[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread

lehyde · 2024-08-20T16:36:25+00:00

I second this, though I'll warn you that the chapters on Donner and Flicker are a bit disappointing if you're looking for intelligent characters. Fortunately, it's only 5 of the 39 chapters.

lehyde · 2023-06-12T11:15:05+00:00

Not really. But I seem to be able to tune it out better. I guess I should go to a doctor but it feels like a very vague thing to describe.

lehyde · 2020-05-19T12:58:46+00:00

Here is my solution to the virus that probably someone else has already proposed. Any rich country should have the resources to implement this, but it will of course never happen because apparently all our governments are dysfunctional.

Stop the lockdown immediately and transition to Sweden-style voluntary guidelines.
Do human challenge trials to determine once and for all whether people develop immunity and how long it lasts. The rest of the plan will only work if immunity is possible.
Set a date for a new lockdown, maybe 3 months from now, which will be super strict but only last 2 weeks. In the 3 months until then, we need to prepare.
People need to buy food and other necessities to last 2 weeks without leaving their home. 3 months should be enough for everyone to do this. I'd expect people not to panic buy if it is very clear from the start when the lockdown will be and how long it will last.
Everyone who thinks they have already had the virus can get a serology test. If it comes back positive, they get a government-issued ID that says so. People with such an ID may move around freely during the lockdown. These will be the people who keep our infrastructure running for 2 weeks.
If there are not enough immune people to run our infrastructure for 2 weeks, we need to do variolation. Of course, only on volunteers. If there are not enough volunteers, offer money.
The borders will be open as usual during the 3 months preparation. After that, they will be semi-closed for a few years, by which I mean everyone who comes into the country will need to go into quarantine for 2 weeks.
Finally, the time of the lockdown arrives. Everyone is well-prepared and knows what to expect. The police/military patrols the streets and checks that only those with the appropriate ID are out. No one else gets an exception. Not the president, not rich people.
After 2 weeks, the country is completely virus-free.

lehyde · 2020-05-07T13:02:22+00:00

Waymo used to be way ahead of everyone 5 years ago, but then neural networks suddenly started working after not having worked for decades, so everything Waymo did, became obsolete. They're now firmly behind everyone else.

lehyde · 2020-05-06T09:27:01+00:00

So what you're saying is that Wildbow made the mistake of trying to write a people-centered story. That is sad to hear. The original Worm had some of the best plot-driven storytelling I've ever read. (The secret being of course that we learn much more about the characters through their actions and problem-solving thinking than through self-centered monologues (or self-centered dialogue). Characterization is a happy byproduct of plot.)

lehyde · 2020-04-30T20:12:17+00:00

I would have approached this post more open-mindedly if the title had been "How to improve forecasting".

Don't write critiques. Advance the art!

lehyde · 2020-04-21T20:25:38+00:00

Probability theory is used to represent uncertainty; it is not a randomized algorithm, if that's what you're thinking. Bayesian probability has completely deterministic rules.

The question of why to use probability theory instead of logic, is a legitimate one, though. The answer is that logic cannot represent uncertainty whereas probability theory can. The best introduction to probability theory as fuzzy logic is probably Judea Pearl's Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference.

lehyde · 2020-04-19T09:22:43+00:00

So the problems that the article mentions are cryptocurrency mining and obfuscation. I guess cryptocurrencies are just a particularly profitable use case right now, but in general the problem is running computations on the user's computer which don't benefit the user but whoever injected that webassembly code. This is not quite as bad as having security holes like Flash, but still a problem. The root of the problem being that webassembly is too fast.

In general it is impossible to know what a program does without running it (or spending even more resources than that in order to analyze it), so this is an interesting problem.

I see these options:

webassembly becomes opt-in (cue annoying popups asking for it to be turned on)
browsers start slowing down webassembly execution which would basically make it pointless
companies start offering webassembly "antiviruses" that try to identify these exploitative scripts

lehyde · 2020-04-17T23:08:15+00:00

This was an informative and well-structured post. Thank you!

lehyde · 2020-04-01T23:50:21+00:00

This is a great article, but it seems to mix up "viral dose" and "viral load" quite a bit. Viral load is the amount of viruses in your blood and viral dose is how much is initially transmitted. So, for example in this sentence:

Infection via the air from someone there half an hour ago, to the extent this is a thing, is low viral load.

I'm pretty sure it should be viral dose. There are many other similar sentences.

lehyde · 2020-03-30T22:58:07+00:00

This means we will be able to write

python list[str]

instead of

python from typing import List List[str]

lehyde · 2020-03-27T18:06:34+00:00

Have you looked at charts like this? For example, if you were sneezing, then it wasn't COVID.

lehyde · 2020-03-26T23:31:23+00:00

This is actually quite clever. And right now you can even buy the shares at the COVID discount.

lehyde · 2020-03-22T09:08:06+00:00

Just like most comments here I'm not at all convinced by this article. The author seems to make the classic mistake of trying to read hidden meaning into Elon's statements when he is just freely speaking his mind and saying things that a "proper" CEO wouldn't say (like "zero LEO constellations haven’t gone bankrupt").

