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ChrisLomont

Re:Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes on Friday September 23, 2022 @01:08PM (#32954501)
>it's that you can't apply statistics to prove this at all

If there are not statistical differences, then there are no performance differences. Cheating by definition should imply performance differences.

If he is cheating, then at some point in the future, if that method becomes detectable and he has to stop, then his play will suddenly suffer, which would be more evidence.

Claiming that statistics cannot answer this question with statistics is not true. It may be hard, or the current sample too small, but claiming stats is not usable is a misunderstanding of statistics.

>This is like the statistical analyses that show election rigging by highlighting a statistically improbable distribution of results

This only works on the public, and is not what professional statisticians that analyze elections do.

And even here, if the event is rare enough, say 1 part in quadrillions, and the analysis is correct, then yes, we would certainly conclude there was rigging.

All human knowledge is statistical. Things we claim to be true are only statistically true to large odds, so even for election rigging, if the stats reach some level of certainty, then it is completely valid proof that would hold in court.

The pop idiocy of election rigging claims has never risen to that level.

>it is completely avoidable if you cheat competently

No, it is not. It may only lower the signal to noise ratio, but there is still detectable differences. If you continually improve the statistics and are forced to lower the signal, eventually the signal would be so low as to not affect the system, which in this case is chess games.

Physics, for example, can tease events out of on the order of 1 part in trillions and demonstrate signal. Plenty of other things do the same.

Re:Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes on Friday September 23, 2022 @10:24AM (#32952364)
>It only takes using an engine move once or twice to completely demolish a much better opponent in a game.

That's not true. Pick an engine, set to a few hundred points above your strength, then try to beat it using only one or two moves from an engine. You will lose nearly every game, because so many of your other moves will be so below the other player that the 1-2 good moves cannot make it up.

This is demonstrated quite often by the games where GMs are "helped" by others in multi-player games, and it shows that help against a much better opponent takes far more than 1-2 moves.

Among really close players it helps. But not once you get a few 100 ELO points apart.

Re:Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes on Friday September 23, 2022 @10:21AM (#32952322)
>You either have evidence or you don't. This quasi economic modeling of chess players is ridiculous

Modeling provides the best evidence in all aspects of life (design, science, invention, marketing, medicine, ....). All human knowledge is built in modeling and statistical evidence. Nothing is 100% certain except mathematics, and even that is often fuzzier than 100%.

So how is modeling yet another thing ridiculous when it provides empirically the best methods in so many other domains?

Re:Is Hans Niemann cheating? – Expert analyzes on Friday September 23, 2022 @10:02AM (#32952063)
>this really weird brute force statistical analysis

Care to explain why you call the method "really weird"? Is there a flaw in the statistics that you can correct?

Here's [1] his publications - all well cited, his h-index is good, and I find no refutation of complaints in the literature about his methods. He seems quite competent in this area.

>how you can state there's no reason whatsoever to suspect him of cheating is absurd

If cheating does not show up in performance then is it cheating? If there is any performance gain then it should show up at some statistical level.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=8nk9k5oAAAAJ&hl=en...

Re:Subprime loans for college hiding in plain sight on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @07:34PM (#32919178)
>Pay attention when you get a mortgage.

I've done quite a bit of modeling for predictive house pricing and investment questions, so I am very aware of how mortgages, math, and housing markets worth. As far back as around 2001 I was writing pricing algorithms for companies that needed it (look at my resume), and I've done a lot since then. So I'm pretty clear on how they work.

>5) Typical money available determines house prices.

No, house prices are indifferent to what one buyer can afford; they are determined by the entire market of buyers AND sellers. If a seller doesn't want to sell at price X, they will not. If a buyer doesn't want to pay Y, they will not. If a buyer cannot afford price Z, they cannot buy that house.

After your step 4, the buyer knows how much they can afford, and looks at houses already at that price.

>Reducing the length will cause people to build equity faster and will reduce volatility and the dangers of things like interest rate hikes

Over 85% of mortgages are fixed interest rates, so interest rate hikes are not that much of a problem. People can use them to their advantage if they understand the pros and cons, but the vast majority will never be affected.

People have a fixed amount of monthly income they can use to pay a mortgage, so the amount they can borrow is completely predicated on that - their ability to make payments. If they are forced to get short loans, they will only be able to buy lower priced houses, and will miss out on traditional housing stock growth. A 100k investment returns half what a 200k investment does.

Also, many people will be priced out of mortgages completely since cutting loan lengths in half roughly cuts affordable house prices in half.

