Absolutely brilliant. It's so stupid (in that it's kind of silly how easy it is to game our mammal brain) but I can absolutely see this giving an extra kick of motivation.
Have you heard of the INCUP model for ADHD? Interest, Novelty, Challenge, Urgency, and Passion. The more factors an activity has, the more drive the ADHD mind has. Rarity system adds novelty and a bit of passion.
Also if you have looked into operant conditioning at all, you know that variable interval reward schedules are the strongest behavior-forming systems (hence, slot machines and every game that act like them).
The problem with the averages argument is not that it’s wrong but that the established biological causes have been for basic low-level things like grip strength but not for higher level cognitive behaviour, especially at the level of software engineering at Google which combines a number of different advanced skills – and there’s a fair variation in the mix of skills equally successful people use, too. Running is a much simpler, highly physical skill which was highly relevant to our evolutionary history whereas being a senior engineer involves a mix of cognitive skills developed over a longer time in a highly social environment, and there just isn’t high-quality data linking those skills to innate biological traits at the level needed to explain the current outcomes.
Complex behavior is very hard to link to underlying biology because our brains are incredibly plastic and actual researchers spend a lot of time looking for ways to tease out the complex interplay between genes and training. I used to support some neuroscience labs which studied things like this but the researchers were careful to note the difference in confidence between the effects they measured and the attempts to identify the underlying biology (e.g. maybe undergrad men could track more moving objects than women, but if monkeys didn’t show an effect you might want to check things like how many hours they spent playing ball sports or video games). Everyone was generally of the opinion that there were innate differences, but that they couldn’t be anywhere near the magnitude we see with athletic performance because too many well-crafted studies have been done to miss something big.
When you’re looking at those bell curves, it’s important to remember that even if you ignore the questions about the methodology for things like personality traits the overlap is tighter than shown, and contrary to one of his foundational claims, there’s enough cultural variation to suggest that the effect is not biological in origin. The first piece I linked discusses at some length how he was thrown off by the Wikipedia summary of a meta-analysis paper on personality traits which found very limited effects, with one analysis within the margin of error. That pattern continues for the few claims he makes in enough detail to assess: inconclusive data, mistakes cribbed from intermediary sources, or failing to link a very low level behaviour to success at a company like Google.
That last part is really important to think about with all of the evo-psych stories which claim our social dynamics of today are based on our evolutionary history without considering just how different the skills we use to work in offices developing software are from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle – anyone at Google is working with more people than was common in most of our evolutionary history!
I went to a talk at the Computer History Museum once. It was a rainy day, and I and many people were hanging our coats on a long rack. The guy next to me asked me "doesn't anyone wear hats anymore?" as he looked in vain for a place to put his hat. It was Vint Cerf. I was speechless. How do you tell Vint Cerf that no one dresses like him anymore? He must already know...right?
What personal would there be left to express in a world reduced to a market of bespoke customers—not only their tastes, but their very spectra of conceivable interior experiences preemptively curated by adaptive recommender systems?
Pop music was always the instrument of creating such consumers; the inevitable replacement of subsistance farmers by sub-subsistence factory workers; the media industry as a core tool in the toolbox of the infinite growth death cult, robbing people of certain things previously considered essential human, by channeling their personal experiences through the designated—the Japanese have a great word for it—idols.
You can't have global power projection without an unidirectional informational channel to common working folk, you see, to make sure they know which way the wind is blowing, and to keep them unable to imagine an alternative to what they're trapped in. We're just on a new level of that, one where the expression of that reality which any of us personally experiences is left perpetually in the rear view mirror; all that remains in the here and now is "content production", and its layers upon layers upon layers of technical facilitators in cutthroat competition for the largest crumb of the donut hole.
It's the reification of post-post-post-so-far-post-that-it's-kind-of-meta-modernism: it's all about how it's about nothing at all! And yet it's massive. The kids, those ultimate judges of practicing vs preaching, have spoken: can't sell out of your "authenticity" if you were authentically in it for the money and fame in the first place. There's still room in all that for originality, even creativity, but it's explicitly just business, never anything personal because that'd be bad taste; drawing a line between the interior world and the social game—or worse, trafficking in those goods which can only be found in the former—has completed its transformation into a social taboo.
Hence, the exquisitely crude, the blatantly false, the unapologetically predatory, has won the battle for the hearts and minds, and is now officially in control of the planet. If you think anything else is going on, you just don't know it yet, and we wish the best of luck to you and yours.
[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.]
The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community.
