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interesting quote:
" "It's possible to argue that films such as The Matrix, Terminator II and T3 are structured like video games, each with plots that feature levels of increasing difficulty," says the study. "
-- A study by the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association
if i have the album "turn blue" by The Black Keys on my Android phone in the play store in a list of potential albums to buy, the icon/album picture is a spiral. If i then scroll up and down, one of those magnetic lines of force of a bar magnet-like pictures appears. Are the typical magnetic lines of force of a bar magnet a Moire pattern of two superimposed pictures of a spiral displaced slightly vertically? If so, does this mean anything for the physics of electromagnetism? Also, i recall that magnetism was shown to be a relativistic consequence of moving electrons; is that related?
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hard work: hard work is indeed the largest controllable determinant of success, and it is also a virtue. However, one thing to be aware of is that you may have more demands on your time than you can satisfy even if you work hard. In this case, you will have to choose how much time to spend on each thing, and the effects of depriving some things of your time will be the same as if that was the only thing you had to do and you weren't working hard. Obvious implications: (a) if you work hard overall, this doesn't necessarily mean you are giving any specific thing enough time, (b) even if you work hard overall, you may not be seen as a hard worker if your efforts are divided, (c) this is yet another reason not to overcommit.
3 notions of "difficult":
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wow this is so accurate:
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you know that saying that in chemistry is really physics, physics is really math, etc? i have something to add:
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it's easier to understand sentences that don't have negation (or have less instances of negation).
The concept of a "best x" can often be substituted for "there is no y better than x".
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we don't know anything
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there needs to be a 'futurist scenarios' wiki which gives brief standardized names or identifiers to scenarios (and 'possibilities', which are attributes of scenarios, eg 'teleportation invented' is a possibility, 'US GDP rises by 50% from 2015 to 2020' is (still only part of) a scenario) like tvtropes.org does for 'tropes' (note; some tropes on tvtropes.org are also scenarios)
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http://lifehacker.com/all-the-first-aid-stuff-thats-changed-since-you-first-l-1742121480
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in Sandman, Dream plays "the oldest game" with a demon. "The oldest game" turns out to be one where each participant imagines themselves to be whatever they want. This seems like a particularly Dream kind of game (no wonder he won). What would be the analogs for the other Endless?
Death: i'm not sure; maybe peek-a-boo? Destiny: flip a coin Destruction: dueling Delight/Delirium: tickling Desire: seduction Despair: i'm not sure (maybe prisoner's dilemma?)
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conditional rationality: eg consider going to a casino with slot machines that let you choose how much to wager on each spin. You know the expected value is negative, so it's rational not to play. But what if you have already decided to play until either you lose $100, or you win $100? In this case it's rational to bet it all immediately (b/c the more iterations you play, by the law of large numbers (sorta?) the more the outcome will tend to converge to the expectation).
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" Anthropologists tend to use a method called “ethnography” as a way of negotiating design validity. The method gets characterized in many different ways, but I find it useful to think about ethnography as requiring you to go into situations that are more-or-less foreign to you and to put your own intuition and assumptions to sleep. You get input from “natives” about how they view those situations, and then you wake your own intuition back up in order to translate what you’ve learned into something that looks like a coherent and reasonable story to you. You then take that story back and revise it until it seems like a coherent and reasonable story to them too. It’s iterated, negotiated story-telling. " [1]
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" "You Are Not a Gadget." One of Lanier's points in that book is that technology can both augment expression and bound it. The Like Button is a classic example of bounding because it reduces your thoughts and feelings about a piece of content to a thumbs up, whereas a simple textbox would let you note whatever you want about the content (text is also harder to monetize and analyze and control).
I personally have been noticing more and more how technology and algorithms seem to bounding expression online and off, particularly around content creation, but also with influencers and personal branding and so on. " -- [2]
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dunno where i wrote this before (i think i did, some of it at least), but some conventions i use for notes:
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a misc. thought on goal-setting/design
in principle, if you optimize for one metric, you can do better on that metric than if you had optimized simultaneously for multiple metrics; that is, adding additional goals may detract from your ability to achieve the first goal.
However, there are different levels of sacrifice here. For example, sometimes there are things you can do that help goal #2 significantly while having only a small (or perhaps highly improbable but significant if it did occur) negative impact on goal #1. Let's define some language for talking about this sort of thing.
We could divide goals into 'major', 'minor', and 'tertiary', or alternately, describe goal importance/priority as high/medium/low.
Within one class (class = major/minor/tertiary, or high/medium/low), this definition neither prohibits or requires some level of sacrifice (this doesn't mean that anything goes; other constraints may or may be present and may or may not be given in some other way). Between two class separated by one step (eg major and minor), a 'moderate' level of sacrifice of the higher class to achieve a 'large' gain in the lower one may be tolerated; between two classes separated by two steps (eg major and tertiary), only a small or improbable sacrifice to achieve a large gain in the lower one may be tolerated.
Also, let's say that in addition to the class-ified goals, there may be other 'implicit constraint' goals. For example, a corporation doesn't need to list "Don't break the law" as a major goal, because this is implicit. The importance of implicit constraints over goals is even stronger than between classes; even a large gain in any goal may not justify even a small breaking of an implicit constraint. For example, many corporations have 'making money' as a goal, but many of them would not want to commit a crime for any amount of money. On the other hand, when uncertaintly comes into play, there are still tradeoffs; for example, in the modern world it may take boatloads of lawyers to even figure out what the law is, and even then there may be uncertainty; this makes it impossible to be 100% sure that you are compliant in all respects; in the face of the remaining 5% chance that they are accidentally breaking the law, instead of just closing up shop and quitting, many businesses try their best to understand and comply with the law and continue on.
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on evil
my guess is:
on the existence and consequences of evil:
complexities in what is 'evil':
Because of these complexities, even if you knew for a fact that you were dealing with an 'extremely good' person it can be hard to have any confidence that they would deny themselves a particular action in a particular situation.
Because of those complexities it's usually (but not always) more profitable to think and speak in terms of evil actions rather than evil people; to act as if there is no such thing as a 'good person' or a 'bad person'.
some silver linings:
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regarding "It's Easier To Ask Forgiveness Than To Get Permission":
" majos 1 day ago [-]
It's also easier to give forgiveness than permission, especially in an institutional context. Forgiveness after the fact doesn't imply approval of the act the way permission beforehand does.
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rdtsc 23 hours ago [-]
You have to dig deeper and ask what makes asking for permission difficult.
In an institutional context when we ask for permission from higher ups, especially publicly, we put them on the spot to clarify some rule or make a pronouncement which rules will be enforced and which won't. Sometimes you have to break rules, or perversely are even expected to, just to get things done. Asking permission means the boss has to tell you that you cannot break the rule officially, even though they know the rule has to be broken for the task to be accomplished. So not only do they deny the permission, they also resent you for forcing them to make the pronouncement and preventing anyone in the near future from accomplishing the task at hand efficiently. In other words even as they respond with "No, Peter, you cannot bypass filling out 10 TPS reports just to fix this bug" in their head they are thinking "Why the fuck didn't you just do it. Why did you have to ask me about it in front of everyone..."
Large power structures usually have rules you cannot break, you can break if you want to, and perversely enough, you should or are expected to break. Winning or losing the politics game often comes down to simply understanding which rules belong to each set.
reply " [3]
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orion's arm idea
A polity that uses modosophonts to assess the clarity / simplicity of expressions of ideas. It does experiments like have a jury of mods who are told an idea, permitted very few modifications and little time to think about it, and then tested to see if they understood it.
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have you ever noticed that on news-ish discussion forums with a front page of ranked posts, that people who agree with an article or are glad about an event (or if not glad, at least i-told-you-so about a bad thing) tend to post more in that article?
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"Only seven stories (six percent) were primarily based on original reporting. These were produced by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Tech News World, Bloomberg, Xinhua (China), and the Global Times (China)." [4]
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one thing i've often wondered about is: if you could live for a very long time, say 10,000 years, and meet all sorts of people, would you find that you can categorize people into a small number of personality types? say, 400 types?
my current guess is, not exactly: what you would find is that people vary across a number of variables, and within each of those variables, there are a small number of options, but the number of total personality profiles is very large (on the order of options_per_variable^number_of_variables); and you would find that the interactions between variables are important and so prevent you from predicting behavior very well without thinking about multiple variables.
As a thought experiment, consider the relevance of physical variables to choices that we might be tempted to consider purely psychologic. For example, someone may get very sleepy in the afternoon; you can see how this may have an effect on the types of career they choose, effects which could not be predicted considering only their psychological inclinations; you'd need to consider both this physical variable and psychological variables to predict an individual's career preferences. You can see how similar effects would make it hard to predict most things knowing only one or two of the psychological variables.
