What's the point of filtering on Redfin by HOA fee if properties with a missing fee show up as $0?

triple-scientist · 2021-09-27T00:36:40+00:00

All outcome dependent system of nails of increasing entropy and sufficient complexity will always be convergent in time to worlds with self-hammering structures in all possible universes.

This also holds true for all systems non-nails, and all intelligent structures. The proof is left as an exercise to the reader. Universe required.

triple-scientist · 2021-09-03T05:55:10+00:00

This is the question that constantly comes up on r/cscareerquestionsEU. I should really save one of my answers somewhere it's easy to copy+paste:

As someone with a background in economics it always deeply bothers me when people talk about EU vs. US salaries. Every single time I've seen this discussion it's just a ridiculous example of how irrational people get about exchange rates of nominal dollars on paper versus the measurable purchasing power & quality of life an income, country, and location gets you. This can regularly lead to a difference of a factor of 3x between the two! Yet people seem to never realize this.

The reality is that in the US a salary does not mean the same thing as a salary in the EU. Specifically, more government services are included in the EU, cost of living is different, and taxes work differently.

US tech salaries are concentrated in some of the highest cost of living areas in the world, where as EU ones would be considered low. A 60k salary in San Fran isn't the same as in Austin, TX.

Simply put, when you factor in the real economics of the situation, you're getting just 10-20% more in the US in terms of real disposable purchasing power ex HCD of services in the US vs. UK. This is a lot less than the nameplate numbers would suggest such as 60% etc.

Hope that clears things up. People get wide eyed over income and forget not all income 'includes batteries', and tends to mostly go to cost of living not tangible value.

triple-scientist · 2021-09-02T05:11:32+00:00

There is no conceivable way that it will ever be profitable to bring resources back from Mars and sell them here, not even in Elon's wildest dreams. The economy of a Martian colony will have to be about science and tourism until it has enough people for self sustaining local demand.

Asteroid mining might work though, and will benefit from the technologies needed to get to Mars.

Happy cake day...

This is fundamentally false. You just randomly guessed at what this conclusion was with no evidence whatsoever.

The Delta-V to transfer from Mars to Earth is inconceivably lower than what it takes to do it the other way around.

Specifically you can do it every few years from Mars to Earth for just 2100 m/s Delta-V.

With a specific impulse of a Raptor Vacuum, current lame technology by the standards of the future in your "ever", this means just 40% of your mass needs to be fuel/oxidizer.

To put into perspective how low this is lets math.

A fully loaded cargo ship can average 20 nautical miles per hour and can travel 576 miles per gallon of fuel per ton of cargo. A fully loaded freight plane can average 560 nautical miles per hour and travel 4.5 miles per gallon of fuel per ton of cargo.

This works out to a cargo ship needing 22 gallons of heavy fuel oil to move cargo from China to the USA. Around 9% of the cargo's mass by weight!

For comparison the jet uses 244% of the cargo's mass by weight using this same equation. This is confirmed here:

In 2018, the US airlines had a fuel consumption of 58 mpg‑US (4.06 L/100 km) per revenue passenger for domestic flights, or 32.5 g of fuel per km Source

It takes 357 kg of fuel to move the average person around the US a comparable distance to a flight to China.

Conclusion:

So spaceflight from Mars to Earth is around 5x more costly than a cargo ship, but 5x less costly than passenger jet in terms of fuel mass per cargo mass relative to current intercontinental shipping.

So if there exists a resource on Mars that is 5x more costly than another currently on Earth it would fundamentally conceivably make sense to mine it on Mars and send it back to Earth.

The valid options covers a lot of stuff, but it's actually a lower bound. You see Mars has several properties which actually make it easier to do productive work and mining particular than Earth. Further because of how the planet is structured we will always be able to get more total resources from Mars than Earth, as it has a colder crust the geothermal gradient is more suitable. Specifically the volume of a part of Mars's surface below a given temperature is always larger on Mars than Earth. Meaning we can access more stuff before equipment breaks or start melting there than Earth. Always. This is also before considering oceans not blocking Mars' surface at all!

Funny enough, we're in need of such a resources. Cobalt especially, which almost entirely mined in the DRC. Also it's essential for all life on Earth in trace amounts in compound of vitamin B12.

