stanfordkid

So basically it's an Orwellian surveillance tool that justifies it's own existence based upon remnants of an unjust war on drugs created by Nixon? I'm so sick and tired of Palantir's advertising tactics of doing good.

We should enable the government to create massive databases of peoples lives and communication, then link those ... so that we can stop kids from doing ecstacy or "catch terrorists".

Give me a break. Palantir is basically like PRISM ... except it came out of the minds of Silicon Valley (from whom I would expect much more) ... than the NSA/CIA

It's easy to condemn this from afar sitting in a super-power democracy, in the ivory tower of free speech. Countries like Turkey, Syria, Egypt etc. are in the middle of geo-political chess games with propaganda coming from Russia, militant groups, militias, rebels etc.

Look at what happened with the Arab spring in Egypt... after the leaders fell, even worse parties and fundamentalist strongmen came in. It was lauded as a democratic revolution until the muslim brotherhood came in. Same shit happened in Syria -- now it's devastated.

There is so much outcry over TikTok being adopted in masse within the United States -- this isn't really that different. Facebook invests a lot of resources fighting fake news in the US -- I doubt it puts any efforts into propaganda (nor has the ability) that is spread in a place like Turkey.

The way to think about these countries behavior is -- imagine foreign governments were sending the KKK $100 of millions along with weapons across your borders. We got a taste of 1% of this with Russian interference -- but it is nothing compared to what happens in the middle east.

Wow. So basically they re-invented Xanax? :P

Joking aside, No way there is any chance that you would stick this in a human (huge potential for harm, no real clinical use case).

LSD is an insanely potent 5HT agonist, it seems highly unlikely any drug that is not "serious" would cause any significant reduction in LSD effects. Benzo's like Xanax can make the trip go in a direction that is less negative... but you are still tripping balls.

Things like multi-resolution font-rendering are actually more complicated than one might imagine.

The easy way is to just tesselate the font into polygons -- but this tesselation often depends on the zoom level. The same thing can be said about implicit curves etc.

Most libraries do use GPU's for basic draw operations (e.g rendering a gradient), but to build something like Photoshop -- you need much more complexity.

It's a paper on epidemiology, that utilizes econometric thinking. I understand the theoretician / empiricist divide very well. But I chose this paper to illustrate because it is very clearly aiming to impact immediate policy (it states this in the abstract). Furthermore it is not trying to create fundamental new theoretical models... but rather provide a justification for why lockdown is economically justified.

I hate to be the one to say this -- but most of modern economics is crap, given how reflexive it is. People know how the fed acts -- they know how policy makers act. The models don't take into account this reflexivity.

Someone like George Soros is a thousand times more savvy on how the economy works than post-docs publishing econometrics papers for $40k a year.

I think there is a different way of looking at it: how replaceable is he and what he has built?

The truth is -- most of Facebook's value comes from network effects, not the actual technology itself. If Mark Zuckerberg never existed, it is highly likely some other platform would have been created -- the knowledge and skillset he has is not that rare. many other platforms existed before Facebook to let you post pictures and chat with friends.

The problem is, that the assumption is not rooted in any empirical phenomena. They have neither historical data to fit to (which itself would be tenuous) nor do they have any sort of first order justification for it.

It's like doing a car crash safety simulation and stating that the airbag provides protective force "linearly proportional to the force of impact, with alpha > 1" ... without ever measuring it or doing any calculations on why this would be the case. Would you drive in a car that was tested this way?

Sure. But updating the equations doesn't change the outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment or make a ball fall up instead of down -- it simply converges on a more precise outcome.

I think the real problem is, is that the humanities -- the social sciences in particular -- have proven themselves to consistently build bad models with unproven assumptions. These assumptions have been leveraged to directly influence policy (instead of, say, trying a lot of different things and seeing what works).

Here's a concrete example of a paper [1] that just came out, attempting to impact COVID19 policy, from a very "respectable" set of academics at Yale -- that is based on a flat out fabricated economic model:

We focus primarily on the moderate scenario. That is, our baseline assumption is that diminishing returns play a larger role than accelerating returns (so that α ≤ 1) but not so large that they lead to α < 0. We stress that U depends both on the variation in economic value attached to different activities and on the model governing the disease transmission

Translation: we made some equations that makes the BAD thing BAD and the GOOD thing GOOD.

[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.19.20107045v...

Not really. The equations of quantum physics don't change by virtue of you observing them.

Have you ever lived next to a subway? This sort of black and white thinking is insanely reductionist

Wow. Pretty cool. Agree that it doesn't compare to high-performance native libs, but still a huge step up for the web and very professionally packaged!

This is why we need data breach laws -- to which dictated Terms of service's must abide. You can't write in a TOS "we have the right to kill you"... it should be the same way with data -- any changes to the scope of how and to whom data is accessible must be approved.

If we can have 60k deaths labeled "due to random fluctuations", as you seem to be claiming, why should there be mass panic and shutdown of all human activity from 90k deaths due to covid?

I don't mean to say that Covid is not a problem -- of course it is. But the response is not correct given the magnitude and nature of the problem.

To me it seems like massive government investment in protecting at risk populations is the answer.

