mitko

How do you reconcile the two seemingly contradictory statements “it would be equivalent of getting hit by three lightnings at the same time” and “it would destroy the planet”

Lightning happens all the time without affecting the planet, I doubt a triple lightning would do more than 10x the damage of a single lightning.

To me this kind of contradiction is a sign that the initial assumption is impossible as lmilcin suggests here, and as the original author concludes at the end of the article.

EDIT: 3 million, not 3. My mistake. Thanks for pointing that out.

You could try projecting rays from start through the obstacles to see where they intersect after a limited number of reflections. This should narrow it to a few candidate spots

Four years ago my sensei invited another sensei for a seminar and the other sensei said nearly exactly the same thing, but I never heard my sensei say it. Is your sensei Fujishima?[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/themitak/status/838896881866588161?s=20

The author might enjoy `git rebase -i main`, which allows reordering, renaming, combining or pretty much everything in your own branch before you rebase and merge it to the main branch.

That way even if a commit message is not clear or you added an improvement to an earlier commit, you can reduce the clutter a lot before sending out for code review, while still having individual commits for different parts of the code change

Seems about right ballpark, if not undercounting it.

My team doesn't releases a mobile client but we release desktop client / chrome extensions every week. It takes about a day of work for an engineer to go through the builds, QA, prepare notes, check the status of things in flight that are trying to land in there, fix some related bugs and so on. And that is with a lot of automation we have. It is also a big distraction from other work, so the opportunity cost is quite high too.

I don't think this was his brother - I think it was a joke (imo bad taste at the time). I did some research around it and it seemed that his brother does look alike but that other person had a different legal name.

I wouldn't underestimate the potential of that project.

I know of other cases where well funded CEOs have tried bullying away someone who recently worked for them from starting a company in a related space. Glad that they weren't able to shut it down, and the new founder has raised a nice round. I'd love to see Radon succeed with his project.

IANAL but I don't think you can patent "path depencence". It is sunk cost

Any idea how to go around the paywall?

“Half the time, though, I couldn’t get a word in. It turned out what most people want is the chance to unload for an hour.” - astrologers are charlatans but I am perfectly happy with people using them as a lightweight cheaper therapy

Is there a minimal guaranteed optimal play for the game of tetris (not just hatetris as linked here). Or phrased another way, if you play against the smartest, most devious AI, what's a score that you cannot get past.

The high score of hatetris seems to be 31 lines, but it seems that it may be taking advantage of the algorithm being myopically giving you the worst piece 1 step ahead, and being deterministic. I wonder if the algorithm has some randomness (among multiple horrible pieces) and multi-step look ahead, how would that affect the high score.

Has anyone done research on tetris's worst case bounds?

Thanks, that was a very helpful comment. I had to reason backwards from "in what situation I'm guaranteed a line", and then, how do I get there. I was able to get 4 lines with a few tries. Here's my base2048 encoded game

ஜɧࢩݥҬuళࡑ௨ټถݹƓقฐࡑ௧ʝÐݶԨքଈݪݫට༨ஈடΟໃʮzටఴঅ୦Ѯໃa௨৫ІܝԥചWђߝsลஈமϺບઞzජТஈߝકІݜҫඨƖݷಏقКחಎؾɑݛkЂϼ०తನլݢသ૫ØঐಳUಮщ౻ऊԀঙങఢVםષථϭŋɼԻహҵ

Exactly - there is no such thing as "no negotiation"

Regarding the example of people mindlessly scrolling. This is also in part a result of the measured objectives/metrics by the company. When a company like Facebook over optimizes for likes and shares, as opposed to say depth of interpersonal connections or something else, then the product evolves to treat users as if they’ve no personality beyond engagement on the feed. That happens even if there is no explicit judgement passed on the users. Source: I used to work on the algorithmic newsfeed of a social media, not Fb.

If you optimize for sheep, you get sheep

I wonder if Arrows Impossibility Theorem has something to do with the puzzle.

My money on that it is possible to solve it without knowing AIT and most likely there is a way to construct a counter example using a script.

Few months ago I head how vitamin D is associated with COVID-19 outcomes and went into a rabbit hole to find more information about wtf is Vitamin D, and how our bodies use it/need it.

There are two videos I found particularly informative.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91eDzM0qiJM

Cost/Benefit of Optimal Health with Sunshine Vitamin D

William B. Grant, PhD

2015

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3pK0dccQ38

D is for Debacle - The Crucial Story of Vitamin D and Human Health

Ivor Cummins BE(Chem), CEng MIEI

2014

For what it's worth, EFF has privacy stickers which are easy to re-apply multiple times and should be thin enough to close the laptop fine. I've been using them for a while.

That’s kind of similar to the format I usually use for writing for my blog. I’d use the blog itself as the permanent folder, and the act of publishing it the ritual which makes it permanent. As I am writing new essays they live in emacs or notes or notion or whatever note taking app I enjoy using currently. Such notes are almost never long lived for me.

