beisner

When >42% of Americans are obese, obesity cannot be viewed simply as a matter of personal responsibility. It is decidedly and firmly a public health and public policy issue, and as such arguments about fairness in vaccine distribution don’t hold much weight, in my view.

Unbiased, or even slightly biased, is impossible. The torrent of factual information is of such a magnitude that it is impossible to present “all the facts”. And presenting any subset of those facts, even a random sampling, induces a bias in the resulting narrative. Including the information suggested in the article would add a different kind of bias. Impartiality is impossible. Neutrality is a a lie. Strong bias is inevitable, no matter the intent.

I can’t find the exact link right now that breaks this down, but basically the ONLY profitable new construction to build is luxury buildings, which by definition are at the top end of the market (and even with a premium, because they’re new!). There was a case study about this in LA.

Over time, older buildings become cheaper until they’re either renovated or razed and replaced with new construction. But it’s a cyclic process: new construction is expensive, and gets less expensive relative to other newer units over time until it is renewed.

Now, there’s still a ton of unmet demand from people moving into cities: this pushes all prices in the market up. And unfortunately, (covid era excluded) there’s just so, so, so much demand from people moving to SF/NYC/LA/Seattle/etc that even if we removed all zoning restrictions and started building at a furious pace, cities probably wouldn’t be able to meet demand across the economic spectrum for another few decades. Covid may affect this in some way in the short term, and other trends may affect this in the mid-long term (we did have suburban exodus once before in US history).

One way to address this problem is to massively fund public transit infrastructure projects inside the city and in surrounding metro areas. Tokyo has ~30 million residents is relatively expensive for Japan, but living even a 20-30min subway/train ride from the city center is actually surprisingly affordable compared to other international cities. Seoul is similar. Chinese cities have similar infrastructure systems, but I can’t speak to how that affects affordability because there are other economic/political factors at play. But that seems tragically unlikely to happen in the US.

Sure, but we do have prior probabilities based on other vaccination campaigns and studies. We also have some understanding of the causal mechanism of this vaccine, so there is other evidence. It’s just not a direct randomized control. People fixate on statistical testing under randomized control, but there’s a lot more information out there that can be used to assess probabilities.

While there probably is an element of that, hard evidence that might paint the Chinese government negatively in general is much more difficult to obtain because of information and communications controls.

But then you can’t figure out what your client is willing to pay and charge them that amount! /s

Bluetooth is a garbage standard riddled with decades of legacy support. Apple achieves the "just works" functionality with a proprietary chip and a proprietary protocol. Bluetooth still can't support simultaneous high-quality voice and audio.

They’ll have a major share in Aurora after the fact. They just are focusing on their core competencies, I assume. To compete in the self driving space, you need to have 1) a crap ton of money and 2) the patience to wait 10 years before you see any ROI. Uber is not structured to do that this late in the game. They’ll probably get a preferred partnership for licensing the tech once it rolls out, if Uber still exists in 10 years.

Just because that is how the world works, doesn’t mean it has to be a that way (or should be that way).

The reality is that the research organizations at big tech companies have always been a very different kind of labor relationship than typical rank-and-file business units. Many of the senior or otherwise high-profile researchers at FAANG companies would otherwise be professors or academics, in positions where there is essentially unbridled academic freedom and no expectation of separating personal convictions and principles from the academic environment.

Google lured many of these researchers away from academic roles, with the tacit promise that they would be able to continue their research - and at times political - endeavors relatively unencumbered. Google has built a research empire on this promise, which has been responsible in part for their continued dominance in various markets.

My point here is that these researchers have a lot of leverage. Advocating for action within an organization, counter to the current immediate goals of management, is only taboo (and thus “fireable”) in most companies because workers have almost no leverage, generally speaking. Not because it’s some inherently “bad” thing. If Google becomes seen as a place that fires researchers for advocating for their beliefs, especially in a capacity that they’ve been explicitly hired to do, then I think a lot of researchers would - and rightly should - reconsider whether such an environment is consistent with their values as academics and, often times, activists. Google’s research group is enormously valuable to the company, and there’s only so much reputational damage of this nature the organization can sustain before academics decide to take their talents elsewhere.

Any service they have Enterprise contracts for they are extremely unlikely to shut down.

There are two classes of Google products: ones that are small user applications, and ones that are core infrastructure internally and externally. As far as I know, only the former have a reputation for being EOLed.

DNS is the latter. Google’s RSS reader was the former.

Surface transmission is almost certainly an extremely unlikely vector for COVID-19. I tried doing some research the other day, and could find no information supporting the notion that surface transmission is likely. It’s also telling that the CDC’s guidelines for initiating quarantine are solely based on physical proximity to someone with covid for an extended period.

