dark
Veritas vos liberabit
No bio...
User ID: 1132
I've seen the same thing. Good for procrastinating on exams. It seems like it might just be an effect of adrenaline?
The literature tends to distinguish acute fatigue (lack of rest for a single night), chronic fatigue (sleep debt accumulated over more than 48 hours) and cumulative fatigue (build up over longer periods, i.e. weeks or months).
The thing to test would be to relieve your sleep debt over the following day (maybe 10 hours of sleep + midafternoon nap for 3 hours) and see how the effects are then.
EDIT: Another thing occurred to me while thinking about naps: Perhaps the 4 hours of sleep should be viewed as a nap, as in they are genuinely restful and provide energy for the morning, but the 8 hours of sleep thereafter aren't enough to compensate for the 16 hours of wakefulness since your last rest. Another thing to test would be a midafternoon nap the day you're feeling good (right after sleepless night).
DDIA is the standard resource here. Read it twice, take notes.
Papers from Will Larson's Staff Engineer (ranging from DynamoDB, Raft, Paxos, GFS, etc.) are worth perusing as well (and will pop up as references from DDIA).
Signals and Threads have a few episodes that I think are particularly relevant for system design, and the entire podcast is definitely worth a listen at some point. In no particular order,
-
Swapping the Engine Out of a Moving Racing Car
-
State Machine Replication
-
Clock synchronization
-
Multicast and the markets
-
Build systems
EDIT: remembered a few other fun things I had stumbled upon recently, How We Built r/Place which is a good example of a small concrete project that has non-trivial scalability requirements, as well as Google's Maglev: A Fast and Reliable Software Network Load Balancer.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Probably worth noting that "no budget" might not have necessarily been entirely dishonest. Retention and raises might not fall under the same category.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Consider Robert Mercer, ex-CEO of Renaissance Technologies: if not genius level intelligence, certainly 1.5-2 sigma above average: PhD at UIUC, ACM Lifetime Achievement Award...
Mercer played a key role in the campaign for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union by donating data analytics services to Nigel Farage.He has also been a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News, the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for president. He is the principal benefactor of the Make America Number 1 super PAC.
Some of his opinions:
Mercer has said that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the landmark federal statute arising from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, was a major mistake. In 2017, David Magerman, a former Renaissance employee, alleged in a lawsuit that Mercer had said that African Americans were economically better off before the civil rights movement, that white racists no longer existed in the United States, and that the only racists remaining were black racists. Wikipedia
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I'm going to disagree on several points here.
It is typically male.
Female teenagers are edgy in other ways, they'll rebel against trad parents by espousing communism, sexual promiscuity or drug/alcohol abuse, dating outside/below their socioeconomic class, etc.
It’s a typically cosmopolitan feature of following the latest trend.
Trend opposition is just as twitchy and fickle as trend following. Edginess can also express itself as disagreeing with consensus, not just aligning with it.
Many progressives certainly want to appear cool — they follow the latest trends in fashion and music — but does this desire foment any edginess?
Edginess strikes me as fractal, on a small enough scale, you're at the edge of some boundary. In hyper-woke circles, any pushback or criticism of the status quo might be considered edgy.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Republicans got more than 46% of the votes in 2020. Of the Republican vote, more than a third is white evanlegical protestant, and more than 70% belong to a white Christian religious group (PRRI). These populations tend to be geographically segregated: if you're from Cullman, Alabama, where more than 85% of the 40000 or so votes went red, I think it's safe to say a tatooed psychonaut pansexual anarchist hippie is not so much on the edge as levitating above the adjacent gulf, cartoon physics style.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I think your focus on teaching muddles the wider dynamic in government hiring: a significant portion of upper caliber talent isn't strongly financially motivated (this probably applies to teaching as well). In this light, all they can do is offer interesting problems (JPL/Nasa/NSA/arguably a lot of defense contractors) and/or good working conditions. Why should they try and pay 1MM salaries when Wall Street can always outbid them?
I feel like you were on the right track with
I know I can cease arguing in such places (better for my mental health overall)
There are two cases to consider: when there is an actual immediate decision process at stake (that you can influence!), and when there isn't.
