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Quality does pay off, however.

You could say that the entire selling point of Apple is that it's better quality than the competitors (even though it's still pretty bad if you compare it to a bicycle).

I guess it's more difficult to spot quality when it comes to software. I would definitely pay for high quality software. It's just that usually the crap quality of a software I'm using only shows slowly over time in little bugs and bad usability and there's no way for me to check for it beforehand.

Same observation from Finland. Additionally, being even slightly drunk in front of children has become very no-no. I recently had a small gathering of other families with children at my home and I made the mistake of offering them some beers. Everyone declined and the looks I got were the same as if I had offered them crack cocaine.

I don't think it's all good, though, since a lot of social events that were previously facilitated by alcohol just disappear. Like who the fuck actually enjoys acquantainces' children's birthdays without a beer or two? Turns out people suck at socialising without alcohol, and if alcohol disappears, people just stay at home and play video games or something.

It's funny how people talk about "teaching" getting more difficult with LLMs.

Clearly teaching got a lot better, since we now have a new teaching tool at our use, the LLMs. It's evaluating that got harder, because students can use the same tool to cheat in traditional forms of evaluation.

If "teaching the students" means the same as "evaluating the students" to you, maybe you shouldn't teach in the first place.

> Besides, a lot of non-fiction just isn't that great. Many books should have been a blog post. These books are rarely a rewarding experience for me, unless it's from a rare combo of historian and good writer.

Many non-fiction books are essentially PR material for the author. They don't write these books, because they have interesting thoughts that are too complicated and long for a blog post, but because their career plan involves being some kind of a public intellectual and writing a book is a part of that. They often have a single idea, that in itself might be an interesting one, but it's simple enough that it could indeed be entirely fleshed out in a blog post or an essay rather than a book.

I read a bunch of pop psychology books (by supposedly respectably authors who were academic researches on this stuff) on child development when my kids were in that age. Weirdly, the author of this leaves out a completely relevant variable from the discussion: the child's age.

As far as I recall from my readings, daycare might be harmful for very small children (around age 2 and below), who are still very attached to their mothers. Above that, it is a matter of how large the group size is and how professional the daycare teachers are. Children below the age of 6 or so benefit from very small groups, because they don't yet have the social intelligence to navigate multi-person interactions. All children left on their own tend to develop anti-social behavioural patterns (such as taking toys from other by force, etc.), and a qualified daycare professional is supposed to watch for and weed out that kind of behaviour.

Do you personally buy everything from the telemarketers? If not, how do you find the products you want to buy?

There doesn't need to be any kind of technical solution. If a telemarketer wants to sell something, they must declare the name of their company. The company name can be reported to police (or whatever authorities are going to handle this) who can then fine the telemarketers.

Again and again nerds coming from maths/CS/etc to finance are surprised to find that financial time series are actually impossible to predict. After spending almost a decade in finance now with a similar background, the arrogance of the "let's just throw in some neural network/whatever and be done with it" attitude now amuses me. After all, if it was easy - or even possible with any kind of effort - to predict (even within some error margins or probability) what the stock prices are tomorrow, anyone doing it would quickly become a billionaire or trillionaire. If the person could keep doing it, at some point they would own enough of the stock market so that their actions would affect the prices and whatever pattern they found would vanish.

Financial markets are not a natural phenomenon that exist unchanged regardless of whoever is observing them. Their dynamics continuously change in response to collective actions of all of the humanity.

Oil price changed quite a bit when the US attacked Iran. If you are trying to predict the price of oil, your model would have to be able to predict Trump ordering an attack on Iran. Does your model include a full simulation of the mind of the president of the United States (and every other person who have any kind of impact on the world events)? If not, then your time series forecasts are not going to be that great.

World is full of empty houses. It's just that people want to live in New York and not in some other place where housing is cheap or, occasionally, even free. And New York is already pretty full.

That's how it was maybe 100 years ago. Now PhD is just another bit of school work. Sometimes people manage to do really great PhD work, but most of the time it's pretty mediocre or straight garbage.

In some ways, people doing research now have it way more difficult than people of the past. They have hundreds of years worth of research to study before they are on top of things and making an original contribution that stands out among the huge amount of research that already exists is really hard. If we want to keep PhD as a proof of meaningful work, then we ought to lengthen the graduate studies considerably. How about a 10 year PhD program, at the end of which you can really say you have mastered the field?

In other words, Meta (excepting maybe the bought departments) has become just like any other traditional mega-corporation. Ugly, inefficient and disorganized, but terribly good at doing the one thing that makes it money.

> I know exactly when it happened: when people stopped buying software.

Things are not, however, much better for software that people actually buy. That is, paid-for apps in Android and Apple app stores.

I'm forced to use the Microsoft ecosystem at work and the sluggishness of it is a major source of procrastination. I find myself putting off small tasks forever, because waiting for word files to open, browsing folder structures in Teams, etc. are all mildly painful experiences. I suspect a lot of people do this, and maybe all of them don't even realize why they are doing this. The effect of sluggish user interfaces on overall productivity is probably well underestimated.

The same goes to some extent to anything with a web interface, for example Databricks.

I was wondering what the hell people here are talking about. Then I saw that my country (Finland) is number one on that list.

