renato

• renato 8 May 2021 16:51 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Jan Christian Refsgaard’s comment on: Pre­dic­tion and Cal­ibra­tion—Part 1

  I’m looking forward to read it, because I think one of the current bottlenecks that limit how many predictions i do is that i cannot easily compare how i’m doing week after week, and i have been looking for a model that help me check how i’m doing for several predictions.

• renato 2 May 2021 22:36 UTC

  2 points

  on: Pre­dic­tion and Cal­ibra­tion—Part 1

  Because 8.86×10−30>2.76×10−30 Person A is also a slightly better predictor than person B.

  Wait, i got confused by the function you used to assign the calibration score. It worked in that case, but it will yield higher values for those who make more ‘correct’ predictions, not those who are more calibrated. For example, person A predicts 100 things with 60% confidence, 61 of them turns out to occur and person D predicts 100 things with 60% confidence, 60 of them turns out to occur. Person D is more calibrated, but gets a lower score than person A, ~5.9e-30 vs ~8.86e-30 (and person E who made 100 predictions with 60 % confidence, which all turned out to be true, would score ~6.53e-21).

• renato 31 Jan 2021 11:27 UTC

  1 point

  on: For those who ad­vo­cate Anki

  Does anyone think that Anki is better than real life use for learning? For rote memorization, yes. For other more complex tasks, no, and it is not even its intended use.

  Or is it perhaps more of a (possibly imperfect) substitute for when one cannot avail themself of a real life usage setting to apply what they have learned?

  As others mentioned before, it is a complement for other study tools. It won’t make you fluent, and probably it will not even help you directly to read/​write/​listen/​speak, but it will make shortcuts to help you comprehend faster and make the other study sessions more effective, and it will save time for you and your tutor/​teacher from the most basic things and you’ll be able to focus on more important things that the tutor is really necessary.

  I’m not sure what are your objectives, but i recommend that you start doing some reading/​listening as soon as can, and start adding all the vocabulary you see for the first time to Anki. I noticed that they usually repeat themselves very often, specially when dealing with similar materials (like another news piece related to the one you’ve read before), and Anki will make it very easy to recall then in the “real life” and it will reinforce itself.

  For reading, i recommend trying some wikipedia articles about something you like, e.g. a game, a famous person, etc., because you will probably already know about what they are talking about and you will be able to focus on the foreign language. If you want another help, skim over the english language article, as they usually cover the same points.

  I’m not sure about korean news, but news are also a good source of reading material, despite it being very boring at the beginning when you only catch the most basic things and it looks like it is a waste of time compared to reading them in english. But, as you read more and more, you’ll start to stumble on news that are a continuation or very related to the ones you have read before, and there will be a huge overlap of what you already read (and memorize) and what you are reading now.

  For listening, i’ve been using some japanese variety shows (which also have a huge amount of written text shown on the screen) and i try to write down every word i think i could infer or that i think it is crucial to understand what is going on. I’m using VLC, and reducing the playback speed by 10% (the smallest step) makes a huge difference and makes it much easier and pleasant to watch. You can also try finding some vloggers or streamers, if you marginally interested in games, and it could also be a good listening exercise.

  For writing/​speaking it gets harder to get a good practice, because it requires another speaker to provide feedback. For writing i’ve used Lang-8, where you write you and a native corrects the text, and you do the same in the language you are fluent for other users.

• renato 18 Apr 2020 23:30 UTC

  5 points

  on: My dad got stung by a bee, and mildly aller­gic. What are the trade­offs in­volved in de­cid­ing whether to have him go the the emer­gency room?

  I’m glad you could already find the answer for it, and I hope your dad gets better.

  I’m writing just to say something that has worked for me (I’m also allergic). When I was stung by a wasp, I found that applying a cold compress reduced the swelling considerably, and I recovered in a matter of hours. When it happened before and I didn’t use the cold compress, I remember it taking days to recover, and I could not walk properly while it was swelled. Both times I was stung on my ankle.

• renato 5 Apr 2020 19:01 UTC

  1 point

  on: Hy­drox­y­chloro­quine: the day sci­ence stopped

  The paragraph that starts with “Fourth, …” is shown twice.

