gpsx

Are there any plans for a Mountain View trial? I live there.

I should have been more clear. 20/20 refers to vision and is used in the traditional form of the expression and is supposed to mean "very good". 50/50 refers to percentages, meaning 50% chance of being correct and 50% chance of being wrong, which would be very bad.

Yes, that is the point. The original saying is Hindsight is 20/20, implying it is very accurate. This version of the statement contradicts that, implying you can't really say what would have happened if things were different.

Your comment about counterfactuals reminds of a saying, or what I would call a more accurate version of a common saying - "Hindsight is 50/50". (Note, that doesn't make hindsight necessarily wrong, just difficult to have confidence in.)

Thanks for those links! I will check that out.

I will say one problem I have is in refactoring the interfaces of my modules, which is what I seem to spend a lot of time one, at least in this stage of the project. When I am updating the bottom ones, I pretty much have to update the others in parallel.

For some background, I have a web version and two electron versions of the programming environment. Then there is a web runtime and a web server which run on the output of the programming environment. Originally the main repo contained code for all the applications, but also some code specific to one or more of the applications. I had trouble versioning a subset of the repository. I ended up versioning the main repo and bumping the version of all apps if anything in the main repo changed, because I didn't have a systematic way of knowing that only certain parts of the repo changed. Perhaps that is the piece I would need?

I said there were a number of frustrations, but that was the driver.

In the new repo format each repo produces a single library/module, and can be versioned as a whole. When I run an application for dev, I can run a given library from a release or from live code (with a dev server serving ES modules from a configured path). This works well when one of the repos is not changing. But I end up developing in a significant number of repos at the same time, so I just configure it to run from live code rather than release for all those libraries i'm working on. This feels like working with a monorepo except I have the hassle of managing commits to all thse repos. Long story short, right now I am working out of the master branch because I screwed up commits. You may have figured out by now my strength is not in dev ops.

I don't think anyone likes advertising, but that does bankroll the internet. There are some great content providers on youtube who do that full time and make a living from it. Even many basic sites owe their existence to advertising because running a server is not free. But the joke in on the advertisers. Internet advertising doesn't work, or at least that is what I have read.

If we hadn't had advertising but instead came up with some micropayment formalism, I bet the internet never would have developed to be what it is today, even for today's content that is not ad driven.

I have a project, a programming environment/runtime, that contains a number of overlapping applications. I started with a small number of repos, including one main one. I had a number of frustrations with that. One of them is I didn't like having shared and unshared code from different applications in the same repo, for the sake of managing versioning. I separated into more repos, maybe 20. After I split it up I discovered a number of new issues, much like the OP here. One of which is complications from working with several repos at the same time, such as when refactoring.

I'll think about the next steps taken by the OP. Does anyone have any other practices they can recommend for managing these type of projects?

I remember hearing a talk by Bill Gates a long time ago where he said the biggest competitor for Word was previous versions of the program. That is no longer true with forced updates. Granted, there are many reasons why it is not practical these days for old versions to be a competitor, but that would be a good message to companies that some of their new "innovations" may not have been a good idea.

Should big internet companies by plumbing and not exert control over content on their system? As much as it annoys me some of the things Google, for example, does exercising the power they have, it does have the right to control what is on there, to some extent. As I interpret it, I think the OP is saying it is not right to censure, but I am not sure how this applies to a private company and content on their own system.

I agree a big company shouldn't have _complete_ power to control content on their site for reasons the OP says because at some point this becomes a danger to society. At the same time it is a danger to society to freely let users promote whatever content they want, for the same reasons.

For all the examples or people who have been persecuted (or whatever word would fit better) for saying the "truth", like scientist who said the earth was not at the center of the universe, there are countless others who, for the better, were quieted from issueing harmful information.

The OP says people should be taught a lesson in critical thinking, but I don't think this is a problem. I think most people are pretty logical, they are just dealing with misinformation, no matter what "side" they are on.

So this is a real problem. It is good the OP raises these questions, but I don't think it has the solution.

Some of the funny effects seen here come not from relativity but from the finite time of propogation. In fact, relativity _reduces_ the effect of you see from time of propogation. An example is that objects seem to be curved, because it takes more time for the light from there to get to you, and you move in that time. With relativity, this apparent curvature is less.

I think stagnation, or at least a change through successively smaller exponential regimes, should be the base case. I'm bullish on our future tech prospects and I know we have the entire universe from which to draw resources. But for all the real world cases of exponential growth, I think they are all limited.

And I only exclude collapse as a base case because I'm an optimist.

That's kind of unfair, in a way. They aren't that bad. It's just that you are used to seeing people who are very good. Try making a video of yourself dancing. It doesn't look like you think. (This is a painful fact learned by any hobbyist dancer, like me.)

But it's true we don't necessarily want to see someone who is not really good. And by not good meaning that they don't spend a lot of time refining that aspect of the routine.

It is up to the sport itself to decide what they want to emphasize and how they want to judge competitions. And it is up to us as viewers to voice our opinions.

