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Interesting article about how everyone at Gumroad works part time and communicates in writing.
No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees (2021-01-07):
> Instead of having meetings, people “talk” to each other via GitHub, Notion, and (occasionally) Slack, expecting responses within 24 hours. Because there are no standups or “syncs” and some projects can involve expensive feedback loops to collaborate, working this way requires clear and thoughtful communication.
> Everyone writes well, and writes a lot.
#1 thanks for sharing.
> Notion
I've used Notion a little. I like it, tho haven't used it much. It's got a nice clean UI and seems well focused on pseudo-collaborative writing (like wikis, docs, etc)
> expecting responses within 24 hours.
I'm not sure how they expect responses in 24 hours with part time work tho.
> Everyone writes well, and writes a lot.
I wonder if this is due to the culture, or mb a self-selection process implicit in who they hire. In any case: I think it'd be a useful thing to reproduce.
----
Note: the post mentions Gumroad memberships (launched nov 2020), which sounds like it might be potentially useful: https://gumroad.com/gumroad/p/introducing-gumroad-memberships
https://kill-the-newsletter.com/
Awesome service that lets you read newsletters via RSS/Atom. It gives you a custom email address with which you sign up for the newsletter, and it also gives you a customized Atom URL to put into your feed reader to follow the messages that get sent to that address.
My Mother Told Me
According to *The Viking Rune*, J. R. R. Tolkien's book *Songs for the Philologists* discusses Egil's Saga, a Viking story/poem that dates back to at least 1240 AD:
> The author is Egill Skalla-Grímsson. The first stanza is Egill’s first poem, which is preserved in the Egil’s Saga. In W. C. Green’s translation of 1893 it reads:
> Thus counselled my mother,
> For me should they purchase
> A galley and good oars
> To go forth a-roving.
> So may I high-standing,
> A noble barque steering,
> Hold course for the haven,
> Hew down many foemen.
A different translation of those verses was made into a song that was used in the Vikings show on the History Channel. A clip was uploaded to YouTube in 2016:
> my mother told me
> someday I would buy
> galleys with good oars
> sail to distant shores
> stand up high in the prow
> noble barque I steer
> steady course for the havens
> hew many foe men
My favorite version of that song is by jonnystewartbass and natidreddd on TikTok.
am I wrong to be annoyed by this pronoun thing?
Context: AGDQ 2021 Super Orb Bros. WORLD RECORD by Mitchflowerpower (linked at 18:14)
GlitchCat7 says at 18:15 to 18:27:
> So what Mitch is going to do here is die on purpose instead of leave the level. That's a time save because **they** respawn at the checkpoint, and that allows **them** to go backwards and access the, uhh, little hidden room here.
GlitchCat7 uses the pronouns *they/them* to refer to Mitchflowerpower in the above quote.
In 2019 (I think), GDQ started adding the runner's chosen pronouns after their name. It's only sometimes there, which -- I suspect -- is because there's an optional field the runner can fill out on some form when providing details to GDQ. Some runners opt out (so nothing is shown), and some runners choose pronouns.
In this case Mitch has chosen *he/him* which is shown next to his name.
Other common pronouns I've seen (on GDQ vods) are *she/her* and *they/them*.
I think some people have tried to train themselves to say *they/them* all the time, instead of using traditional pronouns. I'm not sure why; maybe it's an attempt to not misgender ppl by using (supposedly) gender neutral pronouns. But *they/them* isn't gender neutral in the singular. 'They' indicates either 2+ ppl and is gender neutral, *or* 1 person and an *unspecified* gender (or nonbinary/nontraditional). 'Them' is similar. Neither word is gender neutral in the singular. (I checked the definitions via Google's dictionary.)
I think GlitchCat7 is wrong to use *they/them* in this context. Mitch deliberately specified his chosen pronouns and GlitchCat7 is not using them. How is this not misgendering? IMO: *if*, after learning of someone's chosen pronouns, it is wrong to use other pronouns *then* it *must* be just as wrong for GlitchCat7 to use *they/them* in this context. Moreover, this should *not* depend on whether (and how) it affects the feelings of the person referenced. It should be wrong (or okay) regardless of how the person feels. (Granted, there may be practical considerations from person-to-person, but in principle the person-to-person aspects don't matter.)
There's lots of things I don't understand about why ppl do certain things regarding pronouns, but my main concern with this post is:
am I wrong to be annoyed by GlitchCat7's inconsistency here? if so, why? are there other explanations for GlitchCat7's use of *they/them* (besides self-training) that I should consider and do such explanations change the picture?
#5 there's a problem here but the world has much larger problems. this is a symptom not a root cause. it's not a limiting factor or breakpoint. it's OK to consider/analyze for practice, if you think that's best, and also to connect to it causes. but emotions are better directed elsewhere. (the word "annoyed" varies but often refers to emotion).
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Gab’s Dissenter browser is insecure
https://twitter.com/bravesampson/status/1350685642846572546 :
> Warning! Dissenter for Windows and Linux hasn't been updated since March, 2020. For macOS, it hasn't been touched since November, 2019. The GitHub repo is stagnant since mid 2020. Chromium receives more than a hundred security patches yearly. Dissenter remains unpatched & unsafe.
> I cannot stress enough how reckless this is of @getongab; they know Dissenter is woefully out of date, and incredibly dangerous for their users.
> You're better off using Internet Explorer. Seriously.
https://twitter.com/porkergolden/status/1350688717674074113 :
> I have been trying to tell people this. Huge security risk. They dont follow upstream code and theres been like 4 zero days.
Also, Dissenter is based on Brave, but Dissenter uses poor coding practices.
Brendan Erich, the founder of Brave, tweeted:
> Are they still using our classids in Windows registry so as to make an uninstall hell for anyone who installs Brave then them?
@bravesampson, who shared the warning above, replied:
> It was going to be fixed in "the next build" according to the still-open issue https://github.com/gab-ai-inc/defiant-browser/issues/36
The GitHub issue was last updated in July 2020.
hero LFG (HLFG) posted a criticism on my YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QD3T_xMxUqE
>>> I see that you (curi) said "Ppl like that it being a meme distracts from it being dumb. Gives excuse Like the "I was joking" standard excuse." Your sentence used "Ppl" instead of "People" and isn't great sentence structure. You then criticize Felix The Cat on his low effort sentence structure without apostrophes and not capitalizing "always". There is something natural in me that reflects what I perceive in the other person. This may apply here. You didn't use great sentence structure. Then he didn't use great sentence structure. But you seem too quick to see his faults and not your own. I have this bias where I am quick to point fingers at others instead of myself. I also practice not letting my perception of other people be reflected in my actions.
curi:
>> timestamps? it's hard for me to comment without looking at what was said and its context. this is from over a year ago so i don't remember.
HLFG:
> @curi 24:21 - low effort and social status
Thanks for the critical feedback. I reviewed it.
First, here's some context:
Justin posted an LT meme tweet and called it a horror show.
Felix said "You don't like memes ?"
Justin and I answered.
Felix asked me "What's misleading?"
Felix has written six words total. Then:
Note: Felix turned out to be Andy B.
After considering what happened, I have several responses.
HLFG misquoted me. I think it's a reasonably understandable accident, but it makes a difference. I wrote two separate messages. "Gives excuse" and "Like..." are different sentences, not one sentence with an incorrectly-capitalized word in the middle. I omitted trailing periods at the end of the messages, as is typical with IM type formats.
I don't think there's a sentence structure problem with what I said (shortcuts aren't a structural problem). I think that criticism is due to misreading two messages as one.
I don't think the "Ppl" abbreviation has a functional downside (maybe with ESL people? which Felix wasn't).
One of HLFG's main criticisms was potential hypocrisy.
I brought up the lower-cased "always" and apostrophe issues for two reasons, neither of which was hypocritial. First, because it was inconsistent with his own prior writing (including earlier in the same message), which is a sign of tilt. Second, because I was (when making the video) doing lengthy, detailed analysis for the purpose of explaining some things about Felix's messages which I'd been asked to explain.