That said, if others have found evidence that surface transmission is likely (or even possible), I would love to see that evidence. Now that we are quite a ways into the pandemic, there should be some scientific consensus emerging on how/where transmission is likely.

There would probably be less petty theft if we prosecuted wage theft more aggressively.

I don’t know enough about other countries’ wage theft situation to comment. I would assume countries with larger union representation would experience less wage theft of this kind, but I don’t really know.

I do know that other countries don’t incarcerate anywhere close to as many of its citizens as the US, especially for what amounts to a rounding-error’s worth financial loss due to petty theft (a handful of fighter jets worth).

It’s really telling about what American society values that wage theft perpetrated by the owning class is rarely prosecuted and is considered a civil matter, while non-violent offenses including petty theft and drug possession perpetrated by the labor class (which cause orders of magnitude less fiscal harm) make up something like 90% of all arrests in the US.

I have this too, and refer to it as carcolepsy.

I assume the conspiratorial viewpoint would be, "the people in charge of making the rules aren't following them, so the rules must not be important and are just a power-grab blah blah blah".

They could make a mask mandate a requirement for receiving any amount of federal spending in their state. Something similar happened with the drinking age being raised to 21. Although I wouldn’t put it past some state governments to cut off their nose to spite their face at this point...

Because it’s 2020 and there’s still no Linux distribution that doesn’t have some terrible pain point (whether it’s driver support, UI roughness, randomly not being able to boot to GRUB, etc). Also, as far as I can tell there isn’t really a laptop/distribution pair that has a support experience like Apple or Microsoft hardware either.

Ubuntu or Arch on a thinkpad is pretty close, but trackpad support still isn’t close to apple or surfaces and if the OS becomes unstable you’re on your own.

I’d definitely consider a Linux laptop if it had a Retina-comparable display, aluminum body, excellent trackpad, weighed less than 5 lbs, half-decent speakers, and commercial support where I could walk in same-day and have my OS problems fixed.

The idea is that you create questions that are ungoogleable. Most of my upper-level CS courses had take-homes that were open-book, open-internet, and the professor basically said “good luck finding the answer to this problem online; you will not”.

This is harder for professors to do, and maybe fails in intro courses, but generally is quite effective.

One demographic this policy seems to unintentionally trample is international students. There’s a pretty well-trod path of F1 Visa -> OPT -> (OPT STEM Extension) -> H1B -> (green card, if you’re from the right country). It’s a tall order to expect that all new grads from this path will be able to command such high salaries, and there’s an existing set of international students who have planned their lives on being able to get the H1B before OPT runs out.

In my opinion, we should encourage immigration through our higher-education system (and we have been doing so for decades). I generally agree that the loopholes allowing for below-market H1B roles should be closed, but I think that students/recent graduates should be treated differently. There’s a big difference between sourcing lower-wage foreign workers who don’t already have roots in the USA, and paying entry-level salaries to recent graduates who’ve been living in the US for years already.

Of course, some may take issue with the premise here, and might say that the F1 shouldn’t be issued with intent to immigrate. But I think that’s terrible policy; nearly all of my (uniformly brilliant, top-shelf) friends who came here on F1 had horrendous, soul-crushing experiences with work authorization, even though they provide tremendous value to companies and the country by being here.

The Chinese Yuan is on its way to supplanting the US Dollar as a reserve currency in some regions, particularly Africa.

https://qz.com/africa/1291372/chinas-yuan-gets-support-from-...

Idk, I would be happy to pay several hundred dollars each for a couple of the games I’ve played over the last few years. I sank like, 100+ hours each into The Witcher 3 and Breath of the Wild, and I paid maybe $25 and $60 for them respectively. Considering that’s 2-4 movie tickets, or 1-2 entrees at a Manhattan restaurant, the value per entertainment seems remarkably high even at $60/ game.

Looks interesting, there are definitely a lot of pain points when using the Jupiter notebooks for more complex explanation. One thing I would love to see you in a Jupiter notebook, which some of the various deep learning experimentation start ups (wandb, etc) have is a local visual sink for time series data. For instance it would be great to be able to dynamically plot (maybe in the left or right margin of the window) loss over time for multiple runs, maybe with some dynamic ability to group graph.

I could envision hooking up the outputs of multiple executions of the same (or different) notebooks to these visualizations.

You can kinda get something like this with matplotlib or plotly but it has always felt kinda missing something.

Same could be said for police.

I think this entire post can be distilled into the following:

The time you spend composing a message should be proportional to the number of people in your intended audience.

Baby Yoda.

Yawn. Facebook is not the public square, nor should it be. Imo it’s also the wrong platform for political engagement (because it structurally amplifies the wrong kinds of engagement), and I couldn’t care less what editorial power they exert. There are other, real public forums (where speech is constitutionally protected) where fringe groups can peddle their ideas.

Great way to sequester it right into a whale's stomach.