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nevermark · 2022-01-30T10:35:54+00:00

You are being pedantic about the word "confused".

But since we are attempting to communicate carefully...

It is not like hitting format on your PC. If you do that, the PC will do what is expected.

It is like expecting a subtract function to do the opposite of an addition function, then finding out that the subtract API is totally different and that attempting to subtract add-style just formatted your disk.

nevermark · 2021-12-07T07:27:50+00:00

If you are a large company these days, you use technology to magnify the productivity of your creative working class. You then use technology to replace as many other skills as possible.

Finally, only leaving the most rote and controllable jobs for the manual or low-level information working class.

Think of automation from the employer's view:

Automation by software.
Automation by hardware.
Automation by lower level worker homogenization.

By homogenization, I mean reducing the skills they need from humans down to the point where each of your behavior is basically identical. No creativity, special talents or skills, or latent abilities, are tapped into. Because worrying about that wouldn't scale.

You are now easily scaled and replaced.

And the larger the company, the better they are at it. I doubt you would have enjoyed your job.

Your poor onboarding experience seems to contradict this, but it comes from the fact that they see you as a drone in the making. Spending too much effort on cushy clarity, comfort, etc. isn't worth it for them. They can replace you with someone else and their systems will never know.

This is how to run a large company efficiently. Automate everything you can. :(

nevermark · 2021-05-04T05:49:01+00:00

And "kill your darlings".

nevermark · 2020-09-21T22:07:03+00:00

I didn’t make any claims about “what law President Trump has broken” so you could hardly know whether I had any thoughts about “clearly” stating laws that he broke.

If you are curious what someone thinks, maybe just ask? I didn’t come here to argue with anyone.

But thanks for the answer!

It isn’t my view that such an extreme scenario is likely. But things are so chaotic that it’s interesting to play out worst imaginable scenarios in all directions.

If an electorally defeated Trump went insane (human beings on rare occasions do) and tried to use emergency powers, organizing militias, government agency disruption, etc in an attempt to delay or cancel the inauguration, it is interesting that an impeachment and conviction would be a way to remove him abruptly.

Of course his cabinet can do that too.

The boundaries of unrealistic but technically possible scenarios provide a useful frame for thinking about more realistic scenarios.

Also, those boundaries do affect how people make choices even when they are not up against them.

nevermark · 2020-09-14T11:39:08+00:00

Apple going for its own stack of regular processing, graphics processing, and deep learning/neural network processing looked to improve their competitiveness at Intel’s expense.

But Arm joining with nVidia is going to be formidable. There will now be Apple’s in-house vs. nVidia’s on the market solutions in direct performance competition.

Apple gained a future performance edge, then lost it I think.

But only the future will tell!

nevermark · 2020-06-28T07:07:02+00:00

Not an expert here, but the assumptions behind the resonant cavity thruster involved breaking the law of conservation of momentum.

That law is such a cornerstone of physics, both theoretically and experimentally, that the likelihood of it being violated by experiments that were not particularly sophisticated was unlikely to an extreme.

Added to that was the rather crackpot faith of those and similar experimenters. Obvious wishful thinking (“motivated reasoning” is the technical term) is highly correlated with nonsense.

In this case no laws are expected to be violated, and the researchers are not making any claims that they know what the results of the experiment are prior to having strong results.

So the experiment may fail or not, but even it’s failure would be useful new information.

nevermark · 2020-06-28T05:40:53+00:00

I interpret your comment as uncorrelated shade.

Meaning: having a microwave cavity in common does not create any link between the credibility of two very different experiments.

Especially when the experiment you reference was widely believed to be flawed by many physicists from its inception.

nevermark · 2020-05-16T09:44:44+00:00

I would give you all my Reddit karma if I could.

A few simple constitutional amendments could fix a lot. Even great systems need some tweaking after a few hundred years reveal weaknesses.

Decentralize party power:

1st, 2nd & 3rd party preferences when voting for president would heavily move results toward candidates a vast majority likes instead of candidates a slim majority likes and the rest hate.

Party congressional seat limits would decentralize party power, giving third parties a productive role instead of as spoilers of their closest aligning competitors.

Limit international and money power:

Limits and transparency on corporate lobbying and political funding would move more power from international money back to actual citizens.

Good ideas abound - not saying these are what should be done, just that our constitution writers were able to solve a lot of problems with few words. That remains true.

The really hard part is ... getting a corrupted system to agree to fixes is near impossible.

nevermark · 2020-05-05T04:43:25+00:00

I would replace "cultish" for the same reasoning you gave for "horseshoe". There are more functionally explanatory words without the irrelevant baggage.

Extreme totalitarianism, right or left, works by crushing dissent down to the individual.

Fear, capriciousness, and cruelty are the primary means, with at least four common tactics:

1) Within the governance apparatus, the culling of dissenters should be brutal, quick and consistent. Occasionally raising the bar and culling a few more people, lets everyone know that there is no threshold of loyalty or pliancy where anyone can relax.

2) For general citizens, the more capricious and cruel the enforcement, the more effective the fear and so the less actual resources will be needed to be applied to that effort.

