danblick

The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!"

I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led society to be organized the way that it is, but you should respect that sometimes the order of things reflects knowledge you may not have."

One of his essays on this topic was "Individualism: True and False":

"""This brings me to my second point: the necessity, in any complex society in which the effects of anyone’s action reach far beyond his possible range of vision, of the individual submitting to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society—a submission which must include not only the acceptance of rules of behavior as valid without examining what depends in the particular instance on their being observed but also a readiness to adjust himself to changes which may profoundly affect his fortunes and opportunities and the causes of which may be altogether unintelligible to him."""

https://fee.org/articles/individualism-true-and-false/

I'd recommend thinking a little about the algorithms involved in efficiently assigning a nearby task to each dwarf and then planning a path for each dwarf to its destination.

It gets interesting pretty fast and a PhD would not hurt. :)

e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08291

Would you maintain a roadmap telling you how to get from place to place, or just constantly replan? What happens when you change the available paths by building a wall or locking a door?

John McWhorter is a well-known linguist who talks about things like comparative linguistics. He's said in the past that (colloquial) Indonesian is one of the most streamlined languages around. (But really English is becoming the world's international language.)

One of the topics in McWhorter's research is about how languages become streamlined when they are learned by adults as a second language. English, Mandarin, and Swahili all show evidence of this (for English, it seems related to the Vikings).

Related post:

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/06/co...

For people interested in human languages (or people who don't yet know they're interested in human languages), you might enjoy the courses he's done for Great Courses (paid but worth it, available on ~Amazon):

(1) The Story of Language: covers the topic of language evolution; how languages change over time, how new words are introduced, how languages mix (due to e.g. invasions), pidgins/creoles

(2) Language Families of the World: a survey of what languages currently exist, features of languages in different families

It seems like there's a lot in common here with the idea behind design patterns and pattern languages: giving names to "chunks" of expert knowledge in order to allow those chunks to be communicated, taught, and put in relation to other ideas.

It's obscure, honestly. But most cryptocurrency enthusiasts use the term to mean a blockchain (the data structure) together with a protocol for "consensus" (acceptance of a single instance of that data structure), commonly proof of work / "Nakamoto consensus".

Ya know, Radia Perlman has decades of experience working on networking protocols, I'm willing to bet she understands blockchain as well as anybody. The statement "I cannot distinguish exactly what makes something blockchain technology" should probably translate as "currently the term 'blockchain' is thrown about so loosely its meaning is obscure."

Eh. But inflation only affects nominal assets like bonds and bank account balances. Real assets like houses or stocks (to a degree) would be expected to rise along with inflation.

That makes inflation distortionary, not some ideal tax on wealth. Governments can't just run away with inflation as an alternative to tax.

Instead of arguing to go to Mars, let's get the military interested in kinetic bombardment systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

Clearly we need one because North Korea or terrorists or sharks or whatever.

It's so expensive to put all that metal into space, they'll get interested in asteroid mining before long. And once there's a market for orbital-velocity asteroid metal... profit!

I don't understand how the administration can support this change.

Allowing carriers to discriminate against content providers seems like legalizing extortion.

Is there an argument in favor of this change that would convince a reasonable person?

Yeah, you could argue, "Prime is sufficiently expensive and video streaming is a sufficiently large part of Prime that it's not dumping".

I can see that, it's possible. I mean, if Prime cost $1, it wouldn't be a good argument, but Prime is more expensive than that in reality. How much of the value of Prime is in streaming video (as opposed to free shipping)? It's hard to say (for an outsider at least, I'm sure someone at the company has run the numbers).

The gray area here does make the situation a little more confusing...

For the sake of argument, what if we suppose Prime costs $1/year and the value of free shipping is more than that. Would that be the kind of situation where the government would take antitrust action?

Hadn't heard of that before, thanks!

In this case, I understood the question to be "will deep learning do a good job predicting the function of/phenotype emerging from individual SNPs" and I don't think model interpretation would help (for starters, the model is trained to predict linkage and doesn't deal with data related to phenotypes).

I'm skeptical. Machine learning algorithms are only as good as the training data you can provide them. There are lots of tools in genetic analysis you can use to try to understand function of some sequence (e.g. looking at conservation or homology). I don't see where deep learning would provide new value on top of hand-built statistical models that are already in use. (Geneticists have known about machine learning for a long time...)

Obligatory reference: https://xkcd.com/1831

What is LIME?

You're right.

If I had a game like this, I would want people to think they could make a lot of money by playing.

An easy way to create that impression and to generate hype would be to make some high-value self-trades.

