jshaqaw

Value Investor Club is not what it once was in part due to the decimation of value investing over the last decade along with a general decline in norms of professional conduct but it’s still the best resource. Membership is limited but you can read older stuff at a lag and it’s a great educational resource for new investors.

I think there are (at least) two types of learning modes. One way is to teach a bunch of implementation up front and save the “why this all works” for years down the line. Some brains like a build up from basic principles. My brain works the second way. I didn’t “get” math until well into my adult years when I started with foundations (ala New Math) and everything else just clicked into place.

The way we generally teach math in the US (I can’t speak globally) is sort of the worst of all worlds. Kids spend inordinate time crunching through arithmetic algorithms without any particular deep understanding of what all the symbol manipulation means. Well in 2023 you are going to let a computer do all of that number crunching. There is very little intellectual or practical advantage in grinding our fussy long division problems by hand.

I get that we sort of tried starting with set theory and a nation of people who said “what nonsense this isn’t how I learned math” rebelled to the degree that New Math is now just a joke punchline. But we are still teaching math as if computers/calculators don’t exist in the early years and that’s just laziness.

This is why people pay the rent to live here

Every time I refresh my gear I try to figure out which is more cost effective - buying top tier stuff and getting another X years out of it before obsolescence or buying mid-tier stuff and just refreshing more often.

I end up just getting the top(ish) tier because once I start clicking on things I can't resist but obviously given the rate technology develops any 50k machine was bound to lose its value fast.

I had a chance to reflect on this overnight. I apologize that the initial rant was not written very well. I had to get it out and off my chest but was multitasking to hit a parallel real life deadline elsewhere.

My personal answer to all of this is that YouTube is a failed product for me. It may serve some general consumption/ad revenue production use case but it is a terrible product for a self-directed “power user.” I see the situation analogous to Twitter. The benefits of the platform are too powerful to entirely leave behind but horribly deficient to what they could be and there is no real alternative because of monopoly. YouTube in my view long ago stopped focusing on providing more value in a two sided market between content consumers/creators and shifted to pure monopoly resource extraction. I’m sure there are alternative emerging platforms but the logic of natural monopolies in two sided markets makes it brutally hard for any of them to reach critical useful scale.

But I realize I’ve gotten very lazy over the past decades and outsourced far too much power to the platform companies. Business is always some combination of providing value to your customers and extracting value for yourself but too many of these platforms have lost the balance. I’m tired of being the product even when I try to provide an alternative paid revenue stream to opt out of that deal.

Annoying and painful as it will be (I’m at a point in life where I no longer have bandwidth to self-hack every thing) I am going to have to reclaim big chunks of my digital autonomy. Thanks all for the great discussion here.

Of course people prefer not to know. I happen to be a vegetarian. I’m not a preachy vegetarian (I hope!) and people should eat what they want to eat. Willfully blind meat eating does offend me though although I’m open to being convinced I’m wrong. I feel if one eats meat one should know and respect its origins like a grownup. The consequences one draws from that knowledge is up to the individual.

A can’t miss awesome thing for people on the precipice of the dependent type theory rabbit hole is 1lab: https://1lab.dev/#lab

1lab is the future for mathematics research that deserves to happen.

Cubical type theory is a way to get to a purely constructive foundation for Homotopy Type Theory. Super cool stuff from a foundations of math perspective and has some surprising applications to topological quantum computing but if it isn’t your rabbit hole you can probably not pay too much attention to it.

Adding onto the authors’s own review, I liked the second part on learning Idris but for my purposes the real gem was that it took me from zero prerequisites to a good intuition for dependent type theory in a very clear way that prepared me to go even deeper into topics like Homotopy Type Theory. The works I treasure are those that can build understandings of really complex topics without the crutch of a lot of prior assumed knowledge. It takes incredible clarity to do that well. This was one of my favorite book finds of recent years.

Thanks I’ll check it out.

Self radicalization at least takes some initiative and sustained focus which would seem to limit the relative population risk but I fully admit I’m on the thin edge here of what I have any clue about.

I can’t say. I’m just a hobbyist dilettante here. Maybe that other book is great too but I don’t know it. One fun thing about a language so deep down the rabbit hole as Idris is the mean caliber of people involved is higher than average.