4% of mortalities are <65, with ~1% mortality rate overall.

2017 flu had 60k deaths, despite likely undercounting.

As Nietzsche once put it: “insanity is rare in individuals, but common in the herd”

Roger Penrose is probably the most interesting thinkers on this problem, and I lead towards his conclusions -- that consciousness is a byproduct of biology -- not intelligence or computation.

Highly recommend his book Shadows of the Mind -- it's on my list. In summary he believes that consciousness isn't a by-product of computation done by neurons (the traditional view), but rather quantum level effects created by MAP proteins within the brain as a result of this computation:

But perhaps the most interesting wrinkle in Shadows of the Mind is Penrose's excursion into microbiology, where he examines cytoskeletons and microtubules, minute substructures lying deep within the brain's neurons. (He argues that microtubules--not neurons--may indeed be the basic units of the brain, which, if nothing else, would dramatically increase the brain's computational power.) Furthermore, he contends that in consciousness some kind of global quantum state must take place across large areas of the brain, and that it within microtubules that these collective quantum effects are most likely to reside.

Might this just be the parents responding to the stimuli of each others presence? E.g let me think about whether or not he/she will pick them up or should I do it. It makes sense that both parents would think this. In the situation where they are alone, such a computation does not need to be done by the brain.

There is no way to actually characterize the thought processes using these imaging methods. No where does this implicate that the actual actions or thoughts specifically relating to the child are any different. This makes the conclusion much less interesting.

Peter Thiel talks about how the "4-year degree" has obtained a similar status within the United States.

I think private equity has a large role to play in this. It's sad to me that people point the finger at innovative companies like Amazon, when the real culprits are people who just finance and gut medium size companies you've never heard of in order to eat up the margin that was previously going to workers and extract it for themselves and their LPs.

True. But how much did the productive output of the average American increase? Can we really expect things to "always increase" -- including wages? To me this seems like an absurd idea.

The end goal should be improving the median quality of life, through improving the efficiency of factors of production -- lower cost of goods... not through the expectation that the wages should arbitrarily grow linearly with GDP.

I agree that a citation is needed ;)

But in this case I think the case history points to OP being right, though you'd likely have to have a pretty egregious and clear pattern of such activity, and it would have to be deemed material information:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-sec-capitalone-insidertra...

I think we will soon find that what really makes us "human" is the shared chemo-biological composition of our selves with the rest of the ecosystem and evolutionary hierarchy.

When you cuddle a puppy you can actually smell the infant hormones on them... why... because we share evolutionary biology. How do you teach a computer to do that?

You can think of the body as "data" and the brain as nothing more than a database that let's you query it. AI might give a better database... but until it gets the same chemo-informatic data... well good luck.

Agreed, The "data" being used to generate real human music is the human condition ... so anything trained on a featurized low dimensional representation of that will ultimately be derivative.

Image and sound are ultimately related to feeling ... and it is those feelings that give us humanity -- not the ability to think and manipulate symbols (though that was not apparent to me until this current AI revolution)

Look, human nature is to actually amass wealth without creating value. We are lucky we live in a society where value creation and wealth acquisition are at least tangentially related.

The problem in my opinion is not that a single person gets so much wealth, but rather what they receive the wealth for. Amazon just made life easier for the masses to consume goods. IMO someone like Einstein deserves a lot more money and someone like Bezos less. The people inventing the actual science that then enables something like Amazon don't really get compensated -- and perhaps they should.

From a legal perspective, isn't the burden of communicating privacy to the customer on the website/content provider, not Stripe?

Stripe.js is an API -- developers use this API to build something used by their customers. The customer is the one who's data is being collected, and the developers are the one's facilitating that collection via their service. The fact that it got sent to Stripe is not really relevant to who bears responsibility on clarifying data rights to the customer.

I'll add that this high rate is mirrored in several countries doing anti-body tests on blood donors (though one could argue blood donors are a self-selecting group):

>In this sample 11% has antibodies and the test detects 70-80% of people with antibodies. So, that leaves us with 14.6% immune. With a population of 2,377,081, that means 347053 people would be immune in Stockholm now, for an IFR of 0.27%.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g4znbg/at_least_11...

Totally... no one is saying that we get off scot-free if we stop quarantine. The quarantine can't last forever, and the virus at some point will spread... so even if you are at-risk if you don't get it now you might get it 6 months from now -- unless of course, younger folks get out there and build herd immunity.

Wow -- really enjoyed the write up by Balaji S. -- I had heard about these flaws earlier, but didn't realize how great they really were.

I still maintain the gist of my point though -- we don't have sufficient evidence for widespread quarantine. New York and Italy are outliers, and should be understood as such. Even if the results are 5x or 10x instead of 50x -- it still means decisions were made on grossly inflated worst case data.

As we do serological testing, it is being revealed that the death rate was even lower than previously imagined -- potentially by a factor of 50x [1].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01095-0

Most places (outside of super dense metros) actually don't need quarantine at all. Maybe for people working in eldercare.

With these new statistics the risk of death for those <65 is about the same as the normal risk of random death through other circumstances over the course of 2 months.

A project like this could be the space race of our epoch!