Almaviva

11 ms·

1.
by Almaviva 9y ago
"So it’s 99.5% that it occurred due to warming over the industrial era" There are at least a couple of statistical fallacies in this conclusion. And there isn't a lack of agreement about that. One problem with p-value tests i
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by Almaviva 9y ago
I played a game of Monopoly where I started with a roll of 12. There was a 97% chance I correctly rejected the hypothesis that the dice were fair. Maybe this is true in some sense? But it's still somewhere between misleading and nonsen
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by Almaviva 9y ago
The 0.5% quote is fine. It's turning it into a 99.5% that is not fine. It's essentially like saying that a pair of dice that rolled a 12 has a 97% chance of being loaded, because there's only a 1 in 36 chance of rolling that
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by Almaviva 9y ago
> Why is it wrong? https://xkcd.com/882/ If you look at 200 rivers, it would not be surprising to find something that naturally occurs 0.5% of the time. It is not correct to say that there is a 99.5% chance that thi
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by Almaviva 9y ago
"The calculations put chance of the piracy having occured due to natural variability at 0.5%. “So it’s 99.5% that it occurred due to warming over the industrial era,” said Best." We need to train children in school to understand w
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by Almaviva 9y ago
> Also, is js really even the best tool for this? For visualizing the Mandelbrot set? No. For writing an article on the web about incrementally building it up? Yes.
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by Almaviva 9y ago
Presumably "Machine Language" which is what we called Assembly, back when the translation between what you wrote and what the CPU actually did was pretty transparent.
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by Almaviva 10y ago
Lots of people visit links on the clear web showing illegal and horrific acts. If the full extent of a crime is filling out an http form with a fake email to see some pictures and video, it's still not clear that this is so far beyond
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by Almaviva 10y ago
If the site mentioned in the article had 150,000 members as they say, that's a lot of people to lock up for years for pointing a browser at a url.
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by Almaviva 10y ago
The problem is fundamental and serious, what to do when a growing number of people have literally nothing valuable to contribute to an economy. But horses aren't a good analogy to shed light on it. Horses are more analogous to steam en
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by Almaviva 10y ago
Horses haven't shown the same level of adaptation to different skill sets that humans have.
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by Almaviva 10y ago
> you cannot pick this up in any meaningful way in a "few months" of after hours/weekend study You can't pick up coding like this either. See Peter Norvig's famous "Teach yourself programming in 10 years&quo
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by Almaviva 10y ago
> whole grains Yet the glycemic index of whole wheat bread is higher than Coca Cola. (Look it up!) I.e. the same amount of calories of bread will spike your blood sugar more quickly than Coke. Metabolically, starchy foods including grain
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by Almaviva 10y ago
Now consider that in human history, about 40% of men were able to breed. So 30% of the population goes extinct every generation without passing on genes, assuming all women reproduce. So with a few hundred iterations of this kind of 70:30 s
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by Almaviva 10y ago
Most of the smartest humans spend a significant part of their lives in learning and mastery of skills that go beyond survival.
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by Almaviva 10y ago
If it has any general goal at all that it takes seriously, it will be better achieved with self-improvement.
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by Almaviva 10y ago
We know that AlphaGo uses a Monte Carlo tree search, and presumably contains innovations and refinements to techniques applicable to turn based board games with perfect information and a clear binary win condition. We also know it uses a De
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by Almaviva 10y ago
There's one huge incentive I can relate to: a product for the n percent of lonely men each generation who don't have the social skills, status, or otherwise cannot attract a mate. And afterwards, the men who would find a perfect a
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by Almaviva 10y ago
> Evolution had billions of years, working in a massively parallel way to work this out after all. And it also got to work on it with a hundred billion stars with earth-like planets, in each of a hundred billion galaxies, and (maybe) in
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by Almaviva 10y ago
> If you think there's something else, that is by definition supernatural. First, how others perceive your words usually matters more than the precise definitions you have in mind. If I describe myself as believing in the supernatur
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by Almaviva 10y ago
> If we re-distribute our wealth, population growth will subside. I don't get this argument. People want to fuck and reproduce, and the next generation will contain the genes of precisely the people who most want to, and so on. Some
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by Almaviva 10y ago
> a way of asserting that you think the probability of a technological civilization arising is vanishingly small I have no idea one way or another. I wonder why many scientists are confident that extraterrestrial intelligent life exists
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by Almaviva 10y ago
Say a 1080p monitor display is completely randomized, until it shows a clear visible five-pointed star. Given I'm looking at a star, what is the likelihood there is another one on the screen? Practically 0, I'd think. Why is the e
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by Almaviva 10y ago
I think words are very powerful, in particular "microservices" vs "monolith". By accepting those words, we imply the conclusion: microservices sound sexy and lean and elegant - who can argue with separation of concerns?
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by Almaviva 10y ago
Do the test run quickly, are they clear and readable, do they help find regression problems, is it reasonably easy to tell what went wrong when they fail, does the time and effort and peace of mind saved exceed that invested (over the life
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by Almaviva 10y ago
People seem to have a lot of faith that a drive or urge to reproduce is not something that can be selected for and transmitted through generations, either genetically or culturally, in human beings. If it can be selected for, it will be, an
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by Almaviva 10y ago
> If there are elements of consciousness that are completely separate from the physical world (in that they have no effect on it), we cannot talk about them, nor even think about them. Yet here we are, doing both, talking as well as thin
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by Almaviva 10y ago
I wasn't clear, it's vitally important to predict behaviour in practice at a poetic naturalism level, but there seems to be no reason to adopt strong emergence: consciousness doesn't introduce any new explanatory power that c
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by Almaviva 10y ago
Rationally I feel like we have to accept a Daniel Dennett view: with what we know about the brain, all human behaviour is consistent with the laws of physics, and changing the brain very much changes "what it's like" to be -
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by Almaviva 10y ago
That's not a good comparison. Red and blue have very objective definitions given that we have three types of light receptors in our eyes, and a given kind of light can be measured to activate the "blue" or "red" kin

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