With an equation like options_per_variable^number_of_variables, there doesn't have to be too many variables and options for the number of total personality types to rise way about 400. For example, 9 variables each with 3 options is already 3^9 = 19683.
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two practical issues that come up when discussing politics are:
1) sometimes people talk about what the ideal policy should be, and othertimes they talk about what the ideal compromise policy should be out of the set of policies that they think have a reasonable chance of being enacted. If one person is talking about one and a second person is talking about the other, a lot of time can be wasted by not being explicit about this
2) People are offended by certain viewpoints and if someone tells others that you said something that sounds like an offensive viewpoint, you will be socially sanctioned, even if upon a very close nitpicking examination of what you said, you didn't actually support that viewpoint. Therefore you must refrain from agreeing with certain statements even if you think they are technically true if they happen to sound too close to other statements that you strongly disagree with (especially when the problems of taking something out of context are considered). Furthermore, you know that your reasoning ability is not perfect, so to protect yourself from misunderstanding the meanings of words and implications of a statement and accidentally saying something that you disagree with and that is offensive, you should probably add in a large additional margin of safety, and refuse to support statements that are even near statements that you disagree with.
This presents problems in debate because the counterparty might present a statement that both of you actually think is technically true, but that is worded to sound very close to something that you strongly agree with, and then ask you to agree with it. Now you cannot just say that you agree because this may be misinterpreted by others. But you cannot disagree either because, since you actually agree, that may be logically inconsistent with your other positions. This makes debate difficult because sometimes A or B are contradictory, and some of your statements seem to imply that you believe A, but your other statements seem to imply that you believe B, so the person you are talking to wants to know which it is, and your refusing to answer this question makes things hard and makes you appear to be trying to be slippery instead of earnest.
However, i don't see any easier way. I think people just have to accept the practical reality that sometimes the person they are talking to is unable to answer questions of the form "Do you acccept proposition X?". What they can usually do is to explicitly state that X sounds too close to things they don't support so they are not going to answer the question, and then rephrase X into some other similar proposition X' that they can support, and then say that they support X'. I advocate more awareness of this sort of situation and more acceptance of this solution.
Closely related, unfortunately, the popular understanding of various words and phrases is often at odds with their formal meaning and implications. Such words and phrases should be avoided when possible because of their potential to formulate assertions which can 'trap' people when the actual formal meaning of the assertion is something they agree with, but the popular understanding of the assertion is something they disagree with. Again, i think the remedy is to encourage and permit debaters to attempt to reformulate assertions using different wording.
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not sure where this belongs, but consider the sci-fi situation where someone could create copies of themselves, not just clones of their body (twins) but also copies of their mind.
How would copies of you interact with each other? Would they work together? If so, how would they govern this interaction? Would they legally be considered one person or many?
One imagines that various people might have different ideas about how they and their copies should interact. It would be useful for them to think about this and come up with a firm idea for at least an initial collaborative scheme before they 'branched' into copies, so that it would be certain that all of the copies, at least initially, would agree with the plan.
One could imagine a variety of scheme. One idea would be a strict totalitarian authoritarian hierarchy (with one 'monarch' or 'prime' copy having unquestioned absolute authority over the others). Another would be a complete lack of coordination with one another, where the copies live separate lives just as if they were completely unrelated people. In the middle one could imagine various scheme using special decision-making protocols only appropriate where complete trust can be assumed.
However, my guess is that the best way to do it would be to use the same collaboration, decision-making, and communications protocols used elsewhere by humans. Why is this -- couldn't we expect one's copies to be more trustworthy and altrusistic to each other, enabling us to dispense with the large overhead of normal human protocols that protect against bad actors? Well, first, even if one could initially completely trust one's own copies, the system is vulnerable to subversion. This could come in various forms; (a) an enemy/criminal could brainwash or 'reprogram' some copies, (b) an enemy/criminal could impersonate some copies (even if the copies initially share 'passwords' or other secret ways of authenticating each other, over time enemy/criminal surveillance and intimidation could potentially 'break' this authentication), (c) an enemy/criminal could intimidate some copies. This means that even if all of the copies have good intentions towards each other, this is not sufficient to guarantee that, for example, suggestions apparently given by a copy are always in the interest of the group (so, for example, the 'monarch' system would be particularly vulnerable because an enemy/criminal need only subvert the monarch copy to gain control of the whole group). Second, since this has never occurred before, it's unknown if some of the copies would over time evolve to be selfish rather than to act in the interests of the group.
So, i would imagine that a good system would be for the copies would think of themselves as separate individuals, and set up some sort of ordinary legal corporate entity, with ordinary voting procedures, for collaboration. It is likely that the expected trust and altruism between copies, in addition to shared values, goals, and background, would lead to much less 'politics' than other corporations, leading to much more efficient than average corporate functioning (not to mention more pleasant interactions) -- although on the other hand, a lack of diversity of thought and lack of diversity of background knowledge would probably lead to the corporation to occasionally make surprisingly dumb decisions.
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related technologies:
An 'upload' scenario may or may not be possible, where the mind can be transferred into a digitized storage medium and then either executed there in VR or 'downloaded' into other bodies.
Some consequencies of upload technology:
If the mind can be executed in VR, it may or may not be possible to:
It may or may not also be possible to:
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" cperciva 3 days ago [-]
This reminds me of a different "rule of 3": If you want to compare two things (e.g., "is my new code faster than my old code"), a very simple approach is to measure each three times. If the all three measurements of X are smaller than all three measurements of Y, you have X < Y with 95% confidence.
This works because the probability of the ordering XXXYYY happening by random chance is 1/(6 choose 3) = 1/20 = 5%. It's quite a weak approach -- you can get more sensitivity if you know something about the measurements (e.g., that errors are normally distributed) -- but for a quick-and-dirty verification of "this should be a big win" I find that it's very convenient.
reply " -- [5]
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" Suppose you’re proofreading a book. If you’ve read 20 pages and found 7 typos, you might reasonably estimate that the chances of a page having a typo are 7/20. But what if you’ve read 20 pages and found no typos. Are you willing to conclude that the chances of a page having a typo are 0/20, i.e. the book has absolutely no typos?
To take another example, suppose you are testing children for perfect pitch. You’ve tested 100 children so far and haven’t found any with perfect pitch. Do you conclude that children don’t have perfect pitch? You know that some do because you’ve heard of instances before. Your data suggest perfect pitch in children is at least rare. But how rare?
The rule of three gives a quick and dirty way to estimate these kinds of probabilities. It says that if you’ve tested N cases and haven’t found what you’re looking for, a reasonable estimate is that the probability is less than 3/N. So in our proofreading example, if you haven’t found any typos in 20 pages, you could estimate that the probability of a page having a typo is less than 15%. In the perfect pitch example, you could conclude that fewer than 3% of children have perfect pitch.
...
What makes the rule of three work? Suppose the probability of what you’re looking for is p. If we want a 95% confidence interval, we want to find the largest p so that the probability of no successes out of n trials is 0.05, i.e. we want to solve (1-p)n = 0.05 for p. Taking logs of both sides, n log(1-p) = log(0.05) ≈ -3. Since log(1-p) is approximately –p for small values of p, we have p ≈ 3/n.
The derivation above gives the frequentist perspective. I’ll now give the Bayesian derivation of the same result. Then you can say “p is probably less than 3/N” in clear conscience since Bayesians are allowed to make such statements.
Suppose you start with a uniform prior on p. The posterior distribution on p after having seen 0 successes and N failures has a beta(1, N+1) distribution. If you calculate the posterior probability of p being less than 3/N you get an expression that approaches 1 – exp(-3) as N gets large, and 1 – exp(-3) ≈ 0.95. " [6]
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madrox 3 days ago [-]
What the author glosses over somewhat is the method of sampling. If you read the first 20 pages, find no typos, and use this rule to arrive at 15%, that could be way off. He's assuming the risk of typos are evenly distributed when there's a lot of reasons it may not be. For example, the first half of the book could've been more heavily proof-read than the latter half. It's not out of the question that editors get lazier the farther they get into the book.
If you were to randomly read 20 pages in a book and find no typos, 15% probability makes more sense.
It's understandable to not mention this in a short blog post about the rule of three, but never forget that when you're interpreting statistics...how you build your sample matters.
reply " [7]
" ajkjk 3 days ago [-]
So basically the '3' comes entirely from the choice of a 95% confidence interval. If you want a 99% confidence interval it's instead the 'rule of 4.6', which doesn't roll off the tongue as well.
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jedberg 3 days ago [-]
You could do the 'rule of 5' though and have a confidence of 99.3%, which is pretty close to 99.
reply " [8]
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"The Lindy effect...
