mo_42

I have a different opinion about favourite Git commit messages.

I think commits should be small steps that display the thought process of the author. Every individual commit should be self-explanatory. So the commit message should not describe (again) what the changes are but why it’s necessary. Sometimes the change is not self-explanatory and then I'd put a longer description below.

Somehow I came up with this on my own, so I'd be interested if it really makes sense or if others have a similar style.

Some part of governmental debt is held by the central bank. So the interest that the government pays on this debt goes back to the government because the central bank somewhat belongs to the government too.

I'm in a jurisdiction where lying in many cases is legal. I think the principle in general is that lying without bad intent is legal.

> [...] Do not lie about your birthday to your doctor. Or your bank. Or when you’re trying to get your driver’s license. You get my point.

I don't give my real birthday to my doctor. Because why should I? An approximate birthday is totally fine for medical purposes.

Of course I don't lie to banks or the government. I think legislation against money laundering etc. is a good thing and so I accept these requirements.

When I was studying CS, I had to take some courses outside of CS and I took law. It was pretty fascinating and I even thought once or twice of switching.

I now have the very nerdy perspective that law is the operating system our socially run on. Laws are small snippets of code similar to a predicate in Prolog. We apply them once the conditions are fulfilled.

Only simple in what I call the first level of RSA. But all levels could be fun in an effortful sense.

1. Level: encrypting and decrypting a single number or a couple of characters using public and private keys in a couple of lines of code

2. Level: Follow mathematical proofs and understand why it's theoretically secure

3. Level: come up with an implementation that can be used in production

I guess 1 takes minutes to implement, 2 takes days to understand, 3 weeks to implement assuming a standard programmer who hasn't done security.

I think you’re looking for an open source game that is small, can be built and run, and your son likes already.

From there he can start tinkering with code and assets.

That way your son directly sees the results of his work. Creating an entire game from scratch even with the best tools might be too much in the beginning and he will lose interest.

There's no periodicity in visualization. The design space of visualization is much more complex the atomic number.

Also, this "periodic table" does not show the three main branches of visualization: Information Visualization, Scientific Visualization, and Geographic Visualization.

For example, this page gives an overview of time-oriented visualization with meta information like the original paper: https://browser.timeviz.net/

It also seems to be maintained by people working in that area.

I like that idea. I guess such an amplification effect can lead entire civilizations astray. But still in the long run BS will be ruled out. Here, I disagree with you in that "truth" is also a matter what works and what not. Simply, BS doesn't work. It makes worse models in the heads of people (and possible artificial agents). Worse models will lead to less effective decisions.

Generally, I'm an optimistic about current approaches towards AI. I'm using ChatGPT daily for my work. I'm seeing the BS generated from it all the time but it provides many great ideas from which I create something useful (both writing and programming).

The sinus example scares me. It's obviously wrong. But what about all the subtle errors that will be generated?

Humanity's knowledge is bootstrapped from BS. But most of it is long forgotten. On the internet, the BS ends up in the training data of the next iteration. I guess curation of quality text corpora will be an important thing in the next years.

We just have too many assumptions about names.

There should only be one input field that asks for a name. Even systems that require a legal name should be like that as there are people whose legal name cannot be written in two forms.

In finance and investing, the value of something is computed using the net present value [1]. It's a, theoretically infinite, geometric series. Basically, all the future cash flows are accumulated today.

If the interest rate is high, cash flows in the future have almost zero value today. So future is not really important. If the interest rate gets close to zero, future cash flows become relevant.

As an investor, I'll focus more on currently profitable investments in a high-interest-rate scenario and more on possible future profits (a.k.a. growth) in a low interest environment. To me, this is what it means for tech startups and the industry.

The rest of the article sounds very much like conventional wisdom about interest rate from any econ 101 class.

What I miss a little bit in such economic discussions is that people don't base their explanations in terms of consumption of real goods. All the economic activity, after all, has the goal to provide some consumable value to people (in that sense listening to music is also consumption of a real good).

I think inflation has gone up because we had suddenly higher demand and it took some time to expand supply (e.g., production of computer chips). As the current supply is not enough for all demand, some individuals need to wait. Interest is their compensation for waiting.