I omitted some minor glue words. Instead of "It gives them an excuse" or "That gives ppl an excuse" I wrote "Gives excuse". All the missing words are simple words that are pretty easy to infer. I don't think it's very ambiguous. In retrospect, shortcuts are a bad idea for communicating with Felix, and perhaps I should have guessed that already at the time I wrote it.
Felix's message is *substantively, philosophically confusing*. He's majorly under-explaining some complex philosophical claims (re BoI, which he hadn't read before he tried to disagree with me about its meaning). The poor writing is an amplifier for that. It brings up multiple topics at once instead of staying focused (I think with no genuine intention of following up on or adequately explaining all the topics raised) and turns the conversation into a mess. It was a big jump in complexity without using effort to try to make the complexity work. I was trying to say one thing that I think is reasonably simple and understandable, even for a new person. He responded with five different things at once, all of which are low quality, and there was a drop in the quality of his writing, in a weirdly inconsistent way, just when some clarity was most needed.
My two messages weren't high effort, but were focusing on one reasonably simple point, which I was prepared to explain further if needed. I expected iterative discussion. Felix's response was lower effort and brought up five points simultaneously to derail the discussion and cause chaos. That's not parallel to my communication.
I think HLFG's other point is about mirroring (reflecting). I think he's saying that maybe Felix was copying my conversational style, and it'd be bad to criticize him for copying me. But that wouldn't explain the style inconsistencies within Felix's message, nor the five things at once. He may have been trying to mirror some (which would be another social thing he did), but I think my criticisms were about things he was doing that I wasn't.
#9
> HLFG misquoted me. I think it's a reasonably understandable accident, but it makes a difference. I wrote two separate messages. "Gives excuse" and "Like..." are different sentences, not one sentence with an incorrectly-capitalized word in the middle. I omitted trailing periods at the end of the messages, as is typical with IM type formats.
I did misquote you and it makes a difference. I am not aware of a standard IM type format, and I try to use good sentence structure and standard formats.
> I don't think there's a sentence structure problem with what I said (shortcuts aren't a structural problem). I think that criticism is due to misreading two messages as one.
I agree that my response was based in an assumption that the two messages were in fact one message.
> I don't think the "Ppl" abbreviation has a functional downside (maybe with ESL people? which Felix wasn't).
I think this choice can indicate an attempt to be efficient. Trying to be efficient can be perceived as being lazy or sloppy. I thought you were criticizing Felix for being lazy (or sloppy).
> One of HLFG's main criticisms was potential hypocrisy.
Yes.
> I brought up the lower-cased "always" and apostrophe issues for two reasons, neither of which was hypocritial. First, because it was inconsistent with his own prior writing (including earlier in the same message), which is a sign of tilt. Second, because I was (when making the video) doing lengthy, detailed analysis for the purpose of explaining some things about Felix's messages which I'd been asked to explain.
I understand the second reason. But I have never heard this word "tilt" used in this way.
> I omitted some minor glue words. Instead of "It gives them an excuse" or "That gives ppl an excuse" I wrote "Gives excuse". All the missing words are simple words that are pretty easy to infer. I don't think it's very ambiguous. In retrospect, shortcuts are a bad idea for communicating with Felix, and perhaps I should have guessed that already at the time I wrote it.
I had to read your words that were without the glue words at least three times. I admit that my reading comprehensions skills are not the best.
> Felix's message is *substantively, philosophically confusing*. He's majorly under-explaining some complex philosophical claims (re BoI, which he hadn't read before he tried to disagree with me about its meaning). The poor writing is an amplifier for that. It brings up multiple topics at once instead of staying focused (I think with no genuine intention of following up on or adequately explaining all the topics raised) and turns the conversation into a mess. It was a big jump in complexity without using effort to try to make the complexity work. I was trying to say one thing that I think is reasonably simple and understandable, even for a new person. He responded with five different things at once, all of which are low quality, and there was a drop in the quality of his writing, in a weirdly inconsistent way, just when some clarity was most needed.
I agree.
> My two messages weren't high effort, but were focusing on one reasonably simple point, which I was prepared to explain further if needed. I expected iterative discussion. Felix's response was lower effort and brought up five points simultaneously to derail the discussion and cause chaos. That's not parallel to my communication.
I understand and agree.
> I think HLFG's other point is about mirroring (reflecting). I think he's saying that maybe Felix was copying my conversational style, and it'd be bad to criticize him for copying me. But that wouldn't explain the style inconsistencies within Felix's message, nor the five things at once. He may have been trying to mirror some (which would be another social thing he did), but I think my criticisms were about things he was doing that I wasn't.
Your criticism of Felix's sloppiness/laziness was the one that stuck out to me as seemingly hypocritical. The criticism is probably relevant to "tilt" if I understood what you meant by "tilt". I think a criticism can be relevant and appear hypocritical. I am guessing that "tilt" has something to do with the person's change in writing style. Your writing style did not change from "formal" to "IM type format" within a single message like Felix's did. After further thought, it seems like your criticism is more focused on the change in style within the message. Your criticism is not focused on laziness/sloppiness in general.
#10 I want to attach my identity to the message above.
#10
http://www.pokerology.com/lessons/understanding-tilt/ :
> Tilt is a poker slang term that is often used to describe the angry or frustrated emotional state of a player. [...]
> Tilt is when you play poker poorly, making even a single play that you know is bad strategy, because your emotions are interfering with your ability to think clearly.
> I had to read your words that were without the glue words at least three times. I admit that my reading comprehensions skills are not the best.
Yeah it was overly-abbreviated writing. I think an important distinction to consider is how realistic is it for the conversation to proceed productively from that point. My two messages might be understood or might require one clarifying question at which point I'd write my point better. There's some risk of the conversation breaking at that point, but it's reasonably realistic for reasonable people to get past that without it causing an ongoing problem.
By contrast, I think it's unlikely and unrealistic for a productive conversation to continue after Felix's response message (the one including "always wrong thats okay, always at the beginning of infinite knowledge?"); it's really hard to deal with. The most common way a conversation might appear productive from there forward is by ignoring most of what Felix said, but I think trying to ignore that sort of problem usually leads to problems later (Felix said it for a reason(s), so just pretending he never said it won't address the causes of him saying it).
> I did misquote you and it makes a difference. I am not aware of a standard IM type format, and I try to use good sentence structure and standard formats.
IM clients today sometimes display consecutive messages from the same person without clear visual distinctions to show where the person hit enter. It's only an issue when the end of a message happens to be near the end of a line, otherwise the whitespace makes it easy to see that the writer hit "enter" there. I dislike it.
For example, Apple's Messages can make multiple IMs look like one IM when a link preview or image is involved.
On Discord, this issue only comes up with the "Cozy" appearance setting, and you can see message separation by hovering your mouse on messages (each has its own separate UI controls and timestamp). The "Compact" appearance setting puts the timestamp and username in front of every message by a user, even if they are consecutive. I just switched to Compact.
Also, when texting, people commonly don't type the last period of a message, especially when on mobile. This can occasionally aggravate the first problem where two IMs look like one long IM. (Though it can also be a clue that you reached the end of an IM. If you see no period, end of line, then a capital letter, that generally means two separate messages. Mobile users generally have autocorrect which will capitalize thes start of a message but would not capitalize that word if it was part of the previous message and had no period before it.)
This time lapse film of salamander growth from a single cell compresses four weeks into 6 minutes. (Note: It's actually a composite film of multiple embryos.)
#15 Here’s a direct link to the salamander growth video on YouTube, taken from the HN discussion.
Samuel Culper writes in The Forward Observer email newsletter (emphasis added):
> ... a number of hedge funds, including Melvin Capital, last week had taken out large short positions on the stock of Gamestop, a popular gaming and accessory retail chain. This did not sit well with the gaming community, who responded by purchasing and bidding up the stock price in order to destroy the short positions of hedge funds trying to devalue the company. Gamestop stock was trading at $43 on last Friday’s open and had soared to $65 as of Monday morning, which forced a short squeeze on Melvin Capital, among others. On Monday, Melvin Capital reportedly took an emergency infusion of $2.75 billion to cover the losses, while the hedge fund’s managers doubled down on their short position. Others piled in on the trade, and *Gamestop was trading at $354* in after-hours trading before this morning’s open. In just five days, *the stock soared 723%* as supporters rallied around Gamestop and trolls struck back at hedge funds. Melvin Capital finally closed out of its short position yesterday afternoon. While the firm denies that it’s bankrupt, *there’s speculation that the firm’s losses were so massive that bankruptcy will soon follow*.