The future life expectancy of technology is proportional to its current age. Every extra period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
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"Posner and Weyl do give one example of what I would call a decentralized institution: a game for choosing who gets an asset in the event of a divorce or a company splitting in half, where both sides provide their own valuation, the person with the higher valuation gets the item, but they must then give an amount equal to half the average of the two valuations to the loser. "
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https://ethresear.ch/t/call-out-assurance-contracts/466
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the convention for handles that turn pipes on and off is:
when the handle is parallel to the pipe, it's on. When the handle is perpendicular to the pipe, it's off.
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Caches that take into account amount of use as well as frequency, like the brain (reference that article on exponential for getting and exponential newspaper term appearance, as well as spaced repetition). This reminds me of advanced Branch prediction algorithms
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There should be a word 4 the transient bitter sadness it occurs when you experience a beautiful qualia that you feel is likely highly specific to your personal aesthetic history including the specific aesthetic of the times that you lived in, difficult to reproduce even in your own mind, unable to be communicated or shared, and hence I'm likely to be experienced by very many people besides yourself, hence likely lost forever and will never again be experienced after your death and possibly not even more during your life
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Action Programs
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https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmytongue/
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on design:
There are sort of 4 activites/types of phases involved in design. You may go through each of these phases many times before finishing the design (and in fact i suggest that you do).
Note however that for the most part, the experience you gain is proportional to the amount of projects you finish, not to the amount of projects you start; so although going through each of these phases many times improves the design, from the point of view of improving your self rather than improving the design, there is also value in stopping re-designing early so that you completely finish the project sooner (even when you could have improved the design further).
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Not only war and poverty but also crime and corruption and disease are major problems
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Epacket is good, speedpack is slow. EMS is better than both.
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zengargoyle 9 days ago
| parent | flag | favorite | on: Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code y... |
Pick a random line from a file / stream without knowing how many lines there are to choose from in one pass without storing the lines that have been seen.
perl -e 'while(<>){$x=$_ if rand()<=(1/$.)}print $x'For each line, pick that line as your random line if a random number (0<=n<1) is less than the reciprocal of the number of lines read so far ($.).
It hits my elegant bone. Only one line... rand < 1/1, pick it. Two lines, same as one, but the second line has a 1/2 change of replacing line one. Third line same as before but gets a 1/3 chance of taking the place of whichever line has survived the first two picks. At the end... you have your random line.
microtherion 9 days ago [-]
Same number of keystrokes, but IMHO more idiomatic & readable:
perl -ne '$x=$_ if rand()<=(1/$.); END { print $x }'reply
zengargoyle 8 days ago [-]
Ha, that's how I originally wrote it, but I thought I should get rid of -n and END{} in an attempt to ward of the eww Perl comments. Sigh.
But at least now I know that it's called Reservoir Sampling. I had wondered how to generalize it to wanting N lines.
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visarga 9 days ago [-]
Does this algorithm guarantee uniform probability for all lines? Seems like the original ordering of the lines is a factor.
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chubot 9 days ago [-]
The OP should have mentioned that it's this algorithm:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservoir_sampling
IMO it's a lot clearer if it's not in Perl ...
The pseudocode in Wikipedia also avoids division.
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One way in which the brain differs from conventional computers is that neurons appear to serve as both CPU and memory storage. Rather than having a few fast CPUs and a large bank of dedicated memory with a few busses (leading to "the von Neumann bottleneck" of data transfer between memory and CPU), the brain has many slow neurons each of which has many connections with other neurons.
So, in-memory computing may be more brain-like.
The brain appears to be very good at massive concurrency with low energy consumption, at the expense of slow serial computation and a high error rate.
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An organization that determines its beliefs by voting can have inconsistent beliefs even if each voter has consistent beliefs and votes honestly.
For example, imagine that "(A AND B) logically implies C", and every voter agrees with that statement. Imagine that 1/3 of the voters believe (A, not-B, not-C), 1/3 believes (not-A, B, not-C), and 1/3 believes (A, B, C). If you hold a vote, 2/3s of voters believe A, 2/3s believe B, and 1/3 believes C; so the organization as a whole will hold the contradictory set of beliefs (A, B, not-C).
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The division of the cerebral cortex into cortical areas is somewhat subjective.
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Rational thinking is computationally intractable.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
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http://paulgraham.com/lies.html
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Table 1. Recommendation Rating Scheme Strength of Recommendation Quality of Evidence for Recommendation
A: Strong recommendation for the statement
B: Moderate recommendation for the statement
C: Optional recommendation for the statement
I: One or more randomized trials with clinical outcomes and/or validated laboratory endpoints
II: One or more well-designed, nonrandomized trials or observational cohort studies
III: Expert opinion
from e.g. https://covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/introduction/
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https://venturebeat.com/2012/01/15/pseudonyms-vs-real-names/
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some random (well-known) ideas: https://www.perell.com/blog/50-ideas-that-changed-my-life
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watwatinthewat 4 days ago [–]
Former Marine here, and that's definitely true in this branch.
I'll say though, those who think it will be better out almost always get out when they can. The limitation of those so disenchanted with the Corps they think using the GI Bill or doing some other work will be better is the end of their current contract. It provides a sure out. You have to actively convince yourself it doesn't suck enough to be trapped another 2-6 years, while other jobs you need to take an active role in leaving. Those who stay in think the Corps is worth it.
I've been in a couple industries and never seen the same. People hate their job/occupation field/company, and stay in it for a million reasons. The military is nicely set up to spit out those who won't buy into the institution.
I would be curious to compare percentages within military and police forces of those who agree that "life would be better out, but I don't have a better opportunity out". I'd put money on that subsection of the population being much lower for military than police (and most to all other industries really).
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mcguire 4 days ago [–]
Out of curiosity, if you found a member of your unit doing something illegal, would you report them? Does how illegal matter? How about who it is in your unit?
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watwatinthewat 4 days ago [–]
I was only in five years but saw lots of reports and made maybe half a dozen job-related (DOD order/Constitutional related offenses) and one EO-related.
I'd say in general the likelihood of something illegal on the job being reported is high, while doing something illegal on one's off time (like something alcohol related) is much lower, especially among those of similar rank. On the former, my workplace had a huge layered nest of rules from all levels of organizations, and those being broken were taken seriously, though I did have to argue with my chain of command on whether certain ones needed to be reported. Some of that was due to particular bosses.
Personal/Personal time ones, I heard of things that got reported and some that didn't. Those are definitely more mixed.
On in versus out of unit, I can't really think of much mixing with people out of a unit. I think if there is a difference, someone is more likely to report on someone within one's own unit. From boot camp on, you learn the weak link ("shitbag") in your unit is going to get you all in trouble, so you need to make sure they're dealt with. In my first school after boot camp, there was a beach party reported that had underaged Marines among them. For like a month, the whole detachment on base, maybe 300 Marines, we're not allowed to be out of uniform even in our own room, among other punishments. Group/Mass punishments mean you either deal with a person who will lead to trouble or report them.
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A theory i have is that people disagree more than they think they do, but their actual actions are not as disagreeable as their opinions. So, two people will often hold opinions that the other considers abhorrent but will be able to get along in practice (as long as they don't learn of each others' opinions) because their actual actions will usually be acceptable to each other.
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"However for “absolute” chronological records you would be looking at using Barycentric Coordinate Time, which is what we get when we do a bunch of corrections to subtract the effects of the sun and earth’s (and the other planets) mass and motion, leaving us with a virtual “clock” that is suitably common for anything in the solar system.
To quote one definition of Barycentric Coordinate Time - ”It is equivalent to the proper time experienced by a clock at rest in a coordinate frame co-moving with the barycentre of the Solar System: that is, a clock that performs exactly the same movements as the Solar system but is outside the system’s gravity well.”" -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23788020
"2) Paul Krugman's thesis (yes, that Paul Krugman) is on relativistic economies. As in, my planet is in a deep gravity well, your's isn't. My clocks pas a lot slower. Now, how do I calculate interest? What about letters of credit for ships traveling between places to ship goods? His conclusion: let's hope there isn't money by then, because interest can't work between relativistic time frames. " -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23795479
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" Absolutely, translations are difficult and imprecise, having multiple meanings even in the original Sanskrit or Pāli. Even different lineages place concepts in different categories, like whether or not suffering is one of the three dharma seals or not. Vipassana as taught by the Theravada would say it is, whereas Mahayana and Vajrayana would sometimes say it’s not.
No wonder new meditators get confused when they try to start a practice with all these modern apps and books that avoid teaching any of the lineages! "
Igelau 1 day ago [–]
> It’s very easy to confuse the emptiness of self with the nonexistence of self.
I think part of the issue is that the words/concepts really don't translate into modern english well at all. Another example is how frequently the first of the Four Noble Truths is misrepresented as "Life is suffering". We don't have good ways of saying or explaining shunyata or dukkha that preserve the nuance of the concepts.
Edit: Thich Nhat Hanh is always a solid recommendation. I'll have to find his commentary on the heart sutra.
