…are you serious?

There would be so much data in understanding people’s light usage. For example, you could figure out how late or early people get up, number of people living in a house, how crowded the house is, how many lights are used per room, etc etc. it would be a gold mine of information.

Let’s say you’re a home automaton designer. You want to design devices to be used in the home, but in order to design such devices, you need enough of a stockpile of user data. This lightbulb data would be incredible valuable.

You can probably even analyse the data and determine things like whether someone is watching tv late at night.

From a nefarious view, how valuable would this data be to robbers and thieves?

These things are interesting for two reasons (to me).

The first is that it seems utterly unsurprising that these inconsistencies exist. These are language models. People seem to fall easily into the trap in believing them to have any kind of “programming” on logic.

The second is just how unscientific NN or ML is. This is why it’s hard to study ML as a science. The original paper referenced doesn’t really explain the issue or explain how to fix it because there’s not much you can do to explain ML(see their second paragraph in the discussion). It’s not like the derivation of a formula where you point to one component of the formula as say “this is where you go wrong”.

There was a prophetic podcast episode from the series Plain English a while back that I constantly think about.

In that episode the author describes how the internet is going through a revolution.

Basically 20 years ago, the internet was all about gaining numbers. Companies could operate at a loss if they got people signed up. Facebook, Google, YouTube, Uber, Deliveroo, etc. they were all about getting you in their mailing list or consumer list and who cares what happens then.

Now there’s an issue because that model is not profitable. In order to continue, all the internet is moving towards subscription.

In a sense, I don’t think of that as intrinsically bad. Patreon is a good example. The internet is now filled up with so much shit that people are willing to pay to filter it. So with Patreon, you pay a fee to support an artist to produce the content you want. That itself isn’t a bad idea.

Now that being said, a lot of “bad things” do emerge. The fact that you can no longer buy software like Adobe and it’s all subscription based. That’s shit. But that also inspired software alternatives like Affinity Designer.

Hmmm. If abuse happens, is the right idea to say that “I don’t need this community”?

I’m not sure how that HackerNews comment helps in the slightest. If my university has an obscure basket weaving community and people are getting abused in that community, should I just say “Eh we don’t actually need a basket weaving community”.

It’s also amusing to me that a commenter on a relatively obscure and niche website is complaining that that don’t need (or care about abuse that transpired on) a niche community from another website. And then this comment is echoed in yet another niche community.

A lot of language is subtle.

On this case, the use of the word “obviously” is a backhanded compliment. It’s like seeing someone come last in a race and say “well they obviously tried”. I

I don’t really think if this (the subtlety of language) as a bad thing. If you want to improve as a writer you have to begin dissecting words and meaning and underlying context. It’s part of emotional and social intelligence.

When taking to people, it’s not as easy as “everything is the opposite”. If that were true, then it would be easy since everything is the opposite. Learning the subtlety of language is a skill—you might argue in every way as important as learning to code or learning maths or learning how to walk.

This subtlety of language governs how you treat others, how you write letters, how you give talks, how you parent, etc.

Honestly some of it is a skill, right? Since having kids and being around more children you quickly learn how to feign enthusiasm and excitement.

Also as you grow up you just learn how to pick your battles. Sometimes the gaps between people are so wide.

Science and logic and rational thinking is, in some sense, a religion. Either you drank the kool aid or you didn’t. It’s hard to convert people to it after they hit the work stage.

The first question to ask yourself is: “why do I need to say anything at all?”. If you don’t like the book or think it’s garbage, you don’t need to say anything. It’s not your job to educate your boss on what’s good or bad. So keep your yap shut.

The second issue is how to feign interest or how to steer the conversation. I would treat something like this the same way I treat a conversation about religion, race, or gender, that might disagree with amongst colleagues or people I don’t know.

As others have said, you can turn questions around and ask them. “It’s not my type of book but did you enjoy it? What part did you like?”

The key to it is to leave your ego behind. If a child comes up to me and says they liked some trite novel, I wouldn’t disparage them. I’d feign interest and ask them to talk about it.

The fact that you talk about “redline the shit out of it” makes me think it’s your ego that’s the problem. You think it’s your job to correct your boss and tell them why they don’t understand good writing. That’s an ego thing.

I don’t know anything about small US towns but these stories always remind me of stories from Jack Reacher involving small town corruption. Pretty incredible.

