halhen

An interesting listen https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/171/ about money laundering and spam in streaming services

Here's a take I did on the same thing where I create "stereo plots" (the cross eyed 3D thing): https://blog.k2h.se/post/stereo-plotting-in-r/ . Quite fascinating

Picking a neighborhood where you are relatively well off seems to usefully calibrate those assumptions. Maybe it has to do with status, which is relative.

Earning well and living in a regular middle class neighborhood of teachers, carpenters, and office workers, I don't feel stressed about keeping up with the Joneses I'm surrounded by. I can afford enough relatively (to my surroundings) nice things.

My social circle is not full of wealthy people, so living in a regular middle class area is also not low-status. I also feel like that the kids feel more secure about the things they do and have than they would be if they were always falling behind their friends, doing and having exactly the same stuff.

Or to PowerBI, which will any UUID to a string even in joins. That cast + string comparisons + killing of indexes is not conducive to performant queries...

It seems to me that large parts of the world -are- at war with Russia. And, importantly, we manage to put a lot of pressure on the enemy without getting even more people killed.

Agree! That, and (almost) everything is a vector... Which makes perfect sense for an analytics language.

Once I grokked that R became my default language for anything analytics.

That depends on the encoding, does it not? The binary sequence equal to ASCII "Hello world" might well be PII with many different encodings. By accident, of course, but nevertheless 33 bits of information would be enough.

I believe developers could be particularly good at identifying and communicating all required information from the start. We spend our lives thinking about how to pass information around, and get a lot of immediate feedback about it.

Think about it as a function: What arguments (information) would a function need to be able to return a value?

As a data scientist, I sometimes find myself going over 64 GB. Of course it all depends on how large data I'm working on. 128 GB RAM helps even with data of "just" 10-15 GB, since I can write quick exploratory transformation pipelines without having to think about keeping the number of copies down.

I could of course chop up the workload earlier, or use samples more often. Still, while not strictly necessary, I regularly find I get stuff done quicker and with less effort thanks to it.

Somewhat helpful for Shiny stack traces:

    options(shiny.fullstacktrace = TRUE)

You should be prepared to scroll a bit, but you might get the information you're looking for more often.

I'm not well rounded enough to draw a clear path from where you are. For me Gelmans Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models [0] drove home many, many points. More recently, I have a sense/hope that Pearl's The Book of Why [1] might take this to yet another level.

[0] http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/arm/ [1] https://www.amazon.com/Book-Why-Science-Cause-Effect/dp/0465...

This seems like a young persons fallacy. Why would consumerism be the only reason to drop ambitions? How about acceptance and finding peace? Growing into yourself and seeing your role differently?

I study a lot and perform well at work, but nowadays I would absolutely say it's not from ambition. Instead, it's from me enjoying to play that character in the game of life.

If modern society taught us a fallacy, it is to consider being content as something bad when, in fact, I can think of no better goal to die, and live, happy. Taking the road via accomplishments to get there is not necessarily the most likely way to get there.

I took a job in a data analytics firm, which had the national Swedish gambling operator as customer. The idea was to predict which players were at risk of developing gambling problems using ML. Backing this was also a team of psychologists. (I left about a year ago, so I'm writing in the past tense below.)

As it turns out, the task became to identify those who are at risk today from gambling data, which is relatively easy to do probabilistically with actionable precision. From here, the next step was to figure out if the person wanted help to change, which also is surprisingly easy to do by just asking.

This is by the way also to the industry's excuse that "we shouldn't tell adults what to do!". When asked, on a gambling site, a majority of those with gambling problems SAY that they would like to change, but aren't able to. Then it's no longer about telling people how to behave, but instead helping those who ask for help. But by not asking, the industry can get away with "we shouldn't tell..."

The really hard nut to crack was to give those who want but aren't able to. It's definitely not just about telling them -- most know, _and take responsibility for_, that they do destructive things. Normative feedback (this is how much others play) seemed to work on a mid-term. Calling people also did some positives; many were relieved that somebody saw them and that they finally could talk to somebody, very few got annoyed. But as a first approximation, fighting problem gambling is still an unsolved problem.

Well, Gambling Disorder is a recognized psychological diagnosis in DSM 5[0], so I guess the reader will have to weigh the credibility of the industry's claims vs all the other evidence around.

Also, from your comments I assume you rarely meet a representative sample of your customers. I did, and that experience ALSO matched my other claims. You do you of course, and I know where you're coming from: I too built gambling software for five years before I went to work with problem gambling. If integrity is important to you though, you should read up on the subject (Addictive by design is a good book), meet some of your customers, and take your own and your company's self-interest biases into account.

[0] https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gambling-disord...

Having worked with data analytics in problem gambling for ten years, your dismissal of the addictiveness of these games is either uninformed or rationalized, most likely both.

Recent research in Sweden shows that some 75% of online casino turnover are from what can be loosely described as moderate risk gambling (PGSI3+) and approximately 50% from problem gambling (PGSI8+). Similarly about 25% of regular (monthly) players are problem gamblers. Of those who start playing slots monthly, 10% develop gambling problems within a year.

These are bad numbers. Really bad. And they match my experience from million-players-+ databases of actual gambling data.

