mvhvv

Why do you think that folks discussing this situation find it upsetting, stressful and/or maddening?

The idea that blocking the billionaire owner would prevent me from noticing Twitter is struggling is a little silly.

I see this mentioned a lot, but I don't think it's entirely true. The book was apparently well liked in the USSR due to the obvious anti-capitalist reading. The film was imported by the government intending to screen it as a propaganda piece, but quickly cancelled.

The part about the farmer having his own truck seeming like a luxury to soviet citizens is true, but it's a bit unfair to say it was banned when the book was so well regarded.

I think the distinction between tracking a private jet and tracking a private car is fairly clear cut. The point isn't to actually show where Musk is at any one point (who cares?), but I think the intent of the account is to show the intense disconnect between him and normal (non-private-jet-owning folks).

Unless I'm misremembering, the ElonJet account listed the cost and the amount of fuel consumed for every flight right? His willingness to burn 10 tonnes of jet fuel on a whim definitely doesn't mesh well with his brand as "The EV-guy".

What do you think the value is in a stock that doesn't pay dividends? It seems to me that if you remove them, you're getting into pyramid-scheme territory.

I personally prefer to watch most things with subtitles. I'm usually extremely conscious of how much noise I'm making in the house, and I rarely ever want to watch something at cinema volumes. Good quality subtitles rarely ever feel intrusive, but I really wish there was a better distinction between subtitling and closed-captioning.

Most modern streaming platforms seem to only offer one accessibility-focused option that combines both, and I find it hugely irritating to see text on-screen like "[SOMBRE MUSIC PLAYS]" or "[CROWD MURMURING]".

I'm unsure exactly what the above poster is trying to say, I generally find Rust development very pleasant with nothing but vscode and Rust-analyzer.

But... I'll admit there is one major stumbling block so far. Debugging iterator chains can be cumbersome because of the disconnect between the language and the compiled code. I've found myself stepping in and out of assembly more than I'd like. I assume this is the kind of problem that can be overcome with a nicer debugger though.

It's definitely unclear what "inaccurate" means in this sense?

Is an entire track inaccurate if a single sample is inaccurate? In that case then yeah, rather than measuring some level of audio purity, this is measuring your likelihood of getting a perfect rip before taking CD condition into account.

One thing I think is missed from these kinds of back of the napkin calculations is all the bizarre thermodynamic side-effects you'd encounter if you were somehow able to drill an actual hole through the core without it collapsing. I imagine the convection currents would be extreme.

Not to mention how the pressure in the centre of the earth is extreme because of the weight of the rock itself. When you have a hypothetical uncollapsible hole, you're explicitly removing the vast majority of that pressure. I'd be curious to know how those actual values work out for a "giant chimney" model though.

I'm not sure if things are different outside Australia, but it's probably been 15-20 years since I've lived in a house with a hot-water storage tank. As far as I know most places seem to have instant/continuous systems that heat the water on demand as it passes through the line.

Solar-heating definitely makes storage make more sense, but I don't know how the numbers actually work out on that one.

I'm no power-plant engineer, but vaguely remembering back to thermodynamics 101, in a perfect heat-engine efficiency is relative to the temperature delta.

You can't just turn heat to electricity, so below a certain threshold it's only good for warming spaces.

You made me stop and question myself for a second, but this definitely isn't right. Usually when people talk about "TCP/IP" it's shorthand for the whole "Internet Protocol Suite", but even naively TCP and IP are two different layers.

I think this is really just a factor of what you're used to, because none of those Python examples seem like an issue to me, and the Perl examples seem much harder to parse. I personally prefer print as a function rather than a statement, and keeping most standard lib functionality in modules seems like the right choice for anything other than a DSL.

I agree scope leakage is a major stumbling block with Python for sure, but it only occurs with control-flow so rarely causes actual issues once you're aware of it. Aside from that my biggest qualms with Python are the typesystem and whitespace for scoping, but those two don't cause much trouble for typical scripting purposes.

And, for what it's worth, Python's f-strings have been the go-to string formatting approach since 2016 so your example becomes something like:

  print(f"Hello {name}")

Which is doubly nice because you can also use format specifiers and arbitrary expressions like so:

  >>> f"The current year is {datetime.now().year} and the value of pi is approximately: {22/7:.2f}"
  'The current year is 2022 and the value of pi is approximately: 3.14'

Where do you think Python has failed as a scripting language? I'm not very familiar with Perl, but overall I can't think of any obvious advantages aside from some of the syntactic sugar around invoking shell commands and string matching.

