If you can write you can talk, if you can talk you can write. This cheers his students up. How many of you like to listen to the other students talk? This depresses them again.
With writing, the bar is to be more interesting than silence.
With coding, the bar is to achieve a tiny modicum of formal consistency.
Most people suck at both.
And this is before you describe the operating environment, which 90% of those 100,000 pages of documentation are actually addressing.
What Apple has is the ability to hype usability for two decades and then lead world & dog into iTunes derangement syndrome (is there a single designer left in the house?)—while it locks in profits with pentalobular screws.
I do not know how many pure mathematicians heard or read Gibbs' lecture. If they had studied it carefully, they would soon have noticed that Gibbs had not really succeeded in unifying the notions of quaternion and vector. On the contrary, by putting the two notions side by side he had made explicit the lack of any real compatibility between them
His lecture ought to have suggested to any attentive mathematician the question, "How can it happen that the properties of three-dimensional space are represented equally well by two quite different and incompatible algebraic structures?"
If this question had once been clearly asked, the answer would almost certainly have been forthcoming. And the answer would have led inevitably to a complete theory of the single-valued and double-valued representations of the three-dimensional rotation group. The vectors are the simplest nontrivial single-valued representation, and the quaternions are the simplest double-valued representation.
Also, the quaternions are the prototype of what later were called spinor representations. The development of the theory of spinor representations, which was actually begun by Elie Cartan in 1913 and completed during the 1930's with substantial help from the physicists Pauli and Dirac, might have been accelerated by approximately 40 years.
It is impossible to say what effects such an accelerated development would have had on other branches of pure mathematics, but the effects could hardly have failed to be substantial.
I commented on Slashdot for a long time, because there's a certain utility in mastering Defense Against the Dim Bulbs.
And here's this long, geeky Slashdot thread with everyone stumbling around looked for the entry point into the higher plane of comprehension, and turns out it was completely covered on Reddit back in 1972.
It happens that I corresponded with two heretics on the subject of evolution. Motoo Kimura who was a Japanese biologist and Ursula Goodenough, an American biologist. Both of them had heretical ideas about evolution which I think were probably correct.
I'm preparing a talk which discusses the idea that Darwin was correct up to a point but he didn't tell us the whole story.
Because the biologists are very defensive about Darwin. If you say anything critical about Darwin you're regarded as an enemy. It's a very dangerous subject to tread on. I kept quiet for thirty years so maybe it's time to speak.
The explanation lies in the peculiar behavior of gravity in the physical world. On the balance sheet of energy accounting, gravitational energy is a deficit. When you are close to a massive object, your gravitational energy is minus the amount of energy it would take to get away from the mass all the way to infinity. When you walk up a hill on the earth, your gravitational energy is becoming less negative, but never gets up to zero.
Any object whose motions are dominated by gravity will have energy decreasing as temperature increases and energy increasing as temperature decreases. As a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, when energy f
And don't get me started on the word "FUCK", which is just about every word type in English: Noun, Verb, Adverb, Adjective, Exclamation, point of emphasis...
And being quite so promiscuous, FUCK can be treated as a hairy wart—commanding attention without in any way being instrumental—in just about every sentence more elaborate than "See Jack fuck Jill."
Now given the gigantic (known) number of galaxies containing a gigantic number of stars, even if that life probability is low, that would be quite a stretch to conclude life exists only on Earth.
At what magnitude does any finite number become probable (more probable than 1 or 2)?
Has your argument eliminated 10, 100, 1000 with equal weight? If not, estimate—if you dare—your coefficient of enhanced probability for these (very slightly) larger integers.
———
Or, how about we get first things first?
We don't even know if the process of life formation is fat-tailed or thin-tailed. (Or do you somehow know this, and you just haven't shared this yet?)
Back-of-the-envelope works pretty good for thin-tailed distributions.
Back-of-the-envelope barely ever works out right for fat-tailed distributions (and this particular envelope is made from the precious fibres of papyrus durphdurphi to begin with, which does not bode well).
———
Here's another N=1 anecdote. So far life on earth—over the past 4 billion years—has observed precisely one celestial phenomena in both the gravitation and electromagnet spectra at the "same" time (those are not scare quotes, they're the lesser-used Michelson–Morley conundrum quotes).
Now isn't it amazing, given the observable size of the universe, that any measurement perched at the top of the charismatic, existential food chain could pass through the value one, even for a few short years?
The way I was educated in the mathematics classroom, counting sequences that rarely pass from 0 to 1, tend not to achieve 2 with great frequency. But actually, in this matter, I disagree with my education. Lines this bright tend to be arbitrary in the first place, and actually represent an abstract limit on a far messier process in the real world. (What's the slope at human conception? I doubt we could pinpoint the precise moment of conception with resolution better than 1 ps, so I rate limit God at a trillion souls/second per fertile woman. Concerning the second derivative, this immediately devolves into two challenging problems, perhaps of equal, or lesser (or greater) difficulty: (1) determining the precise moment of fertility—lessor?—and (2) the precise moment of woman—greater?—though perhaps this second determination was a singular N=1 event in all of cosmic history, for a sufficiently sharp (and local) definition of "human" (again these are not scare quotes, they are the lesser used Ramakrishna–Vivekananda conundrum quotes, who, more or less contemporaneously with M–M, were busy observing a second corner of the "same" elephant).
