boreas

The fact that pharma has managed to obfuscate true prices is its own indictment of US healthcare.

(edit) made my comment a bit less confrontational in tone

It's very interesting, the comment you replied to seems to be using a typical free speech canard in support of increasing censorship.

Their argument doesn't seem relevant to the policy discussed in the article at all.

I simply don't have the personality to work hard. In general, I don't believe people change after adolescence. Therefore I am most focused on contentment with the person I am, while nudging myself gently towards greater discipline. Meeting myself halfway, so to speak.

This is why I found this essay very interesting but not very useful. I don't have trouble identifying interests, I have trouble pursuing them with the intensity of a PG. I don't mean this as a criticism at all. I don't think it would be possible to write an essay that would solve this problem.

Huge thanks to whoever posted this link first on HN. It's my favorite history blog by far.

Even if this may not be the most popular entry...

Practically speaking, network effects make it nearly impossible for alternative platforms to achieve the scale of their mainstream ancestors. Right-wing communities exiled from Reddit have much smaller audiences in their new homes.

I'm not so concerned with this level of "censorship" in and of itself. But what happens, when, inevitably, the media starts to demand the same out of Google, AWS, ISPs? That's the truly scary prospect.

EDIT: scary

Hope this gets a response - I don't see a paper.

If there is a paired dataset, I guess this could be "easy". The stylegan "input" is essentially used to control parameters at various stages within the network, so you could adjust them one at a time, or on varying schedules or something, to get the sort of gradual effect.

I know that randomly instantiated neural networks can produce some pretty trippy image transformations as well, so maybe there is a way to bootstrap without paired data.

Lastly, I doubt this is on the right track but it would be cool if you could produce appropriately styled images with a "compression" approach. ie, trying to fit the audio information into some small visually meaningful latent space, and then using that to generate images.

edit: ok just watched the first example, back to square 1 for me. Its literally pulling stuff from paintings.

You might be interested in the novel "The Goldfinch". It's pretty relevant to this post, and somewhat relevant to your comment. But it isn't a heist so to speak.

I would hope that increasing density doesn't require much upfront investment. It's definitely true that density creates more strain on public goods like roads that are disproportionately funded by yesterday's taxpayers. I guess that is a pretty reasonable externality to incorporate into permitting fees.

I wonder if there is any data on how upzoning affects suburban property values. I would prefer not to live in a single family detached house next to condos. Then again, the optionality to put 10+ units on a lot has to be worth something.

Personally, it strikes me as profoundly illiberal that we allow and expect from local governments such complete control over private use of private property.

It is probably one of the most important policy issues from an economic/social perspective, and yet it doesn't have a clear valence in today's binary, identitarian political discourse. I see people from all backgrounds and affiliations arguing for/against upzoning/housing density.

I meant "best" in the sense of achieving some sort of maximum total utility, mean utility, median utility, etc.

My point is that instead of inspecting every economic relationship for "winners" and "losers", we should tax the winners and support the losers at a global level.

Ridesharing created a more or less competitive market for this slice of the transportation sector. Competitive markets are the best way to allocate resources. If you don't agree with that, it will be hard to have a productive discussion.

But if you do agree with that, shouldn't we resolve inequalities by directly supporting the least fortunate (with cash) rather than force parties into arbitrary economic relationships?

I didn't see the article at the time but from skimming it I'm sure I would have been fooled.

GPT-3 fits snugly into the pattern of "AI does intelligent thing -> we decide/realize thing doesn't reflect meaningful intelligence". Maybe in this case the devaluing of blog "crack" is a positive thing.

People spend so much time on the "meta-conversation" about the ecosystem of ideas, and so little time talking about the actual ideas themselves.

What are these repressed debates people are so anxious about? Is it just race stuff?

Also relevant to note that Trump wasn't supported by a majority, as OP seems to be implying. He won in the arbitrary schema of the electoral college.

I've got a question, a lot of startup websites have a similar look to this one. It's a look I actually really like. What technologies are they all using? How would I build a site like this?

wappalyzer doesn't give me anything and I don't have a ton of webdev experience.

