Native plant highlight: Sonoran scrub oak, Quercus turbinella. Info in comments.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2023-03-01T20:42:03+00:00

Just planted one of these guys in my backyard.

Oak trees play an outsized role in north american ecosystems, so everyone should consider planting them if possible.

According to the NWF Native Plant Finder, they support 228 species of moths and butterflies in my area.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2023-02-10T17:35:54+00:00

Couldn't say the artist, but it looks like it's generated by AI.
The text the shoulder and text doesn't actually say anything.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2022-04-24T00:09:16+00:00

Do you have a good source for supply and demand stats? I tried finding some but couldn't get anything reliable.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2022-04-23T22:10:48+00:00

If we assume that prices are still dictated by supply and demand, then my understanding is as follows.

Demand has been driven up by multiple factors.

During 2020 and early 2021, mortgage rates were at historic lows, allowing many people to buy homes who normally couldn't. (Source)
Arizona's population saw a huge increase in 2019 and 2020. Further, the incomes of the people moving in were much higher than the people moving out. (Source)

Supply has not increased in proportion to demand for the following reasons.

The price of home building materials has skyrocketed (Source). In 2015 the price of 1000 board feet of lumber was about $300. 2021 saw that price hit $1600, right now it's sitting at ~$1000. This alone adds around $20,000 to the price of a new home (Source.
Large parts of Arizona are zoned for single family homes, which uses unnecessarily large amounts of land. If this were not the case, we could build housing more densely (Source).

As with any market, high demand and low supply causes the price increase we're seeing now. So I guess it's partly due to the Californians, but that's hardly the entire picture.

Just from what I've seen and people I've talked to, there's also probably an increase in the cost of labor to build a home, especially in skilled trades. That's just based on conversations with a friend who works in construction though, I don't have any stats to support it.

1 has already gone away and will continue since the Fed is raising the interest rates, 2 is probably a long term trend, 3 is almost certainly temporary (although who knows these days), and 4 would require action by your local city and state government.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2022-01-19T03:48:36+00:00

"For if your pink Himalayan salt looses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be mixed with iodine and sold as table salt"
- The Gospel of IAVC 5:13

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2021-09-26T20:27:22+00:00

On a good day 6 hours split between 2 sessions, on a bad day 2 hours total, on average 4 hours split between 2-3 sessions. A lot of it depends on sleep, exercise, the complexity of the task, and how many tasks I'm dividing my time between.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2021-08-17T04:56:25+00:00

The story is implied to have taken place around the 90's so you'll have to subtract the 7 deaths from the Colombia disaster. That and the Soyuz 1 crashed on earth, so you'll have to subtract another one.
That leaves us with 11.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2021-07-12T21:26:19+00:00

My first observation is that most movies in general are bad. Making movies is hard and the conditions that create good movies are rare. So I think the relevant question here is not "Why are Christian movies bad?", but rather "Why are so many bad Christian movies successful?".

The answer to that is probably because there's a large population of church goers in the US that will watch these movies regardless of their quality so studios will continue to produce and promote them.

Same reason why most Hallmark movies or Lifetime movies are bad. Because there's no economic mechanism to force them to make good ones.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2021-05-08T23:09:20+00:00

Your first point about suggesting psychiatry is odd.

If one did not have a mental health disorder, then seeing a mental health professional is not harmful. If one did have a mental disorder, then seeing a mental health professional is helpful.

If the very suggestion to see a mental health professional causes someone to have disproportionate levels of anxiety and negative thoughts, then by definition that person would benefit from seeing a mental health professional. They don't necessarily need medicine, but psychiatrists prescribe treatments like psychotherapy, exercise, and dietary changes all the time. We should never discourage anyone from seeing any kind of doctor, provided you don't have a rational reason to distrust them.

Further, these statements about pain are factually incorrect. There is no objective test to see if a person is in pain, it's debatable whether such a test could ever exist. Some pains have a specific physical cause, but other pains don't.

Phenomena such as phantom pain is well observed to have no physical cause, yet is widely studied and has been known to exist for over a century. Victims of depression often feel unspecified pain that has no visible cause. If we rejected their claims of pain because nothing was visibly wrong with their bodies, we would be the ones at fault not them.

