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JackFr

14,997 karma · joined May 16, 2012

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JackFr··on Lifelong Disadvantage: How Socioeconomics Affect Brain Function
TFA:

> We adjusted the applied regression analyses and structural equation models for the linear and non-linear effects of age, sex, education, cardiovascular risk factors, and presence of depressive, anxiety, and substance use disorders.

JackFr··on Visiting Scarfolk, the most spectacular dystopia of the 1970s (2016)
Reminds me of https://liartownusa.com/
JackFr··on My grandfather Paul Tillich, the unbelieving theologian
Assuredly there are some things you believe which aren’t scientifically provable? In particular questions about how one should order their life? Not questions about ‘is’ but questions about ‘should’.

Is a love of peace over violence, freedom over slavery, ignorance over wisdom simply a matter of taste?

JackFr··on The Starship or the Canoe: Where will our future adaptations be? (2017)
Well actually it’s more likely that Enrique of Malacca was the first person to circumnavigate the globe.

(He had been enslaved by Magellan 10 years earlier on a voyage which had reached Malacca going east, and then returned on the later more famous voyage of Magellan which had gone west.)

JackFr··on Java 22 Released
> concrete syntax TBB (to be bikeshod)

TIL the past participle of 'bikeshed' is 'bikeshod'. Tremendous.

JackFr··on 20 Years of "Not Even Wrong"
The difference between good science and bad science is contingent on whether the search for funding aligns with the search for truth.
JackFr··on 'If anything happens, it's not suicide': Boeing whistleblower before death
Why? A completely unvetted “family friend” who won’t even give a last name provides a salacious quote that’s completely unverifiable. A niece, known to be related and with a name and address offers a counterpoint. It’s ok to be skeptical.

Things like: What did the note say? Where did the gun come from? Is there any CCTV video from the hotel and garage? still need to be investigated by the police.

It is possible that he was stressed, depressed, and expected to have his reputation (and life) destroyed by scorched earth lawyers for Boeing.

JackFr··on I always knew I was different, I didn't know I was a sociopath
> Also her gaze in the picture is quite unnerving.

Photographers know their business.

JackFr··on Montana Man Pleads to Federal Charges for Efforts to Create Giant Hybrid Sheep
The title on the DOJ release is misleading. It's not the breeding that was the crime. Trafficking in endangered species and fraudulent veterinary documents I think were the actual crimes, which he committed in support of the breeding efforts.
JackFr··on Fosbury Flop
The technique was only possible because of better pits. Landing on your neck in a pit of sand and sawdust isn’t advisable. A foam rubber cushion makes a huge difference.
JackFr··on A UK college student explaining congressional procedure to Washington
Pedantic nitpick:

> Matt Glassman — a congressional scholar at Georgetown who has spent most of his adult life studying the Hill — wanted to know the answer to an obscure procedural question. “When was the last time a ruling of the chair was overturned on appeal in the House?” he asked on X, tagging an anonymous user named @ringwiss.

> Less than a minute later, the mysterious account responded with an answer — 1938 — and a decades-old edition of the Congressional Record to prove it.

No, a copy of the 1938 Congressional record does not prove that. The question was “When was the last time…?” I don’t doubt that he’s correct, and the error is on the part of the writer, but what he’s proven is that the answer can’t be earlier than 1938.

And yes, very much a pedantic nitpick in an otherwise interesting article.

JackFr··on Scientists put Jared Diamond's continental axis hypothesis to the test
The problem is to non-academics, it’s all a bunch of Just-So stories and Whig histories, so it’s difficult to judge and the more compelling writer is gonna win.
JackFr··on Scientists put Jared Diamond's continental axis hypothesis to the test
But that gets back to Diamond’s motivating fundamental question.

Why were the Spaniards colonizing the Americas rather than the Incas colonizing Spain?

JackFr··on Scientists put Jared Diamond's continental axis hypothesis to the test
Does the Norwegian rat count as having been domesticated?
JackFr··on Scientists put Jared Diamond's continental axis hypothesis to the test
An interesting section of GG&S addresses how zebras have never been domesticated (for a number of reasons) despite superficially seeming quite similar to horses.

