syntaxfree

So wait, I have pictures of my baby son’s poop to send the pediatrician — which show what will eventually be his naughty bits, as he becomes sexual (in due time, years from now)

I actually don’t have many nudeish pics of him because it’s very cold right now, but we take dozens and dozens of daily pictures so — but in the summer… when maybe he’s going to the kiddie pool grandpa has…

It’s good work, congratulations.

I don’t know what ECS is. You should define the acronym…

The math equations made by Word have a distinctive appearance. Partly because they’re objectively worse in some (a few) aspects, partly because people associate them with Word, the result feels amateurish. This isn’t purely an intrinsic technical quality of Word, it’s just how the cookie crumbles.

Re: lyx as a hard to get into GUI.

Overleaf has decent tab completion and dozens of templates, as well as limited support for markdown. Let tabnine and copilot get to LaTeX; I think we’ll find the discoverability of “text language on Adderall” outguns GUIs.

There's galaxies or distance between "this is acceptable" and "this is understandable".

People are screwed up. You are, too. I hope your business partners and allies don't hold you to the standard you're bearing when your time to behave badly comes.

You can never rule out money laundering. Acquire a big stake of a failing company, claim proceeds from liquidation.

My favourite term of emphasis is "on manifolds".

People often take postmodern theory to be prescriptive and agitate against it -- when it is actually descriptive and sorely needed.

Where existent theory is flawed, it needs improvement. But the world is going to keep going where it's going...

There's also Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Morris comes across as pulling a Neil deGrasse Tyson stunt.

So what's irssi for Matrix?

Important for many real use cases such as estimating demand from prices instrumental variable regression.

There's this other thing called the FWL theorem.

As long as the unexplained term is uncorrelated (in the probabilistic model; linear regression will force this to be the case computationally) with the included variables, your coefficients will remain unchanged. So adding/removing variables shouldn't change results at all -- unless the model is mis-specified and you're including variables that correlate with unobserved factors in unexpected ways.

So for example a regression of children's IQ on the income of their parents provides a plausible mechanism; but if you add the arm length of the kids you will have problems, since arm length is correlated to an omitted variable (kids with longer arms are older and perform better on IQ tests).

That's most of the "in context" story. Nothing to do with multicollinearity.

This is... beautiful.

( the past inside the present: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7bKe_Zgk4o )

Is inline LateX available in a free Ghost host akin to Wordpress.com?

By the way: this needs to be matched against a baseline distribution of initial letters in words and common names. Zoozimps, yo.

Optimality implies objectivity. You don't choose the optimal name, you find out what it is.

1. Some large percentage, possibly more than half, of what a doctor does is diagnosis and prognosis. This is all pure probability. Failure to understand the difference between Prob(A|B) and Prob(B|A) has nontrivial consequences.

2. Frontier areas of medicine -- oncology, psychiatry -- deal increasingly with uncommon situations that not necessarily happen with enough frequency for a doctor to develop a doctorly intuition. There are some great resources -- meta-analyses, for example -- out there, but if we keep cutting slack to practitioners and let them follow the word of "thought leaders", medicine becomes the prey of ideological waves and conceptual fashions.

Couple of links on Roko's Basilisk, which is Forbidden Knowledge in LW:

An explanation: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

Yudkowsky going gaga on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/LessWrong/comments/17y819/lw_uncenso...

> The fact that you disagree and think you understand the theory much better than I do and can confidently say the Babyfucker will not hurt any innocent bystanders, is not sufficient to exempt you from the polite requirement that potential information hazards shouldn't be posted without being wrapped up in warning envelopes that require a deliberate action to look through. Likewise, they shouldn't be referred-to if the reference is likely to cause some innocently curious bystander to look up the material without having seen any proper warning labels. Basically, the same obvious precautions you'd use if Lovecraft's Necronomicon was online and could be found using simple Google keywords - you wouldn't post anything which would cause anyone to enter those Google keywords, unless they'd been warned about the potential consequences. A comment containing such a reference would, of course, be deleted by moderators; people innocently reading a forum have a reasonable expectation that Googling a mysterious-sounding discussion will not suddenly expose them to an information hazard. You can act as if your personal confidence exempts you from this point of netiquette, and the moderator will continue not to live in your personal mental world and will go on deleting such comments.

Uh...

The limit case of this is lesswrong.com, which is a kind of cultish/Vulcan purge of all fallacies. (Ask around about Roko's basilisk)

Does this mean that every teen can write google glass apps now (Z80 assembly was really easy to learn) but in twenty years time AR technology will be unwieldy, crashy and overfeatured?

That says something interesting about behavior and how the function/form relation is contingent but slow-moving. Star Trek communicators were supposed to be used on loudspeaker and looked directly at, and yet when we got flip phones we used them exactly like rotaries.

Your uncle had a mobile, but when he needed to talk in public, he needed the kind of physical anchoring that was associated with talking on the phone in public -- enough that he generated the illusion of being on a payphone. (Much like if you talk on a cellphone that's connected to a charging chord, you still generate the illusion of a landline).

What does this say about glass? That we want it to work like things that are already there -- an always-with-you screen, for example, or a mini-GoPro -- and it might take a while to really come on its own. If it ever takes off, of course. Google has deep pockets but the acceleration is unrelenting and unforgiving.

Somehow I think the government in South Sudan would just rip these off people's faces.

I love Ted Nelson. He had a vision of a future that never materialized, and never will, but he's not bitter. Instead, he's keen on showing people that this "future" thing isn't an inevitable train crashing towards us, but the result of many, many choices, none of them neutral.

How is inflation is SA currently? Inflation tends to hypertrophyze unions, because there comes a need to a common agreement to adjust wages across the board to keep up with prices.

They share some risk in the form of correlations to the actual risk to their employment contracts. But employees who are fired during downturns walk away with all of their human capital and most of their future earning potential (minus what the firing signals in their CV), while the downturn chips away at the firm's capital.

Let me put this another way: no one is really entitled to a job; not in the way their entitled to their properties, which have a _title to their name_. Capital, on the other hand, risks its very entitlement. Employees don't have any assets seized during a downturn. If they wanted to share in the risk and return, they could have bought stock.

The elephant in the room is -- it's 2006, erm, 2012, and even shell scripts can't be expected to run reliably in lowercase-linux anymore?

... this wouldn't be a problem if Ubuntu hadn't run away with its own default shell...

Ah, to be young and naïve again.