Matt Stoller tweeted about this:
> Dodd-Frank fixed everything and now our financial markets are totally reflective of real productive activity. [RT of tweet with an image of Gamestop at $375.15]
More:
- Melvin Capital, hedge fund targeted by Reddit board, closes out of GameStop short position, *CNBC* (2021-01-27)
- GameStop jumps after hours as Elon Musk tweets out Reddit board that’s hyping stock, *CNBC* (2021-01-26)
#17 Upper Echelon covered it too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45b14OFk-wI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDJNx909_nM
I haven't watched the second one yet.
#17 Wallstreet is rigged. Tim Pool:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz2xDpZoz3o
Basically if the financial professionals ever lose, they halt trading and start changing the rules. Of course if reddit lost the government wouldn't give reddit users their money back.
It's the same kinda thing as banks losing on mortgage bets and then getting a huge govt bailout.
the "experts" steal taxpayer money, and other monies (e.g. they're now stealing from reddit users who beat them) by taking risks and then not paying up when they lose, often at taxpayer expense. the rigged system, including the govt, helps them.
you are not allowed to beat hedge funds at the market. you're allowed to lose money to them tho. some regular individuals get away with winning some but a lot of individuals are not allowed to win a lot.
it's a little like gambling at Vegas: you might personally get lucky and win, but the system is rigged. the difference, of course, is that Vegas is entertainment and everyone playing knows the odds are mildly skewed against them.
note Vegas *does* suppress anyone from finding a way to beat the system, e.g. with card counting. but they are trying to make the system work as intended, and as everyone knows it's intended to be (the casino always wins by a little bit). Wallstreet and the markets, by contrast, are lying about what the system is intended to do, etc. – they falsely claim it's open to anyone or any group to win big in a systematic way against anyone else in the system. Vegas won't let you find a way to exploit the system and everyone knows that's their goal; if you're clever enough you might make some money off the casinos but they will try to stop you; they do NOT claim or pretend that being cleverer than them is a way to get money from them. Investing, by contrast, is advertised as an area where you can get rich if you're cleverer than other ppl and beat them.
Wall Street Bets deplatformed by Reddit and Discord:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/27/22253251/discord-bans-the-r-wallstreetbets-server
https://www.cnet.com/news/reddits-rwallstreetbets-is-back-after-intentional-lockdown/
The reddit deplatforming seems to have been temporary, for now. The discord ban looks permanent.
#20 *The Big Short* book and movie are both pretty good, and related, e.g. b/c the ratings agencies rated some financial instruments incorrectly on purpose to protect the establishment side of bets that were made about those financial instruments.
#21 Matt Levine on the Game Stop situation: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-25/the-game-never-stops
He links reddit:
> Here is another “DD”—“due diligence,” the WallStreetBets term for, like, an investment memo—discussing the business, albeit using more slurs and obscenities than is customary in equity research.
Louis Rossmann is talking about it too. Multiple videos including:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdpVzzXWOTA
> Gamestop shorts lose BILLIONS, get $2 billion bailout; AND KEEP SHORTING ANYWAY!
#22 LTT/TechLinked calling out wall st & regulators over getting pissed they're not the ones manipulating the market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=74&v=qEh1gNxUH9Y
There's something deeply wrong when the idea of wall st & govt manipulating markets is, like, a common idea to throw out there. Like a terrible thing that ppl just accept.
Amazon Wins Round #1 Against Parler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBPSTjtAw_Q
Obesity and Coercion
I’m curious to how anyone else thinks about solving childhood obesity whilst avoiding coercion. I’m a big proponent of children being free, but the health repercussions children make going down a path towards obesity are irrational in the long-run. This isn’t to say one cannot be happy and live long (obese men and women do), but often times the obesity can be a hindrance to one’s life, especially at a young age.
I suggest parents engage in rational discourse to understand the causes of obesity (beyond the “eat less, move more” ignorance, such as emotional or social or philosophical reasoning dilemmas). Then children can open up over time about the problem, by which parents can advise them or nudge them in a better direction promoting hygiene.
The problem I currently think about is what to do when the child doesn’t want to help himself at all (for which severa teenagers and young adults despise their parents for being fat as a child).
https://twitter.com/KralcTrebor/status/1354952686165225478
> Ok - here's my best explanation of why @RobinhoodApp restricted trading in the short-squeeze stocks.
Basically says they need money to enable the trades b/c stock trades take 3 days to settle which is a credit risk that Robinhood partially covers for its users.
But Robinhood claims no liquidity issues:
https://www.businessinsider.in/stock-market/news/robinhoods-ceo-denies-the-trading-platform-is-facing-liquidity-issues-amid-investor-frenzy/articleshow/80543740.cms
#26 More on Robinhood lying:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDOvB9OUjBI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2Sk-_Xt06w
Things Google has killed:
https://killedbygoogle.com/
The Managerial Revolution, written by James Burnham in 1941, is a book with an interesting forecast for the future of society.
I'm not going to do justice to the book, but here are my thoughts anyway. I think it's clearly written and decently argued. Burnham is an ex-Marxist, or at least a partially ex-Marxist. The basic thesis is that the world is moving from a capitalist society to a managerial society. I don't know how fully he understands capitalism.
Anyway, Burnham argues that under capitalism, the owners of the means of production have control over them, and under a managerial society, the *managers* of the means of production have control over them. "Managers" in the book are people like factory managers, or middle managers, not executives or financiers or presidents. Managerial society is kind of like the managers of plants and of government bureaucracies run everything. It's basically central planning under socialism.
The book's forecast reminds me of how Bannon says we need to "deconstruct the administrative state". I imagine the book has some connections with Mises' *Bureaucracy*.
#25 Lots of people don't understand their hunger well. Some eat because they're bored. Some eat because it tastes good and they don't have something more appealing to do. Lots of eating is due to habit (from parents or society), e.g. 3 meals a day + snacks is a standard eating pattern that isn't hunger based. Ideas like eating at particular times of day or eating certain types of meals (e.g. "well rounded") cause trouble too because they encourage eating things you don't want to eat and/or eating when not hungry. Often making meals "healthier" means adding extra veggies or something else which increases the total calories.
Reisman open to debate 'Communists, Socialists, and “Progressives”':
https://georgereismansblog.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-challenge-to-communists-socialists.html
Obesity and Coercion
#25
You raise a bunch of issues. I’ll start with one: “what to do when the child doesn’t want to help himself at all”. How does the child see the situation? What advantages and disadvantages do they see to being obese? Do they see a problem and if so, what is that problem? It be a different problem than the parent sees. For instance, the child’s problem might be a parent who pressures them about eating or school-mates who make fun of them for their weight.
Eating
#30
> Lots of eating is due to habit (from parents or society), e.g. 3 meals a day + snacks is a standard eating pattern that isn't hunger based. Ideas like eating at particular times of day or eating certain types of meals (e.g. "well rounded") cause trouble too because they encourage eating things you don't want to eat and/or eating when not hungry.
Yes.
Some other societal ideas about eating that lead to eating more than what’s needed to satisfy hunger:
- If people are together and one of them is eating, the rest should be eating too.
- If there’s a social gathering, it includes some kind of eating. Anyone who isn’t eating isn’t being adequately sociable.
- Any celebration or holiday should include extra eating, whether or not more than one person is involved.
Morgan Housel, “Why It’s Usually Crazier Than You Expect” (Jan 28, 2021):
> I want to try to explain why Gamestop went up 100-fold in the last year and why Sears never recovered. They have to do with the same force in opposite directions. It’s a force that can explain a lot of baffling trends lately, and it’s so easy to underestimate and overlook.
> First, a story about why some animals go extinct faster than people expect.
> Forecasting when a species might go extinct is hard because whatever is causing a species to die off rarely progresses at the same rate. It can speed up in the blink of an eye in ways that surprise people.