As relevant here:
1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some degree of rounding or unknown-unknowns. A -> B and B -> C means A -> C in a formal sense, but A -almostcertainly-> B and B -almostcertainly-> C does not mean A -almostcertainly-> C. Rationalists, by tending to overly formalist approaches, tend to lose the thread of the messiness of the real world and follow these lossy implications as though they are lossless. That leads to...
2) Precision errors in utility calculations that are numerically-unstable. Any small chance of harm times infinity equals infinity. This framing shows up a lot in the context of AI risk, but it works in other settings too: infinity times a speck of dust in your eye >>> 1 times murder, so murder is "justified" to prevent a speck of dust in the eye of eternity. When the thing you're trying to create is infinitely good or the thing you're trying to prevent is infinitely bad, anything is justified to bring it about/prevent it respectively.
3) Its leadership - or some of it, anyway - is extremely egotistical and borderline cult-like to begin with. I think even people who like e.g. Eliezer would agree that he is not a humble man by any stretch of the imagination (the guy makes Neil deGrasse Tyson look like a monk). They have, in the past, responded to criticism with statements to the effect of "anyone who would criticize us for any reason is a bad person who is lying to cause us harm". That kind of framing can't help but get culty.
4) The nature of being a "freethinker" is that you're at the mercy of your own neural circuitry. If there is a feedback loop in your brain, you'll get stuck in it, because there's no external "drag" or forcing functions to pull you back to reality. That can lead you to be a genius who sees what others cannot. It can also lead you into schizophrenia really easily. So you've got a culty environment that is particularly susceptible to internally-consistent madness, and finally:
5) It's a bunch of very weird people who have nowhere else they feel at home. I totally get this. I'd never felt like I was in a room with people so like me, and ripping myself away from that world was not easy. (There's some folks down the thread wondering why trans people are overrepresented in this particular group: well, take your standard weird nerd, and then make two-thirds of the world hate your guts more than anything else, you might be pretty vulnerable to whoever will give you the time of day, too.)
TLDR: isolation, very strong in-group defenses, logical "doctrine" that is formally valid and leaks in hard-to-notice ways, apocalyptic utility-scale, and being a very appealing environment for the kind of person who goes super nuts -> pretty much perfect conditions for a cult. Or multiple cults, really. Ziz's group is only one of several.
I’m not sure if there’s a The Book (probably though… look for industrial automation course materials); I mostly learned by example, by reading standards (check out NFPA 79 “electrical standard for industrial machinery”), and by reading automation vendor literature.
[Overall Pick] Orange Chicken - Famous Crispy Sweet Sour Flavor - 2024 New Improve Version - Special Gourmet Frozen Fast Cook Meal for Happy Eating Time
The most interesting timezone I ever encountered is Europe/Moscow on and around January 1, 1900. If you decide to use that date as a zero date in your code (for example, to handle the transition from two digits per year), you will be in a lot of pain: the offset was +02:30:17. Yes, with 17 seconds! Demo: https://go.dev/play/p/lq36Plr1sIL
In the early 1980s I worked in the incoming stock dept of the worlds largest record store (we were physically separated from the actual store). We had an employee controlled music system, mostly playing mix tapes. One of the goals of many of us was to create a never-ending stream of "constantly being given songs that are as different as possible from the recent ones you've listened to"
We were young and not that well versed in the full range of musical expression (yet). Nevertheless, that didn't stop one of us (me? not sure) hitting it out of the park with a 3 part segue from "King of the Swingers" from The Jungle Book soundtrack to the Sex Pistols "Pretty Vacant" to one of the Bach preludes from the WTC. This sort of thing was routine on a daily basis for all of us, and we delighted in the best ones.
What's cracking, my internet fam?! Your boy mwigdahl is BACK with another epic comment that will blow your mind and tickle your funny bone! Before I drop this atomic truth bomb on y’all, make sure to SMASH that like button, OBLITERATE the subscribe link, and ANNIHILATE the bell icon so you can join the notification squad and never miss out on my absolutely, positively, life-altering comments!
So, here's the moment you've all been waiting for, after an intense period of reflection, meticulous research, and deep philosophical thought, I’ve come to a profound conclusion that will shake the very foundations of our virtual world:
"I TOTALLY agree!"
Mind blown, right? I know, I know. It's a truth so pure, so succinct, it could only be expressed in exactly three words. But wait, there's more!
Now, before you recover from the sheer brilliance of this comment, hit me up with those triple likes, double shares, and single-minded adoration as I ride into the digital sunset! Remember, it ain't an epic dialogue without a bit of back and forth, so drop your cosmic brain thoughts down below and let's get the internet's greatest conversation rolling!
