It's interesting to see these unconventional solutions. Genetic algorithms evolving antenna design produce similar illogical but very efficient designs. Humans have a draw to aesthetic. Robots don't have such limitations.
60 karma · joined December 23, 2022
I find no use for this account anymore. It is no longer fun to participate in any discussion because I am never sure if I'll be a contributor or left marked dead.
I would recommend you do the same. Don't "transform" anything. Just sand down the rough edges of what you have and find a group of people who are okay with you as you are. You will be happier for it and far less stressed. If you're anything like me, you will become exhausted very quickly trying to be something you are, intrinsically, not.
Power and sample size are determined by numerous factors depending on the question under study. You could have N=10 be statistically powerful and N=1,000,000 be statistically meaningless. It depends ENTIRELY on the subject under study. More is not always better and in many cases completely unnecessary.
https://sphweb.bumc.bu.edu/otlt/MPH-Modules/BS/BS704_Power/B...
Here is a decent guide. You may wish to read it so you can learn when you can dismiss a study based on N. You never mentioned, did you back out the study numbers and determine the N=17 number was outside the range of statistical power? If so, would you mind posting your calculations?
The PATRIOT missile error (it wasn't a disaster) was more due to the handling of timestamps than just floating point deviation. There were several concurrent failures that allowed the SCUD to hit it's target. IIRC the clock drift was significant and was magnified by being converted to a floating point and, importantly, truncated into a 24 bit register. Moreover, they weren't "slightly off". The clock drift alone put the missile considerably off target.
While I don't claim that floating points didn't have a hand in this error it's likely the correct handling of timestamps would not have introduced the problem in the first place. Unlike the other examples given this one is a better example of knowing your system and problem domain rather than simply forgetting to calculate a delta or being unaware of the limitations of IEEE 754. "Good enough for government work" struck again here.
This would seem to me a situation that is easily exploited by an AI that generate plausible text. If you pack enough jargon into your paper you will probably make it past several layers of review until someone actually sits down and checks the math/consistency which will be, of course, off in a way that is easily detected.
It's a problem academia has in general. Especially in STEM fields they have gotten so specialized that you practically need a second PhD in paper reading to even begin to understand the cutting edge. Maybe forcing text to be written so that early undergrads can understand it (without simplifying it to the point of losing meaning) would prevent this as an AI would likely be unable to do such feat without real context and understanding of the problem. Almost like adversarial Feynman method.
The homeless problem (now renamed "experiencing homelessness" as if this is a cure-all) has reached such critical mass that hospital beds fill up with patients that have no ailments. How do they do this? I'm sure you know. A homeless person who is either withdrawing, or cold, or hungry, or just a nuisance will come into the ER and tell the attending that they are suicidal. At this point a bunch of alarms go off. At least here where I live this means they are issued a bed immediately ahead of nearly all other patients and subject to 24 hour monitoring. They can, depending on hospital load, be given free room and board for up to 72 hours before a psychiatrist is mandated to give them a cursory once-over before sending them back to the street. They'll be back next week, once again suicidal, and once again consuming more resources than they will ever in their life time put back in.
The hospital can do nothing because turning down one of them who is actually suicidal would damage the hospital. So, people with actual real problems are pushed even further to back or left to line the hallways on gurneys because a homeless person was mildly inconvenienced by their, in all likelihood, self-imposed suffering.
Your notes on primary care are spot on. That has been my experienced as a layman with medical family. I know what they are going through yet I still feel shortchanged and often ignored by my PCP. Private clinics are no better.
Price gouging should be stopped everywhere. The soda companies have taken full advantage of the pandemic and should be punished at the very least for colluding.
You have NDAs already. It's not like you're working for Lockheed with secret stealth aircraft knowledge where a non-compete might be a national security protection. It's a representation of the inequality of bargaining power. If I didn't take the job I would've been out another job for possibly months to reach my payscale (Staff). They are a representation of the scourge of the neo-liberal variety of capitalism. It's not true capitalism, it's actually neo-feudalism, and it's not the only symptom of it.
You will never get anyone in power to agree to make non-competes force payment of a stipend while you're under one. The powers that be have paid off congress. The fact the FTC even wants to look into this after decades of this abuse just demonstrates that fact further.
I've been using Linux forever in one form or another. It was tough in the Windows XP days (which is the most superior Windows distro to this day), but after Windows 7 released Linux came into it's own. I've had no problems running it on all sorts of hardware and gaming on it has gotten better since proton.
People are just set in their ways. Mac-people will mock Linux because they're the kind of people that will pay $1500 over marginal cost for a few extra pixels and some more color depth. Windows people will mock Linux because...it's not Windows. M1 is not cool enough to justify the cost. Once Windows started calling home every time I click something on my desktop it became too much for me to bear.
