cowthulhu

I’ll admit that’s a pretty fair criticism :)

I always feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see how vitriolic the discussion around EA gets. I’m sure you can find some crazies in who adhere to EA in wacky ways (as with any other group), but the brunt of the focus of EA has always clearly been to do the most good per dollar, or to be effective with your altruism. Maybe a secondary belief is that you should donate 10% of your income to charity. These seem like obviously good things, to the point that I don’t understand how people can be so against while maintaining a straight face.

He’s a talented and intelligent engineer. It’s hard to see a world where he gets the “self-driving by end of year” thing wrong, like, four years in a row, but is still operating in good faith when he sends out the tweet for the fifth year.

If instead of using the word “lies” to refer to his statements, we instead used the words “unreliable and deliberately misleading”, would you be more on board?

The solution in that paper does require third parties, except the parties are unknown, the amount of parties is unknown, and the system breaks down if insufficient people are interested in running the chain.

I’m really not convinced that solution is better is any way. If your adversary has the resources to coerce the “leave of entropy” in the OP, cracking that blockchain implementation will be trivial.

Yeah, there's a huge difference!

At relativistic speeds (AKA speeds you can express as a significant percentage of the speed of light) energy increases exponentially as you get closer to c.

Put another way - since the energy of an object is infinite at the speed of light, then the energy needs to keep getting bigger and bigger as you keep putting 9s on the end, since if you're going .9c your energy is not infinite, while if you are going .(9)c your energy is infinite.

To actually answer your question, the energy of an object going at .9999c would be about 50x the energy of an object going at .9c.

> "If you use “kind girl behind the counter” language about the 0.01% most aggravating customer once, you will not be a bank teller tomorrow. So bank tellers basically never use those words, and instead can inflect “Can I help you, sir?” in a way which leaves absolutely no doubt as to how welcome the new arrival to the branch is."

I found myself nodding along to a lot of the contents of this article, but I totally disagree with this part... it runs totally counter to my experience. To be fair, maybe my experience was the exception that proves the rule (or maybe things have changed since I worked front-line at a financial institution), but the expectation that you would be cold or unwelcoming to a customer (or prospective customer) based on class or perceived class was absolutely not the case. Like, I cannot stress that enough. Don't get me wrong, there were procedural safeguards such as "no checking account if you have <650 FICO", but you were expected to be welcoming to everyone who walked in the door and "they seemed poor" would certainly not be an acceptable excuse for snubbing a customer.

Interesting that the CFO and CTO also got the boot, but the positions weren’t eliminated. Is this a power grab? Or am I misreading?

I wonder if there’s any chance that they were using the same RNG on the server. Seems like you could theoretically exploit it if so, given a very low usage server, low ping, ability to get a decently precise window into the current state of the rng, and ability to quickly generate another event with a high economic variance tied to rng.

I’m pretty sure once you cede that you’re willing to use the energy required to move a container ships worth of weight from one end of the canal to the other, the cheaper option would be to pump water to refill the locks. Water is easier to transport than ships, and while I don’t think the efficiency of the locks helps much in this context, there might be some clever optimizations… especially if you’re willing to run a ton of high pressure pipe.

Sortof unrelated, I've been looking at moving some data from SQL Server to Postgres, and one of the big reasons is replication. SQL Server replication has been super brittle for me - it's always silently choking, getting desynchronized, or exhibiting weird locking behavior with no indication of the issue until you notice something downstream is broken. It's been tough to test Postgres replication though, since a lot these issues only occur at huge volumes of data. Anyone have any experience with the two they can pass on?

My struggle with it is mainly that it doesn’t seem to accomplish any of its goals very well, while having really big downsides. A few examples:

It’s difficult to use it for circumventing government controls, since so many of the on and off ramps are subject to regulation and it’s difficult (and expensive) to transact truly anonymously.

It sucks as a store of value since it’s so volatile.

Similar to the point above, it’s increasing subject to government regulation (namely the US) in a de facto sense.

The UX sucks, and mistakes can be super punishing. If you make a mistake then you have no recourse and everyone will applaud the code working as intended, unless the mistake is really big in which case the “code as law” folks will fork the network to rollback the mistake.

In the same vein as the item above, scams are rampart and there is very little recourse once scammed. As a result, it’s tough to see actual widespread adoption as a currency (and not just a speculative asset sitting in a brokerage account somewhere) since the level of technical sophistication needed to use it as a currency without risking wiping yourself out puts it way out of reach of most people.

It sucks for transactions, since the fees are so high and make small transactions bit feasible.

Proof of work sucks and is super wasteful.

There are probably plenty of other ways it misses the mark I’m missing as well. It frustrates me because it feels so fatally flawed, but people take it so seriously. If popular sentiment was that BTC was just a fun thing to speculate on, in the same realm as TSLA or buying short dated calls on the VIX, I would be totally on board! But trying to act like it’s a serious currency that can compete with USD or whatever just seems somewhat delusional. I think blockchain and ETH style smart contracts are super cool tech, and could have super productive applications that legitimately make the world a better, more efficient place, but BTC in its current form doesn’t check that box for me.

My (very naive) thinking would be that lawyers are the worst demographic to con, since they have the skills and resources to try and make themselves whole again (at the expense of the conman), maybe with a few NDAs throw in for good measure. Is this not the case?

Does anyone know if there any current or near-term applications for these? Seems super cost-prohibitive, especially if you can just throw more compute at the problem instead. Super cool (hah) either way.