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tyre 1 day ago [–]
Is there a longer translation that gives more nuance than "suffering"? Often times we settle for less precise words in favor of pithiness/conciseness.
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hvs 21 hours ago [–]
I prefer "unsatisfactoriness" rather than "suffering".
"The word is commonly explained as a derivation from Aryan terminology for an axle hole, referring to an axle hole which is not in the center and leads to a bumpy, uncomfortable ride."
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taneq 20 hours ago [–]
Sounds like a better translation would be ‘slipshod’.
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mtalantikite 1 day ago [–]
For sure, the word is duhkha and has a lot of alternative meanings and explanations beyond just “suffering”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duḥkha
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dhimes 10 hours ago [–]
“Out of balance” is yet another way to think of it (Steve Hagen’s term IIRC)
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great list of questions:
https://patrickcollison.com/questions
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i'd never heard of the 'economic complexity index' before that, but https://patrickcollison.com/questions mentions it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Complexity_Index
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https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/991397611306303488.html https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/stupider-than-you-realize.html
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my quoting conventions:
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i have a theory that dreams are something close to a GPT-like ("generative pre-trained transformer") iterated prediction autocomplete 'random walk' (rather than, for example, a fancier directed thought process partially controlled by a 'subconscious' author which at times reveals hidden desires/knowledge)
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i have a theory that the sort of thinking that we associate with magic does not apply to the external world but does apply to the internal world, that is, to psychological phenomena like motivation, desire, emotions, etc.
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ideas for funding virtual world maintenance that do not tie payment to powers that make it easier to 'win' games:
can give multiple choices: e.g. you can play in pay-for-time mode and get no ads, customized avatar, free transportation etc, or you can switch to pay-for-transport, and you are stuck where you are at but time is free. Then when you want to freely transport you can switch back to pay for time, but you can't switch too often. etc
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if i could tell the world a few things before i die, i guess it would be my suggestions for governance:
Also, on another note: if you have children, hug them
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<=3 level principal; there are what i call 'partnership' style organizations, for example corporate partnerships, and academia, where the system is designed to give autonomy to ppl at the partner level (which, in academia, is profs).
The <=3 3 level principal is that, once an organization has more than novice journeyman, master, then you end up with a large 'underclass' of people who spend most or all of their careers below the partner level (eg in academia, staff scientists and postdocs). Imo this is trouble; the partnership schema (designed to give freedom to partners) is too repressive to permanent nonpartners (and tends to evolve aspects of 'hazing' which aren't worth it if you don't make partner in the end). Also partners/profs may not be good managers b/c that isn't what they were promoted to partner/prof based on (peter principal).
if u need to have more than 3 levels u should switch to a corporate form with e.g. hr, and separate ic/manager career paths (or find some other way to deal with this dilemma).
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perhaps there should be a system for people to assert their belief in certain ideals, ethical rules or ideological principals, or certain domain-specific rules (e.g. "in this blog i will not make assertions of fact without providing evidence" or "in this forum i will not make ad hominems", etc). Perhaps these assertions should be public, but perhaps they should be private (so that someone else can only view the fact that a person has made the assertion if the asserter whitelists them, or if a friend of the asserter whitelists them, etc, or maybe better, if they have both made the same assertion). This could be linked with a reputation system that allows users to view other people's judgments on whether the asserter has kept to their asserted ideals.
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" • Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict.
• Argue as if you’re right but listen as if you’re wrong.
• Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person’s perspective.
• Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you’ve learned from them.
These behaviors correlate very strongly with the people I personally have found most intelligent and productive in group settings.
iovrthoughtthis on Jan 14, 2018
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This is fantastic advise for effective debate.
I would add:
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often some scandal comes up and then years later the powerful people don't get prosecuted or convicted of anything -- i think this is because often they didn't actually do anything wrong, and some complex thing got misunderstood
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in the movie "The Matrix" one silly thing is that the humans' function to the machines is to serve as batteries.
it makes more sense if you take that as a silly pun; the humans function is to supply "power". That is, as a metaphor for the situation where the power that "powerful people" have is ultimately sourced in some way from "common people". This sort of thinking fits more with the famous quote:
“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
some other things i noticed
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on Content-type as used in the REST:
it's only useful for interoperable ecosystems. It's about the interplay of using something like Content-type, with specific schemas, and hyperlinks between resources. For example, imagine that there is a schema (with its own Content-type) for a contact record for a person. In the old days, this might have just first name, last name, address. Various websites offer resources fitting this schema, and they are all interoperable (unlike the walled gardens that the web ended up being today). Then later on people invent a new schema (with a new Content-type) that adds a phone number. Then later on ppl invent a third schema (with a new Content-type) that adds an email too. Now, some of the websites upgrade themselves to support the upgraded schema, and some do not. By using hyperlinks, HATEOAS, and Content-type, clients that only understand the old schema can still get it, and clients who understands one or both of the newer schemas can get it from those servers that support it. So, you can have an interoperable ecosystem of clients and servers some of which understand some of the new schemas, and some which do not. There does not need to be a linear ordering of these schemas (which would require a more centralized process of defining them), only a semi-authoritative Content-type registery.
i guess i still don't understand Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State (HATEOAS).
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todo: https://github.com/medusalix/xow
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generally speaking, you don't want one merchant to perform very many important services for you, because if their semi-automated scammer detection systems mistakenly flag you, you get locked out of everything on their platform
so:
etc
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Three related problems that you see all over the place:
1) In a large company:
Therefore, the product often suffers either from design-by-committee, or design-by-clueless-managers. For example, this happens in large software companies.
2) When hiring someone:
Therefore, in both cases the people who end up actually doing the work don't have much experience.
For example, this happens with construction contractors, and with consultants.
3) When working under someone:
Therefore, it is likely that your boss is either not good at managing or not informed about the thing they are in charge of.
For example, the first often happens in academia, and the second often happens in industry.
One possible solution is to create a role that has power over subject matter decisions but no power over people. For example, in software, to have a 'product owner' who is different from the manager of the software developers. The problem with this is that the software developers have no incentive to do what the product owner tells them to, so the dev team can end up subtly ignoring the product owner and doing their own thing, and the product owner can't get much done except by bugging whichever manager on the org chart is above both them and the software developers to intervene. I've heard of this happening IRL so i don't think this is a great solution.
Here's another solution. Keep both the "product owner" and the "team manager" but put the "product owner" in charge of the "team manager". I hypothesize this would give you a watered-down version of the boss-good-at-subject-matter-but-bad-at-managing situation. The product owner is still in charge, but they were promoted based on subject matter expertise, so they might be bad at managing but because "tone comes from the top" this will still mess with management. But, if the "team manager" is good at managing then they can ameliorate this somewhat.
Of course you still have the 'how can the product owner, who is bad at management, recognize if the team manager is doing a good job' problem, but you have that problem no matter who is evaluating a manager anyways.
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https://arachnoid.com/wrong/index.html#Economics
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" Figure out with this one easy trick if two time varying signals are statistically significantly similar, nonlinear, and more. The Ebisuzaki test. If two data time series are compared and one sees some correlation or time delayed correlation, one would naturally like to know if these 2 time series have a similarity beyond what could occur by chance. If the process generating these time series were to be stochastic and Gaussian (i.e. normal random) as well as non-serially correlated, one could use normal statistical approaches to estimate the significance of the correlation. This would not apply however if the data shows significant autocorrelation that is the data is serially correlated. This means that a process has significant correlation between one timepoint and the next i.e. shows significant autocorrelation. This could also occur if the time series is oversampled compared to the dynamics timescale of the process we are studying. In order to have a statistical test to estimate significance of two significantly autocorrelated and non Gaussian time series one can use the method developed by Wesley Ebisuzaki. The method is essentially a randomization resampling test that preserves the spectral properties of the time series and generates a distribution against which the 2 time series will be compared that is similar to randomization and bootstrapping techniques in concept but importantly works well with autocorrelation and preserves the power spectrum. To compute the Ebisuzaki test decompose the first time series by calculating its discrete Fourier transform. Then randomize the phases of the individual Fourier modes and use the phase randomized Fourier modes to calculate the inverse Fourier to recompose the time series with the randomized phases. Do this repeatedly to generate a distribution to compare against the second time series to calculate the statistical significance of the correlation in manner similar to bootstrapping or randomization/resampling methods. Thanks to Hao Ye for first bringing this up to my attention. References A Method to Estimate the Statistical Significance of a Correlation When the Data Are Serially Correlated. Journal of Climate: Volume 10 No. 9 September 1997 Wesley Ebisuzaki DOI: https://journals.ametsoc.org/.../1520-0442_1997_010_2147... An Interactive Guide To The Fourier Transform https://betterexplained.com/.../an-interactive-guide-to.../ " -- Gerald Pao, Facebook post on Feb 6 2021
a comment on that post:
" Michael Adams Convert the data into log space first. Then apply a ‘moving band pass filter in Fourier. Reconstruct using exponent (undo the log) and now you can separate multiplicative components that have different frequencies. Essentially, apply the homomorphic filtering principle to this technique. Would help to avoid correlating ‘background’ signal and insure you are testing around your dynamics timescale instead of noise or instrument baseline shifts.
