twright0

Sorry! Sorry! $#@%! Sorry!

I really encourage interested folks to read the biography (though it's an undertaking).

According to Caro, part of the background is that the relevant southern Texas precincts were well understood to have vote counts up for purchase; over the course of election counting, both sides would have their controlled districts release counts based on what the other side was reporting to stay in the race. These counts would vary in legitimacy and how skewed they were based on the precinct and need of the candidate that had swayed the boss to their side. But tactics like having armed guards supervise the casting of votes to ensure the favored candidate got a large majority, or simply distributing vote receipts to people who never voted at all and recording votes on their behalf, or making numbers up entirely, were quite common. Typically, though, Caro argues that because both sides did this, and they did it incrementally, it usually wasn't enough to sway an election one way or another, but rather was just part of the cost of doing business. He even says that LBJ lost his Senate election earlier that decade because he got cocky and told the bosses of the districts he had bought to just release all their numbers right away, letting his opposition then juice their numbers just enough to win.

It's really the timing, more than the margin, that makes it clear what happened (and the crudeness of the forgery); after every other precinct reported and finalized, they corrected their number by barely more than needed to win. The 100 to 1 vote margin was actually not that far off from the vote margin that the precinct reported in the first place (... which, of course, really tells you that the whole thing was made up from whole cloth).

An interesting anecdote, another good example of a reasonably modern example of paper ballots enabling election stealing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal

Caro covers this pretty extensively in his LBJ biography series, but it's reasonably clear from the evidence that LBJ won his senate seat by some pretty crude paper voting record manipulation after the fact - changing a '7' to a '9' by writing over the number with a pen - almost certainly with LBJ's knowledge. Given that his senate seat eventually put him in the presidency, it's probably the most consequential voter fraud ever committed in American history (that we know about, I suppose).

Reduce price. Reduce the abominable resource usage. Allow E2E encryption. Increase performance so it doesn't trickle at tens of kilobytes for hours when I have 100Mbps upload and half a terabyte left.

How do you imagine that any of these things would strengthen Dropbox's business at a scale relevant to them?

Reducing price would be straightforwardly bad; most users do not understand resource usage complaints (though I'm not conceding that problem exists - it's a non-factor on my machine); E2E encryption is an anti-feature for a consumer audience who will lock themselves out and demand refunds far above the rate at which anyone will pay for E2E specifically; most users do not have half a terabyte all at once to store nor upload speeds such that the Dropbox app performance is the limiting factor, even if those performance problems are true.

The lack of any major competition

Dropbox's core product faces substantial competition from multiple tech giants (Google Drive, One Drive, iCloud) who have incentive and ability to eat losses on a sync product to sell other services or devices. If they don't find other lines of business to sell alongside sync they will die, and building an incrementally better sync product will not save them.

(I worked at Dropbox a ~decade ago and no longer have any insider insight nor financial stake in the company, but I sympathize that they're in a brutally difficult position in building a sustainable business)

For the better part of a decade people have been buying Teslas under the promise that the cars would drive themselves better than their owner could, or would offset their cost by participating in a self-driving taxi service while their owners were not using them, none of which has come remotely true.

The last third should have been a short epilogue or a full sequel. It's too much of a pivot in terms of tone and focus, and feels incongruous and mismatched with the first two sections (which are excellent). He clearly had a bunch of ideas that didn't fit into the main body of the work and grafted them on anyway; it wasn't bad, it just didn't fit.

The comparison would be Orson Scott Card writing Ender's Game to set up the universe of Speaker for the Dead, but instead making Speaker for the Dead a third of its size and calling it the last few chapters of Ender's Game. They should just be different works in the same setting.

Your calculator won't confidently pretend to conjugate German verbs while doing so incorrectly, though.

According to sixty seconds of googling[0], the extra day makes them eligible for sentence reduction for good behavior.

[0] https://kmlawfirm.com/2022/06/23/whats-the-deal-with-a-year-...

He replies, "I'm Zaphod Beeblebrox!"

