abnry

> Chesterton finds himself surrounded by fences which have no articulated justification, but which might be necessary/justifiable. This is a predicament of his own making. If he and everyone else in the town always bulldozed any fence they came across which doesn’t have a justification, people who want fences would start writing down why they’d put them there.

I think this falls down if the consequence of bulldozing a fence are high and if the original builders of the fence are no longer around.

The problem isn't Chesterton's own making. The problem Chesterton is trying to solve is when, for whatever reason, most likely due to many generations passing, the purpose of the fence isn't written down.

That also ignores the fact that some fences are built through an emergent and collaborative process, and so no one is such a co-creator to write down why it is there.

This story is pretty good, but yeah, come on, tell us what exactly happened!

Exactly. You download something from arxiv and the filename has no meaningful content in it. Generally speaking, you want the filename to be descriptive in some way, extracting the title of the document is a good start.

Is there a good ML tool for renaming PDFs? There are some tools out there but they assume a journal format.

It is interesting to note there are about as many Jews in the US as there are in Israel. There are about 7.6 million Jews in the United States [1]. There are about 8 million Jews in Israel [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel

> This truth is almost never communicated though. Why? Because then wearing a mask becomes a "mark of illness" and nobody wants to label themselves as sick or potentially sick. So the solution to this is everyone wears a mask all the time. But you cannot communicate this whole scenario either because most people aren't smart enough to grasp it or not smart enough to understand why they need to wear a mask healthy or sick.

I can't help but think this attitude is awful. Most people are too dumb to understand that it is the sick people who should wear masks!? Like what in the world!?

No. You shoot straight with the public. Then you plead with them to do what is best for everyone by wearing a mask when they are sick.

The alternative, as you suggested, is extremely damaging to society longterm.

It takes forever (like an hour) to install the data science stack plus pytorch and cuda libraries plus other hardware related libraries.

I messed up my conda environments once when I changed my username. So many references to the old username in the conda folders. Ripgrep saved the day!

If there is a linear relationship between test score (X, ability) and test score self-assessment (Y, self-perception), then the random variables are modeled as:

$$ Y \sim aX+b+N $$

Where N is some statistically independent noise, mean zero.

This means the covariance between them is

$$ Cov(Y-X,X) = E[ ((a-1)X+b+N -(a-1)E[X]-b) (X - E[X]) ] $$

Which is

$$ Cov(Y-X,X) = E[(a-1)(X-E[X])(X-E[X])] + E[N(X-E[X])]= (a-1) Var[X] $$

To get a "DK effect" we need (a-1) < 0, or a < 1. If a=0, in the case of the blog post, then this is absolutely true. If a=1 (which, along with b=0, is the ideal scenario), then this is barely not true. If a > 1, then we'd have a whole new effect about arrogant experts.

So the only thing that matters from this "auto-correlation perspective" is the rate at which an individual's self-assessment increases with their ability. As long as they underestimate the increase, a "DK effect" will occur.

However, in the above analysis, we ignored the variable b. If a = 0.8 and b=0, we'd never have the so-called "DK effect" even though it matches the "auto-correlation perspective" because everyone would underestimate their ability.

This tells me that the value of b matters. It is sort of like the prior ability everyone assumes they have. What the DK papers shows is that b > .5, which I think is in line with the spirit of the popular interpretation of the "DK effect". People should not be assuming they have, at a minimum, a capacity higher than the average.

At the same time, the value b isn't insanely higher than .5, which also makes me want to cut those unskilled and unaware some slack. It "seems reasonable" to assume your baseline is average. That can't be the case, but it feels intuitive.

Exactly. How is this news? What would be surprising is if ChatGPT _could_ generate fake data that passed analysis.

This whole saga has helped me see how rumors grow. (And I know you used the word allegedly, but still.) First it was Ilya who was the ringleader. Now it is Adam. There has been a small amount of new information (Ilya seems to have backtracked), but there is no real information to suggest Adam was a ring leader. It is the pure speculation of people trying to make sense of the whole thing.

If this is the case, and Ilya is truly a non-political guy, I feel awful about how badly he was manipulated.

