PokerPirate
20d ago
Mrs. FiveHour, when between jobs, made tens of thousands of dollars buying at Goodwill or Poshmark and arbitraging to Ebay or TheRealReal.
It's weird to hear you lamenting the decline in thrift stores when you actively destroyed what made them special :/
PokerPirate
20d ago
Here's an example of the correspondence between Bayesian/frequentist interpretations for linear regression: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/283238/is-there-a-bayesian-interpretation-of-linear-regression-with-simultaneous-l1-and.
PokerPirate
23d ago
Fun Unicode story time.
In 2015, I went to North Korea to teach computer science. One of the things I taught was how to integrate their computer systems to the internet, and one of the major challenges is the lack of compatibility between Unicode and their internal character sets.
In North Korea, when they use Unicode (which is rare actually), they use these private-use code points for special characters for the Kims. The Kims are thought to be so special that their names are always written in a fancy calligraphy, and the Norks don't want to rely on HTML to provide this fancy calligraphy (because that might not always be available), and so they do this calligraphy at the font level. The "advantage" of this is that you can differentiate between an "ordinary" peasant Kim Il Sung (of which there actually were some) and "the" Kim Il Sung at the font level in every computer program. (The North Koreans didn't invent this idea, but rather borrowed it from how some Arabic encodings treat Muhammad and his sayings.) Anyway, this caused problems for US diplomats when we would receive documents from the North, convert them to Unicode, but then all references to any Kim would appear as square boxes and diplomats didn't know whether the document was talking about Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Un, or Kim Jong Il. So I went to Korea to help sort this mess out.
Below is (part of) a memo I wrote for the North's ministry of education that outlines some of the other problems that the North has had with the Unicode standard.
Technical Problems
The Committee for Standardization of the DPRK (CSK) submitted a memo to the Unicode Consortium in 1997 that lists three difficulties in working with Unicode in the DPRK. None of these problems have been fixed in the last 25 years. The problems are:
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The official name of the Korean language script in Unicode is "Hangul" (see Section 18.6 of the Unicode 14.0 standard). Hangul is the ROK's name for their script, and the DPRK prefers the name "Choseongul". The DPRK suggested that the name "Korean characters" be adopted as a politically neutral term.
-
The DPRK and ROK use a different sorting order for their alphabets. The ROK order for consonants is
ㄱ ㄲ ㄴ ㄷ ㄸ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅃ ㅅ ㅆ ㅇ ㅈ ㅉ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎand the DPRK order is
ㄱ ㄴ ㄷ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅅ ㅈ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎ ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅆ ㅉ ㅇFor example, in the ROK, the word 까치 (magpie) comes alphabetically before the word 나비 (butterfly), but in the DPRK the word 나비 comes alphabetically before 까치.
The Unicode standard orders Korean characters according to the ROK-ordering, and so by default all sorting done in any programming language will sort Korean words in the ROK-preferred way. A special extension called a collation algorithm is required to sort according to the DPRK-ordering.
As of 2022, the current list of collation algorithms does not have an entry for the DPRK-dialect of Korean, and so it is currently impossible in any programming language to sort text alphabetically accoding to the DPRK-ordering.
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The DPRK internally uses the KPS9566 character set. This character set contains several characters that the Unicode Consortium does not want to support. For example, it contains political characters representing the Workers Party of Korea, and 4 distinct versions of the character 김 (one for normal text, and one each for Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Un).
This lack of support for certain characters used by the DPRK prevents documents produced in the DPRK from being opened in tools like Microsoft Word, and even programming languages like Python and R cannot work with these documents. This lack of compatibility adds considerable friction to negotiations, since diplomats between the DPRK and the United States cannot easily exchange documents.
There is at least one more problem with the Unicode standard for the DPRK not listed above:
- The current Unicode standard does not support transliteration of Korean into Latin characters using the DPRK's preferred Romanization system, and instead only supports the McCune–Reischauer system. Furthermore, transliterations into non-Latin alphabets are not supported at all, despite the importance of transliterating into Cyrillic. A 2018 UN report on romanization describes a good history of the many Romanization systems for Korean.
