ACow_Adonis

I'm a very cynical man who has also had the honour of working for the national statistics organisation, so take what i say with a grain of salt.

While there are lots of "real and theoretical gains" to be made in gambling, a far more cynical take is that the "advanced analytics" is the frontbusiness for the real money being made by criminal enterprises, insider-trading, front-running, special access advantages, arbitrage, regulatory and competetive inefficiencies and insider-jobs.

"No no, we're all really smart see, look at this math that you don't understand, that's how we make millions while being bankrolled by mysterious money and business partners from vegas, who also by definition can't understand the math and hence can't validate what we're doing but who are totally willing to just front us a bankroll :)"

Its possible that there are certain gains left on the table, especially in old and early markets, but be wary of anyone being bankrolled by external forces and earning millions/billions and needing to explain that wealth with "smarts".

Often i wonder whether these articles that appear aren't a form of marketing or reputation laundering, but i have absolute no proof and i'm not particularly interested in looking into it much further. So you know, i'm probably way off :)

So what you're saying is that extroversion is curable with a bit of a change of social behaviours and environment, and with a bit of practice, discipline and repetition we can turn them into mathematicians, farmers, hunters, philosophers, scientists, monks, priests and witch doctors and negate this artificial always networking and hustling environment that's only been created in the last 200 years with the industrial revolution, communication revolution and growth obsessed capitalism :)

This gives me hope: there's no silver bullet, but one day we can find a cure for our modern curse of excessive extroversion :)

It's not that I've decided based on no evidence, it's that I've never met someone in the flesh able to do it where observations are consistent with claims.

Ignoring five minute Reddit or hacker News messages where people say "oh I'm so fast at reading" once you actually have to put them to the test: i.e. oh cool you're a fast reader: so here's a thing we've both not seen but are required to read and we'll discuss and analyse them in the morning. And you can judge how fast they are based on their understanding of the text and how far they've gotten compared to you.

Eventually you start to realise that there's a mysterious absence of observations to the right of what appears imo to be an almost biological barrier.

Then you start to look into their history: well I presume you've read a lot? And you try to talk to them about things... And they're generally not that well-read.

Then you correlate it with other high-performers: PhDs, professors, learned people, people who read all the time and have a history of reading. And you see that these best readers who read a lot also tend to read at a maximum speed of about 300-600 wpm with any comprehension.

So you come to balance these two hypothesese: there's speed readers out there, but they're generally not well read people and don't have a history of reading and they can't discuss much and they don't tend to turn up to discuss things when there's actual reading involved... But they can read really fast I swear!

And you compare them to the people who professionally read, read all the time, are verifiable strong readers... And you clock them between 300-600 wpm.

Beyond the whole "proving a negative" what's a rational person supposed to conclude?

/This is making some minor possible exceptions for people like Kim peek, but aside from having never met him, of such people exist, my understanding is there's also genuine philosophical questions as to whether what those people are doing can neurologically be considered the same act of reading as what the average human being is doing in terms of whether they can then discuss the themes, contents and implications of what they read.

Edit: and this is in context of people like me LOVE reading, so of course we've looked into methods and communities that propose they can increase reading speed, make people read faster, and are filled with fast readers

I'm another "speed reader" skeptic. After significant repeated investigations I came to a stunning conclusion: I'm among some of the fastest actual human readers. My general reading speed 300 to 600 wpm depending on context and medium. For context I was your usual bookworm growing up: reading ahead of level, constantly reading everywhere, always reading while walking, always getting in trouble for reading with other people present like at the breakfast/dinner table, just churning through books non stop. And yes I now read random scientific articles and things for fun.

Anything above that reading speed I've started just allocating to bullshitters, or generally techniques which come back to "not reading" rather than "reading".

That is to say people who choose techniques to try to speed themselves up through strategies like "skimming" (that is to say, not reading parts of the text to try to game metrics) or "extracting key points" (that is to say not reading parts of the text to try to game metrics) or their comprehension drops beyond 100% (that is to say not reading to try to game metrics).

And that's assuming you're not just dealing with the actual frauds trying to talk themselves up in a penis-measuring contest or sell something.

So yeah, I'm in the anything above 400-600 wpm is in the bullshitters club. And technical or difficult text is of course lower and can't be sped up.

No inherent offence intended to "speed readers"... Ok, maybe a little...

Literally the article:

"The extent of the decline seems to be driven by the lowest performing students losing more ground, a worrying trend that predates the pandemic."

"The TIMSS results echoed the 2022 findings of the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP, which saw major declines in math scores among both fourth and eighth graders. American students’ scores actually started to decline before the pandemic for reasons that are not entirely clear."

"This gap between high- and low-performing students started to widen before the pandemic for reasons that are unclear. Since then, other research into post-pandemic academic performance has found widening gaps across race and income, even as many middle and higher income students are doing well."

Hacker News commenter:

"The article seems to be pushing a Covid-causation narrative without any evidence."

