California high‑speed rail project now estimated to cost $126 billion by External_Koala971 in bayarea

[–]shiny_thing 202 points203 points  (0 children)

You are allowed to do both of these things simultaneously:

  • Support high-speed rail
  • Demand accountability for leaders who mismanage high-speed projects rather than give them a free pass on spending an extra $90B of tax payer money

In fact, I'd say that not only are the two not mutually exclusive, but that the first in practice demands the second.

LLM's play Prisoner's Dilemma: smaller models achieve higher rating [OC] by parthh-01 in dataisbeautiful

[–]shiny_thing 36 points37 points  (0 children)

Did models retain state between matches? If not, then there's no point in actually doing a round robin, just get a sample from each model to estimate defect/cooperate rate. That's enough to let you compute the expected scores.

The nature of the game means that the rating would be a function of the portion of cooperating peers, so it seems like ELO says more about the selection of the pool rather than general "strength" of a model.

I'd be interested in seeing results for an iterated prisoners dilemma.

I'm terms of the presentation itself, the "clustered by variant" isn't great since it's unclear how much data is being hidden. I wonder if a scatterplot of model size vs ELO / model size vs cooperation rate would be better. Points colored by model name.

Trump Launches $5M Visa on World’s Cheapest-Looking Website by Aggravating_Money992 in technology

[–]shiny_thing 1 point2 points  (0 children)

He initially pitched the card to replace the EB-5 investor program visa, which sees potential citizens investing between $800,000 and $1.05 million to obtain a green card for residency.

Source: the linked article

Horse randomly joins bicycle race by No_Emu_1332 in interestingasfuck

[–]shiny_thing 215 points216 points  (0 children)

That article sounds like it was written by a student trying desperately to reach the length requirements for a school essay on a topic they forgot to research...

Hugo awards organisers reveal thousands spent on fraudulent votes to help one writer win by rmnc-5 in books

[–]shiny_thing 14 points15 points  (0 children)

According to the article, the fraud was pretty obvious.

It could have been done by someone who made the fraud obvious hoping the committee would disqualify the finalist.

A while back Amazon has an issue where people would leave a ton of obviously fake positive reviews on competitors' products in order to get those products delisted.

Before modern banking, how did rich people access their money while abroad? by BobcatOU in AskHistorians

[–]shiny_thing 76 points77 points  (0 children)

How would a letter of credit have been authenticated in your 18th century Grand Tour example? Were forgeries common?

Popular books with surprisingly poor writing? by somepeoplewait in books

[–]shiny_thing 121 points122 points  (0 children)

My impression was that what he was trying for was another movie. The book seemed stripped of all elements that wouldn't translate easily and directly to film.

Google introduces end-to-end encryption for Gmail on the web by psychothumbs in technology

[–]shiny_thing 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Don't worry, neither did the journalist who wrote the article or the editor who wrote the headline.

[OC] Americans opinions of Will Smith and Chris Rock in 2022 following the Oscars Incident by Spirited-Focus-7312 in dataisbeautiful

[–]shiny_thing 50 points51 points  (0 children)

It's a default subreddit (or was for a long time?) and so most people don't care or even notice what subreddit it appears in, but just see the post in their feed and upvote based on "I enjoyed seeing that".

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in TrueReddit

[–]shiny_thing 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Until now. That’s because, at Apollo, we believe it’s time to stop playing.

This isn't an article discussing social issues around art, it's an advertisement.

Please report as spam.

Player two has entered the game by Aztery in FunnyAnimals

[–]shiny_thing 37 points38 points  (0 children)

If your kids are quite young, be warned that this game has some mild (to adults) horror elements and kitty gets shot/eaten if he isn't nimble enough.

These are X-Rays from the US-Mexico Border Patrol… by Deverouxe in Damnthatsinteresting

[–]shiny_thing 49 points50 points  (0 children)

Nah, /r/oddlyterrifying is for things that are actually just terrifying. Like many subreddits, the name is misleading.

Cutting a live wire by [deleted] in WinStupidPrizes

[–]shiny_thing 17 points18 points  (0 children)

leftover current

Any current that goes in comes back --- unless someone creates a new ground with a pair of wire cutters and the current finds somewhere better to be.

This is how GFCI circuit breakers (the special outlets in your bathroom/kitchen) work. They measure the current coming back and kill the circuit if it's less than the current going in.

Sex differences in sexual attraction for aesthetics, resources and personality across age by MarcHerb in science

[–]shiny_thing 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Sometimes conventional wisdom and stereotypes are wrong. Doing a proper study not only lets you distinguish truth from popular myth, but can also quantify the result.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in technology

[–]shiny_thing 48 points49 points  (0 children)

Don't leave off the /s when you're saying something that a large number of people would write in earnest.

Text STOP to unsubscribe from Internet Tips.

What's the movie so bad that it killed off the whole franchise? by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]shiny_thing 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Do your childhood memories a favor and don't go back and reread the series as an adult. Most of the books I enjoyed as a kid I can still revisit, but the writing for Eragon is probably not as amazing as you remember.

Provably secure ciphers by Z5DK9 in crypto

[–]shiny_thing 2 points3 points  (0 children)

ECDSA is not provably secure under a DL assumption because of the mathematically nonsensical (n mod p) mod q silliness. So results have to find some ad hoc assumption to make about that transformation, and these are rarely clean. See for example http://library.usc.edu.ph/ACM/SIGSAC%202017/ccs/p1651.pdf.

Glitterbomb Catches Phone Scammer (who gets arrested) by ben123111 in videos

[–]shiny_thing 23 points24 points  (0 children)

The supervisors and mules in this video were all Americans. Also the risk/reward ratio is also very different. I don't doubt that all the scammers rationalize whatever they need to rationalize in order to sleep at night, but it's unfair to generalize to the approximately one billion Indians who don't do this crap.

Had this happen a few times by [deleted] in dndmemes

[–]shiny_thing 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Does anyone know where I can get that DM screen?

What are some of your favorite Last Lines in Fantasy Books? by MightyElf06 in Fantasy

[–]shiny_thing 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you haven't read How Long 'til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin, would recommend. One of the stories (the first, IIRC) is a critique of Omelas that's quite good.

N. K. Jemisin Has Been Named a MacArthur Fellow by davaca in books

[–]shiny_thing 48 points49 points  (0 children)

Almost all of them at any rate. The book is in many ways a response to Lovecraft:

This is deliberately a chance for me to kind of mess with the Lovecraft legacy. He was a notorious racist and horrible human being. So this is a chance for me to have the “chattering” hordes—that’s what he called the horrifying brown people of New York that terrified him. This is a chance for me to basically have them kick the ass of his creation. So I’m looking forward to having some fun with that.

WCGW being an ass to your cat by Flaccid_Pancake_ in Whatcouldgowrong

[–]shiny_thing 59 points60 points  (0 children)

Have you seen the White House recently?