FakeComments

I’ve seen no evidence of it.

What I’ve seen is differential comparisons, eg, comparing the rate of white detection to black detection or the difference in certainty scores on each — but I’d really appreciate it if people could show me the actual certainty numbers on black faces so I can see if it’s failing to recognize, misrecognizing, or just less sure then white faces.

Any US citizen interested in zero equity seed money from the US government should investigate SBIR (of which this is the NSF component), a program overseen by the Small Business Administration, but run through the departments. (You end up paying in other ways — but you should be aware of it as an option.)

Every US government research program must provide 3% of its R&D to small businesses, with the goal of seeding American innovation outside of major conglomerates.

Personally, I view results driven government seed money as a viable answer to many questions the US faces — but it requires we pull together behind a vision of free people engaged in small commerce, something the US left wing seems to vehemently oppose.

I’m a capitalist, though: I believe the best way to cause human flourishing is expansive commerce coupled with individual freedoms, and suggest anyone disputing the social value of that show me a system that’s uplifted as many minorities out of poverty as, say, McDonalds franchising.

Can you walk me through a situation where you could use a codeword to the bartender, one that is known by every female in the establishment, but not, eg, simply talk to a staff member, email them, or call them — and how doing so is more discreet?

I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying I literally can’t imagine that being useful for stopping someone I’m afraid of committing crimes against me, because shared codewords don’t actually solve a problem I’ve had in such situations.

No one is saying there shouldn’t be a discreet way to report abuse — I’m saying having to publicly say it to the bartender using language that every female in the establishment knows to be a sexual abuse report isn’t a serious suggestion for discreet reporting.

I’d like to hear how I’m wrong, though.

That may make sense internal to a library, where you’ve established idioms.

But as a counterpoint, I only know what you meant by the first expression because I read the second expression.

I actually agree with you in large part, that short variable names can have more meaning within an established set of idioms because they allow you to parse whole statements at once. But there’s a trade-off involved, because mathematics can take symbology further than that’s useful.

For example:

    E[i=0;5](i**2)

    sum([i**2 for i in range(0,5)])

So it often comes down to a matter of taste.

I think I came across as more disparaging to codes of conduct and those kinds of things than I meant to — they certainly have a place.

One example where you’d want one, where everyone has high social skills, is during a negotiating summit: you want to clearly define the boundaries of when and where are appropriate to negotiate, not because people would be offended, but because people have different (valid) expectations and it helps to established a shared set of norms upfront, to ease the contentiousness later.

If I tried to do the same for my friends negotiating where to eat tonight, they’d all pretty quickly agree the answer was somewhere I wasn’t.

I think it has more to do with the scale and conflict inherent in the gathering, rather than social aptitude, per se. The smaller and more aligned the group, the less useful formal process is.

I think codes of conduct become relevant somewhere between 100 and 1,000 people, organizationally.

Around the point you’re transitioning to more political structuring because simpler mechanisms break down.

It’s a waste of time to use classes, if all you’re doing is hacking together 500 lines into a stable enough heap to generate the graphs for a paper.

Not all academic code is that bad, but the heft is definitely towards that end of the pool.

I got really familiar with the distinction, because I spent a while translating PhD project/demo code into actual products for $JOB. It’s definitely mostly in making things secure, stable, maintainable, and debuggable that you lose most of the time.

For people like me who are slow:

    cap - res      f/t
     |     |    chg   c/t
    mem - ind      flx

Squares are neat.

(Not my area of knowledge; have no real clue. Hoping someone comes along and explains further.)

Yes — and organizations have been firing (and historically enough, killing) middle managers to “crumple” diffused executive misconduct for a long time.

But “moral crumple zone” sounds sexy, while “the human in an AI driven system is just a scapegoat” is probably something the average person on the street has mused about, extrapolating from purely human behavior or in the context of “taking over” for self-driving cars.

I’m not sure I understand your point.

Let’s imagine that I work a job for three years, and a company spends $30,000 training me over that time period, when I then leave because that training helped me reach a better career position.

If they hadn’t paid for that benefit, I would have left after only two years — because the need to transfer for career advancement would happen sooner. This would save them $20,000-30,000 depending on how you count.

So what’s the net difference?

In scenario 1, they received a ROI of 1 year of improved labor, and 1 year of doubly improved labor. Additionally, the fixed costs of hiring are amortized over three years instead of two, and so decrease by 33%.

So for $30,000 they decreased my hiring costs by 33% and received two years of increased quality labor — say 5-10% productivity. Hiring an engineer is 25-50% of their yearly salary, so they’re saving 8-15% of my salary over three years. The productivity of an engineer is going to be like twice their salary, just to pay overhead and profit. So we’re looking at a boost of 10-20% my salary in their revenues.

So they’re looking at ~15-25% of my salary as the return for spending $10k/year. Naively, it seems like that pays off in many cases: it just requires you operate in a trust based manner.