Gerald Pao thanks Mike I can see how you can make the operation an addition of the exponents instead of multiplicative. Neat. So noise is still defined as your high frequency component?
Michael Adams yes. But since log(ab) = log a + log b You are free to now use a low pass filter since it is linearly separable. "
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"The Lindy effect makes perfect sense has an heuristic to evaluate the remaining lifetime of technologies and species at a given point in time. It’s trivial to prove that it works for anything whose survival curve is convex." -- [12]
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the transcendence of pi was only proved as recently as 1882! (by Ferdinand Lindemann)
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" Brown: Yeah. You know, I had the good fortune to work with Laura Cornelissen and Chuck Berde who are in anesthesiology research at Boston Children’s Hospital. They had done these very elegant experiments, where they collected data on young kids, kids zero to six months of age, under anesthesia. So, it’s very interesting.
Strogatz: Little babies, then.
Brown: Basically, yeah.
Strogatz: I mean, zero to six months old.
Brown: Yeah. Right. Zero to six months of age. They had no, sort of, brain disorders there, but they had surgeries, which had to be done within the zero-to-six-month age range, surgeries which couldn’t wait. So, what was interesting was the zero-to-four — the four-to-six-months of age children had patterns which looked something like adult patterns. Not completely, but just like — so the sake of this discussion, let’s say they look like adults. They had the same types of oscillations that you see in adults. The zero-to-three-months of age children only had slow oscillations.
Strogatz: Oh, that’s interesting.
Brown: So, there’s something magical that occurred between three months and four months of age. And then you can lay that on the backdrop of what’s happening developmentally. Like, so, you know, their degree of inhibition is changing, and more circuits are being formed. And we think it just reflects the course of, essentially, brain development. " -- https://www.quantamagazine.org/emery-brown-and-the-truth-about-anesthesia-20210426/
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https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-babies-adults.html
until ~6mos, visual backwards masking doesn't occur in babies
Yusuke Nakashima et al, Perception of invisible masked objects in early infancy, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2103040118
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4 reasons that Apple II computers were better for learning:
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when thinking about things, it can be useful to clarify:
when talking to other people, it can be useful to clarify:
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"
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" The rope
There are only a few data structures suitable for representation of text in a text editor. I would enumerate them as: contiguous string, gapped buffer, array of lines, piece table, and rope. I would consider the first unsuitable for the goals of xi-editor as it doesn’t scale well to large documents, though its simplicity is appealing, and memcpy is fast these days; if you know your document is always under a megabyte or so, it’s probably the best choice.
Array of lines has performance failure modes, most notably very long lines. Similarly, many good editors have been written using piece tables, but I’m not a huge fan; performance is very good when first opening the file, but degrades over time.
My favorite aspect of the rope as a data structure is its excellent worst-case performance. Basically, there aren’t any cases where it performs badly. And even the concern about excess copying because of its immutability might not be a real problem; Rust has a copy-on-write mechanism where you can mutate in-place when there’s only one reference to the data.
The main argument against the rope is its complexity. I think this varies a lot by language; in C a gapped buffer might be preferable, but I think in Rust, a rope is the sweet spot. " [13]
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on Zettelkasten
"...part of the genius of Luhmann's original paper card notes system seems to have been the critical thinking required to determine which handful (1 to 3) of notes are most related and the serendipitous discovery process from having to manually walk the note files when you need to find something. " [14]
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i like airplane sounds
i like color of the orange (neon?) flickering lights in some old surge protectors and doorbells
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It's easy to get the impression that every time you say something to someone, and they seem to understand it, then they received the message. It would be nice if that were true. Actually, when you say something to someone, it's usually a much more lossy communications channel than it seems. Assume that people who seem to understand you might not have, and that even if they do understand, they might forget. It's not that they are stupid or don't care, it's just a universal phenomenon.
Some ways to deal with this are:
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some things that prevent ethical situations from being as easy to solve as you might like:
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some things that prevent discourse, especially about ethics-related situations, from being as easy to solve as you might like:
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for my bookmarks:
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the mathematics of learning mathematics
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a modular dewey decimal system, generalizing the way that biological taxonomy refers to different sub-authorities. Although probably the computerized ontologies are even better at this.
there is something related between:
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sending a long email can sometimes be perceived as argumentative even if you are not disagreeing with the person you are sending the email to
this generalizes to any sort of detail-giving (or detail-requesting) communication
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idea for download time estimation:
exponential moving average, but lengthen the smoothing time as the total amount of time that the download has taken so far increases. So something like:
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import math
class download_time_estimator(): def __init__(self, timesource, filesize): self._timesource = timesource self._download_start_time = self.timesource.now() self._previous_packet_arrival_time = None self._current_estimated_time_between_packets = None self._total_number_of_packets = 0
def notify_estimator_packet_arrived(self):
self._notify_estimator_packet_arrived(self.timesource.now()):
def _notify_estimator_packet_arrived(self, arrival_time):
self._total_number_of_packets = self._total_number_of_packets + 1
smoothing_factor = self._get_smoothing_factor(arrival_time)
if self.previous_packet_arrival_time is None:
self.previous_packet_arrival_time = arrival_time
else:
instantaneous_estimate = arrival_time - self.previous_packet_arrival_time
if self.current_estimated_time_between_packets is None:
self.current_estimated_time_between_packets = instantaneous_estimate
else:
self.current_estimated_time_between_packets = smoothing_factor * instantaneous_estimate + (1 - smoothing_factor) * self.current_estimated_time_between_packets def get_estimated_speed(self):
return 1/self.current_estimated_time_between_packets def get_estimated_time_to_completion(self, remaining_size_in_packets):
return remaining_size_in_packets/self.get_estimated_speed()
def get_smoothing_factor(arrival_time):
if arrival_time <= self._download_start_time:
return 1.0
else:
return 1.0/(self._total_number_of_packets**(2/3))---
to get more intuition about the smoothing factor in the above algorithm, note that if the smoothing factor were a constant, then in the algorithm's formula for current_estimated_time_between_packets: smoothing_factor * instantaneous_estimate + (1 - smoothing_factor) * self.current_estimated_time_between_packets
...todo...1/smoothing_factor would be the number of packets such that their combined weight is ...endtodo...
where x = the count of the total number of packets received so far, here is a plot of y(x) = the number of packets such that the fraction of the total number of packets received so far such that the combined weight of ...todo...x packets...endtodo... in the above formula is 0.5:
import numpy; import matplotlib; x=numpy.arange(1,100); matplotlib.pyplot.plot(x, x(2/3)/x)
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" In accordance with Adler’s assertion, two researchers from Indiana University studied the ebbs and flows of students’ focus during a typical class period. They found that attention spans started to lapse after 10-18 minutes, no matter how good the teacher or how compelling the subject matter. After that, students’ attention would eventually return, but in briefer intervals each time. By the end of class, students could only stay focused for 3-4 minutes. Though this finding hasn’t been refuted, the implication of it — that long lectures aren’t an effective way to teach students — has been ignored by an educational establishment which still relies on lectures. " -- [15]
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https://i0.wp.com/perell.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/20190928_woc915_0.png?w=1280&ssl=1 (another copy of the same image:) https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EObNyXUXUAAn7YV?format=jpg&name=large
other articles on this topic: 2010/2011 research article: Across-Language Perspective on Speech Information Rate by Pellegrino, Coupé, Marsico
2015: popsci blog post/AP: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2015/06/whats_the_most_efficient_language.html (2015)
2019: Christophe Coupé, Yoon Oh, Dan Dediu, François Pellegrino. Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche. Science Advances, 2019; 5 (9): eaaw2594 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594
(The Economist image, https://i0.wp.com/perell.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/20190928_woc915_0.png?w=1280&ssl=1 or https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EObNyXUXUAAn7YV?format=jpg&name=large , is a re-presentation of Fig. 1 from this paper)
https://www.science.org/content/article/human-speech-may-have-universal-transmission-rate-39-bits-second another summary: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190905124520.htm (2019)
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git, but with:
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an alternate name for a manager might be a coordinator; to emphasize their role in helping other people collaborate rather than their role as hierarchical superior / executor. I guess that implies a less hierarchical style of organization.
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a research interest of mine: the formalization of everyday thinking and in particular the data structures/ontologies underlying everyday thinking
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one UI metric goal idea when designing productivity software is to minimize total number of clicks (More generally UI interactions) per user per day. More granularly, want to minimize the length of the sequence of UI interactions required to complete common tasks (also the total time needed to do that sequence; The total time metric includes the software responsiveness).
