.

Reading this on mobile, I feel really lost about what the article is trying to say. The problem is all the sources are in between the essay-bits. I would prefer it if the author just used footnotes like Wikipedia when citing a claim and stuck all the sources on at the end.

One time I had a conversation with a coworker who was asking me what they thought was a simple question.

I tried to explain over and over again that I didn't think the question was very simple, that there could be at least 3 different answers depending on the context and that he would have to specify more. But he was so certain that it was simple that he didn't want to listen to any of my explanations. Eventually it came down to him trying to force me into saying either:

a. That I was too stupid to answer or even understand the question. b. Some false solution to the problem that I already knew wouldn't work with the reliability we needed.

From that point on, I was pretty damn sure that I didn't want to work with this coworker ever again, and I eventually left the company largely because of them (this obviously wasn't the only issue I had with them, or the company at large, but still it played a large role).

I fit in that classic category of "built a website to blog on" and then never wrote a single post. Not really sure why I never posted anything.

To my ear, they all sound about okay for 4 seconds, until my brain recognizes that there's no tension being built or story being told. It's like every track is 4 seconds of music followed by 4 seconds of music followed by 4 seconds of music rather than a track with a real sense of progression.

Many have said in this thread already that maybe we ought to expect that a ml approach in the next few months/years could be much better. I'm not so confident that it will happen so soon. Audio might end up being a much harder problem than visuals, for a variety of different reasons. Having the time domain built into the medium requires some concept of memory, and even modern neural nets seem to struggle remembering what they said before the most recent prompt.

Once again though, its not impossible. Just requires the right techniques and enough people focused on it.

A short list of things worth thinking about trying, listed in no specific order:

1. Find a project at work that you are interested in, and move over to that.

2. Join a completely different team/org at work.

3. Join a completely different company, doing different types of work.

4. Join a socially responsible company, doing charity work.

5. Quit your job, and take a 6 month break. Don't think about work during that break.

6. Go see a therapist for at least a couple of months.

7. Improve your diet and exercise routines, potentially with professional help from a trainer or a nutritionist.

8. Begin a treatment plan using drugs w/ the approval of a psychiatrist.

9. Begin a treatment plan using drugs without the approval of a psychiatrist, YOLO mushrooms time.

10. Leave your job, and move into an entirely different industry. Go start a farm.

11. Take a trip to a country with a radically different way of life, to gather some perspective.

12. Take some daily time to do something away from a computer - like join a pottery club.

13. Read some philosophy books on the meaning of life. Do some introspection based on what you read.

14. Pick a goal at work, like getting a promotion, and figure out what you need to do that.

I want to also offer a quick theory of burnout. Burnout is caused by 3 different sources:

1. Plain old overwork. Too much on-call is not good for your soul.

2. Mission doubt. If you begin to doubt the reason why you are doing something, you will get burned out.

3. Broken steering. If you feel that nothing you do actually is changing the situation, that you're unable to make meaningful progress in your work.

What I want to stress about this theory is that you don't need all three to have burnout. Some people think that taking an extended vacation is the cure to all burnout, because their theory only accounts for source 1, when you can have burnout from a job where you only work 20 hours a week. You might wish to first try and figure out which of these 3 sources seem like the cause for your burnout, and then which of the 14 options seem most appealing to you.

Changing jobs is (likely) necessary but not sufficient. For example, if OP works a front-end job at Meta and switches to a front-end job at Google, that's unlikely to make them motivated. I don't think you're "missing the point", but I do feel that your answer is very incomplete.

I feel like we are - I can run Minecraft RTX at 4k with acceptable framerate using DLSS 2.0 on a 3090. Minecraft is using pure raytracing (no rasterization). It also isn't using A-SVGF or ReSTIR, so there are 2 pretty big improvements that could be made.

Minecraft RTX does suffer really badly with ghosting when you destroy a light source, but my intuition says that A-SVGF would fix that entirely.

That being said, some of the newest techniques, like ReSTIR PT (a generalized form) have only been published for a couple of months, so current games don't have that yet. But in 3-6 months I would start to expect some games go with a 100% RT approach.

Quantum computing is more worthy of funding than the Metaverse, cryptocurrency, and all of Web3 combined - yet every single thread about quantum computing has to turn into naysaying about how it might not be possible. Bitcoin alone has a market cap of over 300 billion dollars, and all of quantum computing has private + public funding of only 30 billion.