———
Well, suppose we even knew how life originated here. Suppose even that's there a biochemically preordained sequence of complexification that leads inexorably to modern humans, modulo epicanthic folds and minutia of that nature. Let's further suppose that the primordial soup isn't faster than God, so it can't spit out the first fully formed cell wall in less than `1 ps. Then there would necessarily be some kind of tau, a time constant, wherein chance and probability are given a discrete interlude do their thing.
Would this ladder have ten rungs? Or would this ladder, observed more closely, have one hundred rungs? Or observed yet more closely, one million rungs? Each with their own tau, along the inexorable monorail of complexification?
Bear in mind, that this monorail could well extend beyond human life in its present form. And presumably, if you sampled far enough down the line, you'd eventually find a stage of pan-galactic convergent evolution which only a single life form in the entire observable universe had yet attained, sapiens xenohari.
———
Big data to the rescue! [auspicious horn tootle]
Suppose we sample every suitable rock in the observable universe in the enthalpic, e
I bookmarked one of those links, which was new to me.
You seem to be implying that the situation is so horrible already that abandoning any and all pretense of institutional norms is a distinction without a difference.
Not even close.
Those pretences were accomplished at great cost, over many centuries.
Politically, humans are still wearing animal skins. They might be full of lice and gnats, and washed but once a year (if ever), but even so, I wouldn't toss them onto the garbage heap, just yet.
Yesterday I visited Wikipedia to scope out the mere-exposure effect.
Zajonc, an only child, was born in Lodz, Poland on November 23, 1923.
In 1939, before the Nazi invasion of Poland reached Lodz, his family fled to Warsaw. During their short stay, the building they were living in was hit by an air raid.
Both of Zajonc's parents died, and he was seriously injured.
The rest of his time in Warsaw was dedicated to studying at an underground university, until he was sent to a German labor camp.
He escaped the work camp, was recaptured, and then sent to a political prison in France.
After escaping for the second time, he joined the French Resistance, continuing his studies at the University of Paris.
And to think we made fun of the Poles growing up (perhaps this was probably due to a large Ukrainian diaspora). But then you grow up, and learn more.
A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Zajonc as the 35th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Damn straight!! The peasant class doesn't deserve no stinking freedom. They can't handle it. All Hail King Alphabet ruler of all teh Intertubes.
You CAN'T HANDLE your own stinking privacy.
Only this is the Jack from The Shining and not the Jack from A Few Good Men.
(Or perhaps the Apple store is Jack from The Witches of Eastwick; none of Cher, Susan Sarandon, or Michelle Pfeiffer are dating Jared, so in that sense, at least, he got off light.)
Granted Intel may not want to be a chip foundry for hire but mobile chip numbers have easily eclipsed desktop/laptop chip numbers so Intel is missing out on a huge market.
You're not even going to try to normalize for silicon area, or number of transistors delivered?
If neither the silicon area nor the number of transistors matters, and it's only about the raw numbers, how about let's just concede the whole show to those tiny little flutter filters (capacitors) that are ten to a small chip... and more to a large chip.
This also pisses me off when the total economy of China is compared to the total economy of America, as if America would be right back on top again, if only it had an extra 300 million people engaged in subsistence agriculture.
It also pisses me off when South Korea is mooted for the G8 because—if you include its very large dark economy—its economy belongs on that list. The entire premise of a large, industrialized economy is that it's a good proxy for regulatory clout (of the central banking and monetary institutions, among others).
But sure, my hero is bigger than your hero, once you include his superior load.
It doesn't occur to The Load that, being an unathletic Muggle, it really might not be such a good idea for them to rush headlong onto the battlefield along with the heavily armored and super-powered heroes. Said heroes will usually have to spend at least half the battle keeping The Load alive.
On Slashdot, The Load is a commenter who won't invest three seconds to distinguish a feature from a bug, if the most readily available number seemingly supports his cause without requiring the use of fire or a stone axe.
Or perhaps you believe that Reddit is better than Slashdot, because most of the comments are shorter (for me, that's a bug, but YMMV).
Here's one thing: if the cellphone industry wasn't getting away with murder on their artificial 2–3 year obsolescence cycle, their numbers would only be halfway so impressive.
How did they gain that power where Intel didn't? (Hint: and it's not because Intel never tried, either).
If they allow a festival of a certain size to use their trademarks, the another slightly bigger one will want to do the same, then a bigger one, and I think you are smart enough to know where this is going.
A naive faith in slippery-slope argumentation is pretty much my definition of not terribly smart.
My neighbour lives nearby.
My neighbour's neighbour lives nearby.
My neighbour's neighbour's neighbour does not live nearby.
