Vitor

Karma: 822

Vitor Sep 18, 2022, 9:37 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: antoine’s comment on: A Brief Introduction to Container Logistics
It’s more the latter. At the local level, salespeople are supposed to have a very good handle of their clients’ future demand. A lot of the trade is also seasonal, and rises and falls in a correlated way (e.g. fruit exports will have good/bad years depending on climate)

When it comes to overall economic trends, I don’t really know. That stuff was handled way above my paygrade by global HQ. But it definitely can happen that a certain route requests many empty boxes to be shipped to them, only to have them sitting there because projected demand did not materialize. These kind of imbalances can be corrected by letting them drain away over time; demand doesn’t shift so much that net importer/exporter status of a region flips. This “passive” management ends up being cheaper most of the time.

Vitor Sep 4, 2022, 10:35 PM
6 points
8
in reply to: gbear605’s comment on: The ethics of reclining airplane seats
Exactly. The worst transatlantic flight I ever had was one where I paid for “extra legroom”. turns out it was a seat without a seat in front, i.e., the hallway got broader there.

However, other passengers and even the flight attendants certainly didn’t act like this extra legroom belonged to me. Someone even stepped on my foot! On top of that I had to use an extremely flimsy table that folded out of the armrest.

Since most of us aren’t weekly business flyers, this is a far cry from a free market.

Vitor Jul 11, 2022, 11:15 PM
1 point
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in reply to: CraigMichael’s comment on: I’ve become a medical mystery and I don’t know how to effectively get help
Yes, it’s mostly a diagnosis of exclusion. But Bayesian evidence starts piling up much sooner than a doctor is willing to write down a diagnosis on an Official Piece of Paper. However, there are some tell-tale signs like the myofascial trigger points mentioned by others, heightened pain when touching specific bones (e.g. the vertebrae), and other specific patterns how the body reacts to stimulus. This is the domain of rheumatologists.

Are your sleep issues stress-related? Like jumpiness, unable to settle into the relaxation of falling asleep? What I’m getting at here is that there are two broad classes of sleep issues. In one, you have trouble falling asleep, in the other, your sleep is not restful because you’re too tense, in a way that persists through the process of falling asleep. The latter is really really bad, as it leads to chronic sleep deprivation because your body isn’t getting good rest, even though you “put in the hours”.

The thing with psychosomatic symptoms is also that there’s a feedback loop between the pain (or weird sensations), and your mental state. As you get habituated to focusing more and more on those sensations, your brain learns to bring them up to your conscious attention more eagerly. This results in pain sensitization. Even in a situation where let’s say the pain has a clear physical cause that has been corrected, the pain can persist. The original injury was just the trigger of the problem.

It might be that your collection of symptoms is actually pain that may be mild / weird enough that you don’t recognize it as such. An easy way to test this is to take a standard dose of an over-the-counter painkiller and checking if you feel any different an hour later.

PS: feel free to send me a message anytime if you want to talk in more depth.

Vitor Jul 9, 2022, 10:44 PM
2 points
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on: I’ve become a medical mystery and I don’t know how to effectively get help
I have recently been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and your symptoms sound like they might be caused by this, or other related things like chronic fatigue syndrome or chronic pain.

You didn’t specify the kind of sleep problems you have. Pointing towards fibromyalgia would be difficulty “turning off”, not being able to fall asleep due to tension/anxiety, and waking up unrefreshed even after getting several hours of sleep.

Do you feel unusually fatigued / sleep deprived? Frequent headaches? mental fog? worse at concentrating lately? short temper?

For background info, I’ve had this condition at a low level for all my life, but it only erupted into a major issue recently, due to taking a covid vaccine. It is known that both viral infections and vaccinations can trigger long-term issues like this.

Vitor Jul 4, 2022, 2:52 PM
11 points
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on: Toni Kurz and the Insanity of Climbing Mountains
This story has been adapted into a (relatively faithful) movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Face_(film)

Vitor Jul 2, 2022, 12:05 AM
6 points
5
in reply to: MSRayne’s comment on: Who is this MSRayne person anyway?
For what it’s worth, being afraid of others’ judgements is a very normal thing. It’s also pretty normal that it gets exaggerated when one is isolated.

Now, you are a clear outlier along that dimension, but I think I can empathize with your situation at least a little bit, based on my own experiences with isolation, of which there are two: (1) for the last few years, due to complicated health issues I won’t go into right now, I am much less socially active than I’d like to be. Constantly cancelling on my friends, and being “more work” to be around has consistently been pushing me towards not even trying (2) during the recent pandemic I strictly isolated myself for months at a time, only having contact with 1 family member. This shifted my social reactions to be much more defensive, feeling easily overwhelmed, and so on. It took months to get back to a relatively “normal” baseline after things opened back up. I have a tendency towards avoidant behavior, and those two situations made it 10x worse.