The most significant marker to predict gambling problems is the amount wagered, say per month. The more someone plays, the higher the risk of that person having gambling problems. About 10% of players make up 80% of the turnover; about 0.1% about 10%. The Pareto principle at play, sure, but combined with the former it basically says that you can't trust the industry for advice on problem gambling.

This is not your safe-little-hobby thing, and the amount players who really enjoy them are much, much, much fewer than you make it sound. The majority of the industry's revenue come from people who would like to stop but can't. This is by any useful definition neither rational nor voluntary. The main claim of the industry is "informed choice" and the users' responsibility to take control, despite loss of control being the very definition of the illness.

This is another tobacco-industry-like example of society slowly realizing the hidden costs being pushed by a powerful industry to unknowing and often vulnerable third parties.

I've given Alan Watts The Book to at least five people I thought could use it. Four of them never mentioned it again. I'm marrying the fifth next month.

One answer is by Simon Bennet. See https://vimeo.com/138060217 , in particular 13:10-16:00

As a newly divorced mainstream western person, I might have an anecdotal perspective on this. You don't divorce because of how easy it is. You divorce despite how hard it is. And while the cultural boundaries are reasonable (not encouraging, mind you), it is the finances, the practical things, the emotions, the social consequences that hurt. And, if you have kids, rip their opportunity to live in the same house as both parents.

My divorce was a "good" one. We agreed, and make the best of it together, not just for the kids' sake but for each other's as well. Still, I never wanna do this again.

According to other people I've talked to, the books I've read, and the therapists I've been to, the idea that couples divorce too easily is simply false. I'm sure you can find examples to point to, but, at least around the Nordics, it simply is not the case.

If you marry a woman who would divorce you in a wink, the reason is you not getting to know her beforehand, not some divorce-culture.

LaTeX and git. Granted, we're a small company with five people in the tech department, all working the terminal most of the time, so we can choose pretty freely. We're a B2B company. Having solid, continuously improved, and useful documentation to put on the table at the first meeting is a huge win in trust and efficiency.

In my experience, the critical success factor is having someone in the team that truly cares about it. In our case, we had a guy whose peace of mind depended on having everything in order, including well-structured, complete, and correct documentation. He left us a couple of months ago, and already the documentation is starting to deteriorate.

> how do you do it?

In Capital volume 1, Marx paints the following logical progression. Whether it carries any historical truth, I don't know. (Note: there are many more nuances to it, and you perhaps need to wrestle the original source to get it all)

To establish a single unit of measurement:

a. The simple, isolated, or accidental form of value: Commodities are exchangeable with other commodities, e.g. 20 yards of linen = 1 coat.

b. The Total or Expanded Form of Value: a commodity is exchangeable with any other commodity, e.g. 20 yards of linen = 1 coat or = 10 lb tea or = 40 lb coffee or = 1 quarter of corn or = 2 ounces of gold or = etc.

c. The general form of value: Any of said quantities of commodities are exchangeable with the original commodity, e.g. 1 coat, 10 lb tea, 40 lb coffee, 1 quarter of corn, and 2 ounces of gold, are worth 20 yards of linen.

d. The money form: One, or a few, commodities become either the de factor or the legal "universal equivalent" commodity in which exchange-value is measured. This universal requires some properties (I'm sure I have forgotten several):

* It must be uniform. Not all horses are equal, so horses are no good.

* It must be divisible and capable of quantitative differentiation. Half a work horse is less worth than half of a whole, and two halves of work horses does not equal one. Horses are not good for a second reason.

* As trade expands geographically, the value of the universal equivalent needs to be universally recognized. Horses for seamen? More inconvenient than it should be.

* The universal equivalent should not deteriorate. Horses die. They really are no good for this.

Instead, precious metals fulfill these qualities. And just as we use dollars and cents, gold and silver can be used to differentiate between different magnitudes of value. (Note: gold and silver still has values as commodities, which determine the amount of stuff you get for them. See the initial points.)

Still, they do have some problems. They require measurements and tools to divide. It's not really convenient to go into Starbucks with a lump of silver to carve the price for a coffee.

So coins are minted, containing the proper amount of each metal. New problems arise. Cheaters carve metals from the coins to melt and create new. Wear and tear cheapens the coins. So bills and coins are created as symbols of silver and gold, but backed by them. The actual precious metal reside elsewhere, and the bill is just a proof of ownership.

Now, those countries and owners who control precious metals get significant power. They can withhold or flood the marked at their whim. No good, says the other countries. So when currency is sufficiently recognized as a means of payment, one can remove the actual backing and keep the bills and coins only. And while we're on it, why bother with the bills at all? A balance in a computer is just as good, right?

If you're interested in this, are willing to contrast your view on things, and have the time and stamina for it, I'd recommend you to take read Marx's Capital. In the books, Marx accepts the premises of a free market capitalism utopia as laid out by contemporary economists, and logically derives the contradictions and instabilities that arise on a societal level. Whether you remain a free market believer or not, the books will deepen your understanding and enrich your view of the world.

It is an intellectual challenge to get through. David Harvey has produced two free video lecture series that can help: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/.