> Say an elephant is being hunted for its tusk. The rate of hunting often massively speeds up over time, cascading into a frenzy that pushes a mildly at-risk species into quick extinction.
> It’s simple: As the number of elephants declines, tusks become rare. Rarity pushes prices up. High prices make hunters excited about how much money they can make if they find an elephant. So they work overtime. Then fewer elephants remain, tusk prices rise even more, more hunters catch on, they work triple-time, on and on until the number of hunters explodes as everyone chases the last herd of elephants whose super-rare tusks are suddenly worth a fortune.
I thought this was an interesting illustration of how things can change non-linearly due to feedback.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/lcrce8/geoff_keighley_activision_blizzard_has_said_it_is/
> Activision Blizzard has said it is planning to apply the Call of Duty® framework across its other franchises, including premium content, free-to-play access to all consumers, expansion to mobile and continuous regular delivery of in-game content.
i think this will suck
https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/lcrjv2/geoff_keighley_on_twitter_during_earnings_call/
> During earnings call, Activision Blizzard said it does not expect Overwatch 2 or Diablo 4 to launch in 2021.
:(
#35
Do you mean it will suck for gamers? It doesn’t seem to suck for Activision Blizzard (AB):
> According to a release from the company, revenue for the 4th quarter of 2020 sat at a comfortable $2.41 billion, a healthy margin above the anticipated figure of $2 billion
https://gamerant.com/call-duty-model-will-applied-future-franchises/
There’s COVID helping the sales too to some degree and other factors as well, but I think that the free to play model generates more money then the not free to play model.
The free to play model brings in more players than the not free to play. And many who would have bought a one time purchase game (not free to play) will end up spending more under this free to play, in game purchases model (sucks for them, I agree with this if that is what you mean - also it most likely will suck for most gamers if this model spreads). Also plenty of ppl who would not have bought a one time purchase game will end up spending money on a free to play in game purchase model.
If you think it might suck for AB over the long term, why do you think that is the case?
#36 mobile games ~all have bad gameplay. PC > console > mobile for quality. there are also major pricing model issues including various forms of pay2win and gambling, plus emphasizing cosmetics often draws attention away from gameplay. making games with bad gameplay hurts companies in the longer run. blizz is forsaking what they were good at, and alienating their more dedicated fans, to compete in a crowded space focused on pandering to idiots.
when you stop trying to make great games, you alienate the content creators, the youtubers, the twitch streamers, the pro gamers, the speedrunners, the people who write strategy guides, etc. that's a big deal even if they're a small numerical minority of customers.
it's kinda like Blizz announced they're going to be more like EA. if you look at other companies actually doing this kinda stuff, they aren't making great games. and companies like EA sometimes make money for a while but maybe you can foresee some ways they may end up bankrupt.
#37
Thx. Makes sense and brings up aspects that I did not think of.
PUA: jmulv and Mystery
Does Mystery Method Still Work In 2019? jmulv's explains MM's best 7 ideas that still work today. good vid IMO.
He did a second video with bad parts of MM: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yfkz9xyaUM](Everything Wrong With Mystery Method)
My comments on all 5 criticisms:
1. peacocking: i think a lot of ppl do it wrong, but the actual idea (as I understand it from Mystery) is fine: wear at least one thing that a girl could comment on, instead of 100% bland stuff. that gives her the opportunity to say something easy, if she wants to, instead of struggling to come up with something to say. and it makes you seem less boring or shy. jmulv seems to think *strong* peacocking is bad, and i agree that's bad for most people in most situations (Mystery personally made it work a lot for himself). jmulv doesn't explain it like this and just says peacocking is bad.
2. negging: yeah this has been misunderstood a lot. i think it's better than jmulv does (if you avoid the misunderstandings) but i agree with jmulv that it's not needed.
3. talking to everyone in the group: jmulv says his methods focus on the target girl and only interact with other people as necessary. i think it's plausible that he can make that work.
4. ignore girl you like in a group: jealousy plotline, indirectly lowering her value. jmulv says he has more direct methods that work better. this is plausible to me.
5. 7 hours of interaction before sex: jmulv criticizes this and says that the comfort needed isn't an amount of time and some things create comfort faster than others. of course. i think Mystery knew that and was just giving a decent rule of thumb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L439ZRJ3zgw
around 2min in jmulv says he tells girls he has no social medias because if they see one thing they don't like, e.g. the wrong political view, it often just immediate kills his chances with that girl.
#40 jmulv then says the key to sleeping with a lot of girls is good management of leads. he has a giant flowchart for how to text with girls and handle situations like she doesn't reply, she raises various objections, etc. you need decent IRL game to go out and get leads, but organized, methodical communication with those leads is the key to closing with a lot of girls. that makes a lot of sense if your goal is to close many women (a lot of guys are satisfied to get one girlfriend they think is hot with a tolerable personality, so they have a different goal).
disclaimer: i mostly think promiscuity is bad.
#39
> peacocking: i think a lot of ppl do it wrong, but the actual idea (as I understand it from Mystery) is fine: wear at least one thing that a girl could comment on, instead of 100% bland stuff.
wearing one somewhat "loud"/notable thing also fits with the fashion principle of having a single "statement" piece that has a strong color or pattern while keeping the other stuff muted. the idea is that having one loud thing can be fine and get some attention, but if you have too many loud things you can clash and don't draw people's attention to anything in particular
#41 jmulv says professional photos + photoshop can put you up to a 9/10 SMV photo and that can be done for anyone in the room. and that has a huge effect on results.
#43 jmulv thinks male brains are wired for math, science, logic, etc., while female brains are wired for social.
this is an understandable view given mainstream state of science and philosophy, but is refuted by universality ideas in BoI. the reason it appears to work or seems right is because of culture causing similar outcomes.
similarly, evolutionary psychology is pretty common with PUA info.
jmulv uses Tinder heavily, and pays Tinder to get more leads than other guys get. paying $100 gives you a big edge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xw1dpWDZksU
he keeps stuff simple and gets lots of leads and goes through them in an organized, methodical way.
he sets up Tinder leads in advance before arriving in a new city.
i can see how/why this would work.
before he's actually on a date with a girl, he's treating it like a marketing funnel instead of treating the girl like an individual.
#39 I watched Does Mystery Method Still Work In 2019? and Everything Wrong With Mystery Method (Top 5 Cons | Part 2).
> negging: yeah this has been misunderstood a lot. i think it's better than jmulv does (if you avoid the misunderstandings) but i agree with jmulv that it's not needed.
I think negging can actually be appropriate for super hot girls, which is what Mystery's method was supposed to be designed for. I think part of the theory is that girls like that almost never receive this kind of communication, so it makes you stand out to an extent, and also disqualifies you as someone who's trying to get in their pants.
In a Dec 2020 lay report by Alek from girlschase.com ("Indirect Club Game Just After LOCKDOWN (A Case Study)"), Alek pre-opens a hot girl by walking right by her and her friend while they are dancing in a club and checking his hair in a mirror. He even kind of physically moves them out of his way without paying them any more attention. That's a kind of situational neg.
I think this LR is interesting because Alek was a bit rusty due to lockdowns and he talks about how he played everything extremely conservatively and safe because he didn't want to mess anything up. Safe, solid game is another thing advocated by Mystery.
> talking to everyone in the group: jmulv says his methods focus on the target girl and only interact with other people as necessary. i think it's plausible that he can make that work.
I think group theory is another part of safe, solid night game. In the lay report above, Alek talks to the girl's group, befriends a guy who is hitting on his target's cousin, etc. My impression is that a group approach is the highest percentage play for approaching a super hot girl who is with her friends in a nightclub.
If you're not going after the ultra hot girls, or if you're approaching girls during the day, my impression is that talking to them individually could be fine and maybe even optimal.
> 4. ignore girl you like in a group: jealousy plotline, indirectly lowering her value. jmulv says he has more direct methods that work better. this is plausible to me.