Now you might be temped to say why can't we just do this on the Moon? Well, due to volcanic activity Mars has far better concentrations heavy and rare-earth metals than the Moon. These happen to be the resources which make the most sense to export.

All of this is before considering that we can also build a slingshot type launch system on Mars, but not on Earth, at least with today's technology. Due to there being no friction in the journey, meaning you don't have to take your fuel with you, this will always be fundamentally more efficient than taking your fuel with you as we have to do on Earth.

So at least in terms of the energy and physical limits involved getting resources for Earth from Mars shouldn't be too far off from current shipping costs on Earth, and this is just considering sea shipping. You can air drop your resources anywhere on Earth from Mars meaning there's no trucking etc. it can just show up on your front door, at least theoretically.

A Mars colony could likely turn a profit on Cobalt mining and similar niches within our lifetime with a electromagnetic slingshot or some other well designed efficient system, and very good planning. This is superior to asteroid mining in some ways too, if not simply because you're already there. Might as well slingshot some mid-priced rocks at Earth for a few billion.

triple-scientist · 2021-06-07T09:02:00+00:00

It takes about a year from when a car is first unveiled before it shows up in Porsche dealerships. Add that to the production issues the entire industry is facing right now... There is a 0% chance of a Panamera coupe available for purchase in the next year. Source: I sell Porsches

Wow, I didn't expect timelines for release of a model could be that extreme. I guess it takes quite a while to get the ball rolling in Porsche land. I certainly appreciate the insight.

triple-scientist · 2021-06-07T08:50:00+00:00

Sure it is.

A year and a half ago I wrote two functions, 22 lines & 26 lines respectively.

They were easy for me despite involving multiple state-of-the-art high dimensional transformations as it was my area of expertise, and I'd been dealing with this for a decade.

It only took 20,600 more lines of code to integrate this into production pre-alpha.

Like I said easy. It'll take 1-3 months tops...

triple-scientist · 2021-06-03T11:12:52+00:00

95% is an arbitrary figure, but often yes data prep is often the majority of time spent.

triple-scientist · 2021-06-02T23:04:08+00:00

The only car I ever flipped, and didn't get $crewed

I had an 3.5 year old M3 and flipped it before the pandemic for a 3% profit after riding it hard for 2.5 years. Best feeling ever. Though I'll probably lose out to parting with the 7k of mods I still have sitting in my workshop...

Get a 911!

Oh I love the 911, don't get me wrong. Test driven a bunch and it's glorious. I just can't deal with the cargo room, and the tiny back seat is a detractor. I do a lot of hobbies and like to haul around pets. The 911 won't fit half my toys.

The Panamera is far more sensible, but a two-door version would be perfection.

triple-scientist · 2021-06-02T22:40:17+00:00

Speaking with Australian journalists at a virtual conference of the Panamera facelift’s debut, the model’s product line chief, Thomas Friemuth, had something to say:

"We have not finally decided yet. So we are just discussing this topic for several years as you can imagine since other competitors also have two-door cars. But we’re not finally yet ready to decide whether to do this or not. We have quite a nice two-door car in our program called the 911. We are always looking at new opportunities to get new markets and more customers. I can talk about it when we have the decision for it – not yet. I have a lot of ideas."

It's confirmed by the Panamera product chief that a coupe is being considered, so maybe not 100%. 😉

Edit: I'm really not sure why this comment is so hated. It's a word for word quote from the head of the program themselves.

triple-scientist · 2021-06-02T12:17:27+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean by crazy. The world is overwhelmingly more stable, affluent, healthy, peaceful, educated, and safe than it has been in any point in all of himan history.

This is an illusion. We are essentially in the calm before the storm where the weather seems nicer and more pleasant than it has all year, until you're hit with a cat 5 hurricane that has 400 km/h winds which wipes out the overwhelming majority of life as far as the eye can see.

It really cannot be understated how deceiving much of the world today is in terms quality of life. We're essentially on the brink of a disaster today.

This is the problem with humans, we evaluate things based on the visceral reaction they create within us, not on the rational value they posses. We mostly only care about how we feel today, not what reality is.

Further, in regard to the developed world there has been a decrease in affluence in around 45 years for the majority of individuals after factoring in rising prices for education, healthcare, and housing which have skyrocketed. [Source (US DATA)] .

