dharmon

People like Zuck, Altman, Musk, and I'll throw Trump in there as well, are high-level hackers. But instead of computers or technological systems, they are hackers of our social code. So much of our society revolves around codes and standards that are only enforced by ostracization from the collective group.

If you take a moment to observe you'll see just how many of these implicit social norms surround us and basically keep the world running. For example, it's kinda bizarre that we can order food in a restaurant, sit and enjoy it over an hour (or two), and only then actually pay for it. You don't even have to provide proof beforehand that you are capable of paying! What's to stop everyone from slipping out after enjoying a meal? Turns out not much really besides the embarrassment of getting caught, or the sense of shame in outright stealing.

Zuck, Altman, Musk, Trump, etc are high-level dine-and-ditchers. They feel no such shame that keeps us regular people in line. There's a reason the word sociopath is often thrown around with these people, as that is a defining characteristic, the lack of empathy or shame.

The thing that separates them from your run-of-the-mill sociopath, in my opinion, is they are aware of this and actively exploit it to their personal gain, at the highest levels. Basically using the leverage that makes tech amazing to multiply their own benefits from such social "hacking" to the highest degree. They've pushed the violation of social norms well past the extremes that I imagine even they could've predicted, with practically no backlash! I mean just look at how Musk initially just flirted with the line and now has pushed well past it, going further and further each time.

I have no conclusion besides agreeing with the article, that the least we can do is not provide them with the respectability they crave. They can keep the money if it was legally (if not immorally) obtained, but let them keep each other warm in their NZ bunkers; I've got no room for them around my fire.

I would also recommend The Arctic Grail as a good companion read. It covers the history of the British quests for the North Pole and the Northwest Passage, with the Franklin expedition being a significant part of that overall story. It also really drives home the point of how much the British love a good heroic failure!

If you're on MacOS, activate spotlight (Cmd+space) then type "134f to c" and it will show you the conversion.

This also works in the search box on iOS.

Other conversions work as well. The one I use most often is kmh to mph, e.g., "220kmh to mph".

I generally have a negative opinion of Martin, but did we read the same discussion? Martin was very gracious in letting many points slide (points where he was correct!), and was generously willing to end the conversation at a sort-of draw when it was clear that Muratori was not really prepared to discuss things at a detailed level (It was obvious to me from the start that Muratori thought "dynamic polymorphism" just meant deep hierarchies of inheritance, a la early C++, Martin realized this later and I think that was the first inkling that he was wasting his time).

Muratori was even wasting his time arguing against programmer time _in general_ is less valuable than machine time? And doesn't understand that LLVM is an extremely specialized piece of software, from which general software engineering practices should not be extracted?

When learning any complex skill, the key is figuring out what the fundamentals are, and practicing those, in isolation and small combinations (along with throwing everything all together, of course).

For painting, the fundamentals are usually listed as something like values, shapes, edges, and color.

Some might make a more exhaustive list, for example breaking shapes apart into more “drawing” skills like perspective, construction, anatomy, etc. this is useful because it’s even more isolated things to practice beyond just making pleasing shapes. (I think some use just “shapes” as the fundamental because the breakdowns imply you are painting some sort of realism, which doesn’t have to be the case. Abstract art, or even non realism representational, still uses shapes)

It can be hard to tease some of these apart, but what the parent is talking about, and what TFA is doing, is practicing values and shapes (though the article also has color, this isn’t necessary). all edges are hard edges, so that is removed from the equation, and you can just practice creating something that “reads” (ie, looks like the thing you intended).

If you wanted to practice values in isolation, you could freeze the shapes, and just adjust the value of each shape to explore what effects it gives and if it still reads.

I agree that learning things, like painting, is made more complicated that it needs to be. Check out Marco Bucci on YouTube. He’s a great teacher (his free videos are fantastic, but I have all his courses as well).

If you watch an experienced artist they don’t generally take these individual steps, as experience lets them combine the fundamentals, but you better bet they put in hundreds of hours practicing them.

You’re probably being too generous in your EDIT EDIT. They are bad. They don’t really make sense except in the very moment, and I think that’s why I can’t remember a single part of even the ones I’ve seen several times (I usually have a movie memorized by third viewing).

