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taway_6PplYu5on 'Gen X has had to learn or die': Mid-career workers are facing ageism

Older data scientist; let's call it 20+ career years and I started late.

I can look at a situation and usually almost instantly see the right approach. Couldn't do that when I was earlier in my career; at least not with the same level of confidence (which is supported by my results working in practice).

I can mentor my team-mates to be able to do the same. Work with me for a few months and your skills will certainly improve. I can spot errors in thinking as well as errors in code; correcting the errors in a person's thought, in how they approach a problem, can have profound results fast.

taway_6PplYu5on Artificial Intelligence Act: MEPs adopt law

according to your quote, national authorities.

taway_6PplYu5on Shields up: New ideas might make active shielding viable

"He was turned to steel In a great magnetic field"

taway_6PplYu5on Scientists built their own Stone Age tools to figure out how they were used

I've read that many ant species have more "roles" than a typical British village prior to the industrial revolution.

Note that this is in agreement with you, that the number of trades open for people to work in was pretty small until fairly recently.

taway_6PplYu5on Fishing for oil and meat drives defaunation of deepwater sharks and rays

except we are harvesting all the krill, not leaving a lot for the whales.

and a lot of the krill goes to dog food.

taway_6PplYu5on Ancient counterfeiters and their fake coins

yes, and transactions over a sum much less than 200K require AML/KYC paperwork.

taway_6PplYu5on Why do tree-based models still outperform deep learning on tabular data? (2022)

https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/blogs/statistics-sql-si...

One of several examples of implementing linear regression in SQL.

taway_6PplYu5on 'Your pay is still – not – going up too fast'

ah, yes, "lay flat" and the new Chinese revolution. "We are the last generation"

taway_6PplYu5on On the trail of the Denisovans

I wonder what generates the power for this air conditioning?

Do we also air condition the farms?

taway_6PplYu5on I worry our Copilot is leaving some passengers behind

By a UI modelling language, do you mean HTML or Javascript or CSS?

taway_6PplYu5on The loss of things I took for granted

> There's a difference between banning things (including books) for use in schools and the federal government declaring certain books illegal.

Perhaps. But there is a law in Florida making it a felony for the teacher to have that book in the classroom.

taway_6PplYu5on The loss of things I took for granted

I don't want to debate your claims about the state of public schools, but wonder if it is worth thinking about what could cause this, and consider the types of investments our country is making in public schools and who is deciding on curriculums.

For example, in Wisconsin, one report finds that teacher pay is lower than it was a decade ago. https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/news/education/20... Wisconsin has a budget surplus, the money is there,

And in October 2023, the governer gave raises to all state employees -- except UW emploees. https://wisconsinexaminer.com/brief/lawmakers-approve-raises...

People who work in public education talk about what appears to be a long-running organized campaign to attack public schools and intentionally degrade them. I'm tangential to the debate so don't have evidence at hand, but I can say that the evidence is strong enough that there is a valid case. Obviously without hearing the other side we cannot draw a conclusion, I'm only claiming that the case is sufficient that it is worth hearing.

taway_6PplYu5on How the codpiece flopped

Counterargument is that the global sperm count decline is global.

As in not limited to humans. It is seen in many mammals.

taway_6PplYu5on Some fish live beyond 100 and get healthier as they age

The trick is you need to filter it through asbestos before you drink it.

taway_6PplYu5on Some fish live beyond 100 and get healthier as they age

Wait, so you are saying that over the course of 85 years, we've had enough volcanic eruptions to disrupt the counting of the equivalent of tree rings in fish bones, in a lake in Arizona? When we KNOW when the fish were first put there?

Has Arizona had that many volcanic eruptions in the 20th century which we somehow forgot to notice, but were still strong enough to disrupt the fish?

https://tucson.com/news/local/environment/old-fish-in-arizon...

Just over a century ago, several hundred game fish raised in ponds in Iowa were hauled across the country by rail to be released into Arizona’s newly dammed Salt River.

A recent study suggests some of those transplanted buffalofish are still alive today in the waters of Apache Lake.

Not their descendants. Not members of the same species. The same individual fish that were sent west in 1918, as World War I was winding down in Europe during Woodrow Wilson’s second term as president.

taway_6PplYu5on Field experimental evidence of AI on knowledge worker productivity and quality

Oh, you mean like self-driving cars?

taway_6PplYu5on 25% of US/Canada trade depends on a single privately owned bridge

How do you define "users"? Say something you ordered or bought in a store was shipped along that road, did you "use" it? If one of the employees of that company had to use that road to get to work, did you "use" it? one of their family members, without whose job they wouldn't have theirs?

Should the owner of a toll road have to pay money back to subsidize the costs of the roads which give access to their toll road? Vehicles need to be able to get on/off the road before tolls can be collected.

