fasterik
fasterik on Hacker News
The fact that this wouldn't have been considered a contribution before, or that this is a novel idea, suggests that there was something wrong with mathematics culture all along. I'm glad they're figuring it out now, but it seems "too little too late" after decades of devaluing all expository and exploratory work other than writing difficult proofs.
Social Security has been running a cash flow deficit since around 2010, currently at around $270B per year and expected to keep increasing. Congress will need to pass some combination of an increase in payroll taxes, raising the retirement age, or reducing benefits.
You're still responding to points that nobody in this thread made. Can you show me a direct quote where someone said that we should ignore people showing up to town hall meetings, or that we should try to guess what people believe without getting their input?
"Making it easier to participate" is precisely what's at issue here. I don't think that's incompatible with what you were replying to. Note, nobody in this thread said that the public shouldn't have input, just that the existing processes of getting public input are broken.
>No he is on record as telling elected officials to ignore people showing up to town meetings, writing letters etc.I don't think that's a charitable reading of what tptacek was saying. I read it as: ideally, democracy should give everyone an equal voice regardless of age, political views, or economic status; local political participation as it exists today skews heavily toward negative affect and toward older, wealthier homeowners, giving those groups a disproportionate voice in the process. We should move toward alternative processes that make it easier for everyone to participate, not just people who have the luxury of showing up to a town hall.
I agree that both parties like executive power, but that's because voters like it when it benefits "their side". If classical liberal ideas like fiscal responsibility and limited government were popular enough, the parties would scramble to nominate candidates who supported those policies. They care about winning elections.
Why don't you post the numbers, then? Here they are:
Bush: +$4.9T
Obama: +$9.3T
Trump 1: +$7.8T
Biden: +$8.5T
Trump 2: +$4.4T
I don't think you can seriously say that there are no meaningful differences between the two major parties. Just compare Biden and Trump 2. You might not like either choice, but their policy platforms are in fact very different, and both are popular among large segments of the population. That's democracy in action.
In my opinion, we don't have a democracy problem, we have an education problem. Too many voters support policies that sound nice on paper but are disastrous when put into practice.
Clinton left office with a budget surplus. He deserves some credit for that, though it was also partly due to the end of the Cold War and the Republican majority Congress under Gingrich. Deficit spending increased dramatically under George W. Bush after 9/11 and every subsequent administration has continued this.
Public debt burden increases interest rates. This benefits holders of government bonds, who are disproportionately wealthy households and financial institutions. It crowds out private investment and inhibits economic growth, which weakens workers' bargaining power. Deficit spending also causes inflation, which disproportionately hurts people on the lower end of the income scale.
That, and there is a looming Social Security crisis due in 2032. Fiscal responsibility hasn't been either party's (or voters') priority for the past two decades, and it's probably going to take another disaster to put it back on the table.
I feel like the AI backlash is creating a rise in "authenticity signaling", cheap public displays of not using AI. Much like virtue signaling, it's lacking in substance and presents as an annoying affectation to people outside of the target in-group.
It is a matter of skill to a large extent, though. A skilled programmer will write fewer bugs on average than an unskilled one. They'll know the patterns to avoid and have a higher bar for quality. Nobody can write 100% bug-free code, independent of programming language. Also, job title might correlate with skill but it doesn't rule out incompetence at the highest levels.
Games are a bit different in that the game engine is a core part of the product. There aren't many projects with $100M budgets building directly on top of a search engine. A lot of small and medium sized companies will use off the shelf game engines, but you'll never see Rockstar switching over to Unity/Unreal.
I'd never heard this term either, but I'm assuming it means that if the video is N frames long, it uses frame N/2 as the thumbnail.
Handfeeding only has higher throughput for single trips/a single item type, definitely not for an entire factory. The player inventory and movement speed can't keep hundreds of assemblers working continuously. A high throughput starter factory looks something like this:
https://youtu.be/RI4ocNajf_w?si=O1aRi22riKwiuh_p&t=7493
It doesn't seem to understand the core mechanic of Factorio, which is putting outputs onto belts and routing them to other inputs. It does this in a few places, but for the most part everything is put into chests and moved around by the player.
Both Bernhard and Ligotti seem to have been heavily influenced by Schopenhauer, the granddaddy of pessimism.
I wonder if it's an age/brain development thing. I also had crazy math and programming dreams in my early 20s. I don't get those any more, though I still spend a lot of waking time (possibly more now than back then) obsessing over math and programming problems.
Bernhard is fantastic. Woodcutters might be a gentler introduction to his style. It's shorter, funnier, and less oppressive than Correction, which is his magnum opus. Apparently he was at least somewhat as unhinged in real life as in his writing. He was notorious for insulting the Austrian intelligentsia and either refusing literary awards or showing up at the ceremony just to rant and insult the audience, which he wrote about in a memoir titled My Prizes. He was a big influence on W.G. Sebald, another great German language writer (my personal favorite) who makes an appearance in McCarthy's library.
I would call it art, not junk food.
What about working on things for the intrinsic value of learning, challenging oneself, creating something useful or beautiful, or the satisfaction of a job well done? Sure, social status is one motivator among many, but I find this genre of evolutionary psychology extremely reductive and empirically dubious.
Another thought: maybe society as you describe it isn't all that different today than many other points in history. It's called the human condition.
"Guilty until proven innocent" is an authoritarian, quasi-Stalinist view. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with seeking profit, and most people who do so are completely within ethical bounds. For the ones who do unethical things, we have laws and courts to decide that and to punish them appropriately.
There is also a "profit motive makes it wrong" idea permeating at least parts of the culture, which is equally suspect. We should apply standards consistently and judge the ethics by the amount of harm that was caused.
If we've learned anything from modern physics, it's that our regular intuitions are often wrong. The framework makes perfect sense mathematically, and it makes the right predictions experimentally. It's still controversial how exactly the framework relates to reality, which is where you get into interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Start with 3Blue1Brown's "Essence of Linear Algebra" series
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x...Axler's "Linear Algebra Done Right" https://linear.axler.net/LADR4e.pdf
Nielsen and Chuang's "Quantum Computation and Information" Chapter 2. (Available online, but legality depends on where you live)
If you're interested primarily in QM rather than linear algebra, I'd recommend not working through all of Axler, but instead using Nielsen and Chuang to learn about qubits and observables, and using Axler to fill in the gaps.
So many entry-level explanations of quantum mechanics start with classical physics, waves, particles, the double-slit experiment, etc. and then jump straight to infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. In my opinion, there's way too much conceptual baggage that comes with these concepts [0].
As a non-physicist, QM only clicked for me when I learned the linear algebra of one- and two-qubit systems and observables on those systems [1]. The math is accessible at a pre-calculus level, and the most "counter-intuitive" aspects of QM (interference, the uncertainty principle, entanglement) make perfect sense in this framework. I think it's the best starting point for understanding what QM really says.
[0] That's not to say they aren't important historically or for a complete understanding of QM. I'm talking about conceptual understanding for someone, especially an amateur, encountering QM for the first time.
[1] Chapter 2 of Nielsen and Chuang is what did it for me. It's heavygoing if you've never seen linear algebra before, but I don't know of a clearer explanation of the postulates of quantum mechanics.
On the one hand yes, Perelman was known within his subfield. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that if some random person had published the same papers, they would have gone unnoticed, since as far as I understand it these were important results that would have been worth evaluating based on the titles and the abstracts.
Volume isn't really a problem going forward, at least in mathematics, since every proof can be accompanied by a Lean verification. Whether other disciplines can implement automated verification or quality assessment will depend on the details of the field.