korin43

• korin43 4 Apr 2019 15:36 UTC

  1 point

  on: Could waste heat be­come an en­vi­ron­ment prob­lem in the fu­ture (cen­turies)?

  I’d like to ques­tion both as­sump­tions (2) and (3).

  For (2), it’s not clear to me that “more en­ergy” is the thing peo­ple want. Some things we do re­quire a lot of en­ergy (trans­porta­tion, man­u­fac­tur­ing) but some things that are re­ally im­por­tant use sur­pris­ingly lit­tle power (the in­ter­net).

  For (3), it seems like we’ve been mov­ing in the di­rec­tion of more-effi­ciency for a long time (bet­ter en­g­ines and tur­bines to con­vert more of the fuel into use­ful en­ergy, fewer losses to fric­tion and trans­mis­sion, etc.).

  Over­all, I think we’re see­ing an up­ward trend in power us­age be­cause more peo­ple are get­ting the full benefit of mod­ern tech­nol­ogy, not be­cause mod­ern tech­nol­ogy is us­ing more power per per­son. I wish I could find a long-term graph, but per-cap­i­tal power con­sump­tion in the United States has been go­ing down for a few years, and to­tal power con­sump­tion in the United States has been flat since around 1995: https://​​en.wikipe­dia.org/​​wiki/​​En­ergy_in_the_United_States#Con­sump­tion Another way of putting this is that it’s not that cars are us­ing more gas, it’s that a lot more peo­ple have cars. This means that in the short-term we can ex­pect en­ergy us­age to con­tinue go­ing up for a while, but it could plau­si­bly peak if/​​when the global pop­u­la­tion peaks and we finish the pro­ject of end­ing wor­ld­wide poverty.

  For (1) I could nit­pick since fis­sion could also power our civ­i­liza­tion for a long time, al­though I don’t think it re­ally effects the ques­tion you’re ask­ing.

• korin43 19 Feb 2019 15:52 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: PeterMcCluskey's comment on: Why didn’t Agoric Com­put­ing be­come pop­u­lar?

  When deal­ing with re­sources on the in­ter­net, you’re run­ning into the “trad­ing off some­thing cheap for some­thing ex­pen­sive” is­sue again. I could *right now* spend sev­eral days/​ weeks write a pro­gram that dy­nam­i­cally looks up how ex­pen­sive it is to run some al­gorithm on ar­bi­trary cloud providers and run on the cheap­est one (or wait if the price is too high), but it would be much faster for me to just do a quick Google search and hard-code to the cheap­est provider right now. They might not always be the cheap­est but it’s prob­a­bly not worth thou­sands of dol­lars of my time to op­ti­mize this more than that.

  Re­gard­ing writ­ing a pro­gram to dy­nam­i­cally lookup more com­pli­cated re­sources like al­gorithms and data.. I don’t know how you would do this with­out a gen­eral-pur­pose pro­gram­mer-equiv­a­lent AI. I think maybe your view of pro­gram­ming se­ri­ously un­der­es­ti­mates how hard this is. Prob­a­bly 95% of data sci­ence is find­ing good sources of data, get­ting them into a some­what-ma­chine-read­able-form, clean­ing them up, and do­ing var­i­ous val­i­da­tions that the data makes any sense. If it was triv­ial for pro­grams to use ar­bi­trary data on the in­ter­net, there would be much big­ger ad­vance­ments than agoric com­put­ing.

• korin43 16 Feb 2019 17:06 UTC

  9 points

  on: Why didn’t Agoric Com­put­ing be­come pop­u­lar?

  I think the prob­lem with this is that mar­kets are a com­pli­cated and highly in­effi­cient tool for co­or­di­nat­ing re­source con­sump­tion among com­pet­ing in­di­vi­d­u­als with­out need­ing an all-know­ing re­source-al­lo­ca­tor. This is ex­tremely use­ful when you need to co­or­di­nate re­source con­sump­tion among com­pet­ing in­di­vi­d­u­als, but in the case of pro­gram­ming, the func­tions in your pro­gram aren’t re­ally com­pet­ing in the same way (there’s a limited pool of re­sources, but for the most part they each need a pre­cise amount of mem­ory, disk space, CPU time, etc. and no more and no less).