Let's consider the easier, latter case: there is nothing at stake, so this is a pure signalling exercise. Arguing about politics, and virtue signalling (for whatever set of virtues you may ascribe to) is almost never perceived charitably. It's at best quietly sanctimonious and at worst autistically obnoxious. It has value in in-group bond strengthening/groupthink signalling, not as an invitation for an actual reflection or discussion. When someone of a different faith than you discusses religion, do you "diplomatically" argue about their beliefs? Life isn't a college debate club, try to find things you might have in common instead of rehashing things that "trigger" you.
Now the harder instance, you're influencing a decision process (i.e., are sitting on a hiring committee). Here, you need to weigh the cost of revealing outsider political predilections (and becoming a pariah, especially in groupthink heavy environments like academia) against the damage to the decision process. Are you overlooking a once-in-a-lifetime candidate just to fill a diversity quota? That might pose sufficient institutional risk that it is worth speaking up. Thankfully, in such instances, there are compelling non-political arguments in favor of your position ("I'm not anti-diversity, the non-diverse candidate just happens to be vastly superior, and we'd be fools to pass them up").
Choose your battles. The best thing to do in an environment where they are "firing white people to bring in a minority" is probably leave. An environment that espouses beliefs that are antithetical to your values is probably a) somewhere you don't what to be contributing to and b) a profound waste of emotional energy that could be better spent elsewhere.
How to fight for what you believe in then? Associate and discuss your positions with like-minded people. Build circles you'd want to be a part of. Don't berate your waiter because they corrected you on a pronoun, in the same way you don't argue with Jehovah's witnesses or telemarketers.
Perhaps worth postfacing this with an apocryphal Twain quote:
Never argue with a fool, they drag you down to their level and beat you with experience
Maybe I'm too far out of the loop, but what are examples of CW books?
Flipping through my memories of childhood books, I'm getting
-- EDIT: Wow... A cursory search suggests 3/4 of these have been banned somewhere at some point in time (annotated below) so maybe I'm cruelly out of touch on this.
-
Where the Wild Things Are; hard to imagine anything controversial here -- banned in 1963 (immediately after publication) for promoting witchcraft and supernatural events
-
The Giving Tree; religious and secular interpretations and adoptions abound, nothing political -- banned in a public library in Colorado 1988 for sexism
-
The Little Prince; maybe vaguely cynical, reflecting de Saint-Exupéry's disenchantment at the time of writing
-
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; a classic written over a century and a half ago, little to be controversial here, surely? -- banned in New Hampshire for allegories of sexual fantasies
Zero people predicted a pandemic
A pandemic is the prototypical black swan event. If you asked people what are the odds of a largely asymptomatic highly contagious coronavirus mutation that crosses over from bats/other reservoirs or is engineered in lab spreads into a worldwide pandemic over the next 30 years, I'm sure many people would have given sensible probability estimates.
Pandemics are largely excluded under force majeure clauses, but take Wimbledon, for example, that following the SARS outbreak in 2002 bought pandemic insurance under an infectious disease clause. They paid roughly 31.7mm USD over 17 years in premiums for 142 mm USD payout. Back of the napkin math (assuming that the payout would be the same every year, i.e. Wimbledon's profits don't increase corresponding to premium increases, which of course in reality they do) suggests that the risk analysts estimated that a Covid-scale pandemic happens at most every 78 years or so. Since they probably factored in losses due to more probable minor diseases, the Covid-19 pandemic was roughly a once in a century event. This passes a cursory sniff check with the last global pandemic being the 1918 Spanish flu.
Safe to say people were thinking about, and even buying insurance against, the risk pandemics posed, so your first point is wrong.
About zero people predicted double-digit inflation (except for the usual people like Peter Schiff who make this prediction every year)
How about conditioning on the aforementioned black swan event and stipulating that US M0 practically doubled and M2 grew by about 5T USD (25% from 15T in 2020) whilst US treasury yields were kept at historic lows? The low interest low inflation free money paradigm that has dominated the past decade, under a historically axed lens, seems more like an exception than a new rule.
No one predicted Dall-E, Chat GPT, etc.
The GPT model was novel, sure, but also came out in 2018, so roughly 5 years ago. It was designed specifically to avoid the problems of supervised learning in NLP. What's surprising is perhaps how far it scaled?