Apparently my brain is broken because I can generate almost nothing but pink errors, though it seems to be a bit non deterministic:

Taoism

Tibet

Tibetan Buddhism

Wrathful deities

Existential angst

Dantes inferno

Major religions

Australian indigenous

Salvador Dali

Others generated sets but should have generated errors because the results are so uninspiring:

Mandalas

YouTube face

Phallic symbols

Corporate waste

Asymmetric deformities

Corporate propoganda

I did work experience at tidbinbilla radio telescope facility in...1999 or 2000.

It had an on-site cafeteria, which aside from being "out in the middle of no where", we all wondered "why?". Why didn't everyone just bring their lunch?

Even at the time, we just explained it as a "just a thing that Americans did" and wrote it off as because of the presence and involvement of NASA.

So it's good to hear that Google invented it sometime later...

/Never listen to tech people commenting on history or economics, lol

The Australian English thing to do is to drop the apostrophe, use an optional creative contraction to make the phrase even shorter, and thereby turn the entire thing into a noun :)

I.e. Maccas vs McDonald's

Of course, the official website https://mcdonalds.com.au/about-maccas/maccas-story uses an apostrophe which is now making me have the same reaction as the Germans :( and makes me think it was run through some international filter :p outrageous!

It's the old bimodal distribution effect and trying to draw a linear correlation between them, or that meme with the two sides of the bell curve.

At some level, swearing is an indicator of emotional immaturity and a preponderance of subjectivity.

At another level, not swearing is repression, oppresion and a denial of reality and any investment in the project.

So what we want to see in the best projects are the programmers who are emotionally invested yet also objective enough to swear at the real situations around themselves and not repress themselves, but who aren't so emotionally immature as to swear because it's cool/edgy :)

I just introduced my kid to Minecraft and it's fascinating how quickly they take to it, but to my (internal silent) horror, they've added so much that changes the survival experience from the early days that it's not really the same any more.

Now there's villages which provide pre-made shelter, you can just trade and build up villager slaves to make all the resources for you, you can get a bed (which you find in all villages) which let's you skip the night phase completely, and they've even added in wings so people are flying everywhere.

Ironically they've taken the mining out of Minecraft (both the mines because you get resources elsewhere and the minecarts because every other mode of transport is better) and the survival out of survival mode.

Of course, I got bored and tried my hand at building a new and better survival mode and recapture that magic mixed with my own curiosities of making a natural world simulation:

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/au-naturel

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kMuTS7tevt4&pp=ygUKYWNvd2Fkb25...

So maybe I'm just playing the game in 2024 after all :)

And my kid loves creative.

Sounds like programmers are obsolete because software will become redundant once we've solved everything in hardware :D

After posting a blog entry specifically targeting and naming someone, their business, posting it on the internet and starting a Mastodon thread.

I'm all for generally leaving people alone, and being civil, but context please.

You don't get to open a salvo against someone, while pretending you're above interaction with them, then play the victim when they respond and universally and unilaterally dictate terms while always trying to get the last word in.

Perhaps we live in different worlds, but there's a world of distanced between unhinged and roughly 3 emails to someone who wrote a peice targeted specifically at your business.

If anything the replies in that Mastadon thread make the author and others appear petty, combative and immature imo, and I do not say that as someone who agrees with all Vlad's perspectives.

I can accept that he invented it in the same sense that I invented recursion. I called it the "ouroboros" function and was really quite pleased with myself for thinking of the pattern.

Now, the fact that I called it by an ancient reference should probably have been the first clue that I didn't get there first, and sure enough later I found out that actually no, it's a very old idea in computer programming.

For the record, I can place back reliably to about 2001 the first time I was introduced to someone showing me an actual free application of searching/displaying ip lookups and laying it out on a visual map because it was about the only thing of value I took away from my first year information systems course, and although I can't remember the name of the application or program used, i've never heard of the blog writers company or his competitor: free software that did it must have already been available and mature for doing it and was being passed around during that time because it was already freely available by the time lowly old me turned up.

And given that the theory of doing so probably worked out long before that I think "invented" might be a liiiiiiiitle bit of a stretch...

If you just strap your phone to an actual microscope (see my other post), you're basically just limited to the magnification that the microscopes achieve. And very good performing microscopes are very affordable by hacker news standards these days.

Stereo microscope magnifications are typical at about 20x to 40x, but I'll commonly go to 640x on the biological one, though in practice you bug out at the physical limits of optical microscopy just above 1000x.

His specific setup is presumably limited by the magnification provided by whatever his objective lens achieves.

Yes, I've got the camera bodies, the macro lens, some historical experience stitching the pictures together to form panoramas, and I've just gotten into microscopy and am pretty sure I've got the microscope base he's using too. So I can see an alternative universe where I wrote this xD.

One of the first things I thought when I started was "how can I get the big camera onto the microscope" and the embarrassing conclusion I came to, is if you've got an expensive phone you can get cheap plastic adaptors and just attach it to the microscope body. Basic stereo microscopes are incredibly cheap these days, as are the phone attachments. I use droidcam obs to stream video so I don't even have to physically look into the microscopes any more. The main thing is going into the phone and getting some practice getting everything on manual so phone photo software doesn't do funky things.