That's why I think low, zero, or even negative interest rates will be the future as production of goods is surpassing meaningful consumption. In that sense, the current interest rates are an anomaly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_present_value

I'm coming out as a Bayesian here. To me, "No Evidence" simply doesn't exist:

> If Crazy Carl says that aliens abducted his prize turnip, ...

Then, this is a piece of information like many other pieces. The question is only how I should process this. Maybe it will only strengthen my belief that Carl is, in fact, crazy. But who knows maybe I should factor in some more information. Is Carly really that crazy as commonly believed or was Carl taking some strange pills yesterday?

Or in a COVID context: So if a scientist says "no evidence that asymptomatic people transmit the disease", it might change your beliefs about the disease or on the person talking about related topics in the future as you lost trust in that person.

I had the same question when reading this. They use the light only at places where cancerous cells were found plus some safety margin I guess.

In that sense it's an alternative to surgery.

> Another Meta employee, also on TikTok, posted that “Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us, and then they were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.”

This might be true. An alternative explanation might be that such an employee changing the color of a button has probably millions of times more impact than an engineer working at a B2B start-up with three clients.

If I would be executive at such companies and I would have the evil intent of hoarding talented people, I'd, at least, give them a playground for experimentation. Maybe a new innovative product comes out of this. This hoarding has become a popular belief in the tech industry but I don't quite buy it.

> Are you honestly trying to say humans living in a primitive society would be comparable to most other animals (not even "intelligent" ones such as chimps)?

No, I'm not trying to say that. I'm trying to express my belief that the gap between the intelligence of humans and other animals is much smaller. Looking closely at chimp communities or dolphins shows that they also have complex communication patterns. Even trees in a forest communicate. So this is also an expression modesty because humans don't understand yet too much about communication of other creatures.

Your second description involves many aspects of human culture. No matter how smart cows are, they'll never think this way.

Then, a big difference of humans compared to other animals is accumulation. We create stuff (buildings, language, knowledge, ...) that further generations will use. To really compare, I'd say, we have to take that away.

Let's assume some people decide to go back into the forest. They go there with nothing and teach their children only the necessary skills to live in the forest. After some generations, a scientist discovers them.

How would we compare them to humans and other animals like the great apes? How would they score on common IQ tests?

I think it helps to think how the balance sheet changes. If you deposit money, the bank has higher liabilities, they owe you that money, and higher assets as they actually have the money. So they might buy all sorts of assets with that money. However, it's not that they need that money to make a loan. That was my main point.

> The sum of deposits the bank holds are not available for withdrawl all at once. So where is it?

This only depends on the central bank being able to produce enough cash for all the people. Technically, the commercial bank will ask the central bank to swap their assets for some cash to hand it to the customers. So practically, they might not be able to give cash to everyone, just because the central banks cannot product it that quickly. But other than that there's no problem that many people can withdraw money. If customers come bank with the cash, the commercial bank will take it, give it back to the central bank, and receive their previous assets back.

This is not correct. Banks don't use your deposits and loan money to someone else. However, I still think you should not support evil banks for many other reasons.

When banks create a loan, they create new money. They put the loan on the asset side of their balance sheet and create the same amount of liabilities due to the receive of that loan.

> I always see references to free will when certain people start talking about > quantum mechanics. Why do people care if free will exists or not?

> It doesn't seem to affect anything I can think of.

Most of the time, we don't care actually. Only in philosophical discussions similar to this one, we talk about free will.

To me, it seems that it's really an unnecessary assumption. In my everyday life I just don't care whether someone has free will or not. It's more about a meaningful interaction or to get something accomplished together.

I guess we need to separate simulations about the real world happening in our brains from the actual reality. Actual reality is based on quantum mechanics. Of course our brains developed as an organ that supports survival of the organism. So there's not really a reason to reflect an accurate picture of physical reality.

I tend to disagree with this writing. I think it's overly broad and imprecise. It doesn't consider that the current advances are rather specific to what we call knowledge work.

I don't see hairdressers, carpenters or people working on construction sites etc. being directly affected by this. Everyone will still need a new haircut, some furniture and a house. Sure, there might be machines to do that at some point but these machines need to be built and maintained by someone. At least in the first round until we have other machines to build and maintain those machines...

As stated by the law. 90% of everything, including such laws, is crap.

