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2024_reading.md

Things I might read in 2024.

  • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Richard Howard (translator) - The Little Prince
  • Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori (translator) - Convenience Store Woman (via)
  • Jorge Luis Borges - Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (in Labyrinths)/ printed (via)
  • Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis (via)
  • William Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker/ audio, go to 12m35s to skip past the introduction spoilers
  • Lia A. DiBello - Expertise in Business: Evolving with a Changing World (in The Oxford Handbook of Expertise) (via)
  • Elad Gil - High Growth Handbook/ audio
  • W. Edwards Demming - The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education/ audio
  • W. Edwards Demming - The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education/ the PDF or ebook
  • Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland/ including the posts I SingleFile'd
  • the relevant-looking posts on benkuhn.net/posts
  • Commoncog Case Library Beta
  • Keith J. Cunningham - The Road Less Stupid: Advice from the Chairman of the Board/ audio
  • Cedric Chin's summary of 7 Powers
  • Akio Morita, Edwin M. Reingold, Mitsuko Shimomura - Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony
  • Joël Glenn Brenner - The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars
  • Nomad Investment Partnership Letters or redacted (via)
  • How to Lose Money in Derivatives: Examples From Hedge Funds and Bank Trading Departments
  • Brian Hayes - Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
  • Bob Caspe - Entrepreneurial Action/ printed, skim for anything I don't know
  • Accelerated Expertise (via)/ printed, "read Chapters 9-13 and skim everything else"
  • David J. Gerber - The Inventor's Dilemma (via Oxide and Friends)
  • Alex Komoroske - The Compendium / after I convert the Firebase export in code/websites/compendium-cards-data/db.json to a single HTML page
  • Rich Cohen - The Fish That Ate The Whale (via)

Lectures/videos

Interactive fiction

unplanned notable things read

unplanned and abandoned

  • Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga - The Courage to Be Disliked/ audio
  • Matt Dinniman - Dungeon Crawler Carl/ audio
  • Charles Eisenstein - The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible/ audio
  • Geoff Smart - Who: The A Method for Hiring/ audio
  • Genki Kawamura - If Cats Disappeared from the World/ audio
  • Paul Stamets - Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness, and Save the Planet/ audio
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ivan commented Jul 16, 2024

I don't understand the economics of this.

How is it even possible to sell an 85" for less than a grand? QLED no less... I understand it's no premium TV, but I just can't fathom it.

https://slickdeals.net/f/17622405-tcl-85-q6-series-120hz-qled-4k-tv-2024-best-buy-amazon-899-99

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ivan commented Jul 16, 2024

i kinda think the real reason that homelabbers like the Monoprice slim ethernet cables so much is that, from a distance, they look kinda like fiber

https://x.com/mycoliza/status/1804205897557905674

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ivan commented Jul 16, 2024

• Our year numbering system is Christian
• Our month names are Roman
• Our day of week names are Norse
• Our 7 day week system is Babylonian
• Our 24 hour days are Egyptian
• Our 60 minute hours are Persian
• Our 60 second minutes, Persian
• Our use of base 60 is Sumerian

https://x.com/alangrow/status/1805644793508491646

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ivan commented Jul 16, 2024

Ask HN: What happens when I click "request for quote" on your SaaS?

I've been part of the team that sets up this process at a few SaaS's, and I've done SaaS procurement for a while, so I clicked that button often (if I didn't know anyone at the company).

1. It gets added to a list of marketing website leads, which is owned by SDRs/BDRs who are there to filter and qualify leads. These are usually early-career people, with a base salary + quota for qualifying leads. The website is many times their least preferred channel of leads due to the quality, but they can't ignore it because sometimes good customers do come through there.

2. The SDR will either work over email or on a call; their goal is to identify if you're a real potential customer (vs shopping for prices, vs confused about what we sell), write up notes, and identify which customer segment you belong to (geography + business type + business size).

3. You will then speak to a salesperson (with varying titles "Account Executive", "Sales Director", "Regional VP of Enterprise Sales", or whatever inflated title makes sense for that sales organization). Their goal is to confirm they're speaking to the right person in your organization (or wasting their time), if your use case is meaningful enough for the "enterprise plan" (they can't sign too small deals), what your budget is, what your usage will be like, etc.

4. Pricing could be made up by guessing your price point, but it's rare. It is difficult to consistently make up pricing that works over time and doesn't have many lowball deals that harm the company's revenue long-term, and salespeople often don't understand the technical details well enough to make things up that make sense. Usually, there will be a pricing framework and an internal calculator (very often, a spreadsheet with formulae and VLOOKUPs) that will give them a range. They can then choose what number within that range to offer, based on who they think you are and how far off they are from their quarterly quota.

5. They can then negotiate the number, or the included features, or the payment terms (upfront payment, multi-year contract, exit clauses, etc.) which can be translated into discounts if they're favorable to the seller.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40726735

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ivan commented Jul 16, 2024

Ask HN: Could AI be a dot com sized bubble?

You might find the recent Verge/Decoder podcast with Cohere's CEO interesting:

https://www.theverge.com/24173858/ai-cohere-aidan-gomez-mone...

The host is clearly trying to push the CEO of Cohere on how all this is going to make money (or just be economic). The CEO is confident, but not in a very specific way. There is a great moment where he is like "we did some proof of concepts with 5 users, and they were pretty good, but when you tell CFOs about the running costs for a full user base, its not viable."

What fascinates me about AI right now is that it seems to have very different economics from traditional software/internet/SaaS businesses. Those business scale super-efficiently. They have some initial startup costs (but still relatively low, especially with cloud providers) and low running costs.

With AI, the initial capital costs to build the model are quite high. And, the running costs to handle queries are also quite high. These companies need to find use cases that generate value significantly in excess of those costs. If those use cases are out there, they must either involve really significant productivity improvements, or the costs have to come down a lot, or both.

All that said, I remember going to a talk by Adobe's founders, in which they pointed out that when they introduced Postscript, the first Apple printer that ran it was only viable because of a last minute drop in memory prices, and when they started building Photoshop, you could fit six (6!) digital images on a powerful computer.

So, I see why the investment is happening, but its a high risk investment right now hoping to identify both high-value use cases and significant cost savings simultaneously.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40740037

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ivan commented Jul 16, 2024

The author of this has been on a crusade against Apple for years, stemming from an incident that was probably hypochondria. They've outright lied about multiple incidents (see https://twitter.com/shantinix/status/1433297575914971136), and I would very strongly doubt any new claims made. For example, a spot check of one of the claims has them currently saying "Still, Gjovik’s limited testing returned results showing a number of the chemicals in use by Apple at ARIA including Acetone, Acetonitrile, Acetaldehyde, Benzene, 1,2-Dichloroethane, Ethanol, Ethylbenzene, Hexane, Isopropanol, Isopropyl toluene, Methylene Chloride, Toluene, and Xylene."

But, in 2021 (at https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart...), "I wanted to get some formal data in the brief time before I moved out, so I hired an industrial hygienist to sample the indoor air and some of the topsoil. Despite the $1,555 I had to pay for it, the results were inconclusive."

It's really hard to "catch" these things in the moment. I work in chemical plants and there are tons of huge releases of extremely toxic gases all the time, which I can often smell from my apartment. I know what they are by smell because I manufacture them myself. Proper continuous monitoring for a broad range of chemicals would cost about $1 million per monitoring station and we'd need to build them along the perimeters of each plant so that leaks can be assigned to the offending companies, and they need to be built near housing so that we know how families are being affected. That sounds expensive, but really isn't that much added cost for a $100 million to $10 billion manufacturing site.

I live in the western hemisphere's largest integrated industrial complex (Freeport, TX integrated with the eastern edge of Houston as well). Note that Freeport, TX has ZERO state or federal EPA VOC analyzers which can actually detect which chemical is leaking. They can only detect "this amount of something with either {sulfur, N-O bonds, aromatic carbon rings} -- no clue what precisely though!". This is the same capability of the most advanced atmospheric pollution satellites. Completely fucking useless for an area which manufactures something like 15-20% of all USA domestic chemicals. The technology to measure individual chemicals exists, but the government isn't paying for it or installing it.

The ENTIRE east side of Houston metropolitan area is dedicated to or "next door" to massive chemical manufacturing. This is an industrial area nearly equal to the area encompassing all of Seattle+Bellevue+Redmond+Renton+Tukwila. That's not including nearby housing - that's just how big the manufacturing facilities themselves are! This massive area has only THREE air quality monitors which test for these kinds of chemicals[0]. During huge major events like the ITC fire[2], they typically show no increased pollution at all, which proves that it's woefully inadequate even during big emergencies that very obviously affect breathing air quality. I lived next to leaks every day and because I worked in the plants I knew the smells - one day acrylates, next day thiols, next day hydrocarbons, etc. But all 3 monitoring sites (over 10 miles from me) showed nothing at all.

Here is the one "correct" monitoring station near the chemical plants of Houston: [0]... but several of its analyzers are often offline/broken/pending maintenance. Here's a map of all the other ones: [1] Generally single/dual color dots mark "not-useful" monitoring sites which might measure only PM2.5 or Ozone, for example. The 4+ color dots are generally useful, they measure specific (large) families of chemicals so you can see very roughly what is leaking, even if it doesn't have "soot" in it.

The data used by ProPublica[3] is actually far worse than the woefully inadequate data collected by TCEQ/EPA air monitoring stations -- because what ProPublica used was "self-reported" data from the chemical plants. But I know from working in them and living next to them that many leaks are never reported and many leaks are never even known internally! Our government's data collection is a travesty. ProPublica couldn't use the real air quality measurements because having 2-3 points across 1000 mi^2 is completely useless for the wind models they wanted to apply to the problem. We don't actually have any data. The government is failing us.

ITC fire which blanketed houston's sky in smoke: [2]

1: https://tceq.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...

2: https://abc13.com/deer-park-fire-2019-itc-houston-air-qualit...

3: https://www.propublica.org/nerds/visualizing-toxic-air

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40773252

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ivan commented Jul 16, 2024

Sen. Mitch McConnell Booed at Republican National Convention

Dude delivers conservatives’ wet dream by helping appoint 3 justices that overturned Roe and he still is hated by Trump’s rabid mob. Hilarious really.

Mitch is the probably the single greatest factor in how the GOP became what it is today. Because of that, I can’t stand him. But it’s hilarious that the MAGA GOP doesn’t recognize his contributions to their ideology. He should be worship as a hero by them, but he very occasionally disagreed with Trump and is now universally recognized as a villain.

I mean look in history to see what happened to some of those party loyalists in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and communist China that fell out of favor. Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev, Ernst Röhm, Gregor Strasser, Heinrich Himmler, Gao Gang, Peng Dehuai, and Lin Biao to name a few prominent examples. All party loyalists and important figures that were subsequently executed, assassinated, imprisoned, exiled, or committed suicide to avoid worse punishment. The fact that the party mob wanted to hang VP Pence and is now booing McConnell (despite him doing, as you said, the most to advance their agenda) should be alarming to everyone. This is not the behavior of a healthy party but rather behavior that closely resembles 3 of the bloodiest parties in history

https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1e464ec/sen_mitch_mcconnell_booed_at_republican_national/

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ivan commented Jul 16, 2024

If you think you're enlightened try finding a parking spot downtown on a one way street when you're late for your meeting and there's plenty of cars waiting behind you

this just in: I'm nowhere near as chill as I'd like to believe, I'm just really good at avoiding driving and other stuff that stresses the hell out of me

I am SHOCKED to discover that getting good at feeling calm and peaceful while sitting and doing nothing does not automatically translate to feeling peaceful while you're out in the world and doing stuff

https://x.com/made_in_cosmos/status/1806253216998318157

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ivan commented Jul 16, 2024

There's an idea in programming language design called Wadler's Law, which is that the majority of discussion is on syntax and not semantics. I imagine this applies to configuration too: the majority of time spent "tinkering" is on layout and coloring and not on changes to the tool's behavior. This is a trap. You get the most value of "configuration" when you use it to improve your workflow.

https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/keep-perfecting-your-config/

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ivan commented Jul 16, 2024 •
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How To Noclip [in The Witness]

  1. Open the steam console by going to "steam://nav/console" in a browser and then opening in steam.
  2. Copy in download_depot 210970 210971 4660219967587740136 and press enter.
  3. While waiting for the network usage in steam's download in the library to stop, go to "C:\Users\[Your Username]\AppData\Roaming\The Witness" and move all the files out of here somewhere else (this is an old version so it can't read your saves and may corrupt them). Should you want a save with most puzzles completed, all lasers completed, all obelsks activated (but none completed) that is compatable with this version, one can be found here http://www.filedropper.com/witnessnoclipsave.
  4. Go to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\content\app_210970\depot_210971" and open either "witness_d3d11.exe" or "witness64_d3d11.exe"
  5. To active noclip, hold down shift, press period (.) then let go of all keys and press "m". To deactivate, click (make sure there's solid ground beneath you), then to reactivate just press m while pressing no other keys.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheWitness/comments/au30c9/how_to_noclip/

The syntax to the "download_depot" command is as follows: download_depot <appid> <depotid> [<target manifestid>] [<delta manifestid>] [<depot flags filter>] : download a single depot You only need to worry about the first three arguments to it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/611h5e/guide_how_to_download_older_versions_of_a_game_on/

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ivan commented Jul 17, 2024

"This is not acceptable!" I screamed as Kathy drowned

https://x.com/Horse_ebooks/status/154826371431022592

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ivan commented Jul 17, 2024

wow, they used to agree with me, and now they don't. I can't believe they lost their way.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/17da5r9/peter_thiel_reflects_on_funding_miri_and_yud/

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ivan commented Jul 17, 2024

The question they set out to answer was "How can humanity create an aligned machine intelligence?" The answer MIRI reached was "We can't." That seems like a totally appropriate/within-scope potential conclusion at which to arrive given that original objective.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/17da5r9/peter_thiel_reflects_on_funding_miri_and_yud/

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ivan commented Jul 18, 2024

  1. When there were people who actually did something negative to me, I'd do them favors or buy them gifts. This sounds crazy, but it worked quite well, and is precisely the spiritual jiujitsu Christ recommended in his sermons.

In high school I attended an all girls’ boarding school. There was a girl who was absolutely insufferable, not particularly intelligent or nice, tiresome, irritating, and I had several classes with her. One evening I told my mom over the phone that I felt badly because I truly hated this girl, and did not know how to move past it. Hating her made me miserable, I felt small and mean. My mom told me to buy her a candy bar, write an encouraging note and leave it anonymously in her school mailbox. I thought this sounded crazy, and didn’t really want to do it, but I did anyway. And it was incredible, the feeling of hatred I had for this girl completely vanished, almost instantly. Hatred is a heavy thing to bear and I learned more from this experience than perhaps anything else that year.

https://x.com/Rquietlyreading/status/1813733643090633039

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ivan commented Jul 18, 2024

gwern suggests that OpenAI has lost its mojo, along with the key employees that made it extraordinary a few years ago. Plausibly it’s now a zombie cargo ship cruising on momentum.

This is a fascinating essay from the person who, more than anyone, predicted the dramatic AI progress in 2021-22. That took pretty much everyone outside OpenAI (including me) by surprise, and apparently most of the OpenAI people as well.

https://substack.com/profile/2269869-david-chapman/note/c-60184177

Apropos of Sutskever now having left OA for good, I've gone back to my thinking about the long-term consequences of Altman's coup, and something I began to wonder in 2021 when the news about Anthropic broke: what if "the elves have left Middle Earth"? What if OA has lost its mojo? If so, what would that look like, and how would we know? What's the "rot" narrative?

Maybe I am a bit too easily impressed by how good gpt-4-base and Claude-3.5-sonnet are at poetry compared to the ChatGPTs, but I can't help but wonder if the OA magic has worn off since GPT-4 finished training c. August 2022. What made OA OA in 2020 was that it had taste: it had much less resources than competitors like DeepMind or Google Brain or FAIR, but (thanks to Alec Radford, Ilya Sutskever, Jared Kaplan, and the RLHF-focused safety team like Paul Christiano & Dario Amodei, and fellow-traveler scalers like Andrej Karpathy etc) they bet big on scaling laws & unsupervised learning at the moment those suddenly began to work. Without taste and agility—or you might say, "without its people, OA is nothing"—OA doesn't have that much of a moat.