EDIT: amusingly, we both forgot to reread Scott's post
If AI can generate images and even stories to a prompt, everyone will agree this is totally different from real art or storytelling.
This is basically GPT-3 and DALL-E. ChatGPT is GPT-3.5 fined-tuned with RLHF. So Scott did essentially envision this event, although maybe he didn't assign a high enough probability on it for your taste.
No one predicted Putin making a major move
This has been discussed in the other threads, but again, once faced with the question, would people really ascribe that low a probability to it? Putin and the other minds in the war rooms cannot have been aiming for a protracted land war, this is more a political decapitation with a puppet substitution gone horribly wrong. If you rephrase war to political/military intervention that aims to replace the Ukrainian head of state, the odds might climb further, and now you can just ask what are the odds of that surgical strike devolving into full-scale war. The Russians were what, 100 miles from Kiev? There is an other timeline where Zelenskyy is either dead or in exile, and Ukraine is not in rubble.
...goes to show how hard predicting is.
Sure? It's a chaotic system, and the conditional probability trees have exponential branching factors? No one is pretending to be prescient or an augur here, the exercise is just in estimating probabilities.
The "prescient" fool confidently spouts "predictions", whilst the wise man merely scribbles down a few numbers and replies, "Wanna bet on it?"
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I feel like the poker analogy is working against you here. Try asking around a table how people would feel open jamming TT with half their life savings and years of their life on the line, whilst only getting to play 3-4 sessions (in this case, marriages prospects).
It's a numbers game. No one wants to cash at a specific tournament, or win a specific cash game. They want to come out ahead over all tournaments and games they play. You put your money in good spots and let the law of large numbers take care of the rest. And there'll will always be those unfavored by Fortuna (or Lady Variance, if you prefer), getting it in with AA vs KKs 8 times and losing every time.
If anything, I'd say slot machines are a more apt allegory, a game rigged against you unless you understand their inner workings.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
What classifier architectures are you looking at? And in the supervised case, how are you planning to establish ground truth (correct label is comment deserves a ban)?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
LLMs tend to do fairly well at this type of small dataset classification problem, has there been any investigation into GPT-3's API for this?
There's a built-in sentiment analyzer, and it's fairly straightforward once you've munged your dataset to get a rudimentary (or not!) classifier, outputting logprobs.
Some documentation is available here, if you're curious.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
A lot of advice on both sides has been given in other threads, so I'll try to shed some light with an anecdote or two.
One of my friends dated a girl like this: sweet, caring and kind day-to-day, but became a monster when drunk. A combination of undiagnosed BPD and low tolerance for alcohol due to SSRIs led to quarterly, then monthly, then finally almost weekly blowups. She would get belligerent, messy, self-destructive, would actively fight off/try to escape from people trying to help her, it was a simple nightmare. For some people with BPD, alcohol is the perfect stimulant/depressive/uninhibitive cocktail to get them to show a really dark/animalistic side of their condition. Independent of the alcohol, it can begin manifesting in other areas of life.
Alcohol tolerance can shift wildly from person to person and from day to day, depending on food and water intake prior, rest and wakefulness, exercise, etc. People tend to find comfort in keeping up with others, because that keeps their consumption in check (they should only really get as drunk as they next guy/gal). If you're consuming more than everyone else, hard to act surprised when you get sledgehammered. I've had friends of all ages get surprised once in a while by how hard 8 to 9 drinks can hit. In an environment where alcohol consumption is ubiquitous (i.e. the West, South America, and large parts of Asia), getting a bit too drunk is inevitable. @MathiasTRex brings up a good point, the fact that her friends let her get away from them in that state is unacceptable. The number of delirious drunks that jump/fall off high ledges, or even just stumble and hit their hand and suffer permanent damage, would shock you (ask a cop/EMT from your area if you're curious).
