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chonglibloodsport

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chonglibloodsport ,

“Before” the Big Bang is nonsense. It’s equivalent to saying “head north from the North Pole.”

chonglibloodsport ,

No, in our current best-supported model of the universe (Lambda-CDM) the concept of “before” the Big Bang is meaningless. It is the apex of the spacetime “bell” from which everything emerged.

chonglibloodsport ,

All dinosaurs are reptiles, including birds. The major clade of dinosaurs to which birds belong is called theropods. The other well-known dinosaurs, sauropods (including all the huge quadrupedal herbivores), are totally extinct and have only very distant ancestry with birds and other reptiles.

By the way, crocodilians have been around for 250 million years, so they shared the earth with the huge dinosaurs of old! But they are not dinosaurs themselves.

I was explaining to my daughter about the differences between Gimp and Photoshop and saw that Adobe had a page that claimed to compare the two. It never compares the two. It barely mentions Gimp. (www.adobe.com)

I expected ridiculous propaganda from Adobe, but they give absolutely no reasons why Photoshop is better than Gimp and list a bunch of things that Gimp can do too....

chonglibloodsport ,

There’s a ton of functionality in Photoshop that even pros never use. Every user of Photoshop needs something different from it. Sure, there’s a core of features that everyone uses (and which the Gimp also has) but there’s also countless other niche features that are a crucial part of the workflow for tons of users and they won’t give them up. This is one of the reasons Photoshop is so hard to replace.

It’s also the reason Latex is tough to replace as well. It’s a phenomenon which is not limited to commercial software, that’s for sure.

U.S. Military Planes Are in Haiti. Haitians Don’t Know Why. (foreignpolicy.com)

In the past several weeks, I have watched dozens of sleek U.S. military planes descend over Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where I live. They were the first flights to land since gangs blockaded and halted commercial air traffic in March. U.S. news reports suggest that the aircraft contained...

chonglibloodsport ,

Yes. Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier. Former cop. Alleged to have perpetrated massacres against the public killing dozens of people and burning down hundreds of homes. As a leader of G9 he publicly threatened genocide unless the prime minister of Haiti stepped down.

This is all information I got from Wikipedia. I don’t know the veracity of any of it. I don’t live in Haiti and don’t really follow the situation there. Whoever Jimmy is, he doesn’t have very good PR. That’s all I can say for sure about him!

chonglibloodsport ,

Either way it’s going to organized crime. At least the crypto scammers are unlikely to influence the election!

chonglibloodsport ,

His theories aren’t discredited. Many people have misconstrued them however. I wrote about this in a reply to someone else.

chonglibloodsport ,

Seems pretty clear to me: they’re going after the Lego and Minecraft crowd. That is, little kids.

chonglibloodsport ,

He probably made a lot more than that on the video. Plus he basically told the world it’s not worth it. Kind of a bad deal overall for the sellers. No wonder they didn’t want him filming inside the cafe!

chonglibloodsport ,

I’ve seen some of these tiny bees pollinating my tomato plants!

With the recent issues of transgender people in sports, why don’t we move some sports over to a weight-class system?

Obviously this won’t work for all sports, but things like football, track, soccer, it would allow for de-gendered team, even allowing athletes with the skills but not the genetically-endowed physical attributes to have a place to play....

chonglibloodsport ,

There’s a big issue with using weight classes in team sports: player weights vary dramatically. Take the NFL for example. Setting aside the enormous differences in weight between linemen (offensive and defensive) and all other position players, there are also huge weight differences within a given position. For example, quarterback Jared Lorenzen was 6’4” and weighed 275 lbs whereas Russell Wilson is 5’11” and weighs 211 lbs. That’s a huge weight difference!

You can find similar weight differences across players in other leagues (NHL, NBA, and MLB). Weights don’t really correlate with overall skill level though they do somewhat correlate with position and skill set (and height of course).

How would you classify by weight in team sports? You might think to do it by position but none of the leagues require a player to remain at a single position for their career. Players can and do switch positions, and many even do so multiple times during a game. Sports like NBA basketball don’t even have any particular rules about what a player at any given position is allowed/not allowed to do, so the positions on team rosters are more like a suggestion than a requirement.

chonglibloodsport ,

It’s really simple: Microsoft is a business solutions company. Microsoft helps your boss spy on you at work. Your boss is their customer, not you.

