rad88

I'm financially illiterate. Where can I find a good high yield savings account?

> Part of my hope by raising expectations and having more aggressive goals, and just kind of turning up the heat a little bit, is that I think some of you might decide that this place isn’t for you, and that self-selection is OK with me.

That it's so employees will quit is the truth of the matter. We shouldn't assume that this is to target "dead wood underperformers". Facebook has a ridiculous performance review scheme that, whatever else it does, is effective at firing people.

They already push people out to sea as a matter of course -- what's happening now is that the economic outlook is unfavorable, and they need people, including decent employees, to quit. They declared a hiring freeze and have announced a policy of attrition. These are normal things that happen during a downturn. It shouldn't be framed as somehow making their workforce more excellent, or as if the people who'll lose their job were "dead wood" anyway. The economy is going to put a lot of people out of work this year, of all sorts.

> I'm not sure I buy the "sentience without self-awareness" concept.

Honest question -- what do you think is going on inside of babies and children? Self-awareness as a developmental process is complex and relational, and takes many years. Our senses though are more or less put together by puberty, built up by simple interactions with the world.

Turing's tests involved 3 parties, and that was a key part of the test. If you design it as an acceptance test rather than a sort, real people are going to fail and computers are going to pass, with embarrassing results. To use one of your examples, the job of the interrogator is not to decide whether someone has been to Spain, it's to decide which of 2 people has been to Spain.

Turing didn't just consider whether a computer could embody complex psycho-social identities (eg womanhood, intelligence, self), but first had to give this question some objective quantifiable meaning, by blinding the experiment and introducing a control group. It's not perfect, but at least it grounds the questions in a concrete framework, and acknowledges that most of the categories in question are only revealed by social dynamics. The only update to it I would make, based on modern developments, would be to consider more the performance of the interrogator, rather than the two competing subjects.

No not really, at least when I attended. I checked and 1st period is at 9am now, which is better. There was a cluster of suicides in my grade and the grades after, which might have led to the change. I left after 10th grade to finish high school at the community college down the road, which is a really excellent program offered to students who aren't "doing well" at the high schools. Honestly this option (Middle College) probably saves lives. The only hard constraint was a 12-2pm (iirc) class with the other high schoolers, and other than that we chose our own course schedule from the community college.

My school district in California also put us on a city bus. I can't remember now whether we got a discount or full vouchers, but the bus line/schedule had definitely been chosen to support the school. It worked great and also familiarized me with the bus system, so when I grew into middle/high school I knew the lines and could get wherever.

That is not what Occam's razor says and is a very complicated, explanation anyway.

> the teaching of mathematics primarily as a language to describe everyday life more accurately

What does this refer to? And how would it affect physical sciences and biology?

It might be true but it is a shallow truth if so. 100% of engineers need to learn elementary algebra even if only 25% of engineers "use" it, for a variety of strong reasons.

Programming is a more interesting issue. If this blog had argued that computer science should be marginalized within software engineering then he might have found something to say (but which has already been said many times by others).

No, you can't actually figure out whether a cancer therapy worked by counting the number of articles published in a given year. You're focused on this "zero-knowledge" approach because you are completely ignorant about this topic, not because it is actually a more powerful approach.

If you don't even know whether spontaneous remission is rare then you should not be offering an opinion about this. It's not even pertinent because these remissions were clearly not spontaneous, but it should alarm you to have spoken so recklessly about a disease which is essentially fatal. What you're saying amounts to "there's a good chance cancer just goes away on its own". Incidentally, this is also the least amount of math I've ever seen in a napkin math argument.

This analysis is mindless and inappropriate. If you care about this at all do yourself a favor and just read the study.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2201445

Otherwise redo your napkin math and cursory search to answer, specifically, whether all these cancers disappearing within weeks of dostarlimab treatment could be a fluke. And do not compare this to "rectal cancer's rate of survival", which is irrelevant and a completely different set of (parametrized) statistics, and also do not compare it to the total number of "cancer studies", which was an arbitrary choice and yielded this meaningless conclusion. Even if this kind of analysis was useful, why did you compare against the number of cancer studies, rather than rectal cancer (1910), or dostarlimab (41), or studies with the same staging and genetic pathology? It's meaningless.

I don't believe you're qualified to tell anyone about the significance of this study, and much less dismiss it as a fluke.

Not meaningfully. Physicists can roughly calculate how much energy will be liberated inside the reactor over its power, or a laser's efficiency, but not (for example) whether their grant money will be available in 2 years, whether oil and gas reserves will open up, in general how much oil and gas are available on Earth, the atmospheric budgets, whether some (un)friendly political group will gain influence, etc.

So sometimes innovations don't work because of things like economics, geoscience, politics, funding, and other times it's fair to say that it's the physics that doesn't play. It communicates more by using an accurate word, while "everything is physics" communicates nothing at all?

Thank you. It's very easy to criticize mainstream media culture, many people make a career out of it now, but it's not in itself productive. To the degree that it's more than a cheap way for writers to gain influence, they'd do better by spending the same time either contributing to the "counter culture" or telling its stories.

That culture has definitely taken root in some ways, but I wouldn't count on it during a downturn. The idea is what will the hiring/candidate pools look like in a tech recession, so a premise is that many people who can presently get an engineering job then cannot. There are so many software programming jobs right now that the market created bootcamps to fill the demand, but it's not like mature engineers necessarily have fewer interpersonal skills, and suddenly there are many more of them all trying to get jobs.

If fallacies worked then everyone would use them, but they don't, so nobody uses them!

