wayn3

again, thats what theoretical physicists do. Someone makes a weird observation and your theory is left with a hole. You try to plug it.

They don't preach these things. Physicists don't run around preaching unprovable holy grail theories. They just make something up. Out of nothing. Because its their job. They need to come up with falsifiable theories that can be verified in lab experiments.

In order to do so, they HAVE TO hypothesize something. They can't just say "err dark matter right?". They have to say "there could be a particle with these properties, a mass of roughly X, producing a cross-section of Y when bombarded with tau-leptons etc.". That's just the scientific method.

Any physicist who postulates particles does that from a position of "it probably doesn't exist". The same way when you measure something to be faster than the speed of light, you assume that a cable is broken.

Then some journalist comes around saying "lol paper says weird particle exists, scientists are whack". That's annoying. But it happens.

If journalists wrote about CS the way they write about physics, the next time someone loses 2 BTC from their wallet, they'd claim that thats hard evidence of quantum computers being invented by north korea. Hypothetically plausible but as outlandish as permissible by reality.

weak bladder

Everything that has temperature emits electromagnetic radiation. Including clouds of dust.

And that's exactly what dark matter is.

Journalism misleads people very hard about physics research. Physicists dont run around claiming they've observed dark matter. That's the wrong direction. Physics has a problem with gravity because some things don't behave in such a way that makes theory agree with observation. Since we are talking about gravity here, we call the thing we are observing "matter". Simply because things that interact with gravity have historically been called matter. Because its "dark" in the sense that we can't see (observe) it, its called dark matter. As a placeholder for something that has not yet been explained.

Then journalists come around and spin this tale about how physicists have found this super magical stuff called "dark" "matter" and its so exotic if you dropped it onto des moines it'd turn the place into honolulu.

Dark Matter is just the placeholder name for an observation that disagrees with conventional theory.

Thats not even a viable argument. You know how long things take. Assuming that thats true, what do you do about it? Something took significantly longer. What are you gonna do about it? Fire them?

Not having a paper trail is increasingly seen as a positive.

What does my paper trail get me? Evidence to be spun into a scenario that justifies firing me if the wind ever blows the wrong way.

this does not sound like wolframalpha at all.

wolframalpha is computer algebra software turned into a web service which allows for searching some papers, pre-written articles and a bunch of interesting, curated numbers.

wolframalpha provides qualitative answers to "questions about math".

answering the physics problem "whats the speed of light" with "er its fast" is qualitative. saying its 2.99+/- epsilon 10^6 km/s is a quantitative result based on data gathered from some experiment.

answering the search engine problem "whats the speed of light" with "2.99+/- epsilon 10^6 km/s" is not a quantitative result. in a search engine contexts, thats just the most likely correct result . qualitative. just a guess. some computer looked at a bunch of data and decided that one of them was probably right based on some popularity heuristic. its like asking an expert who makes an educated guess and claims its right because seniority.

a quantitative search engine would be capable of answering questions like "how many sites do X".

wolframalpha doesnt do that. its just maple in a browser.

Ev Williams is trying to save the world with a blogging platform that is slightly better than blogger.

Meanwhile Elon Musk is over there being a selfish little bitch keeping all the cool toys to himself.

google provides qualitative answers. what would be really neat was a search engine that provides quantitative answers or raw data.

i'd like to be able to search google for "all the pages that contain a particular javascript snippet", for example. obviously, google has that data. obviously, they dont want to make it available.

there are services that offer such things but they suck because their datasets are way too small.

on google specifically: the results pages dont matter anymore. nobody clicks anything but the "#1 results" if they click even that. for questions, google very often responds with something like a quora question or some widget of its own, or something else that is really useful - and if its not useful, you try another query instead of clicking through the results pages.

results pages are mostly kept for nostalgia it seems.

Can you please be in my base teaching me how to refactor my code?

I do mostly contract work.

I have a line item called "distress surcharge" that is charged to clients who want to bother me with being in the office. Effectively doubles my rate. Helps them quit being silly.

Maybe the fact that they are not operating the company. They maybe have a board seat. They can use that vote to get rid of the CEO and hire a new one. That CEO can then decide to give them access to files.

CEOs of delaware corps have to do whats in the best interest of the company. It is probably not in the best interest of the company to reveal documents to a shareholder for the purpose of being successfully sued by that shareholder.

Its probably entirely impossible for a random investor to demand shit.

An artificial pancreas can solve a lot more problems than just type 1 diabetes :)

I'm the first person to admit that if I was to run a company, I wouldn't allow people to work remotely only.

But as an employee, there's no way I'm going to drag my ass into an office ever again on a regular basis, when I can just as well work from exotic beachfront homes.

This is going to work out just like companies who cut compensation work out. You'll be left with the mediocre engineers and everyone who's able to choose to work remotely will eventually do so. If you don't permit that, you're left with the chaff.

Besides, isn't it kind of the managers job to help keep output in check? If my output was down I'd expect a friendly note telling me to quit slacking.

None, except for the very occasional glass of wine.

