zimablue

I think one way to look at it is as an example of the positive effects of destruction. Cities bombed down => get to rebuild higher density, modern form, get a strong regulated rental sector Society destroyed => Britain still has a unique level of class-based system, unique private school=>uni system, lowest social mobility in Europe (closer to the US) Monarchy destroyed (WW1) => get to have functioning politics (proportional representation). UK has never had a proper revolution that stuck, so our politics is directly descended from monarchs arguing with nobles, that's what led to Brexit and after Brexit to our inability to negotiate coherently.

I don't think it was, for one thing because they mentioned that in internal testing it seemed to be equal strength and for another if you watch the game it's not some like slightly weaker strength- it's fundamentally not understanding things like how to deal with drops, shields.

I am sceptical of Alphastar. It's not at all like alphazero, it's lots of complex parts glued together.

In the third group (second of the human and first post-review) of games, against a slightly modified version, the human won. I don't think it was a version modification, I think it was because the human had chance to review the computer's play and think of gaps. Maybe it's stronger than I think or can get stronger, but it looked like the first time a human got to sit down and think about it they could find significant holes in it's understanding. The games it won it mostly just crushed with superhuman micro, that's different in a one-off series than being consistently pro strength.

That's fair enough because it's a complex game but it just didn't seem as "polished/finished" as the chess/go demonstrations.

The pig that wants to be eaten.

I was very young and impressionable and I think this book is like philosophical crack cocaine.

You're using false dichotomy in a kind of odd way, it normally means that you have to choose between one of two positions or arguments, not that someone has stereotyped two groups.

I don't think anyone is saying that these classifications are perfect, but are you saying that they're not true even on average?

There's nothing in this article that mentions "cognitive elite", it talks about education and skills. You brought that to the article completely on your own.

For what it's worth, I think that there are definitely innate differences in ability, but they're very much overstated and the education system is effectively money laundering for privilege. Education != innate ability in a world where elite colleges charge massive fees and all the selection processes are rigged every step of the way by the middle classes.

I have a decent job because I went to a decent uni, if I replay my life with the same ability and different parents who didn't work hard to squeeze me into the best school in the area or push me to value education I'd have no chance at all to be here now, I would be writing javascript for the local bakery for 20k pa. Good tech companies and finance all hire based on degrees.

It depends on what sort of redistribution you talk about.

Picketty argues that we tax income but not wealth and that's the root of our problems. I would imagine that your income is a way higher percentile than your wealth, income middle-class like you and me get smashed by income taxes (as someone from the working class in the UK it absolutely blew my mind when I learned how much wealth the people all around me had in their families, even just upper-middle class).

https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator-united-sta...

$1,000,000 in wealth is near the 88% in America.

If you're hanging around with people whose families live in the nice parts of London/(a major city), assume they're the top 10% ~ 1 million, assume 4% returns above inflation, they make 50k a YEAR from their assets, totally passively.

So their wealth income is way more than some relatives of mine TOTAL household income.

In effect, the upper-middle-classes are born on basic income. If you're trying to make moeny yourself - just attend that university, take that MBA course, spend 5 years on a very risky career path with internships (journalism, media). There's no point you have to worry if you can afford it you can just play a very long low-probability high upside game.

This it getting downvoted maybe because it sounds nasty, but I think there's a relevant point here. Govt open source funding is something that external countries can benefit from, but I think a) the US is so big that any unfairness to them would be outweighed by benefits to themselves and society b) I have an uninformed guess that most government software is not groundbreakingly brilliant so there's quite a small subset that would be interesting to "steal", c) for smaller countries maybe this should be a treaty thing, would be interesting for example for the EU to vote on it, or put it into trade deals.

It's all a spectrum, the question is whether a better system is conceivable or achievable. Scotland was offered a free vote on leaving the UK and voted to remain, if they'd left I wouldn't have wanted us to try and block their entry to the EU or otherwise impose tarrifs or create ill will. You could argue that they should schedule a vote once a decade, I don't think I'd oppose that. If they wanted another vote now that also seems fair.

