fezziwig

Karma: 859

fezziwig Oct 6, 2014, 3:28 PM
1 point
in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 6 - Oct. 12, 2014
I had a similar problem a while back (given a bunch of one-sided cards, I wanted to programmatically generate their inverses). I couldn’t find anything either, and wound up scripting my browser(!?).

fezziwig Jul 2, 2014, 6:23 PM
7 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: A Parable of Elites and Takeoffs
I’d like to address your other points, but I think we have to talk about your last paragraph first.

You’re quite right; that the cold war did not end the world in our particular branch is not proof that the cold war was survivable in more than a tiny handful of possible worlds. But let me remind you in turn that “von Neumann’s plan would have been worse than the cold war” is not the same as “the cold war was safe”, “the cold war was good”, “the cold war doesn’t share any of the weaknesses of von Neumann’s plan”, or even “the cold war was terrible but still the best choice we had”. I’m arguing only that narrow thing: that our forefathers were right to reject von Neumann’s plan.

Fair enough?

fezziwig Jul 1, 2014, 8:48 PM
0 points
in reply to: fezziwig’s comment on: A Parable of Elites and Takeoffs
(Though for what it’s worth, I actually do agree with your point about AI, insofar as the analogy holds: we could get into a Cold-War-like situation and humanity would probably not enjoy the result. I just don’t think world conquest is the answer.)

fezziwig Jul 1, 2014, 8:46 PM
15 points
on: A Parable of Elites and Takeoffs

So one of the involved researchers—a bona fide world-renowned genius who had made signal contributions to the design of the computers and software involved and had the utmost credibility—made the obvious suggestion. Don’t let the arms race start. … Instead, Nacirema should boldly deliver an ultimatum to the rival: submit to examination and verification that they were not developing the tech, or be destroyed.

Damn those politicians! Damn their laziness and greed! If only they’d had the courage to take over the world, then everything would have been fine!

Don’t misunderstand; that’s what’s being proposed here. Hegemony would not have been enough. You need inspectors in all the research institutions, experienced in the local language language and culture. You need air inspections of every place a pile might be constructed, quite challenging in 1945. You need to do these things not just to your rival, but to everyone who aspires to become your rival. You need your allies to comply, voluntarily or not. Whenever anyone challenges your reign openly, you have to be willing and able to destroy them utterly. You can’t miss even once, because when you do you won’t get nuclear war, you’ll get nuclear terrorism.

And you have to go on doing all this until nuclear weapons cease to be a world-ending threat. That is to say, forever.

This strategy probably is the best one for short-circuiting the Cold War. It’s still a terrible plan. Between that plan and nothing our elites made the right choice, and if they did it out of inertia instead of careful calculation then it’s not argument against them, it’s an argument in favor of inertia.

fezziwig Jun 26, 2014, 4:03 PM
11 points
in reply to: Ander’s comment on: Open thread, 23-29 June 2014
Short answer: this popped up on r/programming the other day. Lots of interesting questions there, and they don’t come with answers. This will force you to solve them yourself, without spoilers, which is an incredibly valuable exercise which I strongly recommend for any questions you ask.

Long answer: you’re going to have to unpack your intentions a little. You only have an hour (or less!), and you want to provide the maximum possible resolving power, so to do the best possible job you must know what your company’s decision criteria are for this employee, and also what kinds of evidence your fellow interviewers are going to provide. “Ask technical questions” is too broad a mandate to be really ideal, so here are some questions which might help:

Do you need to do a basic competence check? This is a concrete coding question which a minimally capable developer can solve on a whiteboard, with fully correct syntax, in five minutes or less. Fizzbuzz is the canonical example; I’ve also seen “write a function to determine whether an input string is a palindrome” used to good effect. The point of this question is to efficiently divide your candidate pool into “people who maybe ask a few clarifying questions and then write out a correct, compilable answer as quickly as they can move the whiteboard marker” and “people who fumble around for half an hour and eventually come to something that’s kinda right”. Senior candidates will sometimes balk at this, especially if they’re older than you are; I’ve found it works well to present the problem as a warmup, before you get to the more interesting stuff.

Do they have to already know the languages/tools you use? If so, then you have to drill down on that. Write down a bunch of things which you do in your env every day, pick a random subset, and ask your candidate how to do them. Java people need to know the difference between overloading and overriding, Javascript people had better be able to explain callbacks, and so forth.

How important is it that the candidate be able to solve new problems from scratch? To evaluate this, you want a problem which is novel and not easily solved with a standard algorithm. From the link above, “Add two strings. For example “”423“ + “99” = “522”” is a good example of this sort of problem, I think (or else I just don’t know the standard algorithm). For contrast, question #46 is not good for this: some candidates will have read about reader/writer locks and will immediately start reciting various algorithms and tradeoffs, while others won’t have and are stuck trying to solve what was once an open research problem in the final half hour of your interview.

What algorithms/data structures must they already have mastered? Everybody needs arrays and hash tables, most people need sets and graphs. Good is to ask people to explain them, better is to ask a question that’s easily solved using them.

Do they need to understand the hardware? Probably not, but maybe you’re developing for a console, or doing embedded work, or something.

