ctchocula

Agree with most of your analysis. However, one place I take issue with is your claim that "the weird conspiracy theory thrown out about how attempts at more egalitarian college admissions are simply a backhanded dig at Jews and Asians". Given that we have it on good historical evidence the up and rising Jewish population in elite colleges in early 20th century made Caucasians in those institutions feel threatened, which caused them to change applications to add extra-curriculars as a metric, which was the mechanism to decrease the number of Jewish students admitted---given it's played out this way before where a rising racial minority group has been discriminated against in favour of White applicants, surely you cannot blame people for suspecting the admission process is again being made (a) less meritocratic, (b) decreasing number of Asian and Jewish admissions, and (c) increasing White admissions all in the name of racial equity?

Some sibling comments mentioned replacing the rubber seal fixes the issue of burnt taste. I took a look at my rubber seals and they did have a burnt smell, so I'm gonna give that a shot. Thanks for sharing and good luck with your friend's Moka pot!

> The sad thing about moka pots is that they never break or wear out

I have a slightly different experience. I have 2 Moka pots, but both no longer seem useable after leaving it on the stove too long. Now anything I brew using them tastes burned. I've tried cleaning them, but I still haven't been able to get rid of blackish residue in the water reservoir base. Any tips on how to fix them?

I may be a bit slow today, but how did the traveler use a formula for chapped hands ointment to persuade the king of Wu to use it in dealing with troublesome neighbor state of Yue?

I'm interested in learning more about this! Any recommended readings for how Post-Keynesians address stagflation? It's my understanding that that's one of the economic phenomena that could not be explained within Keynes's theoretical framework.

Typo in the title. It should be "Whole Brain Emulation: No Progress On C. Elegans", not "C. Elgans".

If she really did do this, why didn't she publish all the records for public perusal? Even if the records can't be proven to not have been altered, it seems this would be a show of good faith.

You'll have to join to find out! j/k

Both. It could be something mundane like "Fed raises interest rates in 2020" or something company specific like "Nextgen pixel phone display size is > x inches". Generally the company stuff tends not to be the real sensitive stuff and tends to be more about fun/mundane topics.

> The markets didn't take off, they withered. AFAIK they don't have them anymore.

Actually there is a new prediction market at Google now called Gleangen. It seems to be fairly active and flourishing despite not using real $$. Although there is a leaderboard, so perhaps the desire to want to rank in the top 10 is what motivates people to place bets.

My friend who studies music performance at University had this to say about Bach music, which I always found interesting:

"It's very hard to perceive counterpoint, and there is a limit to how much we can perceive at once. 2 voices is hard and takes practice, 3 voices is even harder, but you can have these flashes where you hear clearly voices playing off one another and its like getting a glimpse into the divine."

Statisticians pointed out that the number of people chose to drive long distance trips rather than fly due to fear of flying in the aftermath of 9/11 and deaths caused by the increase in driving outnumbered the number of deaths caused directly by 9/11.

Dogecoin is inflationary, but not to the extent you are looking for [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogecoin#Currency_supply

Joe Studwell has written a book called "How Asia Works" that tries to tackle the question of what economic policies help countries get wealthy. You can read a review about it here [1]. But basically he boils down to 3 policies:

1. Land reform - Forcibly buy up farms and distribute it to farmers. This forces landlords into cities to develop more productive businesses.

2. Export discipline - Encourage companies to sell overseas rather than to the domestic market. This helps them become more competitive worldwide.

3. Financial control - Encourage banks to loan to companies that export instead of real estate companies.

[1] https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-studwell-got-wrong

I'm in the same boat as you. Once there's money involved, I can imagine a lot opportunity for fraud:

-collecting fake "dust" that's the byproduct of another industrial process and minting tokens off it

-bribing or threatening violence against auditors

Yep, we'll have to agree to disagree.

One reason I disagree is that Dota (and Starcraft 2) are both games of imperfect information (more like Poker than Chess or Go).

