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kkoncevicius

937 karma · joined July 30, 2022

http://karolis.koncevicius.lt
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kkoncevicius··on Digital Signals
> When you play the sound, the start is at the bottom of the image, and then moves upwards (kind of like Guitar Hero)

In this case Y-axis is time, no?

kkoncevicius··on Loss of epigenetic information can drive aging in mice
When you say "just changes in methylation states" it makes it sound as if they don't have any function. Methylation is the mechanism to preserve cell-fate memory after division. Hence in theory it can also carry the information about the "age" of the cell into the daughter cells.
kkoncevicius··on An unorthodox scholar uses technology to expose Biblical forgeries
Under naturalism there can never be a supernatural phenomena that would prove supernatural things exist. Because once the phenomena reaches a state where it can be measured it ceases to be supernatural and becomes a thing of scientific investigation. And while its not in a state that could be measured there is nothing to investigate. Or put it another way - naturalism is a world view that would kill any supernatural interpretation even if/when its real. And as such it cannot be used to prove nor disprove supernaturalism.
kkoncevicius··on Scaling Down Deep Learning
kNN with k=1 is a more complex model than a neural network, not a simpler one. If we had more data it would scale and if we reach a point where we have a labeled image for every possible pixel combination in MNIST it would be unbeatable.
kkoncevicius··on Anthropology in Ruins?
So I did as you instructed - read the article before commenting. And then read your comments and replies. And my final impression is that you here have an agenda more so than the author. Just wanted to share it straight.
kkoncevicius··on Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
"blind review" is good - better than "non-blind review". So in some sense they are eliminating phrases where "blind" is used in a positive light.
kkoncevicius··on Ask HN: How do people find your blog?
I think you first have to answer the question about why you want to blog in the first place. Do you want to get revenue from it? Do you want to share your knowledge with others? Do you want to signal about how skilled/smart you are? Do you want to build an archive as a memory for your future self?

Then, after answering this question, ask yourself - is blogging the best way to achieve the goal? This is what led me to delete the small blog I had and concentrate on better things.

With regards to how you find other interesting things to read - nowadays mostly by marginalia search [1]. I've found that I rarely want to read more than one or few posts from a specific blog. Most blogs are not narrow enough and you find a lot of different subjects covered. So it might be better to specifically look for things you are interested in, rather than follow all articles in a blog by a concrete author.

[1]: https://search.marginalia.nu/

kkoncevicius··on Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative
I read though the suggestions. So "trigger warning" is now problematic and the proper alternative is "content note". And "Preferred pronouns" is hate speech, because you imply that pronouns are merely a preference, as if the person can choose their identity.

Godspeed.

kkoncevicius··on Ask HN: Strategies for Being More Eloquent?
Advice: slow down when you are talking, don't try to play catch up between your mouth and your thoughts. You will stutter and "umm" "hmmm" less automatically. Also because of this it is likely that your mannerisms will become more coordinated and your voice will be a bit lower, which will add to the "eloquent" image.

Exercise: Pick a topic and talk about it for 5 minutes in front of a recording camera on your computer (on a Mac QuickTime can do this). Then watch how you look and sound, notice the things you don't like, adjust them, and iterate.

kkoncevicius··on The Constitution of Athens
To me it seems like there is a lot more to this building-flourishing-decay-collapse cycle than power and competence with regression to the mean. I first got interested by this topic after reading "The Fate of Empires" [1] where the author puts the "blame" so to speak, not on competence, but on the generational gap. His thesis is that it takes approximately 10 generations before the values that built the society are no longer followed by their descendants.

[1] http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

kkoncevicius··on Not Frequentist Enough
> The root challenge of all modern frequentist statistics is "does the selection criteria for the sample actually allow me to generalize the results".

Why did you single out frequentists here? This is a challenge for all inference, prediction, classification, and any other "forecasting".

kkoncevicius··on I don't want to go back to social media
> wrote the addendum because I knew that some people would be curious exactly why I left Twitter, and also because I did feel like ranting about Musk

To me the "addendum" was the low point of the article. Because it turned what might have been a principled position into a semi-coherent rant about politics, former US president, climate change, and "Muskrat", which in it self resembles the worst kind of twitter threads.

