MathYouF

My knowledge of the usage and value and improvement on quality of life for people using cryotocurrency in nations experiencing massive hyperinflation come from one of my closest friends from Venezuela, who I talk to every week for hours (I'm sitting next to him right now as I type this).

Where does yours come from? Because what you're saying directly contradicts his reported experiences for both him and relatives and friends of his. I'm sure you have an equally credible source on the ground of at least a comparable market that informs your view on what does and doesn't affect the lives of people in those countries?

To your point, many Venezuelans do store their wealth in Crypto, and only convert the amount they need to spend that day to Bolivars. That is the use case.

Exactly, if people trusted legitimate financial markets like the NASDAQ and invested their money with accredited, well regulated investors like the former NASDAQ chairman Bernie Madoff, we could avoid losing billions of dollars from fraud and instead bump it back up to tens of billions of dollars.

At least then we can be sure what's left of the stolen money that the fraudster didn't spent and kept in accounts under their name in participating countries can be returned.

Indeed, never seen so many people on HN be so reactionary and emotional about a simple technology.

The demographics of the crowd:

wealthy, living in the most stable country in history, with access to digital forms of banking worldwide, ability to emigrate wherever they'd like, able to transfer money as they see fit, and holding their savings in the global reserve currency for a country which they're a citizen of.

Doesn't help many empathise with why many people around the world can't trust their governments centrap bank, or open a bank account elsewhere, or convert their savings to a stable currency and assume it won't be seized or banned locally.

It's best to just build cryotocurrency and not bother explaining to Americans who aren't willing to listen why it's necessary.

It's like explaining public transportation to people at a country club.

Alternative currencies to the Bolivar have been the only way for Venezuelan citizens to protect themselves from losing their entire life savings because of the actions of their governments cental bank.

Digital forms of currency which aren't regulated by the state control of the banking system are the only safe way to get an alternative currency, since the Venezuelan government made exchanging Bolivars for stabler currencies like the USD illegal.

Im talking about solving the problems of individual Venezuelans, not the government or state. And if people with savings can't rely on them, then a country has no hope of attracting or retaining high talent professionals. Hence why it's so hard to find people left in Venezuela with highly sought after talents anymore.

It's an individual citizen's hedge against a poorly managed government in a country they have little choice but to be in (immigration isn't so easy if you're not born into an already prosperous, stable country to begin with).

My friend from Venezuela certainly would've benefited from owning a currency that wasn't regulated by his government, which made exchanging Bolivars for external currency illegal except for those with government connections.

Are you saying one should only be concerned about the state itself, that citizens ought to go down with the ship and be victims of the government they were born into?

I'm hoping you're simply ignorant of the very real personal problems of people born into corrupt and unfortunate countries have that are mitigated or solved by crypto currencies (even if it doesn't solve the problems of the state) rather than simply uncaring for their plight and unwilling to care about solitons for them that don't involve also fixing the entire corrupt nation they were born into.

You should read up on the last decade in Venezuela, which used to be the richest country in Latin America, and having wealthy professionals see their savings evaporate due to 1,000,000% inflation because of the actions of a government they democratically elected.

Belief is the only thing holding together a lot of the things that we rely on to keep society functioning the way it does.

I'm guessing (though not assuming) you're posting from one of the most historically stable countries in human history, but that isn't how most people experience planet earth, and it isn't guaranteed that that's the wya you'll always experience it either.

I'm also a sort of amateur at 3D modeling (though my background is in VR programming so I have a lot of exposure to it) so take my knowledge with a grain of salt, but afaiu there's a few different steps:

Modeling: Maya is best, Blender is a good substitute

Sculpting/topology: Zbrush is best, Maya is runner up, Blender is a good substitute

UV Unwrapping: All the above are good at this

Texturing: Substance Painter is best, Blender is a good substitute

Animation: Maya and Blender are comparable

So as far as I understand the cool thing is, aside Blender is essentially a nearly as good replacement for Maya, and can do everything to an adequite degree for high quality production.