That got really long, and I don’t have time to make it shorter. Sorry. tl;dr be mindful: know what your criteria are before you ask the questions, not afterward when you’re trying to judge the answers.

fezziwig Jun 4, 2014, 2:10 PM
1 point
in reply to: Yaakov T’s comment on: Rationality Quotes June 2014
Because certainty is higher status than uncertainty.

fezziwig Jun 3, 2014, 9:20 PM
2 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: June 2014 Media Thread

Just a matter of time.

Unfortunately perf isn’t the only roadblock here; middleware is a real problem too. Even if you write your game in Python, your AI, physics, and tree-drawing components were all written by somebody else, in C++. No matter how good your bindings are you have to do some data conversion every time you talk to one of those libraries, or else use C++ data types in your Python game engine.

That’s not to say that soft real time constraints and tight bounds on memory usage and so forth aren’t also hard problems, just that even if you have those things you still need the ability to carve out 12 bytes, put 3 4-bytes floats inside, and give it to Havok unaltered. Eventually people will port Havok and SpeedTree and such to your HLL (or write new better ones), but it’s a chicken and egg problem: no one will do that until there’s a robust market of studios using the language.

fezziwig Jun 3, 2014, 8:45 PM
2 points
in reply to: NancyLebovitz’s comment on: Open thread, 3-8 June 2014
What is she ultimately trying to achieve? More aggressive reminders than a normal calendar app can give you?

Also: computer or smartphone?

fezziwig May 12, 2014, 8:08 PM
3 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: A Dialogue On Doublethink
Yes, it’s pretty much impossible to tell a lie without hurting other people, or at least interfering with them; that’s the point of lying, after all. But right now we’re talking about the harm one does to oneself by lying; I submit that there needn’t be any.

fezziwig May 9, 2014, 7:47 PM
3 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: A Dialogue On Doublethink
You’ve drawn an important distinction, between believing a lie and telling one. Your formulation is correct, but Eliezer’s is wrong.

fezziwig May 9, 2014, 7:41 PM
2 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: A Dialogue On Doublethink
You’ve drawn an important distinction, between believing a lie and telling one. Right now we’re talking about lying to ourselves so the difference isn’t very great, but be very careful with that quote in general.

fezziwig May 8, 2014, 7:17 PM
12 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: A Dialogue On Doublethink
I think you’ve identified a special case of a more general problem, which is that true beliefs do not have equal value, and that their values can vary wildly with your circumstances. To borrow blacktrance’s example: if you’re living in 6th-century Rome then it’s useful to know that Jews aren’t inherently evil...but it’s more useful to know what happens to people who say so. And if you don’t know how to profess that Jews are inherently evil without being corrupted by that lie, then it’s more important to learn that than it is to believe true things about Jews.

This discipline, of predicting the value of information before you’ve learned it, is very difficult. For me, it’s the most difficult thing. But it’s also the center of the art; if it weren’t, we could all level up endlessly by browsing Wikipedia.

fezziwig May 6, 2014, 11:35 PM
5 points
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: May Monthly Bragging Thread
I followed a link to this post from “Recent Comments” because I wanted to know what bug you’d managed to reproduce. It took me a minute to figure out my mistake. Congratulations!

fezziwig Apr 30, 2014, 2:49 PM
2 points
in reply to: christopherj’s comment on: Questions to ask theist philosophers? I will soon be speaking with several
FWIW these questions have standard answers in Christian doctrine: he didn’t want to be tortured to death, but he wanted to do God’s will more than he not-wanted to be crucified. Part of the point of the story is that you don’t have to cheerfully volunteer, you just have to volunteer. It’s ok to be sad or afraid.

fezziwig Apr 28, 2014, 7:27 PM
0 points
in reply to: sixes_and_sevens’s comment on: Open Thread, April 27-May 4, 2014
FWIW, I also read it as an insult. And though I do believe you that that wasn’t your intent, I don’t see how else to read it even now.

fezziwig Apr 24, 2014, 5:43 PM
0 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: How to always have interesting conversations
I’m very late to this party, but just in case: to a mundane, “what ho” doesn’t look like a casual, old-timey greeting, it looks like a typo for “what a ho”. Maybe that’s what went wrong here.

fezziwig Apr 9, 2014, 6:18 PM
6 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014
Right, sorry, that wasn’t clear: parody is a defense, but I doubt it would work in this case because you’re not parodying the material you used, you’re just creating a funny derived work.

fezziwig Apr 9, 2014, 2:06 PM
1 point
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014
There are lots of lolcat builders out there, but this is the only one I’ve used: http://builder.cheezburger.com/Builder

You’re on your own for legally available images, though. I think the community consensus is that it doesn’t matter because parody or whatever, which is not a legitimate legal defense, but I don’t think anybody’s been sued yet.

fezziwig Apr 9, 2014, 1:49 PM
4 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Google vs Wikipedia, for-profit vs not-for-profit
I found your summary a little misleading. When I followed your link, I found this:

“Finally, there’s a little bit of monarchy – which is my role in the community,” he said. “Like the monarch in the UK, most of the role is waving and giving speeches, but I do have certain powers in the community that I almost never use, and if I did would probably lead to me losing the role.”

fezziwig Apr 8, 2014, 3:04 PM
8 points
in reply to: JoshuaFox’s comment on: Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014
I can’t speak for everybody, but some of us are judging it by comparison to other fanfiction instead of other fiction generally. I’d agree that HPMoR doesn’t stack up against good Sanderson or Pratchettt, say, but judged in the reference class of fanfiction it’s pretty extraordinary.