The article could be more precise. It says France's stock market reaches new records. So I'm pretty sure they mean the CAC40, which is only part of France's entire stock market.

Might be that France has quite some long tail of smaller companies that also create value. There might be even more companies that aren't listed on any stock market.

Still for France and Europe, this is a very worrying sign. Market capitalization is an indicator of economic power. Basically, large swaths of the European economy could just be bought by these large companies.

This study only draws samples only from the U.K. The U.K. went through quite a difficult time in the past decade. Could such macroeconomic factors influence the result of the study?

I wouldn't apply these conclusions on other countries.

Why not? A paper is not necessarily scientific nor a breakthrough. In my view, a paper is written and documented communication that's usually approved by peers in the field. Also a blunt observation in nature can be noteworthy. However, we don't see such papers anymore as these fields have matured. Just go back in the history of your field and you will find trivial papers.

I had the same question once and dug around the internet a bit. It seems like they don't verify your information.

I'd recommend to use a fake name and not something like "Ano Nymous" as their rules don't allow that.

Alternative but similar explanation: because e * 0 = 0 cancels the information e. So when doing (e * 0) / 0 we don't get e back.

I wasn't aware of this unique property of / in arithmetic.

This might be good for society. If there are multiple entities that develop such AI technology, there's some kind of competition and a distribution of power.

Of course I'd prefer if everyone could just train such a model on their smartphone with a public dataset and an open source software. At least in terms of compute, companies will always be ahead.

> The vice angle is that when inflation increases faster than wage work, people switch from a longer term wage, to selling what they can negotiate spot prices for to keep up with inflation

This sounds a bit confusing. Does an increase of inflation mean the rate of price changes goes from 2% to 4% p.a. or is it an increase of prices? Then, what does it mean that inflation increases faster than wage work? I can only imagine that it means that prices increase faster than productivity. But even this doesn't necessarily imply inflation. For economists, inflation has a specific meaning that's slightly different than what people usually think (e.g. [0]).

> Wiemar was the complete destruction of a social fabric under reparations and inflation, and the vice businesses that sprung up as people switched from regular wages to survive caused the social reaction that produced the second world war.

Hyperinflation of the Weimar Repulic did not directly cause WWII. Hyperinflation was in the early 1920ies. The final rise of the NSDAP and the election of Hitler as chancellor is attributed more to the misery of the Great Depression beginning at the end of the end of the 1920ies. Although, one can also argue that the overall instability of the Weimar Republic helped this party in gaining votes.

[0] https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentar...

> The whole point of money was to last longer than the expiring and perishable things it was used to pay for. The purchasing power of a dollar in the last century is about 1/500th of what it was when it was paid for the value someone created back then.

I agree that store of value is an important property of money. Although, I think money wasn't explicitly designed as you suggest. Modern money is a complex cultural phenomenon that evolved over several stages. I think there's so much confusion about money because people refer to different stages. If we wanted to have really stable money, we could fix prices of goods. But I guess this doesn't make much sense in a dynamic economy (how do we compare a basket of goods from 1920 with one in 2020 which includes iPhones).

> The real estate bubble created by low interest rates is exactly what happens to everything else in an inflationary environment.

I wouldn't be so sure whether there's a real estate bubble. I think our current situation is different from the years before 2008 where people where actually buying houses in expectation to sell them at higher prices one year later. I would rather explain the real estate prices as adaptations of net present values to changes of the interest rate.

> Hedges include gold and metals, land, art and alternative assets, or like Wiemar [0], people just spend devalued money on gambling and prostitution.

I don't see how a reference to prostitution in Berlin in the 1920ies supports your economic argument. I guess the situation in the Weimar Republic is more complex than simply explaining inflation with printing of money. (As far as I know, monetarism was abandoned by major central banks long ago. The German Bundesbank tried it quite long though, not surprisingly.)

Germany lost WWI and had to pay for reparations. So it had to produce goods for which they didn't get foreign currency. Before the inflation really kicked in, the Reichsmark devalued already. Basically, the central bank didn't have any currency reserves to counter this. So everything imported became much more expensive. It probably also didn't help that Germany had to take care of wounded soldiers that weren't fully part of the workforce. In sum, the production capacity was hindered but there was excess demand.

I try to avoid canned food as the inner coating might still contain BPA: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37154823/