steve_g

Sorry to be pedantic. The proper word is "deduce".

I'm sure I made some sort of grammatical error in this comment.

This guy's main argument is that the objectivist, libertarian folks living in Galt's Gulch wouldn't wear masks, wouldn't have a health department to provide guidance, and would come from an older demographic (more susceptible to Covid). Galt's Gulch would have been ravaged by the plague, thus refuting Ayn Rand's grand philosophy.

Since this is a fictional outcome for a fictional town, I call bullshit.

I'm not saying that Rand had it right; I'm just saying that this guy has nothing to say about her.

I agree with your rules generally, but they're not workable when there's a big power imbalance between the offender and the offendee. Professors and grad students, in particular, have a massive power imbalance. A grad student's success in their multi-year quest for the degree is heavily dependent on the whims of the professor. The student must care about what the professor thinks. Escaping a tyrannical prof could set back the student's career by years.

I considered graduate education after I got my BS, but the risk of ending up as some professor's dog wasn't worth it to me.

Anyone who knows anything about dogs would say that drug-sniffing dogs are a constitutional nightmare. They're basically a rubber-stamp. Dogs want to please their handlers. If the handler wants the dog to alert, the dog will alert. The presence or absence of drugs isn't relevant to the dog.

I never wanted to punch a product designer until I saw that video.

I've seen him talk about his tendency toward depression and I've seen him talk about his recent addiction, illness, and ongoing recuperation.

I've watched a lot of his videos and read his books. I never saw him mock mental disease or say that addiction was for the weak (unless to the extent that all humanity is weak). That just doesn't sound like the type of thing Peterson would say. I have a hard time believing you.

Punching a bully in the chest seems like agency to me. I liked the way that worked out.

My concern would be degradation of efficiency over time as the roof gets dirty. If we're talking about a few percentage points of efficiency, cleanliness will make a big difference. I doubt the paint is robust against frequent cleaning.

This sounds like it would be much better than cheaper alternatives (like whitewash mentioned by others) for one summer, but just one summer.

There are differences in people-group cultures - trivial examples being music genres, manner of speaking, how loud parties get, etc. Substantive group culture differences might include how much education is valued. All this being on average, taken as a group.

But group cultural distinctives/values are very different from corporate culture. Corporate culture goes to how decisions are made, forgiveness vs. permission, what behavior is rewarded, etc. I don't think you can get that from a job interview. I don't believe you can interview for "corporate culture fit" and I don't think it correlates to people-group.

Welcome! We're glad you're here. We CT fans aren't so bad, once you get to know us!

"Think about what a white man would do" seems completely ambiguous to me. It's not a clear way to communicate. It would be better to follow up "I see you're hesitating to take credit for your work" with specific examples of what she might be able to say. Or you could give examples of behavior that people she knows have exhibited.

Even if "what a white man would do" wasn't emotionally charged (and it is), it's not a good way to make the point.

I wrote her a fan letter when I was a boy, probably about 50 years ago. She sent back a brochure with a handwritten note. It made me feel great to get a response from a "famous person"

Rest in peace

Regardless of whether you think Timnit Gebru is a jerk or a very fine person, bias in real-world AI is a big problem.

To the extent algorithms are used to make significant, real-world decisions (whom to arrest, whom to extend credit, whom to grant parole, etc.) they had better be fair. And it seems that black-box algorithmic decisions are becoming more and more prevalent in the real world.

It's been clearly demonstrated that biased training sets give biased results. It's also hard to come up with un-biased training sets. This is a problem that's worth working on.

The caveat is helpful because there's a lot in life that you can't control. Luck plays a part in both success and failure. If you believe that your failures are solely your fault you will be unreasonably discouraged . If you believe your successes are due to you and you alone you'll turn into a jerk.

It's true that your attitude and behaviors matter. Competence is usually rewarded, and you should act in accordance with that truth. But it's not absolute. Life is not a meritocracy (whatever that really means).

I'd say the dick move is firing someone without any kind of coaching or explanation about what you'd like to see done differently. The coaching should have happened well in advance of the firing.

A firing that comes as a complete surprise to the employee is generally a sign of a bad manager (not always, but true enough to be a useful heuristic).

You might consider how you connected with the acquirer. Did they find you? Were you shopping your project to buyers? Are they the only game in town, considering what your project offers?

It sounds like you're not excited by the deal. If you can sustain the status quo for a while more, I'd advise you to ask for more than you really want and be ready to walk away.

I think it's cool that he writes "gruntled."

I got really excited about the Linode/mediawiki solution. We're looking at Jira/Confluence right now, and it seems pretty heavyweight.

But then I remembered nothing takes 20 minutes. I'll bet it takes 20 minutes to set up the wikimedia server and then 4 days of Googling to get our single sign-on to work. We'll have to figure out what to do with backups. Plus we'll need to document the documentation process itself and do the painful change management with the organization. Finally, we don't use Linux, so it would probably take more than 20 minutes to figure this stuff out.

It's a great idea, but it's a non-trivial amount of work. Not that I disagree with your approach, but I'm saddened when I think about how to get there.

In English, the term for caning would be "corporal" punishment. Capital punishment is the death penalty.

Corporal means pertaining to the physical body.

Move, sit, pick, and carry in such a way as to protect your back. Lift with your legs, not your back. Face the load you're lifting.

> "the article also berates self-checkout systems, which everybody I know perceives as a net benefit to their daily lives."

You don't know me, but I want to provide a counter anecdote. My wife and I are both people that see self-checkout as a net negative. The error rate is just too high. They'd be fine if the error rate was low enough so that delays or required assistance was rare. It's not rare.

The best shopping experience is when there are plenty of human cashiers and plenty of lines open.

I don't understand how the mode can be unrepresentative of the overall distribution. It seems like it's one of the finest representatives.

This article describes higher probability letter combinations as higher entropy and lower probability combinations as lower entropy. For example, "yuzz-a-ma-tuzz" is low entropy because z's generally appear with lower probability in English.

I thought entropy worked the other way round - high probability means low entropy and low probability means high entropy. Which is it?

This is great. I read all three articles.

It's amazing how difficult it is to encode rules for dealing with natural language, considering how easy it is for a person to resolve ambiguities, misspellings, and the like. Of course, we forget how much knowledge we have encoded in our own brains.

I'm trying to do named entity recognition for chemicals and materials in quasi-natural language texts that we've developed over many years at work. It's brutal.

It's a problem if the only space on the political/social spectrum you consider "decent" is woke liberalism. The great benefit of civilization is that we can live peacefully with people that we disagree with. If you think everyone who is not a woke liberal is an asshole, fine. But if you want to cancel all assholes, that's not fine.

There have been many times in history when positions that you undoubtedly take were considered "asshole positions" by those in power. Those time will come again.

We need to figure out how to live together.

To save a few clicks, here's the paper that describes the fix and gives some comparisons with the supposedly broken implementation.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.15332.pdf

It sounds like what ALittleLight does is working. Often times people who set boundaries have their boundaries respected. They may get more respect in general.

There's no need to involve anyone else.

It's probably not the path to greatness. I'd say it's more a way to have a basic foundation for thinking.

The thing about fallacies is that they can be persuasive. But if you recognize them for what they are, you can defend against the error.

To extend your metaphor, very few people will be masters of the violin. But it's pretty cool to play it it anyway.

Feeling dumb:

Does this thing learn a graph (i.e. build nodes and edges) from more unstructured data like text in order to make relationships explicit?

Does it take a knowledge graph and use it as partial input to help learn some other function?

Or something else?