And most of those people are gone, and the survivors are being policed for leaks to the media, and now know that if they leave, OA management wants to gag them, and has the power to confiscate their vested equity, wiping out all their wealth (an ability they have confirmed and refused to promise to not use); they further have heard the rumors of Altman's mismanagement, lack of candor and broken promises to Superalignment, outside conflicts of interest, ScarJo, and divide-and-conquer management tactics—even if they do not credit this and believe Altman that he had no idea and some rogue lawyer is to blame, the psychological safety

[...]

https://old.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/1djoqjh/ilya_sutskever_launches_safe_superintelligence_a/l9uogp9/

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ivan commented Jul 18, 2024 •
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I’m sorry. NGL, this is ridiculous. @ljharb please stop making this argument on behalf of “security” of the 99.9999% who don’t need this. You’re in search of an immutable JS runtime that doesn’t exist — and so your best/only bet is to save a reference to every possible runtime API, effectively doubling the runtime itself & adding overhead to all function calls. Users of this (and presumably other, given your philosophy) code are suffering from significantly slower & heavier JS. Stuff like this validates the main criticism (and generally, misconception) of JavaScript — that it “is” slow & bloated. It’s not & doesn’t have to be. Given that you’re on TC39 and actively involved in pushing new language features re: simplicity (thank you 🙇‍♂️), I find it especially odd/contradictory that it’s often your modules that do stuff like this, holding onto Node <= 4.x support (security patched ended 6 years ago), etc. This holds the entire ecosystem & language back… while you (and others) are simultaneously trying to improve, simplify, and lean out the language… huh?

You should let actual security audits defend against the bad actors you’re so eager to defend. That will remove offenders at the source instead of duplicating defenses at every node_module fence.

I’d advise you reinvest the passion/effort into tooling that lints for prototypal mutations. With your skill set and influence, i can definitely imagine it becoming some kind of badge / standard that users expect to see when filtering dependencies. The same tool can be used for application audits to protect the userland glue code between libraries. This way everyone has a collection of green check marks instead of a mountain of saved “require time” function references and/or redundant 50kb+ native polyfills simply because they don’t trust their environment nor the 100s of coexisting modules.

A11yance/aria-query#497 (comment)

At the time of this writing installing eslint-plugin-react pulls in a whopping number of 97 dependencies in total. I was curious about how much of these were polyfills and began patching them out one by one locally. After all was done, this brought down the total number of dependencies down to 15. Out of the original 97 dependencies 82 of them are not needed.

https://marvinh.dev/blog/speeding-up-javascript-ecosystem-part-6/

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ivan commented Jul 18, 2024

interesting to me that the "building a second brain" ppl consider the brain's primary activity to be associative information storage and retrieval, and not coordination of a system of sensory impulses

the brain's associative memory functionality might be considered primary only in one special state: dreaming

perhaps they're not building a second brain, but a more perfect dream?

https://x.com/qorprate/status/1814052577396318314

someone please build me a second prefrontal cortex

https://x.com/babarganesh/status/1814064513622405617

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ivan commented Jul 19, 2024

Due to the use of a controversial value in the certificate extension 2.5.29.9, to meet the first point of BR 7.1.2.11.5, we have decided to remove the extension after discussion.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1903066

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ivan commented Jul 19, 2024 •
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You will need to do the manual update and change of the file listed in the TA. Its not pretty, I'm looking at about 5,000 machines offline.

[...]

For us, it's thousands of end-user devices geographically distributed all over Australia. All BitLocker protected.

This is probably going to take a week or two to get everyone back up and running.

https://old.reddit.com/r/crowdstrike/comments/1e6vmkf/bsod_error_in_latest_crowdstrike_update/

With cybersecurity like this, who needs criminals?

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZZBdGRnScA

Wow, this hits close to home. Doing a page fault where you can't in the kernel is exactly what I did with my very first patch I submitted after I joined the Microsoft BitLocker team in 2009. I added a check on the driver initialization path and didn't annotate the code as non-paged because frankly I didn't know at the time that the Windows kernel was paged. All my kernel development experience up to that point was with Linux, which isn't paged.

BitLocker is a storage driver, so that code turned into a circular dependency. The attempt to page in the code resulted a call to that not-yet-paged-in code.

The reason I didn't catch it with local testing was because I never tried rebooting with BitLocker enabled on my dev box when I was working on that code. For everyone on the team that did have BitLocker enabled they got the BSOD when they rebooted. Even then the "blast radius" was only the BitLocker team with about 8 devs, since local changes were qualified at the team level before they were merged up the chain.

The controls in place not only protected Windows more generally, but they even protected the majority of the Windows development group. It blows my mind that a kernel driver with the level of proliferation in industry could make it out the door apparently without even the most basic level of qualification.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007570

The thing that amazes me is how they've rolled out such a buggy change at such a scale. I would assume that for such critical systems, there would be a gradual rollout policy, so that not everything goes down at once.

Lack of gradual, health mediated rollout is absolutely the core issue here. False positive signatures, crash inducing blocks, etc will always slip through testing at some % no matter how good testing is. The necessary defense in depth here is to roll out ALL changes (binaries, policies, etc) in a staggered fashion with some kind of health checks in between (did > 10% of endpoints the change went to go down and stay down right after the change was pushed?).

Crowdstrike bit my company with a false positive that severely broke the entire production fleet because they pushed the change everywhere all at once instead of staggering it out. We pushed them hard in the RCA to implement staggered deployments of their changes. They sent back a 50 page document explaining why they couldn't which basically came down to "that would slow down blocks of true positives" - which is technically true but from followup conversations quite clear that is was not the real reason. The real reason is that they weren't ready to invest the engineering effort into doing this.

You can stagger changes out within a reasonable timeframe - the blocks already take hours/days/weeks to come up with, taking an extra hour or two to trickle the change out gradually with some basic sanity checks between staggers is a tradeoff everyone would embrace in order to avoid the disaster we're living through today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41004691

The CEO of Crowdstrike, George Kurtz, was the CTO of McAfee back in 2010 when it sent out a bad update and caused similar issues worldwide.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41008579

A colleague is dealing with a particularly nasty case. The server storing the BitLocker recovery keys (for thousands of users) is itself BitLocker protected and running CrowdStrike (he says mandates state that all servers must have "encryption at rest").

His team believes that the recovery key for that server is stored somewhere else, and they may be able to get it back up and running, but they can't access any of the documentation to do so, because everything is down.

https://old.reddit.com/r/crowdstrike/comments/1e6vmkf/bsod_error_in_latest_crowdstrike_update/ldw96jt/

Some guy up there suggested converting [BitLocker recovery keys] into barcodes and to use a barcode scanner. Might save some time.

https://old.reddit.com/r/crowdstrike/comments/1e6vmkf/bsod_error_in_latest_crowdstrike_update/ldx75ph/

One of my good friends works for CrowdStrike and he's been telling me for a while that his boss is constantly complaining to upper management that they don't do enough testing before deploys, lol. But like you say, typically one person can neither sink a ship nor right its course. Oops.

https://old.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/1e76z0s/uking_kunta_makes_post_detailing_issues_with/le0oze0/

CrowdStrike in this context is a NT kernel loadable module (a .sys file) which does syscall level interception and logs then to a separate process on the machine. It can also STOP syscalls from working if they are trying to connect out to other nodes and accessing files they shouldn't be (using some drunk ass heuristics).

What happened here was they pushed a new kernel driver out to every client without authorization to fix an issue with slowness and latency that was in the previous Falcon sensor product. They have a staging system which is supposed to give clients control over this but they pissed over everyone's staging and rules and just pushed this to production.

This has taken us out and we have 30 people currently doing recovery and DR. Most of our nodes are boot looping with blue screens which in the cloud is not something you can just hit F8 and remove the driver. We have to literally take each node down, attach the disk to a working node, delete the .sys file and bring it up. Either that or bring up a new node entirely from a snapshot.

This is fine but EC2 is rammed with people doing this now so it's taking forever. Storage latency is through the roof.

I fought for months to keep this shit out of production because of this reason. I am now busy but vindicated.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41003390

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ivan commented Jul 19, 2024

It doesn't even work on newer Dell laptops, you just can't see the drive. Only workaround we had was to run install media and then run it from the command line there, because of Dell drivers.

The windows recovery partition on newer devices does not see the drives because Intel, in their stupidity, decided that most of newer devices should use Intel VMD/RST by default and not AHCI and Microsoft never included that driver in both the install media and recovery partition

https://x.com/SubZeroNexii/status/1814394934616830323

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ivan commented Jul 19, 2024

Imagine living your whole life, from growing up as a baby to a toddler to a child to an adolescent to an adult, gathering all of your experiences, your career, your family and friends, for it all to vanish instantly and you cease to exist because you got mad at a traffic stop. Your entire consciousness vanishing because you got mad over something that doesn’t matter. It’s actually quite mind-blowing to put yourself in those shoes, conceptually.

https://old.reddit.com/r/AllThatIsInteresting/comments/1e7apnz/indianapolis_driver_faces_no_charges_after/ldz0fao/

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ivan commented Jul 20, 2024

C coding tip: if you ever need arithmetic operations without implicit integer promotions, make a one-element vector type: https://godbolt.org/z/9bo648bsh

image

https://mastodon.social/@amonakov@mastodon.gamedev.place/112809365535996420

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ivan commented Jul 21, 2024

The secret to achieving speedups of multiple factors, not just low percentages, is less about applying generic rules or habits like “Don’t create closures inside for-loops”. It’s a common misconception that if you follow all these “best practices” that your code will be fast, because the uncomfortable truth in most instances (read not all) is that it won’t matter much. What makes code truly fast is being aware of what it’s supposed to solve and then taking the shortest path to achieve that goal.

https://marvinh.dev/blog/speeding-up-javascript-ecosystem-part-8/

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ivan commented Jul 21, 2024

console.count()

https://marvinh.dev/blog/speeding-up-javascript-ecosystem-part-5/

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ivan commented Jul 21, 2024 •
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We currently have an interesting bug on the BBC website where some users have a viewport that is, for example, 599.5px wide. So:

@-media (max-width: 599px) {}
@-media (min-width: 600px) {}

These users get no styles from either media query. I'm about to work on a fix.

https://x.com/JoshTumath/status/1801244891151782150

What about

@-media not (min-width: 600px) {}
@-media (min-width: 600px) {}

See the thread. That's effectively the solution.

https://x.com/lukedeentaylor/status/1801594689310617893

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ivan commented Jul 21, 2024

Feature Comparison

This is a best-effort feaure comparison between rkyv, FlatBuffers, and Cap'n Proto. This is by no means completely comprehensive, and pull requests that improve this are welcomed.

Feature matrix

Feature rkyv Cap'n Proto FlatBuffers
Open type system yes no no
Scalars yes no yes
Tables no* yes yes
Schema evolution no* yes yes
Zero-copy yes yes yes
Random-access reads yes yes yes
Validation upfront* on-demand yes
Reflection no* yes yes
Object order bottom-up either bottom-up
Schema language derive custom custom
Usable as mutable state yes limited limited
Padding takes space on wire? yes* optional no
Unset fields take space on wire? yes yes no
Pointers take space on wire? yes yes yes
Cross-language no yes yes
Hash maps and B-trees yes no no
Shared pointers yes no no

* rkyv's open type system allows extension types that provide these capabilities

https://rkyv.org/feature-comparison.html

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ivan commented Jul 22, 2024

I WANT TO SEE THE STUFF I DIDN'T WANT TO SEE!

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT2GcoCJh5k

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ivan commented Jul 23, 2024

Once in a while, a friend will tell me they've disliked some part of our interactions for months. Suddenly.

I vow to try my best to never do this, and instead always express my feelings — even negative ones, even confusing ones — immediately.

https://x.com/ChrisChipMonk/status/1815549135296286946

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ivan commented Jul 23, 2024

anyhow actually supports backtraces. You just need to set RUST_BACKTRACE=1 and call .backtrace() on the error:

https://docs.rs/anyhow/latest/anyhow/struct.Error.html#method.backtrace

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1e978l7/ive_used_and_loved_rust_for_10_years_here_are_the/?depth=99

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ivan commented Jul 23, 2024

If rust analyzer is doing a long recompile on every change, it probably means it's compiling with different features or environment variables than what you are building your app with. By default RA uses the same target directory as as cargo build to store build artifacts and if they are making incompatible builds it they end up causing each other to keep doing full builds.

This can be especially common with Bevy if you enable the bevy/dynamic_linking feature for your builds but not Rust analyzer's.

Easiest fix is to tell RA to use a different target directory, see rust-analyzer.cargo.targetDir here: https://rust-analyzer.github.io/manual.html

Another fix would be to make sure all features and environment variables the same so they can reuse each other's build artifacts, this can be tricky though.

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1e978l7/ive_used_and_loved_rust_for_10_years_here_are_the/ledd4yr/

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2024

When you codebase grows, this gets tiresome, quickly. Folks will tell you to “get gud” and refactor your app. Sorry, but Cloudflare is one of the biggest in-production users of Rust, and I can tell you there was no way in hell anyone is going to refactor that codebase and ship the features and bug fixes for the sprint. Companies die over this stuff. I can’t imagine telling Matthew Prince that WARP couldn’t meet its feature deadlines because we couldn’t borrow children and modify name in the same scope.

https://dioxus.notion.site/Dioxus-Labs-High-level-Rust-5fe1f1c9c8334815ad488410d948f05e

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2024

I care about the future because I'll probably spend the rest of my life there

https://github.com/l1f

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2024

To override the settings for build scripts, proc macros, and their dependencies, use the build-override table:

# Set the settings for build scripts and proc-macros.
[profile.dev.build-override]
opt-level = 3

https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/profiles.html#overrides
via https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1dkzzn5/dioxus_labs_highlevel_rust/

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2024 •
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Optimise API. Question the existence of all options and flags. Are they necessary? Can they be combined? How can we reduce code branching?

[...]

Reduce jargon. Don’t assume that users will understand specific terminology. Strive to provide precise meaning for experts and beginners. For example, use “character” where you would traditionally use “token” when producing parser errors.

https://biomejs.dev/internals/philosophy/

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2024

Naturally, one might ask: why can’t require() just support loading ESM?

For a very long time, the answer from the Node.js project had been something like this (to quote the documentation before my pull request):

Using require to load an ES module is not supported because ES modules have asynchronous execution.

That had also come up in several semi-official communications. And it was always talked about in such an affirmative tone, so that was what I believed, too - despite being a long-time Node.js contributor, ESM or the user module loader in Node.js was never my jam. When it comes to a component that I am not very familiar with myself, I would just believe what the documentation says, like everyone else.

But this was one of the situations where the documentation and other communications were misleading - maybe they were only talking what happened in Node.js’s ESM, not what the ESM itself was designed to be. Last year when I was browsing the V8 code to fix a memory leak, I found out by chance that ESM itself was not actually designed to be unconditionally asynchronous. Rather, it was designed to be only conditionally asynchronous - only when the graph contains top-level await.

https://joyeecheung.github.io/blog/2024/03/18/require-esm-in-node-js/

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2024 

node --snapshot-blob snapshot.blob --build-snapshot snapshot.js
node --snapshot-blob snapshot.blob # deserialize snapshot

https://github.com/joyeecheung/talks/blob/master/node_congress_2023/startup-snapshot-in-node-js.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhRNTcbAX5A&t=12m18s

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2024

“Usually” is as good as you can do in biology. It’s difficult to make universal statements. When I first started working with genetic data, I said something to a colleague about genetic sequences being made of A, C, G, and T. I was shocked when he replied “Usually. This is biology. Nothing always holds.” It turns out some viruses have a Zs (aminoadenine) rather than As (adenine).

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2024/07/22/why-error-rates/

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2024

every time I return to math it seems to be for a new reason. fascination, solace, entertainment, challenge, utility, power

https://x.com/ftlsid/status/1816114223044517932

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2024

Swelling and bulging in particular are telling signs that the food inside has begun to go bad and is causing the abnormal shape. If you see a bloated can, it's usually just a safer bet to not open the can at all and just throw it out; but if you're still unsure, you can open the can and inspect the insides. Signs of spoilage will vary depending on the actual contents of the can but in general, discoloration, abnormal growths of some kind (like mold), and foul odors are indications of spoilage.

What causes the swelling

Microbial spoilage and the hydrogen gas it produces — which occurs through the interaction between the metal of the can and acids from the contents — are the principal culprits for a bloated can, per the FDA. There are also microbes that do not release gas but can still render the food inside the can inedible; thereby, they may not cause swelling but still can cause spoilage.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as a rule, it is best to never consume food in a bloated can as the likelihood of spoilage is quite high. Likewise cans that are leaking, badly dented, or have loose lids should also be avoided. These cans run the particularly dangerous risk of containing Clostridium botulinum, which can be fatal even in small quantities; for this reason, you should never attempt to taste canned food to test whether or not it is safe. If you see a bloated can, it is just safest to dispose of it promptly.

https://www.tastingtable.com/863613/is-it-actually-dangerous-to-eat-food-from-a-bloated-can/

You can tell by inspecting the can. If it’s contaminated then organisms will grow inside and produce gas, which puts pressure on the inside. It will look like someone blew up a balloon a little too much.