Oh yes, I lived through this and it was fascinating to see. Very rarely does the big boss get the support of the employees to the extent they are willing to strike. The issue was that Artie T. and his cousin Artie S. (confusingly they had the same first name) were both roughly 50% owners and at odds. Artie S. wanted to sell the grocery chain to some big public corporation, IIRC. Just before, Artie T had an outstanding 4% off on all purchases for many months, as some sort of very generous promo. It sounded like he really treated his employees and his customers (community) well. You can get all inspirational about it, but he described supplying food to New England communities as an important thing to do. Which it is.

When was this filmed? Penrose looks considerably younger.

In mathematics, there are whole books almost completely dedicated to problems you are supposed to work out. Or the prose is terse and dense, like Rudin's textbooks on real analysis. They are valuable books, but they aren't often recommended to beginners. You can use a bit of sugar to make the medicine go down.

I think books are often long to give the reader some space to think. Perhaps the best readers know how to create their own space, but the worst readers require the sugar. In other words, books are long because people aren't good readers.

Was Tolkien alive while LoTR was massively marketed?

Hate to say it, but give 50 years, I wouldn't be surprised if Calvin and Hobbes turns into what you described.

How does this compare to nushell? I am in the market to learn something other than bash and right now nushell seems like the best candidate.

Isn't using the website kind of like using an API?

There is a fair amount of published research on this.

Not all of these ideas I have implemented, but here are some things you can do.

- remote control to turn on/off lights in bed

- Bed sensor to turn on/off lights when heading to the bathroom at night

- define a scene (lights dimmed, shades down, mood lights on) to trigger in an event (Netflix turned on TV at 8pm)

- Remote control of wall AC unit out of the house (shut off while away but turn on before driving home)

- Alerts for when my brother turns on the coffee maker

- Control system to avoid coffee maker and microwave running together long enough and tripping the circuit breaker in your old apartment (haven't done this one)

- Alert to tell you when washing machine is done (or use to estimate how much time is left)

- use color lights as reminders or to signify events

- check to make sure doors are closed and locked at night

- check that door for room (or window in room) with AC is closed when AC is running, otherwise shut AC off

- alerts when someone gets home even if you are out of the house (know kid gets home from school, for example)

Ultimately it is a hobby. I had a raspberry pi 4 I bought and had just sitting around. It feels good to see it in the corner doing something cool.

The GUI style choices turn me off to terminator. Silly reason. Maybe I should look at changing defaults.

Wow. There must be some interesting coupling between the coding and the constellation/modulation.

I think there are two types of engineers:

- Those who approach technical conversations where all facts stated must be always true (usually details-oriented people).

- Those who approach technical conversations where facts stated should converge to the truth (usually highly intuitive people).

These two types tend to frustrate each other. Although, I would contend that everyone needs to have the capacity to operate in either mode.

For example, you _must_ be technically correct when programming. You cannot omit a closing parenthesis. However, if you are working on trying to solve the overall problem, usually something that could have multiple implementations, you need to brainstorm, which is best done when you are free to state things imprecisely.

> Besides, it's not really how science works.

You reject objective facts but respond with a claim about objectivity.

Of course, but I can respond to anecdotes with anecdotes.

I have a bunch of siblings, all of us homeschooled. Between all of us, some are more "socialized" than others. You can't leave out the individual in this discussion.

Very, very wrong. I know numerous homeschooled peers who have advanced degrees, including PhDs.

I was homeschooled K-12. Even 15 years ago, my parents would say that they were like general contractors for my education. And it is really is true. I had a mix of co-op, community college, online, self-study, and parent-guided study for all my courses. This was more so for highschool and less so for primary or grade school, which was mostly directly taught by my mother. And as others have said, homeschooling is very, very time efficient. IIRC, during grade school I was done by lunch time (maybe one or two smaller things required).

The kind of comment really, really rubs me the wrong way.

Your data isn't locked up in a format. Just use logseq or something if obsidian disappears.

Those who write the code have the right to control its source code. They aren't "inhumane" or thinking "short-term" just because its not open source.

The article is highly opinionated. This basically opens the floodgates for critical comments. But like you, I sense some value here, because distilling to fundamental principles is part of the game in physics. I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on how accurate it all is, but I am reminded of amazing things like Noether's theorem, where conservation principles come from symmetries. I would love to understand all of this better, and my assumption is that producing results from symmetries is what much of particle physics is focused on.

I think I'm okay with how opinionated this article is because, while I am not qualified to judge, it gives me an incredible sense of the wonder of physics. And I think opinionated intuitions, albeit somewhat wrong or imprecise, are useful for guiding ones understanding.