notafraudster

I moved from west Los Angeles (Mar Vista near Culver City) to Dublin and my rent is significantly higher in Dublin (renting a new-ish build 2br 800 sq ft near the Canal, city center). Dublin's a lovely city -- but it's a lovely city of half a million people in a country of 5 million, less than half greater Los Angeles county. London, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles are major cities of the world. Dublin is a regional city. It's absurd. I never thought I'd live somewhere _more_ expensive than LA.

It’s less the formality and more the hypermodern idioms that feel out of place (what’s the opposite of anachronistic?) in talking about a historical subject. Like, yes Mark Twain had the rizz and the Confedussies took the L but that’s probably not how I’d discuss it.

Unfortunately there seems to be a bipartisan political consensus against the most profitable and useful elements of the New Deal (WPA, TVA, REA, CWA) which would be almost mandatory to go whole hog on this kind of infrastructure proposal, and as we've learned over the last 40 years public-private partnerships are thin gruel as a replacement.

Crucially, Turning Red was _not_ released in theatres in most countries due to COVID-19. It may or may not have been a money loser, but there's very little reason to believe executives think it's anything about the movie that made it that way.

My Dad died before my kids were born. When he got cancer, he recorded himself reading "The Night Before Christmas", which is about enough audio for the high quality version of this technology. Is it ghoulish on my part to want to hear his voice again or for my kids to hear it? Maybe. Do I really care what you think (or really what _I_ think) about that? No.

A little crazy that more wasn't done towards this end in summer 2020 when there was massive amounts of cash available to the hospital system, comparatively very low occupancy such that retrofitting would be less disruptive (lower respiratory disease burden generally inclusive both of COVID and non-COVID due to lockdown measures), and the social will to solve it wasn't politicized in the US or attached to other hot button stuff. I don't really know enough about HVAC to know what it would take to improve the modal old hospital's ventilation so maybe this is an orders of magnitude tougher problem than I expect or something.

I did a CS degree 20 years ago. Databases, concurrent programming, and network programming were all 4th year electives (I took network, AI, and image processing personally). But something not being included in a core curriculum doesn't mean someone can't learn it.

My curriculum was: Year 1: Intro Comp Sci / Year 2: 2 courses in Logic, 2 courses in data structures and algorithms / Year 3: 2 courses in processor design, 1 course in finite state automata, 1 course in parsers / Year 4: a course in ethics, a course in team programming (which covered UML and version control), and two electives.

I believe a major was 14 courses so I'm missing one, or it may have been it was three electives. I didn't take databases because I was already a paid sysadmin before I started college and mostly at the time database courses were just ten tedious weeks of normalization crap.

Also, treat your interns better. The reason to hire interns is because you plan to devote some of your resources to help them in their professional development. Stop asking what you can get out of your interns and start asking how you can best give something to them.

So, basically nothing about this tracks. Arnold would have been best characterized as a right-liberal during his time in politics. He was a moderate Republican in a state that was already pretty left-leaning. Since then he's drifted a little left (focusing on criticizing Trump mostly on compassionate grounds, focusing on civic engagement, and focusing on environmental issues). I think he'd best be characterized in the global scale as something between a right-liberal and a left-liberal. The Atlantic has basically Washington Consensus politics, a little left on some issues, but basically market liberals. Maybe a more simplified way to put this: The Atlantic likely would have been closer to Clinton in the 2016 primaries than Sanders, and closer to Biden in 2020 primaries than Warren than Sanders. So it's true that they don't have identical politics, but it's not true that they're really at odds.

His life story is really inspirational, but his terms as governor sort of exposed he didn't have a great aptitude for elected politics. After he got whooped in his 2nd year midterm on the bond issues, he acknowledged that to be an effective governor he needed to get better at working with the legislature and making the case for his priorities. Then he served another six years with no major accomplishments; he never really felt like he was in the driver's seat after that midterm. He remained personally likeable, and it's true that Democrats put up only a token challenge to his second term election, but this maybe emphasizes the point: he was not in control of the issue agenda in the state, he wasn't a real threat. He didn't do a terrible job as governor, but he did do a very passive job. And in his second term when he did try to engage with the legislature, it didn't work, and mostly (as the article notes) his popularity eroded significantly. After leaving politics, he didn't really stay engaged in the party or build connections in the state, and indeed it's telling that Republicans have had a terrible record in California since.

