SerialStateLineXer
No bio...
User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
5d ago
But what if you lose?
Would you rather be 95th percentile in Lesotho, or 40th percentile in America?
Revealed preference suggests that most people would rather "lose" in a wealthy country full of highly-skilled people than "win" in a third-world country run by incompetent people.
SerialStateLineXer
9d ago
Given that they didn't remove any of those comments, that seems unlikely. You probably just got autojannied.
SerialStateLineXer
9d ago
Speaking of which, /u/JTarrou, what did you get the mop for?
I got about 8k my first month, 4k the next, and have really slowed down the last two months as I hit stuff that's new/completely forgotten. A couple times in the past two months I've had to go back and spend a day or two just doing some uncredited reviews of things I'd forgotten. Reviews are undertuned and don't come often enough, IMO.
The first month was just a review of high school math, so I speed ran it.
How did your graduate without passing math classes?
SerialStateLineXer
10d ago
From this thread on X (here if you don't have an account) back in April. People were dunking on him because he made it sound like he was struggling with basic algebra, though he later admitted that he was being disingenuous and just wasn't spending time on it because was busy with other things. I saw it when TracingWoodgrains linked to it here (no-account link and decided to give it a try. I've always kind of regretted not taking more math classes in college, so this seemed like a good way.
It turned out that I've already taken some version of every class they currently offer as part of my CS degree, but a lot of the material I either never learned or have completely forgotten, and the classes currently under development (other than CS I) are totally new to me. Weirdly, I took the equivalent of Methods of Proof my first year of college, and I have no recollection of it at all. It's not just that I'd forgotten the material, but that the only reason I know I took it is that I ordered a copy of my transcript last month.
Who's Howard?
SerialStateLineXer
10d ago
I hit 15k this week, too. I finished up Math for Machine Learning, and it looks like it covered about 60% each of Linear Algebra and Stats, and 30% of Multivariable Calculus, so now I'm going back and finishing up the remainder of those courses while I wait for them to finish up Machine Learning I.
SerialStateLineXer
14d ago
On a related note, I have no idea what Netflix is thinking with their games strategy. Who wants to play Grand Theft Auto on a cell phone?
Methods of Proof did not strike me (a programmer with many years of experience) as particularly relevant to software engineering. On the other hand, it's a very short course, I think about 1800 XP. Discrete math I think should be more relevant. You will definitely get questions about complexity analysis (Big-O) in interviews.
M4ML is a selection of the most ML-relevant lessons from the LA => MVC => Stats sequence. I think it covers about half of LA and stats, and a third of MVC. I chose to take M4ML first in order to benefit from the interleaving of topics, instead of doing the full sequence one subject at a time.
You can definitely do software engineering without all this math. I studied most of this in college and haven't really ever used it, except some concepts from discrete math. There are specific domains where it can be useful or even essential, but you can have a solid career and make a lot of money basically never using math. One of the best engineers I've ever met told me he almost failed out of college because he wasn't good at math.
I don't know much about how much math you need for ML, as I'm not an ML developer. I would start with discrete math and M4ML, just in case.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I finally finished Math Foundations 3 on Math Academy, a course north of 6 thousand xp
Interesting. It came to about 5k for me, possibly because it most of it was review for me, and I blew through it in under a month, consequently not getting many scheduled reviews.
I also finished Methods of Proof, which was interesting although it focused a lot more on integer factorization than I expected, and am now about 80% of the way though math for machine learning. The more complicated linear algebra material was a bit of a speed bump for me, as I had to go back and do some reviewing to get a better understanding of what was going on. I should be ready for their ML course when it comes out, and maybe even have time to finish up the parts of the LA => MVC => Stats sequence not covered in M4ML.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
It's in the water. People do it without even knowing.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
I just realized: Is porn called smut because it's "dirty?"
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
And the dissent was all conservatives. The Democrats were happy to throw chronic pain patients under the bus in order to preserve an obviously wrong interpretation of the Commerce Clause because it's the source of the Federal Government's power to regulate purely intrastate affairs.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Gonzales v. Raich
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
Caplan's record, as he readily admits, is somewhat less impressive when you account for the fact that he wins by consistently betting in favor of consensus and the future being like the past. He's not successfully predicting black swan events, but arbitraging others' overestimation of the frequency of black swan events.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
In 9th grade we had to memorize and recite a poem. As a flex, I memorized The Raven, but then my teacher said it was too long and wouldn't let me recite the whole thing.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
Nice. I've been in the top 0.5% in Japan for a couple years now, but that's bush league. It might not even put me in the top 5% in the US.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
You can clearly see that "business today" is AI generated fake USA today, "economic times" is fake The Economist / Financial Times, etc...
The Economic Times is a real Indian newspaper, isn't it?
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
She's not going to want to look at you with 20/20 vision.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
Surely learning Georgian is unlikely to increase your earning power meaningfully, so the claim must be about correlation, not causation. Most Americans who speak Spanish are Latinos, and Latinos tend to make below-average incomes. Most people who speak other languages are either positively selected immigrants, or natives who were smart and conscientious enough to learn another language as adults. So they tend to make more.
The Complete Works of Saki. Pen name of H. H. Munro, a bitchy gay early 20th century British writer. Mostly wrote short stories, which are delightful.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
this study seems to show some convergence in educational outcomes with Hispanics (although it includes all kinds of Asians)
The problem with cross-sectional comparisons of different generations is that each generation is from a different wave of immigrants. This study was published in 1998, using data from students who were in eighth grade in 1988, meaning that the 3rd+ generation were from families that had been in the country since long before the 1965 reopening of the country to Asian immigrants. And 20% of 3rd+ generation were Pacific Islanders and 50% "other Asians"; who knows what that means?
Because the legacy Asians come from very different cultural and genetic backgrounds, you can't necessarily attribute to generational differences to assimilation.
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
Remember a hot business studies chick in my dorm slept with half the econometrics track guys to get them to do her maths homework.
I was good at math! Why did nobody tell me about this opportunity?
SerialStateLineXer
2mo ago
Bones heal, pain is temporary, and chicks dig scars.
SerialStateLineXer
3mo ago
I jumped off the deck using a helium balloon to slow my descent. The really painful part was finding out that cartoons had lied to me.
UBS estimated that in 2022, 96.6% of Lesotho's population had a net worth of less than $10k.
https://rev01ution.red/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/global-wealth-databook-2023-ubs.pdf
In 2017, 89% of Lesotho's population lived on less than $10/day:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-than-10-int--per-day?tab=chart&country=LSO
Edit: Also, top n is less informative than top x%. The poorest person in Tuvalu is in the top 10,000 richest adults in the country. Top 100k in Ethiopia (pop 132 million)? Sure, probably richer than the average American. But Lesotho's economy just isn't productive enough or large enough to support 100k genuinely wealthy people.
More options
Context Copy link