Here's the real question to those of you who don't believe in quantum computing - what do you think that money should be invested in instead? VCs are supposed to try to maximize their returns in high-risk high-reward investments using their knowledge of technology to get an advantage. It doesn't seem like to me there are that many opportunities that aren't already saturated with cash. If quantum computing has a 10% chance of paying out, that's equivalent to the success rate of startups (on average).

My version of the statement reads more like:

If an entity manages to obtain a massive amount of wealth, far surpassing its own needs, and there is a definite need for that money elsewhere, then that is a policy failure.

The obvious example is a single person who's a billionaire - a person doesn't need a billion dollars for a house and some food. But it could also extend to a company, or even a subsection of the government. It's just in that case measuring the need becomes several orders of magnitude harder (what should an F-35 cost anyway?)

As far as definite need, the GP probably had these needs in mind: Healthcare, food, housing, and an uncontaminated environment. I think the US is failing in these aspects in such a big way that I would agree and say "billionaires are policy failures".

To me, caring about life means I must care about fairness. It's not even social or political either - there is something metaphysical or strictly logical about it.

Suppose you lived in a universe where there was no fairness, ever. It was maximally unfair at all points and times. You would drink water and it would turn to sand in your mouth. You would wake up and spears would pierce your eyes. Every action you took to help ease your suffering would instead maximize it, in the most unfair way possible. That sounds like a description of hell to me. I would beg for death in such a universe.

Of course, what you actually mean is that you shouldn't care about fairness so much, you shouldn't "bend yourself out of shape" over it. Getting skipped over for a promotion isn't nearly as bad as burning in hell, obviously. If you don't whine about unfairness and instead just focus on your work, you might end up getting that promotion soon after anyways. In other words, it can be valuable to trade a little unfairness for a lot of "good stuff" (whatever exactly that means in the situation).

I think this might be true, but it sets a really bad precedent. The issue is not accepting unfairness when it is happening to you, but when it is happening to someone else. Imagine telling a coworker who thinks that they're being discriminated against due to their race that they should "accept the unfairness and just deal with reality". IMO they should NOT just learn to accept that. It is deeply unfair and unjust and cannot be worth whatever you get by being quiet.

Finally, it's definitely not how "everything" or even only all businesses work. There are plenty of businesses that are doing their best to promote fairly and honestly, it's just a really hard problem to solve. Maybe unfairness will always find a way to creep back in, that doesn't mean that you should just blindly accept it.

Also re: the comparisons to AWS or Google Cloud - it's still totally different. This is more like your car being unable to start because it can't connect to the cloud. I don't expect that driving my car needs internet access, and I wouldn't expect Bitwarden needs internet access to serve me my passwords that have already been synced.

Lots of people are mentioning that you can host these types of things yourself, I want to say that that is not a solution at all.

The entire point of these hosted password services is that they are a turnkey solution - I could give them to my mom, who knows nothing about technology, and trust that they work. I like using a turnkey solution myself even though I could self-host because I don't want to spend brain cycles on solving the "syncing passwords across multiple devices" issue.

I don't quite understand why Bitwarden even needs to have you login in order to access the passwords. Surely you could just have the salted+hashed passwords on device, and Bitwarden just syncs that data from device to device. If you work in an organization and need to revoke access, just change the password. No need to manage whether or not someone is logged in to Bitwarden.

It sounds as if you only were able to access the password because you had a second device that happened to already be logged in. My guess is that if BW's login servers were having a temporary outage, had you not been logged in you wouldn't have been able to login and therefore been unable to get the passwords.

I've been following this paper to implement materials in a raytracer I'm building. As well as https://blog.selfshadow.com/publications/s2015-shading-cours... and this homework assignment https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~tzli/cse272/homework1.pdf

One point of interest was the paper on quantum computing applied to quantum chemistry[1]. In that paper, they did not find generic exponential speedup for a list of chemistry problems with current quantum algorithms. There are 3 problems with this: a speedup does not need to be exponential in order to be incredibly valuable; a speedup does not need to be extremely generic, just enough to cover real-world use cases; and quantum algorithms are still in their infancy, and it's unclear how much more we might discover in the next 10-20 years.

Furthermore, the paper itself links to a github repository[2] with a list of papers that either imply or use an exponential advantage in quantum chemistry. Now would be a good time to mention that I am not an expert in chemistry, nor have I read the entirety of this list of papers so I am not in a position to go through each and every one to decide how generic their results are or what the limitations are. Perhaps all these papers have fundamental limitations that prevent it from being useful in normal chemistry, only in weird souped-up problems specifically devised for a quantum advantage.

