nyan_sandwich

America. Far right is monarchism/fascism.

Last year I stayed at a nearby airbnb and took the bus and hitched rides.

The flaw in this is that our mobility and density is unprecedented, so things that were not feasible for a startup plague in the past may now be feasible.

The reason given was leeching. Neutral is not good enough for that sometimes; you need slightly basic. Some things will corrode at pH 7, but not higher.

Good call though; distilled water is neutral.

I don't get it. The author rails through the whole essay that there are no A players and B players, but the conclusion concedes that some people are stronger and smarter, and some people are going to fit into your company better, which from the perspective of the employer, is fully equivalent to the A/B thing. The only difference is in what you think they might accomplish elsewhere, and vague notions of their value as a human being.

More interesting is the point that a given person may thrive in one environment and falter in another. This is totally true, and very important to keep in mind when evaluating what to do with people who are faltering, but it's not a dichotomy between that and the "fully general robust innate talent" theory. Both are true. Some people are simply stronger and smarter, but on top of that, environment plays a large role. Act accordingly.

That shouldn't happen if you do the motion transform uniformly on all axes. It should just be equivalent to changing the speed of time, rather than actually changing the trajectories.

Excellent.

It looks like it uses linear interpolation between the different glyphs, which makes it look a bit jerky. The author might want to try a sinusoidal interpolation so that velocity reaches zero at the key frames and the whole thing thus spends more time dwelling on the legible parts of the animation and looks smoother.

>What do you do when you realize you are not a programmer?

You could start calling yourself a "recovering programmer":

http://prog21.dadgum.com/56.html

I would also add that YC investment boosts nuclear stuff as a legitimate thing. Could lead to copycat investment (which we dearly need in the nuclear field).

Quit my productive engineering job to chase women, work on personal projects and political agitation. Getting paid to go Galt? Yes please.

I may not be representative, But that's honestly what I'd do.

This is true but the english expression of it is prone to misunderstanding. See the no free lunch theorem for the technical version of the problem of induction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Free_Lunch_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op...

You know, it's probable that someone will invent an automatically diversified wallet that tracks the market cap of cryptocurrencies overall. Rise and fall of new cryptocurrencies would be of interest only to speculators.

>so just force yourself.

>just

ADHD doesn't work like that. "just" supposes willpower, ADHDers have low willpower. The whole problem is how to "just" do something, so reiterating that is a non-solution.

I have real bad ADHD, and everything you say rings true.

There are (only) two things that seem to help me: (social) commitment that would be unthinkable to back out of, and random fluctuations in neurochemistry.

I have a job, and find that I have very little trouble maintaining a good work ethic at work. Especially when the boss tells me to do something differently. The social and commitment aspects really motivate me. Beeminder (https://www.beeminder.com/) is really awesome as well, until your brain figures out that you can cheat. For doing work outside of work, I have a few friends that I just meet up with and mutually enforce work-time, which is really helpful and always productive.

On top of that, I notice major shifts in ability to do work that seem to have nothing to do with anything. Some days I'm randomly on top of the world and able to do huge amounts of highly productive and creative work, other days I can't even focus on what's in front of me (sometimes literally). I can only explain this in terms of random neurochemistry quirks. Unfortunately I can't control it. One thing that seems to help is standing in a dominant victory pose and counting to 300 as fast as possible, which raises testosterone and lowers cortisol. It seems to help a lot if you can remember to do it.

(Solving neurochemistry would be extremely lucrative; there are thousands of people who are separated from large wealth only by this factor.)

So I'd say you are fine on holding a job, but the jury is still out on becoming great.

>avoid perpetuating that state

Why? Surely a state that allows some people a comfortable base on which to build wealth that benefits everyone is a good thing rather than a bad thing.

Don't forget that everything as an opportunity cost. Would you rather eg James Watt fretted about privilege, or used his to build the steam engine?

>quantum >vibrations >consciousness

Reverend Bayes says 99% probability of quackery.

I've heard that in most professions, experience is most relevant in the first two years, then stops being valuable after that, with intelligence and conscientiousness being more important.

It's not quite like that; there are experiments that show that there's no hidden variable, but yeah, entanglement isn't magic. (unfortunately)

>How is this is any better than some Russians' generalization that smiling Westerners are duplicitous?

It might be more accurate

MCMC isn't strictly serial; you can run multiple chains in parallel and get decent results (provided your break in period isn't too big), and this is commonly done for multicore.

The "all the data" problem is interesting. It seems solvable if each node summarizes the likelihood function for part of the data. I'll have to read the paper and see if that's what they did.

Some has scripted it to alternate between "Seriously though..." and "NIGGER"

How nice.

My understanding is that patent trolls persist with bogus patents because it's not in any one firms interest to challenge them. When it's a central insurance company taking the risk, they have much more incentive to do damage to the trolls. This is a good feature of this scheme.

The protection racket shape of this whole thing is a bit worrying though.

Less Voice, more Exit. The solution is not more democracy; everyone'e been pretty consistently complaining about Washington's power for years and it's only gotten worse. The solution is "Google Republic".

Those things are harder to control, so generally less worth thinking about.

On the cause and mitigation of collapses, my humble opinion is that a culture of technical ambition and inquiry is likely to be as important as specific knowledge.

You might want to look at what kinds of people (culturally and ethnically) are behind most innovation and engineering, and look at the differences and influences there. (It may be interesting to look at the historical trend of their power, as well, for futurological purposes.) If the culture that produces civilization stays around through a collapse, there probably is less to worry about than if that culture doesn't survive.

Thus among your important books may be some of the books of industrial culture, like Atlas Shrugged, most good science fiction, some enlightenment philosophy and poetry, Paul Graham's writing, etc.

>if we can't have this conversation, who can?

lesswrong.com is typically able to discuss difficult topics much more rationally than the rest of the internet.

We have some, and will create more. There is no "deserve".

The author seemed to teeter between inspiration and self destructive guilt. I liked the inspirational part.

Disappointed. I thought it was going to be the scoop from someone who steals ideas for a living, but it's just another lecture that ideas are cheap.

It's all about expenses. I live in Vancouver, which is widely considered to be unaffordable. I spend $10k/yr.

Step one is to develop a condescending attitude towards people who need to spend money. This will make it unthinkable for you to become such a person. Personal identity is a powerful thing.

The rules are: don't drink, don't drive, live with friends, and budget.

http://nyansandwich.info/cheapskate.html

A friend of mine is "working" on that. I can put you in touch if you want to encourage him.