We were taught date structures by a Unix fundamentalist, entirely with C and makefiles. He absolutely despised "Micro$hit", and emails containing any format other than text/plain, but helpfully offered that he could receive email sent from emacs. We worked with some kind of perl-based VCS that I forget the details of.

You're saying students are no longer taught all this??

Levity aside, I do have rosy memories of that course (taken around 2009). It taught me well, though I can see how it probably put a lot of people off, maybe even causing them to abandon programming.

It sucks for these people, but as you say, they did something insane with their money. I agree with everyone else here who's recommended you speak to a lawyer and then back away. It might be uncomfortable because you (or they) seem fairly conscientious, but you won't change much anyway. Some people might withdraw and then do some other very risky thing with the money. Or maybe you trigger the service immediately closing shop with no withdrawals. Moreover, organized crime is alive and well in this area. Don't assume that because this is an online scam they are not connected. From the sound of it there are millions of dollars at stake for them, and at most a nagging feeling for you saying you should have done something. Or maybe making a name for yourself. In any case it's not worth it. Calling out a random unregistered Russian crypto "business" that people already know is shady won't do anything.

I see, thanks. I hope you're wrong.

Why would they? There are 8 million Russians living in the country, and close social ties besides. Putin consistently lies and says 80% of the population is Russian and that Ukraine is Russia. Plus the fact that Russian people are generally not psychopathic murderers, the invasion could only be acknowledged as a limited operation, they depend on the world and European economies, the military destroyed other countries/regions far away from NATO and then had no need for the atom bomb either... yes I think there's room for doubt.

I don't know whether MIRVs, each carrying a dozen or so atom bombs, compare to HGVs like the Amiga does to the iPhone. I'd like to say absolutely not but I can't. Either way calling ballistic missiles "obsolete" is incomprehensible to the dead.

SSSHHHHHHHH we need more atom bombs! Raytheon has what we need!

Honest question, how would you describe MAD as being practical? Bearing in mind that the treaties to maintain it were abandoned, and both sides invest (and act) heavily in rocking the boat?

> Russia is thought to have an HGV in its arsenal.

> ..

> But the Kinzhal, as a variant of the Iskander SRBM, is not an HGV

A ballistic missile could be within a few hundred miles of any point near the coast and be there in less than 5 minutes. You're saying this is "trivial" to intercept, what does that mean?

Planetary "carrying capacity" is not at all well defined. It depends on too many things like natural developments (think year 536), how the economy is organized, and powered, where and how many nukes have exploded, the quality of life, unforeseeable technological and scientific developments, dynamical ecosystems, ... So I'm curious what you mean by it? And how can you declare there's "basically no risk" when we still have superpowers with atom bombs going to war?

Sure, it's merely an idea that is believed, like the Greeks believed that the night stars were heros, or Galileo that Jupiter had satellites, or Newton that F=ma everywhere and that God had set up the solar system.

Some of these theories work, others don't. Nobody had a truly solid reason to believe them before it was clear they worked (in the case of those that did). Scientists all believe things they have no strict reason to -- when they're wrong they're wrong, and when they're right it's a scientific discovery.

Planck had no reason to postulate the energy packets when he came up with them. He described it as a move of pure desperation. The explanation (such as it is) for why this worked wasn't developed until decades later.

I don't personally believe Turing machines reveal much about the human brain, but you're verging on a more general claim about how science should be performed. That to hypothesize, work within a model, or even get something out of it you need to already have a precise description of the phenomenon being described and "why" the model might work. None of that is required though.

To be clear this all applies much less to "bread and butter" science. What we're faced with here is a process that has no convincing description.

To convince people to give up on computational models of the brain you need to convince them that it doesn't work. Nothing has been revealed by it in 60+ years. It's never predicted anything. Neurobiology and pharmacology at least have some results to show about a real brain. What you're basically engaging in instead is philosophy -- "pure" math is distinct from the empirical world, what if the whole universe, science requires this specific method, ... But it's better if we can dismiss a scientific idea on scientific grounds, rather than philosophical considerations.

If we could formalize "observe the result" we would, and it would require exchanging energy with the computer, breaking its conservation. The only way to avoid it is to say that we were always a part of the computation, but things seem to get very odd from there.

You mention elsewhere that the whole universe might be construed as a computation in which energy is conserved. Why not take the absurd reduction for what it is though, and conclude that it means there's something wrong with calling anything-at-all a computer?

I find that plausible, but I am a layman. At the very least there's no evidence that the scales can be separated, because despite all attempts a brain in an organism is the only thing recognized as showing "intelligence".

What you describe seems very similar to what's happening in an ecosystem. Our understanding of ecology is maturing though while these fields seem not to be. We have made very impressive calculators of course, and I don't mean to minimize them per se -- mainly people are just reckless with their claims.

It an interesting connection, I think, that natural selection is the only other process that is arguably doing something intelligent. This is a controversial idea and might well be wrong, but I don't believe that's proven merely by the fact that some key mechanisms have no intrinsic "goal".

I agree that the language is imprecise, and (especially for what I just said) has misleading connotations that are unfortunate...

I'm really curious to learn more about the processes you've alluded to and their relations, if you can recommend any reading or care to elaborate.

What did you mean by "computation" then? Honestly curious, because it seems you could also say a digital computer does it at all scales: semiconductor junctions, capacitors, clocks, their multipliers, transistors, up through logic gates, blocks, buses, ..., and all the way out to the fans, power supply, etc?

I understand that. I was responding to the idea that hardware tokens like yubikey, in fact all alternatives to passwords, are too complicated for regular people to understand. And also saying that multiple options, to accommodate different people/scenarios, are fine and don't have to be complicated from the user's perspective. By way of analogy (admittedly I didn't make that very clear).