Or, if we apply your logic, then it is impossible for people to live in rural areas, because the cost of the roads is more than the local economy can bear.

Road networks are an infrastructure investment. Since they are networks, the value comes from the entire network. What is the value of a road with no on or off ramps?

Because the value is so diffisive over both space and time, the only effective way to account for and recoup the cost is through a mechanism that can take a share of the economic growth resulting from the network.

i.e. taxes.

taway_6PplYu5on 25% of US/Canada trade depends on a single privately owned bridge

> The idea that a private individual, no matter how wealthy is able to literally exact a toll on society is ridiculous.

Key recent articles on how the US government is dependent on Elon Musk; how Ukraine depends on Starlink for communications, and how Elon is talking DIRECTLY AND IN PERSON to Putin, while watching Ukrainian troop movements live by monitoring Starlink usage.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/08/28/elon-musks-sha...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/elon-musk-pu...

Elon Musk is “wired for war.” At least, that’s what Musk has told Walter Isaacson, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/elon-...

taway_6PplYu5on Beaver Drop

Maybe an army thing, but much older than WWII.

Geronimo was an Apache war leader who fought against US and Mexican armies, fairly successfully, in the 1850s.

As it turned out, the Apaches were not a match for a much larger and more settled society, so eventually he was forced to surrender.

From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geronimo

Geronimo was a military leader and medicine man from the Bedonkohe band of the Ndendahe Apache people. From 1850 to 1886, Geronimo joined with members of three other Central Apache bands – the Tchihende, the Tsokanende (called Chiricahua by Americans) and the Nednhi – to carry out numerous raids, as well as fight against Mexican and U.S. military campaigns in the northern Mexico states of Chihuahua and Sonora and in the southwestern American territories of New Mexico and Arizona.

taway_6PplYu5on Conway's Game of Life is omniperiodic

Can I say it one more time? Get him building eurorack modules. It's like legos for sound. So many possible combinations! Everything is voltage controlled, so the output of anything can be inputs for anything.

And you get to build lots of cool circuits. Designing your own isn't hard, you can get really far with just op-amps and resistor/capacitor circuits.

some of the resistors are potometers, of course. So you have some knobs to turn.

But it is usually bog-standard chips. op-amp, simple gates, 8-bit buffers.

taway_6PplYu5on Conway's Game of Life is omniperiodic

If you can get him into building eurorack synthesizers, he can start turning some of this math into music.

This module, for example https://www.nonlinearcircuits.com/modules/p/cellular-automat... uses networks of XOR gates to create "is a 16 cell gate and pattern generator using cellular automata rules 90 & 150".

Blinky lights in a grid that steps with those rules and can steer other modules.

I love mine.

The designer has many other wild designs based on chaotic dynamics and many other non-linear mathematical concepts. The name is kind of a giveaway.

taway_6PplYu5on London trains see power cut as thousands stranded in dark for hours

yes, because what if one of those people is touching the power rail? What do we know about the demographics of the people walking? How do we know they all made it out, or is someone lying down somewhere on the track?

taway_6PplYu5on OpenAI negotiations to reinstate Altman hit snag over board role

Bauhaus. 1926.

it is inconsistent in language usage to write differently than to speak. we don’t speak big sounds, that’s why we don't write them either. and: doesn’t one say the same thing with one alphabet as with two alphabets? why does one merge two alphabets of completely different characters into one word or sentence and thereby make the written image inharmonic? either large or small. the large alphabet is illegible in the typesetting. therefore the small alphabet. and: if we think of the typewriter, the limitation to lower case characters means great relief and is time saving. and if we think further, it would be simplified by switching off upper case characters.

taway_6PplYu5on Typing fast is about latency, not throughput

and speed is economy of motion

taway_6PplYu5on Small business owners say they're pressured to hire off-duty cops for security

Your scenario starts with a gun pointed at the person. How much training do you believe is required such that an otherwise ordinary person "win" a gunfight when their gun is holstered and the opponent already has them in their aim?

taway_6PplYu5on Visualizing American inflation across eight categories

Yes, the famous "Yuppie lunch ticket"

taway_6PplYu5on Visualizing American inflation across eight categories

You know, the Spanish once found a whole country made out of silver, they called it Argentina (argent == silver). And they brought a lot of this silver back to mainland Spain.

While the value of silver coin did not shrink to zero during that time, it did shrink quite a bit, all across Europe. Historians like to write about 150 years of massive inflation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution

taway_6PplYu5on Fair coins tend to land on the same side they started

(preface with "in today's world")

taway_6PplYu5on The largest DDoS attack to date, peaking above 398M rps

New headline suggestion: Unnamed group creates larges DDoS attack to date.