> > offering to register them to vote sans additional proof of citizenship

> You are not automatically registered to vote just because you have a WA driver license.

I find it interesting you didn’t actually critique what I said.

In my experience, that’s common with people who hold your position.

There was also no attempt to reply with actual facts: just more fallacious arguments when they were called out about making an unsupported claim and ad hominem —

> Because there’s no significant amount of fraud occurring that ID requirements would fix, and ID requirements are often made to unfairly disenfranchise certain groups.

That’s what HN groupthink is: unsupported facts and ad hominems in support, downvotes and strawman responses to people who disagree.

It’s the thinking that underlines blood sacrifice: if we ritually commit an injustice, it will atone for past injustice.

In 1999 when Palm Pilots and Blackberries were there, showing a clear trend towards greater handheld power after things like brick cellphones and gameboys?

Yeah, that was the general consensus about what the future would be.

Can you cite something to support that?

It sounds like a just-so claim: it’s not really a problem, and the people complaining are just bad people!

As far as I’m aware, not only is there not accurate study — jurisdictions like Washington intentionally make it difficult to track whether non-citizens are voting by issuing them IDs and offering to register them to vote sans additional proof of citizenship. This is why WA has to have enhanced ID — they don’t meet the federal standards of ensuring people they issue ID to are here legally.

It seems strange that people refuse to even talk about it and resort to nasty ad hominems if there genuinely is no issue.

By contrast, insulting the motivations of people genuinely trying to stand up for the law and act with integrity because you decided to employ force and just override them is deeply, unrecoverably immoral.

The very notion of “you and me” is an appeal to realism: without an external world, there is only me — “you” become a figment of my imagination.

Realism explains why my paper a) arrives while I’m asleep and b) sometimes surprises me with the content or by not arriving.

I’ve yet to see a non-realist explanation of my paper that doesn’t seem deeply more convoluted than “someone like me, but not me dropped it off independent of my awareness”.

I’m not saying you can’t make a model out of that, but you quickly arrive at the equivalent of epicycles to explain even basic things like my newspaper arriving (or not).

Also, “quantum indeterminacy” is an assumption, not a proven fact supported by evidence. That’s the exact thing under discussion now: it’s justification as an interpretative assumption.

There’s also an “outside the box” problem: in a non-local universe, it may be impossible for you to compute the trajectory of something without perturbing it, eg, because you slightly jiggle all of the electrons everywhere.

So the co-trajectory of your computation and the particle only ever agree by so much: attempts to increase the accuracy of the calculation kick the particle around, rendering it inaccurate.

There’s deep senses in which uncertainty emerges from being part of the system you’re measuring, in any paradigm.

Yes — so much so, they added it as an extra assumption to their model.

The original justification is that we have things like Bell’s experiment that say reality is non-local or non-deterministic, because they exclude local determinism.

But since then, we’ve found increasing evidence that it’s non-local, and so the choice made for the Copenhagen interpretation, to preserve locality at the cost of determinism, becomes unjustified.

It’s now included as an extra assumption out of tradition, and because no one wants to seriously rewrite things. However, as Smolin contends, that may be a dead-end intellectually and an impediment to unifying QM with relativity.

A non-local, but real QM interpretation has a more straightforward paradigm to merge with relativistic gravity: it aligns their models philosophically.

> I feel like when people say ‘realist’ in this context, they mean someone who believes that ordinary intuitions about the way the world works are how the world must work at all levels.

From the article:

> Like Einstein, Smolin is a philosophical ‘realist’ — someone who thinks that the real world exists independently of our minds and can be described by deterministic laws.

So no, they don’t.

Also, realism is consistent with quantum experiment — non-realism is merely an interpretation that’s had more developers work on it, not somehow a proven component of reality. (Commonly called Copenhagen interpretation; MWI and Bohmian are other interpretations; arguably loop quantum gravity too.)

I agree with Smolin: non-realism is an extraneous assumption meant to preserve locality, but reality is empirically non-local.

Ironically, it’s actually the non-realists who are guilty of what you say — they can’t let go of their Euclidean intuitions, and so come up with nonsense like denying realism. Their entire model is fundamentally predicated on things looking like a smooth Euclidean space at all scales below some threshold — that is, that reality all the way down looks like what we see when we look around.

Non-realists insist on a Euclidean world despite contrary experimental evidence.

If you view energy as distributed across the topology of your space, which often is radically non-Euclidean, you immediately have realism back — the world just is nothing like what’s in front of your eyes. (Enter loop quantum gravity.)

You admit your comment is non-responsive to my point, which is that dang ideologically censors posts.

Do you believe a non-sequitur ad hominem was a constructive comment?

I’d prefer not to learn that style of social skill.

Your comment is also factually wrong: the reason that censorship for civility developed as a strategy is that it’s maximally effective suppressing ideological conversion for the amount of speech it suppresses. Your comment then becomes nothing more than “working under adverse conditions teaches resiliency”, which is true — but not a reason to stop questioning the censorship policy.