BUT
If someone adds another house in between then we have:
My neighbour's neighbour's neighbour's neighbour does live nearby. Total distance is the same, but the intervening steps are now smaller, so this time nearness wins.
It's kind of interesting how we presume that special-pleading is automatically a thin-tail relative ratchet: well, this one time, in band camp, someone went THIS far; therefore, I should too. And then you double down with a recursive invocation: well, this one time, in arbitration court, someone played the band-camp card, and IT ACTUALLY WORKED.
While American Pie was somewhat entertaining, it sure wasn't the Tarkovsky's Solaris or The Seventh Seal. But then again, perhaps I'm underestimating American Pie. Has any other movie ever captured the low-brow slippery-slop in quite the same way?
All but a few people stopped caring about that long ago.
Whatever you do, don't buy yourself a boomerang, because you've yet to even pass the basic pendulum test.
It's human nature to overreact to the most recent catastrophe.
Did you sleep all the way through the Facebook privacy catastrophe 2016–2018? For 50.1% of the American population, what we are now living through is an ongoing catastrophe.
Half the parents in American are now going "hey, kids, look at that pompous know-nothing bozo blowhard—whatever you do, don't grow up to be like him".
So it's only half a pendulum, but on the flip side, it's got an actual powder charge.
I recently read George Dyson's book on the founding of the IAS.
The intellectual and academic caliber of people fleeing Germany (and nearby regions potentially subject to German influence) was unbelievable, yet the cowboy-era administrative end-runs to secure stipends for many of these people were off the charts.
Then America had its middle-class golden era between 1950 and 1980. If I've learned anything from my recent return to the history books it's this: this is the least economically normative period of the last 400 years. Short of handing Stalin the keys to the hydrogen bomb years earlier than he should have got them, it was a pretty amazing time for an empire unlike any that came before it.
Not so long ago, 10% of the population went off to university. Now 41% of women in Canada attain a bachelor's degree or higher. This is associated with an inevitable pressure to make the filters of meritocracy ever more fine-grained. So, of necessity, academia invents a cascade of credentialism mountain ranges. But there isn't enough legitimate signal to make this work, so we're forced to invent credentialist hoops.
Zoom all the way up to the TARP bailout of 2008. There's a large group of economists who think this was too large/unnecessarily/ineffective, another large group who think it was too small/absolutely essential/effective so far as it went (with maybe a sliver of fence-sitters eating porridge at the perfect temperature).
Prospective judgement is counterfactual. Retrospective judgement is counterfactual. In none of these matters are we afforded a virtual mulligan to run the simulation again.
If you're not Einstein, you're probably facing some kind of peer-group proxy measure, with the intervals between the scythe are having contracted from leap years to stutter-step quarters (who can summon the effort to leap any more, when the relentless ankle-blades never let up?)
Goodbye Erdos number two. Hello author position number 997 on a single published paper.
Meritocracy is this weird nodable concept. Sure sounds like a good idea (especially after a long stretch where things are anything but meritocratic). But merit turns out to be a terribly, terribly hard thing to implement well in practice, with acceptable consequence.
On TARP, we never achieved a retrospective standard of merit, all we got was two lousy, tribal camps locked into an egocentric crowing competition. I mention TARP mainly because the stakes here are in the trillion dollar range. Surely if incentive porn FTW, this would be the ultimate case study concerning the collective human incentive to get the individual incentives sorted out.
———
I found these two books exceptionally interesting to read back to back:
* Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy â" 2012 * Coming Apart â" 2012
Same publication year, same thematic material, anode vs. cathode political perspective, but ultimately the same message: implementing meritocracy is far harder than it looks.
Basically the problem here boils down to not enough lions. Actual survival was once a pretty good proxy measure on who had it together, and who didn't. (Until the fated day came where your—former—best friend hid your Nikes.) Problem: the objective measure of the lion cull was a just a tad morally blind.
One of the problems with incentive porn is the notion that incentive gradients should be pervasive and perpetual: don't go to university, struggle to pay the rent; don't graduate at the top of your class, struggle to pay your student loans. Etc.
The other model is that you mill around aimlessly (sort of) until something clicks, and then you go off on a mad tear, when there's clearly something special you feel that you can achieve. If you succeed, you get perks (recognition, fancy jobs, fancy peers). If not, you're simply cast back into the milling pond.
A UBI is one way to provide a giant milling pond of opportunity.
Even the prequels, when people left the theater, they were happy.
I was one of those people in the theatre for the first prequel.
My friend and I left the theatre so disgusted (I recall this vividly) that afterwards I had to mentally quarantine the 1977 Star Wars (which I first watched at exactly the right age) to prevent it from catching Jarbola.
I've always preferred 77 to Empire, and none of the other episodes (Ewoks, shudder) have ever been dear to me in the least.
In Phantom, it was somewhere around the submarine sequence that my friend and I had the following exchange: Is this as good as it gets? Pained shrug. Soon followed by nails dredging palms.
