wsxcde

10 ms·

31.
by wsxcde 7y ago
> * I am not looking for political battles here or to spread propaganda from either side. I am not sure that a Tibetan store in Berkeley CA is a neutral and accurate representation of Tibet's history.* What do you think is an accura
32.
by wsxcde 7y ago
Another way of looking at it is that two of richest countries in the world from 300 years ago spent the most of the past 300 years with most of their citizens in extreme poverty. Now that those countries are catching up again, we're se
33.
by wsxcde 7y ago
> Tibet has been close to China, as opposed to India for more than a thousand years. That is just laughably false. If you live in the US, I suggest visiting a Tibetan store to disabuse yourself of this communist propaganda. (There are
34.
by wsxcde 7y ago
Uighur's and Tibetans have historically not had significant ties with mainland China. The Uighurs are Turkic and have closer cultural ties to the likes of Kazakhstan. The Tibetans are more closely tied to India/Nepal.* After the M
35.
by wsxcde 7y ago
I feel like I both agree and disagree. It is true that beating glucose or lingeling at the SAT competition would require a lot more engineering than just plain CDCL + 2 literal watching. At the same time, I think a lot of the new stuff (whi
36.
by wsxcde 7y ago
The practical significance of SAT is that almost all modern verification techniques are based on SAT solvers. The algorithm he describes is not very interesting because it doesn't even implement unit-propagation. The idea with unit pro
37.
by wsxcde 7y ago
Isn't that a much weaker claim you're making than what Taleb sets off to argue for in the beginning of the article? The article begins with the following: > It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransig
38.
by wsxcde 7y ago
The beef intolerance argument isn't convincing at all because an overwhelming majority of Indians don't eat beef. Taleb's argument is not that a majority can force its will on the minority, it is the exact opposite of that. R
39.
by wsxcde 7y ago
If the argument is that a majority will accommodate a minority as long as that accommodation is unnoticeable to most members of that majority, then I am totally on board with that claim. What I'm trying to push back against is Taleb&#x
40.
by wsxcde 7y ago
I think we're both saying the same things. I said in my response to abiro that "easily accommodated minority preferences are often accommodated". Which is obviously true. But that is a very inane and obvious claim, and not at
41.
by wsxcde 7y ago
And again, I will offer in support of my case that meat is actually more expensive in India than are vegetables.
42.
by wsxcde 7y ago
His argument is not that minorities are also provided options suitable to them when it is economical to do so. He makes a much stronger claim -- that minority preferences will "win". He supports this by using the anecdotes about h
43.
by wsxcde 7y ago
Except, the claim he's making is not that easily accommodated minority preferences are often accommodated. This is obviously true. He's making a claim that minority preferences will "win" -- his word, not mine! That clai
44.
by wsxcde 7y ago
If this were true, then India would be a fully vegetarian country. Except it is not, and it is quite routine to find meat and fish served at public events here. (FYI, the actual stats are that only 30% of Indians are vegetarian, although th
45.
by wsxcde 7y ago
He has written some interesting stuff. In particular, I recommend his book the Black Swan -- it is a very nice description of why there are often structural incentives to disregard unlikely/low-probability events. But he's also de
46.
by wsxcde 7y ago
An alternative explanation is that they routinely bury similar negative stories so they have good reason to believe that obsfuscation and spin will work.
47.
by wsxcde 7y ago
As the article says, the Amazon rain forest supplies 20% of the world's oxygen. We all need it. If we won't do what it takes to prevent the people there from killing it, we will all get exactly what we deserve. It might helpful to
48.
by wsxcde 7y ago
That's why I said you need to get laws passed making beef consumption extremely expensive. Individual acts of voting with your wallet are unlikely to succeed.
49.
by wsxcde 7y ago
If you are seriously concerned about climate change, pressure your government to impose a large tax on beef and pay the proceeds from that tax directly to the people living in the amazon basin. That will incentivize them against deforestati
50.
by wsxcde 7y ago
What is the citation for the drivers being "mostly illiterate"? Sounds like bullshit to me. The country is something like 70-80% literate and a significant part of the illiterate population consists of old people.
51.
by wsxcde 7y ago
> Mutual assured destruction may be the only thing limiting the Kashmir conflict, for example. On the contrary, Kashmir militancy project was started by Pakistan in the late eighties after a botched attempt by the central government in I
52.
by wsxcde 7y ago
As someone below noted, there's nothing Bangalore-specific about this. This is coming from a native Bangalorean who moved away about eight years ago. It's just human nature to want to sit around and chat rather than actually spend
53.
by wsxcde 7y ago
I think we disagree on this. I interpret the failure of OWS et al. as the inability of the protestors to take their ideas mainstream. While gerrymandering, voter targeting and propaganda via mass media do dilute the protesters' votes,
54.
by wsxcde 7y ago
A related point made by Zeynep Tufecki is that mass protests in the past used to be show of force. If you could get half million people to travel to Washington and participate in a mass protest, that meant these people cared enough to take
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by wsxcde 7y ago
This was a great recommendation, thanks!
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by wsxcde 7y ago
Is there a good textbook that covers these? I am primarily interested in a computer science perspective to these algebraic structures.
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by wsxcde 7y ago
Nah, the blowback they'd get from not honoring the purchasing would be terrible. More generally, Amazon are one of the few companies who understand that short term losses can lead to long-term goodwill and profit. So anyway, my predict
58.
by wsxcde 7y ago
> This article repeats the claim that the MCAS software was faulty, but is there any evidence of coding-level errors? No, there isn't. The Verge (and IIRC other sources) have reported that the crashes were due to failures in the a
59.
by wsxcde 7y ago
I think computer architecture is especially prone to this sort of nonsense. The whole field has a weird insider-bias and most program committee members seem to come from the same schools, have the same advisors, and write the same sort of p
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by wsxcde 7y ago
Journal reviews can be stacked with friends just as easily. In fact, most top CS/EE journals ask authors to recommend reviewers. (In theory, the editors will make sure the recommendations are conflict-free and sensible, but given their

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