If there is a sign like this, do not eat the contents of the can, you are highly likely to become very ill or worse.

Edit: as mentioned below, you should not even open a can if it’s inflated, as it could be contaminated with botulism. Botulism is a poisonous substance some bacteria produces - it’s possible to breath it in and receive a dose of botulism, so don’t even open a can that shows signs of damage or contamination.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1eay4ge/opening_a_17_year_old_can_of_corn/leouqcd/

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2024 •
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Obstinacy is a simple thing. Animals have it. But persistence turns out to have a fairly complicated internal structure.

One thing that distinguishes the persistent is their energy. At the risk of putting too much weight on words, they persist rather than merely resisting. They keep trying things. Which means the persistent must also be imaginative. To keep trying things, you have to keep thinking of things to try.

Energy and imagination make a wonderful combination. Each gets the best out of the other. Energy creates demand for the ideas produced by imagination, which thus produces more, and imagination gives energy somewhere to go. [5]

Merely having energy and imagination is quite rare. But to solve hard problems you need three more qualities: resilience, good judgement, and a focus on some kind of goal.

Resilience means not having one's morale destroyed by setbacks. Setbacks are inevitable once problems reach a certain size, so if you can't bounce back from them, you can only do good work on a small scale. But resilience is not the same as obstinacy. Resilience means setbacks can't change your morale, not that they can't change your mind.

[...]

When you look at the internal structure of persistence, it doesn't resemble obstinacy at all. It's so much more complex. Five distinct qualities — energy, imagination, resilience, good judgement, and focus on a goal — combine to produce a phenomenon that seems a bit like obstinacy in the sense that it causes you not to give up. But the way you don't give up is completely different. Instead of merely resisting change, you're driven toward a goal by energy and resilience, through paths discovered by imagination and optimized by judgement. You'll give way on any point low down in the decision tree, if its expected value drops sufficiently, but energy and resilience keep pushing you toward whatever you chose higher up.

https://paulgraham.com/persistence.html

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2024

Mr. Big (sometimes known as the Canadian technique) is a covert investigation procedure used by undercover police to elicit confessions from suspects in cold cases (usually murder). Police officers create a fictitious grey area or criminal organization and then seduce the suspect into joining it. They build a relationship with the suspect, gain their confidence, and then enlist their help in a succession of criminal acts (e.g., delivering goods, credit card scams, selling guns) for which they are paid. Once the suspect has become enmeshed in the criminal gang, they are persuaded to divulge information about their criminal history, usually as a prerequisite for being accepted as a member of the organization.

[...]

The use of this technique is essentially prohibited in some countries, including the United Kingdom[4] and the United States.[5] In Germany, which has high standards for what constitutes a voluntary confession, it may be more difficult to use confessions obtained by this technique.[5] The procedure has been used by police in Australia[6] and New Zealand,[7] and its use has been upheld by courts in both countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Big_(police_procedure)

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2024 •
edited

The human plane of language becomes a zone of shelter, of reassurance. The cold plane of the posthuman is the one in which a formal axiomatic logic, which is not yet a language, unfolds like Von Neumann automata, “tiling the world”. The technologist is able to work out the steps of what is possible next, although it is not possible to communicate it without becoming alien. The technologist does not think about what he will be able to convince other people regarding, he thinks about what marching dolls he is able to wind up. The language of code is different from the language of speech because the language of code is not addressed to another. The language of code does not “care if it is read”, though it is read, by robots and scanners. The language of code is like the mute language of DNA — the original paradigm of a “code” — read by ribosomes.

https://angelicism.substack.com/p/technologists

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2024 •
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One thing is universal among these people: the sense that the left has been betrayed. There is some loosely assented to project among these folks to create socialism or something like that, and Nikki and Anna have strayed too far from it. This betrayal happens over and over, to these weary philosophers — you think someone is a fellow leftist, cheers, next round’s on me — but they turn out to be a “grifter” — this is the eternal woe of the leftist; that someone would become interested in making money rather than having pointless debates all day. It is universally assented to on “philosophy twitter” that it is very important to figure out how to create socialism by synthesizing Marx, Hegel, Deleuze, Althusser, and maybe psychoanalysis. No one has figured out the correct way to put all these thinkers in dialogue but when they do, socialism will happen. Every user on philosophy twitter has their own incompatible sense of the true leftist tradition which they will brashly defend against the others, accusing the others of being reactionary for defecting against the half-formed vision of the true doctrine they assemble in their mind.

The shining light of Anna has come to explain to these chattering fools what should be profoundly obvious. Nowhere in the world does these philosophers’ “leftism” exist. But they presuppose that it must. Their leftism is a kind of spirit of justice which must, axiomatically, always be held to in thought and action even as it is trampled again and again in struggle, even as its letter becomes more and more undefinable, even as it becomes a form of nostalgia for a struggle which only once was. Thus their leftism is a basic religious commitment (wokeness is like a religion). What Anna challenges them to do is make it self-conscious as a religious commitment, for it has no other coherent meaning.

https://angelicism.substack.com/p/the-left-is-humiliated-and-conquered

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

The benefit of journaling is not just reentry, but that you begin to solidify the mental model into a concrete branching of possibilities that is tightly coupled to the specific problem. Your work becomes traversal and mutation of this tree. Several benefits accrue: you begin to see gaps in the tree, and can fill them in. You begin to have confidence in your mental model, recovering the time you used to spend going over the same nodes again and again in a haphazard way. In distributed systems in particular, the work is often detailed, manual, error prone and high latency - with a solid mental model you can get through a checklist of steps with minimum difficulty and high confidence that you didn't miss anything. This ability to take something abstract and make it more concrete on the fly is a critical skill.

Perhaps the greatest barrier to using it is akin to envy. We see others who apparently do this without written materials, in their head. I think we see this as evidence of intellectual superiority and harbor the doubt that using an aid like a journal means we are somehow lacking in skill or ability. This is wrong. Using an aid to map out complex problems isn't a failure, it's essential, especially for problems in systems you've never used before. Over time you may yourself build up your expertise such that you no longer need the aid, but that doesn't signal anything about your intelligence or ability either, only your experience.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40950584

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024 •
edited

What finally got this to stick for me was abandoning all notion of structure and organization (and formal concepts like “logging” and “journaling”) and optimizing fully for capture over retrieval, then relying on search tools and proximity for the latter.

[...]

It took me a couple years to realize this too. For the past five years I abandoned all structure. I use a literal log file. Chronological from top to bottom, with paragraph breaks for each workday. Higher than necessary verbosity, no points taken away for spelling or grammar mistakes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40950584

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

I cannot work without taking notes. It is a process of thinking, sorting my ideas, documenting steps and outcomes, pausing, practicing meta-cognition, gaining clarity and confidence along the process. Plus I have the benefit to go back to my notes and have instant access to what I did days, months, years ago. So I can’t understand how people are working without taking notes, documenting (for themselves), and journaling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952344

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

we will approach all methods in terms of their intended effects—that is, what they were designed to do and what happens when you engage with them

https://vajrayananow.com/about-my-approach

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024 •
edited

We tried to give away the technology, and it didn’t work! So now we are selling it, with considerably more success.

https://stevana.github.io/the_sad_state_of_property-based_testing_libraries.html

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024 •
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The major omission in this article is fuzzing. Not only is it practical and in wide (and growing use), it’s also far more advanced than QuickCheck’s approach of generating random inputs, because fuzzing can be _coverage-driven_. Property-based testing came out of academia and fuzzing came out of security research, initially they were not connected. But with the advent of in-process fuzzing (through libFuzzer), which encourages writing small fuzz tests rather than testing entire programs; and structure-aware fuzzing, which enables testing more than just functions that take a bytestring as input, in my view the two techniques have converged. It’s just that the two separate communities haven’t fully realized this yet.

One pitfall with non-coverage-driven randomized testing like QuickCheck, is that how good your tests are depends a lot on the generator. It may be very rarely generating interesting inputs because you biased the generator in the wrong way, and depending on how you do the generation, you need to be careful to ensure the generator halts. With coverage-driven fuzzing all of these problems go away; you don’t have to be smart to choose distributions so that interesting cases are more common, coverage instrumentation will automatically discover new paths in your program and drill down on them.

But isn’t fuzzing about feeding a large program or function random bytestrings as inputs, whereas property-based testing is about testing properties about data structures? It is true that fuzzers operate on bytestrings, but there is no rule that says we can’t use that bytestring to generate a data structure (in a sense, replacing the role of the random seed). And indeed this is what the Arbitrary crate [1] in Rust does, it gives tools and even derive macros to automatically generate values of your data types in the same way that QuickCheck can. The fuzzing community calls this Structure-Aware Fuzzing and there is a chapter about it in the Rust fuzzing book [2]. There are also tools like libprotobuf-mutator [3] that substitute fuzzers’ naive mutation strategies, but even with naive strategies fuzzers can usually get to 100% coverage with appropriate measures (e.g. recomputing checksums after mutation, if the data structure contains checksums).

I am using this extensively in my own projects. For example, RCL (a configuration language that is a superset of json) contains multiple fuzzers that test various properties [4], such as idempotency of the formatter. In the beginning it used the raw source files as inputs but I also added a more advanced generator that wastes less cycles on inputs that get rejected by the parser. The fuzzer has caught serveral bugs, and most of them would have had no hope of being found with naive randomized testing, because they required a cascade of unlikely events.

Structure-aware fuzzing is not limited to generating data structures either, you can use it to generate reified commands to test a stateful API, as you describe in the _Stateful property-based testing_ section. The Rust fuzzing book has an example of this [5], and I use this approach to fuzz a tree implementation in Noblit [6].

[1]: https://docs.rs/arbitrary/latest/arbitrary/
[2]: https://rust-fuzz.github.io/book/cargo-fuzz/structure-aware-fuzzing.html
[3]: https://github.com/google/libprotobuf-mutator
[4]: https://docs.ruuda.nl/rcl/testing/#fuzz-tests
[5]: https://rust-fuzz.github.io/book/cargo-fuzz/structure-aware-fuzzing.html#example-2-fuzzing-allocator-api-calls
[6]: https://github.com/ruuda/noblit/blob/a0fd1342c4aa6e05f2b1c4e2929804c82e348ae2/fuzz/fuzz_targets/htree_insert.rs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40877028

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

The following instructions do not require any plugins or addons, which is a bonus.

  1. Find your profile folder.
  2. Navigate to the subfolder 'chrome'. If it doesn't exist, create it.
  3. Now inside that folder, create an empty file called 'userContent.css'.
  4. Open that file in a text editor, and add this text (all on one line): @font-face { font-family: 'Helvetica'; src: local('Arial'); }
  5. Save that file and restart firefox.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1210975/how-do-i-block-or-substitute-a-certain-font-in-firefox

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

Hydration works differently

Svelte 5 makes use of comments during server side rendering which are used for more robust and efficient hydration on the client. As such, you shouldn't remove comments from your HTML output if you intend to hydrate it, and if you manually authored HTML to be hydrated by a Svelte component, you need to adjust that HTML to include said comments at the correct positions.

sveltejs/svelte@528d346

This just cost us about two days of three people debugging.

==> Removing whitespace and comments will brake Vue’s hydration strategy when using server side rendering.

https://community.cloudflare.com/t/omit-formatted-comments-from-minification/18572/28?page=2

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

Wikipedia trench warfare is an elaborate game, opaque and bizarre for outsiders to even contemplate, in which motivated figures fight to exhaustion over often trivial-seeming changes with deep significance to participants. Given that, I’ll expend my last remaining bit of sanity to bring legibility to a few of Gerard’s skirmishes. When Gerard fixates on something within an article, he touches it up via a series of gradual, mild tweaks: often individually defensible, usually citing one policy or another, all pointing one direction. He removes neutral information tangential to his fixation, gradually expands and adds citations to the sections he fixates on, and aggressively reverts any change that goes against his vision. When challenged, he raises policy names, invites editors to escalate, requests hard proof for straightforward claims he knows are true, accuses opponents of being fringe conspiracists, and if all else fails, simply goes silent and waits for people to shift their focus before returning to what he wanted to do in the first place.

https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/reliable-sources-how-wikipedia-admin

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

If China wanted to make the yuan a true global reserve currency, they would need to embrace massive financial deregulation and abolish their currently strict capital controls, in order to allow massive inflows of foreign held currency and yuan into China. But China needs to maintain its strict financial regulation for domestic economic success, and political stability. China is unlikely to ever decide to abandon the statist model it has followed for decades just to make itself a better hub for the international financial system.

https://keithwoods.pub/p/the-shadow-money-system-that-rules

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

[Cloudflare is] now processing an average of 57 million HTTP requests/second (+23.9% YoY) and 77 million at peak (+22.2% YoY). From a DNS perspective, we are handling 35 million DNS queries per second (+40% YoY).

https://blog.cloudflare.com/application-security-report-2024-update

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ivan commented Jul 25, 2024

The good thing about open source software is that it’s reusable intellectual property. Consultants can work for one company using it, then move on, and use it to do consulting for someone else. Open source software is great because talented engineers can work where people can see them, on something they can show, and something they can keep.

https://news.alvaroduran.com/p/we-love-writing-software-so-much

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ivan commented Jul 26, 2024 •
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I think the ever-evolving nature of conspiracies is actually pretty important to psychologically grasping their appeal. I have a friend who is a big believer in 9/11 Trutherism. He once compelled me to watch the documentary “The New Pearl Harbor,” an exhausting 5-hour film promoting 9/11 conspiracies. If one actually watches, one quickly discovers that a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theories are mutually exclusive, or at least don’t mesh well together: One conspiracy argues that fighter jets were intentionally diverted the wrong direction to keep them from shooting down the hijacked jets approaching New York, while another conspiracy suggests that United 93 was shot down, and it was all covered up. In some versions, the planes didn’t hit the Twin Towers at all. Sometimes Bush did it, and sometimes Israel did it, and so on. 

Similarly, in my career I’ve worked adjacent to people who, like RRN, were very hostile to Covid-19 shots. That hostility made them sequentially endorse wildly different assertions about how the vaccines worked. Sometimes, the vaccines contain heavy metals. Sometimes, they contain hydra DNA to turn recipients into partially non-human chimeras. Sometimes, the vaccines are a depopulation agent. Sometimes, they’re a mind-control agent, or a killswitch that can be activated by self-assembling nanomachinery. One viral documentary in 2022 claimed that Covid was caused by snake venom in the water supply, and that Covid vaccines were an additional dose of snake venom to keep people sick (all this, of course, because the snake is Satan’s animal).

What stands out isn’t the silliness of these particular theories, but that I saw them sequentially endorsed by the same people.

Some of these people are smart enough to notice inconsistencies, at least when they’re pointed out, so why don’t they bother them? To some extent, I think it’s for the same reason people don’t care that every Batman story doesn’t perfectly line up. Consistency isn’t the point! What actually matters is enjoying individual stories and the wider genre they fit into. Covid vaccine haters don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, they’re driven by a core impulse of “distrust the new vaccine that people I distrust are promoting,” and every conceivably story or tale that feeds that genre of thought is, for them, worthwhile.

Similarly, Real Raw News fans don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, I think their core impulse is, ironically, profound disappointment in how the Trump administration failed to deliver. Trump shook up the American political landscape more than anyone in living memory, and promised sweeping changes to every level of American government, yet his actual administration proved rather disorderly, changed far less than was promised, and then lost power after one term. For many, this simply prompted a revision in how they saw Trump. But for others, the preferred response is to embrace a fantasy reality where Trump is a superhero.

[...]

Imagine you are an ordinary, mildly engaged American citizen. You live far from the halls of power, you work an ordinary job, and whatever your feelings on political issues, you rarely see elections translate in a clear way to your own daily life. You might be interested in Washington, but Washington really isn’t that interested in you. 

Online, the world throws a million potential narratives at you. In some of them, the world is a confusing mess of moral gray areas. In others, the people you care about are winning. But in some narratives, you’re the hero, the people you like do good things, and the bad guys get what they deserve. The superficial evidence for all of these narratives is about equally convincing, at a glance. Look outside, and it’s hard to see the impact of any of the stories. Your entire understanding of reality is mediated through what sites you choose to read and what videos you choose to watch. As a politically marginal person, it won’t matter what you as an individual choose to believe. 

So, what happens if you choose to believe the story you find most enjoyable? And what if millions of others choose the same?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-real-raw-news

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ivan commented Jul 26, 2024

There is no technical improvement good enough to compensate for poor usability. If the App takes 0.5ms to do something but I have to go to 3 different screens, and another takes 2ms but one button is enough, in everyday use it will be faster, even if it is less efficient.

