I believe whoever solves the emotional dysregulation that leads to some persecution complexes will genuinely deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. While I doubt this will solve the problem completely, I do see potential for it to prevent discourse from spiraling quite as badly as it tends to.
I predict that a feature like this would probably chase off some undesirable community members, while genuinely helping some people improve their ability to engage in good-faith discussion and debate. And if it eases the burden on moderators and the community at large who currently police these things, it seems like a clear win. I’m sure it could be mis-calibrated to tone policing, but I’m not one to let perfect be the enemy of good.
Honestly it feels more like setting up a lemonade stand along a marathon route that goes right through our collective vegetable gardens. LLMs are on a quest to scrape and steal as much as they can with near complete impunity. I know two wrongs don’t make a right, but these ethical concerns seem a bit mis-calibrated.
Well, I can go along with your analogy, and say that yeah, I'd be annoyed at the owner of the lemonade stand. Those marathon runners are trampling all my vegetables, and you're just trying to make a quick buck selling lemonade? People (me included) are annoyed at LLM creators scraping the web and gobbling up all copyrighted material, but it's mis-calibrated to get annoyed at Anna's Archive performing some sort of digital selling of stolen goods?
I would argue that UPS has the right to know the location of its packages and trucks, but not its drivers. If a driver has to leave for a few hours for a family emergency, UPS no longer has the right to track that driver, as long as they are not using company equipment for travel.
My rule of thumb is that if you’re not measuring anything you’re not engineering. It’s not the whole picture, but to me the engineering part sometimes means being able to explain (and even quantify) why one solution is better than another.
I've found coding assistants to be a huge boon for this. All of the thorough analysis that previously would've taken a bunch of tedious extra thought work to do for marginal benefit (with a well-calibrated intuition) becomes 5 seconds of thought to the the computer to build a harness and then letting it chew on that for 15 minutes. It now also takes me one command and less than a minute to get pprof captures from all the production services my team owns (thanks to some scripts I had it write), which is just something I never would've bothered to automate otherwise, so we never really looked much at it. Codex is also very good at analyzing the results, and finding easy wins vs. knowing what would be invasive to improve, and then just doing it.
Thinking of seeing if I can get mutation testing set up next, and expanding our use of fuzzing. All of these techniques that I know about but haven't had the time to do are suddenly more feasible to invest into.
I’ve been coaching my son’s team for the last four years, and this sounds like the breath of fresh air the program desperately needed. Keeping the kids engaged and invested has always been a struggle. Having distinct roles and more robust success criteria sounds like a great way to address that problem.
Previous years have mostly centered around a very simple core project that essentially amounts to assembling a LEGO kit and adding a simple motorized part (e.g. making something spin). We usually finish that within the first couple weeks and then ditch the very tedious workbook the program provides.
I’ve been bringing in bins of my own Technic parts and some of Yoshihito Isogawa’s idea books[0]. I try to explain basic mechanical concepts like gears, levers, differentials, and rack and pinion steering. Then the kids explore and create a second project of their own. At the festival (non-competitive at the k-5 level in our area) we present both our projects side-by-side (usually trying to integrate them and stick within the overall theme). We’re the only team that does it that way, but I would much rather focus on inspiring the kids than coloring inside the lines.
My only concern is that making the final challenge more actively competitive will force us back into that limited situation. If the builds are too simple and the challenges too basic (which I expect, because the program leans toward expecting all teams to hit the mark) I doubt we would have the same freedom to expand on the program. Side by side competition is going to have more restrictions than a private presentation to a panel of judges.
On the whole, if this helps more kids stay engaged and having fun overall, I’m happy to figure out new ways to let the kids express themselves. This sounds like a positive change. Now I really hope our program leader lets me buy some of the old Spike kits.
I don’t understand why you’re bringing up Obama. Nobody is defending him, and I think you might be inferring some sort of tribalistic defensiveness without any evidence. I see that sort of thing a lot, and I’ve never understood it.
Please correct me if I misunderstood the point you were trying to make.
The point I'm trying to make is that highly respected and even lauded individuals kill American citizens and people aren't generally afraid of them, so the fact that "they've shot and killed american citizens" on its own doesn't explain any fear. But I had misread the original question so my point was not quite relevant because the question was stated with justified fear already implied.
I’m reading Domain Driven Development and learning why so many of my projects have been tough to maintain.
I also recently learned that you can get ancient coins for very little money if you don’t care about resale value or need them to be in pristine condition. I bought some coins from kingdoms that I’d never heard of. Many are thousands of years old! It’s fun holding a piece of history like that.
> I’m reading Domain Driven Development and learning why so many of my projects have been tough to maintain.