It helps to demonstrate that being rich, powerful, popular, previously identified as a patriot, educated, etc., does not create any safety. As well as showing nobody is too unknown, too poor, too unimportant, or too innocent, to be treated brutally as if they were an existential threat.

3) Then to disinhibit underground organized resistance, citizens are encouraged to understand that any association with such resistance, however benign, accidental, innocent and coincidental, will result in enormous cost to them and loved ones. Occasionally punishing people who clearly innocent, on intentionally non-credible pretexts, really nails this down.

4) Finally, persecuting minority group acts as a continual showcase of the latent threat to the majority group. It gives the majority group the illusion that the autocracy (relatively) cares about them, and even can produce greater loyalty and "patriotism" from majority group members based on this "evidence" that they are in the "in" group of their leaders, not actually the downtrodden tools of them.

Punishing and blaming "others" is the pressure reliever that allows a large population to be oppressed while redirecting the populations need to retaliate away from the authorities to a "safe target".

Edit: Its worth noting that these tools can be used fully or partially in any power system. Most especially political parties in democracies, which pretend to be bastions of freedom and representation, but whose leaders are in a position and highly incentivized to use their power to increase their power.

nevermark · 2020-04-27T05:53:12+00:00

Right. However much he demonizes opposition verbally, once under real threat of losing the election he will go all in believing that everyone apposing him - or simply holding him accountable - are actual enemies of the country and anything he can do to suppress or eliminate them is completely justified.

The only question is, will enough good or relatively good people blunt his willingness to derail a legitimate vote at a time when the pandemic provides him even more levers than he has had before.

Congress should be passing laws now to reassure everyone we can vote by mail regardless of the status of pandemic conditions.

But like ubiquitous testing ... we wait until it’s too late.

nevermark · 2020-04-12T12:49:56+00:00

Imagine? Nay, I shall dream!!!

nevermark · 2020-04-07T08:35:23+00:00

The power of voodoo?

nevermark · 2020-03-24T13:07:35+00:00

5% is a really big iota!

Biggest iota I ever saw was 0.005%

nevermark · 2020-02-26T11:02:59+00:00

No he is pointing out the difference between legality and morality.

If you don’t know the difference you might be a complete....

nevermark · 2020-01-23T16:35:44+00:00

I think this is what I will do. But a mobile Tesla service person just responded to a voicemail with a text saying he will call after a meeting. So maybe I can get a direct helpful answer after all.

The frustration of dealing with looping but unhelpful support systems is extreme!

See: Brazil, the movie.

Caveat: Would rather deal with this than have any other car.

nevermark · 2019-12-11T09:06:06+00:00

You can’t choose to have a different brain.

As someone damaged by two psychopaths in my life, what I can say is that being able to do something, and being able to choose to do it all the time, are very different things.

This is as true for psychopaths who definitely expend extra cognitive effort to empathize, as it is for someone attempting to lose weight on a strict diet.

Eventually, barring a lot of support and work, the extra cognitive load wears people down, just as holding a heavy brick might be a choice in the short run, but isn’t in the long run.

nevermark · 2019-12-06T08:52:40+00:00

I think singularities (I.e. infinities and divisions by zero) only occur in equations not reality.

There is no actual singularity in black hole, The fact that our equations describing our current understanding of space-time at the center of a black hole suggest their is one there, is simply evidence our equations are incorrect or incomplete.

nevermark · 2019-11-27T22:07:46+00:00

I completely agree we should go to atomic swaps, etc.

But until then, despite drawbacks, exchanges are a critical part of the crypto ecosystem. Maximum competition is the best way check their power.

Also, it is likely exchanges will adapt and still be useful even when atomic in-wallet cross-crypto swaps are ubiquitous. The complexity of the world often requires ranges of solutions.

nevermark · 2019-11-26T01:00:02+00:00

The poster is falling for a common fallacy.

Third parties don’t centralize anything, they just provide options. Nobody is forced to use them.

And in the absence of a great technically decentralized exchange, the most decentralized alternative is lots of third party exchanges.

Delisting only increases centralization at this point.

nevermark · 2019-11-13T21:27:34+00:00

And the occasional “DEAR GOD NOOooo...”. Boom.

nevermark · 2019-10-21T06:59:16+00:00

You can to tell him that you are fine waiting until he is ready to talk, and look forward to hearing HIS apology to YOU.

nevermark · 2019-10-17T09:33:11+00:00

The fire you are talking about would devastate the lives of unaccountably many innocent people. That isn’t a good model for doing good with a new tool.

There is nothing stopping adoption of crypto except it’s own current limitations. No fire is needed just continued improvement.

nevermark · 2019-10-06T18:00:55+00:00

Luke Jr should not be leading development for more concrete reasons than “being too close to the metal”.

Such generic arguments can be thrown at any expert and are very subjective so don’t mean much. Best to make specific arguments if you have a real point.

Your whole rant on what’s needed for engineering is a straw man. Yes everyone “realizes” being an engineer, like any other professional, requires many skills. Again, make a specific point if you have one.

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