But hold up, don't scroll away just yet, because I've got a special offer for the next 10 seconds only! If you comment with the hashtag #TotallyAgreeSquad, I'll personally send a virtual high-five your way, delivered at the speed of your internet connection – probably faster than my aunt trying to snag that last piece of pie at Thanksgiving!
And folks, before we wrap up this video comment extravaganza, let's take a moment to honor our totally real and not at all imaginary sponsor, NordExpressVPNWebShadowers. Protect your secrets, your snacks, and yes, even your secret snacks, with their military-grade encryption – because online privacy is no joke, but my puns sure are!
In conclusion, remember to comment, like, and worship the subscribe button. Keep your snacks safe, your memes dank, and your agreements totally - it's your boy mwigdahl, signing off until the next video comment!
My familiarity is that autistic people often experience heightened empathy not on the simulation/experiential divide but a difference in self other relations. That is, the autistic approach to intentionality places themselves verbatim in the position of the other, rather than the allistic which replaces themselves with the other.
I think given the normative social allistic approach, the autistic person generally has a higher pressure to over develop their ability to compensate. Additionally, as this process uses the self as referent, it is less swayed by differences in the other and more prone to being activitated.
I believe that this is neither good nor bad, but the austistic person often suffers on people's assumption of being able to choose where their empathy is directed, and doubly due the effects of this trait. Things like strong, real, emotional connections to inanimate objects are an instance of this that can both cause suffering or joy, but socially can be a burden.
Thus I can fully believe that your approach is functional and high performing. And that others are often flawed by it. There's an innate integrity in it, because you put yourself directly "in the shit" when you do it. I wouldn't discount it as Machiavellian or as dissociative. Could it be that the dissociation is the cost, not the cause?
Other podcasts I'd recommend: ADSP [1] (if you're into programming), 2.5 admins [2] (if you're into computers). But I have no recommendations about hardware design because AFAIK the podcasts you mention and what Oxide is doing are pretty unique.
100% of recent posts I've seen discussing reductive approaches have slammed them, so it's time for a reminder about why we do it.
Truth. Falsifiable truth.
Everyone knows that reductive approaches are limited. It's in the name. They are a tradeoff. Obviously the world is complex and so intuitively you want to embrace complexity, but the more you do this the more your theories become non-falsifiable and therefore not even wrong, severely limiting their scope because most important truths about the world are falsifiable. This is why spiritualism, mysticism, and religious metaphysics failed so completely to discover the wondrous scientific truths underlying our world, even though these things were supposed to be in their weelhouse. The temptation of the non-falsifiable was a poison apple. Once eaten, the plausible overwhelmed and crowded out the true, and they were never able to build physical knowledge reliable enough to stack, let alone stack high enough to discover that we are all made of star stuff and other such wonders. Truth turned out to be stranger and more beautiful than fiction -- the real conceit was in handing the reins to our imaginations when the world around us exceeded our imaginations so thoroughly.
I know it looked like that, but it was weirder—a failure mode I ran into last night, and the process of correcting it was a rabbit hole that maybe would be interesting to share.
The article was posted 27 (!) times (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364657 - in addition to any that may have been deleted) but they were killed because the domain was banned. Yikes! how could such a great site be banned? Well, before this article existed, there was only the author's page of Spurious Correlations, which is fun and clever but not quite suitable for HN, and it was posted so often (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364947) that a mod must have banned it back when nothing else was coming in from that domain. Alas, when a ban like that fails, it can fail catastrophically, because the next thing to come in from that domain, after 85 Spurious Correlations, was this immediate classic.
I ran across all those [dead] submissions last night, realized this was an awesome article for HN and (duh) unbanned the domain. That left the problem of what to do with 27 past submissions - which should 'win'? Which user should get credit? (Eventually we want to build a karma-sharing system to solve this, but that's not done yet.)
When a good article has been submitted multiple times but not had attention yet, we often comb through the submission feeds of the accounts involved, looking for any other good-but-overlooked submissions that we might invite them to repost instead. (Edit: partly as consolation prizes, but mostly to feed more good stuff to HN readers.) That usually means looking at 2 or maybe 5 submission feeds (not 27)! but I spent about an hour last night looking through most of them and finding other articles to invite. For fun, here are the ones I found:
Some of those were quickly reposted (thanks all!). Invited reposts get put in the second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), meaning they get a random placement somewhat low on HN's front page. Most soon fall off, but the ones that spark readers' interest can go on to do well. You can see the list of invited reposts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/invited.
