ailun

Okay. Sorry they're jerking you around. But your experience is clearly not universal.

I just got car insurance last week through Progressive in California. It was cheaper than the same coverage in Washington and activated instantly.

I remember hearing something different. Seems like Mercedes is moving in that direction.

https://insideevs.com/news/575160/mercedes-accepts-legal-res...

Very interesting, thank you! I don't think I've worked on any truly large problems with these methods so I will keep your thoughts in mind when I do.

That's why I said "more worried," though. Of course you can't be sure that they are doing a perfect job for every situation. But I don't think I'm going to do a better job manually than those heuristics - that's why they mostly aren't exposed to the user in the usual workflows, because people who spend their lives researching best practices for these algorithms don't think it's a good idea most of the time. If those heuristics aren't working, you're better off reparameterizing your model rather than messing with them. Hence why I don't think they are worth worrying about too much.

To be clear, I don't disagree with you about MCMC. But wouldn't your first two pitfalls wouldn't be taken care of as much as possible by using a widely used library's implementation? All the libraries I'm aware of tune the HMC hyperparameters automatically - should I be more worried that there's something invisibly going wrong there? And your third pitfall applies to MCMC in general, not HMC in particular.

Why wouldn’t you just use Stan or Pymc or one of the other dozen existing implementations with something like HMC? They use it as the default sampling algorithm.

It’s not. Beijing is pretty accurate as most English speakers say it (except for the tones), although I often hear people do really weird things with the j. The b and j sounds in Mandarin are not the same as in English, but they are closer than p or k to my ear.

I understand media skepticism, but your comment is just as reductive and misinformed as saying that all the protests are pro-democracy.

There are both types of protest right now in China. Many are anti-local government, asking for the central government to help rein in the provincial and city-level officials who are the ones actually responsible for enforcing zero-Covid.

But there are also many pro-democracy/human rights type people coming out as well, especially in Shanghai and on university campuses. There are tons of videos of them calling for democracy, for Xi Jinping to step down, that kind of thing. You can find them on Twitter, but you’ll have to sort through all of the spam that the Chinese government is flooding relevant hashtags with.

This was my first thought as well! I was weirdly obsessed with that game. It crashed all the time, so that part fits. I originally had the demo on CD, I think it came with X-Wing vs Tie Fighter or one of those other Lucasarts games.

I just tried the feature in China, doesn't seem to help.

The situation is a bit different. It's common in China to pay for unfinished apartments. So the bank has nothing to foreclose on, and the property development company becomes even less likely to finish the property. The fear is that more people will protest by stopping payment in a downward spiral.

I don't know for sure about OMSCS, but in OMSA you can ask the advisors to let you take more than 6 credits and they'll usually approve it. There are a fair amount of people who try to finish it in 3 semesters, although that seems a little crazy to me. It probably depends on your course selection, but I would struggle to take more than 3 classes (9 credits) at once (without working), and I would definitely have a shallower understanding of the material.

Yes, they can.

You can email them to enable receiving short codes for a specific number. That doesn't mean it works with all banks or whatever (the sending company may not allow Twilio numbers), but it does work for some of them.

https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223181668-Can-T...

You completely misunderstood their post.

I'm in a similar situation, or I will be eventually. How hard is it for Chinese nationals to move to Taiwan, do you know?

Yeah I forgot a word there. Typed it quickly on my phone. Meant to say I don't think the clips are all recent or in Shanghai.

I saw that video and I don't they are all in Shanghai or all recent.

One more for you (long):

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prospectus-on-prospera

It’s important to keep pointing these things out. I’m not quite as pessimistic as some who believe that the US will continue to do these things forever; I believe the US populace is slowly waking up to what has been done in their names. While people may quibble with the motivations and morality of individual incidents that you’ve mentioned, overall I haven’t heard convincing arguments that they’ve made the world safer overall. The Yugoslavia situation, for example, was pretty complex and I could debate the differences with Ukraine all day, without disagreeing with your overall point.

But I also feel that it’s important to acknowledge that if it was wrong for the US, it is wrong for Russia. There are too many people out there who aren’t really being sincere with their arguments and are using US crimes to justify Russian ones.

Well, I live in China as a foreigner so maybe our experiences are not as far apart as you think.

I’m not on the opposite side of a debate with you, and I don’t care about “high school debate rules.” If you’re right then you don’t need to lie or mislead and use little tricks like the one I pointed out. Just make your point without them - people here are happy to hear your perspective, and will be more likely to hear what you’re saying without all your embellishments.

Then that's a nice rhetorical trick, but dishonest.

A direct quote from you:

The fact that AP backpedaled like this shows how shaky all the evidence was.

You're comparing your impression of a bunch of poor quality news with an article by the AP and calling it backpedaling. The AP did not backpedal, because it never said that Xinjiang was worse than the Holocaust.

Further, things can change with time... that AP article is saying that things used to be much worse.

Please cite the previous AP article that said "worse than the holocaust". I don’t believe it exists.

Because you’re probably waiting with the crowd near where the smaller waves are breaking so you can catch those. Some people do just wait further out for the bigger waves, but they miss out on all the smaller waves breaking closer to the beach in the meantime. If you had more warning you could go out before anyone else sees the larger set coming in. Other people will usually see it in time to get there, but you’ll be first in line.

That said, I don’t think it would be worth it. You usually don’t want to take the first wave in a big set anyways, because if you miss it then you can get stuck in the impact zone for the whole set.

This is one of the best explanations I’ve seen of as_strided. Could have used this a few months ago when we had to use it to implement a CNN in class!

Sure, the quality of mainstream news is always, and has always been, a problem. More education and improvement in understanding is always a good thing. But you're not making any interesting points there, and you have no way to quantify that "most of them are like Gordon Chang". And the problem I see is that people have a tendency to find poor sources of information and use them to dismiss entire categories of information and positions.

By the way, your statement was about "Western China watchers," not some or even most. You may not have meant it that way, but that's how you said it.

I don't believe it is irrelevant. You're saying other people are overly attributing opinions to censorship - and you have a Harvard paper (but don't link to it) that may show censorship in China is more based on potential to go viral than on the actual content. How do you think opinions change if ideas can't freely be shared?

And I'm guessing that the definition of censorship in this paper is based on things that are actually removed from the internet, which is not the whole picture. Movies, songs, TV, news, and books all have to be approved by the party before distribution. Education is controlled by the government. There's also the comments that people don't make in the first place because they know it will be censored. That line is always being pushed, and it's purposefully vague. There was a teacher in Sichuan a month or so ago who made a very polite, short comment saying he wondered if the government would consider other strategies on their covid response and he went to jail for 2 weeks!

How do you think people break out of their set opinions? Where did those opinions come from in the first place?

I agree that there is a bad tendency to look at Chinese people as brainwashed drones. But you're going too far in the opposite direction. China's media control, educational policies, and army of nationalists absolutely affect the Overton window in the Chinese public sphere. You can't tell me with a straight face that it's acceptable to discuss Taiwan independence online in a positive way in China.

If someone genuinely feels that mainstream opinion in China is wrong on Taiwan, they aren't going to be comfortable discussing it openly.