Oooh, thats a good one. Next read the Architects paradox, Why Greatness cannot be planned and Understanding Variation and your views of the world will be forever altered. Or pick up "Architecture Modernization" by Nick Tune if you want more tools to do stuff and if you do not want to achieve enligntenment.
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Where did you acquire cheap ancient coins? ebay? May be cool to get some for my dnd group
Thanks for the recommendations! I’m actually getting to the end and wondered where to go next. Perfect timing! I’ll go ahead and order those today :).
> Where did you acquire cheap ancient coins? ebay? May be cool to get some for my dnd group
I bought most of mine on VCoins. The few I bought weren’t certified or anything, but they have lots of very well established sellers. I got a few bronze and silver coins from the Middle East and India. They were in good shape at about $10-20 US (plus international shipping). I also got some nicer Byzantine and Roman coins in the $50 US price range. I tried to group my orders from each seller to save on shipping. So far everything I’ve gotten is exactly as pictured, and the transactions have been very smooth. I got a couple more from a local dealer. The prices were a bit higher, but he was a lot of fun to talk to, which more than makes up for the price difference.
Ancient coin collecting is an awesome hobby! I have one that scholars think was made by / designed by Pythagoras himself. For a few hundred bucks!
Recently I learned that only 3% of Latin works from 1450-1700 (including renaissance and scientific revolution) have been translated. Secondrenaissance.ai
Latin isn't terribly hard to learn, and it is surprisingly easy to read "technical" documents in Latin; because once you learn the terms the other parts are relatively basic.
Declensions seem very extensive and unintuitive to learn, like they had a completely different structure than modern languages (verbs adjective noun articles)
Getting declensions right is a pain when trying to write Latin, but of reading it you can often just ignore them entirely and work it out from context.
Of course you have to basically memorize the common things but those are all non-standard anyway.
Are you sure you are actually understanding the subtleties? I can definitely read latin and work out what is meant. But when I read my native languages, I can tell that there's A LOT of meaning hidden in subtleties that I would definitely lose if I were to analyze sentences only through etymological meaning of each independent word, to say nothing of the pain of having to parse ambigueties:
Subtleties:
- "Defense! Defense!" "Defend! Defend!" (Basketball vs war)
- "No good", bad? Or bad/neutral?
- "Do you take me for a fool" / "Do you think I'm dumb?" (Accusation of cheating vs Earnest)
That's not to say you don't have the tools to derive meaning from context and parse ambigueties, but if you are simultaneously parsing syntactic ambigueties, then you have much less energies to parse semantic ambigueties and to try to work out what idiomatic phrases would have meant.
And the effect is multiplicative, if you have 2 declensions you don't remember, you have 4 combinations to parse. Multiply that by 2 possible meanings of the phrase (or more) and you have 8 meanings ( or more).
Sure, you can read somewhat, but I'd be skeptical as to how much you can understand what you are reading, sure it's more than chinese since we share a lot of roots, but there's still a lot of meaning that is missed, and knowing declensions is like level 1, it doesn't guarantee you will understand latin either.
Yes, there's tons of subtleties (my Latin is mostly relegated to philosophical and theological texts, not known for unsubtle clear language!) - but they're usually restricted to the document and one or two for each given "phrase".
You become somewhat of a tokenizer and realize what the token means and can parse that way.
It's not day-1 wheelock and can read, but it's way sooner than "I can fluently ask Caesar to make me a hamburger down by the docks."
Not sure what you mean, all the Romance languages are derived from Latin. German, Russian and a lot of languages have cases.
The tough part is having to memorize feminine/masculine/neutral genders + the million cases for how they transform. Genders seem completely useless, Im curious as to why they developed so extensively in language at all.
Right, and we descend from amphibians, but we diverged quite a lot.
I took a look into german, it seems that their case system is much more stable than latin, based on suffixes mostly, and most words having the same form for many cases.
Why genders or specific declensions exist? Being a native spanish speaker I can say:
- Error correcting code: If a gender or number doesn't match, you can reparse what you heard, or ask for clarification.
- Proof of consistent thought: Forces to think ahead in sentences, you can't just make things up as you go, if you used an article early in a sentence it's because you already know what you are referring to. If someone can't even match their genders or numbers, you can pretty much discard what they are saying, or surmise they are intoxicated. Consider how basic autopredict would fail and instantly be detected in spanish, while not necessarily so in english.
As for latin declensions:
- Classism: I don't think the purpose of language is always to increase communication, I think that a high bar for communicating was placed, no doubt there existed simpler languages that could have reached more penetration, but I believe that the incredible amount of cases serves as a test of memorization, a display of mental virtue which one must pass through in order to be worthy of communicating. It would not doubt be a more extreme form of proof of consistent thought, but I imagine it would be much more notable, it would be easy for a roman citizen to detect a non citizen or a slave by how they talk based on their lack of schooling, maybe they couldn't even form complete sentences to collude, they could just be limited to saying yes/no.