• renato 7 Mar 2020 12:44 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: waveman’s comment on: Com­ing Back to Biking

  Hurting knees can be due to riding in too high a gear.

  Another common mistake is having the saddle height too low, forcing you to bend the leg too much and putting more stress on the knees to move the pedals down. Even a few centimeters (~5cm) can make a big difference, but it will feel strange at the beginning and it take some rides to get completely accustomed to the different movement.

• renato 3 Jan 2020 13:36 UTC

  5 points

  on: Has any­one used TAPs to com­bat BFRBs?

  I could stop biting my nails using some TAPs.

  Installing the TAPs took at most a few days, and I think I might have failed and bit the nails some times. It took around a month to get the nails long enough that I could cut and polish them, and after a while the TAPs disappeared completely because I didn’t need them anymore. According to my journal, I started using the TAPs on 20180612 and cut my nails on 20180714, and there is also a register on 20180703 that I was not using the TAPs because their trigger had disappeared.

  I think that what made me bite my nails was that they had a dent or something like that that I could play with, and after I did some damage to it using other nails, I eventually bit it to remove that part that stood too much (I still do something similar with the skin around my nails, and I’ve never thought about getting rid of it). After I could cut them for the first time, I only bit them once when one of them get broken. I don’t remember exactly how I felt at the time (I haven’t write about how I felt in my journal), but I think it was like an accident that happened and I just had to keep doing what I was doing and everything would be fine.

  I remember that I had bitten my nails since I was around 10 or even younger (I’m 30 now), and I couldn’t stop definitively until I used the TAPs, sometimes the nails would grow, but eventually they regressed to the bitten state.

  I used two TAPs:

  • Biting nails #1
    Trigger: Looking at my nails
    Action: Close my hand

  • Biting Nails #2
    Trigger: Rubbing my fingers with the thumb
    Action: Open hand
    It is a complementary trigger to avoid damaging the nails without even looking.

  I didn’t have a TAP for biting the nails (having my finger in the mouth) because I never noticed doing it without looking at them first.

  It has been one and a half year since I stopped, and I think I might have bitten the nails some times, but it was not enough to keep biting them similarly to the case described above.

• renato 31 Dec 2019 1:35 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Sunny from QAD’s comment on: l

  The software I’m using is AutoKey. What do you use? Are you happy with it?

  I’m using LXDE as a desktop environment and it allows you to set the shortcuts in its config file. If I’m not mistaken, other flavors, like GNOME and KDE, had a GUI to bind a certain key sequence to a script.

  It seems that it catches the keybindings instantaneously and any lag is due starting a program called by the script, but it is usually around 1 second, which is similar to launch the program independently.

  Autokey sounded very promising, but it is too slow. I wanted to port my emacs keybindings to use system wide, but it was impossible to use due to its lags.

  This is also a good idea. I’m pretty fast at typing and pretty slow with the mouse, so I’d probably instead make a macro for “prompt me for a search key, open a new tab, search that thing, then take me back to the tab I was in before”.

  My (shell) scripts are pretty simple, the one that prompt me for a search query is:

  xclip -o -selection p > query.temp
  leafpad query.temp
  query=$(<query.temp)
  key=${query%%[ .:]*}  # get only the first word or 'www' or 'http*'
  case $key in
      "wiki") # search on wikipedia
  	term=${query#* } # get from second word to end
  	url="https://​​www.wikipedia.org/​​search-redirect.php?family=wikipedia&language=en&go=Go&search=″
      ;;
      ## Other cases omitted
      *) # didn’t matched anything → search on web
  	# there is a command—search, but it opens a new window
  	url=”https://​​duckduckgo.com/​​?q=″
  	term=$query
      ;;
  esac
  /​opt/​firefox/​firefox—new-tab “$url$term”
  rm query.temp # remove the temp fifo
  

  And a fast search of the current selected text:

  query=$(xclip -o -selection p)
  if [[ $query =~ ^(http|www).*$ ]]; then
      url=$query
  elif [[ $query =~ ^.*\..{2,3}(/[^ ]*)?$ ]]; then
      url=$query
  else
      url="https://​​duckduckgo.com/​​?q=“$query
  fi
  /​opt/​firefox/​firefox—new-tab “$url”
  

  I started with the first one, which offers more flexibility, but most of time I use the fast one and I edit the query if it doesn’t return the desired results.

