jon_richards

Is appears to be 22% in CA. 46% in the US as a whole.

GATE saved me when I moved to the US in 3rd grade.

I remember getting marked wrong on “3-4=-1” because the class hadn’t learned about negative numbers so the “correct” answer was “you can’t do that”. Or my “which statements are true” answer getting marked wrong for being in the wrong order. I came from using electric saws and hot glue guns at age 5 to not being able to use a paper cutter until age 14.

GATE would take us out of regular class for an hour a day. The school was on a rotating schedule, so each day we’d miss something different. It didn’t matter. I was reading a sci fi or fantasy book under my desk anyway. We’d still ace any tests.

GATE wasn’t just accelerated school topics. We’d solve fake court cases (the upside down horse shoe is the one that stuck with me), create and draw 3d block structures on isometric paper (learning about optical illusions), sudoku, circle threading, logic puzzles, etc.

It wasn’t just the activities, it was putting me with other people that also wanted to do them. It taught me that learning is fun. I realize that mixed-ability grouping is beneficial, but it’s also a huge burden to have to constantly bear. Getting out of that dynamic for an hour gave me so much motivation—way more than skipping a grade of math ever did.

Then middle school came along and ruined it. It became an after-school class that thought of big homework projects to give us and we collectively said “fuck that”.

I’m not a fan of this explanation. Entropy generation is only a side effect of life. It’s easy to imagine life arising in a universe without our version of entropy.

I think “I am no man” is a perfectly good explanation in the movie. It implies that the witch king is relying on a prophesy he doesn’t fully understand (rather than a spell). “If Croesus goes to war, he will destroy a great empire.”

I always get an uneasy feeling when I think about this. It’s like I know we’ll point to this later as the clear-cut sign that something was going wrong.

The most profitable business model is no longer “sell to consumers who can afford it.” Sure, freemium is great for the people who can’t afford it, but it reminds me of a feel-good news story about a kid that sold lemonade to raise money for their own cancer treatment. Immediate consequences are good. Actual implications are horrifying.

Yes, mixing invisible characters will solve all our problems.

Some of that might be Python habits which is terrifying for completely different reasons.

One of my favorite “weird” conjectures is that the existence of the uncanny valley implies that at some point it was evolutionarily advantageous for us to recognize something that looked human, but wasn’t… and to be afraid of it.

Homebrew on mac has a long-standing upgrade bug with Postgres extensions like postgis. It uninstalls the old postgis before copying the data over and then gets stuck in a hard to recover state. I always assume I’m going to lose all my data whenever I update major versions.

Then monetize by setting up your own captcha farm, but instead of paying for compute, send the captcha to the spam bots, who send it to another captcha farm and solve it for you.

I’ve wondered if “stripping assets” should require a sort of liability insurance. In the simple case: a company requires 5m in liability insurance to give out 5m in dividends. If the company later declares bankruptcy, any creditors/regulatory agencies can go after the insurance company.

Oh, from the title I was really hoping this was a relativity simulator. It would be neat to travel between stars at different speeds and see them age weirdly.

You literally can’t set up Xfinity internet service without accepting an inbound call and then clicking on a shortened link they text you.

I asked for a callback number instead. They hung up and made me go through the entire process again, culminating in a new inbound call a day later and a new sms.

> One explanation is that environmentally selected genes (meta genes?) that promote mutation of de novo genes in regions of the genome under environmental pressure.

This has been studied. They’re DNA repair pathways. Put a bunch of E. coli in a bioreactor and trace the lineages. As soon as one lineage loses a DNA repair pathway, new mutations explode and out-compete the old lineages (and each other).

Besides cancer and viability concerns, highly stable DNA is mainly beneficial in cyclical conditions (as adaptive memory). In the stable—but highly competitive—environment of a bioreactor, sacrificing DNA stability for adaptive pace is a very beneficial mutation.

The term for this trope is “power spiral” and Gurren Lagaan is a fantastic satire of it. The main character’s power is literally “spiral power” (a drill) and the plot revolves around the fundamental danger of exponential growth. Spoilers: the series ends with the main character piloting a mech that’s piloting a mech that’s piloting a mech that’s piloting a mech that’s throwing galaxies at the bad guy.

Obviously it’s sad that we don’t have a larger Hubble-equivalent by now, but the Webb’s operating temperature makes it a completely different beast. It is massively expanding our capabilities in a way a larger Hubble wouldn’t. And I’m hopeful for the mid-term future, as the massive improvements in launch capability we’re seeing start to pay off.

I feel like this discussion can’t be complete without dragon drop: https://mrcoles.com/dragondrop/

I wonder if they ever got Google docs to print/convert to pdf without disrupting the formatting.

The headline just didn’t convey any sense of scale to me. I found this metric much more interesting:

> 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II.

This reminds me of one of the hardest lessons I ever learnt from college worksheets. We were asked whether a cell’s ribosomes fit in the cell normally or if they required compression of some sort. Subtracting the total volume of ribosomes in a cell from the total volume of the cell itself, we got a negative number, and indicated there must be some sort of compression.

Almost everyone got marked wrong. A simple difference, lacking context, is not a useful measure. What we should have calculated was a ratio.

It seemed arbitrary, but the entire class was a crash course towards scientific writing and everything was graded as if up for review. Picking the right metrics, assumptions, and descriptive language was crucial.

It’s orbiting around L2. I’m not sure if it’s actually in the shadow of earth. Keep in mind that it’s still powered by a solar array.

It’s especially funny considering how many companies do sentiment analysis of Twitter text for algorithmic trading.

Serious question: What does making an announcement while the market is closed actually do? Are you not just throwing money to the people willing to trade after hours?

You need to annualize that 3% to make it comparable. A grocery store isn’t buying everything at the start of the year and selling it at the end. If they do 12 inventory turnovers in a year, that 3% margin becomes a 36% return for the same amount of capital.

Whipple shields

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield

That used to work in Google sheets, but now it only pastes the last thing copied from Google sheets. Really frustrating.

I thought maybe that’s what Terry Pratchett’s Hex was poking fun at, but it looks like Children of Time is quite new (2015 vs 1994 for Hex’s first appearance). I wonder what the origin of that trope is.

Here's a fun example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGaSHDmuAPg

It’s not a computer, but it is quantified.

Brown is (165,42,42). You can argue about false precision, but the term “brown” has false precision as well. The likely variation in interpretations can be described by error bars. Your understanding of someone saying “brown” is informed entirely by statistical inference of your past experience with “brown”.

Changing the representation of the names doesn’t matter, but attempting to understand the meaning behind the names is ultimately quantitative. The numbers are run in the giant black box that is your brain and then your consciousness receives other qualitative answers.

Asking for an AI without statistical inference or quantitative data is asking for consciousness without a brain.