MathWizard
Good things are good
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User ID: 164
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
Has anyone done work for Data Annotation or other similar online AI labeling jobs? I have a PhD in math, and have spent the past few years doing mathematical modeling in Postdocs only to realize that I don't really like writing and publishing papers. Some combination of not feeling like the work matters, getting bored of working on the same project for a long time without any feedback, and then eventually finding out that nobody thought my paper was interesting. Mehhhhhhh. And then I lose motivation and do lower quality work and my next paper is worse. I need to get out of academia. But I also don't really know what else I want to do. I'm good at math. I'm decent at programming, but I don't have experience making truly functional consumer-facing apps, all of my coding has been mathematical models that I run myself and keep tinkering with to add features whenever I want to experiment with what happens when different features or parameters of the model get tweaked.
I'm also settled down in a medium-sized town with existing but limited local career options. I have a house, and a wife who is very attached to her job and family, so remote work is vastly preferable. I'm also pathologically terrified of getting stuck in a boring 9-5 office job that eats my life away. I very much like the flexibility of working from home.
So... at least for now, Data Annotation looks promising? The advertisement claims that it pays $40/hr for Math and Programming talents, which I think I can do (unless they're super ultra competitive and only give the good work to people better than me?). The internet consensus seems to be that it's not a scam, but you might have trouble getting enough work to do it full time. And I could work my own hours, and work on discrete completable projects that feel more gamey and give feedback.
Does anyone have direct experience with this and can provide a more accurate and detailed account? Also, I think there are a couple of other similar companies that do this, so I'm not sure whether I should apply to one of those instead if they're better somehow. Or if I should apply to multiple and split my time between them in order to get a better pickings of the higher paying work? Or do you just anti-recommend the entire thing because it's not worth it? I'd like to hear thoughts and opinions from people who have either done this or know people who have done this, or know of similar remote work for someone with my talents.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
No, it's the limit on the amount that Carlos's insurance would cover.
My bad, that's what I meant to ask but got their names mixed up.
To clarify: This situation arose solely because Keith was impatient. He asked the two judges to impose the 200-k$ limit because he wanted to get his money ASAP, without waiting for the bankruptcy proceedings to finish.
But why was that necessary? Shouldn't there have been an option to do the thing he tried to do? That is, have his case proceed but, because the accident occurred prior to the bankruptcy, anything that exceed the insurance value can retroactively be voided by the bankruptcy? Or is that not possible because it would make him a creditor and the bankruptcy has to figure out how to pay those out?
Wouldn't it make more sense to put a hold on the bankruptcy proceedings and handle the lawsuit first?
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
If it's well-designed then a good run that gets cut short only due to scaling should yield a huge amount of meta-currency and reward you with faster progression. There's nothing that kills a roguelite for me faster than winning on literally the first try because of some combination of luck and the game being too easy on the base difficulty.
I think the main problem is that Roguelites are appealing to two different demographics simultaneously. There are the hardcore gamers who want to challenge their wits and skills and slam their heads into a wall over and over again until they get it: people who play Souls games and lots of multiplayer PvP and brutally unforgiving games, and Roguelites are often good at that. And then there are more RPG-leaning gamers like me who want to grind out levels and currency and overcome challenges through a combination of skill and tenacity, with the ability to fungibly trade one for the other. Skill should be rewarded, but skill and progress should both grow concurrently until the sum combination is enough, so that I can take risks without failures being a literally pointless waste of time with nothing to show for it. And also have an endlessly increasing difficulty so that through progress and rewards I can eventually tackle and overcome higher and higher challenges that used to be literally impossible from the beginning of the game. If the hardest challenge of your game can be beaten in 1 hour by a player of sufficient skill level, then once you reach that skill level the game has no replay value. But if you never reach that skill level then you can never clear the game no matter how hard you try. In my opinion. I understand that lots of people have different preferences than me. But this is the weird sort of interplay, where roguelites are (trying or accidentally? not sure) appealing to both types of players at the same time under the same label. So a lot of roguelites throw some token but short and unimportant meta-progression in there and just scale it so the hardcore players can quickly unlock everything and then balance the game under that assumption, which partially satisfies but partially annoys both types of players.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
Is $200k the limit on the amount that Keith's insurance would cover? If not then Keith is entirely in the right here, and the bankruptcy judge should not have required the limit of 200k in the first place. There's no reason the amount should have been relevant for this ruling except if it would be dis-chargeable via the bankruptcy.
