advael

69 ms·

901.
by advael 5y ago
I've never been that interested in accounts of the lives of entrepreneurs. It strikes me as a genre akin to the autobiographies (or commissioned biographies) of autocrats. This review makes me want to read this book though
902.
by advael 5y ago
The answer to that question has always and will always be no, and anyone who ever thought otherwise is a sucker, frankly. This is a company whose entire ethos and business model was built from the ground up to be about proprietary software
903.
by advael 5y ago
I wasn't aware this was a technical term, but if we insist on this usage, the post I'm responding to is even less meaningful, because this is drawing a pedantic distinction between money that's tied up in expenses and thus, a
904.
by advael 5y ago
What do you consider "disposable income"? Car insurance is legally mandatory if you drive a car. If your income is predicated on being able to commute by car (as it is for many Americans, though hopefully a trend toward remote wor
905.
by advael 5y ago
I haven't used ubuntu on any box I personally use in a while, so take it with a grain of salt, but it seems like it's the only distro all the "X didn't work on linux for me" complaints seem to be about. Experiences
906.
by advael 5y ago
Google's "dialect" both makes sense with other things I've heard about working for them and makes working for them less appealing. The flexible generic and compile-time resolution paradigms offered by templates are a lot
907.
by advael 5y ago
I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but when can we get some momentum behind repealing or ruling unconstitutional anti-subversion laws from the DMCA? It would be nice if this sort of thing goes to court and starts to challenge that law,
908.
by advael 5y ago
It may have at one point, but Goodhart's Law is always looming in the background, waiting to fuck with any filter you care to come up with. In the last few generations, the shift to college being viewed (and subsidized) as an effective
909.
by advael 5y ago
I'm lucky to have a decently large yard in a decently arable part of the world. The garden in my home produces enough fresh vegetables for my (moderate) needs, but it certainly doesn't produce all the food I eat.
910.
by advael 5y ago
Taxing success is part of what got us here. We let these rogue optimizers get really big because of this dumb theory that everyone can somehow automagically benefit from these entities that accumulate massive power and influence. What actua
911.
by advael 5y ago
You chose the example, not me. Also, my contention isn't that the global economy doesn't make sense , of course it makes sense, otherwise it wouldn't be there. What I'm saying is that prioritizing economies of scale is
912.
by advael 5y ago
Most of the vegetables I eat are grown in my backyard. As for "why we are rich", who is the "we" in that sentence? You? Me? Some aggregate across millions - maybe even billions - of people that's meaningless to most
913.
by advael 5y ago
I think this is actually a great argument for incredibly stringent anti-trust that prevents companies from getting very big at all. Successfully scaling inevitably produces extremely undesirable outcomes for anyone not invested in the com
914.
by advael 5y ago
It seems like every few months I read some new way of articulating the idea that code that's hard to maintain and modify is frustrating. Some, like this, don't really pose solutions, some do, but most I think fail to realize that
915.
by advael 5y ago
While a code-data distinction is often illusory in practice, figuring out where this separation can be useful runs throughout the information theory underlying learning systems and programming languages. My question about this proposed mode
916.
by advael 5y ago
Big companies move slow and given the pervasiveness of these devices, it's fundamentally irresponsible to allow the google-apple duopoly in mobile OSes to keep their platforms closed, forming a bottleneck on all security fixes. Trust-b
917.
by advael 5y ago
Sure, but we're not just cutting out those desirable cases from how unemployment is reckoned. Unemployment as counted is tied to the system that doles out unemployment payments, and thus comes along with all the quirks of legislation t
918.
by advael 5y ago
Precisely. People act like this DMCA anti-subversion nonsense is a necessary consequence of copyright as we know it, and that's fundamentally not true. Anti-subversion laws are a recent invention, were a horrible overreaction to some b
919.
by advael 5y ago
This is a good decision, but it's a depressingly incremental step toward a necessary change to laws that currently stand: No software should be illegal to modify for your own use on your own hardware by any means, period. Interpreting
920.
by advael 5y ago
Came here to say this. Unemployment numbers are such a joke of a statistic in a situation where unprecedented numbers of young adults left the workforce entirely in two subsequent recessions and we just don't count them
921.
by advael 5y ago
The US' priority in situations like this is overwhelmingly to provide evidence that the threats it makes with criminal laws and defense of national secrets are credible. It has time and time again chosen to die on hills like this. The
922.
by advael 5y ago
Are we living in the same reality? This is the vector by which a lot of creepy groups that primarily recruit/exploit young men convince them to join stuff. Literally any time anyone says a greek letter before the word "male"
923.
by advael 5y ago
Okay, but even without the second-order effects of signaling games, selecting for enthusiasm is a risky strategy because earnest motivation is not the only or even the most important factor in their contribution. In many cases, a competent
924.
by advael 5y ago
The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence
925.
by advael 5y ago
I agree, the process of peer review is something that should probably be done by academic institutions with neither corporate nor governmental oversight, and seems like something they're mostly happy to do, as evidenced by so many jour
926.
by advael 5y ago
And that's the rub, isn't it? Once a player like Nature or Elsevier can entrench itself in the process by which the other institutions function (Like being gatekeepers on the government's merit metrics for funding), they can
927.
by advael 5y ago
A name that is ironic in the same way as the "academic publishing industry" (as mentioned in the article) OpenAI's weird insistence that its "open" research only be accessible to entities it trusts not to do harm wi
928.
by advael 5y ago
I think this, like healthcare, is a place where the world needs to reckon with the limits on the usefulness of profit motive. There are a lot of benefits to capitalism, and it has produced both societal wealth and innovation in a lot of con
929.
by advael 5y ago
I think this does more harm than good. If there's anything we should have learned from the replication crisis of 2014, a decent amount of "generated" or "satirical" papers scandals, and an essentially constant strea
930.
by advael 5y ago
My days of being unwilling to work at any large tech company regardless of compensation are certainly coming to a middle

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