Historical Basis
The ROK has been actively and publicly developing their systems for encoding Korean text since the earliest days of the internet. KAIST first developed the KSC5601 encoding method in 1974, and actively worked with companies like IBM and Microsoft, and standards organizations in the US and Europe to ensure widespread support for this standard. The ROK issued an official Request for Comments (RFC) on the encoding in 1993 via RFC1557 to suggest that KSC5601 be the standard format for exchanging Korean emails. When the Unicode Consortium was first founded in 1991, ROK programmers were well positioned to contribute to the developing standard. They had the detailed technical knowledge of developing many of their own internal encodings, they had experience interacting with diverse technical committees, and they had the English communication skills for communicating in the Unicode Consortium's working language.
In contrast, the DPRK has severely lagged the ROK in this area. It's not known when the DPRK first developed their own Korean encoding, but the DPRK's KPS9566 encoding was first published internationally in 1997 and officially registered with the Internaional Standards Organization (ISO) in 1998. It wasn't until August 1999 that the DPRK began discussions for enabling Unicode compatibility. The DPRK submitted an official statement to the Unicode Consortium outlining their difficulties adopting the Unicode standard (summarized above), but since they entered this discussion 8 years after it began, the technical decisions had already been made. In order to not break backwards compatibility, the Unicode Consortium issued a statement that they could not implement the changes requested by the DPRK.
Fun Fact: There are 7 emojis in the current Unicode standard that were added at the request of the DPRK. The DPRK originally suggested that the HOT BEVERAGE emoji ☕ should be called the HOT TEA emoji, but an American suggested the emoji be renamed so that Americans could use it to represent coffee. The DPRK delegation agreed, and so the emoji was renamed. This is an example of technical experts working on narrow technical problems being able to work together in a way that diplomats can't.
PokerPirate
25d ago
I'm a white 40yo male who grew up in a middle class CA suburb. It was explicitly taught to me in school that if a police officer pulls you over and you put your hands out of view, you will be shot (because you could be reaching for a gun).
PokerPirate
25d ago
describing them as "making people disappear" is not an unfair characterization.
When Pinochet "made people disappear" in Chile, they had cement blocks tied to their feet and were thrown into the Pacific Ocean from a helicopter. Then the government never acknowledged that this happened.
These death flights have been used by proper dictators to "make people disappear" all over the world. The Trump method of "disappearing" people is very different, and using the same word to describe them is an obvious motte-and-baily.
PokerPirate
25d ago
I don't think it's reasonable to expect cops to engage in that kind of self-risk to avoid shooting people, but I think cops should aspire to as a matter of personal virtue.
This is well said. I find it quite rare for people to make this distinction between what should be legal and what should be matters of personal virtue. I'd wager all the culture war battles talked about here could be profitably thought about through this lens.
PokerPirate
26d ago
Universities are allowed to essentially act as courts for their employees and students, with far more power over them than a private-sector employer has in almost any field,
I don't see how universities have more power over their employees than any other employer. They can fire (and sort of blackball) an employee, but so can any other employer.
Students, on the other hand, lose an insane investment if they get kicked out. So I agree there.
PokerPirate
27d ago
As a machine learning researcher, I don't find anything in the article that is outright wrong, but I also don't see any insights that are new or useful to me.
One of the fundamental results of machine learning theory states (very informally) that every learning algorithm has both a bayesian and a frequentist interpretation. So the quote "[LLMs] aren’t Bayesian by design; they are Bayesian by geometry" is certainly true, it is also true of every other possible learning algorithm. Basically everything else in the article strikes me as the same sort of tautology.
PokerPirate
27d ago
I think most adults have forgotten how to have fun.
And this isn't a new problem. When Jesus said "unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven", I think he was telling his followers that they need to have fun like children.