Finally, even if one can afford monthly payments on a 15 year mortgage, it's still better economically to get a 30 year mortgage and make the payments as if you had a 15 year, except only pay the minimal amount on the actual mortgage and pay the rest into an investment. After 15 years, you will be better off in almost all cases (check the math, last time I poked at it I would be $60k on a $300k house doing this).

As to reducing volatility, if you can just afford a 15 year mortgage for a given house, then you are at more risk since you're not saving cash (as investments) for problems. If you instead turn that into a 30 year, cutting your payments down, and save the excess, you will have cash you can use in case of problems. So this is another benefit to getting a longer loan - you can truly make yourself more resistant to problems and volatility.

A third factor is fixed rate mortgages means the cost of your mortgage goes down over the length of time due to inflation: your income goes up, your mortgage goes down. Inflation gives benefits to borrowers (mortgage holders included) at the cost to lenders (banks).

So, if you check the math, buying a bigger house (up to the limit of what you can spend) and getting a longer term loan historically has resulted in more, not less equity. Model it out and check the math yourself.

Re:Why do married men make 44% more than single men? on Tuesday September 20, 2022 @05:05AM (#32909373)
The article covers that.
Re:Subprime loans for college hiding in plain sight on Monday September 19, 2022 @11:33AM (#32899741)
>ideally it would be designed to not take you more than say, 8 years to pay off

Making minimum payments always increases the length. How do you define your pay off?

For the record [1], in recent years around 58% of bachelor's degree holders incurred debt, with the median at $23,000. If you want to pay over 8 years this is around $3k per year, which should be completely doable for anyone with a bachelors degree over an 8 year span (over 8 years the average person will make far more per year than starting wages).

[1] https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-student-loan-d...

Re:Subprime loans for college hiding in plain sight on Monday September 19, 2022 @11:27AM (#32899662)
Making the loans shorter will make monthly payments scale up, making mortgages less affordable for people.
Re:Subprime loans for college hiding in plain sight on Monday September 19, 2022 @11:23AM (#32899618)
>Allow bankruptcy for college loans.

Making loans higher interest to handle increased risk, making it even harder for someone to pay for college.

Re:Subprime loans for college hiding in plain sight on Monday September 19, 2022 @11:22AM (#32899596)
Very few people are going to be able to follow in your path, which is why looking at statistical outcomes is a much better way to analyze features of a choice.
Re:Subprime loans for college hiding in plain sight on Monday September 19, 2022 @11:21AM (#32899578)
>I live in a country where college is paid by the taxpers,

May I ask which country? Whenever I look at education stats for a taxpayer college funded system versus the US, there are tradeoffs made, such as less of the population getting college degrees through stricter (taxpayer desired) requirements. I'm curious if your country has a solution that's better on some Pareto frontier of education funding methods.

Re:Quiet Quitting Is a Fake Trend on Saturday September 17, 2022 @11:05PM (#32884046)
Yes, it's easy to get an outcome you like by removing context.

But go ahead and do minimal work at all your jobs, then report how well that worked for you.

Then we can empirically see which world view is more accurate.

Of course, crypto boys don't have the best track records of reading reality, do they?

Re:Quiet Quitting Is a Fake Trend on Saturday September 17, 2022 @06:57AM (#32876485)
With minimal effort expect a minimal career. Don't complain when late in life you have minimal success.
Re:Use-After-Freedom: MiraclePtr on Thursday September 15, 2022 @03:04PM (#32856956)
If you even looked at the research, they sample all programs for which there is code to be viewed, and find such bugs.

Of course you could show that sampling is an invalid way to gather estimates of frequency, and rewrite all of statistics, but I suspect your high level C++ perfection is more time useful to you.

Me, on the other hand, trusts the aggregation of researchers over an internet commenter, even if they do have half of all comments in a topic.

Of course your mystery programs no one else can see provides you a way to claim such sampling is not representative. But since you made the claim, it is up to you to provide evidence.

I get that you have none except your anecdotal self-claims, which is certainly selection bias.

For example:

>Programs they are not in (e.g. mine) are nowhere in your list

I could point out you do mot have proof they are not in it; you just have not found one. Current tech on whole program correctness provers don't yet scale to codebases of this size, and absent that, you do not know your few programs do not have them, no matter how much you claim otherwise or try to code otherwise.

"To pretend as you do ... is not honest."

Re:Use-After-Freedom: MiraclePtr on Thursday September 15, 2022 @03:00PM (#32856901)
Yes, and you replied "Nice excuse. But just wholly untrue."

I just provided thousands of examples where it is true. To offset all that evidence can you provide, say, millions of examples where zero (your phrase) use-after-free bugs have been found?