I agree and appreciate that AI is very fallible. That’s exactly why I think the algos should take direct user feedback to knock it off with certain content types seriously instead of very apparently ignoring it altogether.

This is what the meat industry lobbies for laws to prevent people from knowing. Everyone has the right to eat meat just as everyone has the right to know where it really comes from when they make that decision.

Thanks. FWIW I wasn't trying to "yuck your yum" for gun folks. Just not my personal bag of tea. I was raising it as an example of how useless the feedback mechanisms were for correcting the recommendation engine, not trying to draw some line between gun content and Nazi loving.

A huge overlap. Idris is aimed at being a general purpose language with proof assistant characteristics while some of its peers are more theorem provers built with general purpose language characteristics.

I'm a big fan of this book for anyone interested in the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Gentle-Introduction-Dependent-Types-I...

"Consider deleting your view history if you haven't already. Go through your subscriptions and see who they're following. Absolutely do not click on more than one of someone's video if you don't want to get flooded with their content."

- Exactly ... which is both hard and sad. You don't always know what the content is before you click out of curiosity or otherwise. For example, I couldn't write this post before clicking on the Leather Apron guy to see what the heck was going on.

And we should be able to listen to normalize arguments from the "other side" of politics without starting a cascade ending with Nazi propaganda. And the easiest way to do that is to take the user "STOP IT" feedback seriously. Which is really the point of my post if my rant and need to keep things under 4k characters obscured the TLDR.

Exactly. Do Nazi's offend me? Sure (sorry if that's a spicy opinion for some of the people who left response comments here). But as a computer person I'm offended by how lazy and bad the recommendation system is. After two decades the system should be able to segment the person who just wants to watch cooking videos and check out the latest Spiderman news and leave the culture wars for Twitter.

It is a disservice to the end-user and to all the amazing creators for whom Youtube is as present an irreplaceable venue for distribution.

Also, remember I actually pay hard cash for Youtube (which embarrasses me every time I type it!) so the idea that they can't distinguish engagement highly likely to keep me forking over subscription moolah versus engagement highly likely to send me running for the hills when I actively use their provided tools to tell them "I HATE THIS STOP SHOWING IT TO ME" is a pure business failure. The concept that all engagement is good engagement may work on a platform like Twitter where the point is to rile everyone up into opposing war camps but is that really why people come to Youtube? Some people just like physics videos, or cooking videos, or video game reviews, or whatever...

I absolutely get the recommendsation progression. I'm a pragmatist and a capitalist. I'm not demanding a ban on anything.

But when a user explicitly says "NO NO STOP YOU HAVE IT WRONG" and it has no impact then it is not optimal design, it is bad design, and not possibly revenue maximizing. Fixing it would also be a great way for these companies to stop stepping in public relations unforced errors.

Truly sad to throw out the baby with the bathwater though.

On Youtube I can watch IAS lectures on cutting edge topics on quiet evenings. I can find incredible creators explaining mathematical and physics concepts - often with innovative and useful graphical presentation. I can watch Kendo matches from Japan and more BJJ instructional videos from true masters than I'd have time to watch in 10 lifetimes. For someone who spends all day reading/writing text for work and then still reads a lot on free time - well sometimes you just want to watch/listen vs. more text input!

But yes I will move on if anything like this happens again. Nothing is irreplaceable.

I'd love a physical switch which hard disables Siri/audio monitoring

You sir understand our great city.

This all looks great. I’ll save you the Apple agony and run a vm for this.

Very cool. Is any of this exposed at the user level in any way for modding/experimentation or is that just too unworkable in production? Also, curious if there was a toolchain reason for the lack of a Mac version or is it just too tiny of a market to bother?

Hi. I’d be interested on how you feel using lisp impacted the development of the game and the final game structure. Would it be the “same” game if implemented in a more conventional approach? Thanks.

A Lisp Machine in my browser?!?! And just like that my coming week of productivity was lost. Awesome!

Two incredible general interest math books came out this year: The Big Bang of Numbers and The Joy or Abstraction. Both are brilliantly written and convey sophisticated math concepts for general intellectual development versus math specialists. The later book gave me a good foundation for some ideas in category theory I still hadn’t internalized on an intuitive level after reading more conventional academic works.

I get the nostalgia factor but beyond that why in 2022 is a calculator app something people get so excited about?