Looks like we're on track for $20/TB, if you purchase in bulk.
Let's monetize a "huge difference" at $1000 (which I regard as the smallest available value for a "huge difference").
Thus, your 1% extra compression needs to save 50 TB to make a "huge difference" of one large.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking your dataset needs to be on the order of 5 PB for a 1% compression improvement to shave 50 TB.
5 PB works out to 200,000 single-layer Blu-ray disks.
Nice home library. (I think we can already safely assume it's not mostly drama, unless you're Pacman-ratting a good half of the entire IMDB movie list, behind the darknet spider from hell.)
But the issue here isn't fairness or doing what is right. Ultimately professional sports are businesses. And they're not in the business of fair games, they're in the entertainment business.
The NHL has a fairly high luck factor, and it's deliberate policy by the NHL to keep it this way. Lower scoring means that games remain undecided until the final minutes (preventing channel hoppers). It also means that the game outcomes are more random, meaning that every franchise—no matter how badly managed (hello, Edmonton)—has a shot of remaining in contention for most of the season.
It's blindingly obvious that cutting back on hooking, holding, and other forms of obstruction increases scoring and rewards actual talent.
But this isn't what the NHL as a professional business wants. What the NHL wants is the maximum number of viewers glued to soap opera–ish mediocrity.
Take the Bettman point: the worst idea I know of in all of professional sports. How it presently works:
2 win in regulation 2 win in overtime 2 win in shoot-out 1 loss in shoot-out 1 loss in overtime 0 loss in regulation
This simply encourages coaches to implement the trap and take no risks during regulation play; it encourages GMs to employ positionally responsible players with terrible hands, over another player of equal cost possessed of creativity and flair.
A correct formula would have negative convexity:
4 win in regulation 3 win in overtime 2 win in shoot-out 1 loss in shoot-out 0 loss in overtime 0 loss in regulation
This formula would substantially increase the skill factor within a few short years.
It's what the fans like to think they are paying for, but which they (mostly) are not getting. What we're getting instead is a Bettman kayfabe blow job.
Chances that robot referees would be employed to make this better, rather than worse, under current NHL governance: 0%.
Psychopaths tend toward grandiosity, and tend to give out only 1s and 5s.
Normal people familiar with ride sharing mostly give out 4s and 5s, because even a 3 is considered somewhat of an insult or a slag or a snub.
Which is exactly how Uber wants this to play out: every non-psychopathic customer browbeaten into giving out nothing but 4s and 5s after every trip as a form of a consumer-satisfaction reinforcement ritual.
It's also a scheme to trivialize your customers.
I'd be happy to cast judgement on their implementation of the rating system itself (my scores would probably range from 1–2), whereas I have no interest in using it to assess the wait staff directly (who are just the front-end of a complex system, and might well be under the thumb of an asshole manager).
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] I feel sufficiently informed about the rating system itself to provide honest feedback
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a class of artificial intelligence algorithms used in unsupervised machine learning, implemented by a system of two neural networks contesting with each other in a zero-sum game framework. They were introduced by Ian Goodfellow et al. in 2014.
This technique can generate [i.e. more or less from scratch] photographs that look at least superficially authentic to human observers, having many realistic characteristics (though in tests people can tell real from generated in many cases).
This is not just cat-and-mouse taken to the next level. This is the interstellar cat-and-mouse warp-drive wormhole entrance ramp.
Any signal that discriminates is sauce for the gander.
Any network that's pretty good from scratch stands to be extremely good at minor scratch repair.
All you can do with 140 characters is tweak the reader's autobiographical memory to construct an emotionally laden simulacrum. This is basic information theory. The densest compression possible requires the receiving side to have a detailed model of the message space (descriptive world) in which the communication is embedded.
Twitter is a lot like a quarterback calling an audible at the line of scrimmage. "17 cobra 56 blue 88 hut hut." To some degree the QB can fashion entirely unique plays: "cobra" might be a direction to the wide receiver, "blue" might be a direction to the running backs, "88" might be a blocking pattern for the offensive line. But every one of these elements is previously rehearsed.
Twitter is also a lot like Mr Potato Head, where you also work with a fixed palette, but (to some degree) obtain novel permutations and combinations.
The other half of Twitter is to inject some wit at the seams—clever ideas, like listing out multiple Potato Head mustache codes to reference John R. Bolton, while arranging those codes to resemble some other snide cliche. Har har.
And the cherry on top is timing. First is good. Waiting to pounce on the obvious har har is also good. Immediately one-upping the counter-punch is also good. You know, all that stuff, all that stuff that was the real subject of grade eight, while we all got Cs and Bs is actual English class. (Turns out, a lot of people pine for the glory days of their high-school varsity trophies.) We just all need to know who's got the drop, or we couldn't possibly sort ourselves into a cohesive snideathon.
In theory, Twitter could rise to the level of poetry, and I'm sure it sometimes does. But the cherry-chasers will barely notice, and surely won't invest the mental energy required to unpack real poetry, so again, Twitter probably trades in simulacrum poetry—pseudo-poetry that potently reminds you of the real thing, but without demanding actual work.