I can see stability as a knock against Python, but outside of 2 vs 3 the only breaking changes I've really had to deal with were relatively short term issues with third party libs.

I sympathise with your desire to replace shell scripts, but I don't see why that replacement should be Perl of all things. Like you said, Python has displaced Perl due to ecosystem support, so why chase history here?

It's interesting seeing this conception of post-modernism 20 years down the track. I think the article almost gets at the point, but overshoots and ends up in navel-gazing territory with:

"Look at the big picture. Don't focus in on two or three things to the exclusion of other things. Keep everything in context. Don't go out of your way to justify stuff that's obviously cool. Don't ridicule ideas merely because they're not the latest and greatest. Pick your own fashions. Don't let someone else tell you what you should like. 'Tsall good."

Post-modernism is not so much about picking-and-choosing and going-your-own-way, but it is about looking at the big picture and keeping everything in context. Importantly it's not about the total rejection of assumption and consistency, but about critically challenging and analysing them.

I think a lot of folks unfortunately continue to approach it in this same way, but in 202X we often make the additional mistake of assuming that the "modernism" that "post-modernism" is rebelling against is our contemporary "modern" society. That often gets misrepresented as a rejection of the enlightenment or some other extreme sounding position, but it's much better understood as a challenge of epistemic certainty and an attempt to break down and understand our ideological assumptions.

Yes, like I said, I read the article, and I read the linked notes. The article was not really about people criticising his book without reading it, the article was about not engaging in qualitative criticism of his spreadsheets.

Caplan indirectly mentions a paper criticising him, and his dismissal is that it doesn't acknowledge the math.

It's entirely reasonable to comment on why you're choosing not to dedicate your time to something. Especially when the thing to be analysed relies on fundamentally incommensurable values.

FWIW, from actually reading his notes and the extracts of the spreadsheets he quickly dips into a number of flaky assumptions and uses them to apply "corrective biases" which make it very easy to dismiss without wasting time on arduous numerical analysis.

I agree it's a positive move to bring formal logic and statistics into other fields, but (at least where I'm from) the social sciences do engage heavily with epistemology. And as a STEM major myself, I'll admit it's often in critical ways that the hard sciences fail.

The problem with many attempts to apply statistics is that even for the best quality science, the conclusion is only ever relative to the foundational assumptions. I don't mean they're intentional manipulations, but that it's very clear that Caplan is so far off the mark here that his work is difficult to take seriously.

I think a common critique of the trolley problem is an apt analogy here. Not an ethical argument about a specific choice, but that the thought experiment itself is flawed. It presents an absurd binary that neatly removes the human experience and incommensurability of individual life and insists on it's own utilitarian nature.

The problem with the spreadsheets, as with the trolley problem is that these kinds of analyses are founded on ad hoc assumptions that conveniently remove important context.

There is always a better approach. There are issues with our education system that don't work for many children, and wages do not correlate evenly with education across the board, but the conclusion that we should therefore slash public education funding and transition high schools to vocational training is doesn't follow from that unless you make those trolley-problem-style simplifying assumptions.

I read the article, and I even read through the presentation linked in the article. I didn't read the book, but I'm also not giving a qualitative review of the book.

I'm talking about why people don't think it's worth engaging with to begin with. It's not that his critics are afraid or incapable of engaging with him, but that he's being dismissed out of hand because (regardless of whether it's true or not) he presents as a crank who doesn't appear to understand the field he's attempting to critique.

There's an infinite supply of cranks in the world, and it's usually good practice to avoid engaging with them.

The thing is, Caplan is a distinguished economist sure, but he is an interloper when it comes to education.

As you said, it's also worth noting that the community of "distinguished economists" is itself a fairly insular and politically driven field with a lot of ideological assumptions. That's not to say it's all hogwash, but for as much as Economists love to tell you otherwise it's still a soft-science very vulnerable to convenient abuse of statistics.

For what it's worth, I skimmed over the presentation he linked in the article. One of the first claims he makes is:

"Education and ability (IQ, work ethic, etc.) are correlated, so raw numbers give education too much credit."

He then goes on to correct for a "45% ability bias" to income statistics. Without even getting into the problems of correlation vs causation there, it's a perfect example of the foundational assumptions that got his work rejected to begin with.