It's not the countries of the European Union's job to care about their historic ally and second largest power remaining stable and friendly in a time of oligarchs and autocracies? Put aside remain/leave/nationality, your statement is nonsensical.

No, the behavior of the EU does not align with the interests of its member states, that is the truth. As with Greece, so now with the UK. Crushed by unaccountable committee.

The countries of Europe are our allies and friends, the EU as an entity seems to treat the UK as an enemy.

The UK as a negotiating entity has failed to argue coherently, because the political classes are hopelessly divided and opportunistic.

It's important to note that the EU has not agreed to /anything/ in terms of trade as part of this deal, that's why it's a terrible deal. It's a deal to make a deal, but it includes us agreeing to pay massive outstanding budget commitments. So it's pretty much the UK surrendering their only negotiating leverage (and also the ability to revoke article 50) for absolutely nothing in return.

The EU /can/ enforce this on us, because of their relative size and our political disunity/mismanagement, but it seems obvious that they /should/ not.

An agreement which the British people could agree on would be a comprehensive free trade agreement and customs region(with us paying into budget) but no free movement, no deeper integration, and no ability for the UK to make external trade agreements. There are two fictions preventing this - the EU pretending that this is impossible or unfair (there's no law that free trade has to have free movement, it's a convenient political fiction for the EU), and the right Tories pretending that any external trade agreements would even begin to compensate for the cost of customs checks with the EU.

The UK is screwed but the EU is a malign entity, which seeks to treat us as they have Greece- a banana republic to be screwed by committee. A club which won't allow you to leave is ruler. Sorry for the essay, a remain voter.

edit: The backstop is not at all the most disliked part, it gets the most press because it's the sticking point between T May's attempt to shoehorn her bill through because it seems to lean towards a softer type of deal, which loses her the hard-right Tories and the Irish question loses her the DUP. But it's just a fight between the Tory clans who have power, if you polled the UK population or even parliament, it would not be the most unpopular part of the deal, not even close.

SJW is a weird insult to use here, the outcry isn't anything to do with SJWs. FAANG in general are actually very pro SJW in the gender/racial sense, see Damore's firing, the twitter feed of senior devs at any of them.

They're the epitomy of the liberal elite, privacy is totally orthogonal as an issue.

You can say right now that "not everyone cares about privacy" and it seems reasonable, but in a decade or two it will sound like saying "not everyone cares about environmentalism" does now, it's ignorance that will slowly bear fruit.

One guess in London will be young middle class people living in delapidated council houses? It sounds stupid now but what else is cheap in the centre? I was living in one a couple of years ago and they're ironically often more spacious than new=builds. Known several friends do the same. Also, will the centre shift southeast? I guess the relevant question is whether and which businesses follow the pricy housing shift. Like I can't see finance moving from old street/c wharf, but you find tech up towards Kings Cross and at the Eastern side of Old street? And tech is basically the new finance. But those business moves seem a lot smaller than the amount that young prof.s seem to shift around in a couple of decades.

Edit: Another thought, this is a trend driven partly by destruction of council house stock, oligarchic money laundering, etc etc which has created extremely high prices in the centre. If that bubble pops and Brexit murders UK economy leading to a long period of price reduction, maybe young middle class people will go back to living in Kensington fancy houses/flats.

Brutalism is a lot more interesting when you have a vague idea of the background of it => it's a kind of socialist/communist philosophy in architecture, pretty buildings are the enshrinement of social hierarchies into architecture, so build something that is egalitarian by nature - lots of identical units, function over form. Open spaces, honesty in the sense that the architecture shows you how it's really made with exposed concrete etc, not a facade. I guess you could argue that it's the lisp of architecture - no hiding the construction. I guess the point is that it's not mindlessly ugly, it's a statement about priorities and honesty in aesthetics.

Yeah and markets are notoriously immoral, so are manipulative bosses. We banned subliminal imaging remember.

