throwawayjava

Color me skeptical, but it seems like such a system would eventually need to seek out a business model and would turn into mugshotsonline.us writ large. Or "toxic yelp reviews of dubious origin" but for humans instead of businesses. And with all the perverse incentives.

Censorship is bad, but profit-motivated society-wide forever-grudges against people in no significant position of power is also bad.

There's a strong sentiment in certain circles that the best way to deal with emerging powers is by incorporating them into global neoliberal institutions. The theory is that including these countries sets up the correct incentives for liberalization, and that liberal markets beget a middle clas s which eventually demands democratic voice. And democracies are western-friendly.

So the roadmap for China was supposed to be a gradual liberalization, first economically and then politically. This strategy is a long game and "requires patience".

I'm not particularly convinced by this argument (it's too... cold war-y), but I'm doing my best to portray it accurately. And if you accept its basic premise, then there's a strong geopolitical long-game case for "putting up with" asymmetric trade barriers.

The original "data is the new oil" quote was pointing out that raw data, like raw oil, requires lots of processing/refinement before the raw resource becomes something with a lot of economic value and potential [1].

In that sense, simulated environments are the oil of deep RL.

Deep RL has a lot of promise (and obv is already delivering on that promise). But when it comes to the need for high-fidelity and accurate models, we're out of the frying pan and into the fire.

[1] https://medium.com/@TalPerry/on-labeled-data-85fbaf1bdf89

My parents never asked me about NoSQL, and celebrities didn't sell/promote IPOs for companies built around XML processing libraries...

The author hits on this in the end:

> There are some very real things to worry about in association with Blockchain. Cryptocurrencies are not investment strategies, and are not going to have any of the promised power-distribution and -equalization effects they peddle while their value and cost fluctuate so wildly.

Companies and VCs investing in NoSQL databases really were trying to creating business around developer tooling. But most blockchain companies aren't selling themselves as developer tooling companies. The rest of the comparison seems less important than that distinction.

But let's jump into the "finding labor/business case" problem.

> It is already very hard to find a decent backend developer

And why is that?

> In my opinion the super hype over Javascript is because of it's simplicity(compared to GO for example).

Agreed! You totally hit the nail on the head! The reason frontend is easier to hire for, is because HTML+CSS+Javascript provides a relatively small minimal viable set of abstractions that allow you to be productive.

Of course, I don't want to diminish the fact that there's an infinite rabbit hole of complexity here (see e.g., wavethrough); serious engineers can definitely thrive in front-end work. But for "productive enough frontend dev", the set of things you have to learn is relatively small compared to backend.

> if the frontend is written in backend language like GO, it kind of makes it worse.

On the contrary, I think WASM could enable a fix to your problem!

The question is, could we build a WASM-backed unified development environment that allows people to learn full-stack development in the same amount of time that it currently takes to learn just the front-end stuff? And can you produce productive full-stack engineers for a particular full-stack framework while skipping a lot of the fundamental CS stuff?

If the answer to both is "yes", then coding bootcamps could step into that environment that churn out lots of relatively cheap/easy-to-find full stack development talent!

So. Who can build a single framework providing a small set of abstractions (learnable in 6-12 weeks from scratch) that allows for both front-end and back-end development? If someone can do that, and build an educational commodity around it (i.e., a scalable model for bootcamps), then I could see wasm enabling a whole new approach toward web development in which "not top-tier but definitely good enough" fullstack developers are at least as easy to find and for the same price as today's "not top-tier but definitely good enough" frontend developers.

The number of hours I've spent debugging Python/PHP code written by developers who don't understand co-/contra-variance...

Kind of like how "cookie" is not web specific but unless mentioned in an explicitly nonweb context, it means browser cookies.

The smallest possible correct program implementing a tax calculator is going to be a LOT bigger than the smallest possible correct program for controlling a 60's era manned flight to the moon. The latter is more complex in other ways, of course.

Complexity can be "deep" or "wide". software for rockets is "deep and thin complexity", but calculating hyper-local minimal tax bills is extreme "wide and shallow complexity".