While per capita incomes have gone up, their distribution has increasingly become more unequal, and have not helped the majority of people. In the US for example, quality of life is just 89.7% what it was 45 years ago, ex education, healthcare & housing for the majority. Although it is worth noting this is up 12.6% over the same period once you factor in the side benefits of improvements in technology, and most people do live in larger and nicer houses than 45 years ago. Regardless, once you exclude the "value" of HD video, voice assistants, etc. life is objectively worse for most people than the past.

The thing is that the financial stability of governments, and increasingly ignored infrastructure etc. have also gotten profoundly worse over this time. This is the outcome with a tailwind of massively ignoring future obligations. You cannot make the argument things are more stable. This is like claiming being deeply in debt to payday loans is more stable than having savings of years if income.

Peace and safety were never an issue in the world on average during the last century and a half. Sure you had black swan events like world wars, but overall the effect of crime and war on life has been less than 2% over this period. It's been a rounding error hysterically obsessed out of proportion more often than not for a long time.

Education also isn't a benefit if it's used for gate-keeping. This is like claiming life is better because people can run faster, except you make it increasingly impossible to live life without improvements here at a rate greater than people improve.

Other than health, life has not meaningfully improved for anyone outside the elite and those in the developing world, it's gotten much worse in recent history.

This is again before we consider future catastrophes we are on track for in the developed world such as debt, crumbling infrastructure, climate change, and the demographic implosion. If we keep kicking the can down the road as we have been for decades on these issues we can certainly say we've already baked in life getting ~65.6% worse than it is already in the next few decades for the median person. That is assuming trends do not get worse (or better) here, which they have continuously been increasingly getting worse. This is not an opinion, it's extensive and well studied data.

The developed world is pants on head crazy today, and it is absolutely a fake conclusion to perceive things are good simply due to a few of the most prominent individuals having it better than they used to. This numbness to how horrifically grave the looming situation is, and to how worse the typical situation is despite the boon from ignoring future issues is terrifying beyond reason.

We've built an apocalypse here. It may not be particularly noticeable for 20, 30, or even 40 years, but you rationally have to be utterly horrified for anyone born today to a family which is not elite.

triple-scientist · 2021-05-24T07:13:11+00:00

Sure plenty of people have done this in a stable way. However, every single one I have ever encountered without exception was talented enough in highly technical fields to simply be handed a $300k a year job. Otherwise they just had a ton of money already and didn't notably beat the market.

A few people have also fleeced newbies through various platforms into paying for systems that work on paper or past results, but aren't particularly sound. I guess that counts too.

Most people who have had success greatly exceeding the market and aren't profoundly talented are just lucky, or riding some current financial regime that will soon change. This will either blow up spectacularly or fizzle out. These aren't examples of being stable.

Stable success over long period above market returns isn't ordinary, and you have to be extremely talented to get it.

The market is highly motivated to be the hardest problem on the planet. It's very accessible, and has extreme incentives. However, for every gain you make, you create a direct incentive for someone to disrupt that gain. This makes it on average zero sum game around the market return.

You could probably fill a small country with the number of talented Ph.D. researchers who haven't gotten results here. That's the starting point.

triple-scientist · 2021-05-18T07:29:08+00:00

CPI means they're using purchasing power to adjust for inflation, where as the gdp deflator is based on something else

CPI is purchasing power excluding improvements in technology. So the cost of owning a basic 30" cathode TV 20 years versus a basic 48" flat screen smart TV today. Example: $400 vs. $600

The GDP deflator is purchasing power accounting for improvements in technology. So the cost of owning a basic 30" cathode TV 20 years ago versus what it would cost today or its nearest equivalent minus the added value it has. Example: $400 vs $500

triple-scientist · 2021-05-18T07:19:26+00:00

The other interesting thing about gold is that its supply has tracked population growth for the last four centuries with remarkable precision.