From your post, it's not entirely clear if she falls more under the former (alcohol highlights {un,under}diagnosed condition) or the latter (sometimes can't keep up with the social drinking, and somewhat stupid/irresponsible drunk). In either case though, going forward, extra caution is definitely warranted around alcohol.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Passwords are hard. Pwned host computer is game over for almost everyone, barring some Qubes-type VM segregation setup. The passwords need to be entered in plaintext somehow. You can limit the extent of a breach by keeping your entire password db on an offline machine and lazily QR code'ing it across to the live machine whenever it needs a refresh. Password db encrypted with a gpg smartcard is also pretty good (though not as good as the offline setup, unless you need to tap per decryption like with a Yubikey, in which case I'd rate it as only slightly inferior).
I think you forgot the most important tip however: the more secure your setup, the higher the risk of you locking yourself out of your accounts/backups/encrypted storage. Find a way to dump your secrets in plaintext that fits your threat model (all of them, including TOTP secrets - ie, what generates your 2FA codes). This might be a box in your apartment with a backup at your office, or a safety deposit box, for instance. On the other end of the paranoid spectrum, a engraved titanium plate inside a waterproof container encased inside a block of concrete dumped in the middle of a remote lake works as well.
If your attacker is particularly skilled/motivated (or maybe this has changed with new tools, too lazy to duck it now), stylometry is also a hard to work around threat. It isn't as easy to use at scale (queries of the type: sort all users on Twitter whose writing most resembles this sample, descending, a la perceptual hashing), but if you can narrow down with communities that a person is likely to be a part of, it can be a pretty fast iterative search.
People particularly intent on segregating online identities often either take on affected styles (harder than it might seem at first, especially with 100% consistency!) or use a scrambling tool (rudimentary form of this used to be roundtripping translation).
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Most of his references are to landmark philosophers on media, i.e. Baudrillard and MacLuhan (they were both way ahead of their time, they lived in the era of TV but saw trends that would persist into the age of the net), which he does explicitly call out. Also, the title is a reference to one of Baudrillard's keystone works.
I will note aside that Simulacra and Simulation, of Matrix fame, is an absolute must-read if you're interested in social media/advertising/market of "signs".
The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.
Sound familiar?
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Male loneliness: Porn/AI companionship/tailored OnlyFans content. Bona fide prostitution where it's legal.
Male violence as a result of loneliness: I was going to go for an easy slam dunk, but the literature is unclear here. It appears that the proportion of young males is a stronger predictor of political violence than whether they are married or not. Barring that caveat, women exclusive spaces (i.e gyms/classes/... workplaces..?), burbclave type housing arrangements. Maybe easier to just hope unmarried does predict political violence and go short political stability and long volatility.
Mating malaise: dating apps that "solve" this (expect the bizarre proliferation of feature equivalent but community disjoint dating apps to continue), private colleges (already predominantly female, many there essentially just as an exercise in rubber-stamping and with the hope of finding a husband that's not from their hometown shithole), startups that will "solve" fertility crises (I expect government funding for these to explode in the next 2 decades or so)
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
This is outlandishly culturally biased. Essentially everywhere except North America, people live with their parents until they save up to buy a house/move in with a partner. They may temporarily move out for schooling and whatnot if it's not close to home, but the expectation is certainly that they stay and save while they're close to home (were you going for a meta cheap shot about Asians/South Americans/Middle Easterns being inferior romantic partners by inference?).
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
I'm personally a fan of the Wellness Wednesday thread as one of the best random internet stranger advice sources. It escapes the rage-bait/circlejerk flair that the r/*advice subreddits almost universally share.
This isn't a culture war issue.
"Queer interest groups call for social censorship of topics based on witchhunt of the week" sounds like a plausible lede to any CW thread effortpost. Sure, there's a personal spin, where the interest groups are instead his friends, but that's about as CW a topic as you can get without going into "my friends are being beat up by $OTHER_RACE every other week, any (Wellness Wednesday) advice on arming myself for the coming race war?".
That said, not a single comment actually bites and turns it full fledged CW shit-flinging fest, he evens gets a concrete solution with uBlock rules.
As for the downvotes, I'll be charitable and attribute them to a natural response to an obvious troll post. The writing style gives it away
How can I support my trans friends while also being okay with people enjoying the new Harry Potter game?
How should I feel about streamers who choose to play the new Harry Potter game on stream? In some sense they have disregarded my friends' feelings and excluded them from their community!