We have a Ferrari under the hood, but without electric steering, with manual windows and old brake pads.

https://old.reddit.com/r/OvercastFm/comments/1ecra74/the_official_better_than_ever_thread_list_all_the/

#ux

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ivan commented Jul 28, 2024

salon-style spaces for people to talk about important issues and difficult ideas while resisting their reflexive reduction to existing ideological oppositions

https://partiful.com/e/pmrQzkZEienFcvzwJJ9q

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ivan commented Jul 29, 2024

Ask HN: Strategies to Reduce AI Hallucinations?

Feed it grounding text that's about as long as the output text you expect it to produce.

They are called transformers for a reason.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41055736

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ivan commented Jul 30, 2024

As an Essentialist, distilling, organizing and simplifying is your call. It doesn't matter where you go, whether at work or home or on vacation (or a restaurant, store, experience, etc), you see chaos, mess, complexity and it triggers a near-primal urge to create order and simplicity.

It could be complex information, ideas, spreadsheets or data-sets, toys in a room, items in a display, clothes on a rack, books on a shelf, physical or digital, it doesn't really matter. Your brain immediately goes into distill and simplify mode. You think in systems and processes designed to create space, order and efficiency. It's what breathes you.

This is one of the Sparketypes that often expresses itself very early in life. Unlike others where you need to "go out into the world" to experience activities and moments that give you the raw data to really get a sense for what lights you up, nearly every moment of every day provides opportunities for Essentialists to embrace and employ their Sparketype. Because, it turns out, the world is a largely chaotic, complex and massively disorganized place.

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ivan commented Jul 30, 2024

Attachment as a driver of work will almost always produce good results. Unfortunately it may not produce useful results, or results that society wants. The Artist that aligns with society is rare.

https://www.eristicstest.com/the_artist/

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ivan commented Jul 31, 2024

  • If people have a good “user experience” when they interact with you, then they will want to interact with you more in the future.

https://dynomight.substack.com/p/advice

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ivan commented Aug 2, 2024

Ask HN: What is the best software to visualize a graph with a billion nodes?

Visualizing large graphs is a natural desire for people with lots of connected data. But after a fairly small size, there's almost no utility in visualizing graphs. It's much more useful to compute various measures on the graph, and then query the graph using some combination of node/edge values and these computed values. You might subset out the nodes and edges of particular interest if you really want to see them -- or don't visualize at all and just inspect the graph nodes and edges very locally with some kind of tabular data viewer.

It used to be thought that visualizing super large graphs would reveal some kind of macro-scale structural insight, but it turns out that the visual structure ends up becoming dominated by the graph layout algorithm and the need to squash often inherently high-dimensional structures into 2 or 3 dimensions. You end up basically seeing patterns in the artifacts of the algorithm instead of any real structure.

There's a similar, but unrelated desire to overlay sequenced transaction data (like transportation logs) on a geographical map as a kind of visualization, which also almost never reveals any interesting insights. The better technique is almost always a different abstraction like a sequence diagram with the lanes being aggregated locations.

There's a bunch of these kinds of pitfalls in visualization that people who work in the space inevitably end up grinding against for a while before realizing it's pointless or there's a better abstraction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132095

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ivan commented Aug 4, 2024

Intellectual property is absolutely a moat, but it's not the "Intellectual Property" as defined in law. It's the implicit, tacit knowledge & what exists in the collective mind of the team. But it's still property of a sort, the shareholders have a beneficial claim to it.

https://x.com/J_L_Colvin/status/1820119713654984913

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ivan commented Aug 4, 2024

Reinventing the wheel is a terrible metaphor in a lot of cases. I understand why it exists, but it seems to discourage trying something by yourself the first time. There is a lot of value in rediscovering something because you understand it a lot more, and in many contexts, that personal discovery is key.

https://x.com/inkolore_/status/1818739846774768064

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ivan commented Aug 4, 2024

I love thinking.

https://x.com/inkolore_/status/1816133765359652883

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ivan commented Aug 5, 2024

Wow not a single mention of Whisper this entire comment first page! I think Whisper is really cool: the large model can pull speech out of even heavily distorted (wind noise, clipping, etc) audio. I have a story to illustrate why running Whisper on your own locally is not so easy! Much easier to sign up to the OpenAI API.

In my research I found that actually pre-processing the audio to reduce noise (using the IMO best-in-class FB research "denoiser") actually increases WER. This was surprising! From a human perspective, I assumed bringing up the "signal" would increase accuracy. But it seems that, from a machine perspective, there's actually "information" to be gleaned from the heavily distorted noise part of the signal. To me, this is amazing because it reveals a difference in how machines vs humans process. The implication is that there is actually speech signal that is inside the noise, as if voice has bounced off and interacted with the noise source (wind, fan, etc), and altered those sounds, left its impression, and that this information is then able to be utilized and contributes to the inference. Incredible!

With whisper: I started with the standard python models. They're kind of slow. I tried compiling python into a single binary using various tools. That didn't work. Then I found whisper.cpp--fantastic! A port of whisper to C++ that is so; much; faster. Mind blowing speed! Plus easily compilation. My use case was including transcription in a private, offline "transcribe anything" MacOS app. Whisper.cpp was the way to go.

Then I encountered another problem. What the "Whisperists" (experts in this nascent field, I guess) call it "hallucination". The model will "hallucinate". I found this hilarious! Another cross-over of human-machine conceptual models, our forever anthropomorphizing everything effortlessly. :)

Basically hallucination includes: feed Whisper a long period of silence, and the model is so desperate to find speech, it will infer (overfit? hallucinate?) speech out of the random background signal of silence / analog silence / background noise. Normally this presents as a loop of repeats of previous accurate transcribed phrase. Or, with smaller models, some "end-of-youtube video" common phrases like "Thank You!" or even "Thanks for Watching". I even got (from one particularly heavily distorted section, completely inaccurate) "Don't forget to like and subscribe!" Haha. But the larger models produce less hallucinations, and less generic "oh-so-that's-what-your-dataset-was!" hallucinations. But they do still hallucinate. Especially during silent sections.

At first, I tried using ffmpeg to chop the audio into small segments, ideally partitioned on silences. Unfortunately ffmpeg can only chop it into regular size segments, but it can output silence intervals, and you can chop around that (but not "online" / real time) as I was trying to achieve. Removing the silent segments (even the imperfect metric of "some %" of average output signal magnitude (sorry for my terminology, I'm not expert in DSP/audio)) drastically improved Whisper performance. Suddenly it went from hallucinating during silent segments, to perfect transcripts.

The other problem with silent segments is the model gets stuck. It gets "locked up" (spinning beach ball, blue screen of death style--I don't think it actually dies, but it spends a long, disproportionately long, time on segments with no speech. Like I said before, it's so cute that it's so desperate to find speech everywhere, it tries really hard, and works its little legs of during silence, but to no avail.

Anyway, moving on to the next problem: the imperfect metric of silence. This caused many issues. We were chopping out quieter speech. We were including loud background noise. Both these things caused issues: the first obvious, the second, the same as we faced before: Whisper (or Whisper.cpp) would hallucinate text into these noise segments.

At last, I discovered something truly great! VAD. Voice Activity Detection is another (normally) AI technique that allows segmenting audio around voice segments. I tried a couple Python implementations in standard speech toolkits, but none were that good. Then I found Silero VAD: an MIT licensed (for some model versions), AI VAD model. Wonderful!

Next problem was it was also in Python. And I needed it to be in C++. Luckily there was a C++ example, using ONNX runtime. (I had no idea any of these projects or tools existed mere weeks ago, and suddenly I'm knee deep!). There were a few errors, but I got rid of the bugs, and had a little command line tool from a minimal C++ build of ONNXruntime / Protobuf-Lite and the model. Last step was the ONNX model needed to be converted to ORT format. Luckily there's a handy Python script to do this inside the Python release of ONNXruntime. And, now, the VAD was super fast.

So i put all these pieces together: ffmpeg, VAD, whisper.cpp and made a MacOS app (with the correct signing and entitlements of course!) to transcribe English text from any input format: audio or video. Pretty cool, right?

Anyway, running Whisper on your own locally is not so easy! Much easier to sign up to the OpenAI API.

MacOS APP using Whisper (C++) and VAD0--conveniently called: WisprNote heh :) https://apps.apple.com/app/wisprnote/id1671480366

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34992012

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ivan commented Aug 5, 2024

Apple Intelligence in 15.1 just flagged a phishing email as “Priority” and moved it to the top of my Inbox.

https://social.panic.com/@cabel/112905175504595751

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ivan commented Aug 5, 2024

“What are my options?”

Do you perhaps have a button to push… in case of an unexpected situation.

https://x.com/patio11/status/1817955327154831784

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ivan commented Aug 6, 2024

  • TOB-BREW-12, wherein a formula could opportunistically perform a privilege escalation through a user’s previously activated sudo token.

https://blog.trailofbits.com/2024/07/30/our-audit-of-homebrew/

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ivan commented Aug 6, 2024

In United States labor law, at-will employment is an employer's ability to dismiss an employee for any reason (that is, without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning,[1] as long as the reason is not illegal (e.g. firing because of the employee's gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, or disability status). When an employee is acknowledged as being hired "at will", courts deny the employee any claim for loss resulting from the dismissal. The rule is justified by its proponents on the basis that an employee may be similarly entitled to leave their job without reason or warning.[2] The practice is seen as unjust by those who view the employment relationship as characterized by inequality of bargaining power.[3]

At-will employment gradually became the default rule under the common law of the employment contract in most U.S. states during the late 19th century, and was endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court during the Lochner era, when members of the U.S. judiciary consciously sought to prevent government regulation of labor markets.[4] Over the 20th century, many states modified the rule by adding an increasing number of exceptions, or by changing the default expectations in the employment contract altogether. In workplaces with a trade union recognized for purposes of collective bargaining, and in many public sector jobs, the normal standard for dismissal is that the employer must have a "just cause". Otherwise, subject to statutory rights (particularly the discrimination prohibitions under the Civil Rights Act), most states adhere to the general principle that employer and employee may contract for the dismissal protection they choose.[5] At-will employment remains controversial, and remains a central topic of debate in the study of law and economics, especially with regard to the macroeconomic efficiency of allowing employers to summarily and arbitrarily terminate employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment

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ivan commented Aug 6, 2024

97% of Americans' daily trips are done via automobile. Walking, biking, and bus riding tend to be associated with low socioeconomic status. There is heavy policing of low SES populations. In Kaplan, Louisiana it is explicitly illegal to walk at night. https://www.klfy.com/local/vermilion-parish/kaplan-starts-pe...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41105944

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ivan commented Aug 6, 2024

On July 1, 2021, Amazon did something it hadn’t done in many years: It added two new leadership principles to its list. “Strive to be Earth’s best employer” was one new principle. “Success and scale bring broad responsibility” was the other. 

When these were introduced, Amazon was facing intense media coverage over the swell of unionization efforts in its warehouse network, as well as antitrust and environmental scrutiny. And with Bezos scheduled to hand over the CEO reins a few days later, the introduction of the two new principles served as a convenient opportunity to demonstrate a company committed to progress under his successor.

Inside the company, though, the reaction among many employees was swift and brutal: “They are clearly a marketing ploy and they devalue the rest of the Leadership Principles,” one former senior manager of more than 10 years who left the company recently told Fortune. “Total bullshit,” opined a former longtime communications employee at Amazon who was still at the company at the time, and who summed up the new principles as “playing the reputational game versus guiding how you think.”

The problem, explained a former Amazon vice president, is that the pair of new leadership principles are so radically different from the other 14 that it makes it tougher for employees to grasp the essence of the overall principles and to act on them. “I’ve got to think that that’s somewhat challenging for the rank and file. The fact that there are so many LPs, and the fact that these last two are so abstract,” the former VP said.

https://fortune.com/2024/07/31/amazon-leadership-principles-questions-future-jeff-bezos-departure-andy-jassy/

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ivan commented Aug 7, 2024 •
edited

Just do your best.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzXJDP9Hoic&t=27m30s

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ivan commented Aug 7, 2024

JSX

https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1817617945641505193

->

https://www.jsx.com/home/search

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ivan commented Aug 8, 2024

Just for info: It is due to Sulfur in Cysteine.

Hi Gozenka, quick comment about the source of the smell. The smell in NAC doesn't actually come from the sulfur atom in the cysteine, pure cysteine does not smell. Rather, the smell is called by a plethora of small sulfur containing molecules that are created during the NAC production process and end up trapped in the crystals. During transit and use, the crystals break open and these small organic sulfur containing molecule volatilize and create the smell.

OP, if you want to make the smell go away you can take the powder, grind it up with a mortar and pestle to destroy all of the crystal structure, spread the powder on a cookie sheet, and just gently heat it in an oven or a warm room or in front of a fan. Once all of the sulfur containing impurities have volatilized off, the powder will not smell anymore. This is the easiest way to eliminate the smell, but there are others.

Hope that's useful info!

https://old.reddit.com/r/Supplements/comments/17friw8/nac_powder_really_smells_like_farts/

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ivan commented Aug 9, 2024 •
edited

Accordingly, it was not spiritual illumination but everyday banality that he could not stand to lose. No line better distills the tender spirit of “The Book Against Death” than this: “Above all, when I am dead, what I will miss: the voices of people in a restaurant.” Canetti did not fret about the state of his soul; he worried himself sick about the fate of all the detritus that makes up a life:

What will become of all that has piled up within you, so much, so much, an enormous stock of memories and habits, deferred questions, frozen answers, thoughts, emotions, tender feelings, hardships, everything there, everything there, what will become of it all the moment life extinguishes within you? The disproportionate size of this stockpile — and all of it for nothing?

[...]

“He would like to die while writing,” reads one of his notes from 1986. “Before he’s entirely finished, he’d like to complete a sentence, exhale before the next sentence, and die exactly between the two.” And this is exactly what he did. His very last entry contains no acknowledgment that death is even possible. “It is time for me to sort matters out again within myself. Without writing I come undone. I sense how my life dissolves into dead, dull speculation when I no longer write down what is on my mind.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/08/02/book-against-death-elias-canetti-review/

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ivan commented Aug 9, 2024 •
edited

The difference is that I just make claude-dev build very large pieces of functionality that I wouldn't be able to get done in cursor. I'm able to get it to build for example, a role based permission system on an enterprise crud app that already has a lot of functionality. I just tell it to do so and write the tests for it and then ask it 5 times to fix it to pass all the tests and it eventually does it without a me lifting a single finger.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1embttz/is_claude_dev_finally_the_next_level_thing_we/?depth=99

I’ve been experimenting lots with claude-dev the last few days. It‘s hands down the most powerful agentic code generation tool I’ve used,by a significant margin.

Still lots of room for improvement but I‘m eager to see how much leverage the next generation of models will provide. Definitely already more productive as is than my usual workflow.

One aspect that might raise eyebrows is cost. A single days of intensive use on large codebases can easily cost about $80 to $140 for sonnet API calls.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1en8dzu/state_of_gptcoding_aug_2024/lh53a6p/

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ivan commented Aug 9, 2024

Development velocity is the only variable to optimize. Poor stability reduces development velocity. Tech debt reduces development velocity. Pointless meetings reduce development velocity.

https://x.com/olson_dan/status/1820695663757455513

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ivan commented Aug 10, 2024

I interviewed a bunch of people who claimed enlightenment (or awakening/stream entry/similar shifts).

It seemed to me that there were different types of views on enlightenment among these people. Here's a bunch of ways they seemed to vary from each other:

The Bliss Spectrum: characterized by nirvana, ecstasy, constant happiness. They claimed they had reached a state where they were shivering with delight at all times.

The Mental Health Spectrum: of clearness, purpose-drivenness, fulfillment, being aware of what they wanted at all times, being motivated, healthy, whole. For them, ‘enlightenment’ was working all their personal shit out and having a hyper-functional life.

The Science Spectrum: Intense, awesome scientific epiphany. An awareness of their smallness, the universe’s largeness, deep realizations about being walking matter, of the intricate beauty of evolution.

The Superpower Spectrum: The possession of magic abilities, including being able to talk to beings from other dimensions, telepathy, and receiving sacred knowledge imparted to them from divine creatures.

The Concentration Tricks Spectrum: Intense concentration and mental abilities. They were able to alter their perception, slow time, change the space around them, see the refresh rate on monitors.

No-self spectrum: Altered senses of self; they included inanimate objects or other people in their sense of self, or had no sense of self at all. This includes ego death.

Understanding Spectrum: A general spiritual epiphany; people reported a sense of completion, of having ‘no more questions’, of finally comprehending what’s going on, of nonduality, of wholeness.

Wordless Spectrum: An altered or unusual relationship to words, typically distrustful or disconnected; playing with words, going meta with words, not using words, not-claiming, claiming contradiction and paradox.