Assumptions and reductions are always required, there is no researcher in the world that reads every book or paper released in their field, and for those that do read voraciously, only a tiny fragment of that is remembered or understood on the grounds that the author intended.

Part of learning is to deciding which parts to ignore. The book is rejected on it's face because its core claim is essentially "I solved a major issue in another field by reducing it down to the one I know", which is a big red-flag for crank claims.

The article's focus on spreadsheets is part of why it's so easy to brush it aside. The author doesn't realise that the fidelity of the spreadsheet is less important than their own ideological assumptions.

It's possible they cover this in detail in the book, but it's not in this article, nor in any description of the book I've encountered. If something appears as crank-science on it's face (and is getting little traction), then why waste your time on it?

I agree that capital allocation and management are real and valuable skills, but it doesn't require any significant amount of talent to move industry offshore. It's simply shopping around for the cheapest price that meets requirements and writing up a contract.

Ignoring any potential ethical concerns, offshoring only tends to work financially for short-term tasks that don't require long-term understanding of past work. You mentioned in your previous comment that your department is struggling to find engineers that are willing to stick around long-term to work on your legacy systems. How do you square those two ideas?

Are you suggesting that education should be shifted offshore? Or that lower budgets would attract more talented managers?

If you're going to maintain ancient legacy systems and refuse to modernise, then really your inability to attract talent is your company's own fault. I love computing history, but a career in computing is a learning pathway too.

If your staff are only learning skills they can't apply elsewhere, they're going to feel trapped. I left my last position as a systems integrator because I wasn't learning anything other than how to slap together off-the-shelf solutions and bullshit clients.

If you want new people to stay and you can't teach them skills that are valuable elsewhere, then you need to pay exceptionally well and reassure your staff that their jobs are stable. Ideally including contractually obligated recurring pay increases.

For someone with a 40 year career ahead of them, anything less will always feel like a risky dead-end.

It's entirely possible for Caplan to be correct about his material analysis, and that still not be the right conclusion.

If the government doesn't subsidise education, then anything that doesn't promise a return is financially debilitating. Personal choice can't exist when your ability to eat and pay rent rely upon you making a specific decision.

If you don't believe that humanities education has any kind of broader social value, then that's a whole other argument to make.

With a grain of salt, as someone who has not read the spreadsheets (and has no interest in doing so).

The author just seems to misunderstand the relativity of ideology. In particular they bemoan their critics as "..go[ing] with their ideology and status-quo bias, using the latest prestigious papers as fig leaves", but they don't acknowledge that their own findings obviously require some major ideological assumptions founded in neoliberalism.

Critics aren't concerned about the correctness of the spreadsheets, because calculating the value of education as ROI requires assuming that all metrics are objectively (and abstractly) quantifiable, which is simply laughable (in my option). Even ignoring the ideological assumptions you have to make to quantify things like self-actualisation and it's impact on quality-of-life, there's an obvious issue here:

How does education affect our political and cultural landscape? Assuming the math is right and reducing education funding improves the national budget while increasing some measure of quality-of-life, then what's the long-term impact?

The democratic process is fundamentally reliant on the quality of information available to voters. Epistemology doesn't come for free, and "common-sense" is rife with biases. We already have widespread problems with low-information voting, so what happens when we stop teaching critical theory because it's not profitable?

I also prefer a real scroll bar because it's easier to accurately scan through huge files, but I'm honestly confused at the idea of not having a scroll wheel in 2022.

Excluding touch/gesture mice like the Magic Mouse, I don't think I've seen a mouse without a scroll wheel in maybe 15 years. Is it just a hardy relic, or do you have some kind of special design for accessibility?

Edit: Nevermind, sorry I just noticed the other reply that asked the same thing. It's still a very unusual confluence of requirements, but I kinda get it with a track-ball.

Is it reasonable to assume AV will be lower-cost than rideshare? The key thing that makes Uber more affordable than a taxi is that vehicle purchase/maintenance/depreciation/liability are all externalised.

In a full-self-driving situation you no longer have to pay your driver, but you do have to pay for all of the above. With the inevitably higher standards of maintenance required for AV fleet vehicles I can't really imagine it being cheaper than it currently is.

Sure the sensor/cv/vision tech will get cheaper, but machines still wear down.

Just because you don't want to think about externalities doesn't mean they don't exist. There are a lot of strong ideological assumptions you have to make to handwave all these away as "bullshit".