That means a lot of the time, the game revolves around deception and subterfuge. If you've ever had to hunt down an enemy splitpusher and have to decide between spending 10s checking a hiding place and having a chance at getting a potentially game-winning kill, but also having a chance of not finding them and wasting your time, you'll know what I'm talking about. There's no optimal strategy, because all strategies have weaknesses to be exploited (e.g. In BW, if Terran knows you as Protoss always go greedy such as 12 Nexus, they can punish you with BBS. However if you play safe, they can play greedy themselves with 14CC, so there are a lot of mindgames.)

After AlphaZero's victories or DeepBlue's for that matter, professional Go and Chess players could find no weaknesses. Nada.

After OpenAi 5 became available, a professional player compiled a list of 20 weaknesses that I'm not certain OpenAI can ever fix (see link above). How do you tell the neural net when to dust or ward?

The same story with DeepMind's AlphaStar. Despite playing a good macro game, players online have figured out lots of ways to cheese it (e.g. send just one unit will cause all workers to be pulled and stop mining). I understand Poker's been "solved", but these computer games with much larger action spaces and imperfect information might turn out to be significantly harder to pin down than Chess or Go. There are enough edgecases that it's a much better representation of real life problems like self-driving cars (negotiating a merge for example).

I think GP was exactly right when he said AI is amazing at micro, but that humans could win using macro pressure. Open AI 5 is an incredible achievement, but for Dota players it hasn't solved Dota. The best analogy is probably something like playing a fixed strategy in Poker, but never varying it; your opponents will eventually figure what your strategy is and ways to exploit it.

What you mentioned with having a courier for each hero is actually a well-known tactic called "bottle-crow" and was popular in Filipino Dota from 2010-2015. Each support hero would buy a dedicated crow for each lane and a bottle. Then the cores would ferry the bottle to themselves constantly from base, but this tactic got nerfed to death with the change "crow flies at half speed with an empty bottle". You are right that OG didn't deal well with this constant source of health regeneration, but it was largely limited to the laning phase. After the laning phase ends, humans can use their superior macro (i.e. understanding of map movement) which is a definite weakness of the AI.

Against the simple AI that comes built-in to Dota 2, you can be behind by a ton and exploit splitpushing against the AI, because doing any structural damage against buildings will force the AI (who are gathered up for a push) back, and you will win if you drag the game sufficiently into the lategame. There are indications that similar tactics can be used against the OpenAI 5, which is bad countering invisible items/heroes and playing against splitpush [1]. Deciding whether or not to continue to push and which heroes to send back to defend is one of the hardest strategic decisions to make in the game, even for humans. The finals of one of the TIs, NaVi vs. Alliance, was lost on getting such a decision wrong. Eliminating some key splitpush heroes minimized the probability that OpenAI 5 would have been forced into having to make such a decision.

OpenAI 5 would have lost against OG if any of the following had been satisfied:

- had the entire heropool been available (certain natural splitpushing heroes like Furion, Tinker, Phantom Lancer, etc.)

- had the series gone long enough for them to uncover AI's weaknesses (which were apparent to the viewers and later teams). OG's captain even explicitly said "Give us 5 games and we will figure it out."

- had the prizepool been big enough for OG to take the game seriously enough to warrant picking a splitpushing strategy which is considered "cowardly" in some circles.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/beyilz/openai_live_u...

Totally! Feels like this can help in 2 ways:

1) desire to improve at sport motivates you to get fitter (perhaps by running on your own time)

2) playing the sport is good exercise

Like ac29 pointed out, wash sales only apply to losses. The motivation for the wash sale rule in the first place is IRS doesn't want you to be able to use a paper loss for tax deduction and let you maintain the same stock position.

Tax gain harvesting is similar, but the opposite of tax loss harvesting in some sense, because instead of a loss, you are taking a gain in a low income year. IRS doesn't care if you are generating capital gains, because for most people with stocks (read: not making low income) it increases your taxes owed.

All assets within estate tax exemption limit $11.5M ($23M for married) receive a step-up basis on death. This means that cost basis resets to market value on the day you die, and your heirs can sell at market price the amount of money required to pay off the accumulated debt and start the cycle anew.