My native language is Armenian which also has cases, no definite word order, and word endings, but no genders. I think cases are great. Latin sucks cause it has 3 genders and neuter has like 3 different forms, each changing the word endings. The system overall is great, its the inconsistency that makes it difficult. In english, you still have to denote the intent behind the decelerations somehow.
The former. I didn’t realize how few of my projects have even had an intentional architecture. So often they go from feature designs to mockups to tickets to code without any real discussion about how the pieces fit together. There’s certainly never been an attempt to create a common “language” that is shared across the org. On a project half the company might refer to a catalog item as a “product”, and their definition may or may not align with what another team refers to as an “item”. I’m starting to understand that situations like that are why everything gets so complicated.
I buy mine from VCoins. They’re pretty inexpensive if you don’t need them certified or anything, and many sellers are very above board and professional.
Trailer parks have prefabricated housing rather than true trailers. These prefabs can technically be moved, but not easily or cheaply, essentially tying them to the lot. RVs can be moved easily and cheaply.
So no, this is not exactly a trailer park because it separates housing from the real estate.
I'm not pitching the RV Parking Garage concept as an ideal or even plausible solution, but as an example of a way to disrupt the housing market in developed metros.
My goal is to hear some other ideas to decrease average rents while requiring little to no government/regulatory involvement.
> requiring little to no government/regulatory involvement
I think you lose this battle as soon as you start providing residences to people. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that once people are living and sleeping somewhere you’re subject to zoning laws and fire codes and stuff.
With that said, the current housing situation in the US is a mess, so I’m all for reform. I’d like to hear ideas too. I personally can’t think of a solution that sidesteps regulation without becoming a slum full of desperate people, though.
Those desperate people are who most need help. Maybe improving the quality of life in "slums" is where the hacking should take place. But those improvements typically leads to gentrification and higher average rents.
Is there a way to hack governmental reform? Maybe an organization that hires lawyers to find weak zoning laws in jurisdictions where a challenge is likely to succeed, and then tests those laws in court? (Now I've reinvented a thinktank.)
I’m a recovering alcoholic. I’m almost positive that the effects of alcohol are wildly different between the two of us. When I drink my brain spits out more reward chemicals than I know what to do with. It makes me feel extremely energetic and creative. It inflates my sense of self-worth and gives me confidence. It’s genuinely more enjoyable than sex.
And that’s how it dug its claws in, because almost all of those go away after binge drinking for a while. Then you’re just left with the addiction. And getting sober means having to learn to want whatever is left of your life.
Definitely. Alcohol just makes me confused and sick, with no upsides to it.
I'be been told that I must be drinking incorrectly, and given advice how to drink correctly, but no, no positive experience with it for me.
The funny thing is, I actually like the taste of it (it tastes kind of minty to me, while most people claim it tastes bitter) but the effects are pure poison.
Funny, I could place myself directly in middle of you two. When I drink, I feel pretty great at the beginning and it gets progressively more tiring and confusing with more drinks (but you still crave it, it being effectively a drug). Then the next day is just wasted time because of the hangover.
So while I liked to drink more with friends in the past, now I do so less often. And when I do, I tend to overthink how much I should drink not to feel bad later. So usually I just don't drink much, with more time between days when I drink (currently I'd say it's weeks inbetween).
Same, it is the least feel-good drug of any I have tried. But I do love a good German beer with a steak or burger, amazing. Or a cold beer at a baseball game.
My experience is closer to yours, and I've had to learn to enjoy without alcohol, which has been a positive transformation. I still drink, but now I know when to stop. Some of my friends still drink too much and would probably benefit from GLP drugs even when they are not obese.
> I’m a recovering alcoholic. I’m almost positive that the effects of alcohol are wildly different between the two of us. When I drink my brain spits out more reward chemicals than I know what to do with. It makes me feel extremely energetic and creative. It inflates my sense of self-worth and gives me confidence. It’s genuinely more enjoyable than sex.
Yea, me too. Holy shit. I have this too on certain things but not on alcohol.
> And getting sober means having to learn to want whatever is left of your life.
That's a good/harsh lesson for any addiction I think. Thanks for formulating that so clearly.
In my experience the higher up you get on the corporate ladder, the less you’re going to be held accountable for anything. Executives only stick around until they get bored or can cash out. Five years down the line it might as well be a totally different company.
I predict that a feature like this would probably chase off some undesirable community members, while genuinely helping some people improve their ability to engage in good-faith discussion and debate. And if it eases the burden on moderators and the community at large who currently police these things, it seems like a clear win. I’m sure it could be mis-calibrated to tone policing, but I’m not one to let perfect be the enemy of good.
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