Downvoting posts because you don’t want to see more posts like them is how vote-based moderation works. It’s not a fallacy to discourage behavior that you want to see less of.
Brendan Long
Karma: 1,102
No, I don’t want Less Wrong to turn into the Onion or the Daily Show. I enjoy reading the Onion sometimes, but it would be a waste to turn Less Wrong into that.
Criticizing leaders is fine though (although SBF isn’t one here, as far as I know).
I really don’t think LessWrong is the place for personal attacks, whether or not the target has done something bad.
This is what me and my roommate do and it works great. Filling the detergent slot when you finish unloading the dishwasher takes almost no time, and it’s a very obvious signal.
A lot of ICBM’s are capable of launching >10 MT warheads, but my understanding is that the US and Russia don’t actually use such large warheads because it’s more useful to launch 6-10 much smaller warheads instead.
It had read something previously about how huge nuclear weapons aren’t very useful so non-test weapons tend to be MT or less range.
Wikipedia says the highest yield weapon in the US arsenal is the B83 bomb at 1.2 MT.
Russia’s nuclear arsenal is more confusing but sources seem to all agree that their biggest weapons in active use are in the 745 kT to 1.2 MT range. Some examples are the R-39 which apparently currently uses 750 kT warheads or the [Topol M] with a 1 MT warhead.
Why are you planning for an experimental 50 MT weapon when the biggest one in Russia’s actual arsenal is 1 MT (and most are smaller)?
Does the construction cost take the costs of one to infinity years of legal delays into account? I’m pretty sure if people could build affordable housing with a 25% yearly return, they’d already be doing it.
The idea of getting the funding from locals to make the delays less likely might help, although it only takes a small number of loud people to delay construction.
I think movie theaters are only profitable because of food sales, although I assume this is a price discrimination thing where going to the theater and not buying food is still better for the theater than not going at all, it’s just not good enough for them to survive (with their current business models) if everyone did that.
I haven’t really found this to be much of a problem. The prewash cycle should be long enough to rehydrate anything that dried out. Dry things that won’t come off (like baked cheese or eggs) won’t come off if you wash them instantly either.
Also you could just run the dishwasher half-empty and it’s probably still more water and energy efficient.
Aren’t there limits to how much water you can pump out of an aquafer before destroying it?
This seems to be the official legal argument:
The Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, Pub. L. No. 108-76, 117 Stat. 904 (2003) (codified at 20 U.S.C. §§ 1098aa–1098ee) (“HEROES Act of 2003,” or “HEROES Act”), vests the Secretary of Education (“Secretary”) with expansive authority to alleviate the hardship that federal student loan recipients may suffer as a result of national emergencies. The Act provides that the Secretary may “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to” federal student loan programs if the Secretary “deems” such actions “necessary to ensure that” certain statutory objectives are achieved. 20 U.S.C. § 1098bb(a)(1)–(2). One of those objectives is to ensure that “recipients of student financial assistance . . . are not placed in a worse position financially in relation to that financial assistance because of” a national emergency. Id. § 1098bb(a)(2)(A). In 2020, the Secretary invoked this authority in response to the COVID −19 pandemic to suspend the repayment obligation and to waive interest payments on student loans for every borrower in the United States with a loan held by the federal government. See Federal Student Aid Programs, 85 Fed. Reg. 79,856, 79,862 (Dec. 11, 2020). Prior Secretaries have exercised the same authority to categorically waive statutory and regulatory obligations for borrowers residing or working in a disaster area in connection with a national emergency and for borrowers who suffered economic hardship as a result of a national emergency.
So the argument seems to be that the Secretary of Education (who works for the President and will likely do whatever they’re told to do) was given the authority to “waive statutory and regulatory obligations for borrowers residing or working in a disaster area in connection with a national emergency and for borrowers who suffered economic hardship as a result of a national emergency”, everyone* suffered economic hardship as a result of COVID, and waiving entire debts is one way of waiving obligations.
I think you’re right that there’s a good chance the Supreme Court won’t allow this. Theoretically, Congress isn’t supposed to delegate the authority make laws or spend money, but the Supreme Court usually allows it.. up to a point. Spending half a trillion dollars on to protect people from the impact of COVID… in mid-2022.. seems like it might be too far for the Supreme Court. Not to mention that the current Supreme Court is probably not super impressed by an obvious attempt to bribe Democrats.
I would recommend:
Get your resume in good shape
Apply to some places
Consider using friends/people you’ve worked with to get past initial HR filters
Use feedback from interviews to figure out where you should improve
For the resume, I’d recommend hiring someone to help, since you can get direct feedback from people with recruiting/hiring experience in the field. I found the resume review service from levels.fyi to be useful, but I didn’t really shop around and I’m sure there’s plenty of other good ones. The important thing here is that you want to talk to someone who knows what a software engineer resume should look like.