He's never sought any federal office, and I have no idea why the article accepts the false premise that after being Governor, the only other option is to run for President. He could have, of course, ran as a Senator (Governors often do this!), ran for the house (Governors occasionally do this!), gotten involved in executive politics by taking any of a number of federal appointments that could have been open for him (or made a case for a cabinet position). He didn't. The article suggests he wouldn't mind being Secretary of State. If that were true, we'd expect him to have done... uh... literally anything connected to diplomacy in the 15 years since he left elected office?

And frankly a lot of his public engagement with politics over the last few years has been pretty surface level. He's talking directly to the public, mostly in (yes, well articulated) platitudes. I agree with him on all these issues and I'm glad he's using his bully pulpit to advocate for good things that I agree with. But mostly that's where the engagement stops. He's not day-to-day running civil society organizations, he's not building connections with politicians, he's just sort of weighing in in the same way a lot of people do on issues he cares about.

I do think there's a lot to admire in Arnold (his life story is amazing). and I don't have any hostility towards him. He's funny, he's using his platform for good, he's a sports hero, he's a unique and fun actor. I don't think he's great at doing electoral politics.

When you buy a stock, you pay money and someone else gives you a stock. Once you have it, you can hold it for as long as you want. Its value can go up or down. When you sell, you get money, which might be less or more than what you paid. If the value goes to zero, you can no longer sell and you will never get any money.

When you short a stock, you are basically selling a stock you don't have. Thus you get money and owe someone else a stock (in practice what happens is someone else unknowingly gives you a stock for free and then you sell it, and they get an IOU for a share of the stock later; but let's not worry too much about the mechanics). Once you have this IOU, you can hold on. The value of the liability associated with the IOU can go up or down. If it goes down, then when you discharge that liability by buying the share you owe, you will pay less than you were paid for the short, thus making a profit. If it goes up, then you will pay more and thus lose money. One risk with a short is that your liability is unbounded. In a traditional stock purchase, the worst that can happen is that you lose the money you put in. In a short sale, you can lose many multiples of the money you put in if the stock does very well. Under a few circumstances, the IOU can be called, forcing you to prove that you have the money to buy a share; for instance, if you were to short $1,000,000 in shares and the share price triples, you owe $3,000,000.

To summarize: when you buy a stock, it's because you think it will be worth more later (again, let's set aside dividends and other things). When you short a stock, it's because you think it will be worth less later.

The reason shorting is permitted is because in general, there is a belief (mistaken or not), that additional liquidity -- more trading -- benefits everyone involved in a market by reducing the spread between prices for buying and selling; additionally, shorting makes it possible to hedge your exposure to a sector (i.e. to trade off some upside in a sector with some corresponding downside and vice versa).

They do? Every single academic in the country supports open-access, lobbies their institutions to pay for the costs of open access. Every researcher will send you a copy of their article if you are paywalled and want to read it. And you, like all academics, know about Sci-Hub, so you should do what most academics do and use Sci-Hub to pirate the article to begin with.

It looks like since 1/1/2014 (convenient stopping point for my scrape), FDIC takeovers resulted in an average of 76% of what's owed paid out (range 0%-98%). My guess is the <50% payouts were mostly fraud rather than a situation like this where it's a more traditional liquidity event, so I'd suspect it'll be above average, probably in the 80-90% range.

Unsurprisingly, this is not at all what the article speaks to; it may well be true that, epistemically, some of the things you're worried about are going on. But just like this is not an article about whether trace BPA in the food supply has hormone regulation effects, or whether replacing your current car with an EV is carbon positive or negative, it's also not an article about what you just said it was about.

Rather, it introduces two basic concepts in how intelligence organizations qualify their intelligence gathering: (1) estimative language: a concept that maps numerical probabilities into specific language (e.g. in the UK, "highly likely" means 80-90%); (2) analytic confidence: a concept that speaks to the verifiability of an individual source or conclusion, typically based on the mode of intelligence gathering.

