vladTheInhaler

The Grid was by reservation. Bourbon and Branch is still open (or was before COVID). It has a whole song and dance routine to get into its special rooms [1]. I've only been to the "regular" bar.

[1] https://www.thrillist.com/drink/san-francisco/the-tenderloin...

There are at least two that I can think of in SF. Bourbon and Branch has bookcases inside bookcases, and The Grid was hidden behind an arcade machine.

As usual, it's difficult to take statements by Russian officials at face value. Russia has been demanding more funding for its continued participation, relief from sanctions etc. And meanwhile, their Nauka module threatened to spin the whole station apart last month. So is this intended to support their haggling efforts, or deflect blame for state of the station? I have no idea. But I wouldn't count on Russian officials for an unbiased technical analysis, that's for sure.

Well the ISS orbits at R_earth + 400 km. So it wouldn't be nearly as bad as that number makes it sound.

I give your argument a B-. Not for any particular reason. I just felt like it. Was that a good use of your time?

Many different groups have mutually conflicting expectations about what grades are supposed to be for. But one thing I think students, teachers, and prospective employers would agree on is that they should be rooted in some measure of performance or ability. Otherwise they serve no socially beneficial purpose at all. What is the point in taking a calculus exam if you'll just get 0/100 because the professor doesn't like your handwriting?

To elaborate a bit on what another commenter said, the Republican party's whole premise is that government is bad, and we should have less of it. Since they are the government, it is easy to obstruct and oppose any attempt to actually help people. Essentially, the worse a job they do running the country, the more compelling their platform becomes. So yes, I really do think some Republicans are worried that the government might do too good of a job.

As another poster indicates, that's specifically not the case. Most possible arithmetic problems of reasonable size aren't anywhere in the dataset, but it can solve them with pretty good accuracy.

Are you maybe referring to the alternative formulation described in [1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter#Information_filt...

Here is a proposed high-speed rail system with a route across Nebraska: https://www.vox.com/2021/3/10/22303355/gen-z-high-speed-rail...

> All things that are not needed.

> There is some need for that.

I see.

> Trains should never serve food or drink. Passengers can get off the train at a station.

There aren't going to be stations all across Nebraska or what have you. And even if there were, stopping repeatedly would defeat the purpose of high-speed rail. All that time speeding up and slowing down starts to add up very quickly.

I'm going to need you to unpack that a bit. Isn't interacting with an environment and observing the result exactly what natural cognition does? What area of machine learning do you feel is closer to how natural cognition works?

Over the very long term. But that's because people who get more deadly forms tend not to create as many new cases on account of them being dead. The long term trend isn't very comforting for those people, I imagine.

If we had simulations that could tell us how contagious a disease would be just from its genome, that would be earth-shattering. But since we don't that's not really the sort of question a simulation can solve. But I think it should be concerning that at least two related coronaviruses (SARS and MERS) turned out to have very high fatality rates in humans.

This raises a point that I have been pondering for a while.

When we are living in a "state of nature" we have a very small circle of concern, mostly around things like finding enough food, avoiding predators, and creating shelter. Having correct opinions about these subjects is a matter of life and death. But when we introduce society things get kind of unbalanced.

We start getting information about all kinds of events from outside our immediate surroundings, which is really exciting to the "opinion having" part of our brains. But we aren't really accountable for those opinions - we won't die if we think the moon landing is fake, or Obama is a lizard-person. So it allows for a lot of "mental rot" to accumulate unchecked.

The beliefs that have the most direct impacts on us are still heavily constrained though. Stuff like "My boss will fire me if I stop coming to work" or "I will be hungry later if I don't buy groceries" etc. largely keep society functional. But we don't actually have any sort of consensus reality - we just think we do because people's crazy beliefs don't usually impinge on the public sphere. And without any evidence to the contrary, we just sort of assume other people think roughly what we do.

But with issues like COVID-19, suddenly everyone's crazy opinions about which secret society is using 5G to control our minds actually matter a great deal. And as society becomes more interconnected, those things will matter more and more. How can we solve collective action problems like climate change or pandemic response when we can't agree on basic facts about the world? It seems possible that "society" as a whole might be an unsustainable condition. It can last long enough that we become dependent on each other, but then it destroys itself because of that interdependence.

There are a few issues here.

1) COVID-19 is not a static, singular disease. Now that it is circulating widely in the human population it has the potential to mutate, as it already has several times. SARS had a mortality rate on the order of 10%. MERS was above 30%. Part of the miscommunication seems to come from camp 2 assuming that things will largely continue as they are, while those remaining in camp 1 are saying "If we let this keep going, things could get much worse".

2) What about people who aren't healthy and young? Do we just permanently shut immunocompromised people out of society?