It’s like that experiment with chess masters. They show them a board mid-game then ask them to re-create it (which they can do easily), but then they do the same with a random configuration of pieces, which they fail. It’s because there’s no logic to it for their brain to “chunk”. I think it’s the same reason why a movie that you didn’t think was “bad” is completely forgettable. Your brain is built for remembering narratives, but it can sniff out when it doesn’t make sense. Has nothing to do with genre. You can probably remember the main beats of a Pixar film you’ve seen once, even though it was talking toys or whatever.

The 1996 movie Jack with Robin Williams had a joke playing off this. I don’t remember the joke exactly, but one of the boys asks Jack if he’s ever had an erection, and he says something like “No, but I was hoping to get one for my birthday.”

Not to mention the hefty consulting fees he’s been getting for years from places like Google. IMO those probably dwarf his faculty salary and money from books.

I strongly agree with this, with one caveat: there are a few modules that are GPL and not LGPL. Definitely check the module licenses to make sure you're not going to need anything that is GPL. Most likely you won't.

On an unrelated note, as someone who mainly builds desktop tools and has used Qt for many many years, but would like to get away from C++ for UI logic, I can't see any reasonable alternative, but would love for some suggestions.

Qt just makes so many things easy, and basically every use-case is well-explored. Most other options seem to just focus on making easy things easy. As soon as you want to render something in 3D, make a node editor, call into or share data with C++ libraries, implement a reasonable undo/redo system, re-skin the UI to not look like a children's app, etc, other options fall flat.

Now I’m wondering if I’m the only one who grew up calling a semi / tractor trailer a “Mack truck”.

Like many C++ devs I hacked around in cmake for years, but not really understanding what I was doing or how to structure cmake projects. This was made worse as newer ways of doing things came into being.

If this sounds like you, do yourself a favor and go through these slides (or watch the talk they came from):

https://github.com/boostcon/cppnow_presentations_2017/blob/m...

It really clarified things for me, but also avoids going too much into detail. You will definitely need more info as you go along, but you can look those things up in the docs. This presentation does a good job at showing the core essentials that you can build your knowledge on later.

While nobody is surprised, still feels like the beginning of the end of an era. I guess the only question is how long Nadal will hang on. My wife and I joke that Djokovic will still be crushing 20 year olds for years to come, but time catches all of us eventually.

It feels like it's worth mentioning that almost all pro tennis players declare residency in places like Monte Carlo to avoid taxes. This makes sense since they are on the road 90% of the year anyway so why pay super high taxes back home? Federer, however, retained his residency in Switzerland, paying very high taxes on his $130mm (!!) in winnings (not to mention all the other income from sponsorships, etc). In a world where wealthy people hyper-optimize to avoid paying their fair share, playing the "it's all perfectly legal!" card, it is comforting to occasionally see someone who says, hey, I have plenty, maybe I'll pay it forward a bit so the next generation can have the same opportunities I had.

In my memory it was Batman Begins (2005) that had if bad and started the trend, but you’re right about the first Bourne movie (2002) being somewhere near the start (as far as tent pole movies go).

At any rate it’s a super lazy crutch for bad choreography. Contrasted with something like the Indiana jones airplane fight scene with its wide shots of the action is like night and day.

I just read this and also really enjoyed it.

Pépin heaps praise on Howard Johnson (the person), and has no kind words for his son, whom he blames for the restaurant’s decline. Mainly lack of adaptability as fast food hit the country, but then also drastically cutting quality in ingredients.

Pépin claims that he would take home frozen restaurant food (as it was shipped to the restaurants), reheat it, and serve it to his NYC “foodie” friends, including renowned French chefs, without them being able to tell. I actually believe this since most of the pre-prepared food were stocks and sauce bases which freeze just fine, and also take the most time to prepare.

Private jet travel being a particularly big one. Many companies claim their CEOs (even ones you’ve never heard of) need to travel private for security reasons.

Animals as Leaders wakes up my brain like nothing else. I think my brain is vaguely aware that what I am listening to is some sort of complex puzzle, but I don't have the knowledge of music theory to crack it, so instead it's just primed for whatever coding / math tasks I'm working on that I can solve.