• renato 30 Dec 2019 13:57 UTC

  3 points

  on: l

  It is really nice to have someone reporting on those little things that make a good (unseen) impact on their workflow and that we usually don’t even consider the possibility of having them. I have something like that implemented and I also noticed that reducing those small frictions result in much more notes and less disruption of the current task, you think of something, a note is added in a few seconds and you can continue working on.

  They are also surprisingly easy to implement, and I got surprised how fast it took me to have something functional. I think the effort put into writing the script was paid back pretty fast, since some of them took just some minutes to write and test. But, I think the biggest obstacle to do something like that is having the idea and some basic knowledge of programming to do it, and I’m not sure how to transfer it to other people. Maybe giving them the code with very detailed comments and providing some step-by-step tutorial of how to do it. Would you mind sharing your code?

  Now, to add a note to such a file, all I have to do is click inside the command-prompt I have in the top corner of my screen, type “l ” plus the name of the list,

  I found that using some keybindings to rely solely on the keyboard also made a good improvement. There are several available keys that can be used to call the scripts directly, and if it depends on a parameter as in your case, I use the system tool that ask for a command then run it, on LXDE it is A-F2 or W-r (the same from windows).

  I recommend also implementing some scripts to search on the web what is selected by the cursor or open a text file to get a query to be searched. While I’m reading I just open new tabs in the browser to find things I want to look for more details. I doesn’t interrupt the reading flow and I also don’t forget to search for them later (and I don’t have more the thought that there was something I wanted to search by I don’t remember what).

• renato 8 Dec 2019 20:59 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Un­gen­dered Spanish

  Portuguese uses the same vowels terminations for genders, but our articles are a simple ‘a or ‘o’ (instead of ‘la’ ‘lo’) and we also use ‘e’ as the and connector. It means that the vowels ‘i’ and ‘u’ would still free for the third gender, but we do some vocal accommodation orally (I’m not sure about the correct linguist term) and often the sound ‘e’ becomes ‘i’ and ‘o’ becomes ‘u’ (it does not happen the other way). Because of that, all of our vowels are already “taken” with just two genders.

  I found it fascinating that it works so well in Spanish and not at all in Portuguese, even with both languages being very similar (I feel that Portuguese is slightly more gendered than Spanish).

• renato 7 Oct 2019 16:36 UTC

  1 point

  on: Re­place judges with Key­ne­sian beauty con­tests?

  I liked how your idea resembles the aggregation used in prediction markets. But, I’m not sure how it would reflect in the number of cases judged by judge after considering that they receive the same ones to review. If the ratio of KBCJ to normal ones is high, there will be a waste from too many people review the same cases, and you are trading efficiency for more predictability, but it might cost too much in money terms. If it is low, and the pay rate is higher than the normal ones, it can create two different judging modes, the normal where they will still have more freedom to choose, and the KBCJ where they pay more attention to an aggregator to aim for conformity. It feels like the two modes students have, one more relaxed to learn, and another one more focused to get a better grade on a test, even if it involves reducing the amount learn to get a better grade.

  Would this system be expanded to cover both sides lawyers by punishing those who make claims that are expected to be losers considering the KBCJ judgement?

• renato 27 Aug 2019 2:37 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: How do you learn for­eign lan­guage vo­cab­u­lary, be­yond Anki?

  They are not too complex nor rare, so I suggest that you use some related words to increase your exposition to them in a slightly different way. More concretely what I usually do for hard word is:

  • Pick the noun that derived the adjective/​adverb, or the other one.

    For example, dangerous (gefährliche) <-> danger (gefähr ??) I rely mostly on the suffix like ‘lich’, because it preserve the original word. There are other ones like in the case of imagine(d) → imagination, and as your vocabulary expands and you are able to recognize them easier the memorization gets easier.