When deciding who to invite to repost the original thing (in this case, the bridge article), we go by a few heuristics. Earlier submitters are preferred to later ones. Submitters who have never had a story hit the frontpage are preferred to those who have; and those who haven't had a 'hit' for a long time (years, in some cases) are preferred to those who've have had one recently. Submitters who've posted less, or not for a long time, are preferred to HN titans (ColinWright, we love you but that's why https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37312700 'lost', despite being early). Accounts for which we have no email address necessarily 'lose', though I sometimes try to work around that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Oh, and when one of the previous submitters is clearly the article's author, we usually don't invite them to do the repost. That way two people can have some dopamine instead of just one.
Sometimes I do this search recursively*: when in someone's past submission feed I run into an article so good I wonder who else has posted that, and which of them should 'win', so I look through all their histories for yet other articles that deserve reposting, hopefully without losing my place in the previous search. I can't handle a stack depth of more than 2 or 3 before my brain explodes and then I usually bail until next time. (* Depth-first or breadth-first? I've tried both ways to figure out which allows me to hold more state before capsizing, but I'm unsure. Both involve opening a lot of tabs, but in a different order, and both get unwieldy)
This is a great way to meander through the archives (the catacombs?) and find obscure, interesting things. It would be worth writing software to support it one of these years. HN is in a rare sweet spot where it makes sense for YC to fund it simply to be interesting (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), and obscure overlooked submissions are among the most interesting things on HN—so the archives should only grow in value and we can hopefully keep this going a long time.
I got tired partway through last night—a recursive search with 27 inputs is too much. I can't remember why graypegg 'won'—I think I just threw an exception. That left a bunch of submitters who didn't get a repost invite, but I've added these now:
If anyone else wants to dig for worthy ones, I'd love to see the links! People frequently email us asking for second chances for their own material. That's...ok I guess, but it doesn't make my eyes light up. Random finds for no other reason than just-because* are the real treasures here. (* which is also why the current article is an instant classic)
> Instead of trying to bring down another technology (neural networks), how about you focus on making symbolic methods usable to solve real-world problems; e.g. how can I build a robust email spam detection system with symbolic methods?
I have two concerns. First, just after pointing out a logical fallacy from someone else, you added a fallacy: the either-or fallacy. (One can criticize a technology and do other things too.)
Second, you selected an example that illustrates a known and predictable weakness of symbolic systems. Still, there are plenty of real-world problems that symbolic systems address well. So your comment cherry-picks.
It appears as if you are trying to land a counter punch here. I'm weary of this kind of conversational pattern. Many of us know that tends to escalate. I don't want HN to go that direction. We all have varying experience and points of view to contribute. Let's try to be charitable, clear, and logical.
Rogaway was my professor of cryptography at Davis. Amongst his peers he focuses strongly on the ethics of his work, noticing and calling attention to ethical failings by students and professors alike, as well as mentoring students for their future careers.
He also teaches a call called "Ethics in an age of technology". The reading list is that of a philosophy professor rather than a cryptographer. I could not more highly recommend engaging with this surprisingly "unrelated" material.
Rogaway challenged us in small group settings to explore not the implications of computers and the internet, but if technology itself on humanity. I.e the automobile, industrialization, printing press, etc.
Thank you Phil, you've changed my life for the better
Lots of interesting facts are strewn around the paper.
——-
The first paper that squarely talked about the language resource gap in CS/ML. Before this came out, it was hard to explain just how stark the gap between English and other languages was.
Lost in Translation: Large Language Models in Non-English Content Analysis
“I run the world’s largest historical outreach project and it’s on a cesspool of a website.” Moderating a public scholarship site on Reddit: A case study of r/AskHistorians
I feel your pain, I moved to Boston from Buffalo due to this in 2017, and now I have 3x the rent, for 1/4 the space, and a non-existent social sphere due to perma-WFH.
> I also heard one investor mention how Tumblr struggled with technical debt related to their feed
Not sure I'd agree with that, but I suppose it depends on the context and timing of the statement.
Tumblr's solution for reverse-chrono activity feed is, at its core, <1000 lines of PHP and a few extremely heavily optimized sharded MySQL tables. It is creaky and old, but its relatively small code footprint means it isn't terrible on the tech debt scale.
Tumblr's feed is computed entirely at read-time; there's no write fan-out / no materialized inboxes. The key insights that make the system fast (under 10ms latency to identify which posts go in the feed) even at scale:
* If you are grabbing the first page of a feed (most recent N posts from followed users), the worst-case is N posts all by different authors. If you have a lookup table of (user, most recent post time) you can quickly find the N followed users who posted most recently, and only examine their content, rather than looking at content from all followed users.
