lootsauce

Amen to all of that.

This conversation illustrates the challenges with the reproducibility crisis. There is a fundamental problem in how we do science and that problem is hidden by our everyday experience of how effective science has been. This experience colors our perceptions of almost anything that gets dressed up as serious science, including objectively serious science. The scientific process is idealized as this effective tool but research happens at the behest of imperfect institutions and fallible people. Institutions and people are driven by financial and reputational imperative as well as the ideals of their research goals. These can cut strongly against the interests of performing meaningful research and publishing good science.

>That's the problem with flat earth and trump and 1001 other issues.

I would add some of those 1001 other issues include things Well educated and common sense folk “know” to be sound, backed by evidence and scientific research. I would cite the reproducibility crisis which is not limited to just social science but endemic in academia and corporate driven research. Further I would hi-light the “fake news” situation is not ideologically limited nor is propaganda or any individuals personal biases leading to a kind of myopia to counter examples and challenging ideas. Suffice to say it’s easy to throw stones at flat earth and trump but if you think somehow your primate brain is not as broken or fallible as the next person then you’ve surely been had.

Faith, I would argue includes the urge toward something on a deep/spiritual/fundamental level that you may certainly have doubts of and even contrary evidence for. I would posit that it is in the face of such doubt that faith is exercised the most. The faculty is as much one of hope in something because you know something else points to it being true in the absence of easy confirmation. Being certain of something a-priori naturally requires little faith thereafter. There are practical goods that flow from from faith that certainly bolster that sense that it is good and thus it is true. So I would not discount the value of these practical goods as motivator for faith nor would I treat that as an indictment thereof.

I'm a UI developer, never used Org-Mode, not a VIM or Emacs user. But I am very interested in document creation, note taking, organizing workflows. Please forgive the lack of background in this question but...

Can someone explain to me why if org-mode is so popular it is not used in places other than emacs or why is it bound to emacs? Is there some ux quality or set of features that are bound up in the unique key-bindings of Emacs or the scripting integration for example? Could any of this goodness make it's way to more accessible (for your average user) venues such as a basic GUI note taking app?

Can you say reg-u-la-tory cap—ture

The parent site IBM 100 lists many of IBM's historical highlights.

"Over the past 100 years, hundreds of millions of IBMers, clients, customers and business partners all over the globe have helped IBM make the world work better. To every single individual, thank you. We pledge boldness in IBM’s second century to create a company that never stops moving toward the future. Ever onward."[0]

Lofty speak, and not to be a party-pooper but I can't help but think, if we're getting all nostalgic about IBM history, then part of me just can't help but bring it up. IBM collaborated with Nazis and helped enable the holocaust which has been well document by Edwin Black. [1]

As the Nazis invaded a country they would perform a census to identify the undesirables to be removed to concentration camps. This was an industrial scale data management and logistics problem that IBM was uniquely qualified to facilitate. The fact that they did so is not contested although it is not spoken of often and surely does not condemn today's IBM. We should however take it as an object lesson in the double edged sword of technology and the warning that we must restrain firms that would have us think they won't be evil.

"...in the 2012 reissue Black presents a letter dated 1941 from IBM that directed a Dutch subsidiary to work with Dehomag — years after business with Germany was supposed to have ceased. Furthermore, according to Black’s 2012 evidence, Watson took a one percent commission on all profits made in business with the Nazis, and had to personally approve all expenditures on said business, such as bomb-fortifying Dehomag installations."[2]

"What Hitler has done to us through his economic warfare, one of our own American corporations has also done . . . Hence IBM is in a class with the Nazis . . . The entire world citizenry is hampered by an international monster." - Economic Warfare Section Chief Investigator Howard J. Carter [2]

[0] https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust [2] https://allthatsinteresting.com/ibm-nazis-ww2/3

Agree it's paternalistic, but you really want to educate yourself whatever the requirements. https://www.macrovoices.com/aia/218-accredited-investor-acad...

No, this is a meaningless sentiment. Floating a feel-good idea like this accomplishes little in the face of how the world actually works. In the real world the hippocratic oath does not prevent malpractice, over prescription of opioids, or name your beef with the entire healthcare system let alone doctors actions.

Engineers are hired to make weapons systems that kill civilians. Engineers make software that enable ubiquitous surveillance by whomever wants to use it for whatever purpose. No a Hippocratic oath will have a hard time influencing individuals and their organizations that’s what laws and the enforcement thereof are aimed at. I have little hope for oaths or laws however.

Again why is THIS downvoted? Am I taking crazy pills or are downvotes completely meaningless?

what is the reason to down-vote this comment?