Perception Spectrum: Seeing your experience as your own; experiencing yourself as inherent and integral to the experience; a realization that your brain is constructing things, often associated with dreamlikeness.

Morality Spectrum: An intense sense of an ethical direction; describes a ‘right’ or ‘moral’ direction, uses goodness as a consistent guiding description of their insights.

Love spectrum: A sense of love and compassion for all living beings

Tradition spectrum: How much they adhere to classic wisdom and beliefs; tends to believe in reincarnation and karma, places authority in the Buddha’s teachings

Disassociation spectrum: Stoicism; the ability to carefully control emotions, independence from environment, remaining unaffected by whims or pain or pleasure.

Peace: A sense of being deeply okay, at ease with the current moment, settled, present, like everything is all right.

https://x.com/Aella_Girl/status/1820932038238613797

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ivan commented Aug 10, 2024

These are models, supercomputer guesses as to what the weather might be. They are not realtime measurements of every square inch of sky.

The models are different, and have different goals and resolution.

  • GFS: Global, American Model, max 384 hours. Great for planning a few days out, but might not be as accurate in the 3-24 hour range, lower resolution (27km), updated 4x day. GFS27 and GFS+ variations.
  • ECMWF: Global, European Model, max 240 hours, 14km resolution, updated 2x day,
  • ICON: Global (ICON13), Germany Model, max 180 hours, 2x/day, 13km resolution
  • NAM: North America, US Model, max 60-84 hours, US-only, better resolution (12km), claimed to be BEST for North America, updated 2x day
  • HRRR: North America, NOAA Model, based on radar, good for short range, better resolution (3km), max 36 hours, updated 2x a day every 12 hours
  • RAP, WRF -- not in Windy, google them

https://old.reddit.com/r/paramotor/comments/y0znh5/dropping_the_windy_appneed_another_app_to_check/

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ivan commented Aug 10, 2024

These kinds of pesticide registration reviews are routinely delayed. Part of the problem, Glenna says, is that regulators have to rely on industries to release toxicology information because it’s considered proprietary information. “[It’s] intellectual property,” he says, “so university or publicly funded scientists simply don’t have the ability to do the research.”

When a pesticide is first registered with federal regulators, the vast majority of the information available about it is science conducted by the company who made it. “The presumption in the US is in favor of the safety of the chemical,” Burd says. Elsewhere, like the European Union, “chemicals are not presumed safe, they adopt a much more precautionary approach.”

In fact, according to federal law, the EPA can only refuse to register a pesticide if its risks are greater than the benefits it provides, as measured by crop yield or quality. As a result, close to a third of US pesticide use involves chemicals banned in China, Brazil, and the European Union.

There’s also a revolving door between the agency and the industry it regulates. Alexandra Dunn, the former assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, for example, is now running CropLife America, the pesticide industry’s leading lobbying group. She’s only the latest; since 1974, all of the office’s directors went on to work for pesticide companies.

https://jacobin.com/2024/07/pesticide-cancer-lobbying-lawsuits/

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

When voting, there should be a separate box you can check marked "REBOOT" along with whatever other votes you cast. If over 60% of the voters check that box, all officeholders are disqualified from ever running again, and new elections are held the following year.

https://x.com/cmuratori/status/1822166430663774693

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

[MrBeast's] videos are mindless, crude, wasteful and contain zero educational or artistic value.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZu8-WnSqic

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

What's particularly alarming is the speed at which new vulnerabilities are exploited. In one case, attackers attempted to exploit a JetBrains TeamCity DevOps authentication bypass a mere 22 minutes after the proof-of-concept code was published. That speed is faster than most organizations can read the security advisory, let alone patch their systems.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/cloudflare-reports-almost-7-percent-of-internet-traffic-is-malicious/

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

The dilemma of the American conscience can hardly be better stated. Dostoyevsky was a great artist, and a radical one, but his early social radicalism reversed itself, leaving him a violent reactionary. Whereas the American James, who seems so mild, so naively gentlemanly—look how he says “us,” assuming all his readers are as decent as himself!—was, and remained, and remains, a genuinely radical thinker. Directly after the “lost soul” passage he goes on.

All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.

The application of those two sentences to this story, and to science fiction, and to all thinking about the future, is quite direct. Ideals as “the probable causes of future experience”—that is a subtle and an exhilarating remark!

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

Users should be aware that the App Store collects exhaustive usage data and sends it to #Apple. This can’t be turned off. We made this video to show how tapping an app link gets recorded in details.

https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/02/15/lawsuits-over-apple-analytics-switch/#lawsuits-over-apple-analytics-switch-update-2024-07-18

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024 •
edited

Erik Hoel, an American neuroscientist, posits that the industries AI are disrupting are not all that lucrative. He coined the phrase “supply paradox of AI” — the notion that the easier it is to train AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is.

“This is because AI performance scales based on its supply of data, that is, the quality and size of the training set itself,” said Hoel. “So when you are biased towards data sets that have an overwhelming supply, that, in turn, biases the AI to produce things that have little economic value.”

Hoel raises an interesting point. Generative AI’s current applications include writing, image and video creation, automated marketing, and processing information, according to the US Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey. Those are not particularly high value. Using specialist data, sophisticated models could do deeper scientific work, but that data can be in short supply or even restricted.

[...]

What I wanted to point out here though is actually something deeper. Which is that the longer AI takes to show up in any positive economic indicators, the more it becomes the case that AI has brought increasing existential risk in exchange for minimal upside.

https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/all-the-existential-risk-none-of

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

Can other people free-ride on your skill? Can they look at your track record and say “everything this person picks goes down, so I should short it”? I mean! Tuttle Capital Management once launched some very rude exchange-traded funds to fade Jim Cramer’s and Cathie Wood’s stock picks, but I don’t think those had any real alpha; it is not actually the case that Cramer or Wood has this sort of anti-skill. In general, if your stock picks are known broadly, they’re probably not bad enough to make betting against you a reliable strategy.

On the other hand, your broker probably knows (1) what you’re buying and (2) how you’re doing. If you’re terrible, your broker might be tempted. Here is a funny CME Group disciplinary action against a futures broker called Wing Fung Futures Limited:

Pursuant to an offer of settlement in which Wing Fung Futures Limited (“Wing Fung”) neither admitted nor denied the rule violations or factual findings upon which the penalty is based, on July 16, 2024, a Panel of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Business Conduct Committee (“Panel”) found that between July 22, 2020, and July 7, 2022, Wing Fung deployed an automated trading system (“ATS”) in the Australian Dollar, British Pound, Canadian Dollar, Euro FX, Japanese Yen, New Zealand Dollar, E-mini NASDAQ, Micro E-mini NASDAQ, and E-mini S&P 500 futures markets wherein the ATS’s strategy was to submit orders based upon trades executed by its clients who were regularly unprofitable. Specifically, upon a target client establishing a short/long position, the ATS generated a trading signal to enter an order in the same market for the same price and quantity as the client, though to establish the opposite short/long position. The Panel found that by employing this strategy, Wing Fung attempted to profit from its knowledge of its clients’ record of losses, which was not available to others in the marketplace. Additionally, the Panel found that Wing Fung employees used Wing Fung’s clients’ unique operator IDs to enter orders into Globex. The Panel further found that Wing Fung’s leadership fundamentally did not understand, or were otherwise completely unaware, of Exchange rules that prohibited the activity described above. Therefore, the Panel found that Wing Fung failed to diligently supervise its employees and agents.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-07-22/bad-trades-are-also-valuable

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

Jump had a conundrum. The firm needed to test the mettle of its would-be staffers—whether they could parse the nuances in financial markets and translate them into algorithmic trading models. But it couldn’t give the temporary hires the keys to the kingdom, with its proprietary strategies and billions of dollars in capital.

Crypto offered a solution. The sector had its own tradable assets, exchanges, and quirks, but it was separated enough from Jump’s world of stocks and bonds that it wouldn’t pose a threat. “It was a bit of a toy market,” says one former employee, who spoke with Fortune on the condition of anonymity to discuss their previous firm. ...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-05/the-good-trades-have-gone-bad

training/evaluation area

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

Data analytics firm Grocery Doppio’s “State of Digital Grocery Performance Scorecard: H1 2024” found reduced grocery spending among 97% of consumers who had taken GLP-1 medications — glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, including semaglutide drugs Ozempic, Rybelsus and Wegovy, prescribed for diabetes or obesity.

Their grocery bills were down by an average of 11%, yet they spent 27% more on lean proteins from lean meat, eggs and seafood. Other gainers were meal replacements (19%), healthy snacks (17%), whole fruits and vegetables (13%) and sports and energy drinks (7%).

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-07-22/bad-trades-are-also-valuable

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

Dude bought at the peak and is selling now 🤣 🤣 🤣

Elon Musk backs down from $45 million a month pledge to Trump: I don't subscribe to cult of personality

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024 •
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As Joseph Heath points out in Cooperation and Social Justice, the ability to appreciate “explanatory inversions” is one of the things that most sharply distinguishes a scientifically informed worldview from a “commonsense” one:

“One of the clearest points of demarcation between specialist discourses and everyday commentary and debate is that the former are often structured by what might be thought of as “explanatory inversions.” These arise as a consequence of discoveries or theoretical insights that have the effect of changing, not our specific explanations of events, but rather our fundamental sense of what needs to be explained.”

To illustrate, Heath gives the example of social deviance in criminology:

“Common sense tells us that most people, most of the time obey the law. Crime is an anomaly, and as such, stands in need of explanation. Common sense provides us with a wealth of explanations, which seek to identify the motives that impel people toward criminal acts. But if one stops to examine these motives… the most striking thing about them is how ordinary and ubiquitous they are. For every angry person who commits an assault, or greedy person who steals from others, there are hundreds of equally angry, equally greedy people who refrain from doing so.”

In other words, the “root causes” of crime are simply the benefits of crime. Nothing is deeply puzzling about why people cheat, steal, fight, rape, and murder. People rob banks because that is where the money is.

“This is what prompted the realization… that it is not crime that cries out for explanation, but rather law-abidingness.”

Why do most people fail to appreciate this?

“Common sense is wrong on this point because we are all reasonably well-socialized adults, living in a well-ordered society, and so we take for granted the institutional arrangements that secure our compliance with the rules. But the underlying mechanisms are ones that we do not really understand, as a result of which it is difficult to explain why more people do not break the law more often (since it is so often in their interest to do so).”

As Heath observes, the crime example manifests a more fundamental, explanatory inversion concerning human cooperation.

[...]

“The truth about distant or complex matters,” writes Walter Lippmann, “is not self-evident.” Given this, “The pictures inside people’s heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside.”

These points are obvious in some ways. But I think they are greatly underappreciated in how many people instinctively think about topics like “misinformation,” “ideology,” and “science denial.”

In complex, modern societies, the relationship between reality and our representations of reality—between what Lippmann called the “real environment” and the “pseudo-environments” that make up our mental models of the real environment—is heavily mediated by complex chains of trust, testimony, and interpretation.

Think of the economy, society-wide crime trends, vaccines, history, climate change, or any other possible focus of “public opinion.” Not only is the truth about such topics typically complex, ambiguous, and counter-intuitive, but almost everything you believe about them is based on information you acquired from others—from the claims, gossip, reports, books, remarks, opinion pieces, teaching, images, video clips, and so on that other people communicated to you.

Moreover, to organise all that socially acquired information, you relied on simplifying categories, schema, and explanatory models that reduce reality's complexity to a tractable, low-resolution mental model.

In this heavily mediated process, there are countless sources of error and distortion. This is true even if you are ideally rational. But of course, you are not; you are human. Not only is the construction of your pseudo-environment twisted and distorted by prescientific intuitions and innumerable cognitive biases, but you are not a disinterested truth seeker. Instead, your beliefs are biased by motives and interests like self-aggrandisement, status-seeking, tribalism, and social conformity.

Just as importantly, the people from whom you have acquired your information about the world are similarly flawed, fallible, and biased. In some cases, they were outright liars and propagandists, but most were simply influenced by the same mundane sources of motivated reasoning as you.

For these reasons, the truth is not the default when people form beliefs about the world beyond their immediate material and social environment.

Of course, in some sense, this should be obvious. Just as poverty is humanity’s default state throughout history, so are ignorance and misperceptions. At least relative to a modern scientific worldview, almost everything people have ever believed about the world they are not in close perceptual contact with has been completely wrong.

Nothing is puzzling about this_._ The puzzle is that humans sometimes overcome the countless sources of error and illusion that distort beliefs and form accurate perceptions of how things are.

https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/why-do-people-believe-true-things

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

Civ 5 is a turn based game you absolute noob. Everytime i read what you write you just prove to be the noobiest noob ive ever layed my autist eyes on.

https://angelicism.substack.com/p/technologists/comment/62461710

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

But Musk has more recently embraced conservative politics, especially the issue of free speech.

https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/world/news/trump-says-he-has-no-choice-but-to-support-electric-vehicles-because-elon-musk-endorsed-me-very-strongly/articleshow/112270769.cms

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024 •
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So basically a GA Airbus. I think this is a pretty cool project, and while it may not achieve the lofty goals you’ve set forth, any improvement in safety is worthwhile.

As other commenters have point out though, where this stuff falls short is ultimately still the human. Ok, great… your aircraft won’t stall in Normal Law. However you’ve now lost a generator and a whole FCC and you’re in direct law. The 400 hr pilot hasn’t actually flown a plane with direct input since their primary training 5 years ago. They also don’t remember what the different flight envelopes do and do not provide. Essentially the system is more complex but normally it works so the complexity is hidden. They’re not equipped to handle flying the airplane anymore.

This is where GA really ultimately falls short IMHO, proficiency. Airlines are the safest they’ve ever been because the pilots make an entire career out of being prepared for every contingency. People using airplanes as a personal travel tool can be trained and proficient to the same degree but often they are not because flying an aircraft is ancillary to their primary mission.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41163382

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

[Quick reminder: you’re getting this dispatch because you asked to be kept up to date with Sparketype-related news, breakthroughs, research, and valuable resources for work and life.]

email from Sparketype

brackets for sidenotes in email

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024 •
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Among states with access to online betting, the likelihood of filing for bankruptcy increases by 25-30% after three to four years.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/online-sports-betting-hurts-consumers
via https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1822302611065765906

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

he devised an optical character recognition processing cluster by chaining together a dozen dilapidated second-generation iPhone SEs and harnessing Apple's Live Text optical character-recognition feature to find possible inventory tags, barcodes, or other corporate labels in listing photos. The system monitored for new listings, and if it turned up a possible hit, Bryant would get an alert so he could assess the device photos himself.

In the case of the Time Capsule, the listing photos showed a label on the bottom of the device that said “Property of Apple Computer, Expensed Equipment.”

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-prototypes-corporate-data/

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

You can’t actually construct a useful framework built around something you define in the negative, which this is.

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bQ6zpf6buWgP939ov/frame-control#comment-9WeR3QpHmxC3YoSQw

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ivan commented Aug 12, 2024

Katamari Dama-C++

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41211119

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

Google should not be allowed to control both the web browser and the web ads. This should be part of the monopoly break-up.