It's a bit similar to tax gain harvesting, which is when if you live in a no state income tax state and anticipate making very little income this year, but have some appreciated stocks, what you can do is harvest the tax gains by selling the stocks in order to reset to the higher cost basis and immediately buying them back. Since you have little income, you can get away paying $0 tax until $38.6k ($77.2k if married).

It can be combined with a Federal jobs guarantee, where the Federal govt becomes a job provider of last resort. This sets a wage floor rather than a minimum wage and give real bargaining power to workers. I like this idea better than Universal Basic Income, because it prevents workers from becoming lazy and subservient to the state. Also, a lot of people find purpose through their work, so this helps people from losing meaning in their lives. The actual work to be done can be determined by each community, which knows best about what work is required (e.g. child care, landscaping, etc.).

No, there's not. It's a fundamental principle among PoS cryptocurrencies that the work needs to have no additional utility or else it will help the attacker "subsidize" 51% attacks against the cryptocurrency you've built, because now they can both launch 51% attacks which cost $X abut subsidize it by selling the useful compute for $Y they've gotten by launching the attack, which ends up costing $X - $Y.

Compared with a PoS cryptocurrency yielding no useful compute as a side effect, it costs $Y cheaper for someone to 51% attack.

One thing I don't understand is the difference between SARS and COVID-19 in the official Chinese response and willingness for an investigation into zoonotic origin [1]. How can we explain the stark difference?

As an uninformed reader, some possibilities I can come up with are the following:

1. Despite zoonotic origin, China feels its stature in the world is much greater than in 2002-2003, so it no longer feels obliged to allow international investigation into origins of the pandemic in spite of political pressure. For example, Wikipedia says: "After intense pressure, Chinese officials allowed international officials to investigate the situation there."

2. Despite zoonotic origin, COVID-19 has much higher death toll so CPC wants to save face by either hiding evidence or preventing investigations into a potential reservoir species. OTOH, SARS had lower death toll, so they didn't have reason to hide anything.

3. Despite zoonotic origin, Xi Jinping's regime is less transparent than that of Hu Jintao which was in power for SARS, so this time they want to either hide evidence or prevent investigations into a potential reservoir species.

4. Despite zoonotic origin and best efforts of Chinese scientists, a reservoir species has not been identified yet. Is it possible that it may take longer this time around?

5. Lab leak hypothesis: there is no natural, reservoir species to be found.

Personally, I think Reasons 1, 2 and 3 are strongest, because CPC feels like it has to play to its domestic audience and letting international investigators in may feel like a loss of face. However, this doesn't add up, because they already let WHO investigator in, albeit with very stringent limits and not letting them access raw data. I'd be much obliged if a learned person in this topic could tell me what kind of prior they'd put on each of these possible explanations.

[1] First human case of SARS was in Nov 2002, and scientists were able to isolate SARS in civets in late May 2003, so a reservoir species was identified in 6 months. It took 10 months to identify that for MERS (Sept 2012 -> August 2013).

I used to think UBI was the solution, but it has a severe risk of creating a permanent underclass. Then I learned about a Federal Job Guarantee where if the private sector chooses not to provide jobs then the Federal govt will step in and become the job provider of last resort with salaries going for a living wage. This is a stronger guarantee than merely a minimum wage, because companies will just cut jobs in a small town; the Job guarantee will ensure that labour won't just be laid off permanently. It also has some nice properties economists like such as being an automatic stabilizer during recessions when companies are loathe to invest in the economy, while during the good times, fewer people will be on the Federal job program.

Seconded.

This brings to mind "Disturbing the Universe", a selection of autobiographical essays by physicist Freeman Dyson, where he mentions he learned differential equations as a 12-year-old by working through 700 problems in Piaggio's "Differential Equations" over the summer vacation, after which learning general relativity became a breeze.

> Two. Releasing work is generally beneficial for the world. I can't think of a single model release that has ever harmed the world. Let's wait until one actually does before we freak out about whether it might.

I like a lot of the idealism in this comment, and learned a few things too, so thanks for that. I'm not an ML researcher, which may cloud my views a bit, but I think you would be hardpressed to think that the release of ML models hasn't harmed the world. Perhaps we haven't reached AGI, but we don't need to for the release of ML models to harm the world.