This only happens because he was inside a computer simulation of the universe created just for him, so the Vortex shows him he actually is important. Had it happened for real it would have destroyed his mind just like everyone else.

The year that I took AP Physics, every single piece of study material and practice test exercised only really simple math - small numbers, everything cleanly worked out into integers, etc etc. I did almost everything in my head or with quick notes on paper. This pattern was so consistent I almost didn't bring my calculator into the actual exam because I hadn't needed it all year, and grabbed it only at the last second "just in case".

Turns out that was not a design goal of the real exam and basically nothing worked out to neat, small integer solutions - I probably would have hard failed without the calculator. I'm still sort of confused why prep materials and the real exam diverged so much.

The above was referencing stopping on a city street ("Powell between Bush and Sutter"). You're talking about stopping on a highway. These things are not particularly comparable.

Presumably Efani accomplishes that additional protection by maintaining a human support staff they put more resources into training than the average carrier. That's expensive, especially when you consider that it's a relatively niche service (so small user base to amortize that cost over) and presumably only used by people that really care about sim swaps, likely because they are frequently targeted for sim swaps, and thus the training needs to really work. They also have no other lines of business like device sales/financing that could help cover those human operational costs.

That, plus the fact that it's a premium service that is mostly only useful to higher net worth / higher income people, makes it seem reasonable that it would be quite expensive relative to a regular provider.

(~$400 sweater).

From Terry Pratchett:

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

Mostly off-topic, but if you find this compelling, you will certainly enjoy reading the short story "There Is No Antimemetics Division" whose chapters are linked from https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

I benefit from a very robust set of regulatory controls ensuring that food products are as advertised and generally safe for me to consume?

Issuing a fake search warrant is presumably a crime, so they would/should be cooperating with law enforcement about it.

The very first thing you did is write a program that prints a pixel-perfect "memory reset successfully" message to the screen as if you had just cleared it yourself :)

If you meet anyone who disagrees with any of that, let me know

Facebook appears to have disagreed with that; they amplified calls for ethnic cleansing and did not respond to concerns about it, so they must have believed that asking them not to was too much. That's the point.

"Mansions" is hard to quantify; whether a given house was a mansion will be subjective, and doesn't correlate super well with the amount of financial support they gave their child. But if you want to really dig into the details:

Gates

His father was a high powered lawyer in Seattle; his mother was a member on a number of corporate and philanthropic boards, including one that gave her direct access to the Chairman of IBM at the precise moment that Microsoft was attempting to sell software to IBM.

Bezos

His parents loaned him a quarter million dollars to start Amazon in the mid 90s.

Ballmer

His father was a "manager" at Ford, which could mean a wide range of things; he grew up in a very wealthy area.

Allen

He seems to have come from genuinely middle class roots - his parents were a librarian and an elementary school teacher.

Musk

This one is pretty complicated; his father owned an emerald mine and seems to have been quite wealthy, though Elon disputes his father's claim that he invested money in Elon's first company.

Page

Both parents were academics in computer science.

Brin

Both parents were academics, immigrating from the USSR to the US - his father ended up teaching math at the University of Maryland, his mother doing research at NASA.

So that's two (Gates and Bezos) where their parents were significantly wealthy and influential in useful ways; two where it's unclear how much they got real benefit from their parents' wealth, but they certainly didn't grow up poor (Ballmer and Musk); two where the parents weren't rich but academically involved (Page and Brin); and one where they were genuinely just middle class folks (Allen).

how few bad things people can point to that he actually did..

I'd encourage you to read The Power Broker, if you haven't. Some examples that aren't "policy decisions" we can disagree with given our knowledge of how it turned out (eg, building or not building public transit in a given place), but rather things that were clearly morally wrong at the time:

- repeated wholesale destruction of low-income neighborhoods through a variety of bridge, park, and highway construction projects

- evicting farmers and poor rural landowners through opaque legal methods to build highways and parks atop their land

- running a "slum clearance" program that primarily evicted people from slums and demolished them without providing any real place for the humans to go afterwards

- funneling vast sums of money into the pockets of collaborators, friends, and, in the end, himself

The Power Broker paints a nuanced picture, but he did some pretty terrible things in his time.

