mycologos

I'm not a fan of the specific new pasta shape, but I like the brand itself, because they offer something that is hard for me to find elsewhere, especially in a ~normal grocery store: unusual grains in unusual shapes. The comparison with Juicero seems wrong to me because, as far as I can tell, that product was a very old existing product (fresh juice) in a new wrapper. I don't know anything about coffee so I can't comment on the K-cup comparison.

I have tried other brands and failed to find anybody else that is as reliable at unusual grains in unusual shapes. The difference is real!

Birth rates decline pretty proportionally to economic development, arriving at well below replacement levels in highly developed countries. In light of this, it seems misguided to expend energy personally convincing people to have less children, when we could just focus on bringing more people up to the western standard of living that, apparently, organically makes having many kids mostly unappealing.

Less charitably, this is the kind of advice that mostly seems like an excuse to preach at people.

As you've observed, averages can be misleading because they're not robust to outliers. However, this seems most relevant to something like income, where we're interested in "most people" and don't care so much about the one ultra-rich person in the sample.

This appears to be less true for something like emissions, where the overall total is most relevant -- unless you're arguing that it's masking an "unfair" situation where improvements are coming from one group and should be coming from the other?

I've bought half a dozen boxes from this company -- mostly for the weird grains in weird shapes -- and will probably buy more. Yeah, it's expensive for a box of pasta, 2-3x the price of "normal" pasta. But that difference is 3 or 4 bucks a box, and each box is at least 4 meals. I am happy to pay $1 more per meal for a better experience (and that is a generous overestimate of the true additional cost). Grotesque feels like an overstatement.

A problem seems to be that smart jerks know that people would prefer to not be around them and therefore spend a lot of time/energy/intelligence making themselves organizationally powerful enough that people have no choice. I think this is sometimes called "playing politics". Prevention seems to require actors who are both politically savvy and kind, and that doesn't seem to be easy to find.

There's a nice 2017 documentary about Voyager called The Farthest [1]. It includes interviews with many of the now very old team members, and they do exude (deserved) pride, and a still fresh sense of wonder that they pulled it off.

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

I think a "statistics" class could still help a lot of people without ever touching continuous distributions (which as you mention are more naturally built off calculus) or multivariate distributions (which as you mention are more naturally built off linear algebra). Simple stuff like basic conditional probability, Bayes' rule, confidence intervals, basic hypothesis testing, and general "statistical thinking" don't really require calculus or linear algebra. Just getting people to a point where they understand some of the really basic tools seems pretty valuable, and pretty far from the current state of things.

> He specifically wants to kick out all 'non-western' foreigners which is already a fraction of a fraction of the people who immigrate to the Netherlands

Here is a page the Netherlands government with more specific numbers [1]. In 2022 there were roughly 250k immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Ukraine, or Poland, and the next three biggest sources were Syria, Turkey, and India, combing to maybe 50k combined.

[1] https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/dossier/asylum-migration-and-integr...

Knowing nothing about the technical merits of the two groups, it looks like the repeated interaction between Loeb's camp and their critics has been:

1) Loeb makes a bold claim about some phenomenon and attaches extraterrestrial life to it. He chooses to do this in a way that will attract media attention, like a press release.

2) The press release gets picked up by media, because Loeb is a notorious Harvard professor. At least some of the media will phrase it as "scientists say...".

3) Other scientists, perhaps at universities whose press releases are mostly ignored by media, see this and say "hey, I'm a scientist too, we do not say that". They try to engage Loeb and over time escalate their criticisms from "civil and private discussions" to "public and somewhat insulting". They might feel justified in doing this because they see Loeb's mass-media communication as being at approximately the same level of technical detail; at a certain point, a technical argument is not going to attract attention or understanding of the seriousness of the claim being made, but a blunt criticism will ("this guy is nuts and does not represent his field").

4) Loeb describes 3) as a bunch of overly conservative cranks holding back scientists and directly analogizes himself to Galileo, predictably frustrating his critics further.