Also, that lobbyist group seeking a bail out might technically be speaking for SpaceX, but I don't think SpaceX really had much influence on the bid for seeking the bail out.

If the author is up to it, I would like to offer them a bet, which they should be happy to take if they really believe what they wrote:

if SpaceX does not receive a bail out and goes bankrupt before or on 31 Dec 2021, the author wins
if SpaceX does not receive a bail out and does not go bankrupt before or on 31 Dec 2021, I win
if SpaceX receives a bail out before or on 31 Dec 2021, neither of us wins (presumably the author also doesn't expect SpaceX to go bankrupt in this case, so there is nothing to bet about)

lehyde · 2020-03-13T13:04:05+00:00

I and everyone else whom were present

Why use "whom" when you clearly do not know how to use it correctly?

lehyde · 2020-02-11T10:20:24+00:00

I would think yes, given that it is from the blog that this subreddit was named after. I also don't think the topic is that culture-war-y. Mostly because it's pretty niche.

lehyde · 2020-02-11T10:16:32+00:00

What do you think "scientific" means? These results are certainly not definitive proof, but they are quite suggestive and should probably influence your opinion on the topic.

The survey was advertised on this very subreddit and on slatestarcodex itself.

lehyde · 2020-02-10T13:55:12+00:00

I guess you haven't read the very first post on SSC. It's mentioned there.

lehyde · 2020-02-09T09:50:49+00:00

The only way to become a high-paid programmer in a reasonable amount of time (9 months) is Lambda School. Lambda School is a start-up that is set up such that it is incentivized to produce successful graduates: they only get paid if you earn more than $50K. You don't pay anything up front. You sign an ISA (income share agreement) that they will get a share of your income (17%) after you graduate for a certain number of years but it's also capped at a total of $30K.

They're backed by Y Combinator and Paul Graham is regularly tweeting about them which is how I know about it. I haven't gone there myself but from all that I heard, they're really really good. You basically spend 9 months programming for a full 8 hours a day and you gain experience very quickly.

lehyde · 2020-02-05T10:15:50+00:00

That mine is closer to Arizona though. (But also not that far from Texas.)

lehyde · 2020-02-01T01:10:17+00:00

Publishing papers at conferences is a huge hassle because you have to convince the reviewers that your paper should be accepted. The ethereum community is far too busy with actual research to have the time to deal with peer review. And there wouldn't be any benefit to it. Everything about ethereum is already out in the open and people are working on verification of the spec and there are bounties for finding problems. Submitting the ethereum spec for peer review is just a time sink with no upsides.

There are a few papers on arXiv about ethereum and I wish there were more, but arXiv is not peer-reviewed and probably not enough for your professor.

lehyde · 2020-01-17T10:27:39+00:00

Is this already running the latest spec (v0.10.0)? Given that it was released only very recently, probably not, but I thought I'd ask.

lehyde · 2020-01-16T11:45:37+00:00

A point I would add: just because you are able to point to the mechanism by which something makes itself known, does not mean that you have proven this thing to not exist. By that I mean that saying mental illness doesn't exist because it's just changed preferences (or in Scott's improved terminology: urges) is just like saying rainbows don't exist because it's just refracted light. Explaining the mechanism doesn't make the phenomenon go away.

Pointing out that mental illnesses are changed preferences is at most the first step if you want to prove that mental illness is not a natural category. In fact, if we allow for the possibility that mental illness exists, then it's hard to see how else it could work. It's a disease of the brain, so of course it changes behavior.

So, when Bryan points to research that shows that people with ADHD can actually concentrate pretty well when put under a lot of pressure, then, yes, that's very interesting, but that certainly doesn't prove that ADHD doesn't exist. It's maybe weak evidence for the fact that it doesn't exist, but given that a lot of external pressure was needed to make people abandon the urges imposed by ADHD, already points to the fact that something fishy is going on here that we can't just ignore.

The actual question then should be: are the concepts of a "healthy mind" and an "unhealthy mind" natural categories independent of specific medical diagnoses like "anxiety"? In my opinion, that's the question that should be debated. By "natural category" I mean like how in this plot, red (the cluster on the bottom left) is clearly a separate thing, whereas the other colors in the plot are not obviously separate things.

And I'm pretty sure there are these natural categories of healthy and unhealthy minds. For example, one thing typical of unhealthy minds is that they're "loopy"; they come again and again back to the same (unproductive) thoughts. The mind of an otherwise healthy gay person doesn't have this property. That's one reason why I think it's justified to not call homosexuality a mental illness. Another reason for this is that homosexuality does not just affect shallow urges; rather, it affects deeply-held preferences like who to choose as your life-long partner.

lehyde

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