Are there any books (on RL) which are more hands-on and look at the implementations more than the theory?
8,659 karma · joined August 27, 2015
... and the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
I remember once I tried shorting a stock, of a market leader in my area. I knew the field well enough to see that they were trying to fudge some numbers and their quarter was _not_ as good as they had claimed it to be.
But sadly the market didn't see this and the stock went up. E*Trade started pushing me to cover my positions, and eventually I ended up losing a 5-figure sum (nothing earth-shattering, but still a good chunk of my cash).
After I had bought it all back, slowly the market realized what I had seen and the stock dropped as I had expected. Unfortunately I did not have the deep pockets to stick around long enough; all I was left with was a hole in the wallet and a hard lesson learned.
Anecdata (size = 1): I was going through a phase of terrible sleep, and one day decided to take some CBD. I woke up feeling terrible in the head. I had slept like a log, but it felt in my brain as if I hadn't slept at all!
Of course, when you're trying to get by on $3/day, you can't be picky: you can't demand organic produce, for example.
Here in San Francisco, we have a plethora of Farmers Markets. The thing about produce is: once harvested, the clock starts on it going bad. So the farmers have a ticking timebomb on their hands: if they can't sell the produce at the end of the day, (in most cases) it will go to waste. Some of the enterprising ones take a trip to Chinatown and offload their leftover produce for pennies.
So when I was in a situation of hardship where I was living on a few dollars per day, I would go to the farmers market near closing time, and over time developed friendships with them, so they would sell me their remaining produce for dirt cheap. I would take it home, turn some of it into stock and freeze that.
Over several months, I survived on about $100/month in groceries.
If they did not follow the steps to replicate (pre-training, using less compute, etc.) and then failed, so what's wrong with calling out the flaws in their attempted "replication"?
Suppose you show up to buy a truck with #30K in cash (the truck is listed for $30K). You inspect the truck, and find that the A/C needs to be fixed, which would cost you, say $3K. So you decide to split the repair cost with the seller, and now the truck will cost you $28.5K. If you have cash, this is simple: you just hand over $28.5K. But if you have a cashier's check?
What a perverse incentive! Flag every passenger possible; your expected payout is positive. You have nothing to lose!!
So the solution to bad grades in some communities was to take away the opportunity for ALL communities.
Thankfully, a vocal group of people raised a stink about it and even put it on the ballot. The uproar caused the school to backtrack and bring Algebra back in 8th grade starting this year.
This kind of idiotic "social engineering" that the SFUSD is doing is killing the public schools. Parents who can afford to spend the $50K/year on private schooling are taking their kids out of SFUSD and the district is losing funding.
Democrats often say that the Republicans would like to kill public education. But the Democrats are doing a great job of it themselves! Case in point: my friend's kid goes to an SFUSD Middle School. Their 5thgrade class has no math teacher! Math is taught via Zoom and "self-paced learning". SMFH...
The problem with such "videocasts" (as opposed to "podcasts") is that there is another channel that the AI has to control: the video. Generating convincing video is much harder than generating convincing audio.
That would make them 6 orders of magnitude larger.