karpierz

Here's an analogy that might make it clearer:

Alice is in a wheelchair.

Bob has a broken leg.

Charlie is unfit, but otherwise a healthy adult.

Alice, Bob, and Charlie would all say "I find getting up the hills of San Francisco difficult". But "doesn't everyone find that hard" conflates the causes and severity of the difficulty for the three of them in a way that isn't useful for making their complaints feel heard, or addressing the complaints such that they don't have that issue.

For example:

Alice could get an electric wheelchair.

Bob could take public transit / Ubers up, or get rides from their friends.

Charlie could take up running with friends.

Except part of the job involves lifting things in places where forklifts can't fit.

> Message me if anyone's still interested in "dumb" AI like that. :-)

Not sure how to reach out, but I'm definitely interested in reading about procedural methods in music synthesis. Any links describing your approach?

Ito calculus - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%C3%B4_calculus

The question on my mind: how do you figure out what the functions do without reverse engineering?

If I were to guess, you're saying that you reverse engineer the API boundary without reverse engineering the implementation. But then figuring out what the API contact is without documentation seems intractable for most API boundaries.

Light travels in a straight line - black holes don't "pull" light in, they change what a straight line looks like in the space around it.

The event horizon is the distance where all straight lines lead to the black hole.

The author of the technique has a video of it in 3d: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ua-h1pg6yM

But then I can't spend my money for several weeks - the feature that crypto can't implement is having the reversal window be wider than the lockout window.

> I should be able to state that two species have a different lifespan based on a difference in mean age of death - without needing to provide any specific biological mechanism in my study.

You need to control for confounders. For example, if I told you:

- Mean lifespan of species 1 is: 3 years - Mean lifespan of species 2 is: 10 years

Does that mean that species 2 has a longer lifespan than species 1?

What happens when you find out that species 1 is domesticated cattle, which has (almost) all of its males slaughtered at age 2?

You could then say "I meant for two species that are in controlled conditions", but now you need to define what conditions you're controlling, which implies what casual mechanisms you're controlling for.

I think that you have a specific lens with which you view the world, and you're contorting the world to fit that lens.

What would it take to convince you that people don't do everything to attract a high-status mate?

> How does someone find his game before really really good games like baldur gates etc.?

They don't. There have been really good AAA games before Jeff started making games. His business model does not revolve around getting people to play his games before they discover better ones. His business model is to make games that can't be compared like that.

> You're paid what you're known to be worth.

You're paid somewhere between the minimum amount you'll accept and the maximum that the company is willing to give you (which in the case of some VC funded companies, may exceed the amount of profit you generate!)

Where you're paid on that spectrum depends on how much leverage you have vs. the company.

I'd recommend starting here: http://minisat.se/

Apple made them the default because they are the best at monetization of large volumes of search queries from iOS devices. If another company was better at it, they'd put in a higher bid and rake in the profits.

They're saying it's scarier that ad companies can figure out these things without the data because it means that you can't protect yourself by withholding your data.

You start by saying that wealthy people can pretty freely manipulate the amount of income they show for tax purposes.

The follow-up is that based on the manipulated income data, wealthy people pay disproportionately more taxes?

tl;dr: The author starts with the assumption that the Industrial Revolution is inevitable, and uses that to conclude that the Industrial Revolution would've inevitably happened, while dismissing a bunch of other authors who put a lot more thought into their writing.

I'm not talking about code.

The goal of the transaction is for the Spanish bank to have access to USD. In the example given, the Spanish bank would then have to take the crypto it got and trust an exchange to give it USD in exchange for the crypto.

How do you get USD to the Spanish bank without trusting a third party?

How exactly does the Spanish bank get the USD that the American bank sent without trusting a third party?

There's the bonus problem of: even if you magically have correct priors, you still need to assume that Drake's Equation is a good model for the generation process of civilizations. If the equation is missing terms or has extra terms, no amount of Bayesian reasoning helps correct for that.

It's like thinking that you can use Bayesian reasoning to determine the likelihood of Russell's Teapot existing.

> And yet nobody seems to be aware of it, and both the popular and scientific press continue with the “where are they?” Fermi paradox headlines.

A reasonable explanation here is that the paper is not correct because it relies on unfounded priors, which is generally where most Bayesian work falls flat.

To add to this, I'd say that when people say "deep conversation", they generally mean "comfortable conversation".

A lot of conversations that I've heard described as "deep" are superficial discussions of philosophy/politics (see most of HN) or jargon-filled discussions of specific nerddoms that people are interested in.

> That’s not how this works, anywhere: the burden of proof, of presenting facts, is on those who say “yes”.

What? Why? If this were true, you could:

1. Take the claim you want to assert

2. Claim the negation of the claim is false (the "no").

3. If anyone asks for facts, just say the burden of proof is on them to show the negation is true.

I don't think the RTS genre died; I think it evolved. Two of the most popular games in the world, League of Legends and DotA2, are RTS games. The Total War franchise keeps on kicking. Auto-battlers like Teamfight Tactics and Mechabellum mix real-time analysis with turn-based decision making.

It's the old school style of RTS that's dying; harvest resources to build units and beat your opponent. But that style of game was perfected with the release of Brood War, and the core mechanics haven't been improved on since.

> The majority of modern scholars avoid the term [Dark Ages] altogether due to its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate. Despite this, Petrarch's pejorative meaning remains in use, particularly in popular culture, which often simplistically views the Middle Ages as a time of violence and backwardness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

It's named the Dark Ages because 11th century scholars wanted to feel like their time period was enlightened and great compared to the past, not because there was some deep, thoughtful analysis.

It's worth reading in a little more detail.

One of the core points is that "Feudalism" as used outside of academic discussion loses its semantic meaning beyond being a synonym for "oppressive". And so trying to discuss when feudalism starts inevitably falls into a discussion of "when did Europe get oppressive".

Given that society has relied on fractional reserve banking since the 1600s, what is the alternative banking process you had in mind?

If you want to make a game, it's never been easier! Download Unity, download a bunch of free sounds/textures/models/etc, and then write some simple code to your things around.

If you want to make a movie, it's never been easier! Grab your smartphone, write a script, grab some friends and have them read it, then post.

But from experience, actually making something passible (much less "good" or "great") takes years of dedicated practice, which is more accessible thanks to the above, but still doesn't really make the years any shorter.

Can you point to some great movies that didn't see any success this year?

Analogously:

I wonder if many of the low budget films, especially narrative focused films, might be better off as games. Given how everybody has a computer these days, AAA games are formulaic garbage and games aren't centered around a single developer any more, there's probably a market for innovative low budget games made in a basement on a single computer by a few friends and with little to no art assets. That seems like it'd be lower time/money cost and higher expected reward than movie production, plus you'd get to spend time on the internet researching interesting technical problems rather than just sitting in a movie editor for years, working on a movie that will most likely be watched by a few dozen people.

tl;dr: I don't think a good movie is any easier to make than a good game.