whatisthiseven

I keep seeing this sentiment when it comes to those in the natural sciences, but it makes no sense.

I could replace "programming" in your above little bit with "mathematics" and it would be just as weird.

Our modern world runs on computers and programs, just as our modern world and modern science built itself on mathematics and required many to use it. So too the new world of science may require everyone to know to program just as they know about the chemical composition of smells, or the particulars of differential equations, etc.

And I know your argument isn't "they shouldn't learn programming", but honestly since I keep seeing this same line of reasoning, I can't help but feel that is ultimately the real reasoning being espoused.

Science is getting harder, and its requirements to competently "find the exciting things" raises the bar each time. I don't see this as a bad thing. To the contrary, it means we are getting to more and more interesting and in-depth discoveries that require more than one discipline and specialty, which ultimately means more cross-functional science that has larger and deeper impacts.

A little obscure? I have seen this same image comparison ux many times before And it was instantly recognizable.

I would improve it for new users by having a little animation after load that "wiggles" the handle a bit to get the user's attention.

> they're going to want to do it in a way that achieves the goals of the business.

No, a business will spend money in a way that optimizes the goals of the various middle-managers in between those with money and those who make the decisions with that money. Those middle-people aren't paper-clip optimizers and so their decision making does not approximate that of a profit-maximizing firm.

I am surprised how many of these I laughed out loud at. Some of them took a bit of "creative interpretation", but I still felt like the joke was made by the machine rather than me.

When I look at some of the jokes I see all manner of styles. Absurdist. The predictive. Deadpan in-joke. "No Pants" jokes. Self-deprecating. And even British style dry humor (the one about telling the difference between genders felt very British to me, and hilarious).

You should read the entire ruling:

"Ultimately, the employers are forced to abandon the stat-utory text and precedent altogether and appeal to assump-tions and policy. Most pointedly, they contend that few in1964 would have expected Title VII to apply to discrimina-tion against homosexual and transgender persons. And whatever the text and our precedent indicate, they say, shouldn’t this fact cause us to pause before recognizing liability?

This Court has explained many times over many years that,when the meaning of the statute’s terms is plain, our job isat an end. The people are entitled to rely on the law as written, without fearing that courts might disregard its plain terms based on some extratextual consideration.

And as we have seen, no ambiguity exists about how Title VII’s terms apply to the facts before us. To be sure, the statute’s application in these cases reaches “beyond theprincipal evil” legislators may have intended or expected toaddress.

But “‘the fact that [astatute] has been applied in situations not expressly antic-ipated by Congress’” does not demonstrate ambiguity; in-stead, it simply “‘demonstrates [the] breadth’” of a legisla-tive command."

When reading the opinion, which I strongly recommend, you won't feel like they are somehow reinterpreting words to mean different things. The opinion goes to great lengths to define every single word in Title VII, what it means, its intent, and precedence to build on its reasoning, which is states multiple times is based on a plain reading of the law.

Is the reason Bezos gets up every morning because he thinks to himself, "man, if only I have $200 billion instead of my $145 billion"?

Let's be real: Bezos is not "organizing" Amazon so much as he organizes a cabinet of Executives who do the same recursively until some worker does the actual work.

> When governments have tried, they have tended to fail miserably

So the federal government, which must coordinate the efforts of over 2 million employees across a more broad spectrum of activities and labor than Amazon does, doesn't count?

And is the job so hard as to mean hundreds of billions? Or is that just want the market will pay to keep Bezos around? I could understand that part, as it means the market believes Bezos current activities are worth that much. But does that mean he deserves it? I should hardly think those arguments are the same.

> Indeed having credentials makes it that much easier to fall prey to cognitive distortions

And having no credentials makes it even easier to make blatantly wrong assessments, to read the data incorrectly, to completely misunderstand terms of art, to accidentally believe that because you are smart, you can evaluate another field easily with some hard thinking.

Having no credentials means you are likely to not know what you don't know, and so gloss over an entire section of a field when making conclusions. It means not having worked with similar data before to help build a "sniff test" for when something in your work doesn't look right.

The difference between no credentials and credentials in assessing a complex topic and communicating that to a broad audience is as a vast as the difference between the seasonal flu and coronavirus.