If it is the insurance limit then the best outcome would be the $1.6 M being the official amount awarded and the $1.4 M being retroactively discharged by the bankruptcy.
It's unfortunate that the laws aren't smart enough to do the obvious thing.
MathWizard
Good things are good
2d ago
I generally think time limits are bad in games, with a few exceptions. The fundamental problem is that it's a threat. It's a threat that, if you do poorly, you're going to have to restart the entire game from scratch. Like a final boss that, if it kills you, deletes your save file (though less volatile). I don't want to get 90% of the way through a 20 hour game only to have to start over from scratch. I rarely play games a second time unless they are exceptionally good, I'm not replaying the entirety of your game over again just because I wasn't quite good enough the first time.
The main exception I have to this is if there's meta-progression, like in Roguelites, or like Dead Rising. If you've got a 1-2 hour turn around, and I unlock new stuff every time, and the entire game is built around randomized content so it's not just the same thing again, then we're good. Or like in Dead Rising if I get stronger and it's basically a new game plus where I can solve all the problems that happened the first time around there's wayyy less risk of failing the second time around, I can take that. What I don't want is the game to tell me that the last 20 hours of play time were pointless and none of it counts for anything.
That said, I didn't have to replay Pikmin 1, because I didn't fail. If the time limit is generous enough then the majority of players don't run afoul of it. The threat looms in the background, but isn't implemented. If it's set just right then it creates stakes and pressure: the player has to act strategically and not mess up and get their party slaughtered too many times or it'll take too long to repopulate, so it feels more important to perform well. But if it's too generous then players don't feel this pressure and the time limit might as well not even exist. But Pikmin 2 was able to have a lot more content in part because of the lack of a time limit: you can keep playing the game after you "beat" it and go explore and get every last piece of treasure because there's nothing stopping you from continuing to play.
I have not yet played Pikmin 3 or 4, so I can't comment on it there, though I intend to eventually. I anticipate that the time limit in 3 will either be obnoxious if its strict, or superfluous if it's easy. There's very rarely middle ground.
MathWizard
Good things are good
5d ago
That never held water. All people, regardless of their sex or sexual orientation, can marry someone of the opposite sex of any sexual orientation. Gay men are just as free and equally allowed to marry a woman as any straight man. If the gay man doesn't want to marry a woman, that's his choice, but he's legally allowed to.
And pretty much all of the equality under the law anti-discrimination stuff has carveouts for compelling state interests. Like, say, bearing and raising children and ensuring the survival of the species.
Telling gay people that it's illegal to have sex with each other would be one thing: the state intervening in a place where it has little compelling interest or jurisdiction (an argument could be made about preventing the spread of STDs, but it's weak, and promiscuous straight people do that too). But marriage, at least from a legal perspective, is a privilege the state recognizes for people to incentivize the formation of healthy and stable families, which gay people do not do. Arguing it's "equal protection under the law" is like arguing that childless people should get the same tax deductions and/or welfare aid as people with seven children because otherwise you're discriminating against the childless.
How do I accurately evaluate my worth? I'm too heavily confounded by impostor syndrome that I can't tell where it ends and my true value lies. I'm definitely below average for a Math PhD in terms of accomplishments. None of my grad-school work ended up getting published, and I've published 1-2 papers per year in my postdocs which have gotten ~5 citations each. I seem to work a lot less than my peers, and my advisor/bosses have been too busy and/or easy-going to push me, so I've kind of been coasting. That said, I am smart enough to learn stuff when I do try, and got a Math PhD, and know how to hack code together into something that compiles. I don't know what that's worth. What I do know is I'm not willing to put in the 60+ hour per week that the professors I've worked under seem to do writing grants and managing grad students and whatnot. At least not consistently, I would put in a couple long weeks if I really had to.
And I don't want to move, which drastically reduces my options. But on the other hand, the cost of living is not very high, and I'm currently DINK, so technically could survive on just my wife's job, but that wouldn't really be fair to her. On the work-life balance front I heavily lean towards the life part. Work is there so I don't starve and can afford people to do stuff like house repairs that I don't want to do.
I'm sure someone with my intelligence plus work ethic and ambition that I don't have could easily be making loads of money. However, given my constraints, is $40 an hour still an insult? My ideal position is remote, high pay per hour, few total hours, and meaningful/satisfying/moral, (I'm not phoning it in on a job that my employer expects more from), but I'm not sure what that is or if that's too many variables maximized simultaneously and I might need to compromise on some.
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