The only things Blender is decidedly not an equal substitute for is Sculpting compared to Zbrush and Texturing compared to Substance Painter.

Again, I'm not an expert, but I think the above is roughly accurate.

Oh it is assuredly not the best hotel in Kyoto, or even the nicest staff. Still, I don't doubt the service was so much better than they've experienced everywhere else in the world that they statistically just assumed it must also be exceptional by Japanese standards as well.

As an interesting aside, I met a few western youngsters working in the hotel industry in Japan and they were very nice and their Japanese was very good, but they said they constantly seemed to not meet the standards their managers expected of them.

The quality of service you can get at the average 7-11 there feels almost comparable to dining at a five star restaurant in NYC, and going to an average quality hotel can feel like you're a guest at the Ritz Carlton. It's because Japanese have no shame in providing excellent service to others. I feel in the US it is considered as if one is admitting they are beneath another if they provide that kind of service, maybe that's why we have a tipping culture as well, to assuage the feeling of shame that comes with service in the US. A pity the nation has a culture like that, being of service to others is something that should be considered noble and aspirational.

しります (shirimasu) means "know", so, yes.

Having lived in Japan for a year and reading the review of the service, it reminds me how funny it is to read foreigners reviews of Japanese customer service describing it as miraculous when Japanese would consider it standard and adequate. Truly a special culture and country, the rest of humanity could learn a lot about humility and service from Japan.

I watched an interview with her on YouTube and she had a very argumentative tone when questioned by an audience member, rather than a conversational and educational one. Not surprised to hear from a fellow expert that her theories aren't really supported by evidence. She seemed extremely defensive during the Q&A.

Here's the video: https://youtu.be/qwsft6tmvBA

In fact the audience member I linked to basically accidentally stepped on a landmine which seems to be the main critique you've posted of her work, just by talking about facts that seem evident (that emotions are the result of chemicals flooding the brain)

Luddite: a person opposed to new technology or ways of working.

Seems like you came up with the perfect word to describe your view on this. :P

I defintiely do think there is reason to worry about the future you're imagining happening, but as someone who has read through the papers on gpt, this is in no way going to end up being an exclusive proprietary API, so it'll very soon have open source and likely free or at compute cost options.

And well, if it doesn't make us better, no one will use it. If it does, you'll have to adjust to remain competitive, just like millions of professionals for going back millenia who encounter new technology in their chose and vocation. Ultimately, if it makes us better, and doesn't enslave us to the whims of a monopolistic holder (which the point of my post was to conjecture that it likely wouldn't) then it'll probably (though not defintiely) be better for us long term.

Hopefully it doesn't erode programmers abilities like spell check seems to have eroded people's spelling abilities but I fear that's a likely side effect.

Says the person who likely owns a washing machine, sink connected to plumbing, microwave, stove, lighters, clothes made with a sewing machine, ect. ect.

GPT-3 will take way less time to make a good substitute that costs the power of compute than other historical time saving technologies. Unlike other historic technologies, they pretty much spell out exactly how to do it, and own no patents related to its creation. I have trouble seeing the downside.

And the children of those broken 1990 families are now the ones responding to the polls in 2021.

The ones responding to the polls then were divorced men who had been raised in stabler 1960's families.

Maybe being divorced isn't the problem, being raised by broken families is.

A very unrealistic view of the programming and mathematical abilities of the average person, even the average college educated, employed, under 40 person, is the main source of contention I find whenever this argument comes up in my social circles as well.

Those who think anyone can learn programming should pick an acquaintance ages 25-45 who has sufficient time, and attempt to teach them to program, and see the results. Or inquire about the actual success rates of coding bootcamps (which are already self selected groups and have filters themselves, far from the average population to begin with).

I've done the above with very mixed results, it's pretty clear that for a litany of reasons the average person is functionally incapable of being a useful programmer. I don't see the average citizen coding a lot in the next few decades, even casually.