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1esbyod/google_pulls_the_plug_on_ublock_origin_leaving/?depth=99

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

Paul Alfille had the brilliant idea of changing Baker's Game in one respect, allowing cards to be packed on the tableau downward in alternate colors, as in familiar games like Klondike and Demon (Canfield), thus producing the game we know as FreeCell. This has the happy effect of making nearly every deal winnable, though many are still quite difficult. Alfille wrote the first version of FreeCell for the PLATO educational computer system in 1978. The popularization of the game is also due to Jim Horne, who wrote a character-based version for DOS and later a full graphical version for Windows. The latter first appeared in 1992 on Microsoft Entertainment Pack 2 (and later in the Best of Microsoft Entertainment Packs). Later versions were bundled with Windows For Workgroups and Win32s (the 32-bit extension to Windows 3), and eventually with Windows 95 (and 98).

http://www.solitairelaboratory.com/fcfaq.html

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

Women's sports exist to give women a space where they can plausibly win, since there are only a few sports where biological females can hope to medal in competition with men: sports like horseback riding, where the muscle is externally provided, and sports designed to privilege women's greater flexibility, such as women's gymnastics, synchronized swimming, and figure skating. Women can get close to gold in a couple of ultra-endurance sports, and may possibly medal in ultra-endurance swimming, but otherwise, without a separate women's category, the Olympics would be all male.

https://x.com/asymmetricinfo/status/1823475047513907658

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

ULPT: Woman being fobbed off from receiving medical care? Lie and say you've been trying to conceive for over a year (self.UnethicalLifeProTips)

I didn't lie, it's true. The medical attention I've received has exponentially gone through the roof. They finally did a full panel blood and urine test, uncovering an autoimmune disease which they refused to test for for years. Woman trying to live a healthy life? No help. Potential vessel for motherhood? All the help.

https://old.reddit.com/r/UnethicalLifeProTips/comments/1eqmosg/ulpt_woman_being_fobbed_off_from_receiving/

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

Since then, my stance on Cloudflare is "take whatever I can get from them for free, and never spend a single dime in any of their services".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41230500

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

if you have POST
/user/setName
/user/setEmail

you will need to add /user/setNameAndEmail if you want to have a performant api if people need to do both

this idea applies to apis everywhere like in stdlib - you can’t make any api performant, its design needs to factor that in

btw good test is if you can read this post and understand the point or if you can only focus on the rest api design in the example

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1822287652990722122

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

same. honestly. I was in a milieu of people who had intense theories about the world and I mistook this for thinking deeply. eventually I realized they were just a different flavor of fundamentalist religious people

https://x.com/_deepfates/status/1823095284156801368

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

This is common in cases of plagiarism, fabulists, & serial fabricators: "there's never just one cockroach in the kitchen".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41167131

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024

In addition to violating a sense of justice, victims of narcissists feel that narcissists are attacking them personally. If it wasn't personal, it really wouldn't matter as much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRd5LnIEXJM

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024

There is no second gear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNpeVRB19xU

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024

are you megadosing aspirin and taking enclomiphene, bpc-157, cialis, and cordyceps yet

https://x.com/mccraydotlink/status/1782541713992536348
via https://x.com/search?q=taking%20cordyceps&src=spelling_expansion_revert_click&f=live

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024

Lately I keep saying “Yeah, I just don’t think that’s true” and it’s so funny watching people react to someone just outright disagreeing with them. You’d think that’s never happened before

https://x.com/DarbraDawn/status/1815385224303231463

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024

Most of my intellectual success comes from refusing to forget what I already know. Sometimes the things that "everyone knows" are logically inconsistent with each other. If you notice these, it turns up lots of little mysteries.

https://x.com/benlandautaylor/status/1815818656204611850

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024 •
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The Spanish Prisoner is a confidence trick originating by at least the early 19th century, as Eugène François Vidocq described in his memoirs.[1][2]

The scam

In its original form, the confidence trickster tells his victim (the mark) that he is (or is in correspondence with) a wealthy person of high estate who has been imprisoned in Spain under a false identity. Some versions had the imprisoned person being an unknown or remote relative of the mark.[3] Supposedly the prisoner cannot reveal his identity without serious repercussions, and is relying on a friend (the trickster) to raise money to secure his release.[3] In this classic pigeon drop game archetype, the trickster offers to let the mark put up some of the funds, with a promise of a greater monetary reward upon release of the prisoner, and sometimes the additional reward of marrying a beautiful woman stated to be the prisoner's daughter.[4] After the mark has turned over the funds, he is informed further difficulties have arisen, and more money is needed. With such explanations, the trickster continues to press for more money until the victim is cleaned out, declines to put up more funds, or dies.

Characteristics

Key features of the Spanish Prisoner trick are the emphasis on secrecy and the trust the trickster apparently places in the mark not to reveal the prisoner's identity or situation. The trickster will typically claim to have chosen the mark carefully, based on his reputation for honesty and straight dealing, and may appear to structure the deal so that the trickster's ultimate share of the reward will be distributed voluntarily by the mark.[citation needed]

Modern variants

Modern variants of the Spanish Prisoner fraud include the advance-fee scam, in particular the Nigerian money transfer (or 419) scam.[3][5]

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

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024

i generally avoid getting into discussions about code because you’re all stupid and i don’t wanna hear your dumbass thoughts

i tried it a bit today and realized that not only are you all stupid, you also have no hope at becoming less stupid

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1816275222204670188

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024 •
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so many engineers struggle with suspending disbelief so they can make it to a more interesting thought

We had a product manager who couldn't imagine anything that didn't exist

It was wild

Real wild

https://x.com/GremlinIndustry/status/1824502773993316821

often times when trying to think hard about something it's helpful to think of exaggerated scenarios and follow what flows from that

it's not that you think the exaggerated scenario is likely just that it's a useful way to think about things

people often get hung up on this

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1824471608129417407

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024 •
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p2p internet was good. limewire was good. even if the quality was bad and there was transcoding, people understood that people got things from other people. that abundance comes from your neighbor and from being a neighbor

https://x.com/turtlekiosk/status/1822106553777861016

Yeah looking back at many P2P projects my only criticism is we were all trying to solve too many problems at once and we didn't appreciate how amazing the things we built were.

https://x.com/Lucid00/status/1822116875628671057

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024 •
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Researchers from IOActive have reported that it may be possible for an attacker with ring 0 access to modify the configuration of System Management Mode (SMM) even when SMM Lock is enabled.

https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-7014.html
via https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/08/almost-unfixable-sinkclose-bug-affects-hundreds-of-millions-of-amd-cpus/
via https://x.com/arstechnica/status/1822259483940139496

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

The #1 reason for cofounder breakups in the most recent YC batch was co-founders trying to renegotiate a previously agreed equity split.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rXUOP-FcnIE8eNTkKlELkakZ-MLaIvEyIxUlBOLNZPw/edit

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

Ninety percent of Marrero’s patients came back with elevated amounts of glyphosate in their blood, in one case as high as 15,000 times the test’s lowest detectable concentration.

That line struck me - as an example of innumeracy, or at least misunderstanding of tests. Or maybe it was willful ignorance intended to sound more shocking than it is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41248069

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

I like how all the aging brain studies don't control for "im bored of this shit after 20 years and have better things to do than compete"

https://x.com/unormal/status/1822125438677717420

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024 •
edited

If people with high opportunity cost decline to participate in government, laws will be made by those with low opportunity cost

https://x.com/moseskagan/status/1821983315236426040
via https://x.com/patio11/status/1822092419556659615

Singapore tries to do this right with high compensation

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

It brings me no pleasure to say this, but Svelte is dead because LLM base models are better at writing React.

I just pulled the entire Svelte 5 docs into a little script that minifies the tokens and generates a prompt for Claude. Works perfectly.

https://x.com/didiercatz/status/1822188984245559399

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

is there a friendship app for men?

It's called going outside and doing something useful

https://x.com/inkblotistan/status/1821967345113497919

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

you [can] pass an abort signal to .addEventListener

https://x.com/mattpocockuk/status/1817958766756733278

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

i have no idea why i do this. but i will spend 3 hours trying to figure out why a certain thing works. and its always the dumbest most inconsequential thing. but sometimes, only sometimes, it's incredibly useful. to know how a thing works.

this is not related to universal things, no. this is related to how a certain thing was implemented by an engineer of yore at a corporate job. it's not even that interesting most of the time. i just feel. the need to know. i must know

https://x.com/yacineMTB/status/1821180291488370913

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024 •
edited

Every social media website has a guiding motto, agreed by everyone who joins but never spoken out loud. For example, Reddit's is "everybody ought to think like I do". What began as a way to vote on posts grew into a hyper-conformist dystopia, and now any opinion that goes against the grain is not only dogpiled on but quite possibly banned for the terrible perils that such wrong information may pose. Forget controversial political opinions - saying "you can keep a betta in a 2.6g" in the aquariums subreddit will mark you as a public enemy.

[...]

Anyway, Twitter's motto is "I am so much better than that fellow over there". What began as a way to facilitate one-to-one exchanges grew into a clapback dystopia, and now every public figure is hounded by digital hyenas looking to one-up their posts and earn their fifteen minutes of please-check-out-my-GoFundMe. If you're not clapping back at individuals, you're clapping back at Platonic ideals of things

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean/comment/63884247?hide_intro_popup=true

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

i like to say goodnight to my code by scrolling though it at the end of the day

tuck it in with a commit

https://x.com/autosourcer0/status/1819995179157274815

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

We can ask similar questions about our attachments to individual cultural experiences. When should we finish a book we have started? In this regard I am extreme. If I start ten books maybe I will finish one of them. I feel no compunction to keep reading. Why not be brutal about this? Is this book the best possible book I can be reading right now, of all the books in the world? For me at least, the answer is usually (but not always) no. Whatever is that best possible book to be reading, I am willing to buy it or otherwise track it down. Most other books don’t make the cut.

I walk out of many movies, especially if I go alone. I go to many movies expecting to walk out, indeed wanting to walk out. I would like some idea of what the movie is about. Some of this curiosity is for my research, as I have written on the economics of film. Certain movies are so popular or so famous that none of us want them to remain a mysterious black box in our cultural experience. I’d like to get a feel for this movie and I don’t always want to wait for the DVD or suffer the small screen. Knowing about the movie from what others tell you only goes so far. But do I really need to see the end? I can either guess how it turns out or read a review. For me the first half of Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima—not a bad movie—was enough.

If I can manage to walk out of one movie, I can see parts of other movies that same day. One day I saw parts of four movies. I was happy, not frustrated by the experience. Three of them were better than I had expected, although apparently they were not good enough.

Sometimes I will see a movie that ends at 4:00 but schedule an appointment or a phone call for 3:00. I expect to meet my commitment. If the movie is really good—better than I expect—then I am in trouble. But it is a nice kind of trouble to be in. It means that seeing the rest of the movie is better than anything else I could be doing in the world at that moment. That’s impressive. If that is the scenario to be worried about, I feel I am sitting pretty.

Economist Robert Hall once said something like: “If you haven’t ever missed a plane, you spend too much time waiting around in airports.”

Tyler Cowen - Discover Your Inner Economist

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

Have an agentic day full of progress on your goals and projects!

https://x.com/SomeBrashAtom/status/1818671496950173969

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

Have a good time with your Bitcoin and your crypto and everything else you're playing with

https://x.com/molly0xFFF/status/1817301858869973473

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

You're right, this post is based on personal anecdotal experience. I have access to Google Search Console data for over 100 websites, and most have many pages in the "Discovered - currently not indexed" and "Crawled - currently not indexed" categories, despite ranking well for some keywords and getting traffic. This wasn't the case 10 years ago.

Regarding "Google never indexed everything" - I'd say it came close. They did manual de-indexing for heavy spam sites and would even send an email when they did this. Apart from that, nearly everything was in the index, including duplicates. De-duplication happened at the ranking stage, not the indexing stage.

At some point, Google even had a second index, the Google Supplemental Index, for pages of lower importance.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970987

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

Some people wouldn’t recognize a snake if it was on a stage reciting a poem about a snake.

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pYSjxZfB6A

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024 •
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In other words, research indicates the best way to improve your problem-solving ability in any domain is simply by acquiring more foundational skills in that domain. The way you increase your ability to make mental leaps is not by learning to jump further, but by building bridges.

So, there does not seem to be any tangible, empirically-supported reason to struggle with a challenge problem for a long period of time, when you consider that you could be making more educational progress using that time to learn more content. For instance, in an hour-long session, you're going to make a lot more progress by solving 30 problems that each take 2 minutes given your current level of knowledge, than by attempting a single competition problem that you struggle with for an hour. (This assumes those 30 problems are grouped into minimal effective doses, well-scaffolded & increasing in difficulty, across a variety of topics at the edge of your knowledge.)

[...]

As Sweller, Clark, and Kirschner sum it up in their 2010 article Teaching General Problem-Solving Skills Is Not a Substitute for, or a Viable Addition to, Teaching Mathematics:

"Although some mathematicians, in the absence of adequate instruction, may have learned to solve mathematics problems by discovering solutions without explicit guidance, this approach was never the most effective or efficient way to learn mathematics. ... In short, the research suggests that we can teach aspiring mathematicians to be effective problem solvers only by providing them with a large store of domain-specific schemas. Mathematical problem-solving skill is acquired through a large number of specific mathematical problem-solving strategies relevant to particular problems. There are no separate, general problem-solving strategies that can be learned."

[...]

Many heated debates in math education stem from these misinterpretations of deliberate practice. Mindless repetition, doing the same thing over and over again without making performance-improving adjustments, is not deliberate practice. Likewise, any activity that throttles the volume of action-feedback-adjustment cycles (e.g., excessively challenging problems, or think-pair-share type of stuff) is not deliberate practice.

[...]

Just to name one example: last year, I tutored a student who was taking analysis at an elite university, and each problem set consisted of those "think really hard for a long period of time" problems. Things were going the way of a train wreck: despite her best efforts, she was spinning her wheels on these problems and making very little progress. Not only was she unable to solve the problems, but also, she was not noticeably improving any supporting knowledge by trying and failing to solve them.

What I ended up doing was engaging her in deliberate practice on all of the component knowledge that was being pulled together in each problem. Something like this (the following is non-exhaustive):

  • Deliberate Practice on Definitions: I give you a mathematical object and you tell me whether it meets the definition (and why or why not). Repeat over and over again increasing in difficulty. Okay, now suppose we remove some criterion from the definition. What's an object that didn't meet the original definition but does now after dropping that criterion? Repeat over and over dropping different criteria.

  • Deliberate Practice on Theorems: I give you a scenario and you tell me whether it meets the assumptions of the theorem. If so, you tell me specifically what else you know is true about the scenario, according to the theorem. Repeat over and over again increasing in difficulty. Okay, if this is a one-way implication, tell me some scenarios where the converse does not hold.

As soon as we took a step back from the homework problems and started doing that, she started making actual progress on her supporting knowledge. After enough cycles of deliberate practice, she'd re-attempt the homework problems, often solving them completely or at least getting a lot further before starting to spin her wheels again.

The result: her exam performance skyrocketed and she ended up finishing the course with an A.

What could have happened: without this deliberate practice intervention, she would have gotten a low grade in the course and possibly even dropped out of the major entirely.

https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/27964/how-to-choose-a-textbook-that-is-pedagogically-optimal-for-oneself

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024 •
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Why Some People Talk Too Much

Often, the person who is talking excessively may not know they are doing it. Excessive talking can be caused by the following mental health conditions:

  • Bipolar disorder: People with bipolar disorder may talk excessively with pressured (rapid and urgent) speech when their brain is in a manic state.
  • Schizophrenia: Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder that affects the brain and often influences how someone talks, causing pressured speech and disorganized (difficult-to-follow) speech.
  • Personality disorders: People with personality disorders, particularly narcissistic personality disorder, may talk excessively.
  • Anxiety disorders: Anxiety can cause someone to speak excessively. While many with social anxiety may avoid social interactions, some may inadvertently talk excessively when in social situations out of nervousness and anxiety.
  • Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): People with ADHD may talk excessively and interrupt frequently.

https://www.verywellhealth.com/excessive-talking-5224128

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024 •
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De-duplication. We apply several rounds of de-duplication at the URL, document, and line level:

  • URL-level de-duplication. We perform URL-level de-duplication across the entire dataset. We keep the most recent version for pages corresponding to each URL.

  • Document-level de-duplication. We perform global MinHash (666900) de-duplication across the entire dataset to remove near duplicate documents.

  • Line-level de-duplication. We perform aggressive line-level de-duplication similar to ccNet (wenzek2019ccnetextractinghighquality). We remove lines that appeared more than 6 times in each bucket of 30M documents. Although our manual qualitative analysis showed that the line-level de-duplication removes not only leftover boilerplate from various websites such as navigation menus, cookie warnings, but also frequent high-quality text, our empirical evaluations showed strong improvements.

Heuristic filtering. We develop heuristics to remove additional low-quality documents, outliers, and documents with excessive repetitions. Some examples of heuristics include:

  • We use duplicated n-gram coverage ratio (Rae2021ScalingLM) to remove lines that consist of repeated content such as logging or error messages. Those lines could be very long and unique, hence cannot be filtered by line-dedup.

  • We use “dirty word” counting (raffel2020exploring) to filter out adult websites that are not covered by domain block lists.

  • We use a token-distribution Kullback-Leibler divergence to filter out documents containing excessive numbers of outlier tokens compared to the training corpus distribution.

Model-based quality filtering. Further, we experiment with applying various model-based quality classifiers to sub-select high-quality tokens. These include using fast classifiers such as fasttext (joulin2017bag) trained to recognize if a given text would be referenced by Wikipedia (touvron2023llama), as well as more compute-intensive Roberta-based classifiers (liu2019roberta) trained on Llama 2 predictions. To train a quality classifier based on Llama 2, we create a training set of cleaned web documents, describe the quality requirements, and instruct Llama 2’s chat model to determine if the documents meets these requirements. We use DistilRoberta (sanh2019distilbert) to generate quality scores for each document for efficiency reasons. We experimentally evaluate the efficacy of various quality filtering configurations.

