psi75

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61.
by psi75 4y ago
You raise a fair point. Stalin himself was a paranoid, power-hungry psychopath. I did not intend to argue that Stalin himself expected to bring about a communist utopia. It's more likely that he was a straight-out liar. Still, I think
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by psi75 4y ago
I was one of the best posters on Hacker News until my real name account got banned. Now I'm 30 of the best posters on Hacker News.
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by psi75 4y ago
The thing about this stupidity is that it's the thrill of being the cause and, as the essay observes, it is not just low-IQ or low "class" people who indulge. Some people like to steal stop signs, and some people like to ruin
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by psi75 4y ago
When I look at how figures like Donziger, Assange and Snowden are treated I cant help but think our society is a lot more like Russia than we think we are - differing mostly by a matter of degree, rather than principle. Stalinism was econ
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by psi75 4y ago
Also, while we might accept a certain smoothness hypothesis (fuzzy logic as applies to human perceptions) in financial valuations, these functions certainly aren't (if I may be pedantic) analytic at all. If a function is analytic, then
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by psi75 4y ago
Constant acceleration will cause the surface of your coffee to tilt, but not spill it unless the cup is almost full. Jerky motion (non-constant acceleration) causes it to slosh around and can create resonances that disturb the fluid level f
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by psi75 4y ago
That pun really resonates.
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by psi75 4y ago
No, 'zuhayeer is right. For anything beyond the Scrum rent-a-jobs you should be outgrowing in your first five years, being liked is more important than being highly effective. You can be great at your job, but if you fail the politics,
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by psi75 4y ago
Self-checkout isn't a great example since it's mainly just shifting the work from one human (the employee) to another (the customer), rather than true automation. It may not be true automation, but it's very effective, and
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by psi75 4y ago
AI doesn't have to fully replace humans (or even be that good) to have detrimental effects on wages and working conditions. Jobs are like oil; if the people who control the supply can reduce quantity by 10 percent, prices spike (this,
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by psi75 4y ago
It's not clear who was the first to have said it, but there's a quote that is 100 percent on the mark: It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We've been brainwashed into believing in the supr
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by psi75 4y ago
It really doesn't. The vast majority of economic activity in our system is driven by coercion and need, not want and certainly not freedom. People don't show up to jobs where they take orders from idiots for an exact lower bound o
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by psi75 4y ago
Corporate capitalism is going to crash the world in the next 25 years. That we're on an unsustainable course is obvious. Capitalism is basically the sick man of the 21st century, like the Ottoman Empire circa 1915; at this point, every
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by psi75 4y ago
"Capitalism" is a funny way of spelling "China". To be clear, I'm not saying the CCP is a force for good. I don't really think it is; I'm not a fan of them at all. They do a lot of fucked-up shit. But it i
75.
by psi75 4y ago
I believe all this, and it's terrifying. If AI emerges in the private sector (and therefore under the control of rich people) we might as well give up on the entire human experiment, because the AI will be put toward malevolent ends an
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by psi75 4y ago
mathematically proves that greed is good so long as the greedy people are only greedy in the specific ways I have decided are good
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by psi75 4y ago
David Graeber's Debt: the First 5,000 Years is really worth reading to understand the anthropology of debt. It's common in societies to accumulate unpayable debts (that, over time, evolve into debts designed never to be paid) fo
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by psi75 4y ago
It's never going away. The thing to understand about corporate capitalism is that executives don't work for companies; companies work for executives. The bosses want brag points so they can justify promotions, and that's all
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by psi75 4y ago
> What I found incredible is the lack of push-back from academics against the encroaching takeover by the biznoids. Paradox of tolerance. Academics were too peacefully inclined to realize what is happening to them and their jobs until
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by psi75 4y ago
I generally disagree with the premise that scientists are becoming less productive. This one's tricky to measure. If you go by the number of words published, they're a lot more productive than they used to be. Ten papers won&#x2
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by psi75 4y ago
Man, I wish I could use my real name for this reply, but for political reasons I can't (in fact, I change my username regularly) because I have a lot of insight into this problem, why it exists, and why it probably won't get bette
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by psi75 4y ago
When these designs were made, 40 °C in the UK was a once-in-5,000-years event. Now, it seems to be about 1 in 30 years (we don't have enough data to be sure). Also, the problem usually isn't the 40-degree air temperature itself, b
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by psi75 4y ago
I buy the 71 C ground temperature; ground temperatures can be 25-35 C hotter than the ambient air temperature, which is what gets recorded. This is also why rails buckle more than you'd expect: on a 40 C day, you're likely to see
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by psi75 4y ago
How the quality of Disneyland has evolved is... tricky to evaluate. The rides are almost certainly safer and probably a bit more impressive on a technical front, but the experience itself? I'm not sure and, given that I'm a middle
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by psi75 4y ago
I don't know if the numbers match (e.g. 20%) but this is basically what happened in the Great Depression. The advent of industrial nitrogen fixation led to increased agricultural productivity, which caused food prices to decline, which
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by psi75 4y ago
If we don't implement universal basic income, we are utterly screwed. Markets where one side is desperate are inelastic, which means that a small change in supply or demand can cause huge price swings. Usually, this works against those
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by psi75 4y ago
> Is actual war fun? Is the Ukraine war fun? I doubt it’s fun for any of the participants. It’s not fun for Ukrainian soldiers, it’s not fun for Russian soldiers, and it’s not fun for Russian or Ukrainian civilians. War seems to rewrite
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by psi75 4y ago
> We could talk about taking from the rich, but actually the rich don’t consume all that much in aggregate, so that doesn’t help much (wealth and income don’t matter for this purpose, only consumption). This is certainly what traditional
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by psi75 4y ago
That's quite true. Also, one could argue that continuous probabilities in practice are discrete probabilities due to finite resolution--we just don't care to specify what the resolution is.
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by psi75 4y ago
> The probability of observing the data you observed Yes, in discrete cases. In continuous cases, you have to work with a probability density . I think this is one of the hurdles people encounter when they're first exposed to Bayes

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