The reason is as you stated. When grandma goes to buy a budget PC it comes loaded with Windows crap. Their market penetration is deep and their budget is nearly endless. Based on my experience with Windows 11 demos I think Windows 11 will finally push people to look elsewhere. Either Macs, or a out-of-the-box Linux system. Until Linux natively supports Excel, however, I don't think it'll ever reach widespread corporate adoption. Windows and OS X are both moron-friendly as you can tell by their userbase. That's important when you're trying to sell something. It'll always be "people who know" vs. "people who think they know".
...what?
Python has it's faults. Most are handled by a good editor. I only switch from Python when I need something lower level. With Python a company gains:
1. Simple language with relatively low ramp-up time
2. Reasonably fast with proper tuning. I've been on projects processing impressive numbers of RPS built entirely in Python.
3. Comprehensions. You claim they are not sufficient. With them I rarely need to lambda anything. When I do I have `functools` to do any other work.
4. A massive ecosystem of libraries, resources, etc.
A company loses:
1. Projects become difficult to understand at a certain size. This is not properly addressed by even the proper use of MyPy.
2. Somewhat more involved testing process compared to it's contemporary - Ruby.
To compare apples-to-apples you can even look at the interpreters themselves. Python's mainline interpreter has been able to run CIRCLES around Ruby's for years now. I can understand using something like Go for systems level work, but there are few languages that give you so much for very little investment. Even dropbox was run entirely on Python for LONG time before it became too unruly. That's INCREDIBLE given the simplicity of the language.
What you use on your personal time is irrelevant. Your complaints apparently are not experienced by the swathes of companies switching from almost every language under the sun to Python. It's here to stay. At least until Go's ecosystem catches up to Python's. My belief is Go will be the only language to unseat Python at this point. Python will still be around as a "perl-replacement" for basically ever as far as I am concerned.
Now, screen time is implied to be negative. As it should be. Your average kid's screen time is not sitting at a terminal trying to puzzle out how to make a computer work. They are not sitting watching 8 hours of programming videos, or math videos, or Carl Sagan's cosmos. They aren't listening to audiobooks of war and peace. They are, quite literally, melting their brain with the videographic equivalent of cocaine. I am of the opinion parents these days who allow their kids unrestricted time on TikTok/Facebook/Youtube/etc are doing them a major developmental disservice. The entire social media machine is powered by designed-in-a-laboratory techniques to keep you locked in. If an adult, with all their life experience, cannot resist such temptations expecting a child to do the same is non-sensical. It's gotten far too easy to not only use a computer, but to become hopelessly addicted to content farms via the "always-on" new world. Kids just aren't being kids anymore.
Times were different back then. Some people may disagree, but the "nerd" kids 30 years ago were smarter, faster, and better than such kids today. No different than our grandparents having to be the same way back when. They had to be. Now, things are easier. For better or worse. The same technology that could've raised the new generation to be even better than us was instead co-opted by advertisers to hopelessly addict children and adults to what amounts to just a different form of pornography (which, coincidentally was ALSO harder for us to get...I digress). I guess this is more of a thesis on the state of the world than just computers...it's all related.
Frankly, co-sleeping with a baby is irresponsibility of the highest form. It may have worked for the GP but for every one that it works, another 100 show up to my family member's office or to the morgue. There's no conspiracy in why part of the "how to handle a baby" guidelines they give new parents is "never, ever, EVER co-sleep". Its far safer to assume that the new parent is not in the less-risky population and will in fact eventually cause their child's death.
This alone lends credence to their claims. To this date there has been no major breaches despite being a large target (albeit smaller than LP). Moreover, the fact that your vault is both password protected and locked behind a secret key is about as good as you can get in terms of commercially offered security.
That's not to say they couldn't be lying. But after careful evaluation I've gone to them and people much more experienced in security have also moved to them as well.
FWIW a "source code audit" or "making it open source" does not imply intrinsic security. You are putting far too much weight in either a firm to do the right thing with money, or the existence of sufficiently motivated OSS researchers mining what might be millions of lines of code. We still find bugs in the Linux kernel regularly despite it quite literally having tens of millions of eyes on it. What makes you think this would do anything more than assuage your fears through security kabuki? In fact, OSS while sounding nice introduces an entirely new attack vector that a company may simply not have the staff to mitigate. To use the Linux kernel once more vulnerabilities have been deliberately injected into the kernel more than once. There have been game breaking SSL bugs. Huge overflow problems, etc. I love OSS. It is not a panacea. Signal chose this model - it does not imply it is the best, the most practical, or the most secure.