  There also is a close-enough-to-all-know­ing re­source al­lo­ca­tor (the pro­gram­mer or sys­tem ad­minis­tra­tor). The mar­ket model ac­tu­ally sounds like a plau­si­bly-work­able way to do pro­filing, but it would be less over­head to just in­stru­ment ev­ery func­tion to re­port what re­sources it uses and then cen­tal-plan your re­source econ­omy.

  In short, if ev­ery­one is a mind­less au­toma­ton who takes only what they need and performs ex­actly what oth­ers re­quire of them, and if the cen­tral plan­ner can eas­ily know ex­actly what re­sources ex­ist and who wants them, then cen­tral plan­ning works fine and mar­kets are overkill (at least in the sense of be­ing a use­ful tool; cap­i­tal­ism-as-a-moral-sys­tem is out-of-scope when talk­ing about com­puter pro­grams).

  Note that even in cases like Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, the re­source track­ing and cur­rency is just there to charge the end-user. Very few pro­grams take these costs into ac­count while they’re ex­e­cut­ing (the ex­cep­tion is EC2 in­stance spot-pric­ing, but I think it’s a stretch to even call that agoric com­put­ing).

  Also, one other thing to con­sider is that agoric com­put­ing trades off some­thing re­ally, re­ally cheap (com­put­ing re­sources) for some­thing re­ally, re­ally ex­pen­sive (pro­gram­mer time). Most peo­ple don’t even bother pro­filing be­cause pro­gram­mer time is dra­mat­i­cally more valuable than com­puter parts.

• korin43 11 Feb 2019 18:07 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: T3t's comment on: Min­i­mize Use of Stan­dard In­ter­net Food Delivery

  The thing I don’t un­der­stand is how the mar­ket got (and stays) this way. Slice suc­cess­fully cre­ated a new (much lower mar­gin) ser­vice for this. Why is ev­ery­one else putting up with 30% fees on some­thing that’s triv­ial to re­place? For ex­am­ple, why aren’t all of the busi­nesses us­ing ChowNow?

  Pre­sum­ably part of this is that some or­der­ing sys­tems get top billing in places like Google Maps, but given that Google Maps seems to show ev­ery or­der sys­tem un­der the sun, it can’t be *that* hard to get a new one in there.

  Also that ar­ti­cle seems to equiv­o­cate be­tween ser­vices like UberEats that provide their own de­liv­ery drivers and are plau­si­bly worth pay­ing a large fee to and ser­vices like GrubHub that are just on­line or­der sys­tems and could pre­sum­ably be triv­ially re­placed.

• korin43 24 Jan 2019 21:34 UTC

  1 point

  on: “AlphaS­tar: Mas­ter­ing the Real-Time Strat­egy Game StarCraft II”, Deep­Mind [won 10 of 11 games against hu­man pros]

  Looks like you can watch the game vs TLO here: https://​​www.youtube.com/​​watch?v=DpRPfidTjDA

  I can’t find the later games vs MaNa yet.

• korin43 20 Jan 2019 19:17 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Solnassant's comment on: Cloth­ing For Men

  Haha writ­ing my com­ments was way eas­ier since you already cov­ered the hard parts in the ar­ti­cle so I can just make short com­ments about the few places where I dis­agree.

• korin43 17 Jan 2019 21:12 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: Cloth­ing For Men

  I feel like this ar­ti­cle is more op­ti­mized for Euro­pean /​ con­ser­va­tive US fash­ion. In most of the places I’ve lived in the US, you could fol­low ba­si­cally the same rules but go sig­nifi­cantly more ca­sual. For ex­am­ple, you still want to get ba­si­cally the same col­ors, ma­te­rial, lo­gos, etc. but get jeans, t-shirts, and (maybe) nice-look­ing hood­ies in­stead of but­ton-up shirts, chinos and sweaters.

