arn3n

I think there's a pretty simple explanation for this: It's hard to admit when we're not doing well. It's easy to say that the world is getting worse, that you're worried for the future, but to admit that you personally are having trouble is depressing and a little humiliating. I'm guilty of this -- even when times are really bad for me personally, I try to be optimistic and consider my current misery as a temporary misfortune. It helps to keep moving forwards.

There’s a basic approach to this using markov chains which works surprisingly well. Scott Aaronson once challenged some students to beat his algorithm — only one student could, who claimed he just “used his free will”. Human randomness isn’t so random. There’s a neat little writeup about it here: https://planetbanatt.net/articles/freewill.html

Double entry account is, in fact, what gave “transactional” databases their name: They were meant for financial transactions! Nowadays TigerBeetle is a custom built financial database just for double entry accounting. The implementation is fascinating.

Especially with Apple, I often see people scared that if they open up their ecosystem, then users will lose one of the most consumer friendly tech companies out there. It’s not just “if apple allows alternative browsers then Chrome will win”, which is (probably) true. It’s:

* If Apple allows alternative app stores then the whole ios ecosystem will rot and be foooded with malware, brough up during the Apple vs. Epic cases

* If Apple can’t control the data on their user’s phones, then privacy rights will disappear, a common talking point during the Apple vs. Facebook case for opt-in data collection.

And like, these points are correct — Apple kind of acts like a “benevolent dictator” when it comes to their ecosystem. But shouldn’t there be alternatives between “Apple can control all software on the hardware they sell” and “the moment Apple doesn’t have control of their user’s experience then it’ll be far worse”? Like, we should have more tech companies, more options to pick from between these two extremes. The market needs to be more competitive, and if that isn’t possible shouldn’t there be regulation to protect users and devs better? This constantly feels like a “pick your poison“ kind of deal, where we can only pick between a company locking down their hardware or abuse of users via. software. If Microsoft banned alternative browser engines there’d be riots in these comments. Apple is just better to its users.

Giving companies the power to lock down hardware they sell isn’t a solution that will work when Apple inevitably turns against its users, and is a horrible precedent to set legally. Lord knows John Deere and a million other predatory hardware companies are salivating at the idea of users of their hardware not having control over what they bought, and Meta and Microsoft love the idea of users not having control of the software they run and the data it collects. We can’t just picking between the least worst of two companies.

Wind gusts were reaching 125 MPH in Boulder county, if anyone’s curious. A lot of power was shut off preemptively to prevent downed power lines from starting wildfires. Energy providers gave warning to locals in advance. Shame that NIST’s backup generator failed, though.

Are we really shaming having hobbies now?

I keep hearing about how the supply and demand cycles are “lagged” and that this price spike happens every 3-5 years for purely economical reasons. I feel like I’m being gaslit — I don’t recall any such price spikes in the past of this magnitude. You’re telling me that there’s a totally predictable price cycle and NO ONE has prepared for it? Or else prices are just high temporarily and no one can step in to increase supply? Either way, it seems that there’s not enough competition in this market.

I am always astonished by the range of people who claim their college degree was useless, citing rote memorization and bad classes. I had an entirely different experience and so did most people I know. University gave me the opportunity to talk to world-class researchers during office hours, to discuss ideas with my peers and have them either validated or critiqued by experts. Sure, all the information is available online (which is a miracle into itself) but without frequent contact with professors and mentors I wouldn’t have even known where to look or what existed in the field. University, for me, was a place where I was apprenticing full-time under highly experienced people, surrounded by people my age who also were doing the same. Years of self-teaching didn’t get me anywhere close to what a few semesters of expert mentorship got me. I never felt I had to memorize anything: exams consisted of system design or long programming projects or optimization challenges. I loved it, and I’m not sure if people went to different universities or just didn’t take advantage of the opportunities presented to them.

I believe you’re referencing Patrick McKenzie’s takes on fraud, which I agree with — but when he (and others) talk about the optimal amount of fraud they’re usually referring to fraud from “losing money from the company to customers”. This is not PayPal’s case; because PayPal isn’t the victim of fraud on its platform but makes money off its use, their optimal amount of fraud is “as much as they can permit without losing customers or regulators getting up their ass”.

I love conferences and talks and wish I could go to them more — what stops me is the sudden drop in corporate sponsorship of them. It’s been nearly impossible to convince leadership to spend money to train their employees or to socialize within their own discipline, and while I’d love to go to conferences, taking time out of my own PTO and my own wallet to see them isn’t worth it.

In my experience it tends to be the opposite — I am not a quant (QD) but having worked with a few teams there’s a negative selection for technical expertise. QRs who are good at programming are usually pushed into maintaining infrastructure, datasets, or just tooling for less technical members of their team, who then get to use those tools to further their own alpha generation. Orgs incentivize the final step in making alpha — spend too much time helping others or building reusable research, and your coworkers steal the thunder.