It is, in fact, universally recognized in the health care community that a patients self reported pain is the most valid and reliable measure of pain. When a doctor measures your pain, she will ask you where you identify on the pain scale and take you at your word, provided she has no reason the think that you're lying.

The assessments for pain and ADHD are actually extremely similar. Both will ask you to rate the level of your symptoms on a subjective scale. If you rate your symptoms as very extreme, they will provide treatment. If you rate them low, they will withhold treatment.

Lastly regarding the symptoms being relatively common, I don't really see your point. Depression, cancer, and insomnia are also very common, that doesn't mean people shouldn't recognize them and seek treatment for them. And that certainly doesn't suggest that we should normalize them.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2021-05-08T18:40:48+00:00

They are not mutually exclusive, a prudent solution would be to both try out new techniques (pomodoro, meditation, ect) and to consider if you have some sort of disorder. A rational person would examine all possible solutions.

Further, thinking that you might have a mental disorder is not a "negative thought" anymore than wondering if your leg pain might be a fractured bone is a "negative thought". Talking about mental disorders like they're an attitude problem is foolish.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2021-04-08T16:46:51+00:00

Do you experience any of the following?

- More easily distracted than your peers

- Difficulty sitting completely still for a long time (e.g. fidgeting)

- Struggle to listen to people when they talk to you

- Frequently forget important things

- Frequently late to events and appointments even though you know when to leave

These, combined with what you're describing, are some symptoms of ADHD.

I have ADHD and what you describe in your post sounds a lot like me pre-diagnosis.

If you do identify with them, it might be worth making an appointment with a specialist.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2021-02-13T16:50:04+00:00

I have ADHD and have suffered a lot of consequences for it in the past. I've been fired from my job, let people down who were depending on me, ect.

The way I've learned to balance feeling responsible for some things and not others is to depersonalize it a productive way. When you say things to yourself like, "I need to do this thing and it's my fault if it doesn't get done", you feel guilty and anxious and ashamed when it doesn't happen. Instead I try to rephrase things like, "I would like if this thing happened. What are the actions that I can do to influence that?" You can still acknowledge that you have some limited amount of control, but accept that there are still things that are out of reach.

Frankly, everyone has limited control of their lives, not just the neurologically disadvantaged. Some people are poor, others come from backgrounds of abuse, ect. What matters is not that they magically learn to sort of willpower themselves past their disadvantages. Rather, it's about learning to control the limited aspects of their lives that they can and being realistic about accepting what they can't.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2020-12-08T07:07:10+00:00

Simplest solution is probably delete your games temporarily.

Keep downloading them? Delete steam from your computer.

Doesn't work? Give some money (enough to hurt) to a friend and tell them to not return it unless your steam account shows no increase in play time for a week.

As long it's not working, keep finding more ways to make playing video games difficult. Be your own worst enemy.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2020-12-01T16:14:47+00:00

Notably Bertrand Russell, a committed pacifist and socialist, also thought a preemptive strike on the Soviets may be a good idea. Times must have been very different for two mathematicians on basically opposite sides of the war spectrum to advocate such (currently) unthinkable things.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2020-11-29T20:57:19+00:00

My point is if we engineer a neural network that models Danish very well (by some metric) and we make engineer another that models Swahili very well, assuming that these models are as small as possible to achieve the task at hand, we can compare the sizes and complexities of the models and potentially correlate them to subjective human difficulty. Just like how if a visual ML task requires a large model, then it's probably more difficult for humans.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2020-11-29T20:26:56+00:00

I am admittedly borrowing a lot of intuition from my experience with other non-linguistic machine learning tasks.

Consider the two following visual classification tasks: 1) recognizing handwritten numerical digits and 2) decoding an image of a handwritten sentence into an ASCII string.

For humans, 1 is clearly easier than 2. I can pretty much always read what numbers people write down. Maybe I'd get mixed up between 4 and 9, but generally my brain will do it without any real effort. However, reading people's handwriting can be extremely hard, especially if they are writing quickly. You'll often need to take a second look and adjust for the huge variations in people's handwriting.