Like I said, I can't say anything useful about the technical details. But it seems like an important detail here is that Loeb has repeatedly chosen to try and fight this out using public opinion, and his opponents have found themselves somewhat awkwardly picking up and using similar weapons for maybe the first time in their careers, and are not enjoying it. This seems to happen a lot in modern science!

At the same time, it seems like some antidote is needed to the breathless, quasi-mystical hype that cryptic OpenAI claims seem designed to stoke. Demanding precise and substantive criticisms of something about which almost no technical details have been provided seems like an unfair bar.

The people inside a cult are not the most trustworthy sources for what the cult is doing.

> everyone I know at OpenAI (and outside) is a huge Sam fan

Everyone you know is a huge Sam fan? What?

> I think they could have won in the court of public opinion ... [but] they tried to skewer him, and it backfired completely

Maybe we have different definitions of "the court of public opinion". Most people don't know who Sam Altman is, and most of the people who do know don't have strong opinions on his performance as OpenAI's CEO. Even on HN, the reaction to the board "skwer[ing] him" has been pretty mixed, and mostly one of confusion and waiting to see what else happens.

This quick a turnaround does make the board look bad, though.

Bit more context as a CS researcher: Symposium on Theoretical Computing (STOC) and Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) are the two main computer science theory conferences, they're not random journals or something.

But it doesn't make sense for the journalist to have hubris about OpenAI.

"Most important company in the world" is text from a question somebody (I think the journalist?) asked, not from Sutskever himself.

A more plausible theory is that the training actually relies on a ton of human labeling behind the scenes (I have no idea if this is true or not).

(...I don't know what this means?)

I know, I know, it's possible to condemn and work against multiple problems at once, but it's just weird to me that there's so much more antitrust energy expended on free internet search that is very easy to not use than what looks like a pretty obvious price-fixing cartel that directly harms consumers.

HN had a big memorial thread when Monty Python's Terry Jones died, but kept deleting/flagging anything similar for Kobe Bryant at the same time. Its logic around this is not consistent.

As Aphex Twin once said [1] :

> I do get movitated [sic] by listening to other people now but I don't really NEED to do that. I could just lock myself away for days and get inspired by myself. That's my favorite way to do it. It's more like a pure form of motivation when it's all on your own. But you have to wait until you're really bored and you've got nothing to do. That's when it comes out. That's when I reckon it gets good.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080611121559/http://www.furiou...

I think younger people have a much broader definition of "mental health". Somebody 50+ might say "mental health, like a mental hospital? no thanks", somebody in Gen Z might say "fr fr i always talk about how stressful school is with my homies".

I want that too! But things need to be easy to use if we want to hear from the people who are just X nerds and not X nerds and computer nerds. I think that's something ads enabled, because it made it valuable to just have a lot of people show up, which paid for all the work that went into making showing up easy.

> Kill advertising and the web will be fixed automatically and permanently

Is the implicit logic here "kill advertising and the web will be like what it was before widespread advertising: mostly for and by nerds"?

As far as I know, an author is allowed to share the preprint of their Nature submission, e.g. by posting it on their website or Arxiv, without paying an open access fee [1]. The difference between the submitted and final version of a paper is I think usually pretty minor, so this seems decent enough.

[1] https://www.nature.com/nature-portfolio/editorial-policies/p...

I do computer science research and publish regularly (in conferences, not journals, since that's how computer science mostly works -- you write a paper, look for the soonest upcoming relevant conference deadline, submit there, and get a response 2-3 months later). I think discussions about peer review often fail to explain all of the things peer review can accomplish:

1) Verifying that work is correct, assuming that the author is honest (e.g., you take their data at face value)

2) Verifying that work is correct, assuming that the author is malicious (e.g., you scrutinize their data to see if it's fabricated)

3) Certifying that the paper is "interesting" (universities, grant-making bodies, and other bureaucratic entities want some evidence that the researcher their funding is good, and somebody has to hand out the gold stars)

It takes time for even an expert to do 1), and it takes still more time to do 2). There aren't really good incentives to do it beyond caring about your field, or wanting to build on the thing you're reading. 3) can be done more quickly, but it's subjective, but a world where things are only assessed for correctness and not interesting-ness is a world where external funding bodies rely on other weird proxies like citation metrics or something to figure out who's good, and it's not clear to me that that's better.