My point is, I guess, it’s hard to know and counterfactuals with hypothetical species are probably not definitive.

JackFr··on The Achilles Trap: how the US fatally failed to read Saddam
Wait, why did Cheney want to invade Iraq?
JackFr··on The Black-Scholes/Merton equation [video]
There is some valuable intuition in that the value of an option can be broken into three components, the intrinsic value - that is the difference between the asset price and strike price on the option, the time value which is dependent on the time to expiry and the risk free rate, and the “insurance” value which is dependent on the volatility and the time to expiry.

In the swaptions market, for instance quotes are typically for an “at-the-money forward” rate, which makes the first two components zero and all the value is tied to the vol.

JackFr··on Fugitive Wirecard COO Jan Marsalek exposed as decade-long GRU spy
It’s not insider trading as there is no material non-public information involved. Were the information false, it would likely be actionable market manipulation. But because the information was true, from the perspective of the authorities nothing wrong here.

On the other hand, there may be ethical (but not legal) issues from the perspective of the publisher.

JackFr··on How The Pentagon learned to use targeted ads to find its targets
A thermometer, a barometer and a radio.
JackFr··on Testcontainers
> Sure, integration tests "save" you from writing pesky unit tests, and changing them frequently after every refactor.

The DB migration has "ADD COLUMN rateLimit INT"

The application class member is annotated with "@Column(name=”ratelimit”, nullable=true)"

The failure is at the interface between the app and the DB. What testcontainers does is allow you to write a quasi-unit test (not a truly full-blown integration test, but testing a small piece of functionality) across the boundary of two components. I am not aware of a way to reasonably unit test for this error. That might just be me -- seriously if there is a tried strategy for unit testing things like this I'd love to know it.

JackFr··on Marilyn vos Savant and the Monty Hall Problem (2015)
> 50% of the time, monty opens another door and it has a car and you win immediately

Why would you think you won? You didn't choose that one with the car and you aren't offered the opportunity to switch to the open one, only the closed one. The only interpretation which makes sense is that he always shows you a goat.

JackFr··on Microsoft strikes deal with Mistral in push beyond OpenAI
Is gpt4 as good in non-English uses? It's not clear to me that it would be particularly important or advantageous, but does Mistral being based in Europe and polyglot first make it interesting vs. gpt4 in some dimension?
JackFr··on Miracle of Wörgl
Money is anything which: is a store of value; is a medium of exchange; is a unit of account; is a standard for future payment.

It needs to be durable, transportable, divisible and difficult to counterfeit.

Famous example - cigarettes in a POW camp:

https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/econ4260/out/radford_pow.pdf

JackFr··on Miracle of Wörgl
It is exactly Keynesianism.

It is Krugman's baby sitting co-op. https://slate.com/business/1998/08/baby-sitting-the-economy....

JackFr··on Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution
Healthcare in the United States.

The insurers have somehow created which ensures their survival at a real cost. Attempts to rationalize the system have failed because of the focus on getting everyone health insurance rather than health care (admittedly among other reasons).

JackFr··on Incident report for February 21st, 2024
I did too, but it was 25 years ago and quite honestly there was a different attitude about developers accessing production.

Today if a developer can bring down the operation accidentally, that’s a problem with the org more than the developer.

(On the other hand if a developer screws up the shared dev environment, it is his or her fault and they deserve the wrath of their coworkers.)

JackFr··on Incident report for February 21st, 2024
At a company with a modern, mature process this simply should not be possible.
JackFr··on Incident report for February 21st, 2024
I deleted a years worth of trades on a production database for a bond trading system in 1997. They were restored within an hour, but it made a lasting impression.

Different color scheme on prod consoles.

Always use “BEGIN TRAN”.

JackFr··on Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]
He's like an actually smart version of Nicholas Nassim Taleb. Arrogant, egotistical and dismissive but at least he has real math chops.
JackFr··on German credit agency earns millions through unlawful customer manipulation
Well, no. If the applicant is denied they pay nothing.
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