* For subsequent pages, use a timestamp (or monotonically increasing post id) as a cursor, i.e. the id or time of the last post on the previous page. Then to figure out which followed users to examine for the new page of results, you only need to look at followed users who posted since that cursor timestamp (since they may have older posts on the current page) plus N more users (to satisfy the worst-case of all N posts on the current page being by different authors that were not on previous pages).
* InnoDB's clustered index PK means it is very very fast at PK range scans. This is true even for disjointed sets of range scans, e.g. with PK of (a,b) you can do a query like "WHERE a IN (...long list of IDs...) AND b >= x AND b <= y" and it is still extremely fast.
* You can optimize out the access pattern edge cases and make them fuzzier. Most non-bot users only ever scroll so far; even power users that follow a lot tend to check the feed very often, so they don't go deep each time. On the extreme edge, users who follow thousands don't comprehensively try to view every piece of content in their feed anyway. This means you can measure user activity to determine where to place limits in the system that help query performance but are completely unnoticeable by users.
It's produced by the Royal Shakespeare company and is comprised simply of some of the greatest shakeasperean actors (Judi Dench, Ian McKellan, David Suchet, Patrick Stewart) talking about different elements of how to act shakespare.
I recommend starting with Episode 8, "Exploring a character" if only to see David Suchet utterly outclass (the much more famous) Patrick Stewart in their portrayal of Shylock.
Yes - it was a popular AGW denialst go-to in the early 2000s until the increasing temps continued completely independently from the 11-year solar cycle. It's been pretty thoroughly debunked now, e.g;
C is better because it doesn't try to program for you, it isn't clever, convenient, or have any ideas about how you structure or solve a particular problem. It gives you basic functionality and then gets out of your hair and lets you ge on with programming without making a grand statement about computer science. For people who actually like to program and don't want the language to do it for you that is pretty attractive.
It also turns out that if you remove all the fancy abstraction and write everything out, the code becomes very maintainable and easy to manage. The fact that its about as portable as a program can be helps. I find that most people don't want to write C, but almost everyone is pretty happy interacting with C code written by others, because its simple, fast, portable, easy to integrate, and bind to other languages, and most non-C programmers can read it and have a rough idea of what is going on.
Designated moderation is a pretty poor system. Everyone knows who the dickheads are; you just have to leverage that communal knowledge---but in a way that avoids oppressive majorities.
Have a system whereby any user can indicate zero or more other users to be their personal moderators.
This is kept secret by the site; nobody has any idea of how many other people have selected them as one of their personal moderators, other than by leaking that information.
Then have a rule like this: if some (configurable) number of your personal moderators block some post or account, you also automatically block that post or account.
The automatic block doesn't count as a moderating action on your behalf, with respect to those who have selected you as their personal moderator; it's a second-order block.
This could result in a reasonable blend between the classic opposites: someone else deciding for you what you shouldn't read, or else you having to do all the work. The former model represented by moderated forums like Reddit, or moderated mailing lists or Usenet newsgroups, and the latter represented by unmoderated Usenet newsgroups where it's just you and your personal killfile.
Users should have some sort of statistics dashboard to determine roughly much they are not seeing due to which personal moderators.
Personal moderators could be divided into classes. If someone is your class 1 personal moderator, then if they block something, you don't see it. If three class 2 moderators of yours block something, you don't see it. And if seven class 3 moderators block something, you don't see it.
On any user you see, you can pick them to be your class 1, 2 or 3 moderator.
These designations could have an expiry date, otherwise people will "set and forget", and popular users will amass a lot of power to block. E.g. if everyone in a forum chooses you as a personal class 1 mod, you basically decide what that forum doesn't read. That could be a poorly informed choice on their behalf, which would be somewhat mitigated by expiry.
There could be some expiry workflow. On your first visit to the site on a given day, you're reminded of expired personal moderators: would you like to grant them an extension or drop them?
This was originally created as a guide for high schoolers for robotics but goes into relative depth (the subtitle is "Graduate-level Control Theory for High Schoolers). I personally found it quite useful for intuitive understanding of how control systems work.
Absolutely brilliant. It's so stupid (in that it's kind of silly how easy it is to game our mammal brain) but I can absolutely see this giving an extra kick of motivation.
Have you heard of the INCUP model for ADHD? Interest, Novelty, Challenge, Urgency, and Passion. The more factors an activity has, the more drive the ADHD mind has. Rarity system adds novelty and a bit of passion.
Also if you have looked into operant conditioning at all, you know that variable interval reward schedules are the strongest behavior-forming systems (hence, slot machines and every game that act like them).