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acscott

103 karma · joined August 14, 2014

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acscott··on The dead economy theory
Maybe we will all be CEOs or Board chairs of our own corporations employing agents. And we work to find the best agents to increase efficiencies, improve effectiveness, etc.
acscott··on Is Postgres read heavy or write heavy?
Exactly. The parameters you can configure are there due to a lack of automating those since what you want to optimize for might be different than an automaton would.
acscott··on Is Postgres read heavy or write heavy?
A little context may be of help. Maybe a better headline for the article would have been, "How Can You Determine if your PostgreSQL Instance's Workload is Read-Heavy or Write-Heavy?" It's useful to know to help optimize settings and hardware for your workload as well as to nkow whether an index might be useful or not. Most major DBMSs will have some way to answer this question, the article is aimed at PostgreSQL only.
acscott··on You’re a slow thinker. Now what?
Chess Master at Any Age talks about this on page 55: https://archive.org/details/Chess_Master_at_Any_Age/page/n65...
acscott··on IQ tests results for AI
I took an IQ exam in grade school. Went fine until I encountered a number sequence, what is the next number kind of thing. I found a pattern, and it's predicted number was not listed as possible choices. That was total crap. I got vexed and then tried to answer the last 3/4 of the test wrong. Parents were later told I was gifted. (Maybe they meant it as euphemism! Ha!). I later learned of a little-known proof that for every sequence, there are infinite number of correct next-numbers. So the test was flawed. As an adult I took a High IQ test and scored 179. (I still dont' grok epsilon-delta proofs and probably never will). I was tested in college against an IQ test and broke it by solving the unsolvable portion through a stochastic technique. He had to go back to his original assumptions.

I'd say, as a group, those with a higher IQ than another group from a random selection of a normally distributed population, they can be expected to perform better on mental tasks that we care about. But at the individual level? Meaningless. Feynman was ~120. I, who have not contributed to anything like quantum physics scored higher, much higher.

For AI, an IQ test is interesting, but I would randomize the temperature (and other knobs) and take lots of samples. Keep in mind a relatively low IQ can blow away an AI on all kinds of things like compassion, understanding the pains of the human condition, self-sacrifice, etc. (etc. means a whole book could be worth exploring).

acscott··on The Google Willow Thing
e^(iπ) +1 = 0 e, i, π, 1, 0 Beauty
acscott··on The most talented person in the world
The equation to rank links is a poor substitute for an editor. Editors used to be the gateway of information that was disbursed via newspaper, radio, and TV. They were not without fault. So what is the least faulty filter? (Even your own brain, eyes, and ears are faulty, sorry perfectionists.) You cannot trust video or audio now due to deepfakes. What can you trust as a source of information more than 50%?

There's still information in the noise, you have to become your own editor.

acscott··on A study of Google's code review tooling (Critique)
Agreed; after > 20 years of coding successfully, got hit by a storm of subjective feedback; it totally ruined any joy in development
acscott··on A coder considers the waning days of the craft
If a developer making $1/hour produces $10 output (of something people buy), then if you add another developer making $1/hour produces $10 of output, you have $20 total product. Developer A and B can compete on their rate down to the point that it's not sustainable, and thus, an equilibrium will be struck.

How is adding more developers going to reduce the output?

acscott··on A coder considers the waning days of the craft
Title does not approximate well the article. Ad probandum: "Computing is not yet overcome. GPT-4 is impressive, but a layperson can’t wield it the way a programmer can. I still feel secure in my profession."
acscott··on The controller pattern is awful, and other OO heresy (2013)
A little bird told me that it was easier to break up big projects into classes and farm them out than in other languages at the time. The `protected` keyword for example prevented the other developer(s) from modifying that part of the object, creating safety.
acscott··on Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive?
When writing to a log file, isn't that sequential write?
acscott··on Protein Folding Breakthough
Artificial intelligence firm DeepMind has transformed biology by predicting the structure of nearly all proteins known to science in just 18 months, a breakthrough that will speed drug development and revolutionise basic science
acscott··on Burning out and quitting
Sorry for the vagueness and your burnout. I'd look for a professional that specializes in burnout, barring that, a good physician would be the first place to start. There could be underlying health conditions you want to eliminate such as Hashimoto's thyroiditis or sub-clinical thyroid issues. You could have your cortisol levels tested to confirm your stress levels once underlying conditions are eliminated. From my personal research there's a lot of factors involved, stress the major trigger. It's serious and important enough you want to get a professional involved. Sending good energy your way.
acscott··on Burning out and quitting
High performance requires high maintenance. If you are burnt out or have symptoms or even suspect, I strongly urge to get a team together to help. It's something you have to actively watch out for (at least for some people) and actively treat. Here are two data points: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28119229/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29057125/
acscott··on How to Work Hard
I do not know your situation, but my observation is high-performance requires high-maintenance.

