btilly

32 ms·

91.
by btilly 7mo ago
What do you mean, "at long last"? We've always been bikeshedders. For example, back in Slashdot days, some company would decide to migrate something from Windows to Linux. Immediately the debate became whether they should h
92.
by btilly 7mo ago
Sex crimes. Particularly ones involving children. Such as having sexual pictures of children.
93.
by btilly 7mo ago
UK prosecutions happen in public. So I presume that the Hungary accusations need justification. Lack of fair trials: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20251120IP... Illegal surveillance of pol
94.
by btilly 7mo ago
There's more to the story than that. Around 2000 the founder stepped away, and MBAs brought in automated machines. They were more efficient and consistent at making the drinks than the baristas, and business tanked. The founder came ba
95.
by btilly 7mo ago
The reality is that Starbucks is the world's biggest unregulated bank, with their claws in the real estate industry. Who got that way by selling the experience of hanging out in a convenient coffee shop. Their business has run into tro
96.
by btilly 7mo ago
Sometimes having a lot of experience, is a negative for dealing with new things. The problem is that one's past success leads to ego. Ego makes it hard to accept the evidence of your mistakes. This creates cognitive dissonance, limitin
97.
by btilly 7mo ago
The issue isn't how much free speech online is being punished. It is how surveillance could be used to reinforce authoritarianism. The UK does a lot of prosecuting people for having said nasty things online that someone else didn'
98.
by btilly 7mo ago
Unfortunately, that population immediately equates the two for good reason. Bills that are presented as "for the children" usually are a power grab. Even more unfortunately, the issue is so emotional that we can't have a re
99.
by btilly 7mo ago
Exactly. It is much easier to get people to agree to do questionable things, when there is pressure to "do something". A more limited bill takes off the pressure to "do something", and therefore makes the more extreme bi
100.
by btilly 7mo ago
My understanding is that it doesn't. Though if the energy gets high enough, you can start to get other particles out. As for protecting one photon with a sheathe of other photons, the energy density required for that tube is absolutely
101.
by btilly 7mo ago
That's actually not possible due to something called the GZK cutoff. Which is a weird phenomena that causes apparently empty space to turn somewhat cloudy for sufficiently high energy photons. Here is how it works. If an electron and a
102.
by btilly 7mo ago
While the general problem is not always tractable, some of the special cases are pretty important. Take, for example, backprop in machine learning. The model operates forwards. Then you solve backwards to figure out how to update the terms.
103.
by btilly 7mo ago
My top complaint is that if I've successfully used a pattern, I want my text removed. I keep forgetting to backspace a bunch, then get frustrated that my pattern isn't working. Other than that, great game!
104.
by btilly 7mo ago
There is a politically correct thing to say about having kids. It is wonderful, I love them, it made me want to be a better person. That's all true. I'm not going to be politically correct. I'm going to be honest. For some of
105.
by btilly 7mo ago
Absolutely. The effect of straightforward correlations is a change in the variance, which can be measured in finance. The effect of the nonlinear changing correlations is that future global behavior can't be predicted from local observ
106.
by btilly 7mo ago
Given the choice between being homeless and living in favelas, millions in Brazil have chosen to live in favelas. The reality of zoning laws in Western countries is to provide a target for regulatory capture by the NIMBY crowd. With the res
107.
by btilly 7mo ago
The key principle is that you get CLT when a bunch of random factors add. Which happens in lots of places. In finance, the effects of random factors tend to multiply. So you get a log-normal curve. As Taleb points out, though, the underlyin
108.
by btilly 7mo ago
Point missed. All of the reasons why you say this article should be dismissed, are irrelevant to the article's actual argument. Here is the key principle. Suppose that your odds of startup success are dominated by competition with othe
109.
by btilly 7mo ago
This kind of corrruption goes as far back as we can find records. I think that the real question is not how the corruption started. But, rather, how in some places rule of law came to be established instead. That said, I don't have a g
110.
by btilly 7mo ago
It's a slippery slope. What rules are you breaking to do your favor? What rules do you expect someone else to break for the return favor? What rules might they later expect you to break? To what extent do you stop seeing the rules of e
111.
by btilly 7mo ago
My guess as to why it was not specified, is that the corruption is so obvious to anyone who has lived it, that it is easy to forget that others might not get the context. It's like someone trying to describe how fish live, but not reme
112.
by btilly 7mo ago
They are all corruption, or corruption adjacent. The plumber is working for a company. He's supposed to be working on an official job. But he's doing the work slowly because he's actually working on your plumbing problem. You
113.
by btilly 7mo ago
The one we're seeing more of is, "I just happened to buy a lot of the TRUMP meme coin that Donald Trump just happens to like selling. It's just a coincidence that I'm no longer in legal trouble." You know like the p
114.
by btilly 7mo ago
They may sound somewhat similar, but apparently have unrelated origins. блат is borrowed from Yiddish, while блядь has a Slavic root. That said, they do sound less similar to someone who has learned a Slavic language. We learn to distinguis
115.
by btilly 7mo ago
As I commented elsewhere, the Russian name for this is blat. It isn't just corruption. It is a personal trust network for getting things done, that you can't get done if you follow the official rules. You get what you need through
116.
by btilly 7mo ago
Modify "has no trust" to "has no trust in the official system", and the red herring points to one of the key dynamics behind why this happened. This key dynamic is what Russians call blat. My explanation of it is summari
117.
by btilly 7mo ago
Indeed, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market for what an unregulated prediction market can do. Want someone dead? Create a market betting on when they die, and put a bunch of money in. Wait for someon
118.
by btilly 7mo ago
For a somewhat cynical explanation of why that happens, I recommend https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... . As with all forms of cynicism, it has a grain of truth. And a much larger g
119.
by btilly 7mo ago
More precisely than "plausible deniability", it is plausible EMOTIONAL deniability. When you put enough bafflegab around it, you can almost ignore that you said something unpleasant. Because the part of our brains that processes f
120.
by btilly 7mo ago
No, that can't be the expected answer. And indeed, use Postgres was an accepted answer. But when the interviewer keeps pushing back, that's an invitation for the candidate to ask why, and ask what about the environment might make

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