My use case is slightly different, but the underlying principles are the same and I'm pretty sure the microscope hardware is identical to that in the post, so rather than rigging up a custom attachment to the expensive camera, I just rig up the phone camera to the already existent hardware of the microscope.

See crab spider for example of one of my earliest tests: https://imgur.com/xLS07WY

Lol, I actually experienced something similar in Australia recently trying to sell second hand goods.

Of course I asked for payment in cash, which the buyers duelly provided.

But it occurred to me as I observed the new $50 notes in my hand, which were of a new design that I'd never seen before that it had actually been so long since i'd handled physical currency that I wasn't really sure whether the notes in my hand were legitimate designs or not.

Or even their professions of belief to actually be something approaching truthful.

But there are many incentives, both on a self-deceptive psychology level, and on a societal-wide level, for wanting to be seen as a virtuous and forthright person irrespective of one's actual behaviours or beliefs.

The same way other nations do?

if you've been on the internet forums for 20 years, you'll discover that real life user's spelling mistakes are borderline unconvincing :/

so in that way the llm has a very low bar...

An ipad or otherwise, whatever your policy, doesn't negate parenting.

Crying or screaming to get your way because they don't recieve something isn't acceptable behaviour, so you shouldn't reinforce negative conditioning.

if the child wants the ipad at the table that's up to the parent. taking a small child to a restaurant without things to entertain the child, especially if the adults are talking is not really fair on the kids, and honestly with kids you should be considerate of their feelings and perspective even if they also have to do adult things or make concessions to the adult world. in the same way don't take and put them in unfair situations like a restaurant dinner for 2 hours and expect them to sit there happy.

i wanted less screen time for ours, then the pandemic happened and everyone stopped handling cash and i needed my phone with me everywhere and everything runs thorough an app. kid sees phone and we're not going to be hypocrites and we regularly use it for 15 mins of sanity breaks. we recently introduced an ipad at about 3 or 4? though of course we still control and monitor everything on both phones or ipads. so no YouTube and only apps we vet: there's some good painting, learning and science/ natural world apps. And time and place is of course up to us.

honestly it's fine. he'll often grab it and come into bed with us for half an hour in the morning since he wakes up earlier than us, i have no problem with that (except having to hear some of the games while trying to sleep). he usually gets bored and moves on after a bit and we get up.

i don't find any evidence that ipad or screen use is correlated with temperament or behaviour. if it exists as a substitute for parenting or teaching behaviour and self control it'll be bad. if it doesn't it's fine imo. and like all things in moderation. whether by design or circumstance we don't use it just before bedtime, so of course there's lots of sensible rules and habits to instil and do with screens and electronics just as with all things.

with comments back past 2018 i think it's safe to say its a typo xD

come join us at Beyond All Reason :)

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

or if you're an AI maker come join us also and make a better bit for us to play against :)

but... subscriptions ARE a dark pattern?

Possible tangent enabler, but as an Australian i've felt the same + have the same perplexion.

I've bought I think three things from amazon just to try it out. My lesson is that the entire site has a toxic interface and my credit card got falsely charged sometime afterward, which I cannot prove but I'm pretty sure was related to my use on their site. It looks like a cheap scam bazaar.

I don't understand its apparent US ubiquity...but then I don't understand the desire for something like Alexa either.

surely this depends on the actual mail provider you use.

i appreciate its impossible to prove a negative (everyone could be doing something they have no evidence or documentation of doing), but given my mail provider both says that you have to mark a selection before they'll share such information with partners and that marking emails as spam still trains your own user specific spam filter, i don't think (and an really hoping) this is not a universal thing.

quite slow and considered actually. i doubt i could pump them out rapid fire, but maybe i should try. i don't have anything memorised and just go off of feel of runs of numbers.

i have considered trying to memorise some algorithm, but never done it.

i assume that if anyone tried to get me to do these things with a non- uniform distribution I'd probably be screwed, but never tested it.

I find the venn diagram of spammers and "legitimate" companies increasingly overlaps and it's impossible to cleanly differentiate the two.

my university spams me. i bought a torch from olight. they spam me. i get food deliveries. they spam me. i bought some tech. they spam me. i look for real estate they spam me. i get a delivery. they spam me.

it's differentiating between the two that's unrealistic.

there's a line in the movie the incredibles where robert (the hero) is meeting with the designer (edna) of super suits to design him a new suit even though such activities are technically illegal.

The dialogue goes something like this:

robert: you know I'm retired from hero work.

Edna:As am I, Robert, yet here we are.

so now it's 2023. you're telling me it's now safe to click on unsubscribe to the spam emails.

yet here we are.

no, the strait forward response is to ignore and mark as spam any unsolicited emails you did not explicitly sign up for. don't try to interact through the desired or expected channels of any entity that spams you.

yes, I've done some of these before. Ive gotten up above 200 key presses at ~50% before getting bored.

my secret was decidedly less sexy than free will though. i just had XX years of working as a statistician and having a better intuition as to what random strings and numbers actually look like :/