jotakami

If only as young people we could recognize how important it is for society as a whole that people continue to become parents... then we might not resent the unfairness.

I’m way more productive than before I became a parent because fatherhood triggered a cascade of positive lifestyle changes and priority rearrangements.

You could argue that non-parents are better employees, all else equal. But all else is never equal.

Tangentially, regardless of the outcome for productivity, I would argue that a society with more parents is a better society than one with fewer.

Yeah kamaal’s comment on that thread shows just how insanely terse Perl can be... truly the king of one-liners

Oh man, this brings back memories... when this article was written, I was a high school freshman, and I had just bought Teach Yourself Perl 5 in 21 Days so I could learn how to write my own custom CGI scripts for my geeky personal webpage. It was my first true programming language, after childhood flings with BASIC.

Also, I find it humorous how the term “hacker” is used here to refer to literally anyone who works on computers. I suppose the title of this site retains that meaning...

My wife is Japanese and I’ve spent a few years living there. We also have a child, so I’ve experienced many of the differences in American and Japanese parenting styles.

When I read this article, I don’t see amae as something uniquely Japanese of course, but I do see how it is perceived differently in the two cultures. I think the point behind the article is that indulging in amae (both with children and as an adult) is more socially acceptable in Japanese culture than in American or other Western cultures.

Usually I would agree with you but this is an intriguing concept. They explicitly state in the white paper that this is an experiment, so treat it as such. All I’m hearing is a lot of “contempt prior to investigation”.

You probably could have left out all but the last paragraph and made your point haha... but thanks for that quote. It’s almost like you need to climb the Dunning-Kruger curve at least once in a specific domain before you can realize when you’re on the wrong side of the curve in any other domain.

Aren’t all inferences based on abstraction, and all abstractions based on experience? Would it not be more correct to say that the difference here is degree rather than kind, where the intuitive types just have brains that are more active in building abstractions to explain their experiences?

Ever try trading futures basis and spreads? I was killing it in mid-2018 in that space, although I got cocky and used my winnings to make foolish leveraged bets that did not end well.

Back in 2017/2018, not at all surprising. I don’t see that kind of opportunity in the crypto markets anymore though, they’ve gotten a lot more efficient. Used to be able to scalp 1% on big price moves in altcoin futures at least once a week, now the prices move in lockstep with spot.

Depends on the nature of the trades. If you are hedging and maintaining a delta-neutral position (very common situation for market makers and arbitrageurs) then technically your trades are part of a straddle, which is reported separately from capital gains. (in the U.S., at least)

I learned this because I had a six-figure capital loss on my spot crypto trades, and a slightly larger gain on unregulated futures which do not fall under capital gains. Capital losses can only offset up to $3k in other income, so I was terrified that I’d have to pay taxes on the massive “gain” without being able to count the losses against it. Fortunately, the straddle is the correct way to report this, allowing gains and losses to be matched across instruments that may otherwise fall into different income categories.

Yeah we are working on that

The argument is not that a peer group affects all members in the same way, but that the effect of the peer group is dominant.

The book I mentioned addresses that. It’s a quick read, highly recommended.

True, and thank you for the correction. Can’t do much about genes after a child is born though...

There’s a difference between “one factor that explains everything” and a dominant factor that explains most of the variation.

My son started kindergarten this year, and unfortunately we are zoned into one of the worst schools in the district. He’s a bright kid, already knows everything they would teach him, so we weren’t concerned about academics, but let me tell you—his behavior at home, and especially his language use, has taken a really troubling turn. He is obviously picking up the behavior of some of the children he goes to school with.

I read a book not too long ago entitled “The Nurture Assumption,” by Judith Harris. It influenced me more than anything I’ve read as a parent, because it is so obviously true. Her thesis is that everyone assumes that adults have a significant impact on a child’s future, yet there is basically zero evidence to support such an assumption.

Peer groups are the dominant influence on a child’s personality and development, full stop. This is probably hard for educators to accept because there’s really nothing that can be done about it from their perspective.

The parachute paper says this, which I think is their “punchline”:

When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community, randomized trials might selectively enroll individuals with a lower perceived likelihood of benefit, thus diminishing the applicability of the results to clinical practice.

So... was there some kind of selective enrollment in the teacher study? I don’t think that’s the issue here.

Too slow to make the connection here... can you explain your reasoning?

Thank you for substantially raising the mean thoughtfulness of the comments in this thread.

Fortunately, we get asymmetric security through laws and criminal punishment rather than machine gun bunkers.

Also, MR=MC doesn’t imply that wealth is never created, it just means that it can’t be created purely through exchanging commodities.

Bribing outside of the system (i.e. in real life) could be a tremendous coordination and logistical challenge, especially given the amounts needed to make these attacks profitable. Smart contracts can make all of that trivially easy.

It’s like... the people most interested in trustless collaboration are people who are untrustworthy. A trustless settlement layer seems fine, but any real human application is going to have an element of trust and doesn’t belong alongside settlement.

I don’t think you understand. The arbitrage bots aren’t exploiting poorly written contracts, they are capturing free value that users of a dApp have opened up. This free value is available to miners as well, and could be used to subsidize an otherwise-unprofitable double spend attack.

But more to the point: allowing smart contracts in a blockchain introduces all of the complexity of trying to make any other piece of software secure. Except... now it’s on a blockchain where the code is open source and mistakes can allow adversaries to steal money, not just data. How is this an improvement?

This is what I was thinking, since there is probably a strong genetic component to an individual’s dopamine production and response profile. As someone who lived most of my life with undiagnosed ADHD and just recently started taking stimulants for treatment, I can attest that normal life issues which once seemed like arduous mountains to climb are now summarily dispatched before lunchtime when I have a dopamine boost. It’s shocking how effective the medication is, side effects notwithstanding.

You’ll understand when I say this: our lab was part of AIMD, so we were governed by NAVAIR instructions. Sked was for shipboard maintenance, but we technically weren’t performing “shipboard” maintenance so we didn’t use it.

Because developing software is at least an order of magnitude easier and faster when the developer is the user?

A number of years ago I was in the Navy and worked in an electronics shop on an aircraft carrier. We were responsible for calibrating and repairing all the test and measurement equipment for the entire ship as well as the squadrons that we carried with us. Easily over 10k individual pieces of equipment, each of which had to be calibrated on a specific schedule. Most of this data was managed centrally, and we sent/received DB updates a couple times a week. However, just managing our workload and operations efficiently required other data which was not part of this database. I had no choice but to build my own solution, and the only real option was MS Access given the barren IT resources available on a deployed aircraft carrier.

But man, was it a fucking lifesaver. Just for one example, we often had to send equipment out to different labs since we didn’t have the capability to test them, and shipping stuff required a standard military shipping document with various mundane pieces of information about the stuff being sent. Creating these documents was a tedious process of looking up the data manually and then typing it into a Word file. I just recreated the document as an Access form, with fields that would populate from a query. Creating the shipping documents went from 30-45 mins to essentially the click of a single button.

If my answer is “Yes, but only temporarily!” does that still count?

For real though, this comment confirms all of my intuition. I’m about to start a PhD at the age of 36, with a spouse and child to support, and I know my bank account will never forgive me for this. But... I can’t not do it.

Perhaps the difference is in the nature of the information that is being probed and its larger context? Visual imagery often provides almost all of its own context, but the “meaning” of a sentence can be radically different depending upon its source. Humans produce words, so you almost need a working theory of mind to fully understand them. None of that context will ever make it into word2vec.

Perhaps, although the automobile has always had a clear explicit purpose: convert potential energy into rotational energy in a controlled manner. It’s hard to identify such a singular purpose for AGI.