>You reveal that you never had any intention of engaging honestly.

Honest engaging would be for you to provide evidence for a claim you made when asked. I provided extremely solid counter evidence from the result of many, many research teams.

So, care to honestly engage about your claim?

Re:Use-After-Freedom: MiraclePtr on Thursday September 15, 2022 @02:53AM (#32848057)
My other post listed several thousand use after free bugs in hundreds of commercial programs, so your "zero times W is zero" claim is not accurate in practice.
Re:Use-After-Freedom: MiraclePtr on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @03:36PM (#32842220)
From the literature on bugs, even this specific bug is common far beyond "C and Google code".

And, if you really want to restrict to your goalpost moving subset, then go ahead and demonstrate that the above general trends are not trends in your subset. Because the literature on it disagrees with you.

So, to defend your claim "The mistake is thinking everybody else is in it too", care to show where "everybody else" is free from these bugs?

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C15&q=use...

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=use+after+f...

Often the person leaving has not been that good of a contributor due to wanting to leave, while a replacement is new and likely more inclined to work hard.

On a big team, people fit a bell curve, and most likely those leaving are not going to cause much harm (otherwise no big project would get done - all have people coming and going over the lifespan of the codebase).

Re:Use-After-Freedom: MiraclePtr on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @03:27PM (#32842075)
Are you claiming that use-after-free bugs do not scale with codebase size? If so, please provide evidence, because that would be amazing.
Re:Use-After-Freedom: MiraclePtr on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @07:13AM (#32835575)
>The mistake is thinking everybody else is in it too

Which project of similar size doesn't have bugs? You seem to imply most don't, which is empirically untrue.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C15&q=bug...

Re:Use-After-Freedom: MiraclePtr on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @07:12AM (#32835565)
>"Scale of your codebase" is a clever excuse, but it doesn't wash.

Bugs scale with the size of the codebase, for every entity on earth.

>get rid of any engineer and the minimum impact is 3-6 months code and culture familiarisation

On a big project, say 100 devs over 3 years, 6 man months is 1/600th of the work, so a single person is replaceable and it's not even noise. If the replacement takes 6 months to get up to speed the replacement is certainly not a very good developer, even on the biggest projects. At that size, there's lots of small side projects, testing groups, and the like, so there should be plenty of smaller pieces to work on, and some on those small projects are always happy to jump into the main work, not needing 3-6 months to be useful to it.

This is not highly damaging on any but the smallest, shortest projects. And even there people move around all the time and don't destroy projects.

Deutsch Bank has been hit with $600M for laundering, $7.2B over mortgage assets, $2.5B for interest rate manipulation, among a lot of other fines.

These are some pretty astounding sums.

>The (vast majority of the) Tornado Cash contracts

Thousands of little contracts doesn't absolve a financial institution from a few many-billion dollar illegal transfers, especially after they've been warned repeatedly.

>Given that it also has legitimate uses,

You're not addressing the point about "(a)(1)(B)(ii), which concerns reporting requirements".

If they cannot meet US law for reporting requirements, then they are breaking the law, right?

Re:H.R.2184 – End Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies Act on Friday September 09, 2022 @05:48PM (#32785308)
Is there anything on that page about any movement in Congress? On Congress site nothing shows movement since the introduction long ago.
Re:H.R.2184 – End Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies Act on Friday September 09, 2022 @01:00PM (#32781869)
The bill was introduced on 3/26/2021, and has no further action. It's likely just posturing.
Re:H.R.2184 – End Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies Act on Friday September 09, 2022 @12:56PM (#32781783)
They tend to get lots of other tax breaks, including some that affect oil (and any manufacturing plants).
Why that article points out the US spends $12k/capita on healthcare the singles out administrative costs at $1k/capita while ignoring all the other relevant factors is beyond me. They then use the misleading infant mortality stat, ignoring that the US considers vastly more babies viable than any other country, meaning we try to save infants that other countries write off, thus they count against the US when it fails, but not against the other countries that don't count them as viable. It's a really poor article ignoring important nuance in what it presents.

The US pays about twice per nurse or doctor in the system, and part of that is because the US pays nearly twice for most skilled work. So, to get prices like most other developed nations, we would be forced to cut nurse and doctor salaries, which would likely lower quality of workers as future workers went to more lucrative fields, which would likely lower outcomes.

The US can have higher cost or lower quality. How would you make this tradeoff?

> to justify the unethical system that allows millions to die unnecessarily

Which people are those millions?

The system saves millions of lives that would have died in generations past. How do you factor that into your claim?

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