There's some blurred territory I totally agree, in between egregious deception and "expected, competitive" deception eg. make-up, presenting yourself well on a date, moderating your opinions, but this example isn't even close. Noone expects buttons to not work and there's no unavoidable competitive marketplace in public infrastructure providers where there's some massive pressure to be immoral or die.

Lying to someone for their benefit is treating them as an object because you're not respecting their right to honesty or dignity, you're just treating them as an object that might or might not get run over and deceptive technology as just another input. You're optimizing them without their consent like they're some code you're trying to speed up. In the same way that PUAs is objectifying women because you're not respecting them as sentient humans with a right to honesty, you're treating your interactions with them as arbitrary code to be optimized.

re this century, maybe this has always been the attitude but I think you see it in "nudge" ideas which came about within the last 20 years. Govt/Corp application of applied behavioural psychology combined with (at least the UK and I think Europe) an acceptance of a nanny state to a degree that would have been unthinkable previously.

It's immoral because you don't have the right to deceive and make decisions for other people.

Let's take the example further and see if you can find a point where it starts to be obviously unethical, then work your way backwards on the principle discovered.

How about we lie to you about the contents of your food, in some way that manipulates you to be healthier?

Still OK with that, why don't we tell you that something is vegetarian if you can never tell the difference, by your utilitarian metric you've increased my happiness, I got to enjoy some delicious meal.

If I find out you have one day left to live and that day will be happier not knowing that fact, do I have the right to lie to you about it? The utilitarian benefit calculation goes up so case closed right?

If someone if a devout Jehovah's witness, give them a blood transplant and deny that it ever happened, do you have the right to do that?

Not everyone is on the same utilitarian value curve as you and you don't have the right to mess with and deceive them because you think you're smarter than they are. Some (most) people value truth, dignity or reality in their utility function, and you might not even be smarter than all of them.

This whole piece, and to be honest most of the comments here come from such a dark, authoritarian, arrogant perspective.

"lying to the plebs modifies their behavior very slightly in a good way or is it in a bad way?"

It's irrelevant, treat your fellow humans with some modicum of respect and dignity. Terry Pratchett's first rule of morality "don't treat people as if they're objects".

Anyone caught casually deceiving people for some tiny perceived benefit to either themselves or the people deserves a severe lesson in how "irrationally" angry people get when they're lied to.

You can save this page and the comments as an example to future generations of how the elites of this century had become morally bankrupt.

Because it's built and bundled by a monopolistic company with an (at the time, maybe less now) institutional commitment to backwards compatibility forever. Winforms could have been the worst thing ever written and it would still be around and maintained. See WPF (not the worst but not much loved), that will live a long time, even with Microsoft seeming to back off on forever-backwards-compatability.

It's a commodity until they extend it with stuff that locks you in, like (to be fair) Gitlab is also doing eg. CI, hooks etc. The whole playbook has always been to quietly remove compatibility and take the most locking-in possible approach. (proprietary standards etc etc).

Nations(companies) have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.

Microsoft has a permanent interest to lock you in a box, paying tax. Open sourcing some products or whatever PR move is orthogonal to that, that's why they can do it.

Just because those things are useful doesn't mean that they wouldn't be more useful/tractable if they'd stuck closer to logic. How do you know that their usefulness isn't a large part due to the closeness in logic and limited where they deviate, rather than the reverse?

I'm fighting through a book on formal logic at the moment, I never did a computer science degree, is it on the syllabus? It feels like this should have been the first thing I ever studied. I kind of got to it in reverse, data shuffling => everything looks like sql/pandas => everything is relational logic (read about minikanren, datalog, prolog) => lots of things are a surprisingly thin layer over formal logic.

I haven't explored the idea but I read somewhere that type systems are close to unification (rust's typesystem is apparently very close ??).

Interesting to see this article and realise that Dijkstra (God) was interested in logic too.