Having done this, it then suggests that most individual pieces of intelligence have low analytic confidence, but that depending on the opportunity cost (loss function) of (in)action, this may be sufficient to proceed; likewise agglomerations of low confidence intelligence may form a high confidence conclusion (as in an ensemble learner).

By way of examples, it discusses the following examples: (1) whether Russia was using T-62 tanks -> whether better sights would help night vision; (2) the DOE COVID WSJ reporting; (3) whether Iraq had WMD; (4) whether Germany sabotaged Nordstream; (5) whether Russia would invade Ukraine in 2022; (6) the NIE Havana Syndrome reporting. I assume the thing that made you write the fan fiction you wrote was #2.

Honestly, it's a 13 paragraph article and a link around the paywall was posted hours before you posted your thing, so maybe just read the article?

It is incomplete.

There are 7 Commander Keen core games: a trilogy (Invasion of the Vorticons, Keen 1-3), a duology (Goodbye, Galaxy, Keen 4-5), and two standalone games (Aliens Ate My Babysitter, Keen 6 and Keen Dreams, Keen 3.5). The complete pack includes Invasion of the Vorticons and Goodbye, Galaxy, which gives you five of the seven.

Aliens Ate My Babysitter has never been commercially rereleased and is owned by Softdisk, not iD Software

Keen Dreams was -- believe it or not -- bought at auction by a kid named Javier Chavez who didn't know anything about programming or games and subsequently got himself permanently banned from Steam after posting a bunch of alt-right political stuff (!) and eventually changing his developer username to contain homophobic insults against the guy who owns Steam. He also released a reskin of the open source Hovertank 3D that changed the plot to be about killing refugees.

You can see some documentation of the above (note: obviously this has insults, slurs, homophobia, insulting people by calling them Jews, etc.)

  https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1100869421336268813
  https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1141540162679316481
  https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1145771721162723328
  https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1344739372105654273
  https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1437721497221713923
  https://twitter.com/dosnostalgic/status/1437723155704029185

Anyway, after he was banned from Steam, the company Nightdive Studios initially reached an agreement with him to transfer ownership to them. They released a more technically polished version on Steam. At some point he began to contest their licensing arrangement and he had the game pulled again. There is a Switch release licensed by him.

If you want to buy Keen Dreams from him, you can do so at https://www.keendreams.com/, knowing you are giving money to the person I described above. You might notice that the "About us" page reads "We’re a small team of independent devs with a huge liking for older and unappreciated games, who took it upon us to re-release them to new players to enjoy! Look out for our releasr of Keen Dreams soon to be succeeded by more!" or that the main page features an incredibly JPEG artifacted low resolution image of the title screen and other gems like "Commander Keen keen dreams was considered the “lost episode” of Commander Keen, a franchise of 2d side scrolling games developed by id software decades ago." [sic] or "Smooth as butter 60fps gameplay, after all 30fps that’s so next gen consoles…" [sic]

So, that's the sad fate of Keen Dreams.

This seems like a flip dismissal of a pretty serious challenge to the ontology of the grandparent comment. Soldiers can also present threats and competition to government (this is literally what a coup is). Soldiers also retire and go into various fields, including science, engineering, sales, and politics. And almost everything the military does is dependent on external contractors and public/private partnerships and, indeed, university research. So it's an awfully broad conspiracy to add value to infantry grunts, who play a shrinking role in the conception of U.S. military power.

And also every other country in the world has to opt to engage in the same conspiracy, otherwise all the benefits accrue to other countries that are willing to allow the technology to be exposed to civil society (e.g. when the average Chinese university graduate has the benefit of CRISPR super brain, it's going to add much more value than if Fort Hood has a bunch of Captain Americas sitting around).

In total this seems to involve a massive and sprawling worldwide conspiracy involving the coordination of opposing actors who have reasons not to coordinate in service of unclear benefits that don't seem to stand up to much scrutiny.

And in Dublin, the first three exactly match the city area (e.g. D01 for Dublin 1) -- though outside the city the first three become less obvious.