Apple is a consumer products company. You are their customer. They market their products on privacy and security. Betraying that marketing message by spying on users is shooting themselves in the foot, so they’re incentivized not to do that.

Neither company is trustworthy. Economic incentives are the trustworthy concept here. Barring screwups, we can trust both companies to do what is profitable to them. Microsoft profits by spying on users, Apple does not (not right now anyway).

chonglibloodsport ,

Do you have a source for this?

chonglibloodsport ,

I think my biggest issue with the Gimp is that it simply exists. If it didn’t exist there’d be a huge hole in the free software space and people would get together to build software to fill it. But of course there’s no guarantee that would actually produce something better.

Maybe the real problem with the Gimp is that it’s built to scratch an itch for its own developers who are used to its bizarre UIs and workflows. For all the people I’ve seen complaining about the Gimp over the years, none have stepped up to create an alternative. I think this is likely due to the intersection between visual arts people and software engineers being extremely small (and likely most working for Adobe already).

chonglibloodsport ,

I mean the Gimp in particular. My point is that if we could suddenly wish the Gimp into non-existence (a counterfactual) then we could get a do-over. But because the Gimp actually exists it occupies a niche that could go to something better. Instead of banding together to create a better tool, people just grumble a bit and then use the Gimp (or hand over their wallet to Adobe).

chonglibloodsport ,

There’s no demand for that. All evidence shows that people will sacrifice pretty much everything to get a cheaper flight. I think we as a society have simply accepted that flying is a miserable experience that we put up with to get where we’re going. A few hours of suffering for an amazing week in paradise (every vacationer’s dream).

chonglibloodsport ,

The brutal, national, standardized exam is what you get when you eliminate all the other barriers to going to university. It means every single student is in competition with one another to get accepted.

Shuffling staff around between schools just sounds like a great way to drive all the best researchers to the private sector while driving all the best teachers out of the profession entirely. Forcing people to move around to different cities for their job means you are selecting heavily for a particular “nomadic” type of person without any attachments to the local community. Sounds absolutely awful to foist that on educational institutions who really ought to be in the business of fostering community.

chonglibloodsport ,

You could hire a hundred times as many grad students into the tenure track but that still wouldn’t stop people from competing to study with the best ones.

chonglibloodsport ,

Yesterday was my convocation day. So yes!

chonglibloodsport ,

I think you’re still going to alienate teachers with that kind of shuffling. People form relationships with their colleagues. This is especially the case at universities where your coworker may be one of a handful of people on the planet who actually understands your research.

But also I think you may overrate the impact of teaching skill on student outcomes. Universities barely teach their students at all. Apart from lectures, they assign course work and conduct examinations. By far the majority of learning in university takes place alone, when the student engages with the course work. It’s often the case that students will pass a course with a decent grade having never attended a single lecture.

The truth of the matter is that most of the value of a highly selective university is the selectivity. There’s nothing that makes a teacher look brilliant more than having brilliant students. The top schools like Harvard could honestly eliminate lectures entirely, just keeping coursework and examinations, and their students would still be the most sought after.

chonglibloodsport ,

Everything these AIs output is a hallucination. Imagine if you were locked in a sensory deprivation tank, completely cut off from the outside world, and only had your brain fed the text of all books and internet sites. You would hallucinate everything about them too. You would have no idea what was real and what wasn’t because you’d lack any epistemic tools for confirming your knowledge.

That’s the biggest reason why AIs will always be bullshitters as long as their disembodied software programs running on a server. At best they can be a brain in a vat which is a pure hallucination machine.

chonglibloodsport ,

There’s nothing inherent to running a business that implies cannibalizing one’s own brand reputation for short term profits. That sort of behaviour reeks of an inexperienced and perverse management culture. You can find countless examples of businesses where the brand’s reputation for quality, reliability, and safety are considered sacred and any employee who publicly damages that reputation is ostracized. Japanese companies pretty commonly have these cultures, for example.

Study finds 1/4 of bosses hoped Return to Office would make staff quit (www.theregister.com)

HR software biz BambooHR surveyed more than 1,500 employees, a third of whom work in HR. The findings suggest the return to office movement has been a poorly-executed failure, but one particular figure stands out - a quarter of executives and a fifth of HR professionals hoped RTO mandates would result in staff leaving....

chonglibloodsport ,

The office is the principal-agent problem in spades. Even if your manager is a technical person they don’t necessarily understand all the details of what you’re working on: that’s what they pay you for.