Has anyone explored the idea that you write your program largely in logic, and that's your spec/typesystem, then you write the performance-relevant parts in a more procedural language, with either generative tests or some kind of proof system showing their equivalence?

Whether or not the criticism is justified, shutting down all criticism of a female applicant with explicit accusations of misogyny and trolling is wrong. The guy is literally banned and his thread of comments moved on the basis that he dared to criticize a female applicant.

It's also surprising that this got buried with no upvotes and no comments, was it mod-nuked?

On the political level, (putting aside whether gender is actually a factor in this specific case)- I actually don't mind diversity hires in situations like this where you have some sort of representative body. What sticks in the throat is the attempt to have it both ways. When people in power make statements that X (objectively less qualified candidate) is equally qualified as the other candidates, and that ALSO criticizing female candidates is disallowed and they have better "perspective", it's dishonest which normally leads to trouble.

Decisions should be transparent, if gender is going to be a factor, whichever side of the debate you sit on that should be made transparent, and disallowing criticism is obviously a bad idea.

There are kind of three questions: 1. how much is this person suffering 2. is their suffering "justified" 3. is their suffering the cause of their own actions (who is at fault) I and the poster are leaning towards the second and third question. And it's not at all a purely individual opinion (except in the sense that all opinions are), there are cases when we need to adjudicate it as a group - how much compensation do you get when someone does X vs Y. How much of a crime is it to call someone X vs calling them Y, that's more offense/being upset but this argument is the same for all emotions.

It's just a silly attempt to sidestep the argument.

You already maintain a hierarchy of grief. If you found that a colleague was inconsolable because they'd snapped a nail, you'd judge them and respond differently than if their parent was dead. It's also not just based on how "normal" the grief is, there are plenty of very religious people who would be very upset at a relative being gay.

The question "do we want to maintain a hierarchy of grief" is absurd, there is not one human alive who doesn't already do that on some level.

10 years and never happened. Heard it happen to more than one female friend, think it's somehow a gendered crime.

There are more axes than character development or adherence to the constraints of current scientific understanding on which to judge a book.

To me, originality and "philosophical development", or how the perspective of science influences the future and nature of humanity are very important, and that's why I consider this series an absolute masterpiece.

It's great in the same vein as 2001: a space odyssey, or rendezvous with rama, or childhood's end

I don't think that's true, it's true that "money is not real", and will need to be exchanged for services.

But a lot of the expenses each generation has are for example housing, food, cars. So sure, that method doesn't hedge against the price of services or fluctuations in whatever you invest the money in, but neither does the current system. Current system is exposed to inflation, FX etc too. It does at least hedge against [working vs retirement age] population which is one which definitely varies. Basically the current system is going to screw my generation (in the UK) because we're paying off our parent's triple-locked gold-plated pensions, which we are definitely not going to receive. So we'll be the one that pays for ending the offset.

Which flies in the face of population growth and is also sociologically injust in the long term since it's rich people who are trending towards having more children (and also the privileged in more subtle ways:

https://medium.com/makingofamillionaire/rich-families-are-ha...

The source in that article doesn't show a complete reversal of the old trend yet but bear in mind that I think the level of privilege of parents compared to non-parents will be systematically underestimated because we're looking at income (which will both be reduced by having children, and I'm guessing being income-oriented correlates negatively with /wanting/ children so they've probably converted their privilege into other forms). They will also on average have all the forms of privilege which makes you an attractive partner with the time to have kids: looks, background of wealth, easy job.

I think we should very clearly distinguish things that benefit primarily children=everyone, and parents=the privileged.

For example, education directly benefits children and society but time off and tax breaks for parents is more of a benefit to them, the already privileged.

Someone will probably post a reply that we "need" children for pensions but that's kind of a misconception. You can run a pension system where each generation puts money into a pot and gets it back later, the truth is just that we've chosen not to. Basically if there's ever a pot of money government will find a way to spend it, so now we have this weird system where instead of each generation's pensions being self-contained they're offset by one generation. It's a political problem and bad choices rather than some rule of nature.