wyager

20 ms·

331.
by wyager 2y ago
A general principle of science is that simpler explanations are more likely. Rule-of-thumb described by Occam's razor, formalized by concepts like Solomonoff induction. Rules like 1/r^2, being simple, are assigned a higher prior p
332.
by wyager 2y ago
Blaming the internet for misogyny is kind of bizarre, given that current levels of misogyny are within a couple points of all-time historical lows. The internet was invented ~40 years ago. Women started getting vote ~100 years ago. Do you t
333.
by wyager 2y ago
There are multiple reasons that Japan is better than Mississippi, but "Japan is actually materially wealthier" is not one of them.
334.
by wyager 2y ago
> A factory making billions to its owner doesn't improve the revenues, wealth or standard of living of more than 1 person... A factory producing luxury Louis Vuitton handbags... is irrelevant to the living conditions of the workers
335.
by wyager 2y ago
> it's better to have smaller firms that don't (or less frequently) damage society I'm not sure about that - I really like my lifestyle which would be nearly impossible to attain in Europe, but is very attainable for Amer
336.
by wyager 2y ago
> And the above attitude is why the US is a joke with people who can't afford education, healthcare, or a home The median American has all of these things better than the median European, except maybe healthcare. That's tough t
337.
by wyager 2y ago
> Source? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... > Are you adjusting for cost of living, per capita,
338.
by wyager 2y ago
> You are poorer than any European ever could be Are you talking about me, personally, or Americans in general? I suppose it doesn't really matter - you'd be wrong in either case. The median person in the poorest US state is ri
339.
by wyager 2y ago
This attitude is why EU countries are mostly quite poor compared to the US and have relatively unproductive and low-tech economies. You bring it upon yourself.
340.
by wyager 2y ago
What do you think the cause is? Unwashed eggs?
341.
by wyager 2y ago
Nope, competently-written apps can do everything with only user permissions 99% of the time. Most of the time when mac installers require an admin password, it's due to a combination of incompetence and malice. Very frequently I will j
342.
by wyager 2y ago
Oops, yes I did. For curious readers: `2` is a quaternion, but `exp(2)` doesn't generate a rotation, it generates 7.389... just like normal exponentiation on reals. So if you have a real term in your lie algebra, it will generate thing
343.
by wyager 2y ago
> unit quaternions also don’t form a vector space Unit quaternions are the lie group. If you want something you can add willy-nilly, you want the lie algebra of all quaternions, which represent rotational velocities, just as axis-angle r
344.
by wyager 2y ago
The Clockwork Rocket trilogy is ++++, and Dichronauts is ++--. Reading these really helped my intuitive grasp of relativistic mechanics. Incandescence is also cool but (minimal spoilers) is more or less the normal +--- metric. Not nearly as
345.
by wyager 2y ago
Also strongly recommend Greg Egan, who I place in a similar bucket to Chiang. Egan has some books that fall into an (afaik) completely unique sub-genre that I have heard described as "math-fi". Some of his books are (credibly) des
346.
by wyager 2y ago
That sounds terrible. I'm very sensitive to inductor whine - I'm sure there are a few hotels who thought they had a schizophrenic guest based on the lengths I sometimes go through to unplug whiny power supplies in hotels - but not
347.
by wyager 2y ago
I thought this sounded like BS, so I looked a bit more closely into ear physiology. You obviously need some kind of energy source (either an active amplifier or a noisy pump source) to have resonances that can be recorded. What would that b
348.
by wyager 2y ago
> crypto bros wanted decentralized finance where code is law Ethereum and associated "defi" people are emphatically not the same people as the "code is law" people. One of the first things Ethereum did was throw ou
349.
by wyager 2y ago
The issue I've run into with graphite, for example, is that it gets confused by things like squash merges. I think fundamentally a merge-based workflow, which git(hub) encourages, is kind of inimical to stacked PRs compared to rebase-b
350.
by wyager 2y ago
I prefer the JS thing to github, mostly because it makes it a lot easier to juggle lots of in-flight changes that depend on each other while simultaneously supporting code review.
351.
by wyager 2y ago
I used to work there - the jane street code review software is awesome, kind of like graphite but it works reliably. You can write a big tree of PRs. PRs get reviewed separately and you can merge them in any order at your leisure, without w
352.
by wyager 3y ago
The problem is that there are way fewer than 4 billion people who actually have anything worth connecting to their node for. 99% of internet users are strictly consumers, and a protocol change won't do anything about that. For them, th
353.
by wyager 3y ago
I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to describe Sanderson as a contemporary Feynman, at least from the pedagogy side of things.
354.
by wyager 3y ago
> Thousands of poor souls doing terrible pointless menial work just so that a few entitled customers can avoid the clunky self checkout Wanting to make your life more convenient and pleasant isn't "entitled". 99% of jobs a
355.
by wyager 3y ago
Yes. This is all just the latest guise for the human instinct to suppress déclassé consumption. Any time you have people advocating for sumptuary laws there's always some grand moral excuse: it's for the sake of religious decency,
356.
by wyager 3y ago
> something that provides high utility for vastly more people We have a really nice mechanism of distributed utility measurement called "prices" which suggests otherwise.
357.
by wyager 3y ago
Just because it has "transaction" in the name doesn't mean it is applicable to bitcoin transactions. Proposing a bitcoin transaction tax is more akin to imposing a tax on intrabank account transfers, which is facially absurd,
358.
by wyager 3y ago
> Why not levy a tax on Bitcoin transactions in general Do you have an idea of what this would entail at a legal, accounting, or technical level? This is sort of a bizarre suggestion from any of those perspectives
359.
by wyager 3y ago
Bitcoin mining does subsidize electricity generation. It creates an extremely reliable floor price market for power, stabilizing demand and making power generation a more predictable business. There's a reason large renewable facilit
360.
by wyager 3y ago
If you try to take Finnish cultural norms around work and apply them to the entire American population, you're going to have a bad time. There are a lot of people in America who want to live on social welfare. I don't think this i

More ›