Unfortunately here in the UK there has been systematic defunding of things like libraries.

This wasn’t what I read but this looks excellent.

https://archive.org/details/jonah-edwards-presentation

Another super interesting story is about Marion Stokes, who recorded around 71000 cassettes worth of television media from 1975 to 2000s. She houses them in 9 apartments. I need to watch the documentary about her. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes

I remember I started reading about about this when I wondered what kind of media is “safe” for storage. It sounds like a simple question but it’s not. Digital media, unlike print media, is so easy to lose.

I love how so many comments and replies ascribe some form of ‘guilt’ to this, as if HP employees would feel shame. This doesn’t really mean anything to a company that size.

One of the great things about moving to the UK is that, despite all its problems, consumer protection Europe is so much better than in the US.

Sorry, I think you misunderstand that I’m talking about a large scale problem rather than a personal problem. Of course people can individually download videos to preserve.

Imagine losing YouTube’s videos next week. You would have effectively lost nearly two decades worth of media chronicling human and technological development (more if you take into account that YouTube has repositories of older media).

Someone described it like the Library Alexandria. In terms of density of information, I think the comparison is apt.

A good comparison that might be too old for some readers. Back in the 80s and 90s, the early internet was populated via usenet discussions. Google eventually bought this data and merged it into Google Groups. However Google Groups was disbanded. This meant that some archives can no longer be accessed because to do so requires some active component no longer in service. We have effectively lost gigantic chunks of early 90s internet history. A lot of this history was quite important in many facets of life.

There is already something like this via the Wayback Machine (who indeed do copies of video media but more typically VHS and other things) and things like the Russian Library genesis, which is kept in torrent format.

The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.

If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.

Hmm to be fair with YouTube you don’t think this is now a repository of incredibly valuable resources? If YouTube went down and we lost all videos, we would be losing many important resources, from historical documentaries no longer easily found in media, to guides on woodworking.

It’s a bit scary. Once you remove the crap, it’s an incredibly valuable library resource and time capsule.

Nah this is changing.

This of course is what they said about tablets. Now people are replacing desktop or laptop workflow with tablets, or alternatively tablets are being designed with removable keyboards so the lines are blurred.

I know scientific researchers who now only travel to conferences with tablets instead of their laptops.

Finally, I predict that we’re moving to cloud computing. It’s the natural way. You VPN into a network and your computing is done on a cluster or on a central computer.

The same is already happening for gaming. People are connecting controllers and glasses like the Xreal Air to phones, then networking into a computer to play a desktop game on their phone.

Yes.

I think with something like this you have to do a literature search. Even then it’s kind of tough because I’m sure it’s very hard to do objective tests of these traits.

You might say that any activity has similar aspects. Learning a difficult passage in music, learning to speak languages, learning to throw a basketball through a hoop, etc.

I’m not sure there is a huge amount of evidence that video games teach resilience any more than any other similar activity. Moreover, it’s easily the kind of thing that our biases set us up to believe things that aren’t there. For every person who learned resilience from video games, there might be three other people who learned poor lessons, like “I should be lazy and play video games and not study for my exams.”

With academic or professional resilience, I can’t say I’ve seen any positive correlation with video games.

I could easily argue that excessive video game play makes you less resilient to doing non-video-game challenges.

There are so many recipes with minor variations. In the end it doesn’t matter much except for some points I’ll mention. Here is a random one. https://www.vickypham.com/blog/vietnamese-beef-noodle-soup-pho-bo

I would say that a lot of the cooking process is hard to explain via a book. Videos are good. This one seems to be done by a very knowledgeable woman. https://youtu.be/xxM4t8vP-0A

After skimming the above video I’m really impressed by that woman’s knowledge. One thing i am not sure she discusses is the process of skimming the fat off the broth.

After having moved to the UK, where Vietnamese food is not so readily available in areas outside of London (and similar) I’ve gotten used to making my own pho.

The main problem are the herbs as it can be hard to get all the necessary herbs outside of Asian supermarkets.

It’s a really good dish for special events as well, since few people I’ve met dislike pho.

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I’m not reading par se but I’m an audiobook fan and also a fan of the Star Wars Expanded Universe (Legends). I’m enjoying listening to the new recordings of the first Thrawn trilogy.

These re-recordings will probably be the last of its kind, given Disney’s declaration of non-canon.