croissants

8 ms·

31.
by croissants 2y ago
Having not been born during his presidency, whenever I think of Jimmy Carter, I think of his appearance in Travels in Georgia [1], a John McPhee essay that's mostly about following a couple of workers for the Georgia Natural Areas co
32.
by croissants 2y ago
This is in the category of "things I believe I read from a reputable source, but which I can no longer definitively attribute", but my understanding is that one contributor to Tokyo's lovely and specific density is that its z
33.
by croissants 2y ago
A return to less centralized web publishing would also be bad for the many creators who lack the technical expertise or interest to jump through all the hoops required for building and hosting your own website. Maybe this seems like a prett
34.
by croissants 2y ago
Thanks. Do you have some sense of the breakdown in actual expenses incurred by the basic research and subsequent industrial development? It may qualitatively be true that many governments sponsor basic research that is later productized, bu
35.
by croissants 2y ago
Where are you getting 10X? If I look at, say, Merck, their "sales, general, and administrative expenses" [1] trends at even or slightly higher than their R&D expenses [2]. Abbvie's ratio is around 2x [3, 4]. AFAIK, SG&amp
36.
by croissants 2y ago
Do you have evidence for "most new treatment research is government funded (and by governments of other countries)"? My understanding is that the opposite is true: big pharmaceutical companies foot most of the bill for developin
37.
by croissants 2y ago
I'm not sure what chatbots you're using, but the big free ones at this point can and, in my experience, typically do give valid code samples for a surprising range of tasks. I'm skeptical about LLMs as the ultimate future of
38.
by croissants 2y ago
> For some reason people on HN imagine that It's an easy simplifying heuristic to suppose that countries are all self-interested and nobody actually cares about "norms" or "war crimes" or "not filling low-or
39.
by croissants 2y ago
This is the thing that actually worries me the most about AI. Right now there are meaningful practical obstacles to, say, manufacturing ricin or 3-D printing a working gun or figuring out how to kill somebody with a drone, and apparently th
40.
by croissants 2y ago
Another great Kidder book is "House", which applies the same perceptive profiling to the people involved in building a single house -- the couple, the architect, and the construction workers. There's an argument that a lot of
41.
by croissants 2y ago
Tangential, but > 1: a CDC meta-review said that 26% of surveyed US trans students attempted suicide this year, N=20,103 surveyed, ~660 of which were trans. https://archive.ph/0H81G This paper also finds that 5% of cisge
42.
by croissants 6y ago
> It doesn't say anything about the inverse. Interpreted as a literal propositional statement, it's saying "if you have a good attitude, then you will have success". Therefore if you do not have success, it must be be
43.
by croissants 6y ago
> Aspects of society that conventional wisdom holds to be outside or above the influence of tech and media, things like government, we suddenly realize are downstream from a single, monolithic technological communications machine that sp
44.
by croissants 6y ago
> we're not much different from a 3rd world failed state like Venezuela In 2016, Venezuela's murder rate was well over 50 per 100,000, and the USA's murder rate was slightly over 5 per 100,000 [1]. This gap is pretty consi
45.
by croissants 6y ago
Another amusing event from the life of the balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard mentioned in the article: in 1793, Blanchard arranged the first American balloon flight, starting in Philadelphia. George Washington was interested enough to attend
46.
Kinshasa's Traffic Robots(theguardian.com)
1 points by croissants 6y ago|0 comments
47.
by croissants 6y ago
> I'm not sure a group of people could hold strong for this long, given the price rises. Isn't it possible that whatever person or group of people comprise Satoshi just decided to throw away the key, making willpower irrelevant
48.
by croissants 6y ago
A few years ago I read a book called Maximum City . The premise is "let's look at the lives of several people [including a powerful police officer, a dancer, low-level criminals, high-level criminals, very poor people just gettin
49.
by croissants 6y ago
The blog post's author lists a Ferriss book as one of his "3 favorite books" in a video on his channel, so it's more like "guilt by endorsement".
50.
by croissants 6y ago
I like the idea of "synoptic" reading to learn about a concrete topic. It makes sense when different works offer different versions of what happens and why. But it seems weird to do it with fiction. If I'm reading fiction, I
51.
by croissants 6y ago
> From my own personal experience In the other direction, my personal experience is that a pure math undergraduate helped me to structure assumptions, evidence, and conclusions in a way that I thought was sorely missing in most of my hum
52.
by croissants 6y ago
It seems like this elides the difference between the goals of humanities education and the actual practice and outcomes of humanities education. I honestly don't know if humanities education confers the ability to "read closel
53.
by croissants 6y ago
> Somehow Microsoft Research manages to be a much more open place than Google and has researchers publish critical pieces all the time. Can you give examples of these critical pieces? I can't think of any, but MSR publishes a lot of
54.
by croissants 6y ago
> This is super common in other professions sometimes charged with enforcing ethical and legal corporate behavior, including law and accounting. It's not a new idea. I'd be interested in reading about guidelines for people task
55.
by croissants 6y ago
Remember The Last Dance , the documentary about Michael Jordan's last season with the Chicago Bulls? Remember that weird talk show clip where the host describes Jordan as close to a living god? Now, Michael Jordan was an awesome athle
56.
by croissants 6y ago
> Supported by the Gates Foundation, so likely to be widely disseminated in schools. Is it? The financial support seems to be $3 million in 2017 [1]. That year the Gates foundation spent roughly $380 million on "U.S. education"
57.
by croissants 6y ago
> There's nothing that prevents a think tank from working with domain experts One issue here is that the pool of domain experts depends on the different incentives faced by different researchers. If the top machine learning conferen
58.
by croissants 6y ago
I'm with you that a lot of mass media writing about AI is silly, but I think this is article is not in that category. For example, it doesn't "aver [Speech2Face] is transphobic", that's from a statement by Alex Hann
59.
by croissants 6y ago
I see. I guess I parse his argument a little differently. I see the SSC argument as "I would like to spend 100 units of resource (time, money, etc) improving black lives. The line between (donating money to malaria prevention) and (bla
60.
by croissants 6y ago
> I knew before reading the article this would be a defence of views which hold other lives to be worth less than the author (racism), because they felt the need to be so abstract. Wait, which part of the article is doing this? The excer

More ›