It definitely favored verbal skills, I am assuming that was a feature not a bug in the hiring process. The questions were not a project but a conversation in the context of my experience With a specific tech stack such as... “How do you keep a server from getting hacked”, “how do you handle conflicting dependencies”, “how do you know your code is ready to deploy to production”

This sounds like a reasonable approach and that is why software interviews remain broken. I'm sure it works for your organization, not saying you are bad at hiring or anything but it still smacks of the kind of hoop-jumping that turned me off so much from the process last time I was interviewing. This included on-the-spot coding exercises, massive take-home projects that required many hours of undifferentiated grunt work, totally useless whiteboard sketching and pseudo-code sessions, obscure Google-like quiz questions.

The interview process for the job I have now was a massive breath of fresh air.

The application asked for code samples and a cv. It was a small company and the CEO, CTO and direct co-workers all drove the interview process. The process was entirely conversational. First an intro phone call with the CTO and then a questionnaire via email in which I answered about 30 questions on various topics that were all very practical daily software development type stuff. It was painless to respond to each with about a paragraph in detail. Then a call with a direct co-worker about the questionnaire and this was my opportunity to ask questions of him about the company. Before getting the interview they actually read my code samples and reviewed my Github account. In the interview there was a ton of discussion about the company, its culture and all the of the above discussions. Following this was compensation negotiation with the CEO.

Everything about the hiring process said to me yes this is the place, they get it!

Last two paragraphs capture a very interesting dynamic.

"Big data analytics could be said to constitute an authenticity jargon in this sense: although they treat the data set under analysis as having something like an unconscious, they eliminate the temporal gaps and spaces of ambiguity that drive psychoanalytic interpretation. In place of interpretation, data analytics substitutes correlations that it treats simply as given. To a machine learning algorithm that has been trained on data sets that include zip codes and rates of defaulting on mortgage payments, for instance, it does not matter why mortgagees in a given zip code may have been more likely to default in the past. Nor will the algorithm that recommends rejecting a loan application necessarily explain that the zip code was the deciding factor. Like the existentialist’s illusion of immediate experience these procedures generate an aura of incontestable self-evidence.

As in Adorno, here, the loss of particular contexts can serve to conceal, and thus perpetuate, domination. Algorithms take the histories of oppression embedded in training data and project them into the future, via predictions that powerful institutions then act on. If the identities constituted in this way are false, the reifications they generate do real work, and can cause real harm. And yet, to read these figures historically is to recognize that they need not come true. This is not an interpretive path that Karp pursues. But for those of us concerned about the relationship between digital technologies and justice, this repressed insight of his dissertation is the most critical to follow."

The official answer to this problem of ML bias is "fairness" research. But really this is yet another cover for the unquestionable authority of the algorithm and the data, just this time with the added benefit of an overlay of the institutions intent. What is the alternative once we stop trusting Google and Facebook to fairly manipulate the outcome? What when we reject the authority of the data and the algorithms altogether?

As much as it has been tortured and mutated there are still market forces driving things. Supply of housing stock, supply of renters, their ability to pay at all levels of the economy from jumbo mortgages down to section 8 housing are all factors driving the marketplace.

It isn't worth that much. It is however successful at making its stock price go up. These are not the same thing. If one share trades hands at $0.01 above the market then the market cap is outstanding shares * new price. Tesla has something like 185 million outstanding shares. That means a 1 cent change in price nets the market cap of the company 1.85 million. $0.01 = $1.8 million. Does that seem like a reality based means of setting the value of anything? It's about human psychology in the setting of a game at that moment. I would not take a linear extrapolation of that as a meaningful metric of the value of a company.

You can go down rabbit holes of apparent market manipulation, seeming fraudulent financial statements, an unquestioning media, toothless and out to lunch regulators, bubble inducing liquidity pushed by central banks but that stuff doesn't matter until it does. See Wirecard, Enron, Et al.

One trick with regular vehicles to better handle sand is to lower the tire pressure. I'm curious how well you could do on sand with bike tires using lower pressure?

Just going to share a YouTube channel (Skyentific) that I have learned a ton from when it comes to the considerations of sizing and power consumption when selecting motors for robotics. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcgqJ1blFKqbC2bWGY4Opmg

This is a very subjective thought experiment and I'm sure you could make all kinds of arguments against it but here goes...

Imagine person A lives in an area with a high cost of living and gets full salary. Person A is able to purchase a house at a high valuation relative to the national average. Person B in a rural area is able to buy perhaps as nice a house on a smaller salary in a below average market.

Now look at the options available to these two people when they want to move. Person A sells at market rate or perhaps a little below and can move to a lower cost of living with a relatively large pile of cash. Person B has no such option. The real estate market arbitrage is available to person A and not to person B.

The salary of person A looks like it produces options and upward mobility. The salary for person B seems to have more limitations.

great Monty Python bit! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo

"That’s what I’m trying to introduce – that domains can be viewed as a trustworthy asset."