But the raindrops, you say, they form a pattern. Illumination by eternal storm watching. I've looked at clouds from both sides now... Nice gig.
My gig is inherent calibration: long-form messages from which one can adduce the author's competence and validity entirely on internal grounds (as a first term). This is, of course, a complete waste of time... until you get further along, building taller towers.
Water finds its own level. Distinguishing one droplet from another makes little difference at the end of the day.
Twitter people are water folk; it's a kind of dolphin-circus Mermaid culture for people who hate stairs. TheRealNewton: if I have seen farther than others, it's because I have stood on the nose of a breaching Humpback whale.
Followed by a giant spray of a billion tiny drops.
Krzanich's immediate resignation was accepted to show "that all employees will respect Intel's values and adhere to the company's code of conduct," according to Intel.
"This is truly transformational," Intel CEO Brian Krzanich tells WIRED. "It allows architects—both at the PC level and the data center level—to rethink how they build the system."
But in the end, it only transformed Intel's board to rethink Brian Krzanich.
With about 2.9 billion common shares outstanding, Brampton, Ont.-based Nortel is now being valued at $200.6-billion. That fell just short of IBM's total valuation of $201.7-billion at the end of the day yesterday.
*This isn't the reason, but now you will be wondering every single time.
Only those who subscribe to the taint ethos.
These are the people who can't get over Mars mission urine purification systems with engineered osmotic membranes, while they drink tap water that (somewhere in history) a trillion fish have pissed into (or worse).
These are also the same people who regard bleach as Oil of Witch Doctor. Bleach doesn't remove taint, whereas Oil of Witch sure does.
Slashdot Mirror
The lead managed not to name the researchers, the cancer drugs, or the cancer targets.
blah blah VAGUE blah blah VAGUE blah blah VAGUE
News for Nerds with jargon deficit disorder.
Christopher Hitchens:
With writing, the bar is to be more interesting than silence.
With coding, the bar is to achieve a tiny modicum of formal consistency.
Most people suck at both.
And this is before you describe the operating environment, which 90% of those 100,000 pages of documentation are actually addressing.
What Apple has is the ability to hype usability for two decades and then lead world & dog into iTunes derangement syndrome (is there a single designer left in the house?)—while it locks in profits with pentalobular screws.
Interesting doesn't begin to cover it.
Missed Opportunities by Freeman Dyson (1972) ... in which Dyson slags on Gibbs.
See numbered page 644 (document page 10).
I commented on Slashdot for a long time, because there's a certain utility in mastering Defense Against the Dim Bulbs.
And here's this long, geeky Slashdot thread with everyone stumbling around looked for the entry point into the higher plane of comprehension, and turns out it was completely covered on Reddit back in 1972.
* Freeman Dyson "I kept quiet for thirty years, maybe it's time to speak." — 15 June 2018
* The Key to Everything — 10 May 2018
Have you forgotten how the poster children of the 1990s software development rectitude revolution were Visual Basic and PHP?
I haven't. Not by a long sight.
And being quite so promiscuous, FUCK can be treated as a hairy wart—commanding attention without in any way being instrumental—in just about every sentence more elaborate than "See Jack fuck Jill."
At what magnitude does any finite number become probable (more probable than 1 or 2)?
Has your argument eliminated 10, 100, 1000 with equal weight? If not, estimate—if you dare—your coefficient of enhanced probability for these (very slightly) larger integers.
———
Or, how about we get first things first?
We don't even know if the process of life formation is fat-tailed or thin-tailed. (Or do you somehow know this, and you just haven't shared this yet?)
Back-of-the-envelope works pretty good for thin-tailed distributions.
Back-of-the-envelope barely ever works out right for fat-tailed distributions (and this particular envelope is made from the precious fibres of papyrus durphdurphi to begin with, which does not bode well).
———
Here's another N=1 anecdote. So far life on earth—over the past 4 billion years—has observed precisely one celestial phenomena in both the gravitation and electromagnet spectra at the "same" time (those are not scare quotes, they're the lesser-used Michelson–Morley conundrum quotes).
Now isn't it amazing, given the observable size of the universe, that any measurement perched at the top of the charismatic, existential food chain could pass through the value one, even for a few short years?
The way I was educated in the mathematics classroom, counting sequences that rarely pass from 0 to 1, tend not to achieve 2 with great frequency. But actually, in this matter, I disagree with my education. Lines this bright tend to be arbitrary in the first place, and actually represent an abstract limit on a far messier process in the real world. (What's the slope at human conception? I doubt we could pinpoint the precise moment of conception with resolution better than 1 ps, so I rate limit God at a trillion souls/second per fertile woman. Concerning the second derivative, this immediately devolves into two challenging problems, perhaps of equal, or lesser (or greater) difficulty: (1) determining the precise moment of fertility—lessor?—and (2) the precise moment of woman—greater?—though perhaps this second determination was a singular N=1 event in all of cosmic history, for a sufficiently sharp (and local) definition of "human" (again these are not scare quotes, they are the lesser used Ramakrishna–Vivekananda conundrum quotes, who, more or less contemporaneously with M–M, were busy observing a second corner of the "same" elephant).
