fromMars

Not much I can say other than that was a disappointing piece of trash from Paul.

The whole tirade against wokeness by the far right is nothing more than a bizarre attempt to stigmatize those who want to improve things for segments of society.

A more legitimate article might have focused on tactics such as shaming and cancelling those who disagree which is problematic in many instances, but Graham paints with too broad of a brush and comes across as another conservative whose only interest is to discredit those who think differently.

Thanks for the clarification. From the comments I gathered it was about both. I agree that the cosmological constant is the more puzzling of the two.

Not sure what that even means. It's our best theory at the moment and helps explain multiple different cosmological phenomena.

There are also hypothesized particles that fit within the Standard Model that researchers are searching for experimentally.

Honestly, these articles are upvoted by people who know very little physics and think that dark matter is somehow a very mysterious idea.

Why are these anti-dark matter articles upvoted on hacker news.

As I understand it, most cosmologists still thing dark matter is the most likely candidate as it explains multiple different daya points unlike Mond.

Linear algebra is a relatively straight forward subject. I won't say easy because there are bits that aren't, and I struggled with it when I was first exposed to it in college. But in graduate school revisited it and didn't have a problem.

So, I really agree that it's about timing and curriculum. For one, it appears somewhat abstract until you really understand geometrically what's happening.

So, I surmise that most non-mathematicians don't have quite the mathematical maturity to absorb the standard pedagogy when they first approach the subject.

Sure they can, but niantic offered a free game, I already got some profit out of playing it.

Before smart phones or the rise of the internet your information was mined by credit agencies for use by banks, employers and other forms of credit lending.

Credit cards and Banks sold your data to third parties for marketing purposes.

Payroll companies like ADP also shared your data with the credit agencies.

This is not a new phenomenon and has been the currency of a number of industries for a while.

The only thing that has changed is the types of data collected. Personally, I think these older forms of data collection are quite a bit more insidious than some of the data mining done by a game like Niantic for some ml model.

I have a lot more control over and less insidious consequences from these types of data collection. I can avoid the game or service if I like. There isn't much I can do to prevent a credit agency from collecting my data.

For me it's been fear of impacting friendships. I have some friends who have very different political views than myself, although I consider myself a centrist.

Some of my friends are no longer on speaking terms with each other because there identity is not just wrapped up in their political beliefs but also in opposition of the other side.

It's a sad state of affairs and a fairly recent one, in my opinion.

I don't remember political disagreements being such a big deal before the rise of Trump.

During the Trump Clinton election he changed the game and politics became more about insulting and denigrating your opposition.

The information Credit Bureaus and Banks store is much scarier. They know your salary every place you've worked and lived. And with all the recent links anyone can find this information on the dark web.

This balls in the urn problem is relatively straightforward with Bayesian Updating.

We have a uniform prior for the number of red balls that were placed in the Urn, P(U) = 1/101 where U ∈ [0, 100].

We then have the probability the first ball was red given a value of U, P(B1=Red|U) = U/100.

Lastly we have the P(B1=Red) = ∑ P(B1=Red|U)P(U), where the sum is over all values of U.

But we don't actually need to compute this sum because from symmetry arguments we can see that P(B1=Red) = 1/2.

This follows because there are the same number of configurations with U red balls as U green balls and each configuration is equally likely.

So now we can compute P(U|B1=Red) using Bayes Rule.

P(U|B1=Red) = P(B1=Red|U)P(U)/P(B1=Red) = (U/100)*(2/101)

But how does that help us? Well, after we remove a red ball the probability the next ball will be red given the first was red and there were U red balls initially in the urn is:

P(B2=red|B1=red,U) = (U-1)/99.

From this we see that if U was in the range of 51 to 100, then P(B2=red|B1=red,U) > 1/2, i.e., the second ball is more likely to be Red.

So let's compute the following where we are summing over U ∈ [51,100]:

P(U ∈ [51,100]|B1=Red) = ∑ P(B1=Red|U)P(U)/P(B1=Red) = ∑ (U/100)*(2/101) = (2/101) ∑ U/100 = (2/101) (50/100) * 75.5

P(U ∈ [51,100]|B1=Red) = 75.5/101

So we find that P(U ∈ [51,100]|B1=Red) = 75.5/101 ≈ 3/4 which means that given the first ball we picked was red, then roughly 3/4 of the time we would expect the next ball being red to be more likely.

This seems like a much more straightforward way to think about it for me.

That would be a positive. We need alternatives other than just burning energy to base a currency on.

That's a let down after all the hype in the opening pages.