Again, I think this advice is designed again as the conservative, high-percentage way to approach ultra hot girls in nightclubs. Mystery always said he was after 10s. When Alek approached the group containing his target (in his LR from above), he started by focusing on another girl, but it didn't work, and he quickly re-adjusted:
>> Since Ana was the hottest girl and seemed to be the “grumpiest” (or “most bitchy”), I went for her cousin. And that backfired.
>> Alek: Hey, so… (I got quickly interrupted by Ana)
>> Ana: She has a boyfriend (turns out some dude she knew from her social circle was dancing with her)
>> Alek: That’s great since I did not come over to talk to her, but to you
>> Ana: Oh? (She’s curious now!)
I think it comes down to how hot are the girls you're approaching (which includes, how hot do they think they are and how much attention are they getting) and the circumstances under which you are approaching them. Mystery's advice is designed for the hottest of the hot, model-level girls, in nightclubs. Most pickup artists don't address that problem situation.
#46
> My impression is that a group approach is the highest percentage play for approaching a super hot girl who is with her friends in a nightclub.
... and my understanding is that super-hot girls in nightclubs are essentially *always* with their friends.
#46 I mostly agree.
Has anyone read/followed Gad Saad? Is he any good?
https://blog.thinkst.com/2021/02/on-solarwinds-supply-chains-and_12.html
Explains the solarwinds hack briefly.
#49 no but your standards are very low so you might like him
#51 Do you have a criticism of Gad Saad?
USPS (US post office) informed delivery is good. They send you email notifications, with images of the mail you'll get, the morning it will come. They will also send info about package deliveries, sometimes further in advance.
Summary: Two papers in a prestigious math journal contradict each other. Both are over 10 years old, and no erratum was ever published for either paper.
Kevin Buzzard, Formalising mathematics: an introduction. (January 21, 2021):
> Did you know that there are two papers (this one and this one) in the Annals of Mathematics, the most prestigious maths journal, which contain results that directly contradict each other ...? No erratum was ever published for either paper, and if you chase up the web pages of the authors involved you will see that (at least at the time of writing) both Annals papers are still being proudly displayed on authors’ publication lists.
Since 1933, the Annals of Mathematics has been published jointly by Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. In 2019, among math journals, it ranked 4th by impact factor.
The first of the two contradicting papers is "Quasi-projectivity of moduli spaces of polarized varieties" and was published in 2004.
The second paper is "Non-quasi-projective moduli spaces" and was published in 2006. According to its abstract:
> This contradicts a recent paper (Quasi-projectivity of moduli spaces of polarized varieties, Ann. of Math.159 (2004) 597–639.).
To check Buzzard's claim of a lack of errata, I looked at the full text of the 2004 paper with sci-hub and didn't see any retraction or errata mentioned. I also searched the web for errata or retractions for both papers (my search was: ["*title*" errata OR erratum OR retraction]). The search engine found only 20 different results for both papers combined, and I didn't see anything relevant there.
#54 you haven't mentioned or quoted what the contradiction is, or claimed to have checked in any way that they actually contradict.
Has anyone that is familiar with Szasz seen the movie "I care a lot"? Seems to, at least partially, show how psychiatry takes away ppls liberty.
UEG's review (I have not seen the movie nor had I heard about the movie before I started watching UEG's review):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOK0FrovKwQ
#55 True. The point of my post should have been, not that the papers contradict each other, because I didn't address that issue, but that at least one of the papers contains an error.
#57 You haven't shown that either. What error?
#58 One paper claims to contradict the other. If that claim is false, then the paper that made the claim has an error (the claim itself). If the claim is true, then at least one of the two papers contains an error, because two sets of statements that contradict each other can’t both be true. So either way, at least one of the papers contains an error.
#56 The review of "I care a lot" is largely accurate about its merit as a film. It's technically well shot and acted but the main character is evil, has no good qualities of any kind and her motivations aren't explained. The mental health system is used to railroad people into a life of forced drugging and imprisonment without trial and the film depicts a version of this process with a lot of missing and wrong details. Overall I'd recommend reading Szasz and looking into the details of how mental health law works in your jurisdiction if you're interested. The film might prompt some people to do this.
Earth Class Mail
patio11 recommends✱† a virtual mailbox service called Earth Class Mail. They receive your mail for you and scan it. Then you can view the scans and decide what you want to do with each piece of mail: have it shredded, stored, or forwarded to you.
I signed up for Earth Class Mail to try it out. I also updated my mailing address with some companies so that they will send mail to my Earth Class Mail address instead of my home address.
✱ https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1222354794003591168
† https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1343397304099774465
Yaron Brook claims that he values rational criticism but that nobody is criticising him.
> I value criticism
> nobody criticises me
Starts at about 1:43:32
https://youtu.be/77K28gygAJQ?t=6212
#62 Here's an example of criticism Brook received:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=995Riq8JdUo
#62 I responded to Brook's video with a YouTube comment linking to Sunny's criticism from #63
Loading the page now, my comment isn't there.
From memory, the text I wrote was something like "You have received criticism [link]".
A hint about what happens to Brook criticism...
NYT opinion: ignore sources that Wikipedia trashes
Charlie Warzel, Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole (Feb. 18, 2021) (emphasis added);
> Mr. Caulfield walked me through the process using an Instagram post from Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine activist, falsely alleging a link between the human papillomavirus vaccine and cancer. “If this is not a claim where I have a depth of understanding, then I want to stop for a second and, before going further, just investigate the source,” Mr. Caulfield said. He copied Mr. Kennedy’s name in the Instagram post and popped it into Google. “Look how fast this is,” he told me as he counted the seconds out loud. In 15 seconds, *he navigated to Wikipedia and scrolled through the introductory section of the page, highlighting with his cursor the last sentence, which reads that Mr. Kennedy is an anti-vaccine activist and a conspiracy theorist*.
> “Is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the best, unbiased source on information about a vaccine? I’d argue no. *And that’s good enough to know we should probably just move on*,” he said.
JFC.
> He probed deeper into the method to find better coverage by copying the main claim in Mr. Kennedy’s post and pasting that into a Google search. The first two results came from Agence France-Presse’s fact-check website and the National Institutes of Health. His quick searches showed a pattern: *Mr. Kennedy’s claims were outside the consensus — a sign they were motivated by something other than science*.
WTF.
#61 Earth Class Mail can also deposit checks for you! For my type of account, unless I want to pay an extra flat monthly fee, each check deposit would cost around $10. Earth Class Mail also offers another plan which, in exchange for a monthly fee, would give me a certain number of check deposits included in the monthly fee as well as a cheaper rate for check deposits beyond that limit.
#63 I posted that link (and some additional) in the comments on Yaron's video but my comment got removed. At least it is not visible to me.
I then posted a comment asking about the removed comment. I can not see that comment either.
If Yaron and / or his team had anything to do with removing the comments I think that they suck and are dishonest.
#67 Creators who use YouTube and pay any attention know that YouTube has an aggressive censoring algorithm, particularly for comments or chat messages containing links. I've run into problems with it repeatedly.
I think anyone who actually wants to ask for criticism on YouTube, and was intellectually serious, would offer somewhere else to share it in case YouTube blocked it.
The point is, I think a negative judgment can be reached without knowing whether Brook or his proxy removed the comments or whether YouTube's algorithm did it. (In this case, btw, even if it was the algorithm, I think it'd end up in the Likely Spam category and a moderator could approve it, so not doing that is a choice.)
Curtis Yarvin - Gray Mirror
Curtis Yarvin (Moldbug) is a good and interesting writer. He has been posting a lot of content lately about political power. See what you think:
https://graymirror.substack.com/
#69 Thanks for the tip. I subscribed. I like this quote from https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-journalist-rationalist-showdown :
> lying is much harder than it seems; every lie you tell creates a surface area of mendacity that you have to permanently defendu
You guys have any criticisms of Yarvin?
He's majorly flawed. I want to discourage anyone from being an uncritical or only mildly critical fan of him. Put some serious thought into his flaws and your disagreements with him if you keep reading him. (Also consider disengaging from politics.)
One of the issues is his dark sense of life. I agree he has some positives, too. He's come up here before.
> (Also consider disengaging from politics.)
