ambrozk

I will repeat what I said, which is that this is rhetorical point-scoring, not discussion of reality. It's not helpful. Everyone with two neurons to rub together understands that both the Palestinians and the Israelis have engaged in terror against one another over the course of a century of inter-ethnic conflict.

The situation is very much analogous to South African Apartheid. In both cases, an insecure population at the helm of an ethnostate sought to further deprive their state's already-disenfranchised co-residents of legal rights, in an effort to achieve security for themselves. White South Africans made the exact same arguments as Israelis, and in fact collaborated extensively with Israeli security services because they understood that the exact same groups opposed to South African Apartheid were the most potent opponents of Israeli apartheid. The Israelis remained staunch allies of the South Africans long after the rest of the world had decided to isolate them, because the Israelis understood implicitly that they were engaged in the same policies.

As to your question, I don't think a wise Israeli government would make every Palestinian a citizen tomorrow, but I think it is deeply unwise and immoral to further entrench the current policy of legal apartheid. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict will end in either ethnofascism and ethnic cleansing or some form of reconciliation, and this is a step towards ethnofascism.

What are you talking about? The fact that an uprising involves terroristic tactics does not make it less of an uprising. Trying to prevent people from calling the Intifada an uprising (which is the literal translation of the word) is playing word-games for rhetorical points, not discussing reality.

The three incompatible scenarios are:

  1. The accused was nowhere near the scene of the murder
  2. The accused was at the scene of the murder, and in fact committed the murder, but on accident
  3. The accused committed the murder on purpose, because the victim had it coming.

There is a joke I love that illustrates the concept:

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client was nowhere near the scene of the murder, he didn't mean to pull the trigger, and that son-of-a-bitch had it coming!"

A lot of research into plasma confinement is completely empirical. No theory at all. The scientists try new settings, see how they work, and draw a line on a graph extrapolating from them to higher power settings. That's why you need all these small experiments, which have no hope of generating net energy: because you're trying to solve plasma confinement by tinkering, without much of a map to guide you.

> Could you elaborate on what you think the benefits are?

Very simply, I don't want people driving around New York with blown-out mufflers. I have to deal with these people all the time. They are a constant, low-level annoyance that lowers quality of life for everyone in the city. Presently, there are presently no consequences for this sort of selfish behavior, and I'd like that to change by ticketing the perpetrators.

I don't understand what the added value is in making ordinary New Yorkers call the police with a time and cross-street as a precondition for a summons. What are we gaining here? Are we trying to validate the existence of a victim? Of course there is a victim -- there is hardly a block of the city where a loud motorist will not be negatively impacting a resident's life. This place is incredibly crowded. People live almost everywhere. Are we assuming that a manual reviewer is going to be more effective than an automated system? How? At the end of the day, they're going to have to base their judgment on a decibel reading anyways.

I can definitely see these systems being used illegitimately, but this has nothing to do with whether you can face your accuser. A software company telling you that you cannot validate the methodology of their measurement instrument is definitely troubling, but it is not fundamentally dissimilar to the police using speed guns whose internals you cannot inspect to convict you of speeding. Even more problematic than either of these technologies is the fact that the cops jail motorists for DUI on the basis of their own subjective interpretation of those motorists' performances on sobriety field tests.

The use of opaque technology by law enforcement raises significant issues in a free society. But so does the use of opaque non-technological judgement by police officers. Since there are significant benefits to automated enforcement, we should be pushing to improve transparency, rather than pursuing a chimera where we can only be prosecuted on the basis of transparent and reproduceable forensic analysis.

This is normal crotchety "kids these days" silliness. Most IntelliJ autocomplete suggestions are things like: * syntactic constructs (e.g. 'v' -> 'void', 'p' -> 'public'). * variable names you've already defined, or likely will define (e.g. 'MyFoo m' -> 'myFoo'). * methods names you've already defined or method names in commonly-used modules. The idea that the average programmer writing in an IDE is using functions that the IDE suggested, (but they have no idea what those functions do), is nonsensical. In addition to giving you (extremely rudimentary) autocomplete, IntelliJ gives you the ability to browse the libraries you've imported and read their doc. It gives you the ability to quickly see where variables were defined. It gives you the ability to conduct mass renames, move methods into new classes, and to conduct complicated syntax-aware search-and-replaces. It gives you an effective debugging GUI for tests, and allows you to inspect variables at will. I do believe that, as an IntelliJ programmer, I have lost my memory for certain language-specific details, (e.g. the fact that in Java, it is Collection::isEmpty vs. Collection::empty), but it's arguable whether these sorts of details are actually useful information for a working programmer.

