pixodaros

6 ms·

1.
by pixodaros 4mo ago
I don't know where he lives, but I am Canadian so I find it laughable that someone with a few-week bootcamp and a few years of on-the-job coding experience can call himself an engineer in the USA. In Canada "engineer" is a ti
2.
by pixodaros 6mo ago
Google gets money for showing ads and sponsored content on the search page. If you click on a site with Google ads or Google scripts, it gets more money and monetarizable PII. So its in their interest to prioritize sites with Google ads or
3.
by pixodaros 6mo ago
One of the many things I disagree with Scott Alexander on is that to me, frequent blog updates signal poor quality not excellent writing. Its hard to come up with an independent, evidence-based opinion on something worth sharing every week,
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by pixodaros 7mo ago
In any serious engineering operation, a failure like this is time to shut down everything and redesign until the same failure cannot happen. We all read Feynman's essay on Challenger right? But these companies want credit when their
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by pixodaros 7mo ago
No chance of tenure and you don't get grad students and adjuncts busting their butts as underpaid workers for a decade, so universities have to pay them better with the money they saved by laying off a few underperformers (in the USA,
6.
by pixodaros 7mo ago
Also, that 2/2 teaching load is for a research university. The average community college professor or land-grant university professor is not teaching that little. And in lab science the professor will have a serious management and fun
7.
by pixodaros 7mo ago
I am a former academic. The tenured faculty who have 20 years of union-negotiated annual raises, and in some trendy fields or fields with business applications, earn good money for salaried workers. A newly minted Associate Professor of Lin
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by pixodaros 8mo ago
No, that article has one paragraph which frets that if Medicare drives down drug prices in the USA, pharma companies might cut R&D spending, and might get less new drugs (note the conditional and hypothetical). A colleague in biomedic
9.
by pixodaros 8mo ago
AFAIK, Medicare in the USA is forbidden by law from using its big market to drive a hard bargain like most national health services can (Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003). So its like employers paying
10.
by pixodaros 10mo ago
My site has both subscription and one-time donations. The subscriptions bring in 90% of the revenue even though more people have Paypal accounts than accounts with specific crowdfunding services.
11.
by pixodaros 10mo ago
A lot of people expect social media to serve them things to read, rather than following specific sites, and bloggers have a much keener sense of what will be rewarded by subscribers. In the old days, you could make a bit of money just from
12.
by pixodaros 10mo ago
Its worse than that. Someone wants to set him up with a lab in Austin TX. Its the CCP which thinks "maybe we should not let the mad scientist out where someone will let him continue his experiments." (A later story says that he wi
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by pixodaros 10mo ago
If something is really clearly better, people come around. Some people never will but their children and apprentices adopt the new ways. A whole community of practice experimenting is very powerful. Everyone does not move at once, but peo
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by pixodaros 10mo ago
You didn't have to punish athletes to make them wear Nike and Adidas shoes, because they were obviously better than plain sneakers. You didn't have to punish graphic artists to make them use tablets because they are so convenient
15.
by pixodaros 11mo ago
I know several full-time self-published authors and they are not spending anything like $10-30k a year on ads
16.
by pixodaros 1y ago
You could do all of those on Typepad in 2008 except sending some posts only to paying subscribers https://everything.typepad.com/blog/2009/11/feedburner-typep... You had to wait until 2017 for that https:&#x
17.
by pixodaros 1y ago
Writers move to sites like Substack (or 15 years ago blogspot) funded by other people's money like a software developer gets into an AI startup (or 5 years ago crypto). You can make bank in the short term even if you should know it wil
18.
by pixodaros 1y ago
The party line has shifted comrade. This year with posts on Richard Lynn etc. Scott Alexander is now saying in public the same thing he said in a private email: that he thinks race pseudoscientists and neoreactionaries are brilliant and pr
19.
by pixodaros 1y ago
Even GiveWell partnered with the long-termist/hypothetical risk type of EA by funding something called Open Philanthropy. And there are EA organizations which talk about "animal welfare" and mean "what if we replaced the
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by pixodaros 1y ago
GiveWell is an example of the short-termist end of EA. At the long-termist end people pay their friends to fantasize about Skynet at 'independent research institutes' like MIRI and Apollo Research. At the "trendy way to get
21.
by pixodaros 1y ago
In that essay Scott Alexander more or less says "so Richard Lynn made up numbers about how stupid black and brown people are, but we all know he was right if those mean scientists just let us collect the data to prove it." The le
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by pixodaros 1y ago
The actual Hacker News comment which I was responding to mentioned "imperial-entitled cultures ... the cultural, god-chosen center of the universe ... face culture" which sounds like he means China. The comment linked two papers,
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by pixodaros 1y ago
I think I saw Apollo Research behind a paper that was being hyped a few months ago. The longtermist/rationalist space seems to be creating a lot of new organizations with new names because a critical mass of people hear their old names
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by pixodaros 1y ago
US and California culture have lots of problems around arrogance and refusal to see or hear the rest of the world, but refusing to read research from American universities seems harsh. Because the most powerful state that has ever existed
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by pixodaros 1y ago
That singularity happened in the fifth century BCE when people figured out that they could charge silver to teach the art of rhetoric and not just teach their sons and nephews
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by pixodaros 1y ago
Scott Alexander, for what its worth, is a psychiatrist, race science enthusiast, and blogger whose closest connection to software development is Bay Area house parties and a failed startup called MetaMed (2012-2015) https://ratio
27.
by pixodaros 1y ago
The blogger is repeating (with citation) a claim by Richard Lynn, and by the end of his life Richard Lynn was open about being a 'scientific' racist who believed that different races had genes which caused large differences in ave
28.
by pixodaros 1y ago
The blogger says that the average IQ in Europe and North America is 100 but that "the mean IQ of the world is a tad less than 90 today, and it's expected to fall to about 86 by 2050." So the blogger thinks that some races a
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by pixodaros 2y ago
Your web host should provide some options such as AWstats based on the server logs. Your host may or may not make it easy to install something else.
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by pixodaros 2y ago
At least we no longer have to cite a private email to convince people that "Scott Alexander thinks black people are much stupider than white people and part of the difference is probably genetic"

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