One of the main reasons that adults can't have fun is because we worry too much. This worry causes us---and this tweeter in particular---to focus on "productive things" instead of "fun things". But fun things done right are actually highly productive! One of main evolutionary purposes of play is to teach us new skills: Building legos is fun because we learn new techniques that can help us build bridges. Basketball is fun because it improves our body's conditioning. Reading is fun because it expands our imagination.
I am a father of 4 young kids (7m, 4m, 3m, 2f). It's obviously exhausting at times, and I don't begrudge any parent who complains about the exhaustion. But most adults I know are just genuinely not fun people. They are either too addicted to their "productivity" or wireheaded by social media/tv/literal drugs. But kids are untainted. They still know deep in their bones how to have fun, and are constantly seeking it out.
PokerPirate
27d ago
All parents talk about children being exhausting, and it's not any sort of secret. I am the father of 4 young children. The easiest way to start up a conversation with another parent (at a park/school/cub scouts/whatever) is to observe that their children have a lot of energy and commiserate with them. I've easily had this conversation with >100 different people.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
This is a non sequitur. Good treaties define Schelling points, and Schelling points do not need enforcement.
As I mentioned before, no one has a military powerful enough to enforce the CWC on the US and yet the US is voluntarily complying because it makes the US a safer place (and increases trade/commerce) to allow these foreign inspections.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
C-nile greybeard
Worth reading the post just for this pun.
The idea that all arms-limitation treaties are meaningless "toilet paper" is absurd.
For example, the previously-mentioned CWC has UN inspectors visiting the chemical production facilities of signatory parties (and these inspections regularly happen even in US facilities). These inspections allow states to be reasonably confident that other states are not mass-producing chemical weapons and meaningfully reduce the risk of accidental war. (Notably, Iraq was not party to the CMC prior to 2003, did not have these regular inspections, and so international observers were uncertain about Iraq's stockpiles and production capabilities. Saddam Hussein gambled that this uncertainty would make war less likely, but these non-existent chemical weapons were ultimately how Bush/Powell convinced the Coalition of the Willing to invade Iraq.)
Arms control treaties are rarely designed to change a state's behavior during a war. Instead they are designed to change the way states prepare for war. These changes in preparation do impact whether and how wars are actually fought.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
All US landmines now self-destruct in two days or less, in most cases four hours.
Wow. I had always thought they were supposed to live on the order of months. I really struggle to understand the military utility of such short-lived mines. Surely any situation in which you need to deny an area for only 4 hours, it is already unsafe to be deploying the mines in the first place.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Yes, we treat treason as a capital offense and execute people for it. Nevertheless, the FBI/CIA/NSA/etc very explicitly design their procedures so that foreign powers cannot get leverage over people. If we design a procedure that makes it trivial to give foreign powers leverage over people, then we should expect them to use it.
For example, I suspect the vast majority of citizens to be honest citizens. But I also suspect the vast majority of citizens to turn into traitors and sell information about the election to Russia if a Russian agent provides a credible threat of presenting falsified evidence that the honest citizen committed execution-worthy fraud. This is a textbook case of when falsified blackmail is an effective leverage.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I really like this death penalty proposal even though I would normally be against the death penalty in the US. The main difference, as I see it, is that working an election is an entirely voluntary endeavor, and I like the idea that the oath's people take have some sort of real legal meaning behind them.
Of course, there's lots of problems with the idea. The most obvious I see are that the number of volunteers would plummet and that foreign intellignece services would certainly try to plant evidence of voter fraud (and I'm sure they'd be able to do it very convincingly) and they could use the death penalty as leverage to have agents in the voting system.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
Scott notes that the second derivative of various economic indicators does highly correlate with the vibecession, but questions "can people really sense the second derivative of GDP over decades-long timescales"? I think you give a pretty strong argument that yes, people can easily notice this second derivative. All your examples about consumerism not leading to increased real economic power seem pretty second derivativy to me.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
At the private school: Under the "dean of students" office, I count 10 people with the title of dean (or vice/assistant dean), 4 with the title of director, and 5 administrative assistants. We have about 1500 undergrads.
