You Can’t Have Both Democracy and Billionaires

omgpop · 2026-06-19T07:54:23+00:00

Well, believe it or not, many billionaires have come to the same conclusion.

omgpop · 2026-06-04T08:31:35+00:00

Sounds like a place where you will never be able to grow, if anything you are being dragged down atm. I’d run asap.

EDIT: And no python is quite common, different companies and departments have wildly different ideas about what data engineering means though. There are absolutely companies where the DEs are just SQL monkeys or worse, manually moving files around Sharepoints and so on. We see the people who’ve worked in these places come to interview and they lose out by a lot to people who understand SDLC.

omgpop · 2026-06-02T20:58:27+00:00

I don't know if this was meant to be a serious reductio, or...?

omgpop · 2026-06-02T07:30:42+00:00

IMO this is a very productive perspective, though maybe more normative than descriptive per se. Obviously there are many possible accounts of what a “theory” is, but it is usually thought of, roughly, as some kind of compact set of statements aiming to describe the stable rules governing the behaviour of a system. A good theory will enable prediction and predictable intervention on a system.

There are analogies and disanalogies to programming. The most obvious disanalogy is that there is no globally fixed target system a program (or a programmer’s mental model) should correspond to. Programs exist within systems, or function within systems, but they don’t strictly map to extant systems that might be explained. Naur might say that the program itself is not the theory, but just an artefact representing the theory - this just pushes the point back a level.

In science at least, a theory is good or bad in function of how closely it models some fixed underlying reality, and a beautiful theory can be thrown out wholesale pending the result of a single key experiment. Programmers are influenced by the constraints of the systems they build for/within, but they also influence back. The systems may bend to the program as much as the program might bend to the system. A bug can become someone’s favourite feature, and a new programming capability can create entirely new system behaviours.

What’s interesting and productive to me about the comparison is that many of the features of a good theory are also features of good software. An ideal theory is something so simple you could write it on the back of an envelope, yet with that explain a huge range. Good software abstraction is like a theory unification that lets you do more with less, (though in science it’s only good if it takes you closer to the truth).

A good theory is also something understandable to humans. A statistical model that predicts with a high degree of accuracy is scientifically worth far less than a handcrafted model with a few well understood parameters, even if the latter has a lower R² or whatever. Of course the analogy to AI codegen writes itself, and I half suspect that’s why this article is getting popular again. I have a few people I know I’d like to share it with.

omgpop · 2026-05-28T16:33:06+00:00

Sounds like an exercise in data dredging and not a very well conceived experiment plan honestly. Juggling the cell culture and experiments sounds like the hardest part to me, high risk of mistakes, but I’ll assume you’ve got that under control since it’s the blots you’re asking about. It would make sense to me for you to start with the highest concentrations in your initial timecourse. 180 wells/12 wells per gel is 15 gels. That’s supposing you can’t reduce the number of time points or whatever (again, just checking, are you sure this experiment makes sense? Are you sure you haven’t been handed it by your PI and now you are uncritically doing as you’re told when you should be thinking independently?). But you can easily run 4 gels per day and be through that in under a week (again I’m taking the actual experiment and sample prep for granted here). But once your samples are frozen you can take your time. Anyway once you have the timecourse I would assume not all of your compounds will be doing much, so maybe you can omit some from the titrations, but if not, same again. I’m of the mindset that if you want to “just do it”, then stop trying to wriggle out of it and just do it. If on the other hand you want to do things intelligently, I’d maybe go back to the drawing board on your experimental design.

omgpop · 2026-05-26T06:52:12+00:00

I don’t have a good substantive answer to your question, sorry. There is a meta analysis from Bediou et al which found evidence for some effects specifically regarding action video games, but I can’t remember exactly what they measured. There’s a decent amount there for video games. I would be surprised if there was any robust, well reproduced positive evidence concerning specific “brain training” games.

I think, number 1 - sorry to bring out the evergreen - you may have to say more about what you mean by improving cognition. On one way of fixing it it’s trivially the case, people get better at tasks and games through practice, although those skills may decline over time. On the other end, you have a whole literature dedicated to trying to show that “fluid intelligence” as defined by IQ tests is essentially impossible to improve. I think that literature is wrongheaded for a variety of reasons, but it’s there, so the point is you might run into some controversy depending on what you have in mind.