———
Well, suppose we even knew how life originated here. Suppose even that's there a biochemically preordained sequence of complexification that leads inexorably to modern humans, modulo epicanthic folds and minutia of that nature. Let's further suppose that the primordial soup isn't faster than God, so it can't spit out the first fully formed cell wall in less than `1 ps. Then there would necessarily be some kind of tau, a time constant, wherein chance and probability are given a discrete interlude do their thing.
Would this ladder have ten rungs? Or would this ladder, observed more closely, have one hundred rungs? Or observed yet more closely, one million rungs? Each with their own tau, along the inexorable monorail of complexification?
Bear in mind, that this monorail could well extend beyond human life in its present form. And presumably, if you sampled far enough down the line, you'd eventually find a stage of pan-galactic convergent evolution which only a single life form in the entire observable universe had yet attained, sapiens xenohari.
———
Big data to the rescue! [auspicious horn tootle]
Suppose we sample every suitable rock in the observable universe in the enthalpic, e
I bookmarked one of those links, which was new to me.
You seem to be implying that the situation is so horrible already that abandoning any and all pretense of institutional norms is a distinction without a difference.
Not even close.
Those pretences were accomplished at great cost, over many centuries.
Politically, humans are still wearing animal skins. They might be full of lice and gnats, and washed but once a year (if ever), but even so, I wouldn't toss them onto the garbage heap, just yet.
Pouring all your fears into one basket?
When I grew up, the rusty old H-bomb featured as the new-car-smell PELT and we still don't take it seriously enough.
Seems no matter what it is, the Death Race 2000 new car smell eventually wears off.
Yesterday I visited Wikipedia to scope out the mere-exposure effect.
And to think we made fun of the Poles growing up (perhaps this was probably due to a large Ukrainian diaspora). But then you grow up, and learn more.
You CAN'T HANDLE your own stinking privacy.
Only this is the Jack from The Shining and not the Jack from A Few Good Men.
(Or perhaps the Apple store is Jack from The Witches of Eastwick; none of Cher, Susan Sarandon, or Michelle Pfeiffer are dating Jared, so in that sense, at least, he got off light.)
You're not even going to try to normalize for silicon area, or number of transistors delivered?
If neither the silicon area nor the number of transistors matters, and it's only about the raw numbers, how about let's just concede the whole show to those tiny little flutter filters (capacitors) that are ten to a small chip ... and more to a large chip.
This also pisses me off when the total economy of China is compared to the total economy of America, as if America would be right back on top again, if only it had an extra 300 million people engaged in subsistence agriculture.
It also pisses me off when South Korea is mooted for the G8 because—if you include its very large dark economy—its economy belongs on that list. The entire premise of a large, industrialized economy is that it's a good proxy for regulatory clout (of the central banking and monetary institutions, among others).
But sure, my hero is bigger than your hero, once you include his superior load.
On Slashdot, The Load is a commenter who won't invest three seconds to distinguish a feature from a bug, if the most readily available number seemingly supports his cause without requiring the use of fire or a stone axe.
Or perhaps you believe that Reddit is better than Slashdot, because most of the comments are shorter (for me, that's a bug, but YMMV).
Here's one thing: if the cellphone industry wasn't getting away with murder on their artificial 2–3 year obsolescence cycle, their numbers would only be halfway so impressive.
How did they gain that power where Intel didn't? (Hint: and it's not because Intel never tried, either).
Bitchmapitis — prison culture envy disorder
Dbagmapitis — yes, but he's our asshole
A naive faith in slippery-slope argumentation is pretty much my definition of not terribly smart.
My neighbour lives nearby.
My neighbour's neighbour lives nearby.
My neighbour's neighbour's neighbour does not live nearby.
BUT
If someone adds another house in between then we have:
My neighbour's neighbour's neighbour's neighbour does live nearby. Total distance is the same, but the intervening steps are now smaller, so this time nearness wins.
It's kind of interesting how we presume that special-pleading is automatically a thin-tail relative ratchet: well, this one time, in band camp, someone went THIS far; therefore, I should too. And then you double down with a recursive invocation: well, this one time, in arbitration court, someone played the band-camp card, and IT ACTUALLY WORKED.
While American Pie was somewhat entertaining, it sure wasn't the Tarkovsky's Solaris or The Seventh Seal. But then again, perhaps I'm underestimating American Pie. Has any other movie ever captured the low-brow slippery-slop in quite the same way?
Whatever you do, don't buy yourself a boomerang, because you've yet to even pass the basic pendulum test.
It's human nature to overreact to the most recent catastrophe.
Did you sleep all the way through the Facebook privacy catastrophe 2016–2018? For 50.1% of the American population, what we are now living through is an ongoing catastrophe.