Code and reasoning data. Similar to deepseekai2024deepseekcoderv2breakingbarrierclosedsource, we build domain-specific pipelines that extract code and math-relevant web pages. Specifically, both the code and reasoning classifiers are DistilRoberta models trained on web data annotated by Llama 2. Unlike the general quality classifier mentioned above, we conduct prompt tuning to target web pages containing math deduction, reasoning in STEM areas and code interleaved with natural language. Since the token distribution of code and math is substantially different than that of natural language, these pipelines implement domain-specific HTML extraction, customized text features and heuristics for filtering.

https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2407.21783
via https://x.com/GregKamradt/status/1815776204659781978
copied from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.21783

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024

This game, with a few mods (YUP Patch, ect) and engine fixes(NVME, ect) from the community, is a MASTERPIECE. Probably my most played game on Steam.

Highly recommend this guide, if you want to play the game to it's full potential in 2022: https://vivanewvegas.github.io/

EDIT: Link Dead, New Link > https://vivanewvegas.moddinglinked.com/

https://gazellegames.net/torrents.php?id=931

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024 •
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What makes Chantal AI "eco-friendly"?

The underlying AI language model is a 512×10000 matrix that weighs about 195 MB and doesn't need more because it is specialized on image-processing topics. It uses an energy-efficient algorithm (Word2Vec, 2013) that turns a search into a matrix dot product. It is trained with around 450k documents containing around 134 millions words, for a total disk space of 560 MB (compressed). Training needs around 6 h on an Intel Xeon laptop. At runtime, searching the whole index of 78k pages needs 3.2 GB of RAM and takes about 0.3 to 0.5 s on a desktop computer.

While this is not the yesteryear state-of-the-art in language processing, the accuracy vs. computational power ratio is very good and lets the search engine run on low-end hardware with reasonable runtimes. The current web service runs on a shared hosting environnement (CPanel/Linux/Apache) typically in 1  s, along with a multi-site WordPress installation and a forum CMS. No GPU is involved.

The current fashion in AI is to run very heavy algorithms (transformers) on GPU farms, and to provide general audience with nice web interfaces allowing them to abuse the service for their own amusement. For information retrieval tasks, these methods are typically 3-6 % more accurate than the one used here, but are at (very) least 500 times more computational-expensive at runtime, while needing much more input training data.

https://chantal.aurelienpierre.com/

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024

For an automated system to act intelligently, you must feed it as much high-quality, granular, and timely data as possible.

One of the things that the Math Academy system has lacked up to this point is a comprehensive understanding of what's happening with a student at the task level. Going back to my days working in HFT (high-frequency trading), that would fall directly within the category of "microstructure analysis".

If you want to make smart decisions at the micro level, you better have a lot of detailed data at that level (or even lower). And while information such as interest rates, yesterday's trading volume, and the asset price from 15 minutes ago might provide some helpful context, it's not nearly granular enough. You need to get deep in there to find out precisely what the buy-and-sell order books look like, and how they've been changing, millisecond to millisecond. Without that, you're essentially blind, and you might as well hand over your trading capital to the other players in the market and call it a career.

Likewise, for our system to react and adapt to a student as if it were an expert human tutor sitting right next to them, it needs to know exactly what's happening at that level - at that second. To do that, I wrote some code that (as of yesterday) has begun capturing what we refer to as "task events" and will be the first step towards taking our adaptive algorithms to the next level.

https://x.com/exojason/status/1824949655983337788

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024 •
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Cordyceps' method of dispersal is through parasitizing insects.[7] Researchers believe that the insect picks up the fungus while foraging for food.[8] The fungus makes its way deeper into its hosts body, eventually taking over and controlling the insect's behavior.[8] The fungus then makes its host climb to a high point, most likely the leaf of a nearby plant, and latch on, locking it in place.[8] The fungus continues to eat at its host, killing it in the process.[8] After a few days, the fungus's fruiting body begins to emerge from its host's body, where it then sends its spores out to infect more insects.[8]

[...]

Studies have found that excessive use of C. militaris can exert pressure on the filtering and excretory functions of the liver and kidneys, potentially leading to damage in these organs.[15]

[...]

Like other members of the Cordyceps genus, C. militaris produces the pharmacologically active compound cordycepin. Cordycepin is a nucleoside analogue of adenosine-differing by only a single hydroxyl group. It has been shown to induce apoptosis, reduce inflammation, and inhibit RNA transcription in cell cultures. For these reasons, it is under study for its anti-metastatic properties.[22]

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

Because cordycepin is similar to adenosine, some enzymes cannot discriminate between the two. It can therefore participate in certain biochemical reactions (for example, 3-dA can trigger the premature termination of mRNA synthesis).[5][6] By acting as an adenosine analog, cordycepin was found to be the most potent molecular circadian clock resetter out of several screened compounds.[7]

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

There are two distinct advantages to the Cordyceps Militaris vs Cordyceps Sinensis:

  1. No insects are harmed in the making of this mushroom - Cordyceps militaris is grown in a sterile medium, NOT in an arthropod.

  2. It’s a super-charged version of Cordyceps - Cordyceps militaris produces the health-supporting compound cordycepin (3′-deoxyadenosine) in much higher amounts when compared to Cordyceps sinensis (2).

A study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry in 2008, confirmed that not only does Cordyceps militaris contain more cordycepin when compared with the wild Cordyceps sinensis, it has up to 90 times more (2)!

https://www.realmushrooms.com/cordyceps-sinensis-vs-militaris/

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024

I once worked in R&D where our competitive advantage was in keeping our customer relationships and intellectual property private, so we kept everything on-prem. No cloud, no SaaS, no WFH.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41037532

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024

companies can reach a scale where it's very costly to definitively assess who is to blame for crimes and can therefor commit any profitable crime up to a certain threshold. It both makes a mockery of the rule of law as a concept (along with many other things in the US legal system) and is an enormous competitive advantage for large companies

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41121865

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024

Please hire me based on how awesome I think I am, not how awesome you think I am.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40990992

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024

He has a twitter thread where he describes Hobbit Software: "Now thinking about creating a movement to promote "hobbit software". Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of the wizards and the orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them. Oh, the Electron empire is going to war with the Reacts? Sounds ghastly, sorry to hear that. Me and the lads are off to the pub"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41106036

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024 •
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- offer email support, but don't offer phone, video calls or remote support. This works for most people and forces them to properly phrase questions instead of just "jumping on a call" (so you can then effectively train them over the phone, which doesn't scale).

- offer as much self-service as possible

- work at your own pace and it's ok to just not work some days.

- finding a niche is hard, but they can be surprisingly basic. You're just saving someone time, effort, worry etc.

- lean on global cloud services for reliability. Let them do that.

[...]

One trick I may or may not have invented for the enterprise PO problem (manual processes etc) was to offer an Azure Marketplace subscription for the product.

That way they can just go to azure and subscribe to the license that way, without needing any azure resources etc, it's just a billing mechanism.

They can then bundle that into their usual Azure spend and even do manual POs etc that I never have to deal with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41107355

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024

Ethnographer Orr had a sharp eye for detail.  He noticed when a technician on a call began by examining copies that had been thrown in the trash and deduced from them that the problem with the machine was different from what the customer had reported.  “The trashcan is a filter between good copies and bad,” one technician explained  “Just go to the trashcan to find the bad copies and then… interpret what connects them all.”10

https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everything/communities-of-practice/the-soul-of-maintaining-a-new-machine/1
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41167615

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024

Very cultivated people are a joy to behold. Cultivated is a good word - like an orchard, hard work cradles & trusses nature.

https://x.com/michaelcurzi/status/1824304552553705517

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024

The price of Urbit Stars is down from a peak of $28,000 to around $700 now. Investors are completely ruined.

https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1824443472067035307

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024

ROSS
No no, that's not it. I don't know that I want to adopt an adversary position toward the Company...

JIMMY
...but you are in an adversarial position.

ROSS
No, No, I think you're wrong...

JIMMY
I think you'll find, if what you've done for them is valuable, as you say it is, that if they are indebted to you morally, but not legally, my experience is that they will give you nothing. And they will begin to act cruelly toward you.

ROSS
Why?

JIMMY
To suppress their guilt.

David Mamet - The Spanish Prisoner (1997)

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024 •
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Certainty.

The air that Scientists breathe is the unknown. It’s that place where something’s not quite right and there’s a better way out there, but what exactly that is, well, it’s anyone’s guess. Uncertainty is the soil in which they plant their seeds and grow their solutions. It represents possibility. As they work their Scientist magic, over time, answers start to come, solutions take form, and what was once the great unknown starts to come into focus. A specific, certain answer emerges.

While this is the end-state we’re taught to spend our lives working toward, Scientists love the process of getting there, and they love the fact that they figured the thing out. But they don’t love being there. It’s highly unusual to find a true Scientist lingering or reveling in their solution. Instead, they’re thrilled for a moment, then the impulse kicks back in and they’re off to the next problem, dropping back into the realm of the unknown.

But what if there is no next problem? What if you’re locked into a job, role, industry, set of processes, course-of-dealing, or context where everything is fairly figured out, nobody seeks change, and most people want everything to stay the same? If there is no next problem to solve or thing to figure, fix, or improve, you can’t get lost in the process of figuring the thing out. You can’t do the thing you’re here to do if it has already been done, and no one wants it done better.

In an odd way, while most others yearn for certainty, security, and sameness, that same experience can become a growing trigger for the Scientist. If they dwell in it for too long, they get intensely uninterested, frustrated, and maybe even a tad cranky. They lose the ability to come alive and, instead, find themselves trapped in the process and slowly flatlining.

Jonathan Fields - Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work that Makes You Come Alive

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024 •
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My approach is to have separate “take-off” points near the entrance/exit of each room.

Example: If I’m in my home office and find that some things need to go to the living room and some to the kitchen, I simply queue them to take off instead of taking a trip every time I realize an item needs to go. Then when I take a coffee break, I’ll grab all the items; drop the living-room items off on the way to the kitchen, and drop the kitchen items off when I arrive. I get my coffee; grab anything queued up on the kitchen take-off point that can be dropped off on the way, and drop them off on my way back.

As it works out, everything is almost always where it ought to be; and when it’s not, I know where it will be instead.

The key is that I always check the take-off point every time I leave a room.

This is a good idea, as is the idea in the article. The basic requisite however is a desire to not lose stuff. My wife always loses track of her EarPods. My oldest kid always loses his pocket knife.

I could have 20 holding pens in the house and they'd still lose their stuff, since the idea that you have to exert even a minor amount of effort <now> by putting stuff in its place to save yourself much more searching effort <later>, is either lost on them, or they just greatly value the present over the future.

I do not even get annoyed about it anymore - just like I do not get annoyed that it turns dark at night. My stuff is always in its place, and before we leave the house they will spend 10 minutes finding theirs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220059

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024

I just end up buying enough of the item to be within arms reach of nearly anywhere I'm likely to use it.

I used to never be able to find a screwdriver when I needed it, so now I have seven screwdrivers: three regular ratcheting, three stubby ratcheting, and a ratcheting one that lives in my pocket. I keep a regular ratcheting on my desk, in my living room, and in my bedroom, which are the only places I would realistically ever use these things.

As a result there's really no reason for me to lose it; it's already contained into the area that it already lives.

I do this with a lot of stuff now. Separate chargers for my laptop for my desk and my bed, separate iPhone chargers, and a bunch of other stuff.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220932

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024

One of the biggest freaks on the planet. Cannot believe I have the fact that he exists rattling around my brain for the rest of my life

https://x.com/bpleasies/status/1823155412260229583

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024

What I really want is the search/browse experience of nvUltra with the editing experience and cross-platform presence of Obsidian

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41254936

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

I share your suspicion of the thin details. And what details they do provide smell funny too. I’m especially skeptical of this supposed cloak and dagger business:

> My wife just received an email from the online retailer. She has been asked to "Not take any photographs or copies of the product in question due to copyright issues" and it states, "the product must be returned immediately by special delivery by [DATE]." There's some other statements as well about our account being terminated if we fail to return the product by the specific date. We've got a lot of movies and series that we have purchased over the years on this account, I wouldn't want to lose them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269514

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
edited

but I'll show ideas you've never seen
arranged in ways they've never been
I mean you tell me what I did wouldn't work any more
what I'm doing hasn't even been done before

https://x.com/Demruth/status/1825536119024537683

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
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During the average day, more than 80 million people log onto Roblox.

[...]

Each month, players spend close to six billion hours using Roblox.

[...]

So yes, Roblox is unquestionably “working.” Yet Roblox is also unprofitable. Very unprofitable. What’s more, Roblox’s losses continue to swell because its impressive rate of revenue growth has been outpaced by that of its costs. Over the last four quarters, Roblox’s income from operations was ($1.2B) on revenues of $3.2B, representing a -38% profit margin. During the company’s four pre-pandemic quarters, income was ($66MM) on $508MM, for a -13% profit margin. Put another way, revenues are now 6.2x greater, but losses are 18x greater.

[...]

In August 2024, Turkey banned Roblox outright for the “protection of our children”; a month earlier, Bloomberg published a brutal report on the platform’s “pedophile problem.”

https://www.matthewball.co/all/roblox2024

Roblox is dilution-maxxing, stock based comp is up 10x since EOY 2020 whereas revenue is only up 3x. SBC is also ~ 1/3 of revenue.

It's pretty cool to get shareholders to pay your employees so you can be called "operating cash flow positive" as if their comp isn't an expense.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41287099

I got my 8-year-old going on Roblox because she asked for it. I had no idea what is really involved with it and as I watched her play it, it all seemed to me to be a big scam.

She would play games and want Robux. So she would go on her iPad and download iPad games that pay out Robux. The iPad games are total junk that only pay Robux after my kid watches ads. Some of those ads are for crappy games that pay Robux. Repeat the cycle.

I was appalled by the whole thing and deleted Roblox. She has gone back to Minecraft and does not seem to miss Roblox.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41287099

Roblox is a huge problem for me, as a parent of a 8y kid. Let me explain: I try to block violent apps in his tablet using Google's Family app, however, Roblox internally keeps 'offering' my kid almost any game, whatever if there's violence, drugs, killing others, and so forth.

It's a headache and a source of fights, so, I thank the responsible (/sarcasm).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41288059

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
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If you had a control panel to switch off dozens of nuclear reactors simultaneously, you’d have to comply with all kinds of safety regulations, and inspectors would come by to check if you were doing it right. This applies also to large solar and wind installations, by the way.

Because inverters and solar panels at home are “ordinary” consumer appliances, there is no inspection and no legislation. This makes sense since a single installation can’t cause that much damage.

But because we didn’t pay attention, the management of those “consumer appliances” has now moved to just a few suppliers who, on sunny days, even measured individually, control a significant part of our power supply.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-power-plants-in-the-cloud/
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292018

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
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There's a common conception in culture that young people are the first people to embrace new technology, and I kind of enjoy that this is bucking that trend. The older people are, in this case, the first people down at the slophouse, waiting for their plate of slop. This is their thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4V97qwz4Uk

Generated images do not have a human being going “this is a stupid thing to draw”, previously only political cartoonists would actually be the ones to draw stuff like this and they are universally terrible artists. AI enables shitty ideas that no human with any talent would draw themselves, and we are worse for it

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4V97qwz4Uk

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

Some people on this thread rightly point out that [Paul Stamets] is not formally educated in biology and mycology. While that clearly hasn’t been a barrier to him contributing to the field and getting people excited about mushrooms, it does lead to him making statements that might not be precise. From my experience, a lot of science education is background info (e.g. I’m in ecology, but know a lot of things about microbiology) and learning how to talk about your science in an accurate way. If you don’t receive formal education you might not have these two rather important bits of knowledge, and I feel like that may be the case with Paul. It usually isn’t a good idea to use words like “always” and “never” and make sweeping unsubstantiated claims that can’t be rigorously examined in a scientific way. I think that this is the source of the icky feeling Paul gives me. I assume that sometimes he has to put his science hat on to write pubs and go through peer review, but when speaking to the public he puts his pseudoscience hat on where he frames anecdotes as data, makes absolute statements, makes claims about spirituality, and makes claims that seem too good to be true and have no data (besides anecdotes) cited, all while using his tangentially related scientific findings to lend validity to his statements.

Here's an example: "the mycelium is the immune system of the mushroom". That is not not precise, it is complete nonsense. Like stating the plant is the immune system of the flower.

His books also contain a lot of factual mistakes.

His 'Host Defense' supplements are among the worst on the market, they don't even contain mushrooms but 'myceliated rice'. No clue what is wrong with him, he's the one that got me interested in mushrooms 20 years ago, he was a hero to me ! And then I started discovering all this BS, FFS

https://old.reddit.com/r/mycology/comments/p4t1v7/whats_the_deal_with_paul_stamets/

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
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A typical large project in Bevy would take me 30 seconds i7-9700k to compile, and at least 15 seconds with dynamic linking enabled (which was often broken). Add some more major libraries and it can take up to 2 minutes or more to compile on a fairly fast CPU. This is not great for rapid gameplay development.

