mo_42

> The picture, however, looks a lot less clear when you talk with an actual young person.

I guess most of these young persons are in Robert Kegan's socializing stage [1]. Parents and teachers etc. are mostly in one of the next stages. I think they need to go back mentally to imagine how it's like to be between 10 and 15. Obviously your kid cannot go simply forward.

[1] https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-th...

My approach is a flat date-based file structure with a markdown-based Zettelkasten on top:

File are mostly in a flat structure. In ~/, I have directories like documents, photos, videos that directly contain all the files. For certain topic, I create separate directories (e.g., PhD, major projects). The filenames always start with an ISO date (yyyy-mm-dd). For documents, it could be like 2024-03-24_inv_google.pdf. Here, inv means it's an invoice and Google is the organization where the invoice comes from. After the date, there's always a three letter code that tells me the type of document. All physical documents are scanned and OCRed and put in the same structure.

On top of that I curate a Zettelkasten. It's just a directory with a set of markdown files (also a flat hierarchy). This Zettelkasten is layer of information on top of the remaining filesystem. The markdown files link to external resources (e.g., on the web) and also to internal files (e.g., (something)[../docuemnts/something.pdf]). This way I can browse my personal information like it's the web.

This file structure is my single source of truth. I try to export all other information as text files there (e.g., emails, contacts). I'm using restic to backup my entire home folder. I don't use any sophisticated tools, just a basic PDF reader, vim, Gimp, and other standard tools of the Linux ecosystem. I used to sync my home directory using unison but currently, I'm just using a single one.

> IMO it'd be sensible to let the markets set the interest rate.

Actually, markets do set most of the interest rates. The central bank only sets one (to be technically correct several) specific interest rate. Usually, this rate sets the price for short-term refinancing operations of private banks with the central banks. Obviously, other interest rates are influenced by this rate indirectly.

I guess the reason for this approach is that banks can react flexibly to high demand for central bank money (aka cash). For example, if people want to hold more cash suddenly, the central bank will swap cash with good assets from commercial banks (aka printing money) so that they can hand it out to them. With a fixed money supply, interest rates would skyrocket in this case. Just because I want to have more cash rather than see that number on my checking account doesn't make a difference economically and so it should also not influence the interest rate.

Einstein and Higgs predicted phenomena that were tested years resp. decades after their publication.

A theory is also a contribution to a field as long as it tested (not necessarily in the same publication).

Even an observation to a field can be a contribution if it helps people generate new theories and then test them.

Boeing is like most big companies part of the capitalist system where shareholders expect an annual rate of return of 5 to 8%. Every company that does not deliver this rate will fall out of the game.

Some of the shareholders are completely innocent people like some family who's saving for retirement via an ETF. It means that if Boeing is not growing at the rate of other companies, it will fall out of some stock market index and hence the ETF. Before that, it will probably be removed from many other portfolios that are managed by people directly.

Both sides of the game are people trying to do the best. If the managers decided to invest heavily in the next years and make losses, they'd be kicked out of that position and replaced by some who continue running this game.

I think politics is the only way out of this. It won't change until people can convince politics to regulate some areas more strictly or putting higher penalties on some mistakes.

Thanks, I guess it would be the following extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/adsum-notabs/

For the custom chrome, I'm using in userChrome.css:

  #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; }

> However, I hate using tabs in the browser, so thanks to a hacky extension, firefox opens a new window per tab, which means that i3 manages firefox' tabs as regular windows.

Can you provide a bit more information about your setup?

I'm using sway and I removed the tabs from Firefox to handle them as individual windows.

Only if those two words appear in the same contexts with the same frequency. In natural language this is probably not the case. There are things typically considered beautiful and others as ugly.

I quickly read through the paper. One thing to note is that they use the Frobenius norm (at least I suppose this from the index F) for the matrix factorization. That is for their learning algorithm. Then, they use the cosine-similarity to evaluate. A metric that wasn't used in the algorithm.

This is a long-standing question for me. Theoretically, I should use the CS in my optimization and then also in the evaluation. But I haven't tested this empirically.

For example, there is sperical K-meams that clusters the data on the unit sphere.

I think the numbers we need here are GDPs adjusted for PPP per capita and per hour worked. Unfortunately, I didn't find any statistic quickly. Some years ago, I looked at such numbers and some of the Scandinavian countries were doing very good. The Netherlands, France, and Germany were also pretty good.

> Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why. And that's a problem.

LLMs at least the most common ones can talk but they don't do things.

But even if they could. Humans can do it too, even your pet does jaw-dropping things. So far we never said that it's a problem in these cases.

So for me, such statements mostly communicate some sort of fear or skepticism. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't investigate why LLMs can do it. We should rather call it a research problem.

I think the main difference is that digging out gold nuggets doesn't make society more wealthy just the lucky individual. Sure there are positive side effects from which we still benefit.

However, I use LLMs every day to be more productive. They provide me with ideas for programming, cooking, and even planning a vacation. They're not perfect but interns at work aren't either. Besides that ChatGPT seems more like the combined knowledge of hundreds of interns (but not seniors).

So I wouldn't call it a gold rush because LLMs benefit society already plus the future positive side effects of investments in computer chips.

I've been part of universities for 9 years from undergrad to PhD. I was only able to reflect on this system after I left.

Universities always have been a system for selecting people who can keep it running in the future. So the first day as a freshman kicks off a test of serveral years if you're a fit. That's why we have different levels of degrees. People can drop out without much sunk costs. Otherwise only very few would try this journey and then the base for selecting good people would be low.

What I mean with good people who keep it running has changed a lot. Historically, universities didn't have to justify themselves much. For governments, it was obvious because they provided knowledge gain, and, primarily, they provided well-educated people to work for the government. So universities selected the best people because they would become the next generation of teachers or drop out as educated governmental workers.

Nowadays, the government and the public want to see research results (for funding) because this is supposed to be the purpose of universities. I think this is a misunderstanding and universities took part in creating it. So the people universities select for now are still good students but also ones that play by the new rules and crank out as many papers as possible.

My main obstacle during the PhD was to adapt to a research style of looking up fashionable topics in the research community, writing an incremental paper und publishing it. My advisor even objected against some ideas because they're too risky.

> Remember this anytime you watch CNBC & the like.. they can describe in hindsight the WHAT, but the WHY is generally made up on the fly. A classic smart sounding but meaningless joke answer to the above question is "More sellers than buyers". A lot of financial media is basically this.

There's a much broader topic behind this called Rationalization [1]. I won't forget the sentence by a professor of psychology that said: People are not rational. They are rationalizing.

For me, it took a while to sink in but now I do not focus too much on explanations anymore as these are anyways afterthoughts of intransparent internal processes. However, I pay more attention to how people act.

Interestingly, all this is also some kind of rationalization that my mind made up. But how can I be in control of the inner workings of my brain anyways...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(psychology)

First tactic of lawyers is to scare off people. Only resourceful and knowledgeable entities can challenge such claims.

I also use Firefox because it allows more customization.

For example, every major browser nowadays not only supports tabbed browsing but enforces it.

I think tabbed browsing is misdevelopment of UX because I need to handle window management on the OS and browser level. I'm using the tabbing feature in sway/i3 so every application has tabs not only browsers and they all act in the same way.

I know that not many people think this way. But that's the whole point. We should be able to tailor software to our needs.

I tend to think differently. Coding is also a source of value. Why? Because people do what they enjoy. People do what makes them feel important. And people have an identity of being, for example, an assembler programmer. This will go on as long as they can afford it. That is as long as there's a market for some arcane language or skill. If there's no market, maybe they'll pursue it as a hobby. I think HN is full of this. Just two posts from today: compiling the vanilla source code of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom rendered via console.log(). (Interestingly both related to John Carmack.)

I guess the world could be a better place if we'd squeeze out value of every minute. But I don't see that fully also in business. Even Carmack says himself that he's not going to the final abstraction. So I tend to see this as a guideline one can strive for.

I guess every adjective we put in front of code will create an endless stream of opinions.

I had comments in PRs where I should replace `str1 + str1` with `''.join([str1, str2])` (Python) because it's more "clean".

So I judge my code and others code whether it works or not. Works in the sense that it's correct but also in the sense that I can maintain it in the long run. That's it. It's kind of hard to get used to this and keep opinions to yourself though.

> It is interesting to note that all higher lifeforms have evolved to die (presumably to avoid out-competing their descendants).

I think we need to substantiate this more. Where does "higher" lifeform begin? And is this statement really true?

There are trees older than 4k years and some whales become 200 years old.

I think this is a good example of how we mix up concepts: ADHD is just a phenotype. Then, our society classifies it as a condition because it does not go well with current circumstances. Although, both are separate things.