Yarvin agrees with you about disengaging. He talks about it at length. It's a major topic in his work :)
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/1-a-general-theory-of-collaboration
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/2-the-inaction-imperative
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/2a-positive-causes-are-vain-and-unaccountable
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/2b-negative-causes-are-frivolous
#72 Do you have criticism of https://graymirror.substack.com/p/1-a-general-theory-of-collaboration ?
https://ki.infil.net/w02-netcode-p5.html
Great explanation of how "rollback netcode" makes online play in fighting games like SSBM feel almost like you are playing your opponent locally on the same console. (This review is for everything up to "the technical side of rollback netcode", where I stopped reading.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ-opI-jghs
DD video.
I noticed recently that some of my Walmart deliveries have started coming from the local Walmart in bags instead of shipped in a box. When they come like this, they generally come faster than the initial estimated shipping time.
The faster delivery is nice. However, I had a guy leave bags blocking my outside door (so it was hard to open from the inside) and use insufficient bags for heavier items, leading to a bag tear. I suspect the quality of personnel doing local deliveries may be low.
Gab hacked
Free speech social network Gab hacked, private posts, hashed passwords, and more have been stolen, *Reclaim the Net* (2021-03-01):
> Free speech social network Gab has been hacked with over 70GB worth of public posts, private posts, and hashed passwords being compromised in the breach.
Leaking the hashed passwords wouldn't be a big deal for users who use randomly-generated passwords with enough entropy, but a lot of users don't do that.
Leaking the public messages isn't a big deal, because they were already public.
Regarding the private messages, Gab CEO Andrew Torba told WIRED:
> DMs were only live for a few weeks and are not currently a feature supported by the site, so if a breach has in fact occurred in that domain we expect the number of affected accounts to be low...
It sucks that Gab had such poor security that users' private messages were leaked, but at least it's not a huge number of users.
Gab's poor security record with their "Dissenter" browser was written about on curi.us in Jan 2021.
#77 Apparently, the Gab data breach includes the email address associated with each account. Unlike most of the info contained in the breach, this info is *not* public.
https://twitter.com/getongab/status/1366954798524887042?s=21 :
> [retyped from screenshot:] According to leaked database distributed by DDosSecrets the @realdonaldtrump Gab account the email address [email protected].
Vaccinate California Job Available
https://twitter.com/zoelle/status/1367206755290079235
> Do you want to get paid to Google vaccine stuff and do some data entry (with very high attention to detail!) for a few weeks? Bonus points if you can write tiny scripts because it'll go faster, but not a requirement. Please DM me, I have an *urgent* need for help.
Parents and teachers are trying to stop children from using a site called repl.it, which allows them to do programming online:
https://twitter.com/cosmicoptima/status/1367351952846311428
#80 Whatever kids like, parents and teachers hate. It doesn't just apply to books (long ago), then TV, then video games and "screen time". It also applies to learning to code.
Parents claimed they wanted to kids to use more educational games, or educational non-games, on computers. But repl.it is more educational than school and they hate it.
Sigh.
No doubt not all parents and teachers hate it. But many do.
Medicalizing ideas with the label "Capgras Syndrome"?
Capgras Syndrome is used to diagnose people who think people in their life have been replaced by impostors as mentally ill. But people could reason themselves into this if e.g. their family members started exhibiting weird, out of character behavior. Elliot do you consider Capgras Syndrome a real medical problem?
#82 I'm not really familiar with it, but thinking people were replaced by imposters sounds like confused ideas, not medicine. I vaguely recall hearing about this though, and it may be related to either a change in sensory perception or memory loss that screws with recognizing people and matching them to your memories. So it could be an interaction between a real medical problem (not a "mental illness") like that with ideas.
https://www.grubstreet.com/2007/01/in_his_cookbook_bouchon_thomas.html
> In his cookbook Bouchon, Thomas Keller explains how to make the perfect French fries, instructing readers to hand-cut and then refrigerate russet potatoes submerged in water for several hours. As it turns out, Keller isn’t going to quite so much trouble at his Bouchon Bistros: A tipster told us he uses Sysco fries, and though a rep from the restaurant didn’t offer the brand name, she did confirm, after speaking with Keller, that he favors frozens.
> And why would that be?
>> One of the top reasons Bouchon uses frozen French Fries is consistency. The quality of the frozen fries we use, and that of frozen fries in general today, is very good. We use fries which are 100% potato, which do not contain additives. The consistency in these fries is often better than that of fresh potatoes. The second reason is capacity. Bouchon would need to use over 200 pounds of potatoes a day to fulfill French Fry orders. In addition to space in the kitchen, it would require an exorbitant amount of manpower to process this large of an amount of potatoes into useable French Fries.
Frozen fries, which offer various advantages, are lower status somehow. Not even McDonald's would want to advertise directly on the fact that they use frozen fries cuz they're efficient and help keep costs down for consumers, forget about some fancy restaurant doing so.
I've hand cut a single potato btw (though never soaked them for several hours). It's pretty fast once you get the hang of it but yeah doing it on an industrial scale would be dumb.
Capgras
#83 How could memory loss or a change in sensory perception cause this?
https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/inside-googles-plan-to-disrupt-college-degree-exclusive.html
> How Google's New Career Certificates Could Disrupt the College Degree (Exclusive) Get a first look at Google's new certificate programs and a new feature of Google Search designed to help job seekers everywhere.
I like college-alternatives in general and optional certification stuff is fine, but I sure how Google doesn't end up having much control over who can get jobs. Don't trust their political or demographic impartiality as certification body at all.
Telling people you're suicidal
When you tell people you have suicidal thoughts, they can just call the cops on you. Which organizations have people who will not call the cops on you if you tell them this?
idk
chrisvdberge, Getting the colors right in your astrophotos, dslr-astrophotography.com (October 30, 2016)
Interesting article. It opens by talking about optical illusions that have to do with color. Near the end, it links to a post at the forums for PixInsight, which is a proprietary image-processing tool designed for astrophotography. Among other things, the linked post talks about how PixInsight lets you choose an entire galaxy as a "white reference" instead of using the light from a "G2V star" such as the sun:
> In a deep sky image however, no object, in general, is reflecting light from a G2V star. Deep sky images are definitely not daylight scenes, and most of the light that we capture and represent in them is far beyond the capabilities of the human vision system. We think that using a G2V star as a white reference for a deep sky image is a too anthropocentric view. We prefer to follow a completely different path, starting from the idea that no color can be taken as "real" in the deep sky, on a documentary basis. Instead of pursuing the illusion of real color, we try to apply a neutral criterion that pursues a very different goal: to represent a deep sky scene in an unbiased way regarding color, where no particular spectral type or color is being favored over others. In our opinion, this is the best way to provide a plausible color calibration criterion for deep sky astrophotography, both conceptually and physically.
> In this way we try to design and implement what we call spectrum-agnostic or documentary calibration methods. These methods pursue maximizing information representation through color in an unbiased way. In Vicent's calibration method, we take the integrated light of a nearby spiral galaxy as white reference. A nearby spiral galaxy with negligible redshift and good viewing conditions as seen from Earth is a plausible documentary white reference because it provides an excellent sample of all stellar populations and spectral types. Each pixel acquired from a galaxy is actually the result of the mixture of light from a large number of different deep sky objects.
Robby Soave, The Media Got It Wrong: Police Captain Didn't Say the Atlanta Spa Killer Was Having a 'Bad Day', *Reason* (2021-03-19):
> The full video shows that [police captain] Jay Baker was paraphrasing what Robert Aaron Long told investigators about his motivations.
The video is linked in the article.
Andrew Sullivan, When The Narrative Replaces The News: How the media grotesquely distorted the Atlanta massacres:
> We have yet to find any credible evidence of anti-Asian hatred or bigotry in [the suspect's] history. Maybe we will. We can’t rule it out. But we do know that his roommates say they once asked him if he picked the spas for sex because the women were Asian. And they say he denied it, saying he thought those spas were just the safest way to have quick sex. That needs to be checked out more. But the only piece of evidence about possible anti-Asian bias points away, not toward it.