You can face your accuser in court. The camera isn't accusing you. The city is. It's using the camera as evidence.

What are you talking about? It's completely clear to someone who isn't coming at this issue with an axe to grind. Meta's ability to serve European customers is under threat. In other words, the regulatory framework is making it hard for them to do their jobs. Meta is not threatening to leave. They couldn't be clearer.

Some of the information is public. Who knows how much there is behind it?

Okay. Hold your grudge from the 90s. No one can stop you. It's pretty weird not to care about his enormous efforts in philanthropy, though.

Melinda Gates is trying to get the best possible settlement from her divorce. The Epstein issue is obvious leverage. Melinda loses nothing by Bill being embarassed in public, and she gains a lot at the negotiating table.

The guy's work has directly prevented the deaths of enormous numbers of poor people worldwide. That trumps everything else in my book.

Also, don't fall for his wife's PR team. You have no idea why she's divorcing him. Claiming that the issue was Epstein is what any smart legal / publicity team would do in this circumstance.

Why? He dedicates huge amounts of money to worldwide public health, and is giving away the vast majority of his fortune over the course of his life. Why shouldn't I hold such a person in high regard?

This is a very dumb meme that people use to avoid learning anything about the actual hurdles that are currently being faced by fusion researchers. At some point, fusion will be much less than 30 years away, and at that point, I guarantee you that lazy people will still be repeating this joke, because it is literaly the only thing they know about the subject.

But what about all the ghosts who're reading this who might have also been victims of tragic sexual abuse?

I enjoyed it, and I'm happy when writers practice their craft with a bit of humor.

As you say, going from what we have to what they have will be no simple matter. It would take decades of reform at the very least. In the meantime, it doesn't make sense to just stop improning people for minor crimes.

Just use sci-hub. It always works, and it's very easy. There's no good reason to give the journal your money to read an article they had no hand in writing or funding.

It is absolutely true that a good percentage of my candidates fail due to stress. As an interviewer do everything you can to decrease the level of stress, but there's no way to eliminate it. I often note, in interview feedback, my subjective belief that the candidate's poor performance is likely to have been a fluke due to the particularities of interview conditions. But in addition to candidates who make errors under pressure, there are many candidates who are unable to perform very, very basic tasks. There are many candidates, for example, who mess up basic syntax; who adopt bizarre naming conventions which suggest a complete unfamiliarity with functioning codebases; who confidently propose solutions which make zero sense, and are unable to answer basic questions about those solutions, but simultaneously are unaware that they are not answering the questions you pose. Many of these candidates have sterling resumes. At a certain point, you realize that resumes are not a good predictor of performance.

This conversation makes me crazy. People talk about the merits of unions in the abstract, with no reference to the actual, very specific union at hand: the Alphabet Workers' Union, or "AWU".

AWU is not a traditional workers' union. It is a political advocacy organization. AWU's mission statement is explicitly and emphatically not to further full-time employee's interests. Rather, it is organized primarily as a vehicle for achieving a broader political end ("social justice", as that term is construed by AWU's organizers), potentially at employees' expense. Almost none of AWU's projects have focused on Googlers' work conditions or pay. Instead, they have focused nearly exclusively on modifying Google's products and policing its contracts, often in ways I find extremely objectionable. For example, they have lobbied heavily for Google to increase censorship of YouTube and Search, and to demonetize "problematic" content creators. They consistently advocate increasing institutional support for DEI efforts, and it was their efforts which led to the creation of Alphabet's Chief Diversity Officer position. They agitated on behalf of ex-employee Timnit Gebru against Google's ML work, which is obviously a threat to the hundreds of Google workers whose jobs depend on the models that Gebru's research criticized. Why should ordinary Google workers support such a "union"?

I want to add that I agree with some of AWU political stands. For example, they opposed Project Dragonfly, a censored version of Google Search intended for the Chinese market. They opposed Google contracts with the DoD and CPB. I think these are all worthy causes and I hope that employees continue to agitate against them! But as a former employee of Google, I am under no illusions that AWU would have represented my interests as an employee. Primarily, they are a political action committee set up by an extremely vocal minority of Google's employees to further those employees' political goals.