If the game founders or early adopters didn't do this, they probably should have.

It's not proof they did but there's means/motive/opportunity.

I'm kind of imagining a future waterworld scenario where Earth's ice caps have melted completely and humanity looks back at electronic cat breeding as one of the gross excesses of our civilization that ultimately led to its destruction.

They're pretty cute though.

Okay. I'm not a zealot about these things, but I think the author underappreciates the nicer aspects of agile. My favorite book on agile looks at it from a mathematical / risk management / process model standpoint.

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Principles_of_Produ...

The concepts used in the book - batch size, uncertainty, feedback, control, queue size and latency - these really are useful things to think about when scheduling work.

I used to think in terms of stories, but then I heard Tyler Cowen tell me a story about the dangers of stories, and now I don't think in terms of stories so much. (My story of personal growth.)

https://www.ted.com/talks/tyler_cowen_be_suspicious_of_stori...

(PS: my comment is actually just a joke from the talk, but in any case I really enjoyed and talk and would recommend it.)

Yeah, "moving the web forward" sounds a lot like building barriers to entry. On the other hand, these browsers are open source software, so I'm not sure that's a great argument.

Scheme is a wonderful and flexible language. There's a reason it was used as a teaching language and in books like SICP. I don't use it very much, but you really have to admire some of the power in the language, like the way variable binding is handled to make macros so powerful. In short: scheme is probably one of the best base languages for building DSLs. If I had to pick "most tasteful" programming languages I would put scheme in the top 3. (Above Python, which is the language I use the most, and above C++ and Java which are other languages I use at work.)

Check out their investor presentation which compares their idea of AV ride-sharing with existing ride sharing services:

https://www.gm.com/content/dam/gm/events/docs/5265893-685163...

My understanding is that "driverless testing" here means either (1) moving the safety driver to the back seat or (2) following the vehicle with a second vehicle with a remote kill switch.

Thanks for posting that link though, I've been curious to read more about this.

"""At first, most of Waymo's driverless cars will have an employee in the back observing the vehicle's behavior. If something goes really wrong, they'll be able to push the "pull over" button to stop the car."""

I like to imagine that maybe Uber and money-losing ventures like it will help bring some balance to the universe by taking away the billions accumulated by super-rich investors and redistributing that money to working-class drivers through subsidies.

Like, I don't know: does all that red ink have a positive effect on the Gini coefficient?

(This pipe dream might not be supported by actual facts.)

Nah - this happened yesterday (the day before your post). It's unusual for media to be allowed inside autonomous cars, and the conditions are usually controlled. The conditions in this demo were fairly loose (difficult public streets in San Francisco) and also involved relatively little intervention by safety drivers. (Uber did a demo in SF once but it involved very frequent human takeovers. Alternatively, Waymo had a recent demo on a closed course (I think the one at Castle airforce base) and others in Arizona suburbs where conditions are less challenging.)

Fwiw as a human driver I find driving in San Francisco to be pretty challenging/stressful.

Tim Wu's "The Master Switch". A history of communications industries in the United States with an emphasis on consolidation / industrial organization and its effects on free speech.

If you get average gains/losses with below average costs your performance would be above average.

When I was younger I enjoyed reading about finance and investing. The investment strategy I settled on was the three fund portfolio from:

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_portfolio

and I haven't seen any reason to change this in ~10 years.

I'd recommend poking around that site to learn about the philosophy of index investing. (You might still want to actively invest after reading that, but you should probably first understand some of the reasons not to.)

This was my thought too. The findings are written as "unit tests cause X" when really what is shown is "unit tests are associated with X".

Another explanation for the results could be common cause:

Maybe packages with more unit tests are also professionally developed, or written by people interested in software methodology, or are older; and those aspects are also associated with method length/decomposition patterns/etc.

I think this happens in every profession. Restaurants have their own DSLs, so do hospitals; many software jobs have their own domain language, especially once you get start talking about actual systems/implementations.

"Just sleep a little faster." - Arnold Schwarzenegger

https://youtu.be/1g2ntIN7JuY

Restricting access to medical education (certification) is only one way to restrict supply.

Another way is to require certification for more kinds of activities in the first place.

If Americans want access to less expensive healthcare, why not make it so that some kinds of medical treatment are available from people with ~2 years of education instead of 10? (Yes, the treatment would be inferior, but also much less expensive.)

Also, when IBM's Watson becomes the world's best diagnostician (Any Day Now), what will its legal status be? Probably IBM would be happy with a special exception to the law that makes it hard for other computer companies to enter the market?