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some UIs for wall street in the 80s:
https://www.quora.com/What-was-so-special-about-the-original-Bloomberg-terminal-that-it-was-such-a-category-killer-basically-wiping-out-long-time-industry-standards-Quotron-and-Telerate-and-even-Reuters https://www.marlinllc.com/_media/_data/MarlinNews/imd_25years_report_oct2010_web.pdf https://www.wallstreetandtech.com/exchanges/oh-what-memories%21-/d/d-id/1255254.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_room http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9015/901509.PDF https://www.google.com/search?q=reuters+telerate+bloomberg+quotron+adp https://www.google.com/search?q=reuters+telerate+bloomberg+quotron+adp+ui https://www.businessinsider.com/old-wall-street-trading-technology-2015-12#behold-the-handheld-quotron-machine-26 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_telephone_system#Key_telephone_system https://www.businessinsider.com/old-wall-street-tech-2013-3#but-some-of-the-modern-trading-desks-are-somewhat-legit-27 https://www.google.com/search?q=video+workstation+Wall+Street+terminal
"In 1991, Forbes did a big profile of the upstart that clearly had a lot of momentum
By then, Bloomberg had 14,000 terminals. Compared to: Reuters: 185,000 Dow Jones Telerate: 85,000 Quotron (owned by Citi) 70,000 ADP: 68,000 " -- https://twitter.com/neckarvalue/status/1277635343454527488
Reuter Monitor, Reuters Monitor Dealing Service (rmds) https://www.thebaron.info/archives/technology/reuter-monitor-the-big-bet https://www.vads.ac.uk/digital/collection/DCSC/id/12786/ https://www.thebaron.info/archives/technology/reuters-technical-development-chronology-1980-1984 https://www.thebaron.info/archives/technology/reuter-monitor-terminal-a-brief-history-of-its-development https://www.longfinance.net/media/documents/Paper_Tape_To_Low_Latency_Data__A_Lifetime_In_Market_Data_2020.11.10_v2.pdf https://www.thebaron.info/archives/technology/reuters-technical-development-chronology-1985-1989
telerate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telerate
bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/blog/look-back-bloomberg-keyboard/ https://www.google.com/search?q=bloomberg+terminal+manual
quotron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotron https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/28/technology/80s-wall-street-businessman/index.html
adp
links: https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA117871125&sid=sitemap&v=2.1&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E475423aa https://www.google.com/search?q=reuters+telerate+bloomberg+quotron+adp
Rich, Inc. Micrognosis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_turret
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http://linusakesson.net/scene/a-mind-is-born/
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PETSCII
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https://www.today.com/health/personality-types-average-self-centered-role-model-or-reserved-t137902
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters#Indexing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collation#Radical-and-stroke_sorting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-Corner_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_Indexing_Chinese_Character_Components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical
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should learn how to use an abacus sometime
https://www.wikihow.com/Use-an-Abacus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus
looks like the most talked-about kinds are the suanpan and soropan
anatomy of an abacus: columns, decks, beads
looks like each column represents a digit, the beads in the lower deck each represent one unit, and the beads in the upper deck represent some larger unit (often 5). If there are k beads in a deck in a column, then there are k+1 possible states there (which includes 0, so the largest number representing is k).
the convention is: 0 is represented when all the beads in the lower deck are down, and all the beads in the upper deck are up. Imo this convention is probably so that when you max out the lower deck and need to change it back to zero while adding one to the upper deck (carrying), you can do this by a simultaneous downward motion on both decks (move one bead down in the upper deck while moving all beads down in the lower deck), which gives less chance to be interrupted and wind up in an inconsistent state where you have reset the lower deck without incrementing the upper deck, or incremented the upper deck without resetting the lower deck.
Looks like the soropan is using a decimal/bi-quintic number system (1 bead (two states) in the upper deck representing units of 5s, and 4 beads in the lower deck (5 states) representing units of 1s; so each column represents (upper*5 + lower) which ranges from 0 to 9.
by the same logic, the suanpan would be base-18 (each of the two upper beads represents 6, each of the five lower beads represents 1; 2*6+5 = 17). However from what i read it seems like perhaps it is used as base 10 and the extra beads have some other function, i haven't yet read what that function would be. A wild guess is that maybe it is more conventions to reduce the chance of being interrupted and left in an inconsistent state when doing stuff across multiple columns. For example, i haven't heard that they do this, but if you max out a column and need to carry one to the next column, it would be nice if, instead of "simultaneosly" moving everything in the maxed out column lower deck down, and everything in the maxed out column upper deck up, and incrementing the next column (which may itself require touching both decks in that column, or even cause another carry to yet another column), you could just do something with an extra bead in the maxed-out column, and then in a separate step later, do the carry to the next column.
note that an abacus can be used to compute with any base lower than its 'natural' base so a suanpan could be used for base 10, base 12, or base 16. I think i've read about it being used for base 10 and for base 16.
since i like the duodecimal number system, a duodecimal abacus would be cool. You could have 3 decks, for factors 2,2,3, but then there's no convention for the polarity of each deck that allows you to preserve the property that when 'carrying' between decks, all the beads are always moving in the same direction. So it might be better to just have two decks, one with 3 beads (representing a factor 4) and one with 2 beads (representing a factor 3). You could have the lower deck have 3 beads and have these be worth 1, and have the upper deck have 2 beads and have those be worth 4. I searched briefly:
https://www.google.com/search?q=base+12+abacus https://www.google.com/search?q=duodecimal+abacus https://www.google.com/search?q=dozenal+abacus https://www.google.com/search?q=%22base+12%22+abacus
but couldn't find much about an abacus like this, except for:
http://totton.idirect.com/soroban/Feet_Inches/ (using a suanpan to do base 12 calculuation; not a duodecimal abacus)
https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/dbk/ has a picture that i explains as: "3/2 Duodecimal (base 12) Abacus: simple column values with Chinese solid-and-broken-bar signs and number values below. This is a fully functional Duodecimal Abacus, and to make it functional, the value of the Broken Bar sign has been changed to "1", and the signs and values re-arranged. " By 3/2 e means that this has a deck with 3 beads, and a deck with 2 beads. However, this does not match the convention that i've seen elsewhere that the deck with the smaller number of beads goes on top. This choice is explained in the "Final Comments" at the end of the page.
"It is possible to create a custom abacus. I often use the example of Sumerian mathematics: the Sumerians counted on the digital bones (phalanges) of their fingers, so the base of their counting system was 12. All of the 12s (and 60s) we have in our mathemateics, e.g., 12 hours, 60 seconds, etc. have their roots in Sumerian math. But the Sumerians never invented an abacus. What would a Sumerian abacus look like? " -- http://www.fjcollazo.com/documents/AbacusHist.htm (but note: according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus#Mesopotamia , the Sumerians did have an abacus, but it was base 60, not base 12; so "Sumerian abacus" wouldn't be a good name for a 3/2 abacus)
https://books.google.com/books?id=R9f_Zsd0qdYC&pg=PA73&lpg=PA73&dq=duodecimal+%22abacus%22&source=bl&ots=EgO7rPZpYI&sig=ACfU3U0Yh0s8BujvdvNxNLC1cW0DZRfZtw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjtidzeiPv1AhWqJUQIHV39Bd0Q6AF6BAgQEAM#v=onepage&q=duodecimal%20%22abacus%22&f=false suggests that "The use of a duodecimal abacus should be confined to the upper classes, who have begun to require duodecimal calculations. It confuses little children, if employed before they are fully instructed in decimal notation and calculations."
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.4349.pdf
http://www.dozenal.org/drupal/sites_bck/default/files/DuodecimalBulletinIssue151-web_0.pdf article "A Duodecimal Abacus" page 7 does seem to describe a duodecimal abacus of the type i have in mind.
