Bartweiss

6 ms·

1.
by Bartweiss 6y ago
> in both cases someone could accidentally optimize the test I think this is what I disagree with. The water heater story is about a viable-for-market design which also optimized for the test. The equivalent for a car emissions test mi
2.
by Bartweiss 6y ago
This is omnipresent even where regulators aren't involved: every graphics card benchmark out there is 'manipulated' relative to real world performance. At this point it's so universal that I don't think anyone is ev
3.
by Bartweiss 6y ago
I do think that manipulating a purely instructive measure is less extreme than manipulating a compliance test; consumers can seek alternate tests and reviews, but the state emissions test has special status even if a dozen other tests give
4.
by Bartweiss 6y ago
Crash test dummies have basically this problem also. They're designed for realism in certain very narrow ways, and then the very small number of approved dummies are used for testing car safety. The industry has made a bit of progres
5.
by Bartweiss 6y ago
Citing Maven also feels a bit circular. It's an important Java application, but being a build tool it's only because there's lots of Java out there to build. Minecraft and a lot of the other apps are terminally impressive, so
6.
by Bartweiss 6y ago
Wait, which countries are we referencing outside of those three? Thailand looks straightforwardly exponential so far and has fairly heavy mask use, agreed. But Singapore, Taiwan, and arguably Malaysia seem too early to call: they're st
7.
by Bartweiss 6y ago
> you had to be logged in to the web interface already with another account Obviously I don't know specifics, but if this applies to any router which has multiple tiers of login then it could be a pretty serious problem. I suspect
8.
by Bartweiss 6y ago
I don't think this is uncharitable at all. I'm sure Kinsa has made a good effort at controlling for testing frequency, and I'm sure it's helped. But there's no reason to think the dynamics of COVID-motivated testing
9.
by Bartweiss 6y ago
Good point. The TARP bailout in 2008 involved buying a ton of stock from troubled companies, but it was sold back to them as soon as they could buy the money back. And this will be the second bailout for a bunch of airlines. So one of the m
10.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
There's also a fairly good argument for this in the line of trains and highways. Planes aren't physically trapped on one course, but pretty much every nation heavily regulates who can fly where, when. Airports are often state-cont
11.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
The third option is "because they don't want to be blamed for model error". Governments aren't necessarily competent, but you can try to get them to understand 5%/95% confidence intervals, at least in hindsight. If
12.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
It's been fascinating to see the rise, fall, and rise of digital watches among techies. I remember 1990s Dilbert having an entire storyline about the engineers getting into a calculator-watch arms-race. In real life, it was pretty comm
13.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
> The CEO will be under tremendous pressure if he/she tries to optimize for a 1 year timeframe (for example) as opposed to quarter-by-quarter. Its bizarre to talk to well-meaning execs (even below C-suite) at public companies and
14.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
For any business with decent size, absolutely. There are a thousand ways to claw back options, and the reason they don't get used is that doing it even once would make hiring practically impossible. For a small enough company? It falls
15.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Not only is an easily discovered public event poor leverage, it becomes much worse leverage if it comes up in an interview. When companies (or governments) try to manipulate employees, they frequently rely on some kind of willful ignoranc
16.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
I notice this pattern all the time in guides to "polite" workplace communication. Their examples are hypothetical, so they look at how positive something sounds without considering the underlying content, or go even further and c
17.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Eh, it probably buffers against overreaction, especially when a correction in fundamentals is being mixed with a reaction to new pressure. But this is still a good point: if the market really is overheated then short-term monetary policy wo
18.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
This is why the whole idea of "in the public interest" exists. If a reporter received these same recordings in the mail, they would quite likely publish them. If they received a recording of a random person discussing their medica
19.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
This is a novel and important result in antibiotics . It's also a proof-of-concept for using ML to produce vital drugs with novel mechanisms, rather than incidental alterations or discoveries in noncompetitive spaces. It might be an
20.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
I think the criticism is that it's not obvious whether success here was a function of improved performance, expanded throughput, expanded testing, or sheer luck. Chess engines have clearly improved in both design and computing power ov
21.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
> How am I confident that this is realistic if you literally say its generated? This is a particularly good question since it's recently been shown that even neural nets trained on real data often pick up substantial, predictabl
22.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
A related interpretation: your debugging tools need to be at least as good as your programming tools. Ideally, better. Debugging a K8 cluster with print statements is hopeless, but if the cleverest code you can write in a dumb editor is g
23.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
> had you built a tractor for a company they would definitely want to know why you want to build a brand new tractor when the old one is working fine. You're not wrong about the cost and the need to justify it, but I think you mig
24.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Truly gnarled legacy code can be almost impossible to understand just by reading, so that truly grokking it requires writing something in the codebase. (Mind, that's necessary for understanding but not sufficient.) And so at a certain
25.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
> Why not use this power to secrete chemicals that help you gain more control over yourself? If you haven't tried it yet, you might be a fan of Nancy Kress' Beggars in Spain . Instead of adult use of nootropics, it deals wit
26.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
And even the ones who do practice decent anonymization are generally contributing to the problem just by holding a lot of data. Lots of companies are content to stop at "our data can't be linked back to a person's identity&qu
27.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Which also begs another question about the lines around 'fake'. If you put a quote next to a picture of someone who didn't say it, is that deceptive? "Well sure, the entire point of 4chan's stunt was to deceive peop
28.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
It's not just the tone - there are plenty of religious people who flatly disagree with the moral claim above. "The baby is going to die, so this isn't murder, and it's going to suffer, so this is mercy" is not neces
29.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
Twitter has an actual post up announcing the policy, with a fair bit more detail on tiers of actions and reasons for actions. (The big one that alarms me is "reduced visibility", which seems far more manipulative than labeling or
30.
by Bartweiss 7y ago
My first thought was that scope creep from facts to implication is what broke down trust in Snopes. Per their blog, it appears they have several tiers of action but what standard label. I imagine that the first time people see "false&q

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