I don't get it. Imagine an HN where random people who never did any software started flooding HN with articles about how the software people are lying to us all and just making big bucks. Software is easy, here is how to make great software. And every single one of them was just random near-garbage pulled from a couple minutes reading slides from Agile experts and the occasional wiki article about "software abstraction".

It would be downvoted so fast for being so wrong, and no one would engage with it for being so terribly wrong because disproving all the points is exhausting and not worth the time. Yet, you would think it OK on HN.

Maybe you downvote some of the wrong ones, but others get lots of comments, and soon all these wrong posts just get more attention and comments as people are arguing over half-made points in a blog post by a sales guy that "has a few software friends".

The long-term changes to HN would eventually push away people that care.

But we don't live in that world, maybe not yet. So instead we allow people who get so many basic facts wrong about an epidemic to post on HN, and @dang explained elsewhere why this makes sense (and I agree from a moderating standpoint to keep this content up) and I agree with it.

But we really only allow this content because it isn't the bulk of content on HN. If the bulk of content on HN resembled the above, I don't think we would like the community HN becomes.

Quite ironically, this is highly related to the virus itself. The virus isn't a problem on its own. It is a problem because it infects hundreds of millions of people very quickly, and we have poor means for slowing or stopping it at all.

Very much like misinformation.

> to having broad testing availability

What are the costs of this testing?

You may know more than them, yet you merely stand on the shoulders of ever taller giants. Discounting the expense and difficulty of knowledge at the time isn't very illuminating.

I had the exact same "Deja vu" moment until I realized the same as you.

Feels rude for OP to just verbatim copy/paste their comment without acknowledging they are doing that. It cheapens their words and makes it feel like copy-paste garbage you see all over the web. It also makes me think OP never learned anything significant from previous replies to their first comment, and is just spamming to get others to agree with them.

edit: Furthermore, OP never engaged with the comments on their previous post, and isn't engaging with comments here that disagree.

So, is OP part of a misinformation campaign of their own design? No idea. Wish they would bother responding rather than copy-pasting the same stuff each time uncritically.

> It is a common misconception among tech people that all systems operate in rational ways, but this is only really the case for machines.

Very elegant and concise. I would say this extends to all deeply complex fields: engineering, physicists, quant, etc. They all have a mindset of "I can understand the whole system because they have logical components that build on top of one another" and so therefore expect and demand that all other fields do the same.

Did you also disable that setting under the "location" submenu, which explicitly says it works even if bluetooth is off?

Not that this is good design, mind you, but if you turned both settings off and still say BT activity, then that is much different.

I think, when discussing software, the phrase "should never" just doesn't belong. I have only a short software career, but of all the bugs and unintentional behavior I have read about failures small and big companies make, I am no longer surprised.

For that matter, software itself is full of surprising and undefined behavior, so it really shouldn't be a surprise that large corporations sometimes have "simple" mistakes that appear really big. That is just software in motion.

But why not state that rather than question begging? To everyone else, it seemed you were hammering away at some important point but without any context.

Honestly, though, so many ads for insurance say you don't need a doctor visit, or health checkup, or whatever. I could easily see customers getting confused thinking they wouldn't need to give over health documents because the ads are deliberately misleading.

Just because a business's practice is obvious to itself and those in the know, doesn't mean customers can get fleeced because "they should have known better". Caveat Emptor is kind of bullshit with such high information asymmetry.

That is basically the motto of the Bloomberg Terminal, so I would agree with that to some extent.

The answer is the insurance company wouldn't. Easy. Why are you asking, though? Companies shouldn't commit fraud just because they want something.

I used thunderbird for years, gave up, and then tried it again a couple years ago. I think the UI/UX is really bad and was the reason I had forgotten why I left, and it was the reason I gave up the second time.

I unfortunately can't remember my complaints to make them more specific for a lively discussion, but I guess I am an anecdotal counter-point for thinking the UX was actually not a success.

> Afterall, if you absolutely knew that quantum immortality was true, then you could (and likely would) walk around taking obviously foolish risks without ever experiencing any consequences.

On the contrary, wouldn't it be the case that all the "yous" that did such a thing died, leaving only the "yous" that attempted only a small fraction of risky events? Just because many worlds is true, it doesn't mean all possibly infinite combinations of things also exist (e.g. PI is infinite, but it doesn't contain all possible combinations of numbers, nor itself).