3) Developing a vaccine is not the same as actually getting the population vaccinated, as the last six months have demonstrated. Nobody in camp 1 wants society to stay locked down for its own sake. If 99% or even just 80% of the population was vaccinated, I think you would find a huge majority of camp 1 move to camp 2. Unfortunately the attitude of camp 2 has turned out to be the biggest obstacle to actually getting that done.

I wonder if there is a way to poison an oil well, so that it becomes un-economical to purify. Chemical separation is obviously what the whole petrochemical industry is about, so maybe something like injecting radioactive material. Then you pay the well owner to poison and seal off their well.

I was interested in a build like this a few years back, but I was put off by the price of the sensors. Seems like not much has changed, unfortunately.

My understanding is that some systems, for instance in Germany, have a system like this. The employees have elected representatives on the board of directors, giving them a direct say in corporate policies.

> There's no good (or even sub-par) reason(s) to remain in the ME any more.

The United States never should have involved itself in Afghanistan. But we did. As far as I am concerned, we created a moral obligation to the people of Afghanistan. I'm not a military strategist, so I don't know what steps, if any, would be necessary to let the Afghan government be independent. But abandoning them after spending two decades promising democracy, equal rights for women, etc. is a complete betrayal.

The example you're thinking of is actually in gridworld [1]. As you allud to, one of the parameters of the model is the cost of simply being alive for an additional time-step. If the cost is negative (a reward), then the agent will just sit there forever and accumulate infinite points. If it is zero, it might still just sit there to avoid falling into the hole, which has a large penalty and ends the simulation. As you turn up the dial on the cost of living, the agent starts using more and more aggressive strategies to reach the goal quickly. But if you make it too big, it will just jump in the hole.

[1] https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs188/fa18/assets/slides/lec...

Okay, 50% worse or something I could maybe buy, but 1000%? You're giving a single bureaucrat way too much credit. People always seem to believe that there was some magical time when San Francisco was an artist's refuge, and the rent was cheap, and there was no crime. I don't buy it. I was driving with my father a while back, and he pointed out the apartment where he used to live. And the spot down the street where the under-aged prostitutes used to hang out. Parts of the city have been a mess longer than anyone has been alive. Some are improving, some are getting worse. Let's not pretend that firing one person would somehow fix all of that.

I suspect that those riding without helmets might actually be cheaper to treat. If you survive an accident but get your foot degloved, and you need an amputation and a prosthetic and months of physical therapy, and then a hip replacement years later because of your messed up gait, that's a lot of taxpayer money. If you die on impact, treatment is much cheaper.

You might be interested in Peak, by Anders Ericson. The author mentions him briefly, but the book is well worth reading. He looks at the case of Benjamin Franklin, and some of the strategies he used. In brief, he found pieces of writing that he especially admired, and transformed them in various ways, then tried to reproduce the original from the transformed versions. The version that seemed the post practical was to create a cue for each sentence, and attempt to reproduce the original wording from the cue. Another was to scramble the sentences of the piece and try to put them back in what felt like the most logical order. These seem pretty mechanical and rote, but they tie into an overall approach Ericson lays out called deliberate practice.

Because it makes the point that congress is completely paralyzed on most major issues, largely because of of the filibuster. They are leaving it to the executive branch and the courts to effectively write the laws. This is an enormous systemic failure, and Democrats shouldn't be high-fiving because they kicked the can down the road a little way. Why do we even have a congress if they aren't going to actually legislate?

Except that Covid isn't just one disease, and immunity is a moving target. If you got the original variant back in February 2020, that may or may not protect you from a new variant with new mechanisms for evading/suppressing immune response.

Yeah, not surprising at all. When I interned there, there was a whole onboarding segment about network security that constantly made reference to a huge hack that had apparently happened and IIRC slowed their internal email system to a crawl with the sheer volume of phishing emails flying around. Everyone knew about it and was very embarrassed. And yet they would let us take our personal laptops in and out and connect to the network with no real oversight, because they didn't have the funds to give everyone their own machine.

I've seen both responses from people I know. One person has always been a bit of a workaholic, and used work as sort of a coping mechanism for anxiety. As one might imagine, they started working much much longer hours. Another person I know got in the habit of working from about 10 to 3 or so, to the point where I was worried for their job. I think the lesson is that people's relationship with work is just a highly individual, and people will have very divergent outcomes.

I mean there are a lot of questions that can be posed, but are computationally intractable to answer. Think of the traveling salesman problem. Or worse - the halting problem.

Wow, that story was so much more depressing than the title let on. I was hoping for some sort of work on allocating resources for contact tracing or something.

DeSantis has definitely made things worse by playing chicken with the cruise lines over vaccines.