My engine on the other hand, takes 0.2 seconds to compile a large project. This is because every piece of gameplay code is either a dynamically linked library or WASM module that simply uses the data driven entity component system as a universal interface. This is not common in Rust, but we're on the cutting edge of a new paradigm here! This same sandboxed interface can also be given to players / modders / developers for my UGC game. Bevy also does not have a stable release yet, which means investing in it is just as risky as my own engine, except the decisions for breaking changes are made by a third party. Bevy is also massive, which means code changes to the engine are unfamiliar, difficult, overwhelming and within their ecosystem.

https://legendofworlds.com/blog/4

is interesting because people complain about Rust compile times but maybe don't realize they're wielding a big flexible thing where they can decide to prioritize compilation times over other things

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

The open secret about business is that all the experts communicate in frameworks but don't think in frameworks.

https://x.com/ejames_c/status/1825173202764701772

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

I was telling my mother that working in tech puts you in a sort of continual survival mode. I explained how I tried to foresee the decline at companies & projects based on a variety of conditions. And she said, “That’s crazy! And you’ve been doing this for decades?”

https://x.com/hpdailyrant/status/1824463482777223535

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
edited

what was your strategy for SST?

  • build stuff for ourselves
  • pay attention to users doing weird things
  • expand our scope to cover weird things instead of explaining why they should stop
  • repeat

idk if it'll succeed but it's doing ok

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1823742329993273843

  • make a list of things that are bad
  • fix them
  • repeat

that's it

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1823748599097745874

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

i honestly can't stand doing client side engineering but it's the highest most important work that you can do most of the time so i just bite down on a cloth and power through

https://x.com/yacineMTB/status/1823718017500635578

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

Meditation has completely nuked my motivation. Why do anything when I can just feel whatever sensation I want without doing the thing? Why travel when I can stay at home and feel whatever sensation I'm seeking my travelling? Why date when I can feel infinite love at home? Why work when I can feel like the richest person in the world instantly? Why do anything at all but sit with my mind, which is capable of giving me any mental state I desire at any time?

https://x.com/prodigygrimes/status/1820472801914233229

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
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Pareidolia (/ˌpærɪˈdoʊliə, ˌpɛər-/;[1] also US: /ˌpɛəraɪ-/)[2] is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia.

[...]

Pareidolia correlates with age and is frequent among patients with Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies.[8]

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

But after a fairly small size, there's almost no utility in visualizing graphs.

I want to stress this point and go a bit further. It can be worse as people have pareidolia[0], a tendency to see order in disorder. Like how you see familiar shapes in the clouds. There is a danger in that with large visualizations such as these that instead of conveying useful information, you counterproductively convince someone that something that isn't true is! Here's a relevant 3B1B video where this is kinda discussed. There is real meaning but the point is that it is also easy to be convinced of things that aren't true[1].

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132095

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

As seen in Figure 5 the target part reveals that LNK invokes the Windows Command Processor (cmd.exe). The target path as seen in the properties is only visible to 255 characters. However, command-line arguments can be up to 4096, so malicious actors can that this advantage and pass on long arguments as they will be not visible in the properties.

https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/rise-of-lnk-shortcut-files-malware/
via https://www.google.com/search?q=lnk+file+malware
via https://www.proofpoint.com/us/blog/threat-insight/threat-actor-abuses-cloudflare-tunnels-deliver-rats

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

social norms are minimum viable proof-of-work for "safe to interact with"

https://x.com/loopholekid/status/1575187379261829121

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ivan commented Aug 21, 2024

a lot of bots are out there parsing JSON-LD metadata. Nice things tend to happen to blog posts that include the Semantic Web metadata:

Social media sites (Twitter/Discord/Facebook/WhatsApp/etc) start showing that nice link preview with an image for your links.

https://csvbase.com/blog/13

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ivan commented Aug 21, 2024 •
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Last spring, I spoke with a writing professor at a school in Florida who had grown so demoralized by students’ cheating that he was ready to give up and take a job in tech. “It’s just about crushed me,” he told me at the time. “I fell in love with teaching, and I have loved my time in the classroom, but with ChatGPT, everything feels pointless.” When I checked in again this month, he told me he had sent out lots of résumés, with no success. As for his teaching job, matters have only gotten worse. He said that he’s lost trust in his students. Generative AI has “pretty much ruined the integrity of online classes,” which are increasingly common as schools such as ASU attempt to scale up access. No matter how small the assignments, many students will complete them using ChatGPT. “Students would submit ChatGPT responses even to prompts like ‘Introduce yourself to the class in 500 words or fewer,’” he said.

If the first year of AI college ended in a feeling of dismay, the situation has now devolved into absurdism. Teachers struggle to continue teaching even as they wonder whether they are grading students or computers; in the meantime, an endless AI-cheating-and-detection arms race plays out in the background. Technologists have been trying out new ways to curb the problem; the Wall Street Journal article describes one of several frameworks. OpenAI is experimenting with a method to hide a digital watermark in its output, which could be spotted later on and used to show that a given text was created by AI. But watermarks can be tampered with, and any detector built to look for them can check only for those created by a specific AI system. That might explain why OpenAI hasn’t chosen to release its watermarking feature—doing so would just push its customers to watermark-free services.

[...]

But Warner has a simpler idea. Instead of making AI both a subject and a tool in education, he suggests that faculty should update how they teach the basics. One reason it’s so easy for AI to generate credible college papers is that those papers tend to follow a rigid, almost algorithmic format. The writing instructor, he said, is put in a similar position, thanks to the sheer volume of work they have to grade: The feedback that they give to students is almost algorithmic too. Warner thinks teachers could address these problems by reducing what they ask for in assignments. Instead of asking students to produce full-length papers that are assumed to stand alone as essays or arguments, he suggests giving them shorter, more specific prompts that are linked to useful writing concepts. They might be told to write a paragraph of lively prose, for example, or a clear observation about something they see, or some lines that transform a personal experience into a general idea. Could students still use AI to complete this kind of work? Sure, but they’ll have less of a reason to cheat on a concrete task that they understand and may even want to accomplish on their own.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/08/another-year-ai-college-cheating/679502/

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ivan commented Aug 22, 2024

assigning tasks to people who have the right disposition for them

https://commoncog.com/understand-that-people-are-wired-very-differently/

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ivan commented Aug 22, 2024

I suspect a lot of folks who are into note-taking methods have this mindset that if only we knew how to take better notes, we'd be able to reason better, produce better output and become more accomplished. I also suspect we are cerebral types and have rich inner worlds, so it's only natural that we think that more and better analyses will help us understand the world better. Yet, despite the many tools that we have, many of us only hover just a little above mediocrity in our accomplishments.

(I'm describing myself in the above paragraph.)

Outside of certain fields like academia and writing, I've observed that accomplished people tend to focus more on "doing" (including doing the "wrong" things) rather than constructing a super coherent model of the world. They rely on rough heuristics and feedback loops to learn, rather than careful analysis.

I read an article this week "Action Produces Information" [1] that made me think that maybe the more cerebral among us ought to step outside our mental models occasionally and actually try to interact with the gritty world and let reality be our teacher (instead of our models). By interacting with reality, we actually generate new information.

Quote:

Watch any group of entrepreneurs for a long enough period of time, for instance, and you would notice that the best entrepreneurs aren’t necessarily the best calibrated Bayesian updaters or expected utility calculators. Instead, the best entrepreneurs tend to have a mix of bias-to-action and fast adaptation in response to new information.

It seems to me that better note-taking methods are great for sharpening the brain (which is a valuable thing in itself), but a bias toward action/empiricism might be better for sharpening the skills needed to do meaningful things in the world. They're not mutually exclusive, but given a finite amount of time, my intuition tells me that putting more weight on the latter will tend to have a higher payoff.

[1] https://commoncog.com/blog/action-produces-information/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24295299

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ivan commented Aug 22, 2024 •
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But the weeks turned into months, and the evidence kept piling up. Eventually, things came to a head. I remember standing in the shower, thinking about all that had happened at work, when I realised that I wasn’t being honest with myself. “You’re avoiding this because it’s hard. You already know what to do. The evidence has been staring at you in the face for months.”

I started the firing process the very next day. A month later, one of my subordinates talked about it during our one-on-one. He asked: “Why did you take so long? We thought you didn’t know.”

“I think I knew,” I replied. “I knew there was a problem. The evidence was pretty clear.”

And then I sighed: “I knew what to do; I just didn't want to do it.”

[...]

In theory, the most difficult challenge in decision making is making the right decision. In practice, I’ve found that the most difficult challenge in decision making is executing a decision you do not want to do. This includes things like firing a subordinate, quitting your job, or laying off a quarter of your company. It includes breaking up with your partner when the relationship doesn’t seem to be working out.

Being effective calls for us to act decisively on decisions that we do not like. This is common sense. And yet it remains amongst the hardest things we do.

https://commoncog.com/decisiveness-is-just-as-important-as-deliberation/

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ivan commented Aug 22, 2024

The testing effect (also known as retrieval practice, active recall, practice testing, or test-enhanced learning)[1][2][3] suggests long-term memory is increased when part of the learning period is devoted to retrieving information from memory.[4] It is different from the more general practice effect, defined in the APA Dictionary of Psychology as "any change or improvement that results from practice or repetition of task items or activities."[5]

Cognitive psychologists are working with educators to look at how to take advantage of tests—not as an assessment tool, but as a teaching tool [6] since testing prior knowledge is more beneficial for learning when compared to only reading or passively studying material (even more so when the test is more challenging for memory).[7]

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

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ivan commented Aug 23, 2024

In 1991, Garfield was a doctoral candidate in combinatorial mathematics at University of Pennsylvania and had been brought on as an adjunct professor at Whitman College. During his candidacy, he developed his ideas and had playtested RoboRally, a board game based on moving robots through a factory filled with hazards. Garfield had been seeking publishers for the title, and his colleague, Mike Davis, suggested the newly formed Wizards of the Coast, a small outfit established by Peter Adkison, a systems analyst for Boeing in Seattle.[81][65] In mid-1991, the three arranged to meet in Oregon near Garfield's parents' home. Adkison was impressed by RoboRally but considered that it had too many logistics and would be too risky for him to publish. He told Garfield and Davis that he liked Garfield's ideas and that he was looking for a portable game that could be played in the downtime that frequently occurs at gaming conventions.[81]

After the meeting, Garfield remained in Oregon to contemplate Adkison's advice. While hiking near Multnomah Falls, he was inspired to take his Five Magics concept but apply it to collectible color-themed cards, so that each player could make a customizable deck, something each player could consider part of their identity.[65] Garfield arranged to meet with Adkison back in Seattle within the week,[82] and when Adkison heard the idea, he recognized the potential that this would be a game that could be expanded on indefinitely with new cards in contrast to most typical tabletop games; Adkison later wrote on the idea on a USENET post "If executed properly, [the cards] would make us millions."[65] Adkison immediately agreed to produce it.[83]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering

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ivan commented Aug 24, 2024

I was a Tabula Rasa closed beta tester. What killed Tabula Rasa was one simple decision during beta, that had the testers in uproar, but were unheeded. Until that time, every player who participated in killing an enemy got the full experience for the kill, this lead to a camaraderie, where everyone was encouraged to help each other. The decision was to change this so only the player who did the most damage got the experience, changing the entire mood of the game from band of brothers to get away from me killstealer. Such a simple change absolutely destroyed the game.

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMxjwtxn6NI

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ivan commented Aug 24, 2024 •
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On June 11, he saw Robinhood restricted his account reflecting what appeared to be a negative balance of $730,000. 

Later that night, at 3:26 a.m., the company sent an automated email demanding Alex take "immediate action," requesting a payment of more than $170,000 in just a few days.

[...]

Alex wrote, "I was incorrectly assigned more money than I should have, my bought puts should have covered the puts I sold. Could someone please look into this?"

[...]

The day after Alex took his own life, Robinhood sent an automated email suggesting the trade had been resolved and he didn't owe any money.

"Great news!" The email read, "We're reaching out to confirm that you've met your margin call and we've lifted your trade restrictions. If you have any questions about your margin call, please feel free to reach out. We're happy to help!"

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alex-kearns-robinhood-trader-suicide-wrongful-death-suit/

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ivan commented Aug 24, 2024

As a field of research, human–computer interaction is situated at the intersection of computer science, behavioral sciences, design, media studies, and several other fields of study. The term was popularized by Stuart K. Card, Allen Newell, and Thomas P. Moran in their 1983 book, The Psychology of Human–Computer Interaction. The first known use was in 1975 by Carlisle.[1] The term is intended to convey that, unlike other tools with specific and limited uses, computers have many uses which often involve an open-ended dialogue between the user and the computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93computer_interaction

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ivan commented Aug 24, 2024

During its manufacture, the glass is toughened by ion exchange. The material is immersed in a molten alkaline potassium salt at a temperature of approximately 400 °C (750 °F),[22] wherein smaller sodium ions in the glass are replaced by larger potassium ions from the salt bath. The larger ions occupy more volume and thereby create a surface layer of high residual compressive stress, giving the glass surface increased strength, the ability to contain flaws,[23] and overall crack-resistance,[24] making it resistant to damage from everyday use.[22]

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

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ivan commented Aug 24, 2024

Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to use an object only in the way it is traditionally used. The concept of functional fixedness originated in Gestalt psychology, a movement in psychology that emphasizes holistic processing. Karl Duncker defined functional fixedness as being a mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem.[1] This "block" limits the ability of an individual to use components given to them to complete a task, as they cannot move past the original purpose of those components. For example, if someone needs a paperweight, but they only have a hammer, they may not see how the hammer can be used as a paperweight. Functional fixedness is this inability to see a hammer's use as anything other than for pounding nails; the person couldn't think to use the hammer in a way other than in its conventional function.

When tested, 5-year-old children show no signs of functional fixedness. It has been argued that this is because at age 5, any goal to be achieved with an object is equivalent to any other goal. However, by age 7, children have acquired the tendency to treat the originally intended purpose of an object as special.[2]

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

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ivan commented Aug 24, 2024 •
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There's more to Eyezen than just blue light filter. Unlike stock lenses, it is a digital/freeform lens. It adds room to personalize. Instead of a single focus point in the middle of the lens, this free form design lens can add more focus points to improve user comfort. If the eye exam was done on 0.01 point instead of traditional 0.25 diopters, you can add this in too.

Eyezen is usually issued with EPS (eye protection system) which is their (Essilor's) blue filter, but you can ask for without. Usually, blue filter lenses have a lot of remaining blue reflection on the lenses. This is not the case with EPS unless you chose Prevencia coating. Note that it does come with 3-4% base tint. Never add any blue blockers to glasses for people who need to see white as white or need high contrast (e.g. painters, photographers).

https://old.reddit.com/r/glasses/comments/1d4eybh/is_eyezen_or_similar_blue_light_prescription/

see also https://opticaljedi.com/2018/09/18/more-on-blue-light-filtration-eyzen/

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ivan commented Aug 24, 2024

"This is a personal decision based on a need to reprioritize various commitments, and I remain supportive of the company and its important work,”

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-director-lip-bu-tan-184009065.html

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ivan commented Aug 24, 2024

Flow in positive psychology, also known colloquially as being in the zone or locked in, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time.[1] Flow is the melting together of action and consciousness; the state of finding a balance between a skill and how challenging that task is. It requires a high level of concentration. Flow is used as a coping skill for stress and anxiety when productively pursuing a form of leisure that matches one's skill set.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

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ivan commented Aug 24, 2024

I'm so old and i still fail to distinguish wanting to do something from liking the idea of myself doing it

https://x.com/hyperdiscogirl/status/1826970787795906816

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ivan commented Aug 25, 2024 •
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In the philosophy of science, epistemic humility refers to a posture of scientific observation rooted in the recognition that (a) knowledge of the world is always interpreted, structured, and filtered by the observer, and that, as such, (b) scientific pronouncements must be built on the recognition of observation's inability to grasp the world in itself.[1] The concept is frequently attributed to the traditions of German idealism, particularly the work of Immanuel Kant,[2][3] and to British empiricism, including the writing of David Hume.[4]

[...]

According to philosopher of science Ian James Kidd, epistemic humility is a virtue that emerges from the recognition of the fragility of epistemic confidence–that is, of "the confidence invested in activities aimed at the acquisition, assessment, and application of knowledge and other epistemic goods."[11] For Kidd, any given truth claim rests on three types of confidence conditions: cognitive conditions, or specialized knowledge in a particular knowledge domain; practical conditions, or the ability to perform certain actions required to ascertain the claim; and material conditions, or access to particular objects about which truth claims are made.

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

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