Sometimes! My attempt with GPT-4 yields a response where it acknowledges the print/len swap, but does not produce correct code in the end - it sort of loses track of what the original goal was. https://chat.openai.com/share/300382cb-ac72-4a75-847c-ecbf5a...

Dihydrogen monoxide too!

I suspect that this comment section is going to fill up with such anecdotes, but his OCW lecture series on Linear Algebra got me through a college course with a less than inspired lecturer. Had no idea he'd been doing it so long, extremely impressive

Most image viewers ignore bytes after the End Of Image in the jpeg format, so you can stick whatever you want on the end.

What gives you confidence its explanations are accurate?

write and explain me more optimised algorithms for certain cryptographic operations

This domain in particular strikes me as a poor choice for this approach. "Don't roll your own crypto... but definitely don't let a language model roll it for you, either"

Maybe a real life reading group or something would help.

This is what it took for me - having a few other people agreeing to a schedule and meeting to talk about what we had read. I ultimately very much enjoyed GR but it is really difficult to read alone for the first time. Both the social pressure to keep at it and the ability to have "what the hell was that" conversations with other people really helped.

(My father's favorite author is Pynchon, so while he slightly prefers Mason & Dixon to GR, it's been in my awareness for a very long time; I think my first attempt was in my teens and I didn't succeed at finishing until my mid twenties)

This doesn't seem accurate - the scenario needs to be imaginable, but that doesn't mean it's a prediction by the author. I could write a story about the downstream effects of discovering FTL travel in 2030, but that doesn't mean I think it's going to happen. Even for something more realistic - something that will probably happen on some timeline, just not right away, like a Mars colony - the author might not want to explore or think about other technological or societal changes that happen in a longer period of time? Fiction is just that, fiction

I think it's more than this - it feels pretty unclear that the "league" feature is real in any sense.

There's no particular reason to believe that the other users and scores in the league you're in represent other real-world humans, and could simply be generated algorithmically to put you at a specific point in a score distribution based on A/B testing for what works the best to keep people engaged. And if they do pull real human scores into that list, they don't necessarily need to make that list consistent between users; so if you get second place, the real human whose score is shown in fourth place could be looking at their own wholly separate list in which they were second (with a userbase as large as Duolingo, I think of these two things as largely isomorphic). As far as I know, Duolingo doesn't document or discuss the mechanics of league formation, so even if they were manipulating outcomes like this it wouldn't be outright lying.

My experience doing Duolingo regularly was that my own score would vary significantly week-over-week based on my time and effort, and I would always land somewhere in the top four-ish spots in the "league" I was in regardless. If I were really being put together with a set of humans at the beginning of the league and the scores just played out organically, I would expect to occasionally win big or get demolished, but that never happened to me.

And my guess is that being competitive towards the top of the league but not consistently winning is the best for user engagement, so they'd have every reason to fake/engineer that outcome.

Do you have a source for this? I've seen content around GMs finding stronghold-style setups that the AI cannot find a way out of, and theoretically getting to repeated move / 50 moves without capture draw scenarios. But I'm not aware of any examples of Hikaru or anyone actually winning against the best computers (eg modern Stockfish) on even footing

The reason that sports dictate school start times isn't difficulty in scheduling practices (since you could, at least on paper, put those practices before school starts rather than after). The problem is that sports are competitive between school districts, so you need shared non-school but school-adjacent time blocks between neighboring districts to schedule games in. Shifting one district much later (to run 9-5, for example) would make it impossible for that school to compete with others after school, which is going to be a practical nonstarter.

In my mind, this is one of the biggest obstacles to changing school timing significantly. Most other objections are internal to a school district, so a single motivated school board could tackle and fix them, but this problem requires coordination between many different school districts all at once.