Just the same, it's incredibly annoying that ecommerce sites still generally require full addresses rather than just using the An Post Eircode lookup thing to map an entered Eircode to an address.

Almost ten years ago now, Qualcomm and Apple began suing each other. Apple's position was Qualcomm was playing hardball with patents that ought have a FRAND license. Qualcomm's position was Apple was being mean, and then also to sue various downstream part contractors for not paying royalties they claimed were owed to them but that Apple was contesting. In general Apple won more of the litigation than they lost (but not all), and the litigation eventually ended in a large settlement. But Apple said at the time of the settlement, that it was untenable to have to source all of their LTE stuff from Qualcomm and they planned to secure their supply chain in the coming years. This is that statement now coming to fruition.

So in toto, my impression is that this isn't fundamentally about seeking any particular cost savings or technical difference, so much as it Apple trying to disentangle themselves from external suppliers who they view as hostile or undependable.

A lot of colleges now have what amount to transition classes for high school kids who can't hack it in college. The upside of these is that they seem to actually help students who went to shitty high schools or who needed a change of environment. The downside is that typically they don't count for credit but they still cost money.

It depends on the college. I have two friends who are professors in the same subject (a humanities-ish subject that is reading/writing heavy).

One is a professor at a low end CSU. The way she describes her students is roughly high school level; they struggle with tasks like writing a 2-3 page, 3-point, sandwich-style essay. They struggle with reading primary source material. Her senior students typically seem to have the kind of skills I would expect of a college freshman. Many students have severe life disrupting issues (rehab and court are common). Deadlines seem to mostly be a suggestion.

The other is a professor, again in the same subject, at a relatively well ranked and famous north eastern liberal arts college. The way he describes his students is that they engage, handle very dense primary source readings, and that many of them are on track for grad school or law school. I am not sure what he assigns them as final assignments, but I would assume 10-20 page final papers are not uncommon. He's never mentioned anything about behavioural issues, though like every other professor he notes that accommodations/mental health stuff is worse than it used to be.

I also thought "boy, ChatGPT seems to be closer to what was expected of me in 10th grade English than it does to any university course I ever took", and frankly I went to a mediocre Canadian university and didn't really go to a competitive world class university until my PhD.

So it's possible that the push towards everyone has going to colleges has created greater stratification from college to college. The CSU system's mandate is to serve the underserved, so it's probably not a stretch to say many of the people in my colleague's classes wouldn't have gotten into college without an explicit effort to make a college for them.

The design appears to be based on the notion that most of the confounders are washing out in the propensity to seek cardiac treatment, which was a precursor for recruitment into the study. I agree this doesn't mitigate all confounding concerns. Given the design where patients are measured at baseline and the endline event measure is measured later, I'd like to see a balance table at the baseline measures.

One possible pitch: I'm also not sure whether the circulating blood levels of this chemical are actually connected to consumption of the sweetener. You could imagine a world where two individuals who have identical consumption of the sweetener but different free-circulating levels of the chemical, the higher levels of the chemical could be an indication of other confounding health issues causing malabsorption.

I am not a biologist or doctor and don't know anything about sweeteners or any of the mechanisms that may or may not play a role here, just commenting on design.

Sorry, just to be clear, the thing you're responding to isn't a troll proposigin a hypothetical, the Oompa-Loompa story got edited several times decades ago, in the decade after release. The edition you read growing up is an edited edition. This actually literally happened already.

It's fine if you retroactively disagree with this and wish you had time traveled back to undo the SJWs of the 1970s before they could start. I am not personally interested in litigating whether or not publishers should edit books. I don't care about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it wasn't a book I read often growing up and I don't care for either movie. I care least of all about what you think of a book. You do you, random stranger on the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_and_the_Chocolate_Fact...

I don't think there should be blanket immunity for anything simply because an algorithm did it. Let's just imagine there wasn't. Imagine that you could, in principle, sue a website over their promotion of illegal content. I would think on a fact-specific basis, HN would have a very good defence against liability even absent blanket immunity.

