scottlocklin

I snork at the rest. The present Harvard entrance exam is a great test for social signalling that you're stinking rich. Not many actual high school students actually form a non profit and get 1600 SAT or whatever; unless mom and dad are loaded and did it for them.

Absolute hogwash. In my parents day (in the 60s) high school included mastery of at least one foreign language and one dead language. Mom and dad read Beowulf in high school, in Anglo Saxon; something modern English majors don't do. And my parents were working class people at working class schools in a factory town. Moving the goalposts to allow morons to get a high school diploma isn't improving educational attainment. Hell, I could point out a dozen examples of decline in Bachelors degrees in my lifetime.

This was a meme a few years ago: a 1800s era Harvard entrance exam, and Harvard was the easy school: https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...

This attitude, however popular it may be among the coddled infants of current year, is a form of barbarism. Being threatened by ideas is hilariously insecure unless you believe your ethical and ontological system is a network of lies. Hell current year ding dongs fall apart into a froth at the mere writing of words -let alone the formation of them into something resembling ideas.

FWIIW IPFS is amazing, and fortunately doesn't need the contributions of such people to thrive.

You failed, first sentence.

You're also the second person asserting some secret knowledge of academic ding dongs who published a paper (as if this is some kind of achievement) without, you know, actually even attempting to make the case.

I dunno man, the culture came from McDonnell-Douglass which was actually purchased by engineer-centric-at-the-time Boeing. How this culture spread in Boeing ought to be some kind of HBS case study, except they wouldn't notice that it should be taken as a cautionary tale.

The only reason I thought of doing it was skipping the "marshall the data" step for online algorithms; performance basically. If you look at something like Vowpal Wabbit, it stores/consumes data in this ridiculous text format dating from when people invented the Support Vector Machine in the 80s. This annoys the shit out of me, as it involves creating the ridiculous 80s text format. What if it consumed database columns instead of this nonsense, and did the hashing trick and everything you needed to solve the problem? That would be cool. That, in fact, would be something like how the universe is supposed to function instead of the stunted grotesqueries we have today. You could do crap like exploratory analysis right on your database, as a query. You could even get fancy and do wackadoo online matrix decompositions while you're writing the data out in the first place (or at least when nobody's looking), and store it as metadata, meaning you know all kinds of good shit about your data even as you're writing it down. Anyway, because marketing departments keep bellowing about "deep learning" instead of the actual breakthroughs in machine learning and linear algebra of the last 20 years, nobody gave a shit about it. Even (large research group in gigantor corp) couldn't figure out a way of selling the idea. I went on to a productive career in something entirely different, and all I got out of it was the ability to make snarky comments about seemingly clueless academics.

Jesus flippin Chrikey kill it with fire. Academics; where do they come from?

Having scoped out a design for this, seen a design for it in a large corporate research lab, and noting that several large scale machine learning packages .... almost do it .... themselves: you just need to lay out the data in a memory friendly way, and you're freaking done. It's a completely straightforward task which could be done with any number of existing columnar data stores if it hasn't been done already. The only reason it hasn't been outside of (large research lab) is the type of skill needed to lay out the data in the DB properly and the type of skill needed to write efficient machine learning algorithms almost never exist in the same person. Then you get academics .... who think you need to write automatic differentiation in SQL to integrate ML with databases, having never heard of, I dunno, online BFGS or Pegasos, and, like, C.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276103942_REVIEW_of...

The investors didn't get screwed; they made a bad investment, and the short sellers didn't have anything to do with the malls failing. It boggles my mind that people look at speculators helping make markets in risk hedging as the vultures. The vultures are swine like Bain who levered up viable companies on debt to "increase shareholder value," looted pensions on bankruptcy and moved manufacturing abroad. Meanwhile McKinsey advising giving pharmacies "rebates" every time someone ODs.... but it's the guys shorting dying shopping malls who are the problem....

That said, it's pretty marginal stuff. ESNs are weird. Cool weird anyway.

If I were looking at it in a serious way rather than reading the funny papers, I'd think about ways of applying topological ideas to ESNs. ESNs on the critical ridge probably have an interesting graph when projected onto a topological space.

No, it really hasn't! My ancient x220 is still as fast as, or faster than almost all pre 2020 laptops. By contrast, hardware in the period of time ~9 years before 2011 when I bought it is absurdly slower to the point of unusability. Same story with my threadripper versus my 2009 era desktop. For single threaded stuff, not IO bound, they're subjectively about the same. If I need a lot of threads, big memory or big IO, the recent machine is comically faster (like 100-1000x), but lots of things are single thread bound. Again if I take the leap back in time separating the threadripper from my 2009 era machine; there were huge improvements in performance; imagine trying to compile something on a 1998 era tower like OP did.

Mind you I have had positive experiences with psychedelics; I wouldn't push them on anyone, and think it both creepy and unwise to do so.

I'm pretty sure pedophile blackmail rings would like everyone to pay attention to the ridiculous idea rather than the "actually exists in the corporeal world" idea. Hence, QAnon. Seriously: Roy Cohn, Dennis Hastert, Franklin Scandal -all republican pedophile scandals, or republican pedophile blackmailers. Epstein obviously an apolotical rapist of children and blackmailer of politicians. Dutreux affair was in Europe. None were particularly satanic. All are real things which actually happened and feed into QAnon horse shit. QAnon obviously disinfo. Muh Russia is just horse shit that never happened in any meaningful way beyond the usual countries fucking with each other thing.

I don't think we have differing viewpoints, particularly. Which viewpoint do you disagree with?

Meanwhile, muh Russia idea has .... Trump said something nice about Putin once.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cia-slamdunk-idUSN264...

You know, this situation is what we're talking about here. As for "special training" -you do realize that the special training police receive in firearms is more or less "how to kill people more efficiently," right? Exactly the same training given to civilian holders of concealed carry licenses in the US in states that require them. Seems kind of messed up that a guy with a genuine need can only get what he needs by bribing sherrifs. Looking at his background I don't think he needs much more training.

FWIIW you don't need any training in my state to carry a pistol. In fact you don't even need a license (you will be issued one if you're a non-felon for use in other states). It causes zero problems, my state has the third lowest crime rate in the country. The two lower crime states in the country, we share borders and gun laws with.

>You definitely don't need a gun

You definitely don't get to decide.

Citations needed.