That, or stop helping your coworkers/accommodating them… risky, as a career move. Only seen that work once.

Obesity is highly correlated with other medical conditions, from cancer to diabetes to heart disease. I wonder if there is a point at which it is cheaper for health insurance companies to offer subsidized or even free GLP-1s to patients than pay out for other specialized medications. For example, my insurance covers flu shots in my community every year because it's presumably less expensive to pay for the shots compared to the increased rate of hospitalization that the flu causes.

I miss Lina Khan.

God, I’d love to work for something like this.

The closest equivalent thing we have today is (in my mind) places like the Apache Foundation or LetsEncrypt, places that run huge chunks of open source software or critical internet structure. An “Apache for search” would be great.

I actually love performative licensing. Notable examples are the "Stallman License" [1] and the "Pinkest Pink: Available to Everyone except Anish Kapoor" [2]

[1] https://github.com/benlk/misc-licenses/blob/master/stallman-... [2] https://stuartsemple.com/anish-kapoor-banned-worlds-pinkest-...

Not all decimal numbers have finite binary representations. 0.3, for example, is 0.010011 with a repeating block of 0011. For some business applications, you know you're being given a base 10 decimal of finite (but possibly very large) length.

I really wish stories like this traveled farther. As the world fraud economies have grown, most people have remained mostly uninformed about how fraudsters and Ponzi schemes operate -- how they sound, what their founders act like, and how they can go on for far longer and trap far smarter people than you'd expect. With the constant weakening of serious consumer protections (at least in America), sharing these cautionary tales is more important than ever.

On a tangent, I wonder how much of "Uncut Gems" was inspired by this story.

“In other languages, it would be considered overkill to write a full parser when a simple regex can do the same thing. In Haskell, writing a parser is no big deal. We just do it and move on with our lives.”

I see a long code file filled with comments and long paragraph-level explanations. I think I’d rather just learn and use regex.

Rust’s “mutable-xor-aliased” model makes it particularly amenable to developing verification tools on top of it [1]. Without this model, verification becomes just as hard — and just as practically intractable — as all the verifiers for existing languages.

1: https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/312681.html

I truly love this aesthetic and it's vision of the future. Clean air, healthy food, empowered communities. Abundance without waste, progress without destruction, and equal opportunity without tyranny. This is the future that we should be developing software to enable. Instead, I'm frequently disappointed by the modern usages of software, which seem to cause excess waste, accelerate the destruction of our planet, and enable authoritarians. Maybe it's time to rethink what we're working towards.

I will never stop supporting Lina Khan. Her tenure at the FTC has accomplished more in the past four years than the past four decades.

He’s forgetting that software keeps getting slower. Forever and ever. With new hardware comes new expectations for hardware by software vendors.

This is a take on environmental communication I’ve heard more and more of recently. Out of curiosity, do you know of other literature or people trying to reframe the human/nature relationship?

If you don’t want to change your whole stack, ClickHouse’s Materialized Views do something extraordinarily similar, where computations are ran on inserts to the source table in an online/streaming manner. I’m curious how this solution compares in its set of features/gaurantees.

An aside about Forbes: I used to be subscribed to a few of their newsletters. About two years ago, I would notice that nearly all the newletter content would say something along the lines of "as reported by The Information" and I realized that a huge portion (>60%) of the newsletter content was just summarizations or rephrasing of articles from The Information. Which, I mean, great that you're citing your sources, but are you really providing a service here?

I just read The Information, now.

One example that the article gave is how Ghanan farmers couldn't risk to expand or specialize their crops because of the risk of drought. That feels like a need that could viably be met with sensible insurance.

One form of insurance I've always been a fan of in the US, at least, is mandatory car insurance. Considering that the cost of a collision can be extraordinarily high for all parties involved, but because most people don't crash, amortizing that risk out among drivers enables more people to get vehicles and transportation without freak accidents putting people into financial distress.

I've always thought that ethically "right" forms of insurance (and other financial products, like equities, futures, etc.) is that they should enable individuals to take actions that are riskier than they would normally be able to, without unduly increasing the aggregate risk of the entire system. Of course, this is 1. Hard to measure and 2. Hard to define "unduly". For example, I believe mortgages are a "good" financial instrument, because they enable people to have homes and roofs over their head without introducing systemic risk... except when done in 2008. The devil is in the details and the implementation, I suppose.

Does anyone else notice that quanta consistently has good illustrations and diagrams for their articles? Good visualizations and graphics can do extraordinary things for the understandability of a topic -- people like 3Blue1Brown understand this, and I'm glad quanta puts effort into it.