mvhvv · HackerTrans

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Why do you think that folks discussing this situation find it upsetting, stressful and/or maddening?

The idea that blocking the billionaire owner would prevent me from noticing Twitter is struggling is a little silly.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I see this mentioned a lot, but I don't think it's entirely true. The book was apparently well liked in the USSR due to the obvious anti-capitalist reading. The film was imported by the government intending to screen it as a propaganda piece, but quickly cancelled.

The part about the farmer having his own truck seeming like a luxury to soviet citizens is true, but it's a bit unfair to say it was banned when the book was so well regarded.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I think the distinction between tracking a private jet and tracking a private car is fairly clear cut. The point isn't to actually show where Musk is at any one point (who cares?), but I think the intent of the account is to show the intense disconnect between him and normal (non-private-jet-owning folks).

Unless I'm misremembering, the ElonJet account listed the cost and the amount of fuel consumed for every flight right? His willingness to burn 10 tonnes of jet fuel on a whim definitely doesn't mesh well with his brand as "The EV-guy".

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

What do you think the value is in a stock that doesn't pay dividends? It seems to me that if you remove them, you're getting into pyramid-scheme territory.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I personally prefer to watch most things with subtitles. I'm usually extremely conscious of how much noise I'm making in the house, and I rarely ever want to watch something at cinema volumes. Good quality subtitles rarely ever feel intrusive, but I really wish there was a better distinction between subtitling and closed-captioning.

Most modern streaming platforms seem to only offer one accessibility-focused option that combines both, and I find it hugely irritating to see text on-screen like "[SOMBRE MUSIC PLAYS]" or "[CROWD MURMURING]".

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I'm unsure exactly what the above poster is trying to say, I generally find Rust development very pleasant with nothing but vscode and Rust-analyzer.

But... I'll admit there is one major stumbling block so far. Debugging iterator chains can be cumbersome because of the disconnect between the language and the compiled code. I've found myself stepping in and out of assembly more than I'd like. I assume this is the kind of problem that can be overcome with a nicer debugger though.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

It's definitely unclear what "inaccurate" means in this sense?

Is an entire track inaccurate if a single sample is inaccurate? In that case then yeah, rather than measuring some level of audio purity, this is measuring your likelihood of getting a perfect rip before taking CD condition into account.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

One thing I think is missed from these kinds of back of the napkin calculations is all the bizarre thermodynamic side-effects you'd encounter if you were somehow able to drill an actual hole through the core without it collapsing. I imagine the convection currents would be extreme.

Not to mention how the pressure in the centre of the earth is extreme because of the weight of the rock itself. When you have a hypothetical uncollapsible hole, you're explicitly removing the vast majority of that pressure. I'd be curious to know how those actual values work out for a "giant chimney" model though.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I'm not sure if things are different outside Australia, but it's probably been 15-20 years since I've lived in a house with a hot-water storage tank. As far as I know most places seem to have instant/continuous systems that heat the water on demand as it passes through the line.

Solar-heating definitely makes storage make more sense, but I don't know how the numbers actually work out on that one.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I'm no power-plant engineer, but vaguely remembering back to thermodynamics 101, in a perfect heat-engine efficiency is relative to the temperature delta.

You can't just turn heat to electricity, so below a certain threshold it's only good for warming spaces.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

You made me stop and question myself for a second, but this definitely isn't right. Usually when people talk about "TCP/IP" it's shorthand for the whole "Internet Protocol Suite", but even naively TCP and IP are two different layers.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I think this is really just a factor of what you're used to, because none of those Python examples seem like an issue to me, and the Perl examples seem much harder to parse. I personally prefer print as a function rather than a statement, and keeping most standard lib functionality in modules seems like the right choice for anything other than a DSL.

I agree scope leakage is a major stumbling block with Python for sure, but it only occurs with control-flow so rarely causes actual issues once you're aware of it. Aside from that my biggest qualms with Python are the typesystem and whitespace for scoping, but those two don't cause much trouble for typical scripting purposes.

And, for what it's worth, Python's f-strings have been the go-to string formatting approach since 2016 so your example becomes something like:

  print(f"Hello {name}")

Which is doubly nice because you can also use format specifiers and arbitrary expressions like so:

  >>> f"The current year is {datetime.now().year} and the value of pi is approximately: {22/7:.2f}"
  'The current year is 2022 and the value of pi is approximately: 3.14'

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Where do you think Python has failed as a scripting language? I'm not very familiar with Perl, but overall I can't think of any obvious advantages aside from some of the syntactic sugar around invoking shell commands and string matching.

I can see stability as a knock against Python, but outside of 2 vs 3 the only breaking changes I've really had to deal with were relatively short term issues with third party libs.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I sympathise with your desire to replace shell scripts, but I don't see why that replacement should be Perl of all things. Like you said, Python has displaced Perl due to ecosystem support, so why chase history here?

