bertil

Similar name, seemingly a lot less talent (intentionally so, IIUC), but awe-inspiring grit: _How To Make Everything_ on YouTube [0] has really hit the nail on the head with having an average man trying to recreate items from scratch.

He’s not that good with his hands, sweats easily, lack coordination and has the natural instinct for measures, roundedness, and flat surfaces of a goat. That makes so many of his attempts that much more credible. He insists (with some exception) on exclusively using tools that he made himself—something he called “The Great Reset”. This means a raggedly thread and an Flintstone-like pen for dimensions. Expectedly, that doesn’t help much.

It’s genuinely so much more valuable for that lack of professional training — although him and his growing team are learning, and getting genuinely good as things go.

He often has the help of a professional using modern tools and the difference with his own attempts is generally very intructive, more than the principle themselves. Can you make a nail from scratch? A professional blacksmith can make somethign really nice; an amateur can try… it will keep two planks together, but not inspire confidence.

Great entertainement value and very worthy reality check: could you make clay pot? You saw an attractive instructor seemlessly whip out something wonderful on TikTok once? Good for you. HTME will give you a more realistic expectation of what you can do on your first five tries: one of them holds most of the water.

Say what you want: after years of grit, they have raggedy but reasonnably useful workshop tools make from absolute scratch.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfIqCzQJXvYj9ssCoHq327g

They are allowed have friends and to communicate with them?

Probably.

I just happen to have had the most incredible physics teachers, and I know elite engineering schools do too: Feynman, that Eastern European lady who is way too loud and excited about science, the “let’s see if conservation of movement works, or if that bowling ball will crush my skull” guy. Every school had more than one. Steve Mould is a gift from above, but not a unique one…

On the other hand what Randal Monroe from xkcd and Grant Sanderson from 3blue1Brown have alluded to, that felt like witchcraft unlike anything I’ve seen in class.

I went to what should be one of the most demanding schools for statistics and it took me years to make sense of it. Re-opening my notes after things clicked was earth-shaking.

And it wasn’t specific to the school: we also had economics teacher, and they were incredible: hilarious, terrifying, unforgettable. “Our task is to forecast inflation. We have tried many approach, mainly macroeconomics and bone reading. Bone reading was more accurate, but the minister didn’t think it involved enough suffering.” How do you forget that?

> Carbon capture is being successfully used all around the world.

[Citation needed]

> economic upside of cheap energy isn't being accounted for

It is: we anticipate companies to operate “indefinitely,” which turns to a high market value. Banks sell that stock, pension funds store it, and their activity is accounted for.

What we don’t consider (in the GDP, company valuations, bank transactions, or any metric) is how the millions of people who will survive the first mass wet-bulb death event will react.

I can’t speak intelligently about the relationship between the pension fund and the wealth fund (it is complicated), but I think you overestimate the share of upcoming revenue from oil over the on-going benefit from operating a fund that is betting on sustainable solutions. Someone smarter than me should correct the record here.

However, the key information here is neither side of that contradiction, but that Norway has found a very large deposit of Phosphorous. Until now, Marocco has the largest reserves (by so much it’s actually daunting, confusing really, how they didn’t end up like the Saudi Arabia of bird poop, which is essential for growing food, so a tad more essential than burning donuts).

Norway seem keen to leverage that the way they leveraged fossil fuels, so I’d expect that fund to grow bigger, faster, and without the discomfort of selling something that could, and most likely will, end up drowning Norwegian towns.

> new oil field

I was surprised because I assumed Norway wouldn’t open new oil fields. I’d say it’s “interesting,” but what I actually mean isn’t publishable.

I spend a lot of my life very much hoping for things like that, but I’m increasingly wondering how not having a central server makes it impossible to be interoperable, successful, and spam-proof.

Having “AGI” —or at least a very convincing conversation agent— isn’t helping much.

I don’t think this announcement will make any of the relevant debates (on the impact of Meta on the world, or the fears around AI, or the confusion on whether sharing a trained model qualifies as “open source”) any less frustratingly controversial and heated.

I’m convinced it’s not done in many areas of science. I have seen it done extensively in others.

The point is: I’m not sure doing it should be qualified as plagiarism.

I happen to tell people I’m a statistician—because it’s true, and because I didn’t learn from the first 10,000 times someone heard that, turned around, and left without a word. The always run away, except in one case… If they stay, I know they are

a. a Ph.D. Student and

b. having a very bad time and therefore

c. about to ask me pointed questions about their methodology section, what is a t-value and a p-score, why there are two xis, and whether it’s too late to prevent Bonferonni, Hochberg, Holmes, Benjamini, and Šídák from ever publishing they terrible ideas. (Yes.)

