leto_ii

Why make it about his ethnicity?

> Lower staffing levels per unit of care performed makes medical care cheaper for patients.

Based on how neoliberal capitalism tends to work it will simply lead to more profits for hospitals etc.

Wdym? self-checkout definitely lead to fewer supermarket workers being employed.

> Since we started it in 2005 we've funded about 6500 companies.

> Starting a successful startup is the most common way to become a billionaire, so in effect I've spent the last 21 years training people to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have, but there are many more in the pipeline.

Seems to me that right off the bat he completely undermines his own point - less than .5% of the founders being funded at basically the best connected best financed incubator become billionaires. Easy, right?

I won't even go into the embarrassing math that follows... pyramid scheme salesman levels...

For me at least ChatGPT was down as well. Does anybody have an idea what they're using from Google?

> the ending went completely downhill for me

The series was cancelled after 2 seasons, so many plot lines were left unresolved.

Is this sarcasm? Otherwise I'm not sure how that follows. Seems more reasonable to believe that they're hitting walls and switching to PR and productizing.

I find the outlined scenario well argued and plausible.

What's more interesting to me though is the complete lack of mention of labor unions as a potential defense mechanism for engineers (either in the OP or in the conversation here, at least so far).

For a while now I've felt it's quite arrogant and completely naive of us to not accept that we're just keyboard workers, and not rare special flowers that will forever be economically privileged.

> sometimes you need the excellent dry theory and sometimes you need the more concrete but messy application, and in truth you will always vacillate between the two - this is the former

Fully agree. Axler says it quite clearly that the book is intended for a second course in linear algebra. While not an applied text, I find it close enough that it allows you to subsequently go back to your applied material and see it with new eyes.

I'm actually right now working through this book (3rd edition). It's pretty much the most abstract and most clear and simple maths books I've worked through so far (I'm not a mathematician).

Personally I find it suits my needs perfectly, even though initially it can be intimidating. But once you start getting the hang of it I think it can allow you to build a much deeper intuition for things than a more applied text.

Assuming that that's true (which wouldn't make any sense to me, but let's say), why would Snowden defend Durov?

> Would Snowden have said the same thing if Durov didn't escape from Russia before he was arrested?

Why not? What's the thinking here?

> Probably not, Snowden is part of the Russian Spy and Disinformation campaign. He is basically a Russian agent.

Any evidence for that?

This is not a matter of class balance that much. If you want to predict which of two parties somebody will vote with, the most natural framing is that of binary classification.

For that you need to threshold your predictions. Ideally you'd like your model to generate a bimodal distribution so that you can threshold without many false positives etc.

As other commenters have pointed out in one way or another, the problem seems to actually be that this simplistic model of voter choice can't capture all the structure of the real world that humans can quickly infer from the setup. Things like: state elections have millions of voters, 55/45 is actually a decisive, not a narrow win etc.

In a generic setup, imagine you have a binary classifier that outputs probabilities in the .45-.55 range - likely it won't be a really strong classifier. You would ideally like polarized predictions, not values around .5.

Come to think of it, could this be an issue of non-ergodicity too ( hope I'm using the term right)? i.e. state level prior is not that informative wrt individual vote?

The idea would be that language first evolved as a mechanism for thought and only later became used for communication. Spoken language would still be connected to the underlying mechanism though.

> The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me

So, as a person who definitely has an inner monologue, I absolutely agree. It's not like I'm literally sounding out words in my mind all the time. The vast majority of things I do I do without explicit use of language.

I think my understanding (mostly coming from Chomsky and in disagreement when OP) is that language is a mechanism for thinking that is mostly not accessible through conscious introspection.

> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking

I'm curious, what is it like when you read something? Is it just not meditated by a monologue at all?

> There are many flavors of this kind of accounting. Another version of free attribution would allow the company to take that entire 30-pound batch of “33% recycled” pouches and split them even further:

> A third of them, 10 pounds, could be labeled 100% recycled — shifting the value of the full batch onto them — so long as the remaining 20 pounds aren’t labeled as recycled at all.

Amusingly reminiscent of CDO tranches.

Many interviews with him directly you can check out. Article is consistent with those interviews.

He has discussed this in recent interviews and talks e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chat...

> his critique of BF Skinner’s “Verbal Behavior” had been wrong after all

btw, this is in no way proven (or true imo).

> would generate way too much workload to follow up and thereby cost time and money for better leads

Having lived a decade in NL, my impression was that keeping costs down is the top priority. Unless you have a serious chronic condition or were in an accident, good luck getting somebody to take a look at you.

(irl, after a while you learn to push, exaggerate symptoms etc. or just go back home to get tests and treatment).

In Bucharest we have an entire subway station tiled with marble containing countless very visible fossils [1], specifically of rudists [2]. Here are a few nice photos:

https://www.descopera.ro/wp-content/uploads/media/401/321/59...

https://www.descopera.ro/wp-content/uploads/media/401/321/59...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politehnica_metro_station

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudists

I started appreciating the design and build quality of commie blocks only after living in "the West" for a while. The prevalence of poor quality, cramped (and very expensive) housing in many of Europe's wealthiest cities is really disregarded, I think.

> Sounds to me like more time on hand to prolong those movie nights.

Unfortunately that's not how things work under capitalism. To the extent that coding assistants make a difference in productivity (in my experience quite limited gains), that will just mean that you get more work done for the same time and salary.

Ok, the guy is not some Fields medalist, so it depends what you mean by math chops, but here are a few of his papers published in respectable journals that have non negligible math content:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784... (free at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.01370.pdf)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784... (free at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.1791.pdf)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784... (free at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.04722.pdf)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-0921-x

There are plenty more btw, these were the ones that I could find in more prestigious journals.

if you follow him on Twitter you'll see that he also does quite a bit of recreational maths too.

Taleb has math chops, what are you talking about?

He's also quite a bit less self-aggrandizing.

Otoh, they do seem to like reach other, which in my book does cast some doubt on taleb's ability to judge people...