You could imagine the kind of elements that might matter for a fact pattern that would emerge from a deposition: revenue and size of website, proportion of website revenue directed towards moderation, percentage of requests that identify illegal material that are responded to, manner of response, tools provided to users, the types of content actually hosted on the site, nature of the algorithm itself, discussions that were had internally about access to harmful content. HN is a text-based website (which also mitigates the harm claim), it gets maybe in the orbit of a few hundred submissions a day, the vast majority of possible harm is when a submission is connected to a topic likely to cause legal issues, and in my experience such topics are typically flagged within a few minutes and removed quickly. There's no mechanism to directly communicate with users, there is no mechanism to follow users, there's no mechanism to change what you see on the front page based on what you clicked before. Everyone is exposed to the same content.

By contrast, thinking about the companies that are actually the target of these lawsuits I was at the TASM (Terrorism and Social Media) 2022 conference -- some of my research is adjacent to this but I've never done any work on terrorism and my social media work involves alt-tech stuff, not the big social media platforms -- where the keynotes were harm policy leads for Europe for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, all of whom made it clear that their position was that it is incumbent on academics and government agencies to identify harmful content and work with social media, because every region has their own unique content challenges and it's not possible for Tech companies to handle those at a global scale. A question was asked of the panel that went something like "Meta was, as it admits, instrumental in spreading the violence-inciting messages that drove the anti-Rohingya pogroms in Myanmar. The defense is that Meta wasn't prepared for, or staffed for, detecting issues in a single small market, and things snowballed quickly. You could hire 100 full time content people in that country for the salary of a single person sitting on the panel or a single SWE, so how could resource constraints be the issue?" and the answer was "We're already devoting enough resources to this problem." I think that's an incredibly shitty answer to the question, and I think a deposition could surface exactly this kind of logic, and to me that would be a fact pattern that supports liability. I hope they get their pants sued off in every jurisdiction that allows it. It's clear an aversion to staffing is a huge part of the issue.

So from my perspective, I think the typical process for resolving civil liability + reasonable assumptions about how courts should interpret fact patterns is likely to get to outcomes I'm plenty happy with.

(In the two cases in front of SCOTUS right now it seems like the victims, who have basically no evidence connecting the perpetrators of the violence to the social media services used, would win: the argument seems to be of the form "some terrorist killed my family member, and some other terrorists got radicalized online, ipso facto social media is liable". I don't think that'd be a winning case with or without s.230)

It probably bodes a little poorly (either for the product, or for the product's applicability to this website) that almost every comment seems to be confused about what the product is or why anyone would ever use it. I've read the original post several times and I still don't understand myself. I read the main page and I can't tell if I'm meant to be in the target market or not. I clicked on Pricing and I don't understand what the free plan is (it doesn't give us access to "Links", which I thought was the product?)

The "Why do you charge for excess searches?" link in the pricing page opens the Forex question, not the excess searches question.

Pricing page provides pricing in GBP, EUR, USD, and AUD but does not use any kind of location data to localize the currency.

I used the "Resources" menu and I don't understand what "Spend management: Unlock incremental revenue" means

It's like arguing that _in response to you_ arguing Disney Land [sic] discriminates against Michael Jackson, which would be a valid refutation of your argument.

I didn't realize this was a thing! Also, the article notes the extension makes its actual ruleset available, so if you use e.g. uBlock Origin, you can add this as a rules list: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-filter...

Nice!

It's not clear to me why Iran is a part of this multipolar order. It's true that the U.S. has backed Saudi Arabia/GCC and more or less taken the Sunni side in the Sunni-Shi'a split, but why is Iran considered an independent world power in the multipolar world but Saudi is not? In the same way, Cuba and Yugoslavia were not powers in a multipolar world in the 1960s just because they stood against a U.S. The hegemony but were nevertheless not explicitly owned by the Soviet Union.

The U.S. definitely has an interest in an isolated and weak Russia, but the polarity of this situation is totally unclear. Isolating Russia has already empowered China. It may strengthen the EU and EU-central/eastern European ties, but it may also cause a further loss of influence in Africa and SE Asia for the west. It's definitely possible to make the math shake out for this to be strategically useful for the U.S., but I don't think it's as foregone a conclusion as you expect it is, and for that reason I don't see how this is any more likely an explanation than any contradicting explanation.