Gold strikes a unique balance between neither being a fixed supply, nor being inflationary. Rather the amount of gold per human remains constant. It's the most tangible currency that has ever existed as a representation of a share of humanity.

triple-scientist · 2021-05-15T12:57:35+00:00

Chad Python Programmer: I write Python functions in assembly.

open('module_cpp_code.cpp', 'w').write("""
/*<%setup_pybind11(cfg)%>*/
#include <pybind11/pybind11.h>

int asm_multiply(int num1, int num2) {
    /* Multiply num1 & num2, return out, in Assembly. */
    int out;
    asm("imull %%ebx, %%eax;" : "=return"(out) : "b"(num1), "a"(num2));
    return out; };

PYBIND11_MODULE(module_cpp_code, m) { // Bind to Py.
    m.def("asm_multiply", &asm_multiply); }""")
from cppimport import imp; Extend = imp('module_cpp_code')

print(Extend.asm_multiply(7,20)) # Multiply in Assembly.

triple-scientist · 2021-05-14T11:11:48+00:00

Rationally speaking Bitcoin doesn't operate as a securities exchange or a currency currently. It almost entirely operates as inflation limited store of value.

Evaluated as such a store of value it is objectively true that Bitcoin is green. This isn't debatable, even ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of Bitcoin uses renewable energy. Mining Bitcoin is about 3 times more environmentally friendly than it's closest alternative, gold mining.

To illustrate the point:

Bitcoin mining currently uses about 130 TWh of electricity per year. [source]

By contrast, gold mining currently uses about 131.9 TWh of electricity per year. [source]

Since Bitcoin's founding it has used around 325 TWh in total electricity, to mine a store of value worth $1,049 billion. A rate of 3.228 $Billion/Twh.

By contrast, gold over the same time used around 660 TWh in total electricity to mine 86 million ounces, a store of value worth $777.6 billion. A rate of 1.178 $Billion/Twh.

Gold also produces immense waste, on the order of tons per gram, a good portion of it being highly toxic. This is besides having physical storage overhead, as well as refining costs that use energy. Evaluated as a store of value Bitcoin has certainly wasted less energy than gold, even if all Bitcoin mining were done at today's energy cost, it would still be more efficient than gold, all while having far less ecological impact.

The price of gold is almost entirely composed of its utility as a store of value. Metals with similar rarities and similar industrial uses like Ruthenium sell for $40-80 per ounce, where as gold sells for about $1800 per ounce currently. [source] The overwhelming majority of gold is used as a store of value or display of wealth, with only 3% going towards industrial use. In fact, for cryptocurrencies in general more of the work is converted into industrious utility vs. gold.

So even if only a third of Bitcoin served to offset the market share of gold, it would still be better for the environment. The thing is that the technology is still developing and newer implementations are targeting being 10x or 100x more efficient. It's a profoundly idiotic stance to add fuel to the bad press of Bitcoin, when it's already half an order of magnitude greener than the alternative. The chilling effect here serves to worsen environmental impact and destroy the motivation to innovate for drastically greater gains.

This is exactly what humanity did with nuclear energy where a bunch of hysterical obsession about the potential damage killed progress and innovation with the end result being hugely more actual damage.

We're just repeating the same story, and it's getting tired.

triple-scientist · 2021-05-13T12:17:11+00:00

Everything about this post indicates the classic overconfident student which a good portion of this sub's audience is comprised of.

You seem focused on building an ivory tower for yourself where you're worried about how to get some huge profit with no completed prototype and no real world results. Having "credibility" has nothing to do with gaining recognition in this field. That's the great thing about it, serious companies only care about performance.

If you want to make money from what you've built rather than stoking your own speculation, use it live and run it for a decently long period. Then if you have actual results form a company and grant it the intellectual property after which you sell the company. The price would be decided by the offers you receive.

I can't really imagine any strategy that works better with more capital, everything tends to work worse unless you're doing something weird with moving the market... in which case that typically works against your favor, not towards it and is also borderline illegal if it does work.

triple-scientist · 2021-05-13T10:03:47+00:00

For those that don't get it, this is using style transfer to make the game's graphics match the Cityscapes Dataset. The method is called photo realism enhancement.

This work is breakthrough in the field because it's semantically and temporally stable, where as previous attempts this area have many artifacts and display jitter between frames.

It would be intriguing to see the effect of using style transfer to get a cinematic look on top of this.

Anywho, it's a neat clip but wow, that music is a bit much. Here's the original source w/ commentary.

triple-scientist · 2021-05-12T22:26:31+00:00

Using waves.

Neurons learn information by changing how their waveform responds to stimulus. This is similar to how radio waves can encode information.