I won’t give any advice, because you haven’t asked for it and I don’t have good solutions anyway. But I’d like to point out that the kind of social anxiety you’re describing (intermingled with avoidant and/or depressive behavior) can often be ameliorated by simple exposure and practice. So please don’t be too hard on yourself, and remind yourself that you’re in a place where you’re not the only weird one. Furthermore, people here will tell you in plain words if you “mess up” in any way, which so far no-one has done.

Vitor May 25, 2022, 11:37 PM
1 point
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in reply to: arunto’s comment on: Mandatory Post About Monkeypox
Our base expectation for asymptomatic spread should be quite low, because previous variants of monkeypox and smallpox (mostly) didn’t spread like that. So I disagree with your “MSM with AIDS” scenario. It wouldn’t be that surprising for the spread to be contained to the particularly vulnerable AIDS population.

Vitor Apr 16, 2022, 8:18 PM
7 points
0
on: Convince me that humanity *isn’t* doomed by AGI
“Foom” has never seemed plausible to me. I’m admittedly not well-versed in the exact arguments used by proponents of foom, but I have roughly 3 broad areas of disagreement:
1. Foom rests on the idea that once any agent can create an agent smarter than itself, this will inevitably lead to a long chain of exponential intelligence improvements. But I don’t see why the optimization landscape of the “design an intelligence” problem should be this smooth. To the contrary, I’d expect there to be lots of local optima: architectures that scale to a certain level and then end up at a peak with nowhere to go. Humans are one example of an intelligence that doesn’t grow without bound.
2. Resource constraints are often hand-waved away. We can’t turn the world to computronium at the speed required for a foom scenario. We can’t even keep up with GPU demand for cryptocurrencies. Even if we assume unbounded computronium, large-scale actions in the physical world require lots of physical resources.
3. Intelligence isn’t all-powerful. This cuts in two directions. First, there are strategic settings where a relatively low level of intelligence already allows you to play optimally (e.g. tic-tac-toe). Second, there are problems for which no amount of intelligence will help, because the only way to solve them is to throw lots of raw computation at them. Our low intelligence makes it hard for us to identify such problems, but they definitely exist (as shown in every introductory theoretical computer science lecture).

Vitor Apr 16, 2022, 7:44 PM
7 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: A Quick Guide to Confronting Doom
This phrasing bothers me a bit. It presupposes that it is only a matter of time; that there’s no error about the nature of the threat AGI poses, and no order-of-magnitude error in the timeline. The pessimism is basically baked in.

Vitor Mar 29, 2022, 7:38 PM
1 point
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in reply to: 9eB1’s comment on: Humans pretending to be robots pretending to be human
Right, but we wouldn’t then use this as proof that our children are precocious politicians!

In this discussion, we need to keep separate the goals of making GPT-3 as useful a tool as possible, and of investigating what GPT-3 tells us about AI timelines.

Vitor Mar 29, 2022, 8:53 AM
6 points
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in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Humans pretending to be robots pretending to be human
It is definitely misleading, in the same sense that the performance of a model on the training data is misleading. The interesting question w.r.t. GPT-3 is “how well does it perform in novel settings?”. And we can’t really know that, because apparently even publicly available interfaces are inside the training loop.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with training an AI like that! But the results then need to be interpreted with more care.

P.S.: sometimes children do parrot their parents to an alarming degree, e.g., about political positions they couldn’t possibly have the context to truly understand.

Vitor Mar 26, 2022, 10:35 AM
23 points
0
on: Your risk of developing long COVID is probably high
I’m sorry, but I have a very hard time believing your 1-15% range for long-term disability. If 15% of the labor force lost (say) half their productivity, we would already be seeing severe economic consequences across the board (all industries, worldwide).

I didn’t follow your calculations, but I do know that some monitoring projects define long covid as “having any symptom on a list (fatigue, more frequent headaches, etc) a few months after infection”. This is the proper definition from a scientific perspective: if we want to understand long covid, we want to capture it at all levels of severity and in many different manifestations. But this obviously produces a huge overestimate in terms of severe cases, as it also captures the upper range of the usual fluctuations of these symptoms.

Vitor Jan 12, 2022, 1:24 PM
2 points
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in reply to: birdy’s comment on: An Observation of Vavilov Day
Take electrolytes. This is a mixture of salts your body needs, without them you might get muscle cramps and pain. You can get them at a pharmacy in powdered form.

Light exercise is good, heavy exercise is bad.

Other than that, try to stay relaxed, but still somewhat busy.

