pilarphosol

It’s a fine title. It’s descriptive and honest. It doesn’t read as click bait/scam.

Click bait would be, “Passive income guaranteed in publishing,” which would make a (false) promise you did not.

True, but the reason there was so much demand to live in the metaverse is that the real world was so odious.

This. And VC doesn’t help much, because as soon as you take the money you are in a race to become the next overpowered, uninspiring behemoth, only with less resources and a low chance of a real payoff.

It’s worse than that, even, because it’s believed there are no Fermat primes at all after 65,537. It’s one of the few cases of a conjecture being (with very high probability) 100 percent wrong.

This is all true, but the result of social media is that people feel like they’re getting social fulfillment despite, in most cases, getting anything of value. So people are irritable, exhausted, and feel no need for offline socialization.

We’ll eventually come up with ways to resist this, but it’ll be hard. We can’t, if we live in the expensive cities where the jobs are, return to the real physical world, because that place was bought by the rich when we weren’t looking and now they own it.

Prime numbers are interesting in this regard not for the notional reason (low Kolmogorov complexity) but because if their high “randomness.” They are not patterned so much as they are the leftovers excluded by patterns (notably, nontrivial multiplications) but, for this reason, of interest to number theorists simply because facile pattern “shouldn’t be” there. Which I guess gets to the heart of why diagonal arguments so easily torpedo discussions of “interestingness” or the lack thereof.

I think it’s hilarious that they went and changed their name to their worst idea.

The term “metaverse” comes from Snow Crash, which is a dystopia. They would know this if they actually read.

TED is also a laundry for the wealthy. It’s a knock-off of Davos (also PR, because the WEF itself doesn’t have power) that isn’t overtly evil, and it’s also more accessible, insofar as anyone who wants to attend probably can if they make the effort.

The WEF is a weird brand of expensive deadpan satire. The institution itself doesn’t have the power to implement conspiratorial evil, and the attendees can do that anywhere. Davos is more of a meme than it does anything. People who own billion dollar meat companies aren’t actually going to make us eat bugs. TED is a nicer, left-speaking alternative for people who get the Davos joke, and its purpose is to trick the PMCs into thinking they are still in college and that this is actually a mutual aid society where the way things are is just the best humans can do.

Walled gardens are unfortunately the future of the internet.

The public web is full of bots and adversarial content. Worse, anything you contribute in good faith can be used against you in the future by businesses and governments. Even in the rare case where those institutions are trustworthy, there is no guarantee of them being that way. So, the public web’s only power users are those who seek to influence others, who are therefore adversarial toward any higher minded purpose.

Balkanisation and fragmentation, unfortunately, seem to be at least our near future.

This is about right. They want every podunk town to remember that the smartest or most impressive kid in 10 years went (finishing is optional) and they don’t really want more “strivers” than that.

The lack of them is probably more harmful than the content is helpful. But I do think they move readers who are on the fence about what to buy. It takes a long time investment to learn whether a novel is any good, so social proof is, unfortunately, a pretty big influence.

The good and bad news is that publishing’s social proof is about to lose 98 percent of its value once NLP gets to the point of having as much predictive value as publishing’s signals. We might be there already. That doesn’t mean a program can decide what is and is not great literature. It doesn’t have to. It just to be better than the curators we have. That could probably be written in a hackathon with a decent labeled dataset.

The good news is that this will make it a lot easier for good writers without connections or preexisting celebrity to be discovered. The bad news is that there will be a few people who reverse engineer the AI graders and get millions of readers despite not being all that good.

The disease of blurbs is not that anyone consciously takes them seriously, but the fact that not having them has become a black mark. People are used to chatty book covers. This is just one of the many tools a dying industry uses to keep its unfair advantages.

It works first and second order.

First order, every number is equally (un)likely and there is no harm in choosing yesterday’s number, because it is nevertheless no more unlikely today than any other.

Second order, you want to avoid split pots, so doing what others are doing reduces EV… your number should be as random as you can make it… and any lottery that actually produced the same numbers twice in a short period of time would be subject to increased scrutiny, which must also be factored in (you might get no prize if it is discovered, even if the conclusion were untrue, that the lottery were rigged) so yesterday’s numbers actually are objectively bad choices.

Either way, the metaphor stands quite well.

The downturn is hitting all companies and all jobs. It’s bad out there.

What’s perverse, and not being discussed enough, is that this is an engineered recession. Rather than admit our economy no longer works, the Fed can alternate between low and high interest rates (inflation or unemployment, take your pick) and so, even though bad things are happening, the fact that it’s different bad stuff each year makes it look like the Fed is doing something.

1. Buy Ford.

2. Don’t pay.

3. Get repoed…

4. …while in the car.

5. Accident.

6. Collect settlement.

This is not legal or financial advice. As with time travel, safety not guaranteed.

Being a data scientist is what I imagine being a lawyer is for idealists who go into the profession. They think there is an underlying reality that holds bad actors to account—for attorneys, this is the institution of “The Law”—but, in fact, most of the job is helping those bad actors justify what they already wanted to do anyway.

And just as most legal disputes end in settlements, most data scientists are excess capacity, kept around because the programmers who will put up with typical dev nonsense aren’t smart enough to hit the high notes… when the fact is that said high notes only need to be hit very, very rarely in business. Being a corporate lawyer comes down to intimidation—no one wants to face off against Apple’s team of lawyers—and 99% of being a corporate data scientist is talking in maths to impress (or defraud) clients and investors.

AI companies seem to be in a paradoxical space where they need the optics of being open even if it goes against their business interests.

I’d look into the Kelly criterion to get more color on this.

The US is a low trust society, because of all the poverty. You really notice the difference if you travel to Europe. It turns out that having half of the population be economically unsafe makes everyone and everything unsafe.