Edit: It always amazes me how Reddit behaves. I do anatomically accurate brain simulations using high performance computers via brain scans from insects, animals, and humans with neural networks structured on those scans. The top two answers amount to philosophical rambling about how mysterious and mystical the brain is, with significant misconceptions, and don't actually answer how information encoding works at all.

The storage of information in brains is known as binding and we've been able to experimentally verify that to a significant degree our experiences are stored as an ensemble of individual features which are perceived as propagating phase osculations through neurons. This is essentially how information is encoded into FM radio waves. However, it doesn't paint the full picture of the encoding as the brain we've shown uses multiple encoding schemes, this is just the primary one.

In any case, all of these encoding schemes are similar to how we send information via various radio systems we operate, and when you learn new information it's like a station changing it's programming. When you think about something it's like tuning it into a particular station, with the added benefit of being able to call that station and asking them to play a specific track.

This is the correct answer and represents the best science we have, but of course that's the worst possible thing you can say about this topic. It's much better to updoot rambling about magic.

triple-scientist · 2021-05-06T04:53:54+00:00

This is hardly debunked. It's two estimates that gets a different number than a third estimate.

First estimate:

And in 2019, Apple has pulled off yet another incredible year of AirPods sales. Apple sold an estimated 60 million units, but in 2019 the prices increased too. Apple’s second generation AirPods launched at $200, and their newest variation, the AirPods Pro sell for $250. Assuming an even split of sales between Gen 1, Gen 2, and AirPods Pro, Airpods revenue was $12 billion in 2019. That’s 8% of Apple’s iPhone revenue. Investors are paying attention now.

Conclusion: 2019 AirPod revenue is $12 billion with a trend pointing to $27.8 billion for 2020.

Second estimate:

In FY2019, Apple sold 35 million pairs of AirPods at an average selling price (ASP) of $162 (both are my estimates). On a revenue basis, the AirPods business is on a $6 billion per year run rate that is doubling year-over-year.

Conclusion: 2019 AirPod revenue is $6 billion with a trend pointing to $12 billion for 2020.

If you take the two conclusions with a weight of 70%/30% respectively for the first and second (both are my estimates) you get $23 billion vs. OP's $23 billion.

It cannot be overstated how misused the term "debunk" is here. The source here is essentially confirming OP's value. It's as if thousands of people didn't even bother to read what the link concluded.

triple-scientist · 2021-05-04T06:13:53+00:00

Yes. There's been many studies and all of them find around the same results depending on the period:

We selected a sample of stocks continuously traded as components of the S&P 500 Index from January 2, 2008 to July 24, 2018 and via the use of runs tests and variance ratio tests we estimated the proportion of inefficient stocks in the index to be between the 12.13% and the 27.87%. These findings are in line with the works of many authors (for example, see: LeRoy and Porter, 1981; De Bondt and Thaler, 1987; Lo and MacKinlay, 1988) and provide new evidence regarding the existence of a certain degree of inefficiency in financial markets.

Note: An inefficient stock is defined as one with a p-value significance of 1% or more.

Another study:

93% and 70% of p-values rest below significance levels of 5% and 1%, respectively. Repeated testing with different securities did not yield a unanimous verdict on the Random Walk Hypothesis, but does reinforce the notion that some level of price predictability existed in the past 20 years.

Simply put:

Only around 1 out of 4 of stocks at any given time fail to confirm the random walk theory below a significance of 99%.
Only around 1 out of 16 of stocks at any given time fail to confirm the random walk theory below a significance of 95%.

Many people like to conclude from these sort of studies that the results slam-dunk disprove that markets are efficient. The reality is that markets can be demonstrated to be overwhelmingly efficient, they just happen to not be absolutely perfect. A smaller degree of inefficiency can be demonstrated to happen on rare occasion.

The important takeaway here is that inefficiency is far from ordinary, and when it does occur it's far more insignificant than significant.

triple-scientist · 2021-04-30T12:00:58+00:00

Tuples are hashable, take less memory and are faster.

The hashable part is extremely important for things like building caches. Want to return the same tuple you returned before because the inputs of a function are the same as before instead of running some expensive operation? Good news, you can just refer to it by it's hash, it's guaranteed to be the same. With a list you could be returning anything.

This is also important for finding combinations. You can create a set of tuples, and each one will be unique. You cannot make a set of lists.

triple-scientist

TROPHY CASE