jltsiren

25 ms·

511.
by jltsiren 1y ago
I don't think any simple trick like that is enough. If people are allowed to choose their own paths, they will make different choices, and every aspect of the society has an impact on the choices they make. If we want a society where p
512.
by jltsiren 1y ago
You can get a much lower value for time by measuring how much extra time people are willing to spend to save some money on groceries and other purchases. But this is not a new problem. There are established models for the value of time in m
513.
by jltsiren 1y ago
As a fraction of GDP, the EU spends more on academic research than the US. And if you add the UK, the total is also higher in absolute terms. (The US spends more on R&D, but that's mostly business spending.) From an individual pers
514.
by jltsiren 1y ago
People who support public funding for research are usually strongly opposed to central planning in the allocation of the funds. They don't want to have uninformed politicians, administrators, and citizens deciding what research is wort
515.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Rust is widely used in bioinformatics, as is C++. Largely because people developing new tools often have to write their own low-level algorithms and data structures. Many tools deal with sequencing data, which means collections of strings t
516.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Cost per square meter is a misleading measure. A model that assigns a fixed price to a 0 m2 home and an additional price for each square meter is a better match for both construction costs and subjective utility. Or maybe the additional pri
517.
by jltsiren 1y ago
There are different kinds of parliamentary systems. In some, the prime minister is a big important leader, almost like a president in a presidential system. In others, they are just another interchangeable cog in the machine. Here in Finlan
518.
by jltsiren 1y ago
This reminds me of something that was popular in some bioinformatics circles years ago. People claimed that Java was faster than C++. To "prove" that, they wrote reasonably efficient Java code for some task, and then rewrote it in
519.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Legislators thought otherwise, when they explicitly created two subcategories of O-1 visas: * O-1A: Individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics (not including the arts, motion pictures or tel
520.
by jltsiren 1y ago
A slightly different take: The key information is halfway down the page, in the figure that shows the number of new graduates and new temporary workers each year. The number of new temporary workers has been relatively stable, while the num
521.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Software is a common skill, especially among military-age men. Probably around 5% of those employed in that group have software-related jobs. Doctors are rarer, and they also need more training to become productive, which makes them harder
522.
by jltsiren 1y ago
That's not what Occam's razor means. It means that after you have exhausted all options to rule out competing hypotheses, you choose the simplest one that remains, for the time being. Consider some explanations that are consistent
523.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Courts do not seek to establish the truth. They aim for a reasonable balance between false positives (innocents convicted of crimes they didn't commit) and false negatives (criminals allowed to go free). In practice, the false positive
524.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Multigenerational households were the norm until recently. The eldest son gradually took over the household and raised his family there, or something like that. Both because it would have been terrible waste to have an entire house for some
525.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Megathrust earthquakes are pretty common around the world. Some of them cause major damage, such as the ones in 2004 and 2011. But even then, the impact is mostly regional.
526.
by jltsiren 1y ago
In some countries, kids learn some of that already in basic / secondary education. As a consequence of the same Humboldtian ideology that gave rise to the research university. If schools help people become upstanding and well-informed
527.
by jltsiren 1y ago
The EU already allowed keeping your shoes on in 2016. It's up to each individual airport / authority to decide if they want to invest in a more convenient screening process. Metal belt buckles probably trigger false alarms in ever
528.
by jltsiren 1y ago
In many fields of R&D, the effort required to maintain a steady pace of improvement grows exponentially. Maybe you develop AGI one year by spending $X, and the next year you need $1.2X to make it 110% as good. For a while, you can keep
529.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Your "original definition" was always meaningless. A "Hello, World!" program is equally capable in most jobs as the median human. On the other hand, if the benchmark is what the median human can reasonably become (a prof
530.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Adding parallelism is much easier on the hardware side than the software side. We've kind of figured out the easy cases, such as independent tasks with limited interactions with each other, and made them practical for the average devel
531.
by jltsiren 1y ago
These are scientific papers we're talking about, typically written by non-native speakers to a primarily non-native audience. Scientific writing practices have evolved over a long time to convey meaning reliably between non-native spea
532.
by jltsiren 1y ago
When you institutionalize an ad hoc process, you turn it into a system that can be gamed. YC did that for startups, and it was already pretty obvious in 2014 when Paul Graham wrote that essay. Every other government was claiming to support
533.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Most editors are not smart enough to do it consistently right. For example, VS Code often inserts extra quotes when I try to break "long string" into "long " + something() + " string". And when I try to write a
534.
by jltsiren 1y ago
I was talking about academic research, where the total spending is ~$100 billion/year in both blocks. See, for example, https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf25313 and https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20
535.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Household income is a funny collective measure. If housing becomes less affordable, household income increases, as kids stay longer with their parents. And if housing becomes more affordable, household income decreases, as kids move out ear
536.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Researchers are underpaid and research is underfunded everywhere. Like most jobs that people find inherently interesting. I don't know about the specific situation in France. In general, Europe spends more on academic research than the
537.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Tests can only show that something is not AGI. If you want to show that a system is AGI, you must wait for expert consensus. That means adding new tests and dropping old ones, as our understanding of intelligence improves. If something is t
538.
by jltsiren 1y ago
You haven't seen examples of administrative downsizing, because it's rarely newsworthy. Universities routinely cut administrative and support staff according to their individual circumstances. Local news may take notice, but wider
539.
by jltsiren 1y ago
Choose an algorithm that's reasonably efficient and easy to implement. Then parallelize if it wasn't fast enough. Then try to find a better algorithm. And only then vectorize. Pick the low-hanging fruit first, and only resort to o
540.
by jltsiren 1y ago
When you are a smaller country that's more exposed to the international markets than the US, wage suppression is often good for the economy. High wages indicate lack of competitiveness, as foreign businesses can generate the same outpu

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