I think we are saying the same thing, but I am just elaborating on what "signal detection" means. The usual approaches at worst just don't work, and at best don't scale very well.

I am saying that (I believe) RenTech has taken a very holistic approach to signal detection and maintenance, rather than the very academic approach that used to be the norm. And even if a signal is found, they have to be weaved into the trading system gradually, and eventually removed when they no longer work. This is a very challenging problem and they are very good at it.

I think this posts misses the most important piece, the real secret sauce, which is how do you sift through massive streams of data and separate the signals from the noise? And how do you do so continuously so that as soon as an edge evaporates you don't keep trading it?

I think the key insight they made here is much less sophisticated than many think. The usual guess is that all these math geniuses have some magic statistical models that tell them the answer, but I don't think that's it. There are known, good ways to detect these things, and most (if not all) hedge funds are aware of them.

I think the magic is in the systems engineering they have done. It is a system which is able to evaluate the quality of a signal as it would be traded. Traditionally, quants come up with models that they then backtest to "prove" before doing live trading. A lot of models that look great on paper, or on historic data, fall flat in real-world trading. Hedge funds spend significant time and resources on quality back-testing data and systems, and I think Renaissance has been able to take this to a whole new level.

This is all mainly a guess on my part, but based on the book The Man Who Solved the Market, which alludes to this system without going into details (obviously). It is much less exciting than some super sophisticated ML models or what-not that people imagine is the source of their success.

This post focuses on the leverage, which is great for goosing the returns, but isn't the whole story. Put another way, if you could magically be gifted some part of Ren, which you rather have their special leverage arrangements, or the signal vs. noise oracle?

I get what you're saying, and I would agree that the power of _most_ politicians is minimal compared to the absolute richest people in the world (so not just mere single-digit billionaires, unless their wealth is built on owning a platform, like Oprah).

However, read the book Charlie Wilson's War. Wilson had no money to speak of, but the book reveals the incredible power that he wielded, largely by sidling up to selective groups (like the Israeli lobby) and getting key committee appointments. And Wilson wasn't even a U.S. Senator! (Generally speaking Representatives have far less power than Senators)

Maybe even more so then now, it was very common for studios to step in and "fix" a movie. I.e., re-edit it. So any footage that existed was fair game to end up in the final movie.

Wilder would famously film the absolute minimum amount, so in his words, "there is only one way it can fit together." Or another line of his, "the only thing that should be left on the cutting room floor are tears and chewing gum."

I am not so confident that even in 8 years the outcome will be clear. Just like today Tesla is selling hot garbage and calling it "self driving", I am sure manufacturers will be selling cars that claim to satisfy the requirements of the bet, and even do so... sometimes. I am not confident they will work as reliably as the bettors here are intending, even if it is marketed as L5.

Edit: What I'm getting at is even though it is a friendly bet, they should define the terms of success / failure a little more clearly. Unless there is some governing body that grants L5 status?

Probably my favorite, that you're missing on this list (mostly likely cause his channel only recently "blew up"), is Brian Lagerstrom, formerly called Weeds & Sardines. Another recent fave is Middle Eats. I probably make his lentil fatteh recipe every couple of weeks.

I tend to avoid cooking "entertainment" a la Babish and Weissman. Weissman is frustrating cause it used to be a legit cooking channel, but at some point a few years ago he stopped trying to make recipes that you would actually want to eat and focused on food porn. Then he got super lazy where you can tell he doesn't even test his recipes before filming.

This is great! Thanks!

I am forced to use a Windows machine sometimes for work, and to me the unpardonable sin is that Windows seems to randomly reboot _without asking me_! I come to my office and all my open sessions are gone. How do you turn this off?! I try turning off the setting but it randomly turns itself back on.

Also, how do people set up a reasonable dev environment not built around Visual Studio? On my Mac I just use Terminal + MacVim (with my plugins), so I don't have particularly demanding needs. I tried WSL, but its just Linux side-by-side with Windows, not integrated with windows. If that's what I wanted I would just use Linux, but I need a command-line where I can still build Windows apps. Currently I use bash-for-git (so I can run `cmake --build ...`) but its so non-standard in lots of ways that it drives me a little nutty.