I don't understand why people do these things, but just like twitter - your post would also be better without this type of stuff. Just personal opinion.

To end on a positive note - I like your apps and the spartan css style of the blog. So this is a friendly message :)

kkoncevicius··on I don't want to go back to social media
To me this also seems like the right attitude and the right comment.

The author blames twitter for negativity and arguments, but spent quite some time on his post criticising the new Twitter ownership and then went on a rant about Elon Musk. How is that better.

Is the idea here that people should express their criticisms on blogs rather than tweets? But blogs have to be shared on some kind of social media to be read by others too (like this on on HN).

I would agree more with the message of "do what you like and don't go around telling others what they should be doing". Doesn't matter the platform. If everyone practiced this then most problems with social media would go away.

kkoncevicius··on Books recommended by profitable founders
Survivorship bias - yes; but I think it's still better than getting recommendations about books and productivity systems from people who do nothing but peddle advice.
kkoncevicius··on Overfitting and the strong version of Goodhart’s law
My first impression is also in agreement with the parent. The blog post appears to use some terms loosely in order to make the connection between overfitting and Goodhart's law stronger. For example - calling training sample "proxy" and stating that it is is a slightly different goal is already leading towards the pre-defined conclusion.

And the reply also leaves me with a similar impression:

> your training objective can be different at train and test time

But this is not overfitting, this is concept drift, a different and well-defined thing in ML.

> the datapoints you use can be different at train and test time

Both train and test data came from the same population. They are just different incomplete random samples.

I guess what I am getting at - overfitting happens because we know we are training a model on an incomplete representation of the whole. But that representation is not a proxy, as suggested in the article - it is not slightly different to the goal. It's an incomplete piece of the goal.

kkoncevicius··on Gundam and anime replace rampant politics in Japanese Twitter Trends
Early reddit was very similar to HackerNews. One front page where users submitted interesting links and stories. Then slowly subreddits started to get introduced, like "/r/science", "/r/programming", and "/r/atheism". Already very early people didn't like this change and created /r/TrueReddit. Read their rules and you can see how similar to HN this is "only interesting stories", "do not editorialize the original title" etc. However even /r/TrueReddit shifted heavily towards politics (i.e. short by top -> all time and see which stories get most upvotes). After that /r/TrueTrueReddit for people who were trying to maintain the same spirit. But it is dying now more or less.

Many many small changes had to happen before it downgraded into what we see today [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Reddit

kkoncevicius··on Gundam and anime replace rampant politics in Japanese Twitter Trends
Same in Lithuania.

We even had a "Black Lives Matter" rally here, when things were happening in USA. Media reported on it, mostly Lithuanian teens showed up, some skipped school to attend. I don't think there was a single black person. They even had some signs against police brutality, when in Lithuania most of incidents happen not by police but to police.

kkoncevicius··on Show HN: Hyper minimalist habit tracker for Chrome
Nice design! Would love something like that for the apple watch.

I assume for chrome it also works, but only for people who more or less live in the browser.

kkoncevicius··on Ask HN: You just bought Twitter, not Elon. What changes are you making?
1. Disable replies - end to the constant arguing and conflicts.

2. Disable retweets - end to the "aggregator" accounts.

3. Disable likes - end to vanity posting.

4. Adjust the ranking algorithm - users who post a lot and use a lot of hashtags are downweighted.

The goal would be is to make twitter a platform for people to share updates about their work. Artist share their paintings, scientists their articles, developers - the new versions of their software, etc.

This would kill twitter thou.

kkoncevicius··on What did Mary know? A thought experiment about consciousness (2013)
> Who is "allowed" to talk about England?

I don't see any issue - both can talk about England and provide different perspectives.

kkoncevicius··on The Forgotten Revolution
Some more examples can be found in Schrodingers book "Nature and the Greeks".