I’ve been confronted with utter confusion in every field of knowledge, including art history, and literature. It’s a miracle we make any progress in science, but I wholeheartedly blame *how we teach statistics*. It’s, at best, a dark cult that requires sacrifices to obscure gods, and most likely three cargo cults in a trench coat. Conditioning scientific discussion to passing under the Caudine forks of Greek letters incantations isn’t helping us. We need a reform.

There is no problem with people looking at black holes, counting cells in a Petri dish, or trying to define inflation. If it hurts when you touch your forehead, your thigh, your elbow, and your knee, it means your finger is broken. There is one thing in common between all those people: the three-hour elective on stats taught by someone who had the social skills of a door hinge, the clarity of VentaBlack, and the patience of a toddler on cocaine.

There are amazing statisticians who explain things beautifully. Get them to teach, and people will finally grok uncertainty. They’ll see how clumsy are most of the methodologies pre-approved by reviewers because it was used in the same journal before. We ask the most critical minds of our generation to challenge the status-quo. They know how. They just need to know what the status-quo actually means.

I didn’t look too deeply into the scandal about plagiarism (because seeing people I admire fight like kids makes me sad), but I saw one glimpse: one accusation was comparing the Literature section of two papers by a PI and their Ph.D. student, and finding the two first paragraphs matched.

Dude, that’s the “You must read this before taking the class” segment of the paper. It’s a human-legible context for the Reference list (and occasionally, the opportunity for some minor pettiness against the competing lab). No one reads it (except Master’s students trying to catch up), and of course, it’s copy-pasted between two papers on the same topic.

After that, I kind of skipped the topic.

I read that as a dismissal of the title: as you have experienced, chemotherapy is horrible. “Kinder” there can feel like a comically low bar.

But this is wonderful progress. Let’s hope is a lot kinder.

This is the first model that I’ve noticed offers the one feature that I am really looking for in a laptop: an integrated keyboard and the included screen at eye level.

Sure, that one has a first screen where the screen usually is (next to the keyboard), and that’s certainly useful. However, the possibility of not straining my neck is by far where most laptops fail. That’s why so many people use either one of those stands and separate keyboard, or a whole different screen and close and plug their laptop into a desk setup: better keyboard, sure, but it helps less than a well-positioned one; bigger screen, not sure that counts when you want to focus.

I use a separate screen from time to time (for presentation, I either need a separate viewing angle or some remote screen sharing like Zoom works better that way). However, I initially bought those to set them up higher while traveling, and it’s practically impossible to do without a heavy stand. Hotel rooms or café tables don’t have the support I need.

This model could. I’m very excited.

Let’s hope the screens are light enough, the base heavy enough and the hinges sturdy enough to hold it all upright.

Product development, as in product teams and writing software, i.e., what most people at Amazon or on Hacker News do, is R&D.

Sodium boosting Lithium battery isn’t novel at all. There’s a lot of SEO crum but here’s a two-year-old mention, for example: https://cnevpost.com/2022/11/29/sodium-ion-batteries-evs-ran...

This article would be a lot better if there were anything material about what was novel. Mixing the two isn’t new. If the AI was anything more than a word-mashing stochastic parrot, it could have come with a representation that piked Pr. Murugesan’s interest or it could be that he had an idea while looking at gibberish ellucubrations, the way people find inspiration in their shower.

But unless the article explains what those representations are, we can’t tell.

Replacing Lithium with Sodium, the only information this article suggests came from the AI, is about as trivial as you get in chemistry. That is a question that a high school teacher would ask their class after introducing the period table and expect everyone to know.

I click systematically, and it almost always says they picked a broad category, like “Men between 25 and 75 in [country].” There’s usually some phrasing that is meant to be ambiguous or unclear but that I have to interpret as “based on your other behavior.” I can only assume neither I nor the gay commentator earlier have ever done anything that expressed an interest in either underage pornography or AI-generated female honeypots, and so that “smart” implicit targeting really needs some serious scrutiny.

I get the joke that it reveals what I do in private. I’ve made it myself when people are complaining about Twitter—usually after confirming the rest of their activity matches the prejudice that I’m lobbing at them. What I can assure you is not happening, in public or in private, is me speaking Finnish or Cantonese.

Technically (and by that, I mean if you get into multivariate, intertemporal, multi-product auction theory, so very technical), “customers,” i.e., users seeing irrelevant ads, means they don’t get to see relevant ones, don’t click. Those customers would waste their bandwidth and scrolling time, but they rarely pay per Mb and scroll fast. They might fat-finger an ad (that happens surprisingly often when you start looking into it) and waste both their time closing windows and tabbing back to where they were.

Most Meta’s “customers,” the advertisers, see a higher number of ads shown per client acquired. That doesn’t really change their decision to advertise, and their budget as long as the cost per client (click to the site or converted client, depending) is the same.

Therefore, I’d argue users aren’t that impacted (unless you count not seeing a relevant ad as a bad thing, which I would, but that’s controversial); advertisers have less impact than they could, but it’s not that it costs them, as much they don’t pay for something they didn’t get. Meta is the one loosing 4% of their potential revenues.