Half the parents in American are now going "hey, kids, look at that pompous know-nothing bozo blowhard—whatever you do, don't grow up to be like him".
So it's only half a pendulum, but on the flip side, it's got an actual powder charge.
I recently read George Dyson's book on the founding of the IAS.
The intellectual and academic caliber of people fleeing Germany (and nearby regions potentially subject to German influence) was unbelievable, yet the cowboy-era administrative end-runs to secure stipends for many of these people were off the charts.
Then America had its middle-class golden era between 1950 and 1980. If I've learned anything from my recent return to the history books it's this: this is the least economically normative period of the last 400 years. Short of handing Stalin the keys to the hydrogen bomb years earlier than he should have got them, it was a pretty amazing time for an empire unlike any that came before it.
Not so long ago, 10% of the population went off to university. Now 41% of women in Canada attain a bachelor's degree or higher. This is associated with an inevitable pressure to make the filters of meritocracy ever more fine-grained. So, of necessity, academia invents a cascade of credentialism mountain ranges. But there isn't enough legitimate signal to make this work, so we're forced to invent credentialist hoops.
Zoom all the way up to the TARP bailout of 2008. There's a large group of economists who think this was too large/unnecessarily/ineffective, another large group who think it was too small/absolutely essential/effective so far as it went (with maybe a sliver of fence-sitters eating porridge at the perfect temperature).
Prospective judgement is counterfactual. Retrospective judgement is counterfactual. In none of these matters are we afforded a virtual mulligan to run the simulation again.
If you're not Einstein, you're probably facing some kind of peer-group proxy measure, with the intervals between the scythe are having contracted from leap years to stutter-step quarters (who can summon the effort to leap any more, when the relentless ankle-blades never let up?)
Goodbye Erdos number two. Hello author position number 997 on a single published paper.
Meritocracy is this weird nodable concept. Sure sounds like a good idea (especially after a long stretch where things are anything but meritocratic). But merit turns out to be a terribly, terribly hard thing to implement well in practice, with acceptable consequence.
On TARP, we never achieved a retrospective standard of merit, all we got was two lousy, tribal camps locked into an egocentric crowing competition. I mention TARP mainly because the stakes here are in the trillion dollar range. Surely if incentive porn FTW, this would be the ultimate case study concerning the collective human incentive to get the individual incentives sorted out.
———
I found these two books exceptionally interesting to read back to back:
* Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy â" 2012
* Coming Apart â" 2012
Same publication year, same thematic material, anode vs. cathode political perspective, but ultimately the same message: implementing meritocracy is far harder than it looks.
Basically the problem here boils down to not enough lions. Actual survival was once a pretty good proxy measure on who had it together, and who didn't. (Until the fated day came where your—former—best friend hid your Nikes.) Problem: the objective measure of the lion cull was a just a tad morally blind.
One of the problems with incentive porn is the notion that incentive gradients should be pervasive and perpetual: don't go to university, struggle to pay the rent; don't graduate at the top of your class, struggle to pay your student loans. Etc.
The other model is that you mill around aimlessly (sort of) until something clicks, and then you go off on a mad tear, when there's clearly something special you feel that you can achieve. If you succeed, you get perks (recognition, fancy jobs, fancy peers). If not, you're simply cast back into the milling pond.
A UBI is one way to provide a giant milling pond of opportunity.
It would surely
I was one of those people in the theatre for the first prequel.
My friend and I left the theatre so disgusted (I recall this vividly) that afterwards I had to mentally quarantine the 1977 Star Wars (which I first watched at exactly the right age) to prevent it from catching Jarbola.
I've always preferred 77 to Empire, and none of the other episodes (Ewoks, shudder) have ever been dear to me in the least.
In Phantom, it was somewhere around the submarine sequence that my friend and I had the following exchange: Is this as good as it gets? Pained shrug. Soon followed by nails dredging palms.
Hard Drive Cost Per Gigabyte — July 2017
Looks like we're on track for $20/TB, if you purchase in bulk.
Let's monetize a "huge difference" at $1000 (which I regard as the smallest available value for a "huge difference").
Thus, your 1% extra compression needs to save 50 TB to make a "huge difference" of one large.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking your dataset needs to be on the order of 5 PB for a 1% compression improvement to shave 50 TB.
5 PB works out to 200,000 single-layer Blu-ray disks.
Nice home library. (I think we can already safely assume it's not mostly drama, unless you're Pacman-ratting a good half of the entire IMDB movie list, behind the darknet spider from hell.)
This runs much deeper than that.
Why it's so much harder to predict winners in hockey than basketball — 5 June 2017
The NHL has a fairly high luck factor, and it's deliberate policy by the NHL to keep it this way. Lower scoring means that games remain undecided until the final minutes (preventing channel hoppers). It also means that the game outcomes are more random, meaning that every franchise—no matter how badly managed (hello, Edmonton)—has a shot of remaining in contention for most of the season.
It's blindingly obvious that cutting back on hooking, holding, and other forms of obstruction increases scoring and rewards actual talent.