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

It's interesting seeing this conception of post-modernism 20 years down the track. I think the article almost gets at the point, but overshoots and ends up in navel-gazing territory with:

"Look at the big picture. Don't focus in on two or three things to the exclusion of other things. Keep everything in context. Don't go out of your way to justify stuff that's obviously cool. Don't ridicule ideas merely because they're not the latest and greatest. Pick your own fashions. Don't let someone else tell you what you should like. 'Tsall good."

Post-modernism is not so much about picking-and-choosing and going-your-own-way, but it is about looking at the big picture and keeping everything in context. Importantly it's not about the total rejection of assumption and consistency, but about critically challenging and analysing them.

I think a lot of folks unfortunately continue to approach it in this same way, but in 202X we often make the additional mistake of assuming that the "modernism" that "post-modernism" is rebelling against is our contemporary "modern" society. That often gets misrepresented as a rejection of the enlightenment or some other extreme sounding position, but it's much better understood as a challenge of epistemic certainty and an attempt to break down and understand our ideological assumptions.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Yes, like I said, I read the article, and I read the linked notes. The article was not really about people criticising his book without reading it, the article was about not engaging in qualitative criticism of his spreadsheets.

Caplan indirectly mentions a paper criticising him, and his dismissal is that it doesn't acknowledge the math.

It's entirely reasonable to comment on why you're choosing not to dedicate your time to something. Especially when the thing to be analysed relies on fundamentally incommensurable values.

FWIW, from actually reading his notes and the extracts of the spreadsheets he quickly dips into a number of flaky assumptions and uses them to apply "corrective biases" which make it very easy to dismiss without wasting time on arduous numerical analysis.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I agree it's a positive move to bring formal logic and statistics into other fields, but (at least where I'm from) the social sciences do engage heavily with epistemology. And as a STEM major myself, I'll admit it's often in critical ways that the hard sciences fail.

The problem with many attempts to apply statistics is that even for the best quality science, the conclusion is only ever relative to the foundational assumptions. I don't mean they're intentional manipulations, but that it's very clear that Caplan is so far off the mark here that his work is difficult to take seriously.

I think a common critique of the trolley problem is an apt analogy here. Not an ethical argument about a specific choice, but that the thought experiment itself is flawed. It presents an absurd binary that neatly removes the human experience and incommensurability of individual life and insists on it's own utilitarian nature.

The problem with the spreadsheets, as with the trolley problem is that these kinds of analyses are founded on ad hoc assumptions that conveniently remove important context.

There is always a better approach. There are issues with our education system that don't work for many children, and wages do not correlate evenly with education across the board, but the conclusion that we should therefore slash public education funding and transition high schools to vocational training is doesn't follow from that unless you make those trolley-problem-style simplifying assumptions.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I read the article, and I even read through the presentation linked in the article. I didn't read the book, but I'm also not giving a qualitative review of the book.

I'm talking about why people don't think it's worth engaging with to begin with. It's not that his critics are afraid or incapable of engaging with him, but that he's being dismissed out of hand because (regardless of whether it's true or not) he presents as a crank who doesn't appear to understand the field he's attempting to critique.

There's an infinite supply of cranks in the world, and it's usually good practice to avoid engaging with them.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

The thing is, Caplan is a distinguished economist sure, but he is an interloper when it comes to education.

As you said, it's also worth noting that the community of "distinguished economists" is itself a fairly insular and politically driven field with a lot of ideological assumptions. That's not to say it's all hogwash, but for as much as Economists love to tell you otherwise it's still a soft-science very vulnerable to convenient abuse of statistics.

For what it's worth, I skimmed over the presentation he linked in the article. One of the first claims he makes is:

"Education and ability (IQ, work ethic, etc.) are correlated, so raw numbers give education too much credit."

He then goes on to correct for a "45% ability bias" to income statistics. Without even getting into the problems of correlation vs causation there, it's a perfect example of the foundational assumptions that got his work rejected to begin with.

mvhvv

4 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Assumptions and reductions are always required, there is no researcher in the world that reads every book or paper released in their field, and for those that do read voraciously, only a tiny fragment of that is remembered or understood on the grounds that the author intended.

Part of learning is to deciding which parts to ignore. The book is rejected on it's face because its core claim is essentially "I solved a major issue in another field by reducing it down to the one I know", which is a big red-flag for crank claims.

The article's focus on spreadsheets is part of why it's so easy to brush it aside. The author doesn't realise that the fidelity of the spreadsheet is less important than their own ideological assumptions.

It's possible they cover this in detail in the book, but it's not in this article, nor in any description of the book I've encountered. If something appears as crank-science on it's face (and is getting little traction), then why waste your time on it?

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