I think I am with you in my opinion of some of the dancing. I would rather see a gymnast reflect the music less rather than do some unattractive dancing.

And when it comes to differences between men's and women's floor routines, that doesn't bother me one bit.

What would someone do if their to do list was finished? Presumably a person always has more to do. And presumably people think of doing a lot more than they actually can do. Your reach should always exceed your grasp. (Or, less politely, when all is said and done, there is a lot more is said than done.)

Redwood City and other mid Bay Area mid-peninsula cities have very nice weather. They have the same effect that makes San Diego so nice, the interface between warm sun and cool ocean. If the criteria was slightly different, biased cooler, Redwood city might be on the list.

I want to add to my above comment. Non-entanglement is a special mathematical case, but it happens quite often. If the two particles never interact in any way, then the special condition will be true and they will not be entangled. There is another case where the particles _appear_ not to be entangled. This is when the wave function is so jumbled that even though the particles are entangled you can't detect it. This is called a decoherence. This also happens quite often and is why macroscopic quantities don't exhibit entanglement and hence quantum behavior.

I think your analogy works for both many worlds and Copenhagen. You can view each universe in your analogy as states in the wave function. The two interpretations diverge only when the "observation" occurs. In the Copanhagen interpretation the other universe disappears. In the many worlds interpretation they both remain.

I think people get confused when they think that each object has a wave function. This is not correct. The universe has one wave function. The wave function consists of a bunch of possible states along with the coefficient for each state. You can think of each state as being a distinct snapshot of what the universe might look like - including for example the position and spin of each particle. In the example of two electrons shown here, the wave function has non-zero coefficients only for states where the two electron spins are in opposite directions.

When we make a measurement, the state of the universe appears to collapse, meaning any state that is not consistent with that measurement disappears. This means the other electron is left in the opposite spin state. (Important aside here, some people believe the wave function collapses, "Copenhagen interpretation" and some people believe the wave function doesn't change but the the brain of the observer correlates/entangles with the electron, "Many Worlds Interpretation". Either way there is an operational collapse of the wave function.)

A special case for a wave function is when the coefficients are arranged so that state of one particle, say particle 1 spin, is symmetric no matter what the state of another particle, particle 2, is. This special case is when particles are NOT entangled.

(Edit: added paragraph on measurement)

In the paper, Carrol goes through great pains to try reject people changing the laws of physics because they don't understand consciousness. This is exactly how I view people taking up the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, where the wave function of the entire universe collapses when a random person makes an observation. Instead I take Schrodinger's equation (and the many worlds interpretation) as the rule and what we observe illuminates how _we_ work, or more specifically how the brain and consciousness work.

If you want to get technical, this isn't a continuous surface but weave of strings. And something that makes this more complex is the location of the string intersections has a static/dynamic friction component that is difficult to model analytically. But I think we accept your approximation if you are looking for numeric results.

I think that is good intuition. The transverse force is the second derivative of the transverse position, to first order. But then there are higher order effects in it. I think that is where that math breaks down.

There is so much emphasis on fake news but I think any story can be shaped by _which_ facts are discussed. Face it, you can't put a complete nuanced view in the sound bite world of social media.

At the same time, I think people enjoy being outraged. You get an actual physical energy burst, and you can think how superior you are to the misguided idiots you are talking about.

I don't think social media is tricking us into this behavior, it is just helping us do it better. It would be good if we could figure out how to discourage the behavior in the first place.

A central authority means not only trust but responsibility, and in turn risk. Why require so much responsibility when it is not necessary? The possible problems are not only malicious actions from the central authority but accidental actions and also susceptibility to malicious third parties. [Edit - problems]

I agree it will take something dramatic to fix the divisive political environment in the US. I would add one possible mechanism to your list which I am sure we all hope is not the solution - the country uniting against a common enemy in a war, the obvious choice for now being China.

I agree with you. I'll put it another way. Usually if the price of something goes up and becomes too high, fewer people buy and the price drops. That is a stable system. An unstable system is when the price of something goes up, so that causes more people to buy causing the price to go up more. That is an unstable system causing exponential growth, which I'd call a bubble.

Mortgage rates have been falling for the past 40 years. Now they might start rising (emphasis on might). If they do, could that reverse the continuous rise of housing prices? That is how the bond market works, which has also seen rate drops and prices rises for the past few decades now.

I'd like to add that being a bubble doesn't mean the object of the bubble is bad. Take the dot com bubble - some of those dot coms are doing pretty well now, like amazon.com, google.com, facebook.com and news.ycombinator.com.

Wow, it's funny reading the comments (and the article). Everyone is saying "The world is like X now", with a different value of X.

Ford is supposedly coming out with a smaller pickup, the Ford Maverick, that I think is similar in size to the old Ranger.

Wouldn’t it be nice if energy were free, and caused no environmental damage? Well, how about cheaper and cleaner. Whether you think spending energy on coin mining is worthwhile or not, energy is required to do any work (by definition), so to feed our innovations, easy energy is important (and not evil). We will need to work on that.