Once it came to light they lost control of their vaults the calculus changed. In my memory this is the largest, most prolific breach in history. Every other breach of a major site pales in comparison. The only solution is to change password managers immediately (I went to 1password) and begin the process of changing everything and updating your security posture. Unfortunately, the hackers also have an insane amount of metadata on customers. So if you stored incriminating (either legally or socially) websites in there the hackers now have a lot of leverage to get you to bend the knee.
In summary, lastpass has been on the down slope for a long time. But it was easy to just accept this and work around it. This breach changed everything. It revealed their incompetence in full and woke a lot of people, including myself, up to just how hard it is to trust a company. It's just not enough anymore to have a big company slapped onto your logo (LogMeIn) and hope they provide the correct mitigations through experience. From now on I, and many people I know, will be carefully evaluating their choices with password managers, etc from now on. I don't think their CEO can be trusted especially with all the weasel words used in the disclosure and the timing of the disclosure. They showed no respect for their customers in either the aspect of security or disclosure. If you know nothing else about this breach that should be enough to get you and everyone you know to run.
I think most people dislike vegan food because vegans eat it. Not because of the food. Vegans have done a number on their appearance to the public. Most people seem to have the same experience: how do you know someone is a vegan? Don't worry they'll tell you! (and chastise you for wanting to eat a steak)
When I was in college every holiday, like clockwork, a brigade of vegans would descend on campus and hand out flyers explaining how problematic it was eating meat. You do that enough times and people just avoid anything associated with you out of spite.
My canine teeth tell a different story. Meat was eaten when it was available. Certainly they also ate berries and what not as cavemen. However, it wasn't like grug, or medieval grug, went out of their way to eat 3 square meals consisting of mostly vegetables. Grains, probably. But vegetables were often times as much of a luxury as meat.
"Beyond meat" etc are all poisons as far as I am concerned. To turn vegetables into a meat-like substitute requires some seance with dark magic. Their entire marketing gimmick is to compare it to Tofu. Tofu is minimally processed. Beyond meat and things like it are typically processed more than your average bag of potato chips.
Time isn't as available as it used to be when I was a kid. My brain still works the same though. Learning is learning.
I don't personally think the article was in any worse taste than the book. Just because someone cites studies doesn't mean they know how to relate data. There's two entire websites dedicated to this sort of fallacy, here (HN) and Reddit. Pop-sci is the most annoying part of the 21st century to me.
I'm not convinced anyone actually understands sleep. We know too little and we can die. Too much, and we can die too. "Just enough" is the answer but as far as I can tell no one can quantify what this even means. I sleep enough to be rested. This seems to be >= 6 hours a night. The book would insinuate that I'm going to die of all sorts of terrible diseases as a result. The book itself isn't good science and I don't think a criticism of such a broad-strokes painting of a complicated subject needs to be any more kind.
To address your greater point if there's any place where you can throw a rock and find bullshit it's nutrition and health "science". In fact, the industry is so rife with bullshit it's often difficult to tease out actual actionable data. More people need to directly criticize these people in such a fashion until they simply go away.
Any car running CANBUS is vulnerable to a potentially fatal attack. They have not resolved this. However, you also generally cannot avoid it. Even the base model Honda civic is vulnerable to attacks on the drive-by-wire system. In a less morbid sense, most modern cars cannot even be serviced at home without going to the dealer for a reset of whatever subsystem. ABS comes to mind.
I would not detract from an old car. A car 25 years old has 99% of the safety features of a modern car and, in good working order, will protect you just the same. Or maybe I just don't worry about it because the probability of anything greater than a minor fender bender killing you is pretty high even with modern tech.
There is no crunch right now if you have a degree and can program. Companies are tightening their belts and recruiters are not aggressively spamming you. This does not mean jobs aren't there. The only thing an environment like this changes for me is all extra expenses are cut hastily and I begin hoarding money.
Companies with infinite VC money are certainly slowing down hiring. FAANGs are slowing down hiring because they used PPP money to overhire and are now trimming down the fat. There are PLENTY of companies that fit in neither of these categories. The work may not be pretty, but it'll keep you fed and insured. I have friends in outsourcing jobs and they have have gone gangbusters the last two years. If there's one thing I fear it's not this alleged "slow down" it's that every job is slowly being filled by foreigners working for pennies on the dollar.
The article gets their data from Indeed. I do not use such a site, and I know of no one who uses such a site. I generally only take jobs through my network of friends I've made and only after that exhausts do I begin the process of asking recruiters whats up. I don't believe job-farm sites are a good proxy for actual industry jobs.
ShotSpotter works in isolation because in isolation a certain noise profile is almost certainly a gun shot. Like most ML aiming to change the world it's powered by p-hacking.