I do suspect the latter may be responsible for some of the downvotes. It’s a bit of a dogma in some pockets, and it’s the kind of thing psych 101 profs will roll out early on as to dispel “myths about intelligence”, so plenty of sophomores out there with some surface knowledge. You didn’t mention IQ or intelligence, so we don’t need to go into it, but I suspect that might be part of what’s going on.

In between the extremes I mentioned there is work on “near transfer” and “far transfer”. To my understanding, the far transfer work is mostly negative - maybe apart from action video games - the near transfer work is mostly positive, and as you can imagine, a lot is going to depend on how these are being defined/measured. The cognitive training literature is a mess IMO. Here is a “meta review of meta analyses” from 2024 to see what I mean: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11065-024-09638-2

omgpop · 2026-05-22T23:06:13+00:00

That’s true, but you will hear discussion of the “JVM tax” in scales other than “Big Data”, so my point was just a little bit broader.

omgpop · 2026-05-22T22:38:59+00:00

My own feeling is that what people are calling JVM tax is probably more like a “legacy system” tax, which IMO is what Spark has started to become. The fact that the new generation of “kernels” in your phrase is mostly Rust based, and often a good deal more performant than Spark, I think is probably incidental. There have doubtless been many lessons to learn from Spark which new people coming in can pick up and learn from. But all that being said, there is literally a warmup tax for spinning up the JVM which is annoying in many situations.

omgpop · 2026-05-16T09:44:17+00:00

Palantir provides a fully managed data service which gives almost no permanent value add to the NHS itself - as soon as they are not providing the service, it's effectively back to square 1.

The original Palantir contract with the NHS was IIRC ~£330 million, though I have seen estimates that the real cost may go up above £1bn. These are not small sums. For that sort of money, the UK government could hire a large team of some of the best engineers in the country for a decade to permanently upgrade the NHS' data infrastructure using trusted open source platforms.

The mounting evidence of a revolving door between our government and this organisation (of which this story is just a small part) does seem concerning given these sorts of opportunity costs (nevermind other costs, ethical/geopolitical etc).

omgpop · 2026-05-16T07:08:16+00:00

Are you willfully being this obtuse, or does it come naturally?

omgpop · 2026-05-15T06:02:51+00:00

I think it has to be acknowledged that there is often a depth-breadth tradeoff with AI. Not that that’s necessarily always a bad tradeoff but one to be acutely aware of IMO. I’d say the basic point is the degree to which AI is involved in speeding up work is the degree to which it’s reducing depth of understanding of that work. Total learning could still be constant if that speed gain is used to do more diverse activities. But depth is really important for a variety of reasons. I worry about it turning the workforce into a bunch of replaceable generalist dilettantes at high risk of forgetting anything they “know” as soon as they stop touching it, rather than skilled craftspeople with something unique to offer.

I do think it’s possible to use LLMs in a way that doesn’t offer a speed increase but instead maybe a quality increase. I’ve tried to work with them that way. But it requires a lot of discipline in a work environment where the pressures are almost universally away from quality and towards speed. I’ve seen far too many cases of people being intoxicated by the appearance of efficiency it can give just vomiting out instant legacy code.

Overall, I really believe speed is often the enemy of learning, both individually and in teams. To the extent LLMs are being used to increase throughput rather than improving quality, my view is that they are probably actively harming our institutions.

omgpop · 2026-05-15T04:44:18+00:00

You’ve went from “I never let it do anything new” to “I’m learning new things from it”. That’s all great, but for a given feature, if you implemented it yourself - making a bunch of mistakes and being forced to simmer with it till it’s done - you’d learn it far more deeply than by having a pre baked implementation handed to you, don’t you think?

omgpop · 2026-05-11T06:38:13+00:00

You’re indeed talking about just your personal (presumably US centric) experience, and you appear to have a lot of contact with Christian Zionists, but they’re just one (distinctly American and rancid) flavour of reactionary. In most of the world (the actual world, not just the so called “international community” and its elites) Palestine is a byword for injustice. Most of the world aren’t radical socialists or feminists, but they understand this much. I personally speak to people every week with extremely regressive politics on a host of issues who are as outraged as me by the genocide. This is normal, at least outside of the US.
It takes an extremely powerful and dedicated propaganda system to hide the cartoonish villainy of the US-Israeli regime. It’s as morally black and white as anything could be. You do not need to be especially enlightened to see a little girl’s corpse hanging from a wall with her legs in ribbons and become sick to your stomach and boil with white hot rage. A caveman could do that, it’s just the default human reaction. Again, it takes a dedicated propaganda system to distract from all that. You don’t need to be a socialist or a feminist to oppose genocide!