The method actually reminds me of a simple h-refinement scheme for FEM.

We downloaded this last night and my 4-year old has been having a lot of fun working through his 50 or so build options.

We routinely get various lego build books from the library, but it's frustrating how almost every build requires a few critical pieces that we don't have. It'd be cool if this app could tell you if there's some set or kit or odd-lot pieces we could buy that would suddenly make a large number of builds available.

I think there are a few factors unique in U.S. history that would naturally lead its people to believe that hard work alone is sufficient.

Firstly, I think times of change are the catalyst needed for mobility (up and down). Just like in organizations: fast growing companies are where many employees first get elevated to, say, the CTO or Director level, and which they can then maintain from company to company. They worked hard, sure, but not harder than anyone else. It was that disruption in the status quo that gave them the opportunity in the shifting sands to find elevated ground.

I think the other factor is points of leverage. A sibling comment points out slavery, colonialism, cheap labor. Those are general points of leverage, but there are others (and possibly not the most important ones for the U.S.)

So the first great change in my mind was just the establishment of the U.S. For decades we pushed west "discovering"/stealing new territories and its natural resources. This led to mobility for some, but the leverage is small (still need lots of people to work your massive land stake in Kansas). Still, those resources were sent back to Boston or wherever and led to many opportunities.

Second, the Industrial Revolution. Now you're getting into great leverage possibilities. Vanderbilt was an ace accountant, but what other time in history could somebody good with a ledger rise to the richest man in the world? Vanderbilt was an exception, no doubt, but there were plenty of people who had accounting skills who significantly improved their station in life (and hence their subsequent generations).

Next was WW2. With Europe ravaged by war, the U.S. naturally was able to rise and fill various roles previously filled by the British and others. (Maybe the most important one here is reserve currency status.) This created ridiculous opportunity for its citizens to make a name for themselves. This is the wave many boomers rode to their current levels of wealth.

Lastly is the computer revolution. The wealth from this one has probably been more concentrated, but the leverage possible has improved the station of many many people (myself included).

So I think hard-work (or related things like "savviness") is necessary, but not sufficient. Maybe now people are just coming to terms with a world / country that is mostly settled, and without that disruption, the chances of moving up in life are greatly diminished back to where they've been for most of human history.

My PSA for sous vide cooking: chicken breasts can actually be tasty! 153F is the perfect temp for me. Too much lower and its got that raw chicken texture to it, Too much higher and it gets stringy and dry.

Pork tenderloin gets the award for thing most-improved by sous vide. Cook it medium rare at 135F (I sprinkle with a little salt first). Then pat it dry, put a bit more coarse salt on the outside and sear it hard and quick.

For the record I generally like Beato's channel. I suspect part of what you dislike is a result of the YouTube-ification of his videos. Making everything amped up, strong opinions, etc. Watch some videos from 5 years ago. There are no "wow!"s in response to every line in a song, more nuanced opinion, etc.

Unfortunately, though, he's been a little more clickbait-y of late. For example his "rant" videos, which are both very clickable and don't have copyright claims like most his videos. I expect to see more of these going forward now that he knows he can rant for 30 min, cut it down to 10 min, post it, and make $10k from ad views.

The "What Makes This Song Great?" series is wonderful. If for no other reason where else are you going to here isolated tracks from your favorite songs? But I somewhat suspect he was trolling his viewers with doing one on "Since You Been Gone" a few weeks ago. I enjoy the song and am happy to crank it up and dance with my kids, but the production / arrangement is typical Dr. Luke blandness. But of course I still watched the whole video, waiting for him to "break kayfabe". :)

His friends and colleagues were very disappointed that at the very end he turned to religion to help him cope with his fears. He even had a priest visit him for last rites. (Source: A Beautiful Mind)

If you like Adam Ragusea, you might like my other favorite YouTube channel, Ethan Chlebowski. (although I'm guessing you've already seen him).

Those two are actually about learning to cook better, rather than "cooking entertainment", like PBS cooking shows vs. the Food Channel.