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On imperial vs metric: i've heard a base-12 fan say that we should use base-12 and use the imperial system of units; however a commentor on HN has a good arguments against that: "Your argument would make sense if our system were actually base 12, or if we actually worked in halves or thirds of feet. Or if we ever had a reason to convert feet to eggs, or feet to hours. No, the base changes for every unit of measurement. Inches are divided into 16ths, feet into 12ths, yards, into thirds, miles into 1760ths. Inches are the worst as the base changes depending on how accurate you want to be, or if the fraction can be simplified, 3/8ths 7/16ths, 15/32nds. And of course all of the numbers used to count them are base 10." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11955212
apparently some ancient people (sumerians?) counted on their fingers by using, on each hand, the thumb to point to one of the twelve segments (phalanges) of the other fingers (each of the 4 other fingers has 3 segments, so 12 in total). So, this gives a duodecimal system with each hand storing one digit. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger-counting#Asia
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why we have 360 degrees:
it's from the Babylonians. They had base 60, inherited from the Sumerians, who probably used it because they counted to 12 using finger segments, and 12 is very divisible but it lacks the factor 5 but 12*5=60, and now if you take a circle and inscribe equilateral triangles two of whose sides are coming from the center (so the side length = circle radius), and the third one is a chord, then you get six of them, like this: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/chord-length-circumference-circle-segments-d_1870.html ), and if you divide the angle spanned by each of those 6 into 60, you get 6*60=360 degrees
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time is the crucial resource
you probably have various friends who go on lots of awesome vacations, and friends who play time-consuming video games, and friends who read books, and friends who cook, and friends who have hobbies, and friends who keep up with the news, and friends who excel at their careers, and friends who socialize a decent amount, and friends who exercise enough to stay in shape, and friends who learn new skills (foreign languages, etc), and friends who stay on top of their email, phone calls, messeges, doctor's appointments, taxes etc enough to not be a total train wreck, and friends with kids, and friends who keep up with social trends enough to not be a clueless old fuddyduddy, and friends who keep up with technology enough to not be a clueless old fuddyduddy. This can lead to a mistaken sense that you should be able to do those things. But you rarely find all of those things in the same person (although there are a small number of exceptional people, of course). Realistically, you can choose to achieve a few of these things, but not all of them.
people are always telling you "you have to do X activity, it's only Y minutes a week". But there are a lot of potential Xs, and the Ys add up.
If you do some X but don't spend enough time on it because you are spending time on some other worthy activity, from the point of view of other people involved in X the result is similar to you not spending time on X because you are lazy. If you spread yourself too thin, you may feel especially aggreived/unappreciated because you are spending all of your time working hard on worthy things (and not as much time as you would like doing stuff you enjoy), but society/the system will punish you the way that it punishes people for slacking off.
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after a meeting, always send a written summary of important decisions taken verbally
why?
you don't want to end up in a situation where you and someone else meet to decide something, you both agree for you to take an irrevocable action affecting both of you, and then months later, you find out that they are surprised by it and blame you. Did they forget what they had said at the meeting? Did you misunderstand what they had said at the meeting?
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another way of looking at 'anyone can learn anything'
maybe anyone can't learn to do anything at a competitive level, eg. can't learn basketball enough to be in the NBA. But maybe anyone can learn anything to be better than 80% of people.
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for difficult theoretical problems, such as math problems, you might imagine that it's hard to think of any way to potentially solve it, but often it's the reverse; you can think of tons of potential paths to a solution, but following any of these paths takes a long time, and most of them don't pan out
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useful physical stuff that i didn't use to know about:
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other useful stuff that i didn't use to know about (but more expensive or niche):
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opinion: two things that should be added to the std high school curriculum:
perhaps a course on introductory computer programming would be helpful too, although that's not as clear to me.
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on math classes in elementary school:
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some guidelines for notetaking:
from [16]
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"You can't tell people anything" -- http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/
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i forgot some of what this note meant: "2022-05-20 Radius of dots for intuition about probability distribution"
i remember sort of what that was about; it was about visualizing probability distributions. And i'm not sure if i really meant the radius of each dot, or the density of dots. Perhaps i meant for 2-d or multidimensional/joint probability distributions; you could have a grid and the radius of each dot denotes the probability at that point; or equivalently you could have more density of dots in each grid square when the probability in that square is high.
you could of course do this by color instead, but this way you could use color to denote something else (or, this way works for black & white printed material)
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Why is "design by committee" a problem (if it really is a problem at all, that is)?
My guess is that when you have a committee, you have to compromise. And one of the most effective ways to compromise with other people is the "yes, and" technique; don't reject another person's ideas in favor of your own ideas, rather, build upon their ideas and add your ideas. One interpretation of this is that, when one idea wins and another loses, that creates winners and losers; it's a zero-sum game; when both person's ideas win, that's a non-zero sum game where everyone wins. So, this tends towards a type of compromise where everyone's idea is included in the final outcome.
This is a problem for many design situations because often one part of good design is reducing scope and complexity by saying no.
In addition, design decisions are often wholistic in the sense that the pros and cons of one decision could depend on many other details; as each planned detail changes that might suggest revisiting other details, potentially causing a cascade of changes. So at times during design, large numbers of prior tentative decisions may be reevaluated almost simultaneously. This is hard enough to keep track of within one person's head, but in a committee it stresses the communications bandwidth even more.
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https://www.boredpanda.com/people-share-secrets-about-their-industry/
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" The team from Mount Sinai had 48 participants sit in a brain scanner and play a kind of “ultimatum game.” Essentially, they were divided into teams and told to split $20 with one another. In one version of the game, there were no rules whatsoever. They could haggle, negotiate, manipulate, and bargain as much as they wanted.
The study revealed two things:
First, after a computational analysis of all the finished games, they discovered that the results were what would be expected from people who thought “two, three, or four steps ahead” of others. In other words, if people were only thinking one step ahead, or from reaction only, the results would have looked completely different. " -- [17], speaking about Humans use forward thinking to exploit social controllability
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people talk about the AI alignment problem, but i think equally as important is the AI happiness problem. People are conscious, but some people have the capability of being happy a lot of the time, whereas other people have a mental makeup which prevents them from being happy as much. Since we don't understand our minds or consciousness it's hard to say if a given AI design, if it is conscious, would tend to be happy; yet it's very important, for their sake, that we try to avoid creating minds which cannot be happy, or which tend to be unhappy.
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DonbunEf?7 on May 10, 2018
| parent | context | prev | next [–] | on: The Logical Disaster of Null |
You seem intelligent, so I'm going to drop you into the deep end. In category theory, a topos [0][1] (plural topoi) is a structure-place where logic can be done. Boolean logic corresponds to a particular topos. Actually, there are at least two topoi which do Boolean logic; one of them has the law of excluded middle, and another has the axiom of choice. [2]
And there's an infinite other number of topoi to choose from! Topoi can be custom-made to categorical specifications. We can insist that there are three truth values, and then we can use a topos construction to determine what the resulting logical connectives look like. [3]
Finally, there are logical systems which are too weak to have topoi. These are the fragments, things like regular logic [4] or Presburger arithmetic.
To address your second argument, why do we work in a world with Boolean logic? Well, classical computers are Boolean. Why? Because we invented classical computing in a time where Boolean logic was the dominant logic, and it fits together well with information and signal theory, and most importantly because we discovered a not-quite-magical method for cooking rocks in a specific way which creates a highly-compact semiconductor-powered transistor-laden computer.
Computers could be non-Boolean. If you think that the brain is a creative computer, then the brain's model of computation is undeniably physical and non-classical. It's possible, just different.
Oh, and even if Boolean logic is the way of the world, does that really mean that all propositions are true or false? Gödel, Turing, Quine, etc. would have a word with you!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topos#Elementary_topoi_(topoi_...
[1] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/topos
[2] https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/two-valued+logic
[3] https://toposblog.org/2018/01/15/some-simple-examples/
[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00526 " -- [18]
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generic advice that applies to many things:
notes (and quotes) from from [19]
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Algorithmic thinking for everyday life:
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i noticed that a friend of mine chose a hotel for a trip just by noting which ones they've been to before. Whereas I would have spent hours and hours analyzing reviews. This is a special case of the general tendency in business to choose status quo products and processes. This can be seen as something analogous to caching; computation (remember, computation is not free!) (and in this case also associated costs of experimentation) is being saved across similar situations. This is a way for programmer nerd neophiles such as myself do to (a) understand why business people seems so annoyingly/suboptimally neophobic in their decision making, and to (b) understand when to use this principal in their own lives and ventures to determine when it may be optimal to choose the status quo.
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Assume good faith
trust but verify
many people have a abhorrent views but don't put them into practice, working with them is fine
in the absence of definitely bad intentions, give credit either for good intentions or good results
honesty is super important
miscommunication or lack of communication is The cause of a lot of issues
feedback is paramount (for improving a skill -- you can often learn faster if you get better feedback about your performance and about how you can perform; for your career -- you often have better results if you can get feedback from decision-makers about if you are doing your tasks the way they want; for institutions -- institutions often do a better job if they are getting and paying attention to feedback from their users/customers)
often when some person or institution is doing a bad job, you might imagine that they or it could improve, but sometimes the only way this situation improves is when that person or institution is replaced by a different one, and sometimes if the person or institution does actually improve it was only because there was a threat that they would be replaced. When a person or institution is immune to being replaced, then sometimes it works out great, but sometimes it works out poorly.
watch out for being altruistic when you can't take care of yourself/fulfill your responsibilities yet (it is more costly for the group to pick up your slack than for you to be self-sufficient/do your duty)
ethics are paramount
self-improvement is important
Reliability is important
Kindness is important
Utilitarianism but it has some problems, hence real-based layer on top
The Golden rule
One issue with utilitarianism is the combination function
Expected value, Sharpe ratio, half-kelly criterion
Politeness is important, procedure is important, individuals are important, networking is important, communication and information are important
Freedom is important, family is important, friends are important, leisure is important, health is important
Communication and information And collaboration are important
Effort is most important (hard work over intelligence). But strategy and intellect are important too
Time allocation is as important as effort. Imagine there is some Task which can be done in a crummy way in 20 hours but can be done well in 40 hours. If, during the week, Person 1 spends 20 hours on Task A and 20 hours on Task B and 20 hours on Task C (60 hours total), and Person 2 spends 20 hours on Task A and 20 hours watching TV (20 hrs total), and Person 3 spends 40 hours on Task A (40 hrs total), then you might think "Person 1 is the hardest working because they worked 60 hours this week; Person 3 is okay because they worked 40 hours; and Person 2 is lazy because they only worked 20 hours and goofed off the rest of the time"; but, from the point of view of a client who is only looking at Task A, Person 1 and Person 2 seem to be equally lazy, and Person 3 seems to be hard-working. In most cases, the only reason 'effort' is important is because it helps to spend more time on stuff.