This problem is pervasive throughout society. How many people can hire a dentist, a car mechanic, a plumber, or any of countless other specialists and fully understand what the person is doing so that they don’t get ripped off?

chonglibloodsport ,

I’m skeptical of the claim that an average person has the power to ruin someone’s reputation as a punishment for wrongdoing. Our society is large and extremely anonymous. People can easily pick up and move to another town, if that’s even necessary at all.

Generally I think the only people whose reputation gets damaged severely enough to follow them around for the rest of their life are public figures or infamous criminals such as murderers and rapists.

I personally have been ripped off quite severely by an unscrupulous HVAC company and I don’t see much recourse. I could try to damage their reputation but then they could sue me for libel. I think their unscrupulous behaviour is likely protected by the enormous contracts they make their customers sign and the government gives them the power to have your natural gas supply shut off if you refuse a costly repair they deem necessary.

Who would win: every human in the world vs. every animal in the world?

I’m thinking the animals would easily defeat us, since trying to get all 8 billion+ humans to agree on a plan of attack would be a near-impossible task. By the time we’d be done trying to coordinate a plan, I figure the lions and cheetahs would have already devoured us, not to mention the larger animals like the elephants....

chonglibloodsport ,

They might do a bunch of damage at first but then we’d spray vast quantities of pesticides on everything.

chonglibloodsport ,

They’re paying the Filipino care workers about $710/month. Paying a professional Korean working parent to stay home from her job to care for her own kids would cost a lot more than that, both in terms of the money spent and the cost to the employer to train and hire a temporary replacement.

chonglibloodsport ,

I’m sure if they could pay Koreans to do the work they would. The issue is that they’re too expensive. Korea has a highly educated population with extremely fierce competition to get into the best universities (the infamous CSAT) and the best jobs after graduation. Koreans who do not make it tend to move overseas where their education gives them an advantage over other immigrants for college and job spots. This process leaves very few available workers for many different low-skilled jobs (not just child care).

chonglibloodsport ,

We need to make a distinction between child care and early childhood education (ECE). Korea does have ECE programs at their universities and so presumably there are spaces available at ECE programs. However these are expensive because they’re staffed by highly educated professionals, so only well-off parents can afford them.

This is of course true in any country with a highly educated populace. The issue has been called “cost disease.” When you have a highly efficient, highly productive economy, you end up having to pay less productive workers more. For example, compare a typical office worker with a hairdresser. An office worker today is far more productive than they would’ve been a hundred years ago. On the other hand, the hairdresser today is exactly as productive as they were a hundred years ago.

Hairdressing productivity has not increased at all whereas office work has. So if you want hairdressers to still exist you need to pay them a lot more than you would have a hundred years ago (commensurate with the increase in productivity of office workers), otherwise the hairdresser might as well get an office job!

You can see this story repeating itself throughout both Korean and Western economies (and anywhere else where productivity has increased dramatically). And in all of these countries you can see a lot of reliance on foreign workers to fill in these sorts of low skill jobs (such as basic childcare).

The other aspect of professional child care facilities that I see no one talking about is real estate. These facilities need a ton of space in some really expensive areas to handle a relatively small number of children. Paying for an in-home childcare worker can be a lot cheaper than a professional facility for the simple reason that you don’t have to pay for the overhead of the facility’s rent and maintenance costs.

chonglibloodsport ,

Wait. So they don’t have separate gender events for artistic swimming?

chonglibloodsport ,

Her mother is Chinese.

chonglibloodsport ,

This was covered in a great talk by Soren Johnson (lead designer of Civ IV): Playing to Lose: AI and Civilization.

His main thesis is that players constantly demand stronger AI (that doesn’t cheat) but when they try it they hate it. The issue is that strong AI doesn’t role-play like an actual historical leader, it plays like a “gamer” who will stop at nothing to win.

That is, strong AI opponents treat Civ like a game of poker and they’ll use every possible means of defeating you. They’re not reliable allies or trading partners, they’re bluffing, duplicitous liars.