The level of detail - trans friends (who I love dearly) - coupled with the admittedly amusing false dichotomies is a dead giveaway. There was no need to go into that level of detail to get meaningful advice - "my friends are getting offended because content-creators have different views than them, what should I do" would have sufficed and would have nonetheless garnered, I reckon, substantially the same response.
Arguing that Jesus was gay at $IVY_LEAGUE might not be trolling, but walking into a Texas church and asking the pastor whether there's any evidence to support that claim sure is.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Asia is facing its' own fertility crisis, but I think it's safe to say that almost universally, family housing isn't conducive to premarital sex. My point was rather that if it's a norm, it's not particularly unattractive, as it is in the US. Are Japanese, Indian or Chinese refusing to date because their counterparts still live with their parents?
Also, I can't say I've witnessed this in Asia, but Brazil, for instance, has the whole love motel thing going on, where entrepreneurial businessfolk set themselves out to allow the generationally entrapped to tryst and frolick away from the watchful eyes of their progenitors.
dark
Veritas vos liberabit
1yr ago
Scandinavia doesn't surprise me here. I had a Swedish friend whose parents started charging him rent when he turned 18 (not unusual in the US, unheard of in Southeastern Europe/Asia).
I'll dial back my tone a few notches so we don't talk past each other. I think you've started this thread out of genuine concern for the culture of this place, which is a good common starting point.
I suspect if the political valence had been flipped he would've received at least a more neutral/positive response
Maybe..? I really feel like the trollbait tone attracted more disparaging replies. Picture
I have some Young Earth Creationist friends (who I love dearly) and they are offended by some of the Ice Age movies. When they see Ice Age content (including streams and clips of the new Ice Age 2: The Meltdown game), it can be offensive and threatening for them.
Downvotes are the online equivalent of an eye-roll or a sneer. You're not (at least, necessarily) dignifying the thought with a fully-formed response or counter-argument, but you're shaking your head as your counterpart speaks. Now prof_xi has strolled into the temple and yelled Sibboleth, and though the Gileadites did sneer, they did not slay him.
The Culture War Thread aimed to be a place where people with all sorts of different views could come together to talk to and learn from one another.
[...]
But once you remove [spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse], you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
The one foundational principle of this place, the shibboleth of Mottizens, is the belief that if it can be said respectfully and civilly, it can be said here. This is a bastion of (moderated) free speech. The Motte left reddit (amongst other reasons) because of increasing admin attention, notably around transgender CW conversations. The Motte has survived the Pharaoh chasing them across the Red Sea (r/ssc -> /r/TheMotte) , and wandering the desert for 40 years (r/TheMotte under a fickle and vindictive YWVH/spez), before finding its Promised Land here. An entire Exodus just to keep worshipping at the altar of freedom of expression.
prof_xi wandered amongst the Israelites to ask how people felt about them Moabite thots and gods. He waltzed into a mosque to ask help for his friends who are putting together a Mohammed sculpture visible from space.
I believe that my trans friends should be able to browse the internet without seeing content they deem hateful/disturbing
This is about as antithetical to the spirit of this place as you can get. And as far as a response to the desecration of local idols go, that thread managed to remain essentially constructive and, in my opinion, exceedingly charitable.
What's on display here isn't Red tribe bias lynching a befuddled Blue tribe newcomer, rather overly polite entertainment of a pretty conspicuous troll.
Don't overcommit. Startups in most markets are gambles, people will often found 3-5 companies before successfully exiting, but if you have relevant experience, you already know this. Working 100 hour weeks for lower pay for a company that's worth 0 in 2 years won't feel good.
Roll with the punches and learn fast. You have outsize responsibility and accountability, a single (serious) mistake can be extremely costly for the entire company. It'll be harder because there's not an entire team to shift the blame around with.
Watch out for interpersonal strife. This is unfortunately fairly common in early stage startups, high stress, big egos and small teams can lead to explosive conditions. My heuristic is more than 2 months of continuous friction/misalignment and infighting is a huge red flag, and 6 is a signal that the investors/board should get involved to see if there's anything to salvage.
Learn to enjoy it. Startups aren't really the golden ticket we make them out to be (especially early stage ones). If you're not having fun, accept it and move on. There'll be other ways to make millions.
More options
Context Copy link