Indeed, my children (3 and 5 year old) run freely around the half hectare communal yard of my housing company (which includes 12 apartments). Almost all kids here go to school by themselves either by walking or by bike, starting at the age of seven. I also see kids around this age playing without adults in groups on streets and parks all the time.

City planning gets a lot of shit here, but apparently we did something correctly. It might also have something to do with cities here being generally safe. I'm probably just as concerned about my children's safety as parents in any country, but it just isn't that scary out there.

> Academic integrity committees at prestigious schools are horribly lax. They want these types of issues to go away quietly.

Yes, because the working model is that the students are there because they want to learn. And they are paying for the professors to teach them. If they cheat in classes, they are really just cheating themselves, and this should be no concern to the staff.

It's even worse when you live in a small country with high amount of immigration. Half of the new words are borrowed from other languages or internet memes and there's no way to decipher their meaning without looking it up.

> So many people these days spend hours watching short-form videos spray endlessly from a screen while they stare dumbly at it. They aren't even picking which videos to watch, just letting the algorithm do it.

This is how TV broadcasts also work, though. You could even argue there's an algorithm behind TV broadcasts too - it's just a kinda poor human-run algorithm trying to maximize viewer numbers.

Unlike many people, I still often watch TV broadcasts to relax for exactly this reason - there's no decision fatigue since I don't need to choose what to watch. Usually there's only one channel with something that's even remotely interesting and it's kind of an obvious choice.

I feel this more and more as I age. Especially after having children.

I used to be a "tech guy" (like most people here probably) and was excited about new technology. Now my main feeling when something disruptive (like AI currently) comes up is: "why the hell do people need to rock the boat".

The thing is, I'm perfectly happy living my life as I have been living so far, concentrating on doing stuff with my children and having fun. When the world changes, stuff I need to worry about it: is this going to affect my job in the future? What is the long term effect of exposing my children to this? Is the stuff I teach my children going to be relevant in the future after this disruption has happened?

I don't want to be forced to learn new stuff. I mean, I can learn new stuff occasionally for fun, but it's not fun if my life and salary depends on it. Fuck the tech bros trying to change everything up.

The only reason to buy Nintendo hardware is so that you can play Nintendo's exclusive games. In the past, I felt that it was worth it. In the recent years, there haven't been many good Nintendo releases, definitely not enough to justify buying Switch 2.

I feel that Nintendo should really become just a software company. All consoles are converging towards using more or less similar PC hardware anyway, so having your own hardware platform doesn't seem very useful anymore.

It's just due to one person (GabeN) holding majority of the stock and choosing to run the company this way. Gabe will retire or die at some point and then anything might happen.

I gave the same prompt to Gemini pro. It thought for maybe 3-5 minutes and gave the wrong answer (it claims the statement is not true) with some arguments that I can't understand well enough to disprove.

> “Guys whose job it is to sell astroturfed viral marketing campaigns really love to tell people that their astroturfed viral marketing campaigns are extremely effective.”

Here it is.

I recall a story of a digital marketing team using Google sponsored link clicks as a metric for how well their stuff was working. Turns out that people just switched to clicking the sponsored link instead of the same link on regular Google results. The only thing achieved here was that the marketing team gave some money to Google.

I have never been even close to anything marketing related, but I'd assume that measuring its impact is highly non-trivial in the statistical sense. Also, only the companies selling marketing even have access to the relevant metrics and they have an incentive to exaggerate the results (sometimes maybe even internally).

"The Wire" TV show portrays these things well. In it, the powerful people often have the least clue about anything. They are just playing the game and often winning by sheer luck. They also often do fuck up, but because they are powerful, are able to get other people to take the hit for them or build a narrative that hides the fuck up.

The older I get, the more I think that this TV show is actually the most realistic portrayal of how the real world works there is.

There can also be an argument that laws are always only an approximation, and they should be broken in corner cases where they clearly don't work as intended.

Civil disobedience can also be a useful societal force, and with perfect law enforcement it becomes impossible.

We've had the AI tools for maybe two years, and they have only gotten really good in the past half a year or so. For fuck's sake, adopting electricity took like 50 years, why would you expect to see any kind of effect from the AI so quickly? The tools are still developing - rapidly - and people are still figuring out the best usage patterns for it.

If Meta wins this, does it mean that pirating becomes legal again?

Sympy is part of SageMath. SageMath is just a kind of user interface to Sympy and a bunch of other Python libraries. Mathics I haven't tried.

I used to be a university researcher in theoretical physics and, in that field, everyone uses it, but I suppose that would count as "very specific math research" Any kind of complex integrals, systems of equations, etc. and Mathematica is invaluable, and, as I said, so much ahead of Sympy.

You could do stuff other than theoretical physics research with Mathematica, though. I has a lot of functionality and I always felt that I used only a tiny fraction of it.

I've had the same idea. Especially regarding anxiety. You start getting anxious and scared of everything, because your brain knows that your body is out of shape and incapable of dealing with stuff if anything happens. If you can't deal with any problems, then you must constantly be on lookout for them so that you can avoid them.

Every major technological invention nowadays quickly breeds open source clones that evolve to be on par with the commercial ones on some time scale. Why hasn't this happened to Wolfram Alpha/Mathematica? I know there's Sympy, but it's so far behind Mathematica that it's not even comparable. Is the heavily mathematical nature of the tool somehow an insurmountable obstacle to the open source community?