• korin43 17 Jan 2019 21:05 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: avturchin's comment on: Cloth­ing For Men

  I think shirts like this could help your sta­tus within small sub­cul­tures. I think the ar­ti­cle is more about how to dress to max­i­mize sta­tus for the over­ar­ch­ing cul­ture. Depend­ing on your goals it could plau­si­bly be worth it to op­ti­mize for a sub­cul­ture in­stead, al­though I think the cases of that are prob­a­bly un­com­mon (since most sub­cul­tures are fine with nor­mal fash­ion too).

• korin43 17 Jan 2019 20:56 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Cloth­ing For Men

  I up­voted this ar­ti­cle be­cause the gen­eral ad­vice is very good, al­though I dis­agree with most of the spe­cific ad­vice (the brands, which pieces of cloth­ing are most im­por­tant). Fancier com­pa­nies are gen­er­ally nice in ways that have noth­ing to do with fash­ion (nicer ma­te­ri­als, more com­fortable). Pretty much any brand works fine if you can find the right fit and col­ors. Although you may need to ex­plore mul­ti­ple brands to find clothes that fit you, it doesn’t mean you have to go straight to ex­pen­sive clothes. I can’t find any­thing that fits me at Wal­mart but ev­ery­thing at Tar­get does, and they’re very similar prices.

  I started wear­ing rel­a­tively ex­pen­sive cloth­ing in the last few years, but it’s en­tirely for rea­sons that aren’t ob­vi­ous vi­su­ally (jeans with a very slightly stretch around the waist are a lot more com­fortable, wool shirts dry quickly and don’t smell bad af­ter phys­i­cal ac­tivity).

• korin43 28 Nov 2018 15:50 UTC

  2 points

  on: Dou­ble-Dip­ping in Dun­ning—Kruger

  Please link more of your posts here. I looked through the his­tory on your blog and there are quite a few that I think would be rele­vant and use­ful for peo­ple here. In par­tic­u­lar, I think peo­ple would get a lot out of the posts about how to make friends. Some other other posts have ti­tles that look in­ter­est­ing too but I haven’t had time to read them yet.

• korin43 10 Nov 2018 2:08 UTC

  3 points

  on: Real-time hiring with pre­dic­tion markets

  I won­der if it’s just the field I’m in, but this doesn’t match what I’ve seen as a soft­ware en­g­ineer. Com­pa­nies fre­quently retroac­tively cre­ate open­ing if some­one good enough ap­plies (I’ve seen this hap­pen at ev­ery com­pany I’ve worked at, and it’s the offi­cial policy at my cur­rent com­pany).

  I also don’t think the peo­ple in charge of hiring care that much about salary (they don’t want to pay more than they need to, but re­al­is­ti­cally, how good some­one is and how long they’ll stay at a com­pany mat­ter a lot more). Part of it is that the pool of qual­ified ap­pli­cants is much smaller than most peo­ple think so the situ­a­tion of de­cid­ing be­tween two (good enough) can­di­dates for one open­ing is rare (it has never hap­pened to me).

• korin43 22 Sep 2018 13:52 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Pattern's comment on: De­sign 3: Intentionality

  I’ve been us­ing Stan­dard Notes. It’s ba­si­cally just a net­worked text ed­i­tor which can dis­play struc­tured text nicely.

• korin43 29 Mar 2018 19:35 UTC

  14 points

  on: De­sign 3: Intentionality

  I know it’s kind of a weird thing for this post to do, but this one fi­nally gave the push I needed to setup de­cent jour­nal­ing soft­ware, so I can do bet­ter plan­ning, and also have some­thing to refer­ence in daily stand-up meet­ings in­stead of try­ing to come up with a sum­mary of the pre­vi­ous day on the spot.

• korin43 7 Feb 2018 15:24 UTC

  3 points

  on: How to Create a 360 Video Player with OpenGL ES 3.0 and GLKit

  Not sure why this got voted down so badly, but I can’t get the link to work. Maybe you missed some­thing when post­ing it?

