Kevin_P
1yr ago
My favorite illustration of this is something called Centaur Chess.
Early chess engines would occasionally make dumb moves that were obvious to human players. Even when their overall level improved enough to beat the top human players they still often did things that skilled players could see were sub-optimal.
This meant that in the late 90s / early 00s the best "players" were human-computer teams. A chess engine would suggest moves, then a human grandmaster would make their move based on that - either playing the way the computer suggested, or substituting their own move if they saw something the computer had missed.
But as AI continued to develop the engine's suggestions kept getting better. Eventually they reached a point where any "corrections" were more likely to be the human misunderstanding what the computer was trying to do rather than a genuine mistake. Human plus computer became weaker than the computer alone, and the best tactic was to just directly play the AI's moves and resist the temptation to make improvements.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
They've changed core aspects before. THAC0 was probably the defining element of pre-third-edition D&D.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
The Oxford English Dictionary is usually a good place to look. The full version has sourced examples for early usages of all different senses of a word.
Unfortunately it's a paid service but someone here might have access, most likely through a university.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
I've read several times here that the climate forecast often described by news articles as "business as usual" (RCP8.5) is based on outdated assumptions and that actual emissions are already well below that forecast.
The explanations seem reasonable, but when I've tried to look for data to confirm / quantify it I havent had any luck.
Does anyone have a good source with numbers for forecast emissions from RCP8.5 (and possibly other forecast models) directly compared against actual emissions since the forecast was made?
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Limiting to things that I've known people to forget or not think of:
-
Chargers (this is the #1 forgotten item among people I know)
-
Plug adapters, if traveling somewhere with a different electrical system
-
Mouse (you CAN work on the trackpad for two weeks, but it's much less comfortable)
-
Work shoes, if traveling in comfortable shoes (somehow shoes are much easier to forget than shirts or trousers)
-
Download or print out your tickets and hotel reservations
-
Spare phone, if traveling somewhere where roaming is expensive (it's often much cheaper to buy a local sim card rather than paying roaming fees for data)
Obviously also ID, bank cards, phone, laptop, clothes etc as others have said - but those are obvious enough that you're not realistically going to forget them.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Sorry for snapping at you but that was one of the examples I was thinking about when I wrote the post. It makes a lot of assertions but is very short on actual numbers. There's a chart but it's on a 100 year scale and far too zoomed out to read off the emissions numbers for any given year. And maybe I'm just not reading the references properly but I looked up a few of them and couldn't find anything in there that directly says how many gigatonnes of CO2 were emitted vs how many were forecast by RCP8.5.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
People here often bring up legal issues with relying on IQ tests etc but I don't think it's the real problem. The legal issues basically only apply to employers in America, but other countries without those laws are still experiencing the same sort of higher education signaling spiral.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
The easy exercise is to try and solve exam questions from n years ago. Most of the time, in most subjects, people just walk away shocked how much harder they were.
I don't know about your course in particular, but the "look how badly current students fail old exams" technique is deeply flawed. When a course is changed it almost always adds some parts while removing others.
If the previous version covered points ABCD but the new course is now ADEF then it's only natural that today's students would be confused by points B and C. It's not a fair comparison unless you also consider how well the original group would have done on E and F.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Specifically Frontier (Elite 2) and Frontier: First Encounters (effectively an expansion to Frontier but sold as a separate game to try and wriggle out of a contract). The original Elite didn't have Newtonian flight.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Why would I buy AI-generated imagery from Shutterstock when I could just make it myself?
Aside from the time savings that other people have mentioned, the other big advantage of Shutterstock is that it handles all of the relevant copyrights. Using AI art generation is probably OK from an IP rights perspective, but there's still a chance that a generated image will be close enough to the source material that the original artist could sue.
Using Shutterstock already insulates companies from the risk of traditional artists giving them a copied picture. I can see how people would see the same service as valuable for AI images too, at least until the legal issues get straightened out.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
The great majority of romantic fiction read by women, fan-fiction or otherwise, is heterosexual pairings with the OP, a female character from the setting, or a stand-in for the OP.
My priors were strongly in the opposite direction, at least in the fanfiction space, so I checked the numbers on Archive of our Own, (the most popular fanfiction site).
They confirmed my suspicions: M/M pairings are almost twice as common as M/F (4.7 million fics vs 2.4 million). They're also read a lot more, the most popular M/M fic had 8.2 million hits vs only 2.7 million for the top M/F fic.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Mostly money. From the administrators' point of view it's all about the tuition fees. And not just for the masters students, in some humanities programmes even the PhD students have to pay.
From the professors' point of view, postgraduates help support their supervisors' research, plus they're much more interesting to work with than undergrads.
What if they are millennial versions of Ted Kaczynski, taking the maximum expected-value path towards acquiring the capital to do a pivotal act?
Or maybe just taking the maximum expected-value path towards becoming insanely rich?
The collapse was dramatic but it's a consequence of the same high-risk strategy that had FTX valued at 32 billion USD a few months ago. If that's the upside then their actions can be rational even if the chance of success was quite low.
EDIT: Also SBF may have lost most of his money but according to this article he's still worth around $600 million US. So even if the company failed, rationalism still seems to have paid off for him personally.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
I'm not going to tell you to move or not to move. If you have the money there's nothing wrong with spending it on something that will improve your quality of life.
But this:
I wonder if by moving to the pricier place, the higher rent will light a bit of a fire under my butt and result in faster progress in my work that ends up paying more dividends on a net basis. That might even be true after the first 15-months when rent will basically double.