This conversation makes me crazy. I was at Google when its employee union, a.k.a. "AWU", was trying to get off the ground. I formed my opinion of it completely independent of company propaganda. AWU is a political advocacy organization, not a traditional union. AWU's mission statement is explicitly and emphatically not to further my or other full-time employee's interests. Rather, it is organized primarily as a vehicle for achieving a broader political end ("social justice", as that term is construed by AWU's organizers), potentially at employees' expense. Almost none of AWU's projects have focused on Googlers' work conditions or pay. Instead, they focus nearly exclusively on modifying Google's products and policing its contracts, often in ways I find extremely objectionable. For example, they have lobbied heavily for Google to increase censorship of YouTube and Search, and to demonetize "problematic" content creators. They advocate increasing institutional support for DEI efforts, and it was their efforts which led to the creation of Alphabet's Chief Diversity Officer position. They agitated on behalf of ex-employee Timnit Gebru against Google's ML work, which is obviously a threat to the hundreds of Google workers whose jobs depend on the models that Gebru's research criticized. Why should I support such a "union"?

I want to add that I agree with some of AWU political stands. For example, they opposed Project Dragonfly, a censored version of Google Search intended for the Chinese market. They opposed Google contracts with the DoD and CPB. I think these are all worthy causes and I hope that employees continue to agitate against them! But I am under no illusions that AWU would represent my interests as an employee. Primarily, they are a political action committee set up by and for an extremely vocal minority of Google's employees.

"Mathematical fundamentals" is a sliding scale. You have to define your end goal. What do you want to understand, that you are currently unable to understand due to your incapacity with mathematics?

If you want to understand computational complexity theory, for instance, you need a different set of "fundamentals" than you do if you want to understand high-school physics. It'll be a different thing if you want to read econ papers, and a different thing if you want to study machine learning.

Within the intersection of all these fundamentals is probably basic arithmetic and algebra. Those tools are basic requirements for everything else. Beyond that, you need to define your goal before you decide what math to learn.

I do not think it is possible to weed out all or even most of the completely incompetent programmers on the basis of resume screening. My reasoning is, I frequently conduct technical interviews, and a good percentage of those are with candidates lacking basic coding skills, and many of those candidates have impressively written resumes.

I frequently administer technical interviews. For candidates who have passed an initial recruiter screen, I have ascertained no correlation between resume quality and code production. Many, many candidates with extremely impressive resumes are unable to produce basic, working code.

You're right that if you refuse to accept any excuse for not performing [habit], the chain rule could be demotivating. But this is just a misapplication of the rule. The sensible reason to use the chain rule is to prevent a failure of volition. It's meant to address the problem where you say "I won't perform [habit] just this one day, because [reason]," and then before you know it, you've lost the will to ever [habit] again. If I ever decided not to journal, I do not think I would forgive myself. I forgive myself for the couple of incidents where I made no decision at all.

I think the last time I forgot to journal was... maybe a year and a quarter ago? I fell asleep before I intended to, and when I woke up, realized I had missed a night. I have never ever decided not to journal on a particular night, and this fact is enormously motivating. That is why the chain system is useful.

One interesting question is, how do I journal when it is extremely impractical? The answer is, I've done whatever was necessary to maintain the chain. Lacking a journal, I've used a pen and scrap paper. Lacking any writing utensils, I've used my phone. Lacking my phone, I've borrowed someone else's phone. The important part is that I made the sincere choice the perform the action, in however nonstandard a way, and this reminds me of my commitment. I've essentially inducted myself into my own religion.

I've written a statement to be issued by the reporter in question: "If the State DA is stupid enough to help Mike Parson prosecute me to avoid blame for his own incompetence, it will be my pleasure to face him in court, make him a national laughing stock, and end his career."

Without criticizing your Fibonacci Streaks idea, I don't think that your pessimism regarding chains is actually accurate. I think that voluntarily performing some practice every day becomes increasingly stable past a certain threshold of time. I have maintained a number of chains over many years. For instance, I have a daily diary in which I have written daily entries since early... 2019? I think I have missed 2 days, total, and in both cases, it was a case of simple forgetfulness due to some involuntary cause (e.g. taking a nap and sleeping through the night), and thus did not decrease my motivation going forward. At this point, I think daily journaling is extremely well-ingrained, and I do not think I will cease doing it any time soon.

The difficulty that people run into with maintaining daily rituals is that they have no way of reliably enforcing the ritual during a period of low motivation / energy. My approach is to find a low-commitment version of the ritual to be performed on days where you don't feel you can really give it your all. How I approach this with diary writing is simple: on nights where I feel I cannot possibly spend much time writing, I write an entry of the form, "It is incredibly late and I do not want to write more before I go to sleep." Nothing more. By doing this, I am able to maintain accountability without torturing myself.