My perception from computer science is that it should be harder to submit papers, because there are too many authors who simply rarely produce good papers and are clogging up the conferences with endless resubmissions until they get reviewers lazy enough to all say "weak accept".

OK, I spent ~an hour reading parts I [1], II [2], and III (TFA). My perception going in was that comment moderation is very hard, and essentially impossible at scale, and that Facebook/Meta cannot credibly be accused of literally causing genocide. Here is how my opinion shifted some after reading this series:

The articles present a lot of evidence to support the notion that Facebook was well aware of clear-cut incitement to violence years before its escalation into large-scale genocide in late 2016. It isn't spelled out explicitly, but I think there are two things that make Facebook's initial apparent non-response easier to understand as incompetence rather than evil:

* In the aftermath of the Arab spring, technology and social networks enjoyed a honeymoon in public perception that is hard to remember over a decade later. People, including (especially?) people in tech, could genuinely believe that making it easier for people to talk to each other was basically good, full stop. I'd suggest that this honeymoon only really ended after the 2016 US presidential election, which caused a lot of soul searching about information and echo chambers, and got even worse after the Cambridge Analytica scandal [3, this is a graph image from NBC news]

* As part I of the article notes, "[t]he information landscape in Myanmar is so unstable that accounts of any given incident conflict, often in major ways". This dynamic seems to appear in a lot of places where well-off westerners interact with much poorer and more chaotic countries (Rwanda is a clear parallel). Part I points out that the "Burmese government" itself seems to make statements both fanning anger against the Rohingya and then trying to walk them back when it boils over into disorder

So I think it was possible to be a basically well-intentioned (naive) Facebook employee in the leadup to 2016 and hear of strange, almost genocidal sounding posts in another language in a place you don't understand and still not think "this is a break-glass moment and I need to escalate and make a new path inside my corporation for this to be taken seriously". In hindsight, this was wrong, but I think we're forgetting that what happened next didn't seem possible, because we still thought of the internet as an exceptional new dawn in mass communication. A lot is necessary for people to process something as a novel, serious emergency.

However, it's hard to maintain this judgment over the ensuing years, as senior figures at Facebook are repeatedly presented with evidence that people are deliberately distributing misinformation (e.g., making fake accounts, and other clear-cut evidence that doesn't require a fact checker and research) and mostly wave it away unless it's big enough to provoke media and investor consternation. By the end of the 2010s, I think Facebook was well past the "this sort of thing wasn't something we could imagine" stage of a crisis, and into a less defensible position along the lines of "this is reality, it cannot really be moderated, but we can pretend to moderate".

One last point re: moderation, I have no idea how Meta hires its Burmese content moderators, but it must be tricky, since as far as I can tell most people in Burma are anti-Rohingya. I would like to be wrong about this, but what should be factually trustworthy sources like the Brookings institution write things like:

> Most of the Myanmar population, especially the Buddhist majority, feels that the Rohingya don’t belong in their country ... [t]he straightforward solution would be to help the Rohingya return to their homes in Myanmar and live in peace and freedom. Sadly, this solution looks impossible in the near term because of the nationalist sentiment of the Buddhist majority

[1] https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup

[2] https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-ii-the-crisis

[3] https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_fit-560w,f...

[4] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/on-the-ground-in-myanmar-...

In what sense is Costco an "abusive" company? They squeeze their suppliers, but their suppliers legitimately have other options. I'm not aware of any market what Costco is the only game in town.

OK, but it's not like there's a section on the USMLE that says "by the way, how fast is your fastball? how many 3s can you make in a minute? what's your mile time?". The argument that being an athlete makes it significantly easier to become a doctor is weird, because getting into a good undergraduate institution is not the main hurdle to becoming a doctor.

Fair, I don't actually know which legislative method is easier. I have a vague hunch that a city is more likely to be able to dictate who docks at their ports than introduce their own pollution taxes, but I don't know.