"Dragged to Jesus"

I don't have a position on whether it's a good thing or not, but it seems like the anecdote about importing a part might be the desired path for the government: Make it a huge pain to import parts so that people prefer sourcing them domestically.

Also, I've never seen a comment fall off the rails halfway through as hard as this one did.

Wapcar.my doesn’t seem very authoritative, and either way 640 cars doesn’t seem like many in a country the size of China.

I asked because I did Google it, and all the top results were either unrelated, or from sites I’ve never heard of before.

That’s a pretty dramatic claim - do you have any citations from major/reputable news outlets or the like to back it up?

Working in finance, significant digits are (of course) super important. You always want to assume a stakeholder doesn’t have a perfect understanding of the data definition, so provide less precision (even if you know the actual value to a cent) to avoid the stakeholder misusing the data given a slightly flawed understanding of some obscure edge case.

If the number stays at 32.56m for a period of time, you want them to consider it sideways movement rather than start worrying about the fact that it did technically go up by a few hundred dollars.

I feel like trains are similar in a lot of ways, and many orders of magnitude cheaper. That’s definitely cool to think about though!

That’s a funny point, I guess I never really though of whether “related” was more correlation or causation.

I'm the de facto DB guy at work, WLB is fine... it's very rare that I have to work after-hours. The main reason for this is that our DBs are basically exclusively used during business hours, and if you set things up right it's rare that you'll get anything breaking on its own after-hours.

Also - maybe this is specific to me, but most emergencies I deal with are of my own creation. It's rare to have a DB spontaniously corrupt a page. Most emergency issues I deal with are performance-related (this used to take 2s, now it's taking 200s) and you can mitigate those ahead of time if you're thoughtful (breaking code up so you lean less on the query optimizer, automatic index maintenance, consistent and well-indexed join paths).

Depends what you mean on major impacts. A potentially breaking upgrade is a total nightmare, and never a fun process. But most (almost all?) of the things you do are much lower stakes, and definitely do not take a few quarters.

Gotcha! I don’t mean to dunk on you… sounds like a cool project if you take appropriate safety precautions, but the possibility of accidentally creating some poisonous (or carcinogenic) substances seems pretty high. I’m far from and expert though.

I might have a low risk tolerance, but I would toss any cookware touched by, like, half of the chemicals you listed. Don’t want to find out the hard way that some nasty layer of something is slowly leaching into my food.

If you do move forwards with this, definitely write up your findings... "Removing burnt food with piranha solution without dying" will make a great blog post.

That seems like a terrible idea on many levels. Will definitely make for some fun anecdotes though (assuming nothing goes wrong). Also - I don’t know if I’d want to eat anything cooked on a baking dish exposed to so many toxic chemicals.

I assume you’re not joking, but this was a major whoosh if you were!

I feel like history has shown repeatedly that having a good product matters way more than trust, as evidenced by Facebook and Uber. People seem to talk big smack about lost trust and such in the immediate aftermath of a scandal, and then quitely renew the contracts when the time comes.

All of the big ad companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook) have, like, a scandal per month, yet the ad revenue keeps coming. Meltdown was a huge scandal, yet Intel keeps pumping out the chips.

Yeah, the key “innovation” of crypto tumblers is that funds end up in a different wallet than they came from. If the tumbler just spat the money back into the wallet the money came from, it wouldn’t be very useful.

But I suspect that as the accuracy of the analogy goes up, so too does the inherent sketchiness to the reader, which is probably not what the author wants.

No, don’t explain it. It’s not a real Nolan flick unless everyone leaves the theatre confused about something.

If you need a lot of revisions/tweaks, the price could be pretty prohibitive.

It’s amazing how every action the board takes (or the new CEO chosen by the board) just makes them look worse.

I’d like to offer my consulting services: my new consulting company will come in, and then whatever you want to do we will tell you not to. We provide immense value by stopping companies like OpenAI from shooting off their foot. And then their other foot. And then one of their hands.

I might have a lack of perspective here, but the line "If someone puts 80 hours into something and regrets it, it's useful information to know" just doesn't map for me. I can't imagine a game that someone is enjoying enough to play for 80 hours, but then they end up regretting it. That just doesn't seem possible. It might just be that I'm out of touch and experience games differently than others though.

To disagree a bit further - 80 hours is a really long time! If it takes you 80 hours of game time to notice an issue, it's probably not a major issue and rather you've gotten bored of the game and are now hyper-sensitive to every little bit of jank or questionable design. It's like the people who will leave a negative review on a survival game with thousands of hours played - the problem isn't the game, it's that they got bored! If after two weeks of enjoying playing the game full time you don't feel like you've gotten your money's worth, you might need to lower your expectations.

Oh - I'll throw a quick exception for games that are predatory. If after 20/40/80 hours the game changes such that you need to start dropping a bunch of cash to keep progressing, that's deserving of a bad review to warn others to stay away lest they end up paying much more for the game than the sticker price indicated. Addiction machines designed to absorb as much of your income as possible like some sort of drug-dealing mosquito suck and deserve to be called out.

Strategy gamers are incredibly whiny and entitled in my opinion. I struggle to remember a strategy game or DLC released by a major studio recently that wasn’t review-bombed on release. And yet studios aren’t going out of business, indicating that people are getting value out of these products and repeatedly buying and enjoying them.

This really frustrates me because it makes it very difficult to actually determine what games or DLCs are worth buying. If every release is reviewed "mostly negative" on steam, then the reviews don't help inform you about the quality of a game.

If you look at steam reviews, it’s even more frustrating - you’ll get negative reviews with 20, 40, even 80 hours of playtime.