"A mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master" -- ??
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"corridor work": there are many situations in which, before a meeting, you should have met with most of the participants of the meeting individually, heard their views, and tried to persuade them of anything you need their support on
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various lawyer ranking things:
Chambers Benchmark Litigation Lawdragon Super Lawyers Legal 500 Best Lawyers in America
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"The most important single decision I ever made was to change the IBM 360 series from a 6-bit byte to an 8-bit byte, thereby enabling the use of lowercase letters. That change propagated everywhere." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks
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investing note: kelly betting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_criterion#Investment_formula
fraction_of_all_assets_to_invest = probability_of_success/fraction_of_investment_lost_in_failure - probability_of_failure/fraction_of_investment_gained_in_success
Let's look at one special case, where the result of failure is a total loss of the amount invested, and the reward of the investment in case of success is huge:
if the result of failure is a total loss of the amount invested, then fraction_of_investment_lost_in_failure = 1:
fraction_of_all_assets_to_invest = probability_of_success - probability_of_failure/fraction_of_investment_gained_in_success
if the expected value of the investment is really really high-reward, then fraction_gained_in_success is huge, so (approximately) the second term goes to zero:
fraction_of_assets_to_invest = probability_of_success
So, we have an easy formula to quickly solve 'lottery ticket' cases (where the potential reward is large but the potential loss is total, and the probability of success is small) (and we didn't even need to use the assumption that the probability of success is small):
when potential loss is not total, we still get:
fraction_of_all_assets_to_invest = probability_of_success/fraction_of_investment_lost_in_failure
Observe that if you follow this formula, then the amount that you invest is:
amount_of_all_assets * fraction_of_all_assets_to_invest
and then the amount of assets that you lose in case of failure is:
amount_of_all_assets * fraction_of_all_assets_to_invest * fraction_of_investment_lost_in_failure
In other words, the formula is telling you that even if your reward is arbitrarily high, you should still only bet an amount such that you can afford to lose at least (1/probability_of_success) times before you run out of money. This is an upper bound.
To summarize, Kelly gives us a simple heuristic upper bound for risky investments: even if the expected value of the investment is really high, never bet so much that you can't afford to lose at least (1/probability_of_success) times the amount that you lose for each failure. So, for example, if you have $1000 and you are offered a 10% chance of a 1,000,000x return, and a 90% chance of losing the amount of the bet, then even though the expected value is fantastic, you should not bet more than 10% of $1000, which is $100.
next chapter
but wait, you might say, I've heard that sometimes Kelly prescribes leverage, that is, effectively betting MORE than amount_of_all_assets. But here you seem to be saying that you should be able to afford to lose multiple times. So when is leverage prescribed?
The answer is that it can happen when fraction_of_investment_lost_in_failure is less than 1.
Recall the conclusion above: we said "never bet so much that you can't afford to lose at least (1/probability_of_success) times the amount that you lose for each failure". If the loss in case of failure is less than the amount bet, then the amount bet can be more than amount_of_all_assets and yet the loss in case of failure can be less than amount_of_all_assets.
For example, if the expected return is fabulous, and fraction_of_investment_lost_in_failure is 10%, and probability_of_success is 20%, then
fraction_of_all_assets_to_invest = probability_of_success/fraction_of_investment_lost_in_failure = 20%/10% = 2
Observe that if you bet 2x of amount_of_all_assets, then each time you lose, you'll lose 10%*2*amount_of_all_assets = 1/5 of all assets; you can do this exactly 5 times before running out of money, which is equal to 1/probability_of_success (1/20%).
So, (at least in this formulation), Kelly does not in fact ever prescribe using leverage when there is a chance of losing more than your assets.
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Often things are spread by the media which are controversial. This also applies to things spread in a 'viral' way on social networks. This occurs in a somewhat subtle way with "outrageous" things. Someone does something that seems obviously outrageous from the headline but then when you read it there's some sort of a catch -- maybe there is not conclusive proof that they actually did the thing -- maybe it was in self-defence -- maybe although the headline is literally correct it is sort of misleading; etc. However, and here's the key, there is also strong argument that the 'catch' is irrelevant, or alternately that the outrageous thing is so bad that it can't possibly be justified even by the 'catch'. These sort of things cause controversy because, if you don't buy the 'catch', then what the person did is really, really bad; but if you do buy the 'catch' then, depending on the situation, maybe it's not bad, or maybe it's still really bad yet not quite as bad as it seems from the headline alone. The people who don't buy the 'catch' are often shocked that anyone would defend the person who did the outrageous thing, and maybe those people are bad people too, etc.
Anyway, these sorts of things spread virally because they cause discussion. The important point is that they spread more than news about someone who clearly did an outrageous thing with no catch (because no controversy there and therefore little to discuss; almost everybody agrees that the person's outrageous action merits strong condemnation). Therefore, the incidents that you hear about the most are often those with some sort of catch.
Which is unfortunate, because the frequently discussion of such incidents is divisive and corrosive to society, yet this dynamic causes them to be discussed very frequently.
(This isn't my observation, I read an essay about that once but i can't find it now)
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if you have something (like furniture or a portable washing machine) that you need to move around (especially on carpet, but also on non-carpet), you can get 'furniture sliders' to put under it
if your dishes have white spots, maybe you are using too much dishwashing detergent
don't leave stuff, even bags of trash, visible in your car, or someone might break into it
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on command responsibility in business:
why are bosses and sometimes even bosses' bosses held responsible for their subordinate's failures? Here's one reason. For context, I just read https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-the-story-of-qantas-flight-32-bdaa62dc98e7 which talks about many things, but the point relevant for this post is that an airplane mechanical failure is because two holes in an oil pipe were misaligned by half a millimeter. A forum comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38593225 on this article says that "To a half-competent machinist or manufacturing metrologist, half a millimetre of concentricity error on a part of that size might as well be half a mile. It's a huge, grievous error that can be seen with the naked eye...Many people at that plant knew that they were delivering out-of-spec parts. Everyone who handled that part could have told you at a glance that the counterbore was badly off-centre. Rather than going back to remake the parts, rather than figuring out why the parts were bad, they just went through the motions of QC, shipped them anyway, falsified documentation and discarded evidence. For all the complexity of the analysis, the root cause is blindingly simple - flagrant negligence, concealed by flagrant deceit.".
The article says that one of the things that was done afterwards to make sure this didn't happen again was "A number of efforts were initiated to change the culture around non-conformances at the Hucknall facility." So imagine you are the CEO of the company that runs that factory and many others; if you have a factory where "Many people at that plant knew that they were delivering out-of-spec parts...Rather than going back to remake the parts, rather than figuring out why the parts were bad, they just went through the motions of QC, shipped them anyway, falsified documentation and discarded evidence", what do you do?
Well, you could fire the people who you can find evidence that they "falsified documentation". But, two problems remain. First, sometimes the person who lied covered their tracks well and you won't find any incriminating evidence -- so if you want to end up with a high probability of getting rid of most of the liars, you may have to fire some people without firm evidence that they lied. This means that an employment environment in which someone isn't fired without evidence that they performed badly or did something wrong may have trouble getting rid of dishonesty.
Second, in many situations one of the reasons that employees lie is that their managers push them to do so, both directly and indirectly. So, what can do you do? Maybe you shut down the whole factory and fire everyone there. But an intermediate approach would be to collect evidence, make an informed guess as to which managers were in charge of the groups where the funny business most probably occurred, and fire those managers.
In summary, some sorts of bad culture (eg lying, bribery, etc) are 'infectious' and 'corrosive' to a company yet hard to detect. The company's interest is to stamp out these as much as possible, even at high cost. Due to their position, managers have the ability to be the root cause of corrosive culture while covering their tracks. So when bad things occur under their watch, you fire them just in case they were the source.
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