Or perhaps only a society rich as rich as the U.S. can begin to question if total economic output is a noble metric that our brightest and ablest minds ought to strive for or be awarded public accolade for.

Perhaps it's only in disfunctional societies, possibly ones who've seen a lot of harm from communistic rhetoric, that they think in simple terms that those making a larger pie are still morally better than those who shrink the pie in the name of equality or morality.

Perhaps that dichotomy isn't as relevant in the U.S., where the pie is already large and many further methods of expanding it don't actually benefit society and the metric of assuming those with a large slice must've also expanded the total size of the societal pie isn't holding up to scrutiny.

My critique of your your critique aside, I agree that I don't personally feel under the thumb of billionaire oligarchs, though they clearly do unduly influence our legislative process to benefit themselves to a higher degree (corruption) than in Northern and Western European nations which we comapre ourselves to in terms of degree of liberty.

Hey Stepan,

I've been in a fitness routine for the last two months with intensive personal training and a dietician, but I'm around 25% body fat because of where I started. However I'm very diligent about my calorie tracking and have a set diet already and workout regularly, and this is one of my top priorities right now. I'd love to have a group to join to learn from. I'm probably not going to be able to get a six pack by September given by current body fat %, but I get caliper, circumference, and weight measurements weekly, so I can provide good data and might get close.

My email I signed up with is 11fishem, hope I can join!

The state also makes it possible for me to charge for usage of everything else I own, not just land, by restricting people's ability to use it freely without my permission. For example, my body, my computer, my laundry machine, my bed, ect.

Is your main argument that because of the limited quantity of land it deserves special reconsideration, or do you think all or a vast number of property rights should be abolished?

GPT-3 does only thing, predict the next character based on the previous n characters.

The nuance of the context (previous n characters) and the quality of the prediction(s) (following character, a function of gpt-3 you can repeat by just concatenating its last prediction to the previous n characters) is what has significantly improved.

It has now learned on a significant amount of the writing available on the internet. Which includes guides on writing code, stack overflow, and github repos.

So one is able to write something that looks like a python comment

// This function adds two numbers

And the following n character predictions of gpt-3 will with some unreliability spit out the python code for that function as its predictions

def add(x, y): return x+y

This has been shown to work with simple descriptions of pages, with it returning html with css embedded that matches that description.

I believe GPT-3 being able to convert descriptions of functions or designs into semi-functional code is what has some excited. It's certainly the strongest argument and reason to hope it could be different this time that I know of. I'm skeptical but come from a generative AI background so I wouldn't underestimate it will be able to do things previously unaccomplished by making templates in the past.

Ask who your manager will be. Look them up on LinkedIn. Look at all the people on the technical side of the company and their LinkedIns. If their last few jobs for the last several years aren't technical, that's the answer.

In general, pretty much any company that isn't a technology company will fail this test. Working for companies which are young and specifically software companies is your best bet.

The grass is greener if you stop working for companies dominated by non-technical leadership.

Unfortunately the types who move from one corporate behemoth to another rarely see the light and continue indulging in the fantasy that one day they'll find a large old company run by non-technical leadership with respect for engineering, other good developers to collaborate with who haven't left, and processes focused on progress.

The rest of us learned the lesson and stopped working as engineers for such companies.

Literally told a FB recruiter yesterday I was already earning near FB comp for global remote work, and for that reason I wasn't even intersted in interviewing for the position they were offering which required in the office work in SF after "corona ended".

Like or dislike the Chinese government, question how much it cares about saving face versus protecting the international community, sure.

But name a time since the dawn of commercial air travel 1950-2019 where a country, much less the country with the largest population on earth, suspended all air travel for any reason, much less a flu they'd only discovered a few weeks prior.

I have my doubts on how many other countries would've isolated their entire population and suspended travel in and out if given the same time line and information.

Do you really think if a flu outbreak had been detected in the US that we would have suspended ALL travel in and out of the country in December of 2019 only a few weeks after becoming aware of it?