Possible, but it seems simpler that they included luxury items from the Islamic world in their burial practices without understanding or worrying about the religious connotations of the script on them.

Ibn Fadlan observed the "viking" Rus in southern Russia. It would be more surprising if there was a significant community of Muslim converts in the Scandinavian homeland.

Fascinating stuff.

Edit: and another guy posted a link that makes a great argument that this was fake news in the first place

There are many choices in the policy space, but the decision about how to treat an individual advertisement is essentially binary. The line between truth and falsehood must lie somewhere, and I can guarantee you that different political factions will have very different ideas about what should lie on either side of that line.

Somehow the scariest part was the erasure.

Articles that praised Tiyip’s achievements are now being systematically deleted from the internet. His name and legacy are being erased, even from the list of presidents of Xinjiang University. Ironically, Sheng Shicai, the Guomindang leader who ruled Xinjiang from 1933-1944, who was described as one of the most evil traitors by the Communist Party, is still listed as a president of the school from 1942-1944. Yet, there is now no trace of Tashpolat Tiyip’s name.

Almost a caricature of an authoritarian approach to dealing with an undesirable.

Completely off topic, but it took me three tries to parse this:

There’ve been rumors for years that Ive had one foot out the door

I wouldn't take it for granted that he's telling the truth on that. He has been riding on My Lai credibility for so long, but some of his recent stuff such as his piece on how the OBL assassination went down is completely wack.

You need to provide statistics for extraordinary claims about housing being purchased by foreign investors and not used. Common sense says it should be a very marginal phenomenon. After all, renting out property should almost always be worth it with the high housing prices in the area.

Unfortunately, vague statements assigning blame to ambiguous external actors (like yours) are very much a part of the discussion. Demand isn't artificially inflated. More people want to live here than there are housing units. So we need to build more, or agree only the most privileged deserve to reside in the Bay Area.

I am pretty sure that property is required for Chinese messaging services, not discouraged.

I recently read the IB text and loved it. Someone already mentioned the fact that IB has more historical material than Marco Polo, but there are a bunch of other contrasts as well.

Most importantly to me, Marco Polo follows a sort of ethnographic style which arranges the narrative around the description of all the peoples and regions he encountered. IB describes his journey linearly in chronological order, which makes more sense to the modern reader. Secondly, we get a much greater sense of the personality of IB in his travelogue. He talks about bursting into tears from loneliness, he talks about longing to be able to stay forever on an idyllic tropical islet, etc.

For those who are interested, my favorite medieval travelogues are:

- William of Rubruck [1] Friar who traveled to the court of the Mongols. Very sharp and strong personality. Featuring a three-way debate between Muslims, Christians, and Buddhists.

- Ibn Fadlan [2] Abbasid envoy to the Volga Bulgars. Featuring pre-Islamic Turks, Jewish Khazars, and of course the absolutely insane viking ship burial.

[1] https://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/rubruck.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_ibn_Fadlan

Totally agree. And the amount of sexual access these upper class medieval Muslims had is pretty insane. Not only does IB marry women and leave them, he buys "slave girls" all the time on the cheap.

When people make vector embeddings for words, it's fairly common that the embedding for one language is just a rotation of the embedding for the synonym in another language. So I think the higher level (and lower dimensional) representations of thoughts could be pretty consistent across native languages. Even though you might perceive your thoughts to be formulated in your native language, your brain almost certainly generates that representation from another, which is probably more universal. That means we could exchange these universal representations of thoughts and our own brains would do the "translation" as necessary.

As an aside, is there anyone else extremely disappointed with the quality of discussion over at /r/cryptocurrency? This conflict over IOTA has been unfolding for a long time and the guys on that subreddit defend it fanatically, accusing DCI of "FUD"ing IOTA. I am not sure if the subscriber base is technically illiterate or users that hold a given coin have a strong incentive to dismiss any criticism.

As someone fascinated by the technology in the crypto space but very skeptical about the real-world usefulness of many of these projects, I wish I had a better forum to read beside the odd HN post.