And it's a valid point! If people really are choosing not to take jobs that are readily available, then automating those jobs is a net benefit.

Now, we should not ignore the fact that this is stated as a hypothetical! Are there a mass of unemployed who are choosing not to work? And would all of the people who lose their jobs due to burger flipping automation be able to find new jobs or be happy with no job?

Those seem like the more relevant questions.

This strikes me as eerily similar to the argument that type systems are impossible because of the halting problem. It's sort of true in some sense, but not in an even remotely useful way. So it mostly functions as a way of derailing the conversation away of the more subtle distinctions that do matter (e.g., could we design an easy-to-use type system that rules out this particular type of non-termination/other class of bugs).

There's a large middle-ground between "hard code all your own rules" and "completely unconstrained learning". Learning under constraints is not a new idea.

A classical programming analogy to your argument might be "well the halting problem is undecidable so ignore all this high-level language stuff and just go code up your own turing machine; it's the best you'll ever be able to do".

> because you aren't going to find "fairness" in machine learning.

Why not? The human notion of fairness is fuzzy, which is why researchers have provided various formal notions of fairness in machine learning tasks. Obviously, these formal definitions may or may not correspond to your own gut instinct about what is "fair". And there might be friction between different notions of fairness. None of that should be surprising; otherwise, fairness wouldn't be something that philosophers continue to bleed ink about.

But it is equally obvious that for some notions of fairness, there will exist machine learning algorithms that learn well under the given constraint.

This is not about national security. This is very explicitly a response to Google's desire not to cooperate with the US military on explicitly defense-related research. Two senators literally drew that line for us.

Agree! Could you imagine having millions or billions of records of students learning the same set of concepts? Big data pedagogy, here we come!

> Kids skipping class, kids beating up other kids, even someone walking in with a weapon

Oh... Disagree :-(

Schools are places of learning, not prisons. Technology in schools should enable learning, not surveillance.

That's sad. You should spend time with some different kids. The ones I spend time with have an insatiable appetite for learning new things. Each student is passionate about something different, of course.

> They don't look at public schools as refuge, or as empowerment.

That seems mostly orthogonal to the question of whether they want to learn and whether they realize that learning can be empowering.

The amount of cognitive dissonance in this quote is ridiculous. When I originally read this qoute, I was expecting to find further down that Google is doing defense research with China.

But nope. Google is contracting with a Chinese manufacturer to build cell phones, not performing weaponized AI research with the People's Liberation Army.

Apparently, it's unpatriotic and borderline traitorous to say "you know what? I'd rather focus on building some decent cellphones instead of finding new ways to kill people from afar."

Surprisingly, it's not really a huge deal.

Nonetheless, Switzerland has a relationship with the rest of the EU that is analogous to the relationship between a small, dense US state and the rest of the USA.

Nonetheless, Zurich has a relationship with the rest of the EU that is analogous to the relationship between NYC and the rest of the USA.

This issue of whether Switzerland is properly considered "part of" the EU regardless of its membership status seems like quite the diversion from my actual point and is not at all relevant to the parallel I was drawing.

>> This leads to hugely destructive wars.

> Nonsense. Self-interest != hostility.

Right. Just because someone is looking out for their own self interest doesn't mean that they are constantly "winning" a zero-sum game with someone else. In fact, sometimes cooperating is the most self-interested move you can make...

Which is exactly why all of these other nations might be "upset about the US change in behavior" without necessarily prescribing any course of action that isn't also in the US's best interest.

That's because you still haven't answered the original question:

>>> Is a trade deficit important to not have?

E.g., consider your examples:

>sheiks owning the sports teams and chineese businessman owning all the prime housing

Given that I'm not the type of person who buys sports teams and prime housing (of the sort purchased by Chinese businessmen), why should I care about that style of FDI? I mean, I guess it must suck for the American ultra-rich that they now have to compete with the Chinese ultra-rich for access to ultra-veblen goods like owning sports teams, but... why the hell should the rest of us care which mega-rich person owns the local sports team!? What possible material impact could that ever have on us?