It's been a century since this last happened, no one alive in 2019 really had any memory of such a catastrophe unfolding. I think China would've been called alarmist, totalitarian, and an unreliable business partner, had they taken the full measures of lockdown early enough to possibly prevent it spreading internationally.

Correct me if my understanding of how tax credits work is wrong, but if Pelton said they'll only build the factory with a $47mm tax credit, the two choices of Ohio's government are as follows:

1. Not collect the first $47mm/$??mm of taxable revenue they generate

2. Not collect any taxable revenue since they didn't build there

Not to mention that there are other ancillary benefits to choice 1 since they'll be paying for land, paying wages, paying truckers to shop things ect.

Therefore there are no other programs that $47mm in uncollected taxes could have been spent on, since the money only exists if they even choose to move there.

Are we on the same page about that or is that not how tax breaks work? (assuming the company refuses to operate at any dollar amount fewer of tax break)

Wasn't trying to trivialise your work! Just offering some ideas of the basic ways this could be tackled. Sorry if you thought I was trivialising it, the intent was more to support the idea that modern DL can still provide solutions with relatively simple methods.

My bet is they just invested a few months making a varied dataset, a few grand on mturk using labelme, some image augmentation, a few engineering tricks for a nice UX,some strategies for getting the model to converge on tricky test images, and got it to hit 100% accuracy fairly quickly.

Any time I encountered a rule that seemed strange I would ask my closest Japanese friends (girlfriend, her parents, friends) and they always gave a reasonable answer that almost always was related to the rule upholding collectice civility, safety, or productivity. And they happily acknowledged the possible drawbacks and were willing to consider if the law was actually good.

Another thing they value is to not make change until one is certain it is actually an improvement, and they assume existing rules were made with the same care. The above can be very frustrating because there's some changes that are obviously for the better and some rules not made with the best intent or carefulest consideration.

But the idea that Japanese are all cowards dismisses that the demure personality comes from a collective cultural agreement that requested change must be thoroughly considered, and that it is in some way implying the previous makers of a rule were unwise or lacked consideration. So to propose a change without being what they'd consider a brute or idiot would take maybe more energy than that person is willing to give for the issue.

I appreciate the time taken to give a detailed reply, especially from someone with experience living in Japan, and who had once a possibly similar view as I do currently.

That said, as much as you think I've integrated right wing fallacies (assuming the progressive Japanese you've spoken to have spent significant amounts of time living outside of society, something you equated to the right wing label of anti-Japanese) you have also integrated left wing fallacies (pro-{new,futuristic,improved}-Japan" and "pro-{traditional,old,unchanged}-Japan"/that left wing thinking is oppressed in Japan, the country with the largest communist party in the democratic world).

The main argument of people who don't agree with you is that many progressive policies aren't, in fact, creating an "improved" Japan, and are just upholding western values that don't serve them any benefit.

I'm also a vegan socialist, and have spent plenty of weekends hanging with friends who frequent Shinjuku-gyoemmae, if you know what I mean, and have been vocal about all of this to people in Japan, and experienced no push back.

Perhaps I am shielded from critique being non-Japanese myself, but to call Japan a country dominated by Conservatism feels very different from the one I experienced, and seems to me that it only appears that way to the very most demanding progressives who are just as quick to label normal Japanese people as right wing. Everyone against them seems extremist to an extremist, so I have trouble believing your view isn't also deeply oppositely biased and not a clear view of the society.

You've both just completely missed the real underlying thing going on in that situation.

To the Japanese person, the main question on their mind is is the thing the village council is telling them to do in the best interests of the community and their neighbors.

To question of if the village has the legal authority to make them do something, and implying that if they don't then the Japanese person has no more problems, misses the fact their their real struggle is deciding how to be a good neighbor and citizen. Obeying the village government isn't the virtue they're "signaling", caring about being a good neighbor or member of society is the virtue they actually have and maybe the cost of being one is really the issue, or lamenting over if it's necessary to do what was asked to be a good citizen.