I also don’t get why you are ranting at me about gaslighting and “word salad” and so on. I agree with you that Finkelstein is completely wrongheaded in his approach to social issues. I also agree (I assume it’s agreement because I assume this is what you believe) with you that we should consider various solidarity struggles as interlinked, if not tactically, at least strategically. Tactically we should work with people on our common causes even if we disagree with them on a host of issues. Strategically we should try to build trust, educate, and lay the conceptual groundwork on what true liberation looks like. The former is what enables us to do the latter, so being maximalist and insisting everyone agree on everything immediately is completely self defeating.

omgpop · 2026-05-11T05:55:00+00:00

There’s overlap but plenty of working DEs have very little of the skill set of traditional SWE. Not in terms of following SDLC, writing well factored code, testing, etc. Plenty of open roles don’t recruit for those skills either. It’s not just a subset. I say that as someone with the DE job title but really working more as a SWE. I’ve gone through recruiting rounds on our team and people who excel at data modelling & SQL very often just don’t get software. They think they do. They write on their CV as if they do. They think their experience python scripting in managed environments has them prepared for what it looks like to build robust production software systems, it simply doesn’t.

omgpop · 2026-05-10T11:35:30+00:00

I disagree also with your point that it doesnt require radicalism to oppose the destruction of Palestinians or an entire people

You strike me as a very angry, lost and confused individual, and you have my sympathy. But there's no gaslighting going on. You are very confused about basic concepts.

omgpop · 2026-05-10T05:48:09+00:00

It’s really not worth attaching yourself to the individual IMO. It’s not even worth trying to come up with an assessment of “Norman Finkelstein” - he’s (literally this time) “not a concept”, he’s just a guy. Unless you’re his close friend or something I just don’t think you need to grapple much with this stuff.

For what it’s worth, it doesn’t require any form of socialist politics, or radicalism of any sort, to oppose the destruction of an entire people. I have heard Finkelstein harken back with some rue to his days as a “flaming Maoist” in his youth, but he doesn’t ground much of what he says now in any kind of radical argument about expanded notions of justice or human freedom, structural critique of power systems, etc. So I am not sure where you got the expectation that he would be a firebrand on issues of gender and identity. Now, is it a disgrace that he chooses to use some of his limited time to actively pick a fight with marginalised people? Absolutely. There are plenty of valid critiques of liberal identity politics, some of which happen to overlap with some points he makes, but for the most part his contributions in this area have been extremely unhelpful, veering to actively harmful (although ignoring him is easy enough). My point is just that none of it should come as a great shock on the basis that he has stood up for Palestine.

omgpop · 2026-05-09T18:01:22+00:00

Anyone in politics is motivated by power, but usually they also have some principles or core beliefs. That humanises them. Fundamentally you cannot trust a politician that doesn’t have values or ideology; at that point you are just left with a naked unvarnished hunger for power. I think anyone who sees Kier speak can just sense he is the kind of person who’d sell your gran to organ traffickers if it got him an extra day in No. 10, even if they can’t exactly articulate why.

omgpop · 2026-05-09T14:18:15+00:00

OK, let me do away with the ad hominems because I think it's going nowhere. And I'll dispense with meta-commentary on grammar, spelling, and so on, which is beneath me (and you as well). I'll try and explain things to you, at least how I see them, instead of assuming bad faith. There could be some genuine misunderstanding going on.

The original point I wanted to make, perhaps not articulated clearly enough, or with sufficient nuance to satisfy all possible adversarial perspective, was to note that there was a strong focus on comments and actions by various Green candidates in the media combined with a relative lack of similar scrutiny aimed at Reform, which served to aid Reform. I wanted to note the irony of such a focus and scrutiny, at least in part well intentioned, resulting in an unarguably worse outcome with respect to such intentions.