One that stuck with me is the "discovery" of atoms. Some philosopher (don't remember the name) in Greece was thinking about the volume of a pyramid. And he imagined what would happen if we dissected the pyramid through the middle and looked at two squares formed on the bases. He reasoned that the squares should have equal areas, however if that was the case for every such dissection the pyramid would never form and instead we would have a cube.

So his reasoning was that in order to explain this paradox objects in the real world should be composed of small elements, so that after dissection the squares are slightly different.

kkoncevicius··on Scientists are finding fungi in cancerous tumors
As far as I can gather from reading this - contamination cannot be ruled out.
kkoncevicius··on Bruce Willis Sells Deepfake Likeness Rights So His 'Twin' Can Star in Movies
My guess is because the younger generation does not go to the movies that much. So the films are being produced for people who still do - the generation that likes Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Ghost Busters, etc. What is the best way to get most of them go see your new movie? - a remake of an old classic.
kkoncevicius··on Censorship by big tech at the behest of the U.S. government?
So according to this article big-tech fears the US government and do as they are told or at least react to cues about what and who should be censored. On the other hand - some fraction of big tech banned the previous US president, while he was still in office, with no such fears.

What am I missing?

kkoncevicius··on The Advice Gap
I would add:

4. It's hard to understand and appreciate the advice without experiencing the situation first.

kkoncevicius··on Tell HN: Banned site-wide from Reddit for helping a fellow mod fight hate speech
You helped creating a bot that punishes users for posting certain words. You used those same words in your message and got a treatment not unlike the one you were helping to automate.

Maybe there is a lesson here somewhere.

kkoncevicius··on Ask HN: What book changed your life?
Well, it is a hard read, but in short - it offers a curious interpretation of your personal experience of the world, suggesting that you are the only being, reality is manufactured by you (or in other words, you and reality are the same thing), that mind is something external to you, that you were not born but rather you were and the idea of you being born was a construct that you conjured later. Also, the living state you take for granted is only maintained and recreated every moment by memory and is compared to a dream and you are encouraged to "wake up" a second time.

You should listen to the linked video for a better introduction.

kkoncevicius··on Ask HN: What book changed your life?
"I am that"

You can listen to some quotes from the book here: https://web.archive.org/web/2oe_/http://wayback-fakeurl.arch...

kkoncevicius··on What makes a great opening line?
I've found a lot of good opening lines in short free-form essays. Here are some examples:

"This single stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected corner, I once knew in a flourishing state in a forest." - A Meditation Upon a Broom-Stick, Jonathan Swift, 1701.

"'What is Truth?' said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer." - Of Truth, Francis Bacon, 1625

"The devil is a citizen of every country, but only in our own are we in constant peril of an introduction to him." - Disintroductions, Ambrose Bierce, 1902

"Human being are curious creatures, and in nothing more curious than in the forms of diversion which they devise for themselves." - Evening Parties, Rose Macaulay, 1926

"The effort which people put up to avoid thinking might almost enable them to think and to have some new ideas." - Symmetry and Repetition, Lewis Namier, 1941

"The other day a cousin of mine was married; thought what God or myself had to do with it I do not know, but I was obliged to go to church." - The Sterner Sex, Rebecca West, 1913

"Sometimes it is so hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle.", Bad Poets, Randall Jarrell, 1953

kkoncevicius··on Ask HN: Any way to hide all posts from specific domains?
Thanks! This works with one exception - when two links in a row are from the same domain only the first one is removed.

I don't know any javascript, but this is my attempt at modification:

    let domains = "twitter\.com|\
                   cnn.com\
                  ";

    (function(){
        'use strict';
        var links = document.getElementsByClassName("titlelink");
        var owners = [];
        for (var link of links) {
            if (link.href.match(domains)) {
                owners.push(link.closest(".athing"));
            }
        }
        for (var owner of owners) {
            owner.nextSibling.remove();
            owner.remove();
        }
    })();
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