I'll give two examples: 1) image detection - Now that image detection is good enough, surveillance in dictatorships can be run more efficiently and scalably in a way KGB couldn't have dreamt of. Even if the release of a model like YOLO saves an hour's worth of time of an ML researcher working for the dictatorship on their surveillance project, this can cause a lot of harm to the oppressed ppl living in those countries.

2) troll bots based on GPT-2. You gave an example of high-quality, human-quality propaganda, but what troll bots lack in quality can be made up by quantity. If you run a lot of troll bots and can sway the dominant viewpoint on all the forums you want to target (which you can since these bots are infinitely scalable), you've achieved your purpose. I also think you are overestimating the quality needed to influence the average person's worldview. For example, we saw from the Cambridge Analytica news that all they had to do to affect a few swing voters' behavior was target them with a few ads. I personally read through some of the example output from GPT-3 and if I were browsing a forum, I wouldn't be all that confident whether they were a bot or not.

I'm not the biggest fan of Amazon, but one thing they do well is gift receipts that let you return the gift for Amazon credit without letting the gift sender know you didn't like their gift.

I find it remarkable how well MCTS works. Even without the value or policy net, the vanilla algorithm is capable of finding meaningful results by solving the MDP.

A nice writeup that helped me understand MCTS: https://tianjun.me/static/essay_resources/Lets_Play_Hanabi/p...

One of the unfortunate side effects of Affordable Care Act was that retail jobs nowadays don't provide you with any health coverage if you work part-time and they now try to limit your weekly hours at 29.5, which is the max before they have to treat you as a full-time employee.

The author of the tweet also has some excellent advice on learning the history of economics, which is to start from the father of economics himself, Adam Smith. Then follow that up with Das Kapital (which I know is an unpopular stance here on HN) and some Keynes (who is credited with coming up with the economic theory that helped bring the UK and US out of the Great Depression). Here's a snippet of Prof. DeLong's advice:

> We have our recommended ten-stage process for reading such big books:

1. Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book.

2. Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at—the kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate.

3. Read through the book actively, taking notes.

4. “Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it.

5. Find someone else—usually a roommate—and bore them to death by making them listen to you set out your “steelmanned” version of the argument.

6. Go back over the book again, giving it a sympathetic but not credulous reading.

7. Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of this strongest-possible argument version might be.

8. Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is?

9. Decide what you think of the whole.

10. Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into your mind so that it becomes part of your intellectual panoply for the future.

> Follow this process, and your reading becomes active. Then you have the greatest possible chance of learning the books—of thereafter being able to summon up sub-Turing instantiations of the thinkers Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes and then running them on your wetware. If you can do that, you can be closer to being as smart as they were. And at the same time you will be aware enough of their weak points and blindnesses that you can be wiser than they were.

Link: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/12/a-note-on-reading-bi...

IIRC, amongst banned heroes were key splitpush heroes such as Nature's Prophet, Tinker and Phantom Lancer, which are a known counter to the early-game advantage, mid-game push strategy that the OpenAI 5 executed. Early-game laning and mid-game teamfight combination are micro-intensive, and consequently the biggest advantage the OpenAI 5 had over OG. Against the simple AI that comes built-in to Dota 2, you can be behind by a ton and exploit splitpushing against the AI, because doing any structural damage against buildings will force the AI (who are gathered up for a push) back, and you will still win if you drag the game sufficiently into the lategame. Deciding whether or not to continue to push and which heroes to send back to defend is one of the hardest strategic decisions to make in the game, even for humans. The finals of one of the TIs, NaVi vs. Alliance, was lost on getting such a decision wrong. Eliminating some key splitpush heroes minimized the probability that OpenAI 5 would have been forced into having to make such a decision.

It would not surprise me if the OpenAI 5 would have lost against OG had the entire heropool been available, had the series been long enough or had the prizepool been big enough for OG to take the game seriously enough to warrant picking a splitpushing strategy (which is considered cowardly in some circles).