But admittedly, it’s a wider, complex, integrated system. I’d rather not feel like an increasingly large chunk of it is gambling, tax evasion, and human trafficking.

There are some Ads I'm keen to watch: I just clicked on an ad for Netflix telling me about a new movie that came out. I probably shouldn’t watch movies in the middle of the day, but that was relevant, well targeted, and will lead to measurable gain for Netflix (assuming they have the data stack to tell them that an extra view from an existing user is good).

I like seeing ads for conferences (assuming my boss will grant me the budget to go and not assume I’m supporting human trafficking). And, as I mentioned, I’m comparing vendors, so seeing ads for competitors of what I’m searching now would be great (relevant ones comparing their offers, not funneling to pointless sales calls with people who couldn’t get out of Vim if they ever figure out how to start a computer).

If anyone is curious whether I’m exaggerating, I had to check a vendor presentation for work. The video is on YouTube, and the first ad I saw reads:

> Beauties From Eastern Europe > Chat and meet real Slavic women > Sponsored > love-stories

with a photo (presumably AI-generated) where to be completely honest, I could see that she was wearing red lacey underwear and had had a full bikini wax.

Do you know what kind of question I want to have from my boss when discussing a vendor? NOT WHY DOES GOOGLE THINK I WOULD FINANCIALLY SUPPORT LITERAL HUMAN TRAFFICKING.

So guess what I’m activating on my browser to NOT GET FIRED.

I’m hoping that, at some point, someone at YouTube will ask a User experience researcher to look into users’ motivation to block ads and realize that there are glaring issues with their model.

What has been happening to me is that, for the last decade or so, I only see ads in languages that I don’t speak or understand. I wrote about it—a lot. Nothing. A friend worked as the head of Analytics for that part of YouTube and he told me, “They don’t care.” I pointed out that it’s so common that Antonio Garcia Martinez wrote about it in his book _Chaos Monkeys_ (in 2012) and estimated that, at the time, it costs Facebook 4% of their ad revenue. I can confirm because I raised that point internally not once (in 2016 and it was fixed) but twice (the fix was overruled and I saw it again in 2020). In 2024, they are still wasting their time and energy, and 4% of Meta’s revenues isn’t chump change.

That’s not counting on pervasive ads for alcohol (illegal where I am), gambling (having an opt-out is mandatory in most jurisdictions), tax evading services (also illegal where I am), and specifically on Threads and Twitter, literal prostitution, and/or romance scams (I didn’t investigate which, tried to report, but was told that’s fine by their community guidelines).

I’m not a security researcher, and I refuse to investigate further than strictly necessary for my sanity (I expect deserved judgment from this community for that) however, in spite of that, I know ads are a constant vector for malware. Not much is done to address basic vectors, like not running any executable code in ads.

The only reason why enormous waste at scale, rampant illegal activity, and gaping security holes aren’t the only topics of conversation online is that everyone who can explain what’s happening has opted out. Forcing them back in isn’t the solution.

Unlike what you are implying, I never posted anything offensive.

If you want me to help you with your User experience research, let me know where to send the invoice.

Ask them.

Look around and ask them

Incogni has been sponsoring a lot of the YouTubers I watch regularly, so I’ve had to ask myself: is that worth it?

There’s, of course, the risk of sharing your personal details with a company that gave money to people to build para-social relationships… not the most compelling case. But there are also questions about jurisdiction: can they get companies based “abroad” to do something? That article from the Cyber Collective seems to focus on US legislation, and the worst abuse I’ve heard about is happening in the US, but I don’t remember finding my details when I asked some of the most egregious actors in that space—for obvious reasons: I don’t live in the US.

I wish that actors like Incogni or DeleteMe shared statistics about how many actors capture your details based on where you live, whether you have a mortgage, a loan on your car, a credit card, social media presence, etc.—or anything else one might do that would help those company flag your details.

This article, and every comment on here, every discourse about that problem, takes this tsunami of shocking images as a natural, exogenous phenomenon.

No one ever asks: Who shares those? Why? Do they ever stop? Can we discourage them from doing that?

People uploading this have reasons to do so. You can talk to them. I did.

That’s probably the most horrifying flip side of that debate. There’s genuine physical abuse at a scale that would make every genocide, or any pandemic look tame, but it’s all dismissed because car companies represent a material amount of ad revenue.

But because the images of it (not the reality of losing a loved one, or the consequence of losing a parent) are gory, there’s nothing we can do to highlight we should care about more than ad budgets.

There are other types of storage than batteries: flywheels, pumped water storage, etc., and each has a time frame where they are competitive. I’m assuming that with 400M EUR, there’s room for all sorts of short-range and long-range options.

I suspect for the Netherlands, wind supply is the main factor. That typically needs week-long storage; not sure what’s the best tech at this time frame.