If I were to write something large like a book, I would probably maintain distinctions between early drafts vs later drafts of chapters. I am imagining that most writers do have some system which captures the notion of the stage the work is in.

Publishing externally is the ultimate way to make it permanent though- otherwise nothing stops the author from amending.

Re: easy search. Slapdash can handle search in all your work wikis/docs at once and is very fast. It can search github/gitlab too. I am part of the team there.

Or does it...? Case in point, the fifth axiom of geometry, attributed to Euclid, that through a point there is exactly one line parallel to a given line has been shown to be unprovable, and Lobachevski and Rieman have built alternative geometric theories assuming that axiom wrong.

I find it hard to believe that Math is that different from physics or other sciences in its robustness.

Some advantages that math has had over other sciences is low resource consumption (pen and paper), easier reproducibility(thinking), and it has gotten a long head start of 2-3 thousand years.

Yes, I’d recommend Headspace, to start. It makes it EASY, and really breaks down the technique in simple parts! I was arrogant before that and thought I don’t need a “guided” meditation, but I was wrong. I’ve also been using Waking up recently, though that definitely has a steper learning curve. Headspace is like a “elementary school” while waking up is “middle school” in terms of difficulty. I don’t think I would have been able to form a lasting habit had I started with Waking up. Headspace is so well curated. Today I use both- one session per day each.

I haven’t tried Calm and have no opinion it.

I feel so surprised, didn't realize this song had such lyrics. Makes me really want to come up with a modern set of lyrics and go to a karaoke. Something like this:

~~~

Mitch McConnel, AOC, trade war, Cardi B,

fake news, ICO, arnold schwarzenegger,

wiki leaks, bitcoin, hacker news, facebook,

North Korea, South Sudan, annexing Crimea,

Game of Thrones, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Key and Peel,

Buttigieg, Snoop Dog, can you "feel the Bern"?

We didn't start the fire, sha-lalA-la-lAla

(and so on... please someone finish the rest)

Thank you! I feel closer to you for mentioning this. Dealing with rejections is still hard, and it compounded my sales anxiety. Bringing the rejection rate down over time (through improving the product as well as the messaging) helped me a lot with the anxiety

I'm grateful you mentioned the "sales is part of the value I'm providing" aspect - totally agree.

To add to it, we now know that "build it and they'll come" is a fallacy and we have to "make people something want". Yet, "make something people want" is not enough. We have to first make it, ensure it's something they want, and find a way to _bring_ it to people.

And that bringing to people is part of the package. Can be done through sales, or digital marketing, or outsourced through affiliates, or it can rely on advertising. Or a combo.

I feel that the proof is in the pudding, and without people actually "buying" our products, we haven't proved that they want it, not at the price we're selling it at.

OC author here - seconding the recommendation! That book actually stresses on becoming a better listener, not a better talker!

The benefit of talking to the customers and bypassing the sales anxiety was learning about what they thought about the product. Not the sales!

The article talks about “user onboarding” as if it is different from the first run experience. Perhaps it is a SaaSy jargon to separate them. But for us at Sleek, we obsess over the first run as it is how we onboard users - until the user has gone through their use case, we assume they’re new to it.

Learn by doing, not by learning.

I wrote something on a related topic recently: https://dimitarsimeonov.com/2019/02/13/how-people-turn-their...

"""

We like to refer to that effort as willpower. But, from the point of view of looking at emotions fighting for dominance inside our brains, willpower is simply the strength and effort of the constructive emotions. The emotions which lead to long term happiness and comfort, even at the expense of short term pleasure. Logical, sober thought is one such constructive emotion, and we call it willpower whenever we are able to make our actions agree with the constructive emotions.

Yet… there is such a thing as “destructive” willpower. You might have seen it under the name of “rationalization”. It is what destructive emotions use to take over our action. If people say and think “I’m gonna be OK to drive with one drink,” that’s their drink addiction emotion convincing them to drink. That’s destructive willpower. It’s not the absence of willpower, but the redirection of willpower towards a destructive emotion.

"""

I had the same gripe about working at Twitter- the two main metrics were daily active users and user active minutes. User research was way understaffed so a lot of the side effects of optimizing metrics remained unchecked

Edit: I wrote “The vanity metric paradox” a while ago to express it more clearly http://dimitarsimeonov.com/2018/03/23/the-vanity-metric-para...

Thanks!

According to https://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work/General-Informat... they do not fund “Political campaigns and legislative lobbying efforts”

As to reasons, why, I am not sure but I imagine there is a pragmatic angle to it in addition to reputation and other considerations. Investing in politics increases the risk that the funds get wasted if the political climate changes.

Can confirm... I am a 31 year old _data scientist_ who worked on these kind of algorithms, saw the metrics, and tweaked the algorithms to increase these metrics. I got addicted and it is harder to develop a healthy relationship with my phone/social media/youtube than it is with caffeine (I quit it!) or alcohol (I take a 1-2 month long break every year and rarely have more than 1 drink).