... is wishful nonsense, as you seem to have already figured out based on your following paragraph.
You can use the same logic to justify any sort of spending, not just housing. And other things too - eating that extra dessert is actually good for my diet, because gaining weight will make me more focused on exercise tomorrow.
Ironically the motivation trick will probably work better in the opposite direction. Tell yourself, "if I put in the extra effort over the next 12 months, I'll treat myself to a nicer apartment this time next year". That way you're linking the effort to the reward in a much more direct way.
Like I said at the beginning, this doesn't mean you shouldn't move. If the nice apartment is worth the extra cost then go for it, you don't seem to be hurting for cash. But don't justify it based on second-order effects that will probably never happen.
Also you can simplify the two short-term financial effects you mentioned. A $x discount per month for 15 months plus a $1500 one-time cost is pretty much the same thing as a discount of $(x-100).
Kevin_P
1yr ago
One big advantage is the thing most posts in the thread have been complaining about: The Algorithm (TM)
I'm going to go against the consensus here and say that I actually quite like the suggested videos page. The results are far from perfect but if a video appears on my homepage there's a better-than-even chance that it will be relevant to my interests, vs a roughly 0% chance for videos on the front page in incognito mode. And I don't think the results have got noticeably worse in recent months/years.
Logging in also gives you access to other features, including the subscriptions feed that shows you new videos from channels you've subscribed to, the ability to make comments (yes, youtube comments as a whole are trash, but there are still certain pockets that have value), and being able to give upvotes that at the margin will encourage creators to make more of the sort of content you enjoy.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
I remember some posts at the previous place talking about an Islamist (Taliban?) leader that was radicalized when he studied in the US and was horrified by American attitudes to casual sex, homosexuality etc.
Does anyone remember the guy's name and have a link and/or more details?
Kevin_P
1yr ago
What are ways that the Trump contingent could bring such a conspiracy to light without sounding like schizophrenic conspiracy theorists?
Maybe I'm out of touch because I'm not American but I thought Clinton's Pied Piper Strategy to push Trump to the nomination in 2016 was an established fact. Or at the very least a widely accepted theory even in mainstream / leftist media sources.
"They're trying the same thing again" doesn't seem like it would be treated as an outrageous conspiracy theory. Although by the same token it wouldn't be a shocking revelation either, just the standard dirty tricks that happen every election.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
That's their "standard" rate, but they also have a 70% royalty rate (30% Amazon cut) that applies to most books in practice. You just need to price your book between $2.99 and $9.99 USD and allow it to be part of Kindle Unlimited.
(The reason for positioning the lower rate as the standard one is probably because a bonus for including the book in KU sounds nicer than a penalty for not including it, even when the practical effects are exactly the same)
Kevin_P
1yr ago
tl;dr; sports + celebrities. No one cares about paul graham or taylor lorenz, lots of people care about Brady, Belichick and Dicker the Kicker
This policy has been an absolute disaster for that group, at least based on my little corner of non-political Twitter.
Until yesterday the effect of Musk on sports/hobby Twitter was zero to slightly positive - the only noticeable change was that the trending hashtags are less dominated by American politics. The Mastadon "migration" was never more than a handful, and even those that did set up accounts either forgot them after a week or just set them to mirror Twitter posts.
But the external links ban seems to have changed all that. Suddenly everyone is setting up alternative accounts, it's an order of magnitude bigger than the initial takeover. Linktree and similar services were very widely used so there are a lot of people that never cared about the takeover that now feel threatened. Even if you aren't personally affected Twitter has made itself look weak so people are concerned about it collapsing.
The policy has seriously undermined Twitter's standing in that area, in a way that looks like it will persist despite the U-turn.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
52 weeks in a year, 26 bi-weeks, 26 * 16667 = 43,334 USD/year. Which is... pretty low, these days, even by startup standards.
You're out by an order of magnitude. It should be 433k, which seems unrealistic even in Silicon Valley.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
The article is talking about charitable foundations rather than individual donations. Rich people set them up then hand over the management to professional charity administrators. The article argues that the money then gets diverted to standard leftist causes, regardless of the original donor's intentions, and that this is especially true for foundations that are set up to continue after the original donor dies.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
I noticed that nobody has mentioned this yet so I'll throw it in for context: Margaret Thatcher abolished tenure in the UK back in the 1980s. The circumstances were pretty similar to today - the object-level issues were different but the basic layout of the situation was the same. It didn't create the sort of disaster that doomsayers are predicting but also do much to stop academics criticising the government, as far as I can tell things went on pretty much as they did before the change.
Kevin_P
11mo ago
Just doesn't exist. Private universities weren't really a thing back then (government-funded universities didn't charge tuition fees until the late 90s) and although the Labour Party screamed about it at the time they made no attempt to reverse the policy when they came back into power.
This is already happening. The US government has already banned Nvidia from selling high-end chipsets to customers in China. One important point about the bans is that this not only bans the current top-end chips but also anything they develop in the future with similar capabilities - so in a few years it will cover high-end gaming cards too, and gradually extend lower down the range as time goes on.
That's currently in the geopolitics sphere, but it's easy to see it being rolled out to other customers that the people in charge don't want to have unfiltered access to modern AI tools. If the masses want powerful GPUs they can use an online service like GeForce Now or Dall-E that restricts any sort of dangerous/undesirable behavior.
More options
Context Copy link