> The main point of that previous post is that although economists tend to dislike monopoly and extol the virtues of competition, there is surprisingly little criticism of central banks among these same economists.

I think professional economist don't have "likes" or "dislikes". Also this statement doesn't seem correct in another way. I think economists try to understand what setting yields the most wealth. If a monopoly yields more wealth than competition, then, economists will recommend a monopoly.

For example, the metric system is similar to a monopoly. It doesn't make sense to have multiple competing systems here.

Same with a currency as it's a unit of accounting. Having multiple currencies would have higher transaction costs because people would have to convert back and forth daily for comparison and making purchases.

There's also the perspective from MMT, where money is a license to pay your taxes. So having multiple ways of paying your taxes doesn't make sense in this view either.

> I want to understand how things work. AI feels like a black box to me. The amount of papers I’d have to read and mathematics that I’d have to ingest to really understand why a certain prompt X results in a certain output Y feels overwhelming.

First, no paper will make you understand why prompt X made result Y. But you can understand the architecture of these systems and try to understand the prompt answer relations somewhat intuitively (e.g., by learning your own models with various text collections).

I think we need to accept these AIs as creatures of their own kind. As complex actors that we don't fully understand.

Humans have been breeding dogs since tens of thousands of years and we don't understand them fully. But we understand enough to employ them in useful ways and mitigate the risks.

I think the DMA is not the best legislation. Some parts don't require regulation whereas missing parts definitively require regulation. For example, I cannot publish my app in the app store. I don't need an alternative market. I'd like to have an anti-discrimination law for app publishers (side note, I'm not trying to publish a porn app, just a small productivity app for a limited audience).

In a previous comment [1], I considered abandoning Apple. With this official statement, I'll actually switch to Android. I'll welcome the F-Droid store very much.

Apple, I've been your customer since 2006. I started with the iPod. During this time I had a significant fraction of your lineup. I'm not affected by your changes but I'm using some PWAs. With this erratic behavior, I'm afraid you kill features that I'm using.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39299007#39299469

Feels like it's constantly improving. I'm running it since 1.5 years. Battery life is much better now. It even supports TLP (with the AUR version).

Hard to tell what I'm missing currently. But I'm using rather basic tools in the command line and all these work fine. Of course Firefox works. Inkscape, Darktable, TexLive, too.

I'm a long-term Linux user and started buying Apple products long ago. I still keep my iPhone 4S around because I think it's a piece of art. I think the hardware and physical design of Apple products is really great.

When I heard about this new EU regulation, I started to consider retiring my iPhone. I developed my own iOS app, but I'm unable to run it permanently because I need to get it approved by Apple to install it on my own device. PWAs are an alternative I was considering, and I'm also using some from others.

If this is true. I'll switch to Android. The only device I'd keep using actively is the M1 MacBook because it's running Asahi Linux and I haven't booted into MacOS for months now.

New social networks are exciting until the business needs to make money. The first phase of a social network is funded by investors. So the developers make it super-interesting and easy to join. Then, it reaches a stage where the investors want to see a profit. So developers need to convert an interesting and exciting social network into a money-making machine. Feeds won't be ordered by time anymore, ads lurk around in every corner, and algorithms will be tuned to push profitable content over interesting content. Before that, social media was a bargain for the user. Now, it's a bargain for the investor.

When I was studying, I sometimes saw classmates typing the lecture directly in LaTeX. To me, they always seemed very busy and a little stressed. Also, it seemed that learning and understanding wasn't their primary goal rather than having beautiful lecture notes.

I would have liked to have a tabled with a nicely working pen. But good old paper and pencil also did the job. Some professors even recommend not taking notes at all but rather preparing the lecture. Then, attending it by primarily listening and trying to understand and then working on the homework.

This sounds a bit over-engineered. Wifi passwords change rarely so I think it’s totally acceptable to print a page every now and then.

Interesting, whenever the discussion comes up to rename things, I propose that we should do the reverse: name things after animals. Instead of "George H.W. Bush Library Center" we could call it "Albatross Library Center". Obviously, naming things after animals leads to much less discussion. We can even choose fitting names (e.g., Gentoo Linux).

I also have difficulties with Gnuplot and Matplotlib. I like Vega [1] that allows me to create visualisations in a declarative way. If I really need something special I go with d3.js, which had a really steep learning curve but with ChatGPT it should have become easier for beginners.

[1] https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/