> And yet. Well, you know what’s coming. Accompanying one original piece on the known facts, the NYT ran nine — nine! — separate stories about the incident as part of the narrative that this was an anti-Asian hate crime, fueled by white supremacy and/or misogyny. Not to be outdone, the WaPo ran sixteen separate stories on the incident as an anti-Asian white supremacist hate crime. Sixteen! One story for the facts; sixteen stories on how critical race theory would interpret the event regardless of the facts. For good measure, one of their columnists denounced reporting of law enforcement’s version of events in the newspaper, because it distracted attention from the “real” motives. Today, the NYT ran yet another full-on critical theory piece disguised as news on how these murders are proof of structural racism and sexism — because some activists say they are.
Fola Akinnibi, NYC Spent Half a Million Dollars Per Inmate in 2020, Report Says, *Bloomberg* (March 10, 2021):
> The New York City Department of Corrections spent $447,337 per inmate in fiscal 2020...
> "The cost to incarcerate a single individual on Rikers has exploded even as our jail population remains near historic lows ... ” [New York City Comptroller Scott ] Stringer said in a statement...
I wonder if the low prison population contributes to the high cost per inmate. Maybe there are economies of scale involved in running a prison that they aren't taking as much advantage of with so few prisoners.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, Facebook Helped the FBI Hack a Child Predator, *Vice* (June 10, 2020):
> Facebook paid a cybersecurity firm six figures to develop a zero-day in Tails to identify a man who extorted and threatened girls.
> All along, [the criminal] would claim he couldn’t be caught by the police: “You thought the police would find me by now, but they didn’t. they have no clue. The police are useless,” he wrote. “Everyone please pray for the FBI, they are never solving this case lmao … I’m above the law and always will be.”
> [The criminal] used the secure operating system Tails, which runs the anonymizing software Tor and is designed to encrypt and push all of a user's traffic through the network by default, hiding their real IP address from websites or services they use. Using this tool, he contacted and harassed dozens of victims on Facebook for years until 2017, according to court documents.
According to the article, Facebook paid a company to find a previously unpublished security hole in Tails and to write an exploit for it. The exploit was delivered to the criminal's computer by the FBI as part of a video that the criminal solicited. When the exploit ran, it revealed the criminal's IP address to the FBI. He was subsequently arrested and convicted.
Practical Engineering, What Really Happened During the Texas Power Grid Outage?, *YouTube* (March 23, 2021)
This is an interesting ~17-minute video about the recent power outage in Texas. It explains, at a high level, what the electrical grid is, how it works, what caused it to fail, how the orgnization that manages the power grid tried to cope, and why different sources of power (like wind, nuclear, gas, and more) all failed due to the cold.
One interesting tidbit: The video says that the electrical grid has to maintain the frequency of AC power at very nearly 60 cycles per second. Apparently it takes a high degree of coordination between power plants to make that happen. If a power plant detects that the grid power frequency is at or below 59.4 Hz for more than 9 minutes, it will automatically disconnect from the power grid. Apparently the 59.4 Hz trigger was hit during the Texas power outage, but only for about 4.5 minutes, so no automatic disconnect was triggered. When one power plant shuts down, the other plants have to work even harder to keep the AC power frequency at 60 Hz, which can trigger a cascade of failures. If all the stations in the power grid disconnect, then getting everything going again is called a "black start" and can take weeks or longer.
very interesting article about Aldi and the techniques it uses to run its supermarket efficiently https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/05/business/aldi-walmart-low-food-prices/index.html
#95 Nathaniel Meyersohn, How a cheap, brutally efficient grocery chain is upending America's supermarkets, *CNN Business* (May 17, 2019):
> Aldi only stocks around 1,400 items — compared to around 40,000 at traditional supermarkets and more than 100,000 at Walmart supercenters.
Limiting selection is a way to keep costs down. Costco does this too. As long as what's there is good, it works.
> A Walmart supercenter averages around 178,000 square feet. Costco warehouses average around 145,000 square feet. Aldi’s small box stores, however, take up just a fraction of that space, at 12,000 square feet on average.
Small store size seems like a key way to keep costs down. Rent is a big cost.
> a single Aldi might have only three to five employees in the store at any given time, and only 15 to 20 on the entire payroll.
15-20 employees on the payroll for an entire store! That's got to be a lot less than Costco or Walmart.
> unlike other stores, where there’s a clear division of labor — runners retrieve carts, cashiers ring up customers and clerks stock shelves — Aldi employees are cross-trained to perform every function.
Interesting @ cross-training.
> at checkout, cashiers hurry shoppers away, expecting them to bag their own groceries in a separate location away from the cash register.
Having customers bag their own groceries is another cost saver. Costco does this too.
> Costco’s Kirkland Signature, for example, raked in nearly $40 billion last year, an 11% increase from 2017. Kirkland’s sales last year beat out Campbell Soup, Kellogg and Hershey put together.
Tha's a lot of sales for Kirkland.
> Having customers bag their own groceries is another cost saver. Costco does this too.
Every Costco I've been in bags (boxes/puts in cart) your groceries for you, unless you use self-checkout which is a newer option for the minority of checkout lanes.
#97 Thank you. You’re right. That was sloppy of me. I should figure out how I made that mistake.
#29 Western guy talking on TikTok about inspecting factories in China :
> You’ll be meeting with the [factory] manager who’s probably the owner, but they call themselves managers...
oh hey we passed 20k comments recently. (btw the first few hundred comments actually got lost long ago. when i was on blogspot, I used some javascript add-on thing and then the company went out of business or had no export option or something. RIP.)
#100 i guess that's unclear. *blogspot didn't have built in comments originally!* so that's why i had a third party commenting thing.
later i used movable type a bit and then made my own custom blog and imported stuff (i think i basically got everything but the early comments. there were actually some long discussions back then btw.)
Men, what kind of low grade sexual harassment do you face on a daily basis? reddit has some pretty good threads with info about what the world is like. a lot of the answers are not what i would call "low grade" (like grabbing their dick through their pants)
#102 btw reddit browsing tip. the way i browse big threads like that is read a top level reply and then maybe a couple replies to that, then i collapse it to find the next top level reply. if you just scroll down normally you'll end up reading tons of nested comments, but i think the top level replies that actually answer the main question are generally more interesting.
in this case i read this much including only a few nested comments:
#103 you can see in the screenshot it says things like "229 children" or "336 children". that's what i'm skipping. i'll generally read 0-3 children (most often zero) and collapse it.
CDC extends nationwide eviction moratorium through June
Brad Polumbo, The Biden administration quietly extended a disastrous pandemic policy, *Washington Examiner* (March 30, 2021):
> “The CDC has just announced that it is extending its nationwide eviction moratorium through June,” the National Review reports. “The original CDC eviction moratorium from September made it a crime — punishable by up to one year of imprisonment and a fine of up to $250,000 — to evict certain tenants for nonpayment of rent.”
The government didn't enact a moratorium on mortgage payments for affected landlords.
> “No one is asking restaurants and grocery stores to give food out for free, so why are government agencies, with no authority to legislate, asking landlords to provide a service without compensation?” asked Pacific Legal Foundation attorney Ethan Blevins.
Good question.
Good blog post about learning how things work
This blog post below describes an approach to learning things that is way better than average.
Julia Evans, Get better at programming by learning how things work (emphasis in original):
> ... in this blog post, I want to talk about a different way to get better at programming: learning how the systems you’re using work!
The post then gives a good examples of things that a programmer could learn, including "how flexbox works" and "how numbers are represented in binary".
> When I’m programming and I’m missing a key concept about how something works, it doesn’t always show up in an obvious way. What will happen is:
> - I’ll have bugs in my programs because of an incorrect mental model
> - I’ll struggle to fix those bugs quickly and I won’t be able to find the right questions to ask to diagnose them
> - I feel really frustrated
Good list of signs that you're missing a key concept.
> I think it’s actually an important skill **just to be able to recognize that this is happening**: I’ve slowly learned to recognize the feeling of “wait, I’m really confused, I think there’s something I don’t understand about how this system works, what is it?”
> It can feel bad to realise that you really don’t understand how a system you’ve been using works when you have 10 years of experience (“ugh, shouldn’t I know this already? I’ve been using this for so long!“), but it’s normal! There’s a lot to know about computers and we are constantly inventing new things to know, so nobody can keep up with every single thing.