Either way, this paper is by no means conclusive on the subject. There's a ton of more research to be done in multiple fields to know for sure.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2208.02199.pdf [2] https://github.com/seunghoonlee89/Refs_EQA_GSQC

I'm confused by what you wrote, because when I worked there during the pandemic, or even a year into it, almost no one was in the office. The first plan was to bring people back by Jan 2022, but then it was decided that individual directors could decide for their teams what was best. From what I saw while I was there (approx 6 months ago), most desks were still empty.

I don't mean to necessarily disagree with the general tone of what you're saying, though. I felt some of that while I was there.

How is this relevant to the current discussion whatsoever?

According to the PIAAC, 54% of Americans are illiterate. That is, they are able to read simple things like menus, but they are not capable of synthesizing new information from multiple texts, or understanding the nuance of an authors argument. If I recall correctly, Americans scored an average of around 275/500, while the best scoring country, Finland, scored an average of 300/500. (This is a statistically significant jump, and causes a huge portion of those in Finland to not be considered illiterate, but they just begs the question of why the literacy cutoff is where it is.)

Finding KiwiFarms posts that currently dox a user are going to be hard, because now that the site is under increased scrutiny from the public there is likely to be an attempt from moderators to remove posts. We can clearly find posts however that doxxing has been part of the sites history for years.

For example, this post contains an address:

https://kiwifarms.net/threads/onision-james-gregory-jackson-...

Here is a post containing the IP of some user:

https://kiwifarms.net/threads/leonard-f-shaner-jr.9940/page-...

Here is a list of past addresses for someone:

https://kiwifarms.net/threads/russell-greer-just_some_dude_n...

A more charitable version of this argument would build in a series of degrees as to how likely those denigrations are to make stochastic terrorism occur. For example, vague insults directed at a group of people are less likely to cause terrorism than ones associated with a single person. Insults that come loaded with implicit threats (like doxxing) are much more likely to cause stochastic terrorism than those without. Insults and threats against groups who are marginalized in society are more likely to cause terrorism. Insults made in a space full of mentally deranged people are more likely to cause terrorism.

With all of this, it's clear that if you're going to argue that stochastic terrorism even exists, you should believe that it is happening at Kiwi Farms. Incredibly personal, incredibly specific (doxxing), directed at marginalized people, and in a space full of people that are already predisposed to acts of violence.

The homeless probably have struggles getting a card.

First of all, I have to say I hate how the author not only mentions their book, but puts a huge ad cutting into the text telling us we can buy it at "Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Target". This makes it clear to me (regardless if the author has a point!) that the author is financially benefitting off of selling me fear.

Secondly, I hate how liberal thinkpiece authors can never lay the blame at the hands of the people using tech. If you google something as contentious as "Washington Times Antifa Evidence", and you don't even have the integrity to scroll down the page to see if there's any disagreement, then there is nothing Google can do to protect you from the conmen of the world.

Any attempt to "fact-check" will result in an extreme backlash, as conservative laypeople will rightly notice the liberal-slant, and conservative lawmakers will use that as an excuse to punish Google. It will likely be ineffective in changing people's minds, and it may result in serious costs to Google as a company.

I don't have anything to add except fuck Web3, fuck NFTs, fuck play-to-earn, fuck the blockchain, and fuck anyone supporting this garbage. Gamers despise the cryptocurrency craze that bought up their graphics cards to generate random numbers and will never support it en-mass.

Maybe if I have anything to add, it's that gamers already dislike cosmetics without any blockchain nonsense. Cosmetics hurt esports and other competitive gaming by messing with the trained instincts around color/silhouette, and thats before we talk about any actual pay to win mechanics.

I think we might just have different definitions of productive. To me, writing code or reading a paper can be productive, but so can a conversation with my dad or a nice meal out. Basically I see "Productivity" and replace it with "Productivity towards producing more personal utility" where that utility can be anything - happiness, relaxation, actual goods and services, etc.

Furthermore, I think putting on the hat of "productivity" can sometimes reveal unusual things. Like how a conversation with a friend is just repeating the same old dreary boring stuff, and if you put a little effort in you can have a more "productive" conversation.

I mean this is funny but this isn't at all what the post is about. What it means by "productivity porn" is only tangentially related with the hustle sigma male trillionaire grindset stuff.

It's not possible to do uniquely, i.e. producing the unique scene that produced the image, but it's possible to produce some scene that would produce that image.

I don't think anyone can create the metaverse. The technology that needs to be built is a brain-computer interface, but humanity is currently incapable of anything even close to that. No amount of money or political power can make it happen, at least not in the next 50 years.