You mean there's a non-trivial number of patients who are prescribed opioids to essentially self-medicate at home because keeping them in the hospital until they're recovered is "too expensive" - who are then told to deal with their addiction themselves because no doctor felt the need to actually guide them through responsibly using their drugs?

Who are THEN told that they just can't get drugs anymore because now they're just filthy addicts. That's actually impressive. For a glorious nation like the united states of america. Borderline malice.

I'm not saying that everything has to be surgically repaired. Whatever the surgeons decide to do I'm cool with 99.9% of the time.

Its just that there are people who "should" have surgery who "can't" have it because money.

Another issue is that just because a doctor advises you to take opioids doesn't mean that you're not abusing them. Doctors tell you to do all kinds of things that are bad for you because they are the lesser evil. The prime example being chemotherapy.

The primary use-case of morphine-like substances is to treat acute pain. Taking any kind of opioid for prolonged periods of time leads to systemic adaptation and you end up an "addict".

Is there data on this? Probably. Depends on what you want data for. The fact that america is under-insured when it comes to healthcare is well-established fact.

I don't buy "people take opioids because their lives are lame" - because its bullshit. There are drugs that are way easier to acquire that provide a lot more "fun". You don't start on heroin and then switch to vicodin, either. A heroin addiction is treated with methadone.

If you want a really clean "feel awesome" high, you want a benzodiazepine like Lorazepam. I had a prescription for that once. Popping one of those pills, you smile from ear to ear within seconds and experience pure bliss. If you intentionally try to have negative thoughts, you just laugh harder because it feels so ridiculous. If you wanted to "trick" a doctor into prescribing those, faking the necessary symptoms is really simple.

The drug industry has a pretty good grasp on how to engineer drugs to do one specific thing really well without causing a bunch of secondary effects. Modern painkillers are good at dealing with pain, without turning people into loonies. But opioids are opioids and if you take them indefinitely, you mess with brain chemistry.

such laws generally don't apply to war. they don't even apply to soldiers.

an officer can order hundreds of soldiers to charge into certain death without repercussions - as long as the military goal he's trying to achieve is justifiable.

People take painkillers because they can't afford surgery.

Say you have a messed up disk in your spine. Surgery is tens of thousands of dollars. Getting a prescription for opioids from a primary care physician is a bit cheaper.

You don't see doctors in europe routinely prescribing hard pain killers because they try to fix the problem instead.

Healthcare in america is set up in such a way that hospitals just bill whatever and then have the lawyers argue over whats reasonable. That kinda works when youre part of the medicare system and their lawyers represent your side, but when youre on your own, you're suddenly in hospital recovering from major surgery, facing bankruptcy and have to hire a lawyer to tell the hospital to suck it.

So you just take the painkillers and hope for the best.

either that or they started a company when the hypetrain was around

In the case of paypal its not for tax purposes, but its still for money purposes.

Financial institutions tend to gravitate towards luxembourg. Favourable banking law and part of the EU etc.

maybe sign up for triplebyte and let them figure it out? nothing to lose

obviously. but they are only in ireland because it fiscally makes sense. there is no real reason for facebook to maintain a presence in the EU any more than they have to have a Seoul office to offer facebook services in south korea.

They are concerned about actual monopolies.

There are hundreds of messenger apps out there that roughly work the same way. If facebook suddenly charged $100/day for whatsapp, people would just use something different. Like Kik or whatever. Its true that those competitors dont really have market share. But thats not the point. They exist and are readily accessible. If facebook wants to shoot itself in the foot in trying to force its customers to use their competitors, thats just healthy competition.

Therefore, there's no real threat of a monopoly here. Facebook bought a network effect, not a monopoly.

Compare that to something like mobile carriers. If At&t buys verizon and spring or whatever they're called, there ARE no other options.

Antitrust laws are mostly about keeping market mechanics in tact. Facebook and Google cant really force anyone to use their products. If their products are too expensive, there are lots of competitors. That's why they want to get rid of net neutrality. Making it expensive to run competing services strengthens their position.

Because the european commission likely has no executive antitrust agency that would be capable of overseeing this.

I don't think its possible to HAVE any real consequences. Clearly they are american companies. Europe can't do a whole lot about shutting them down.

They could block them, if it wasn't for laws. But even if it was not for laws, who would really want to not have access to google?

To be real about any of this, the Internet is killing the concept of "jurisdiction".

Lufthansa the airline or Lufthansa Group?

i give a guy on twitch $25 a month because we are somewhat friends and he's struggling with money.

and I pay $40 a month for 400mbit internet which is neat.

there is no reason that python has to be the language of ML.

there is no reason that english has to be the language that is spoken when foreigners interact with each other. but somehow, it is. and it doesnt really change.

I guess the difference is that a bribe would go to an individual. As in - an individual would then be doing something that is in conflict with what the organization he's working for would otherwise do.

If you just "bribe" the organization, there's no conflict of interest. "We want to build this" "we dont want you to" "heres some money" "ok".

Its a bit like negotiating with the CEO vs. bribing a lone DBA about getting access to proprietary data.