• korin43 17 Dec 2017 16:39 UTC

  3 points

  on: Se­cu­rity ser­vices re­la­tion­ship to so­cial movements

  This seems to be con­flat­ing two com­pletely differ­ent phrases that use the word se­cu­rity. Se­cu­rity mind­set has noth­ing at all to do with work­ing for a gov­ern­ment agency or be­ing a spy. It’s a similar con­cept to “an­tifrag­ility” ex­cept that you’re as­sum­ing that bad things don’t just hap­pen by chance.

• korin43 9 Dec 2017 18:48 UTC

  4 points

  on: Fix­ing sci­ence via a ba­sic income

  Wouldn’t this just push the prob­lem back, so ev­ery­one would fight over Phd pro­grams so they can get a guaran­teed in­come? I imag­ine this would se­lect for peo­ple who are good at im­press­ing schools over peo­ple who are good at re­search.

• korin43 6 Dec 2017 18:37 UTC

  0 points

  on: The Crit­i­cal Ra­tion­al­ist View on Ar­tifi­cial Intelligence

  The pur­pose of this post is not to ar­gue these claims in depth but to sum­ma­rize the Crit­i­cal Ra­tion­al­ist view on AI and also how this speaks to things like the Friendly AI Prob­lem.

  Un­for­tu­nately that makes this post not very use­ful. It’s definitely in­ter­est­ing, but you’re just mak­ing a bunch of as­ser­tions with very lit­tle ev­i­dence (mostly just that smart peo­ple like Ayn Rand and a quan­tum physi­cist agree with you).

• korin43 22 Nov 2017 17:54 UTC

  10 points

  on: An Ed­u­ca­tional Cur­ricu­lum

  I don’t know much about the spe­cific goal you’re work­ing on, but my ex­pe­rience with CS has been that the best way to learn is to work on real prob­lems with peo­ple who know what they’re do­ing. I’ve learned sig­nifi­cantly more from my in­tern­ship and jobs than I did in school, and that seems to be pretty com­mon. Rather than try­ing to de­sign a cur­ricu­lum, I’d ad­vise try­ing to find some­one do­ing what you’re in­ter­ested in and get a job/​in­tern­ship/​ap­pren­tice­ship work­ing with them. After you’ve done that for a few years, I sus­pect you’ll know what you’re not get­ting out of the cur­rent deal and can ei­ther go off on your own or find a differ­ent set of teach­ers.

• korin43 2 Nov 2017 6:36 UTC

  31 points

  in reply to: jacobjacob's comment on: The Coper­ni­can Revolu­tion from the Inside

  I feel like you may have gone too far in the other di­rec­tion then, since what I got out of this was definitely “there wasn’t any ev­i­dence for he­lio­cen­trism and peo­ple just liked it bet­ter for philo­soph­i­cal rea­sons”. As far as I know, the stan­dard sci­ence ed­u­ca­tion ex­pla­na­tion for he­lio­cen­trism in­volves new­to­nian physics, ob­ser­va­tions that peo­ple weren’t able to at this time (like you said, Ty­cho tried), and hind­sight.

  Can you ex­pand on what the ev­i­dence that should have con­vinced peo­ple was? I feel like this ar­ti­cle is a puz­zle that’s miss­ing key in­for­ma­tion.

• korin43 2 Nov 2017 5:55 UTC

  10 points

  on: Satoshi Nakamoto?

  Why would a hu­man with­draw from the ac­count but an AI wouldn’t? It seems like you’re as­sum­ing ei­ther:

  1. The cor­rect de­ci­sion is to not with­draw the money. No hu­man could be smart enough to figure this out, but an AI would. Are you an AI?

  2. The cor­rect de­ci­sion is to with­draw the money, and the AI is stupidly not do­ing it. Why is the AI stupi­der than a hu­man?

  I sup­pose Bit­coin’s waste­ful­ness would be a good cover for an AI want­ing to use a bunch of com­put­ers with­out mak­ing peo­ple sus­pi­cious. I doubt it’s the fastest way a su­per in­tel­li­gent AI could make money though.