JS can be a highly supported tool, but it isn't itself a primitive use-case. It is an enabler of use-cases and, to OP's point, JS for the sake of loading JS isn't useful if the content of the site really didn't need it.

AAA to me are the publishers that are buying TV ads to promote their games regularly and operate with revenues into the billions with hundreds or thousands of employees. But this is a bit of a misnomer, as AAA can also mean the kind of design the game takes and its monetization model. This is an important distinction because AAA studios always design their games with particular monetization schemes or design their games in a particular way with lots of money behind their visuals. AAA studios can absorb multiple failures in either design or whole games without much loss. While it might seem pedantic to define AAA first, I feel like this is necessary to help focus down what isn't AAA.

Smaller studios, like Zachtronics, Daedalic Entertainment, or Coffee Stain have a respectable library and are medium sized companies that can afford the occasional flop in their production line up. They all started as indie studios which had produced their first game with very little. But they have clearly evolved passed the indie stage and now develop, design and build their games with their niche in mind but with the budget and operating maturity of companies that know what they are doing.

True indies, in my mind, have many or all of these characteristics: 1) tiny library or even a single game 2) small team funded independently or through small scale funding 3) very niche game design and approach to mechanics and play 4) Will fail entirely if any game they put out fails 5) Little to no business acumen 6) focused entirely on the game as an artistic expression of play rather than a business function.

To be indie doesn't mean you have all these things, or don't contradict some of them. Just this is a loose guide I think helps to identify differences.

For example, Stardew Valley is an excellent example of a game which is indie, but it is the most extreme form of "indie game", being made by literally one guy and financially supported by his wife. Minecraft was indie, but is now owned by a major publisher (Microsoft).

Zachtronics I used to consider indie, but they now regularly put out games and are financially quite secure. Their first games were Flash games that had little appeal and were quite artistically lacking. Their first commercial success, SpaceChem, was a huge breakthrough for the indie studio in establishing itself. Over the course of its future releases it would transform out of the indie space and into a comfortable sized gaming company.

SpaceChem is so obviously indie when you first play it that you can feel and see the history behind its development as a team that used to work with flash games. MOLEK-SYNTEZ, the latest game from Zachtronics (which followed EXAPUNKS) are clearly creations of a company that understands its market segment and knows how to execute on its brand and create games that fill that segment at a high quality of art, polish, and aesthetic.

AAA studios do something similar, but they don't have a "niche" or market segment outside of the most bland description: gamers that want shooters or cinematic RPGs.

Pummel Party, from the studio Rebuilt, also very much feels indie. It tried to apply a different formula to the "Mario Party" genre of games and make it more "take that" oriented in its design and presentation of absurdist mechanics. That kind of design philosophy worked well for Goat Simulator in a similar vein.

I think these distinctions are important because nearly all games organize themselves behind a publishing title of some kind, and delineating a game as "AAA" because it has a big name publisher or "indie" because it isn't well known doesn't allow us to analyze the market and the wide variety of game companies out there, or understand the kinds of games and how/why they were made.

I find taking this more nuanced approach to analyzing game development allows for a much more rich view of game development and its history and is a better indicator of the kinds of games that will be created, as well as the development path studios will take as they get past their initial successes and become established within the industry.

As an aside: maybe I didn't come up with a particularly good categorization scheme, as I hadn't thought about this as deeply and I had to look up example games/studios to ensure I had something more lucid over my hazy memories, but I hope my post helped to at least illuminate the kind of overall thinking and philosophy I applied in segmenting the game development space.

I agree with your post, but describing it as "indie" is weird as there is a huuuuge market of non-AAA that is not indie, and yet that market also produces interesting and innovative games.

There are over 30,000 games on Steam. If you ignore the AAA publishers you'll find tons of excellent games regardless of indie status.

That is a good point about something I hadn't considered. I was going to disagree with you until the last sentence, which then clicked.

As AI is developed, it is also championed as "closer to real thought" and might someday solve the more general intelligence problem, only for those same experts to later realize that would never be the case and then retroactively proclaim "this was never going to solve general intelligence, but it is still AI".

The history is full of this kind of revisionism, so I agree with you.

You mean like these three articles on it from the NYT?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/nyregion/parking-placards...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/nyregion/parking-ticket-s...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/nyregion/the-new-math-of-...