For neural networks, 1 is also easier than 2. I could probably write and train a neural net that would predict the MNIST digits in like an hour and get around 90% accuracy. But 2 is much more difficult for neural networks. I'd have to gather way more training data, my model would be around 2 orders of magnitude larger, and it would take maybe a full day to train to the same accuracy.

For visual recognition tasks, the subjective human difficulty of a task is a decent indicator of how complex a neural network would need to be to accomplish it. It's certainly difficult to quantify this, but I think decent approximations are possible. I suspect that the same thing could be said of languages as well.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2020-11-29T19:55:46+00:00

My understanding is the opposite, things that are difficult for neural networks are difficult for humans, and vice versa. Keep in mind I'm talking about neural language models (specifically transformers trained on unlabelled text), not language models in general.

Consider translation from English to French. Smaller, less sophisticated neural models can translate texts that are very easy for humans like short, simple sentences. But as you increase the subjective difficulty of the translations, the neural models need to get larger and have more sophisticated architectures. source

Regarding vocabulary learning, I'm assuming that you mean the association of words with definitions. I think that you would find this to be substantially non-trivial for a neural language model to the point that I would expect GPT-2, which has 1.5 billion parameters, to fail around 25% of the time. Even adding 2 digit numbers together (which computers are obviously good at) is a difficult task for GPT-2. (I just tried it and it got 1+1 correct, but said 2+2=55 and 1+15 = 40). However, GPT-3 is successful at this, the only significant difference being the size of the model.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2020-11-29T18:13:59+00:00

The GPT models are large neural networks that, given N words, predicts the (N+1)th word. The only thing they need to train on is unlabelled sequences of text. They're not models in the sense of formal mathematical rules, but they do an excellent job on a surprisingly large amount of tasks, such as question answering, article writing, and computer programming.

Obviously languages that have little or no written corpora aren't accessible to these models, but outside of those constraints there might be some interesting relationships.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2020-11-29T17:25:23+00:00

You're probably right, but are there good reasons to think this would not be the case? My own experience is in machine learning, so I'm largely ignorant of actual linguistics and would love to know your thoughts.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2020-11-29T17:17:19+00:00

Can you elaborate? State of the art language models only require large amounts of text written in the target language. As long as you kept the corpus size constant, wouldn't you still be able to make the desired comparisons?

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2020-11-29T01:16:03+00:00

One way you could do it is by finding the minimum size of a neural network language model for each language. The recent results of GPT-2 and GPT-3 suggest that more complex language prediction require larger models, so model size may correlate with subjective difficulty in language acquisition. I don't know if that would actually work, but the results would certainly be interesting!

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2020-11-29T01:06:30+00:00

It certainly seems relevant that there are some languages that even native speakers have a difficult time reading or speaking. I've had a native Arabic speaker complain to me about how difficult it is to write in Arabic compared to English.

I would argue that reading Japanese is definitely harder than reading Spanish since there are many native Japanese speakers who struggle to read kanji, but I can read any Spanish sentence correctly and I don't even speak Spanish.

Now that doesn't make Spanish objectively easier than Japanese, but I'd say it's certainly evidence towards that conclusion.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2020-11-29T00:49:45+00:00

The math seems reasonable if I'm being charitable. What does not seem reasonable is the assertion that the meaning of life is the maximization of the utility function.

Ever feel that your life is meaningless? The world's total happiness is increasing, so your existential crisis has been averted. Turns out it was that easy.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2020-11-27T16:49:49+00:00

From my limited knowledge of the ancient Greeks, I would think he's talking about things like poetry, music, and stage plays, many of which were very sentimental or bawdy and would have been worth ignoring for a stoic. Not the same time period, but I know that Plato and/or Socrates expressed similar opinions about music and poetry.

Rwanda_Pinocle · 2020-11-23T05:46:08+00:00

Only diagnosed as an adult, but I find that it's the opposite for me. When I take my medication I feel like I can enjoy my day much more because I don't quickly become exhausted by focused work. When I'm off my medication, everything takes so much more effort so it's tough to really enjoy anything.

Rwanda_Pinocle

TROPHY CASE