Also, see this article: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32056943/

Anything else I might suggest might sound like an advertisement, but apply your skills in software to what's required for your high-maintenance needs.

acscott··on The trouble with Cassandra as an object storage metadata database
Do you mean AP is the choice of losing consistency given a partition?
acscott··on You don’t have free will, but don’t worry
"Taken together we therefore have determinism with the occasional, random quantum jump, and no combination of these two types of laws allows for anything resembling this intuitive idea that we can somehow choose which possible future becomes real." How do we know that the present moment is deterministic, the whole of the present is only the result of the whole of the past? Don't we have to know/understand everything to draw such a conclusion?
acscott··on Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, research suggests
Sampling the set of Mensa members is not the same as sampling "superior IQs".

digression: My personal preference is to call IQ a testing quotient and not intelligence quotient--it's more specific and less qualitative, for "intelligence" is overloaded.

acscott··on Climate change and the 75% problem
Saw this last night: http://www.anotesark.com/ Had never heard of Kiribati (pronounced roughly Kiribahs). That country could be the canary in the coal mine for the rest of us. Glad there are people such as Gates who are not waiting around.
acscott··on MS Paint IDE
Outstanding work. Will the VIM plugin come out soon? But this really improves productivity already. I have setup several hot keys to shortcuts to MS Paint IDE that save me from having to use the mouse and keep my hands on the keyboard. Great time saver.
acscott··on Project Euler
There's a legend, Gauss came up with that while an elementary student: http://www.nctm.org/Publications/Teaching-Children-Mathemati...
acscott··on The Depression Thing
In general, if one has a serious decision to make, it's probably wise to seek out expert counsel (not that you should blindly follow that counsel either). Same goes with your health.

[Avoiding getting into some kind of discussion about anecdotes, scientific evidence, etiology, qualifications, etc. I am glad for remissions and worried about those still suffering.]

acscott··on Equifax C.E.O. Richard Smith Retires After Huge Data Breach
That might move the needle forward a bit. But if the lawsuit for the fine can be tied up in court, delaying penalty long enough for the executive bonuses to hit, it would not be very effective, I think.
acscott··on Equifax Suffered a Hack Almost Five Months Earlier Than the Date It Disclosed
Risk v. reward I'm afraid. The Sarbanes-Oxley legislation attempted to put skin in the game for the C execs in public companies; so, I cannot help but notice how many public companies delisted, went private after that. The whole of the corporate charter was meant to insulate investors' personal wealth against risks. I guess this is where licensing can provide a backstop to poor development practices, but it seems to have not really caught on.
acscott··on Perfection is a modern heresy
If everything is always changing, then the perfect happens only one moment in time and the next moment the perfect is gone. Secondly, you can only influence things to perfection and when they hit perfect, you got lucky. You cannot make it happen. With design, there must be some way to be objective to evaluate a design. If there is no objective, then how can you establish, know and recognize what is perfect?

A witty saying proves nothing -- Voltaire.

acscott··on Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming
It is a good question. Locking in gains means selling. But you do not know the right time to do that unless you know something no one else does. Sell if you want less volatile returns to get a monthly income during retirement for example. Otherwise you are trying to time the market.

There may be some kind of magic options strategy to lock in those gains, but it also would include taking on other risks (interest rate changes, market risk, commodities etc.) and you have to have a big bank roll to play in that game to make it worth while--and now you have another job which could be full time to manage it all...

I guess to answer your question in another way, you lock in those gains by not trying to time the market, by paying the lowest commissions and fees possible. :)

acscott··on Wall Street Banks Warn Downturn Is Coming
No.

:) You are asking about timing the market. No one can do it, it is said. (I think it can be done, but it would be through illegal means, i.e. insider trading, which I believe happens all of the time since it's too easy to do and too hard to catch). Also, you don't have to invest in stocks. You can buy and hold on to bonds (AGG or ACWI).

You might see your holdings value go way down. People sell then. It's normal psychology. It is so tough to see the dollar value of assets go down and sit on it. But if it's the best investment, you don't sell. Hold. The best investment has a holding period of forever. It will go back up--eventually. If it is a good investment and it does not go back up, money will not be very useful anyway (i.e. asteroid hits, etc.) This is why common advice is to only put money into stocks that you will not need for at least five years or more.

Some people have said that some of the biggest gains in the stock market are just before it drops. You do not want to miss out on these, since that is often where the 9.5% return on stocks comes from.

This is free advice and I am not licensed to advise. Oh, and good on you to start saving now. That's _your_ money that you worked for. Keep it yours. Get out a spreadsheet and run the numbers assuming different % returns and _consistent_ savings over time. You might see you can become a millionaire.

acscott··on Relation of Product Originality and Usefulness to Generating Word-Of-Mouth [pdf]
"While originality increases buzz, it might lead to negative..." word-of-mouth if "...the usefulness of the product is perceived to be low."
acscott··on Why isn't everything normally distributed?
Now, having read some comments, do not get lost in your assumptions (which implies you should know your assumptions). It's really that simple.
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