Human players who play against such AIs report a very negative experience. Many of the diplomacy functions in the game become rather useless against such an untrustworthy AI, and the whole situation devolves into something more akin to “turn-based Warcraft” rather than Civilization.

chonglibloodsport ,

Population is higher than it’s ever been. The wider the base of the pyramid, the taller it gets.

chonglibloodsport ,

Too bad he probably never uses it!

chonglibloodsport ,

It’s really quite an amazing adaptation. These fish live at extreme depths. There is essentially no light at all down there, apart from the dim glow of the bioluminescent bulbs they use for luring prey. I would imagine encounters between males and females of the species to be quite rare under the circumstances. That the male can permanently attach himself to the female is a very tidy solution to the problem.

chonglibloodsport ,

That is so weird. Looks like blue dye! Definitely way less appealing than the natural colour of pickles that I’m used to with relish.

chonglibloodsport ,

If the new police, whatever you want to call them, have the power to enforce laws then they will be subject to all the same pressures as current police. Power corrupts!

The fact remains though is that there’s a very large number of people in the US who want the police to commit the violence they have. They’re voting for the politicians who pass these laws.

chonglibloodsport ,

You can find many of the same problems with police in other countries which don’t have the same ancestry.

chonglibloodsport ,

And that’s the most naïve way of looking at it. With more data you may be able to see if Linux users favour certain genres of games over others, so the number may be a lot higher than 2% for your game in particular.

chonglibloodsport ,

You can get a hot rotisserie chicken and a freshly made garden salad at most grocery stores and it’ll be cheaper than a McDonald’s combo meal. Way healthier too!

chonglibloodsport ,

Google is absolutely allergic to hiring humans for manual review. They view it as an existential issue because they have billions of users which means they’d need to hire millions of people to do the review work.

chonglibloodsport ,

I’m not sure what you mean by “true cost of business.” The biggest cost here is the issue of copyright claims and takedowns which were created by law in the first place, not by a natural phenomenon.

No matter what system we design, you’ll find that people adapt to take advantage of it. Well-meaning laws frequently have large and nasty unintended consequences. One of the biggest examples I can think of is the copyright system — originally intended to reward artists — which has led to big publishers monopolizing our culture.

chonglibloodsport ,

There are an estimated 720,000 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per day. At 8 hours per day it would take 90,000 people just to watch all those videos, working 7 days per week with no breaks and no time spent doing anything else apart from watching.

Now take into account that YouTube users watch over a billion hours of video per day and consider that even one controversial video might get millions of different reports. Who is going to read through all of those and verify whether the video actually depicts what is being claimed?

A Hollywood studio, on the other hand, produces maybe a few hundred to a few thousand hours of video per year (unless they’re Disney or some other major TV producer). They can afford to have a legal team of literally dozens of lawyers and technology consultants who just spend all their time scanning YouTube for videos to take down and issuing thousands to millions of copyright notices. Now YouTube has made it easy for them by giving them a tool to take down videos directly without any review. How long do you think it would take for YouTube employees to manually review all those cases?

And then what happens when the Hollywood studio disagrees with YouTube’s review decision and decides to file a lawsuit instead? This whole takedown process began after Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube!

chonglibloodsport ,

Yes and the rich have the advantage here: they are few. Cooperation is always easier to achieve with few than with many. Now include the fact that the rich have vastly more resources and the scale of the problem becomes much more apparent:

You’ve got to organize the masses with very few resources. The rich in the mean time leverage their resources to buy traitors, crack coalitions, divide, and conquer the masses.

This is the reason why popular revolutions rarely succeed. If you really want to win you need to divide the rich and get some on your side.

chonglibloodsport ,

Reminds me of Mirror’s Edge. I kind of love the concrete and ambient light, flat colours and shadows look!

chonglibloodsport ,

Is this at a hotel? Just hang a “do not disturb” tag on the pipe to keep the water running!

Should I permanently leave Israel?

I’m not sure if this is the right community for this question, but it says “no stupid question” so here goes. I’m an Israeli who now lives in the US, but I am considering permanently residing in the US or elsewhere (perhaps somewhere in Europe or Canada) because I’ve become kinda disillusioned with Israel for a variety...

chonglibloodsport ,

Mainly housing. A lot of western countries have housing issues but Canada is one of the worst. Extremely unaffordable here.

Is it important to you to live in a Jewish community? Where I live in Canada there aren’t very many Jews but I think there is a bigger community in Toronto. Nothing like you’d find in New York or Los Angeles though.

chonglibloodsport ,

FOMO.

chonglibloodsport ,

It was ultimately his responsibility because it was his production. It was not his fault for pulling the trigger, it was the unsafe working conditions on set.

If any of us died at work due to unsafe working conditions then our families would definitely want the employer held responsible to the full extent of the law. Baldwin may be a famous actor but in this situation he was an employer too, not just an actor.

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