I really hate this style of analysis. It's transparent, yes: it's a prior being updated by evidence to produce a posterior, and you see where the rabbit goes in the hat. But this just puts a sciencism gloss on what are basically qualitative arguments.

A short version of their argument is "You might think for any number of reasons that the Syrian government launched the missile, but other peoples calculations of the launch location were wrong and ours were right so it couldn't be the government." Their prior begins at 95-5 for the government doing it, then it becomes 69-31 for the government doing it when they show a video of an anti-government guerrilla wearing a chemical hazard suit, then it becomes 7-93 in favour of the opposition once they decide they know the launch site. The launch site evidence is supposed to mean the Syrian government's probability is divided by 3 and the opposition's probability is multiplied by 15. That's the whole argument, that's where the rabbit is in the hat. After that point, no other evidence can adjust anything.

Most of the other evidence is just conjecture: they assign a 90% confidence to the evidence point "No western countries shared their evidence that the Syrian government did it" and they feel this fact is enough evidence to half their confidence in the Syrian government doing it. As proof for this, they literally say "The US says they have signals intercepts saying the Syrian government did it, but what if they actually have signals intercepts from the Syrian government asking if they did it or maybe they did admit to doing it but they were lying" This is not evidence.

This really seems like crank people trying to apply a rational choice / scientific skeptic veneer to a process of qualitative reasoning. And frankly I flicked through another ten or fifteen pages on the blog and almost everything discussed was discussed in the exact manner LessWrong/Slate Star Codex commenters would, and many of the issues being discussed were the exact issues discussed on those sites.

(I have no prior at all on the Syrian gas attacks, as I don't pretend to know anything about Syria or chemical weapons)

There's nothing wrong with anonymous sourcing, but if your thing is based on a _single_ anonymous source, AND you've cultivated a reputation for being a credulous crank (see also the sourcing on the alternate universe Bin Laden writing Hersh did), AND you don't have any kind of editorial machine to back up your sourcing, AND the claim is incredibly inflammatory, then probably that's going to present a problem.

I think people value the better SOC, but less incrementally year-over-year and more on the kind of upgrade cycle they're on. An iPhone 6S is absolutely still useable, and if you upgrade to a 7 it'll feel mostly the same, but if you upgrade to a 10 (or a 12 or a 14) you'll notice workflows where you get a real increase in fluidity and the same is true on a Pixel. I agree that battery failure and camera is likely what _drives_ the upgrade, mind you, but the better SOC brings collateral benefits.

I agree with the results in the video (and the inference the author made that most of what's going on here is software processing being over-tuned rather than hardware), but I don't really think this is dispositive to the overall conversation, which is basically:

Side A: Apple makes ludicrously expensive ultra-luxe products that only the conspicuously rich buy, like Rolex or Bentley.

Side B: Apple is definitely on the premium end of the market, but generally justify their presence there due to elements of product quality, and their price positioning isn't anything like Rolex or Bentley.

I think pointing out individual instances where products exist that beat Apple products in some respect and are cheaper doesn't really weigh in on the debate. In broad terms, Apple's high end phones are at or near price comparability with other high end phones, and at or near performance/specs/value with other high end phones. Maybe a smidge above or below in some respects at different times, but basically that's where they are.

To me, Apple is closer to Volvo, or maybe in a pinch BMW, in terms of their market positioning than it is to Bentley. That's not to say you can't prefer a Kia (better value / cheaper price) or a Genesis (premium brand spun off from a traditionally cheaper competitor) or a Lexus or an Audi (in the same price tier), but more or less it makes very little sense to pretend BMW and Bentley are the same thing.

When I went to the Grand Canyon I was surprised at how little my brain could comprehend the depth. There are so many false bottoms, when you're up on the rim, you look down and you see something you think is the bottom, but then you realize there's still a canyon below that, then you look down into that canyon and find the bottom, and then you realize there's still a canyon below that. It's like your brain absolutely cannot process being 2 kilometers above the bottom. That's what I thought of when I read your post.

(I had a similar feeling when I was in the High Atlas mountain range in Morocco and tried to look up to the top)