Good point about how we're always inventing new things to know, so you can't know everything (at least, not in detail).
> Learning how things work doesn’t need to be a big huge thing. For example, I used to not really know how floating point numbers worked, and I felt nervous that something weird would happen that I didn’t understand.
> And then one day in 2013 I went to a talk by Stefan Karpinski explaining how floating point numbers worked (containing roughly the information in this comic, but with more weird details). And now I feel totally confident using floating point numbers! I know what their basic limitations are, and when not to use them (to represent integers larger than 2^53). And I know what I *don’t* know – I know it’s hard to write numerically stable linear algebra algorithms and I have no idea how to do that.
Good point about how becoming more familiar with something involves knowing what you don't know.
> connect new facts to information you already know
> When learning a new fact, it’s easy to be able to recite a sentence like “ok, there are 8 bits in a byte”. That’s true, but so what? What’s harder (and much more useful!) is to be able to connect that information to what you already know about programming.
> The important thing here is to ask the questions and explore the connections that **you’re** curious about – maybe you’re not so interested in how the strings are represented in memory, but you really want to know how many bytes a heart emoji is in Unicode! Or maybe you want to learn about how floating point numbers work!
> I find that when I connect new facts to things I’m already familiar with (like emoji or floating point numbers or strings), then the information sticks a lot better.
This idea of exploring connections reminds me of what Ayn Rand said about "chewing" ideas.
> how to get information: ask yes/no questions
> When I’m talking to someone who knows more about the concept than me, I find it helps to start by asking really simple questions, where the answer is just “yes” or “no”. I’ve written about yes/no questions before in how to ask good questions, but I love it a lot so let’s talk about it again!
> I do this because it forces me to articulate exactly what my current mental model is, and because I think yes/no questions are often easier for the person I’m asking to answer.
The post then goes on to give examples of yes/no questions.
> When I ask very open-ended questions like “how does X work?”, I find that it often goes wrong in one of 2 ways:
> - The person starts telling me a bunch of things that I already knew
> - The person starts telling me a bunch of things that I don’t know, but which aren’t really what I was interested in understanding
> Both of these are frustrating, but of course neither of these things are their fault! They can’t know exactly what information I wanted about X, because I didn’t tell them. But it still always feels bad to have to interrupt someone with “oh no, sorry, that’s not what I wanted to know at all!”
> I love yes/no questions because, even though they’re harder to formulate, I’m WAY more likely to get the exact answers I want and less likely to waste the time of the person I’m asking by having them explain a bunch of things that I’m not interested in.
More pro-yes/no thinking.
> asking yes/no questions isn’t always easy [...] Asking this kind of really specific question (even though it’s more effective!) puts you in a more vulnerable position than asking a broader question, because sometimes you have to reveal specific things that you were totally wrong about!
Great point.
>> It can feel bad to realise that you really don’t understand how a system you’ve been using works when you have 10 years of experience (“ugh, shouldn’t I know this already? I’ve been using this for so long!“), but it’s normal! There’s a lot to know about computers and we are constantly inventing new things to know, so nobody can keep up with every single thing.
>
> Good point about how we're always inventing new things to know, so you can't know everything (at least, not in detail).
Even in areas where people are not constantly inventing new things to know, it’s common to use stuff for 10 years and not fully understand how it works. It’s normal and we shouldn’t feel bad about it. Not feeling bad about it can allow us to see the truth of the situation and then improve our understanding.
#107
> Even in areas where people are not constantly inventing new things to know, it’s common to use stuff for 10 years and not fully understand how it works.
AFAICT, no one was talking about "fully" understanding things. Why did you add that word?
#108
I think what I meant to say is: It's common to use stuff for 10 years and not understand how it works as much as you think you do or as much as you think you should.
I don't know why I added that word. What do you think? Maybe it was both not reading carefully enough and not writing what I was thinking carefully enough.
#108
I don't know if you asked why I added the word because
1) you have an idea about why I added the word and you want to start a conversation about it
or 2) you want to remind me that asking yourself why you made a mistake is generally a good idea.
Is correlation a form of induction?
Dominion
I've been playing Dominion online . You can play with the base cards for free. I enjoy it.
I’ve played face-to-face Dominion in the past. Recently I’ve been playing 6 nimmt! and Carcassonne on boardgamearena.com . If you try in some organized way to get better at Dominion, can you share details of what you do? I don’t know how to get really good at a board game. I’m considering trying it with Dominion or Carcassonne.
Dominion online gives players a Glicko strength rating. The current top player on the leaderboard (nasmith99) has a rating of 67. You could play enough games to get a good sense of your current rating and then set a goal of improving it by 1 point.
Here are some resources for getting better at Dominion:
- "Dominion strategy basics" YouTube series by Wandering Winder ("good general advice, advice considered up-to-date" per Dominion discord #coaching channel pinned post)
- "How to base dominion" YouTube series by Burning Skull ("good intro to the game for those without ［subscriptions to cards beyond the base set］, advice considered up-to-date") per Dominion discord #coaching channel pinned post)
- Dominion strategy wiki
ppl lie:
https://www.tiktok.com/@lgndfrvr/video/6950815905383337222
ppl are stupid about plagiarism
https://www.tiktok.com/@eliseecklundx/video/6950371642128239877
Hyperthreading performance
I wanted to get an idea of how good hyperthreading would be for CPU-bound workloads. So I did an experiment. I wrote a test program in Go to execute the same CPU-bound calculation on a specified number of threads.
Then I found out how many threads my server had, which is 2 × the number of sockets (2) × the number of cores per socket (10). I used the program `lscpu` to get this info:
CPU(s): 40
Thread(s) per core: 2
Core(s) per socket: 10
Socket(s): 2
I read that recent versions of Go will, when running tasks in parallel, use every thread (called "CPU(s)" above) available at the start of the program:
> As of Go 1.5, the default value of GOMAXPROCS is the number of CPUs (whatever your operating system considers to be a CPU) visible to the program at startup.
For the test, I first ran the program with 1 thread. It took 4.9 seconds. With 20 threads it took 5.2 seconds. With 40 threads it takes 6.2 seconds. That's 4.9 × 40 CPU-seconds worth of work, which it does in 6.2 seconds. That works out to an improvement of about 30x over using only 1 thread. That's better than the roughly 20x improvement I would expect if there were only 20 cores with 1 thread per core and less than the 40x improvement I would expect if I had 40 cores (cores per socket * sockets).
I also ran the program with 80 threads, and it took 12.3 seconds. That's still approximately a 30x improvement (4.9 × 80/12.3). So that seems to be the ceiling for this workload.I also ran the program with 80 threads, and it took 12.3 seconds. That's still approximately a 30x improvement (4.9 × 80/12.3). So that seems to be the ceiling for this workload.
#117 Corrected pastebin link for test program: https://pastebin.com/jvEhKz8J
Another hyperthreading test
#117 I temporarily disabled hyperthreading on the server and re-ran the test program with 40 threads. It took 10.4 s, or about twice as long as it did with 20 threads. This is what I expected, because the server has 20 cores.
Bottom-swiping on iPhone to switch between apps
iPhone tip I didn't know about.
https://thume.ca/2020/09/04/macos-tips/ :
> Swiping left and right on the home bar at the bottom of the screen on phones since the iPhone X quickly switches between recent apps. This is absolutely essential to how I use my phone and such a huge boost to multitasking fluidity I feel bad for all the people who don’t know about it.
I've made changes to force https on curi.us and FI websites, both via nginx redirect and via cloudflare settings. Please let me know if you run into any problems.
https://www.tiktok.com/@danieljgallardomusic/video/6957105390563642629
This guy plays a drum beat that'd normally be programmed on a computer. Reminds me of how people take TAS-only techniques in speedrunning and find a way to do them by hand.
Some of the comments on the video:
> Bro you know you can just do that on a computer right?
> Wow some of those rolls are so fast and accurate that if I only heard this I would have assumed they were computer generated. Incredible skill!
> Thats stunning. Never would think this can be done by other than composing software
> Way better than doing it on a computer. 💪 🔥 💯
testing