"I'm more interested in what the underlying cause is of the inability for the cheerleaders to accomplish anything beyond attracting attention. If this problem is real, at some point you're going to have to figure out how to get people to take action. "

The problem isn't with the "cheerleaders" as you put it.

It is with groups and parties with interests aligned with oil and carbon producers that are degrading all efforts.

Why is it the "cheerleaders" fault, rather than the largest entities fighting against it, the hordes of people online "just asking questions" (but really question begging, hand-wriging, and engaging in long but useless discussions about whether or not to trust authorities), people who actively spread disinformation, and people who repeat the same defeated anti-AGW talking points everywhere they go?

I find it baffling you think the failure is here, and not with Trump, the GOP, Dems backed by oil/coal/heavy industry, etc. The issue isn't the science (as you suggest), the issue isn't with the technology or economics (though to some degree it is).

For that matter, the entire world has committed to CO2 reduction. So it seems clear that the effort of "cheerleaders" is turning to action. Subsidies are going to solar, wind, etc. Car companies producing electric vehicles are getting subsidies. We have had cap-and-trade on the worst GHG in the 90s and it worked. We banned freon in the atmosphere from creating a large hole in the Antarctic.

I don't see the issue you insist on.

That could happen in an extreme case, but I think if the intent is to write something to inform, then regardless of one's expertise the content should make clear the value.

I think when assessing anyone's work that is done through a pseudonym, anon, or what appears as a clearly fake profile, one needs to really pick and choose how they decide to ingest that information.

I would be hesitant to even remark on the anon blog that the blog is written in the most defensive manner possible, as that indicates to adversaries the level of aggression the target expects, which can itself narrow-down where they might be.

It is a truly hard problem, but if the value of OP is complete anonymity and the signal to noise ratio isn't as important, then these obfuscation steps are valuable. Not the least because they can be implemented or dropped at any time as one's security threat changes.

I didn't downvote (don't have the karme for it).

But you won't engage with the science. You're just probing at basic problems of epistemology and hand-wringing. Literally no one can argue against that and it isn't productive. What about the science do you want to discuss?

We are discussing climate science. If the person I was trying to convince was so ignorant of the subject to not even know what IPCC was, I would point them to the body, its website, and NASA for summarized data.

If someone who wants to drag out useless arguments online without addressing real datapoints wants to pretend like "IPCC Is so foreign", then you are just wasting time.

You know what the IPCC is. You can find reports from NASA. You know the body of research out there. Why aren't you engaging with it? You decry the lack of discussion, but you won't even engage with the highest quality of research available on the topic.

Calling out a fallacy without substantiating further is just arguing for the sake of arguing. Either engage usefully or stop question begging.

I didn't say to blindly trust the authorities. I read some of the reports myself. You can, too.

If you mean you only want to trust primary research you do yourself, then this discussion is impossible.

Lots of good technical advice has been given and I won't rehash that, but I think there are lots of other methods you'll need to consider, too.

1) Time of publish. You'll want to make sure the times you publish entries are random and can't be correlated with things you are doing. If you take a vacation, you'll need entries going up.

2) How you write. You'll want to ensure your writing isn't too similar to your own. Either have others write it, excessively use synonym dictionaries, or introduce writing styles and elements exclusively to the posts you write.

3) What you write about. It should be as diverse as possible. If you only write about one topic, or clearly have a bias for one topic, then it is easier to pin down your interests and focus searches against you to that. Write about cooking, about programming, about art, about politics, etc. Even if you hate or aren't good at it.

4) Fabricate entries. You'll want to write about topics you dislike, or topics you don't believe in or about places you have never been. Reference dates and times that would be impossible with your schedule, your income, your skills, or your connections. For areas you are most versed in, introduce simple errors to reduce your apparent expertise. In areas you are most ignorant, plagiarize from experts in a non-obvious way to fake expertise.

5) Write in only your native language so as to not giveaway where you learned some other language. If this isn't enough, then run your writing through an automatic translator each time into some other language you might know and only do a light touch up of the most egregious errors.

You kind of get the drift. Lots of people here can give technical advice, but that is always one slip-up from going wrong and you getting caught. Having lots of disinformation and mixed information in the blog itself can help provide cover and deniability.