Totally agree with this, back in print days great typography featuring ample white-space was a signal to the consumer of a high end / luxury brand. Perhaps the unstated logic is we make so much money that we can spend much of it on empty space ina fancy magazine. That is a kind of gravitas in design which implies success which implies authority / social confirmation. A more desirable domain name can be seen in the same light, "ohh they must have spent a lot for that name well can't be some fly-by night operation." Cost limits creating exclusions serve as signals of authority / reliability / success etc. all over the place, think of the country club, it's got a very high membership fee, if you're there you must be wealthy and important, and imagine the networking. That is the logic anyway.

My opinions are not mine and they are holding me back.

Give multiple and opposing views equal respect and disdain at the same time. Treating a thought as your own, as an opinion "you hold" greatly holds you back from a great deal of valuable perspective. Of course you surely hold some world-view and gauge things from that position but try to cultivate more of these positions as if you were someone else.

Don't get your sense of self so wrapped up in all the thoughts and ideas that flit about in your brain. You will surely be a different person in 1, 5, 10, 20 years and may well have a completely different perspective then.

There is very little original thought, mostly there is just repetition and re-contextualization of the same old stuff. That is not a bad thing but you should really divest yourself from being emotionally wrapped up in opinions (yours or others) and treat them as the conclusions of research papers with small sample sizes.

Now when you converse with someone, stop thinking about "your" response, and just listen, really listen to what they are saying and try to really understand where they are coming from so you can integrate that into your thinking.

What I keep thinking about all of this is that an open, functioning, well regulated, free market economy (not defending crony-capitalism like we have had) with targeted generous welfare programs is a far better solution than UBI and other massive fiscal interventions/bailouts/helicopter money. Here is my concern and would love to hear any reasoned arguments as to why it is not a problem.

It is a lot of money, and eventually the money comes out of something, be it the increased prices from increased buying power in the market or the loss of buying power due to slippage against inflation driven by government spending debasing the currency. (they are two sids of the same coin i guess)

It wont happen immediately, this is a massive deflationary shock right now, but surely helicopter money will do what is intended and drive inflation eventually undermining the intended effect of UBI in the first place. The economy is dynamic and reflexive, if everyone knows that everyone is getting x amount of money increased demand and information in the market will drive prices quickly higher.

Government planners will eventually seek ways to mitigate this outcome, perhaps by pegging UBI payments to inflation or enacting price controls on say rents or taxes to take money out of circulation perhaps through a VAT. Either way this is the long-run nightmare of more directly managing an economy from the top down. And I fear that it is a road that leads to a far less dynamic, creative and self sustaining economy.

The intended economic foundation for everyone that UBI seeks to provide may prove to be a short term benefit and eventually become a complex game of trying to control a very complex system.

Any experience clustering or classifying documents based on these high dimensional vectors? Also what have you found of dimension reduction techniques such as UMAP or good old PCA?

My massive level of cynicism on this subject makes things like this seem completely unsurprising. I generally feel that the Binney and Snowden revelations served to normalize knowledge of being systematically monitored by big brother. This common knowledge of being watched is absolutely necessary for a surveillance state to function as intended. The gold mine of private data made available to them via National Security Letters and other such mandates to provide access. Surveillance capitalism is not really about capitalism at all but thats just my cynical side again.

Best discussions on the economy I have found are on Macrovoices[0] podcast and Realvison[1] TV Both are macro focused and take as a given the audience is trying to make money or at least preserve assets. It's been an amazing few years listening to all the interviews and working over the ideas in my own head then seeing things play out in the markets and economy.

[0] https://www.macrovoices.com/ [1] https://www.realvision.com/

This reminded me of my childhood. I grew up spending every afternoon in my grandpa’s workshop where the sign read “Bud’s saw sharpening” he also did tv and radio repair. It was a fascinating magical place where I could tinker and look through his old Popular Mechanics while he meticulously sharpened chains and various blades on specialized equipment. He had one small room that was packed with vacuum tubes. I would open each box up and marvel at the technology. I can’t imagine how valuable all that stuff would be now.

After reading the article there is an important insight I did not know of and clearly neither did Tech Ingredients as they demonstrate use of alcohol.

from the article

"the FE (filtration efficiency) of these masks is influenced by the electrostatic charges embedded within the fibers of the filtration layer(s) in the interior part of the masks."

"... using alcohol will erase the charges. However, exposing the masks to air at elevated temperatures such as 70℃ for 30 minutes allows the charges to be retained."

Tech Ingredients did a fantastic video on the subject recently, I love everything from this guy and the recent series in response to COVID-19 is great stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UdtKssU7po

I believe you are speaking of a fragment. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/DocumentFra...

This is one of the best put-together economic development campaigns I have seen. Kudos to people behind this, it's a compelling case!