Vitor Jan 4, 2022, 10:00 PM
9 points
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in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: An Observation of Vavilov Day
24h is not enough time to produce the physiological changes typical for fasting. That requires ~72h. I’m not saying that skipping a meal or two, doing intermittent “fasting” and so on aren’t good things, you just shouldn’t confuse them with an actual fast.

It takes around 12 hours until your stomach is empty (depending on what you ate before obviously). At ~24h, your body’s glycogen reserves deplete, but the fat burning process is just beginning in earnest. This is the hardest point IME. At ~72h, you’re in full starvation mode and symptoms should start to decrease. I’ve never gone longer than 72h though.

W.r.t. blood sugar, you usually have a dip around expected mealtimes (your body adapts to your habits and secretes insulin in anticipation of eating), but the truly hard period is between hours 24 and 72.

Vitor Dec 29, 2021, 11:16 PM
9 points
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in reply to: NoSignalNoNoise’s comment on: COVID Skepticism Isn’t About Science
Opposition to vaccines comes in various gradings and flavors. I think it’s pretty clear that initial vaccination has positive expected value for almost everyone. But it’s much less clear if a booster shot can claim the same value proposition: it has a much smaller direct benefit to the bostee, so the argument for it is mostly based on solidarity. Is that enough to make it mandatory?

You can also be pro vaccines but against public policy about them. There has been some amount of goalpost shifting, e.g., in the scope and duration of covid passes. In some places, there was an implicit deal on the table: get vaccinated and you will be allowed to visit restaurants and bars. But a few months later this was changed to requiring recent vaccination (4 months instead of 12). Regardless of whether you think that’s a good motivation to get vaccination, the promise has clearly been broken.

Vitor Dec 29, 2021, 6:29 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Omicron Post #10
For reference, in neighboring Switzerland we did not stall with any significant lockdowns, and omicron is starting to take over only this week. Yesterday was the first time a clear uptick was visible in total case counts (delta + omicron), after a period of case counts being almost flat.

Vitor Dec 29, 2021, 6:06 PM
14 points
0
on: Does Braess’s paradox show up in markets?
Perhaps this is a more theoretical answer than what you’re looking for, but this kind of thing can be a problem in combinatorial auctions, even though they’re designed to find a globally optimal allocation of goods.

Just think of the road segments as individual goods, with bidders (drivers) making bids on bundles of roads they intend to use. The auction then finds the best possible allocation of roads (maximizing the sum of bidders’ reported utilities), and charges the winners some amount of money via a pricing rule (see below).

A pricing rules often used in auction is VCG (Vickrey-Clarke-Groves). Instead of paying your bid on the bundle that you won, you just have to pay the externality you impose on others by participating in the auction, which is always less than your winning bid. This is super nice because it makes the auction strategyproof, i.e., it’s a dominant strategy to reveal your true values for each bundle of road segments.

Now, you would expect that when more goods are introduced, the competition for those goods must decrease, making prices cheaper on average. However, under VCG payments you don’t have this kind of monotonicity: adding a road segment to the supply can increase the VCG payments while leaving the allocation unchanged. That’s a recreation of the paradox, just in a different domain.

I’m just sticking with roads as the example, but this might in principle happen in any auction where goods are complements (= bidders might value a bundle more than the sum of the individual goods it’s made of).

Vitor Dec 15, 2021, 9:45 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Omicron Post #6
data from Switzerland: https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/epidemiologic/virus-variants

Vitor Dec 10, 2021, 10:28 AM
5 points
0
on: Covid 12/9: Counting Down the Days
The referendum in Switzerland was definitely not a vote for a “vaccine passport”. It was a vote that approved the covid certificate (vaccinated, recovered or tested) in a bundle among many other covid measures (funding for impacted businesses etc).

Vitor Nov 26, 2021, 5:46 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Lukas Finnveden’s comment on: Rapid Increase of Highly Mutated B.1.1.529 Strain in South Africa
This is south africa’s number of reported covid cases. There’s a huge spike on nov 23.

The south african health ministry is claiming (in the slides linked elsewhere in these comments) that they reacted incredibly fast, publicly communicating the finding of the new variant to the world within 36 hours. But the numbers reported here look exactly like you’d expect if someone had deliberately sat on the data for several days, and then released it all at once.

Also, the graph (in the post) showing the proportion of different variants needs to be taken with a grain of salt. That graph makes it look like the new variant is taking over brutally fast, much faster than the delta variant did in its day. But if the reporting of cases is this uneven, then we cannot extrapolate any short-term trend at all.

EDIT: just saw Gurkenglas’ other comment. If the data is wrong then my interpretation is irrelevant. But I’d still caution people to not jump the gun in predicting this new variant’s behavior based on very little data.