But this isn't what the NHL as a professional business wants. What the NHL wants is the maximum number of viewers glued to soap opera–ish mediocrity.
Take the Bettman point: the worst idea I know of in all of professional sports. How it presently works:
2 win in regulation
2 win in overtime
2 win in shoot-out
1 loss in shoot-out
1 loss in overtime
0 loss in regulation
This simply encourages coaches to implement the trap and take no risks during regulation play; it encourages GMs to employ positionally responsible players with terrible hands, over another player of equal cost possessed of creativity and flair.
A correct formula would have negative convexity:
4 win in regulation
3 win in overtime
2 win in shoot-out
1 loss in shoot-out
0 loss in overtime
0 loss in regulation
This formula would substantially increase the skill factor within a few short years.
It's what the fans like to think they are paying for, but which they (mostly) are not getting. What we're getting instead is a Bettman kayfabe blow job.
Chances that robot referees would be employed to make this better, rather than worse, under current NHL governance: 0%.
Psychopaths tend toward grandiosity, and tend to give out only 1s and 5s.
Normal people familiar with ride sharing mostly give out 4s and 5s, because even a 3 is considered somewhat of an insult or a slag or a snub.
Which is exactly how Uber wants this to play out: every non-psychopathic customer browbeaten into giving out nothing but 4s and 5s after every trip as a form of a consumer-satisfaction reinforcement ritual.
It's also a scheme to trivialize your customers.
I'd be happy to cast judgement on their implementation of the rating system itself (my scores would probably range from 1–2), whereas I have no interest in using it to assess the wait staff directly (who are just the front-end of a complex system, and might well be under the thumb of an asshole manager).
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] I feel sufficiently informed about the rating system itself to provide honest feedback
Never gonna see it, not in a million years.
Because that's not what it's there to do.
Generative adversarial network
This is not just cat-and-mouse taken to the next level. This is the interstellar cat-and-mouse warp-drive wormhole entrance ramp.
Any signal that discriminates is sauce for the gander.
Any network that's pretty good from scratch stands to be extremely good at minor scratch repair.
All you can do with 140 characters is tweak the reader's autobiographical memory to construct an emotionally laden simulacrum. This is basic information theory. The densest compression possible requires the receiving side to have a detailed model of the message space (descriptive world) in which the communication is embedded.
Twitter is a lot like a quarterback calling an audible at the line of scrimmage. "17 cobra 56 blue 88 hut hut." To some degree the QB can fashion entirely unique plays: "cobra" might be a direction to the wide receiver, "blue" might be a direction to the running backs, "88" might be a blocking pattern for the offensive line. But every one of these elements is previously rehearsed.
Twitter is also a lot like Mr Potato Head, where you also work with a fixed palette, but (to some degree) obtain novel permutations and combinations.
The other half of Twitter is to inject some wit at the seams—clever ideas, like listing out multiple Potato Head mustache codes to reference John R. Bolton, while arranging those codes to resemble some other snide cliche. Har har.
And the cherry on top is timing. First is good. Waiting to pounce on the obvious har har is also good. Immediately one-upping the counter-punch is also good. You know, all that stuff, all that stuff that was the real subject of grade eight, while we all got Cs and Bs is actual English class. (Turns out, a lot of people pine for the glory days of their high-school varsity trophies.) We just all need to know who's got the drop, or we couldn't possibly sort ourselves into a cohesive snideathon.
In theory, Twitter could rise to the level of poetry, and I'm sure it sometimes does. But the cherry-chasers will barely notice, and surely won't invest the mental energy required to unpack real poetry, so again, Twitter probably trades in simulacrum poetry—pseudo-poetry that potently reminds you of the real thing, but without demanding actual work.
But the raindrops, you say, they form a pattern. Illumination by eternal storm watching. I've looked at clouds from both sides now ... Nice gig.
My gig is inherent calibration: long-form messages from which one can adduce the author's competence and validity entirely on internal grounds (as a first term). This is, of course, a complete waste of time ... until you get further along, building taller towers.
Water finds its own level. Distinguishing one droplet from another makes little difference at the end of the day.
Twitter people are water folk; it's a kind of dolphin-circus Mermaid culture for people who hate stairs. TheRealNewton: if I have seen farther than others, it's because I have stood on the nose of a breaching Humpback whale.
Followed by a giant spray of a billion tiny drops.
Intel's Bold Plan to Reinvent Computer Memory (and Keep It a Secret) — March 2017
But in the end, it only transformed Intel's board to rethink Brian Krzanich.
Excellent choice of end-point. Fucking morons.
Nortel market cap rivals IBM — 29 June 2000
Only those who subscribe to the taint ethos.
These are the people who can't get over Mars mission urine purification systems with engineered osmotic membranes, while they drink tap water that (somewhere in history) a trillion fish have pissed into (or worse).
These are also the same people who regard bleach as Oil of Witch Doctor. Bleach doesn't remove taint, whereas Oil of Witch sure does.