There is a lot of evidence that aphants score higher on spatial reasoning tests than those with vivid visual recall and are over represented in fields like math and science.

These two skill sets appear to be divergent, i.e., people are either good at visualizing and recalling fine details or they are good at manipulating/reasoning about spatial objects.

Personally, I have always excelled at the latter and have a strong sense of direction and have scored well on tests that require one to manipulate/rotate objects in my brain.

I sort of agree and disagree. I wouldn't agree with the idea that most FAANG engineers are not passionate by nature about their work.

What I would say is that the bureaucracy and bullshit one has to deal with makes it hard to maintain that passion and that many end up as TC optimizers in the sense that they stay instead of working someplace better for less TC.

That said, I am not sure how many would make different choices. Many who join a FAANG company don't have the slightest inkling of what it will be like and once they realize that they are tiny cog in a giant machine it's hard to leave the TC and perks behind.

I find this hard to believe having worked in multiple enterprises and in the FAANG world.

In my anecdotal experience, I can only think of one or two examples of someone from the enterprise world who I would consider outstanding.

The overall quality of engineers is much higher at the FAANG companies.

Not a compelling article especially one from 2005. I think history has already proven Dyson wrong.

Sean Carroll has had numerous excellent podcasts on this subject. As I understand, in general, these climate models have actually underpredicted the rate of changes we have seen so far.

No. Just no. Literacy is incredibly difficult in a language that requires knowing 10,000 characters to learn it.

East Asian Languages are tough for Westerners, or at least that has been my experience. The biggest problem is really the barrier to reading especially with Chinese and a lesser extent Japanese.

Would love any tips from someone who has mastered all those characters without full immersion or a structured University curriculum.

From what I can tell, all the GPT team did was scale up ideas already there invented elsewhere in previous large language models.

I am not sure that is a reason to bet on them making any breakthroughs needed for AGI.

Can someone confirm the validity of the section called ”Can we derive the James-Stein estimator rigorously?"?

The claim that the best estimator must be smooth seemed surprising to me.

Didn't work out for me. I was pursuing a PhD and got married and shortly after had a child. I could no longer comfortably subsist on the salary of a Research Assistant. So I left academia to make more money.

I could imagine marriage helping if one doesn't have kids and the cost of living where the school is located isn't too high or if one's spouse has a successful career.

The advantage of being married is that you don't have to spend as much energy dating and other social activities.

I wouldn't go that far, but in most cases they have never stood out as extraordinary in my experience. That isn't to say that many aren't extraordinary, but I imagine those who are end up in academia or something.

What happened with Ethereum's proof of stake? Have there been successful alternatives that eliminate the need for mining?

This is why I am not a fan of crypto. It's environmental impact is disastrous in its current form.

I thought this originated at Microsoft long before Google with stack rankings of your team members.

I do know facts about there internal system. Internally, strict separation is taken very seriously and the logs are keyed by cookies with separate access and physical logs for different cookie spaces and no joining is done based on ip addresses and device signatures in these logs.

It would take a determined and malicious employee to subvert these controls and possibly require multiple employees to get by code reviews to do such.

That said, I can appreciate the skepticism an outsider might have about such claims.

But, I also disagree that Google is incentivized to do "privacy theater" as you call it. For one, many already assume the worst of Google and also such theater could open them up to major lawsuits.

One could make the case that a company like Apple has invested a lot more effort in "privacy theater".

Also, different icognito sessions will be logged as different users since all the cookies are deleted when you close all your incognito browsers.

So the TLDR, is that yes data is being logged for an incognito session by Google, but that data isn't tied together by Google across icognito sessions or icognito and non-icognito sessions.

I don't believe this is true. In incognito mode you don't have the same gaia or dblck cookie ids. Your traffic is logged in icognito mode by Google but as a different user under a different identifier.

Now certain websites could use tracking methodologies based on ip address and device signatures to identify you as the same user and set a cookie identifying you as the same user for purposes like remarketing, but Google itself doesn't join this data from their own logs.

This announcement is just clarifying that Google does log data in icognito mode as do other websites. It doesn't say that Google joins your icognito session data with your non-icognito session data.

Governments spy on a wide range of people, it would be illogical to call someone a conspiracy theorist for asserting that the US was spying on Assange and lends doubt to your claim that most would be rebuked as such based on that alone.

In contrast, evidence that the US Intelligence agencies actually framed Assange for rape would be much more newsworthy.

I think Church and religion can also fill a similar role. As someone who isn't active in any religion, I notice that coworkers who are tend to have a lot of social activities and presumably friends as a result of their participation.