At the public school: There are 3 people total in the "dean of students" office: The dean, a vice dean, and an administrative assistant. They have 25000 undergrads.
Both schools have separate deans for managing the faculty and the dean:faculty ratio is similar between both schools. Both schools also have separate "student-centered" departments (not part of dean of students) for financial aide, study abroad, career center, the gym, varsity sports, etc.
PokerPirate
1mo ago
I teach at an expensive private college (cost per year >$90k) and I used to teach at the state school down the street (cost per year $20k). There is definitely a difference in the quality of the education, but the private school is at most 1.5x better than the state school. (For some majors, the state school would be 1.5x better than the private school.) The amenities (food, gym, clubs, etc.) are basically the same.
The main difference---and what the parents are really paying for---is that the admin of the private college is VERY hands on. The private college has something like 10x the number of deans per student, and those deans have very busy jobs interacting with the students. One of their jobs is to ensure that every student is registered for whatever accommodations they might be eligible for. They see themselves as "cutting the red tape" for the students and "helping them navigate the bureaucracy". At the private school, I deal with these deans every semester, and your stat (20-30% of students on accommodations) matches my experience here. The public school is very different. There are no deans helping students get these accommodations, and a student must be very proactive in order to get them. (My sense is that basically none of the engineering students I had would have even known accommodations existed.) Teaching at the public school for 6 years, I literally never had to deal with the deans about student accommodations.
I don't think accommodations are the only reason for the price difference between public/private colleges (the administrators do a lot of other things as well), but I'm sure they make a substantial part.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
TNG is on my list of shows/movies that I'll be forcing my kids to watch. It's great for teaching leadership lessons that I want my kids to learn, and (as you allude to) it's great for teaching them what growing-up-in-the-90s-tech-leaders think of as an ideal future.
I never could get into any of the new star treks though.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
I appreciate you posting this. I hadn't previously heard of this book, and I'm interested in the subject, so I might read it now.
That said, this was a hard review to read because of a lack of structure. You don't ever actually clearly state what the book is about or why we should care about the author. (Your 3rd to last paragraph references "director of global public policy" but it's not clear if this was her actual title at facebook, and this should be front and center). It's also clear that you believe that the narrator is unreliable, but you don't actually provide any examples of what she wrote that makes you believe that.
So other than being made aware that the book exists, I didn't really gain anything from your review.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Two exceptionally reasonable decisions that give me confidence that the justice system works like it should.
I hope John had to pay the court+Frank a shitload of money for wasting their time and being a shitty neighbor.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Several wartime militaries have included large percentages of females. The obvious example is the Soviets in WWII, but the Chinese, Israelis, and many other modern-ish armies have fielded large percentages of female soldiers. In no case have any of these armies treated women as "fully equal" to men in combat, but neither does the US military.
I suspect that a look at the population graphs for these countries would support your thesis, but it seems disingenuous to talk negatively about women in the military without referencing these concrete examples and actually testing your thesis against data.
PokerPirate
2mo ago
Thanks for replying, and sorry if I sounded hostile. I enjoy your posts :)
I'm good with the idea that the we can't always have a Wild West and that part of what made the West fun was the taming of it, and so we can't have it again.
But I'm not cool with the idea that destroying the commons is okay when I do it in a classy way but not when those shlups do it in a low class way. It's either a commons that needs preserving or a resource that needs exploiting.
As an aside, my impression is that there is still a lot of finds to be had at estate sales (at least in CA). I think the real reason the thrift store market has dried up is not because of people buying the good stuff from the thrift stores, but because the suppliers have stopped sending the good stuff to the thrift stores. People now find the good stuff at the estate sale, and so the left over junk that gets donated has much less signal to noise. I suspect the higher prices at the thrift store are also related to garden variety inflation, where it is magnified tremendously by not being part of the official basket of goods tracked.
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