Note that even if your resume isn’t very good, if you have someone who can vouch for you at a company, that will usually get you past the initial resume filter. You’ll still need to pass the rest of the interviews but it can be really helpful with big companies, and at smaller companies a reference might lower the bar for the rest of the interview process too.
For the interviewing/feedback piece, I’ve found that the biggest companies are generally pretty unhelpful (hope you like form rejection letters telling you to consider going to school or something), but I’d say most of the companies I’ve applied at that aren’t huge will give some sort of feedback. Sometimes it’s vague but still somewhat useful (“we don’t think your experience is a good match for this job”) and sometimes it’s surprisingly specific (Stripe gave me feedback on each of my interviews seperately, and told me exactly why they didn’t hire me).
I haven’t talked about leetcode questions much since if you’ve already done dozens of them, it’s probably not the weak point for you anyway. One thing to do here is that if you can technically do the questions, it’s worth also putting in some effort to do them as nicely as possible (simple code, non-wasteful performance, good variable/function names, etc.). Pretty much any professional software engineer should be able to review this for you since it’s the same as reviewing a pull request, and you could try the Code Review Stack Exchange too (although I think the average Stack Exchange users is relatively junior and they sometimes give strange advice).
I largely agree, but most apps will let you listen to things at faster speeds if you want to (my max speed is 1.25x − 1.5x depending on content dryness though).
I would expect grad students to have very little experience and you could hire people with similar levels of experience (junior engineers) with normal university wages.
I agree that the connection to lithium seems pretty weak, although it’s possible there’s still something special about potatoes (maybe potassium?). The two weird things with the potato diet are the increased energy (the opposite of how most diets work?) and that it seems to work fine even if you “cheat” constantly. Note that olive oil and (lots of) salt were recommended as part of this, so I think most of us weren’t eating bland boiled potatoes.
That said, it’s possible the only special thing here is that potatoes are just really convenient for a no-variety diet.
For the weirdness around how they did this / didn’t preregister, I thought they were pretty upfront about how this was exploratory (trying to generate hypotheses and see if the effect is plausible, not confirm a hypothesis). The next step would be a more serious experiment like the Potato Camp they mentioned.
Doing it this way lets them figure out what to focus more expensive / complicated studies on without wasting time and money (like if they ran a big experiment without peeling the potatoes and it ended up being a complete waste).
I think doing this kind of thing is really important because trying to make everything safe means we frequently don’t do useful science (see: we let millions of people die to avoid letting volunteers take risks in vaccine studies). Doing more mad science is a useful correction. That said, I think it’s important to remind volunteers that they shouldn’t keep going if the mad science is hurting them. I get the impression SMTM was trying to tell people this but they probably should have been more direct about telling people saying they’re not feeling good to stop.
The only cases I can think of where cars are an important signal are dating (not having a car signals that you’re poor) and entry level jobs (where the ability to show up to work on time is 90% of the qualifications). I don’t think either of those things apply to you though.
Major brand prebuilts have a bad reputation (I’ve never bought one so I don’t know), so if you wanted something close to what you’d get by building it yourself, here’s a similar configuration from iBuyPower:
https://www.ibuypower.com/store/intel-z690-plus-ultra-pc-daily-deal?wid=1765335
Note that this wouldn’t ship until 7⁄22 so I’m not sure if that’s even an option. You can pay $50 more to have it supposedly ship around 7⁄15.
Due to some deals they have going on, you might as well get a slightly nicer CPU than I’d bother with on the Dell, and I suspect this PC would be quieter than the Dell version.
This version cuts a few things you could upgrade if you wanted to:
Make it a little quieter by picking one of the 360mm processor cooling fan options (bigger fans don’t need to spin as fast so they’re quieter) ($133 more)
Make it a little easier to upgrade memory in the future by picking the 2-stick RAM configuration ($100 more)
Upgrade to a Corsair power supply to have a vague feeling of better reliability ($56 more)
Increase memory or pick a different video card if you want to
No one is arguing that SBF didn’t run a scam because, as far as I can tell, most people on this site think SBF did run a scam (more specifically, stole his customers’ money to prop up his other business). There’s very little discussion of this here because the Less Wrong-adjacent EA Forum is more relevant, but the posts on that site are highly critical of SBF right now.
The problem with this post is a moderation issue: Less Wrong isn’t the right place to post songs about how bad people are, even if they are actually bad.