People do not rationally switch positions — they switch positions during an emotional cascade after a sufficient number of rational reasons have accumulated. That “avalanche” where an emotional spark triggers the awareness of a substantial shift in your beliefs.

These criticality events necessarily require an emotional trigger such a failing to be able to substantively reply to provocatively phrased arguments or the inability to factually correct mocking humor.

Civility suppresses precisely that: the emotional barbs in arguments and the mockery which might provoke a person to change their stance, in a substantive manner.

Rationality alone is all powder, no spark.

> That guideline is based on the evidence of what happens when people don't follow it. That's the opposite of arbitrary.

I didn’t mean to imply that the rule was arbitrarily selected, merely that your application of it was arbitrary — that it, at the sole discretion of a small group of people, without guiding rules, and without systematic review for p, eg, bias.

Force, such as bans, applied in an arbitrary manner is inherently tyrannical — and your appeals to civility a rote recitation of a millennia old justification for tyranny. Tyrants are never merely enforcing their biases on others — it’s always for the greater purpose!

Having been a member of this community for a while, my reply would be that flame war groupthink is better than this groupthink: flame wars can occasionally change minds and show the diversity of extant opinions — while your groupthink preserving censorship distorts people’s view of the diversity of opinions while leading to no more changed minds, and is therefore strictly worse.

> Especially: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

> dang has previously said that they’re more critical of people who perturb the groupthink, and take action against them for things people supporting popular opinions would be excused for.

Your entire moderation policy is based around precisely what I claimed, as you yourself stated: the arbitrary application of increased standards for comments which disrupt groupthink, or to use a euphemism, are “divisive”.

You have, to me, in reply to contentious things I’ve said.

Repeatedly.

My naive read is that $500k is an estimate of their profit over X time period, likely based on the $50k restitution over Y time period, which is the conduct they’re actually charged for.

The reason for the discrepancy is simple: the government can only relcaim money connected to what they indict you for — not all the crimes people suspect, but can’t prove; in contrast, a newspaper is free to speculate “Well, if a month long sting caught them doing $50k, then they did like $500k/yr!”

You can get similar estimates if the government catches them with unsold drugs, and the paper reports how much money they would have made selling it. Again, a reasonable estimate of their cash flow, but sensible the police seize the drugs rather than money they haven’t earned yet. (And can’t seize past money, if not connected to a crime.)

I don’t have specific citations, but I’ve seen both in local papers over the years.

There was a lot of pseudo-legal justification and lack of prosecutions for the Bush torture program as well, which was another violation of American norms.

You have a very idyllic view that people can’t break the rules and get away with it: Obama murdered an American in violation of the law, but there is a tradition of not holding presidents accountable for their crimes.

Personally, that lack of accountability seems to have led to a ratcheting level of presidential misbehavior and a collapse in societal norms — precisely what this thread is about.

> Neither will catch issues like using a subnet that doesn’t exist [...]

The CDK does: you’re either explicitly bypassing the safety checks, are explicitly importing a value (which necessarily is validated at runtime), or have to provide a subnet definition to instantiate the relevant object.

You then use these programming language constructs to implement higher level ideas like applications, fully in a programming language.

That exists for AWS:

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cdk

CloudFormation YAML being terrible is well known, to the point that AWS did precisely what that person suggested.

https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cdk

They are in the process of releasing a kit to define your infrastructure programmatically, and let them deal with the mess of CloudFormation as a compiled IR they send to their backend when you deploy.

This seems a strange response, since the extra-judicial killing of an American by the Obama administration was widely regarded as a serious breakdown in American norms — precisely by the same crowd who says things like GP.

Your link then would be support for their point, not a refutation.

Generally speaking, point out something in the past few years that’s an example of what the person is talking about isn’t a way to refute that things are changed — that you can only point to recent ones is evidence that things have changed.

Of course, Obama has no respect for American traditions, broadly: he’s the first president in history not to leave the capital and to continue to be politically active during his successor’s term.

His actions certainly aren’t what I’d put forward to someone claiming that American values used to be something, but have recently changed — Obama in general is an example of that collapse in principles.

There’s a strong, intentional skew in their enforcement:

dang has previously said that they’re more critical of people who perturb the groupthink, and take action against them for things people supporting popular opinions would be excused for.

That’s what it means when they say they censor to keep “civility”: if the groupthink finds you disruptive, you will be silenced by arbitrary application of rules others (who subscribe to groupthink) are excused for — and in this way, an insistence on civility always favors groupthink.

The pretense of censoring for civility here is merely dishonest gaslighting about their ideological policing, in favor of groupthink.

It’s precisely the same kind of dishonesty you see in YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook’s censoring of conservative voices: hyperpartisans screech, and complicit moderates use that as a pretense to enact their biases.

You have a second vision that had nothing to do with what we were talking about before, which was changing the current system to one where entrenched private interests would be censors — the envisioned change I was responding to.

Your non-sequitur other wishes have nothing to do with that being a hellish vision.