The only type of FDI that effects my life is FDI in productive assets, like factories, and those are strictly good for me (more and better-paying jobs).

"So we lost the Toyota factory but on the plus side the sports team isn't owned by a Sheik" seems like a really dumb trade-off. What am I missing here...?

What am I missing?

They're both instances of a relatively small area with very tight historical ties to a much larger region. The relationship between the local economies and the regional economies bears enlightening similarities.

US states are not sovereign nations. but the analogy b/w EU member states and US states still makes perfect sense in some economic discussions.

The analogy is useful. A more apt criticism of the analogy might be "Switzerland's economy is not tightly integrated and dependent on the EU's economy" or "Switzerland has lots of tariffs", but neither of those things is true.

So, if we're going to follow Switzerland's lead, we would roll back tariffs.

Switzerland is more akin to the EU's version of Massachusetts or New York, and Zurich is the EU's version of Manhattan or SF. It's the sort of economic zone that will always exist in a large economy like the US or the EU. The population is disproportionately made up of citizens from one or two cities/metro areas, and those cities have a high concentration of highly educated and highly paid individuals typically focused on one of a few industries. Consequently, even those employed outside of these high-paying industries make more than average compared to the rest of the country/bloc.

Situating ourselves similarly to Switzerland requires placing the US very high in the global value chain while maintaining a global order of very low trade barriers. Which has always been the neoliberal agenda, at least ostisibly.

In other words, if we want to emulate Switzerland, we have to do exactly the opposite of the Trump plan -- continue offshoring anything lower in the value chain, continue insisting on low trade barriers, continue dominating everything higher in the value chain. Obviously, even if this strategy works for the country in aggregate, it's going ot have definite losers in a country as large as the US.

On a (very!) related note, the US and Switzerland currently have basically the same PPP.

[1] https://www.heritage.org/index/country/switzerland

I strongly disagree. Here are four notable counter-examples:

1. Desktop Linux. I'm a religious Linux desktop user, but MacOS is definitely a better operating system.

2. Office suites. Libreoffice/OpenOffice/whatever-we're-supposed-to-call-it-these-days is stuck in the 1990s.

3. Videogames.

4. Large web services (Google Search, GMail, Facebook).

Notice that four these examples, where closed-source software outshines OSS in quality, cover 90+% of most people's computer time...

Open source software seems to do especially well mostly when the end-user of the software product is a programmer/software engineer/IT type.

I have no idea about these patents, but it's certainly possible that those particular patents describe functional subcomponents/processes of an overall system that doesn't work.

> How come some prominent physicist or biologist doing "competition research" didn't declare that the patents were based on bogus claims?

I'm not sure what "competition research" means. In any case, approximately 0% of prominent scientists read patents. Patents are written both for and by lawyers/courts.

Yes. SAT/ACT scores are terrible signals because of Goodhart's law. Professional tutoring in wealthy suburbs starts at $100/hr. Many ambitious students opt for four-figure private prep courses.

SAT/ACT scores may have been good signals 20 years ago. But today, those scores discriminate against poor students and students aren't inculcated into the "elite institution rat race" from a young age.

That discrimination matters to U Chicago because they are interested in admitting brilliant, creative thinkers. Not perfectly groomed drones. If you don't require test scores, then there's a lot less back-and-forth about admitting that one kid who did publishable research as a high schooler but also happened to do only so-so on the associated SAT subject test.

Qualitative evaluations have many problems, but overly quantitative evaluations also have their failure modes. Especially when the candidate knows the quantitative function they're supposed to be optimizing.

> for students who have the time and encouragement to study for them

It's not just time and encouragement. SAT/ACT prep is serious industry. $100+/hr tutoring sessions. Owners of good SAT prep businesses can make six or seven figures in a few months.

And good prep courses really do work. Tests, like coding interviews, are a game you can hack with enough time and effort.

The signal is totally washed out; with enough money, you can learn how to take the test well enough.

But yes, referring to a proposed amendment as "the 28th amendment" is very confusing, since there will always be multiple proposed amendments at any given point in time.