btilly

6 ms·

61.
by btilly 5mo ago
The problem with that is that there are certain kinds of users that like to take control of community projects. And then they take control of more, and bigger ones. There are a lot of political tricks that get used. What is scary is that on
62.
by btilly 5mo ago
ELO is shockingly easy to manipulate. For example there was a literal jail with a decent chess player in it. He created a pool of players who got great ELOs by beating him, then used them to boost his rating higher. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
63.
by btilly 5mo ago
My first ever paper was a pretty good entry at this. https://dspace.library.uvic.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/66... 16 lemmas, one theorem. The theorem makes all of the lemmas obvious. Though, in retros
64.
by btilly 5mo ago
I am curious why the killers didn't eat more. Is this just the choicest bits - another pup is easy to find?
65.
by btilly 5mo ago
I completely agree. Lemmas are simple, obvious, and yet they completely change how you think. How many proofs cite the Axiom of Choice? How many cite Zorn's Lemma? Which is more important, the axiom that we're relying on, or the r
66.
by btilly 5mo ago
Yes, it is valuable to have more than zero information. But often we don't have the information that we wish. Even more often, the information that we have leads us to a story, that severely misleads us. Reminding ourselves of the zero
67.
by btilly 5mo ago
You speak about laundering ignorance into precise-seeming mathematics as if it was a bad thing. But that's the entire idea of Bayesian reasoning. Which has proven to be surprisingly effective in a wide range of domains. I'm all fo
68.
by btilly 5mo ago
The analysis in the article explains why it applies to any phenomena that we might be able to notice. The argument given is the same as the one that I first ran across, not by that name, in https://www.nature.com/articles&#x
69.
by btilly 5mo ago
Lindy’s Law is an absolute gem, that I'm keeping. If we don't understand the fundamental limits to any particular kind of trend, our default assumption should be that it will continue for about as long as it has gone on already. W
70.
by btilly 5mo ago
Hanlon's Razor applies here. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Pretty much anyone can get onto the free tier for Cloudflare. The fact that someone is, doesn't mean that there
71.
by btilly 5mo ago
Once people have gotten used to not having to conform, forcing them to conform is an uphill battle. Doubly so when, as happened with Microsoft and IE, the vendors would like to encourage vendor lock-in. The only time to reasonably do it is
72.
by btilly 5mo ago
Opinions vary on how good an idea the robustness principle is. That is why, for example, the XML standard requires a conforming validator to throw an error on invalid XML. In our modern world, the robustness principle has become an invitati
73.
by btilly 5mo ago
The odds of random porn purchases being reversed are very different than the odds of random porn purchases by 14 year olds getting reversed. Source, I have a number of friends who worked on the web side of online porn a long time ago.
74.
by btilly 5mo ago
Yes. There is a reason why a family of languages is known as Indo-European. For something completely different, try learning Mandarin.
75.
by btilly 5mo ago
People were wrong. We pay money online mostly through credit cards. Credit card transactions can be reversed. If children spend money on porn, those payments are likely to be reversed. This is really bad for the ability of the porn sites to
76.
by btilly 5mo ago
Huh. I wonder how compiler technology would do. Possibly as a component of an attempted solution.
77.
by btilly 5mo ago
In other words, it is a network effect. My perspective is that network effects are far less long-lasting than they feel in the moment. For example if being decent at everything and having a huge community was the only thing that mattered, P
78.
by btilly 6mo ago
Do you really think that adding iron releases net carbon? That would be hard to explain chemically. The worst case scenario laid out in that article is that most of the carbon absorbed, was later rereleased. So net zero carbon, not net carb
79.
by btilly 6mo ago
The problem is that the top researchers in the field have spent their lives devoted to amyloid beta. They may well have helped direct hundreds of millions in grants to this line of research. The idea that they have blocked the treatment of
80.
by btilly 6mo ago
Yes, there is overwhelming evidence of climate change. And that we are causing it. However research into what we humans can do to ameliorate it is verboten. For example https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertili
81.
by btilly 6mo ago
I would expect that for any sampling of data that has a roughly similar distribution over many scales. Which will be true of many human curated corpuses. But it will also be similar to, for natural data as well. Such as the lengths of rando
82.
by btilly 6mo ago
The exact phrase appears in the title. There is a title length limit. In this case, I don't think that it is wrong to pick the most interesting piece of that title that fits in the limit.
83.
by btilly 6mo ago
However the humans who have LLMs justifying their opinions, often become far more fatiguing to interact with. Even if we don't use LLMs, they are still transforming our lives.
84.
by btilly 6mo ago
I highly recommend Bill Thurston's Proof and Progress in Mathematics , available at https://www.math.toronto.edu/mccann/199/thurston.pdf , to better understand that human element in mathematics. Unfortunately
85.
by btilly 6mo ago
I do believe that you are missing a healthy dose of sarcasm. Such as faking downloads to give yourself inflated statistics so that your employer will trust untested and AI-written garbage. That said, there really are good use cases for read
86.
by btilly 6mo ago
Planning now on a fast upgrade later, is planning on discovering all of the critical bugs after it is too late to do much about them. Things need to be rolled out in advance of need, so that you can get a do-again in case there proves to be
87.
by btilly 6mo ago
That's not new. I read a UI book in the early 2000s that cited research showing that most users didn't understand filesystems. They would seem to, but then the idea that the same filename in two places was two unrelated files woul
88.
by btilly 6mo ago
I would question to what extent repeating propaganda, qualifies as debate. Even if you do say that it qualifies, it doesn't qualify as productive debate. There is really no productive debate to be had here. Even if you think that Ira
89.
by btilly 6mo ago
In my experience, developers who rely on precise and relatively obscure corner cases, tend to assume that they are more stable than they later prove to be. I've been that developer, and I've been burned because of it. Even more pa
90.
by btilly 6mo ago
That sounds like the worst kind of misfeature. It sounds like it should solve your problem. At first it seems to work. Then you keep on finding the footguns after it is too late to change the design.

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