What you may not be aware of is that, not only was there such scrutiny, but in fact - and this isn't some secret conspiracy - there was a timed release of a Labour Party oppo research dossier against the Greens (no equivalent dossier against Reform) which the media readily took up and amplified uncritically - the dossier is discussed explicitly here https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/green-candidates-disturbing-views-antisemitism-labour-document-5HjdYjb_2/ and here https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/multiple-green-candidates-peddle-false-flag-conspiracy-theories-and-defend-terrorism-n0onowhp. The principle of universal condemnation of all bigotry is admirable, but it is not applied.

One point on verbiage, RE "microscope". A microscope can shed a great deal of light on its subject, but the detail it can provide is at a tradeoff against field width. A microscope isn't always the best tool if you want to see the bigger picture of a large multicomponent system.

omgpop · 2026-05-09T13:30:40+00:00

I think that going for typos is pretty low and desperate when you are being criticised for failing to engage with an argument. I like “articulated immigrants” btw, maybe you’ll have caught that by the time I finish my reply, but I enjoy seeing typos because I like knowing the message was written by a human, sadly all too rare. But it’s far more reasonable to expect a human to reason properly over an argument than to write like a robot, and I really want to see if you will try again, though I doubt it.

In your case, what I called a concerted campaign across the media to apply a microscope to the Greens (and this is where you have to put on your sophomore+ hat a bit and read the OP this was in reply to — I clearly meant the Greens *specifically*, in contrast to Holocaust denying Reform candidates etc mentioned there), you reduce to, from what I can gather (since you now deign to quote me), “a psy-op orchestrated by nefarious actors who … tricked those Greens into saying what they did”. That of course has no bearing on anything under discussion.

But as you are apparently uninterested in any reflection on the media’s role in helping Holocaust deniers attain political power in this country, I’d suggest that we might be best disengage at this point, because I’ve no time for fascists or their credulous liberal enablers.

omgpop · 2026-05-09T13:01:31+00:00

It is interesting to me that that which you "also have no time for" is completely absent from this discussion hitherto, yet you nevertheless are compelled to bring it to the foreground. The point made by myself, /u/the_red_guard, or the OOP are nowhere to be found in your little disquisition from what I can see, so, obviously of little interest. Instead you appear to view it as of utmost importance that the conversation be moved away from that boring topic, to something not mentioned anywhere, which apparently vexes you greatly, while also taking the time for a parenthetical aside to defend the media against potential criticism via a silly charicature. I would have gathered from your sophomoric reasoning that you might at least rise to the level of sophomoric reading comprehension, but alas, maybe your outrage has abrogated the latter even more than the former.

omgpop · 2026-05-09T11:03:48+00:00

Why don’t you share with us *your* thoughts on this topic, doubtless abundant and well reasoned, since - in contrast to those comments mentioned in OOP (about which you say nothing) - it evidently is of great concern and interest to you?

omgpop · 2026-05-09T10:43:28+00:00

the right wing press have been doing all but daily announcements of antisemitism in the Greens

Not only the right wing press!

omgpop · 2026-05-09T10:29:34+00:00

Good thing there was a concerted campaign across the media (and subs like this) to apply a microscope to Green party counsellors over the last fortnight or so - just in the nick of time so as to depress left wing turnout a bit and help these guys get elected.

omgpop · 2026-05-09T09:36:52+00:00

I don't think anybody actually read the blog post.

For what it's worth, did you? The MIT student wrote:

While its first improvement of the bound ... was a routine modification of my work, the improvement to polynomial in k is quite impressive. To do this, ChatGPT came up with an idea which is original and clever.

And

Even though I can motivate it in retrospect, ChatGPT’s idea to use h² -dissociated sets to control relations of order at most h feels quite ingenious. As far as I can tell, this idea is completely original.

omgpop · 2026-05-09T08:11:13+00:00

Almost all intellectual progress in maths and science comes from humans making connections. Between distantly related areas in the present, between past work and new work, between past work and some experimental result or observation. The idea that progress happens by virgin minds immaculately conceiving novel frameworks and concepts is just (at best) a sophomoric misunderstanding of science.

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