academia_hack

I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.

I agree crypto has no utility but I also really don't want to live in a world where governments ban me from buying and selling knowledge of numbers because of the particular algorithm which produced them. Or from using my computer to compute whatever I want.

The pertinent difference here appears to be a falsified bomb threat and the use of a fighter jet to implicitly threaten the lives of the pilot and crew if they didn't kowtow to the illegal instructions. Both of these factors seem like more than minor details and much more dangerous precedents. Lying about bomb threats is far beyond the pale of acceptable behavior for a national aviation authority.

The + is also useful for knowing who sold your email address on or was responsible for a data breach. If I start getting spam to <my name>+hulu@gmail.com, then I know I could chase down Hulu on Twitter for an explanation.

I bought a diet-aid box with a timer called "Kitchen Safe". Just dump my phone in it whenever I have the will power, set a timer for a few hours, and turn a moment of motivation into hours of phone-free bliss. The box is designed to shatter if you hit it, so there's no need to worry about losing access in a real emergency but the replacement cost is high enough to not do that everytime reddit beckons.

Check this repo out - didn't make it but I use it to teach my students about adversarial learning: https://github.com/jayelm/bad-flamingo

The alternative to search snippets is a world where I have to be bombarded with cookie consent popups and advertisement and then scroll through paragraphs of nonsense to get the two word answer to a trivial question. Google adds enormous value in synthesizing this information and presenting it only when it is relevant. I don't know why people think they have an inmate right to make profits off of basic facts and trivial public data.

Smartmusic.com does exactly this. It's not 100% accurate and is mostly sold to school band programs but they've got a pretty cheap annual hobbyist subscription.

There's so much stuff about the world that we don't understand and want to and that even trivial machine learning techniques can help us figure out. Yet, at least in my field (computer security), it has become incredibly difficult to publish research that applies machine learning without having some needlessly obtuse methodological twist to make it seem more complicated. Even low hanging fruit needs picking and I'm worried discoveries with intrinsic value are being left to rot in the name of feeling "scientific."

Given the virus, travelling for celebration also seems like something that should be discouraged.

I've really liked Gigabyte's gaming laptops (aero) for this reason. They've got premium build quality and excellent specs but don't look like a Mardi Gras float. They're also very light and have long battery life for the specs. Only downside is the price and mail-only support really.

Even paying zero dollars you still have to file taxes, send in FBAR, invest in a FACTA compliant way, sort out redundant pensions, and deal with the IRS - all at comically inflated costs since software products (e.g. Turbotax) don't do overseas taxes well, if at all. And if you make a mistake navigating an incredibly complex web of under-documented treaty law and ambiguous paperwork you can quite literally end up imprisoned by a country with one of the developed world's most comically broken justice systems the next time you go on holiday. I once won a random prize drawing for a modest amount of cash ($15k) and ended up paying nearly $3k in accountant fees to navigate the double-taxation process safely. My US tax burden was $0, but the filling burden was way beyond that. I haven't benefited from US public services or anything in many years. The US is essentially the only country on the world that inflicts this nonsense on people.

I feel like this is trivially resolved by selling a subscription to those additional services (e.g. for product updates or support agreements).

I'm just imagining a scenario where I build something with a subscription library and then 5 years down the line they get acquired by some private equity firm and increase the subscription cost by a factor of ten. Now I'm faced with a choice of either paying license ransom or losing the ability to use all of my own original software and creative effort.

Fair point. I'm personally not convinced that distinction is intrinsically meaningful rather than just legally and commercially convenient - especially in the case of libraries or programming languages. Qt is valueless as literature absent independent creative art that uses it to build a program - like screws in a piece of furniture. Charging people to use the component is fine by me, but making their own creative work contingent on third party approval that can be modified or revoked at any time seems unreasonable/immoral even if it's permitted by law.

If I buy a frying pan and open up a restaurant with it I don't have to keep paying the frying pan company so long as I use my pan to create meals. Subscriptions for software libraries and components weird me out much more than subscriptions for services and end-products (with recurring costs for the service providers) do.

It's an historical artifact from a time when people lived and worked on the nobility's land as literal serfs. The UK is just dreadful at progress, especially when it doesn't serve the elite. The whole concept of a 99 year lease was actually a major victory for commoners / compromise with the nobility and landlord class. While that compromise is no longer part of living memory (1920s) it's certainly still viewed as the furthest acceptable limit by many hereditary and institutional landlords.

The back channel theory sounds like a good point to me. Anonymous peer review is largely a charade, I'd be more surprised if Google didn't have fingers on the scales and flies on the wall at top ML venues than if they did. It's very possible that the leak/breach of anonymity is what kicked off her demands to get the names of people who filed complaints that led to the paper's retraction.

One of the best predictors so far for UK COVID policy has been to assume anything Boris Johnson rules out will be the exact thing that happens.

I'm no expert, but I'm stunned that it costs more than $10,000 a year to connect a single computer to a corporate network such that AWS Macs become cost competitive. I've never worked in a big enterprise organization but I just can't wrap my head around the inefficiency required to make that math work.

I have always been curious about the concept of "digital nomadism" and remote working while traveling to many countries around the world. Most people I know living this lifestyle have a very lax viewpoint on the concept that remote working around the world incurs special tax liabilities/visa requirements. I'm not sure if that's actually true or if living in countries for 2 months at a time for the purpose of remote working does create tax & visa nightmares.

Do you have any advice for US citizens who might be interested in taking up that sort of lifestyle? In particular, are there countries that are trivially amenable to such arrangements or certain types of employment contracts / job arrangements that help provide legal cover for perpetually travelling employees?

I'm not convinced that scientific formalism is always necessary or valuable. "Computer Science" is an anachronism that arose due to the sort of people who built the first computers and the sort of reasoning they valued. It would have been bizarre to complain about how pointillism in art lacked fundamental theory when artists first embraced it. If people want to play around with a new approach to computing and spend some money doing so, I don't think having them sit down and prove theorems about optimal data structures is strictly necessary. Maybe it won't be mathematically perfect on the first go around, but who cares?

The coin toss example given here seems tautological. Why would my unfair coin have to abide by some norm of probability? If I were designing such a coin, it would obviously include a mechanism for tracking state such that if the last toss was heads the next would always be tails. For example, it could literally redraw the upwards-facing side to the desired outcome an instant before striking the table.

I've never had a great head for mathematics because it feels like most impossibilities arise from arbitrary constraints and definitions. Reading such proofs feels like: 1) I've created an arbitrary universe with made up rules 2) This condition does/doesn't break one of those rules I made up 3) QED

For example, why on earth can't a straight line in a rectangle have a 180 degree angle at its center making that rectangle an octagon too? It's not clear why one system is epistemologically valid and the other is not. The proof of impossibility feels like a "no true scotsman"/"no true octagon" fallacy disguised by a bit of added notation.