  • Pick the antonym or some related words that strongly associated with the original word.

    For example, danger → safety, or → accident. As your vocabulary expands, you will probably be able to easily identify the other word to give the context you need to recall the hard word. You can also employ some kind of code to denote that it is the antonym , like ‘danger <> safety’, or have a specific relation.

  • Pick some longer words that are composed by the hard one and a word you already know.

    It seems counter-intuitive, but some of them are easier than the root word because each of them restrict the possible meaning of the other one. It does not have to be a single word, but one that both words usually come together, like ‘finally reached’ or ′ ready for use’. You can also “cheat” and just pick the words that appeared in the original sentence. It feels like “over-fitting”, but it is amazing how can you sometimes remember where you read the word for the first time and what it was its context.

  I also noticed that most words are already formed by a prefix. I’m not sure how regular are the words in German when you remove or change their prefixes, but it might also help to get the shorter ones memorized, and then the ones built from them will be easier to learn.

• renato 26 Aug 2019 22:44 UTC

  3 points

  on: How do you learn for­eign lan­guage vo­cab­u­lary, be­yond Anki?

  A little unrelated to you original question, but it seems useful.

  I could add “learn to write” to my goals but that seems significantly harder to self teach, because checking my work is harder than looking up the same sentence in the English version of the book.

  You can try Lang-8 where some native speakers correct your writing while you do the same for some other users. I used it in the past and the community was very good, the texts I submitted were corrected very fast (it depended on the time I have posted them, but usually less than a day, and sometimes in a few minutes), and most users also added some good comments on how to sound more natural or some suggestions of alternatives.

• renato 26 Aug 2019 22:26 UTC

  6 points

  on: How do you learn for­eign lan­guage vo­cab­u­lary, be­yond Anki?

  Can you give an example of the words that you cannot memorize and the sentence they are coming from (with a translation)?

  Are those basic words or probably some rare ones? Depending on the frequency of those words appearing again I would suggest either:

  • If they are fairly common, add some related words to force some redundancy.

    I use Anki to memorize Japanese vocabulary, and in my case I pick words that share the same kanji than the hard word. For example, the word 図書館 (library) can be made redundant and easier to remember by adding 図書係 (librarian) and 図書 (books).

    Bigger words sometimes are composed of two (or more) smaller ones, which are easier to memorize and also help to remember the original one (I know it happens sometimes in German, but I’m not sure how frequent they are). I guess that you can pick some words with the same roots in German, but I’m not sure how easy is to find them in a dictionary or some other source.

  • If they are somehow obscure, it might be better to drop them for now.

    As you mentioned, you are spending much more time on those words than the others and it seems it is not helping to memorize them now. That time could be used to learn other words, and it might be a better use of it. And, if you are exposed to those hard words again in the future, with a bigger vocabulary, it may be easier to remember them by having a more solid base (for example, some words were very difficult to grasp in the past, but similar words now are much easier). Sometimes seeing a word that was hard for me in a different context make a huge difference and I can easily remember them, and it is not just the effect of being exposed to it again.

• renato 13 Jul 2019 20:54 UTC

  4 points

  on: Let’s Read: Su­per­hu­man AI for mul­ti­player poker

  A very interesting analysis of an interesting article. I’m not familiar with AI development and because of that my questions may be too elementary.

  Its major strength is its ability to use mixed strategies… to do this in a perfectly random way and to do so consistently. Most people just can’t.

  It amazes me how much of the advantage from AI and other computer programs are derived from their lower bias than humans.

  Because poker is played commercially, the risk associated with releasing the code outweighs the benefits. To aid reproducibility, we have included the pseudocode for the major components of our program in the supplementary materials.

  It took 2 professionals to develop its algorithm and one of them to code it. As I understand, with the provided pseudocode it would require only to code it again to create a new instance of the AI. Or, is there something crucial that is missing? Can you estimate how much work/​cost would be necessary to do that?

  Could you include a link to the analyzed article on the introduction? It is easy to find, but it feels strange without a direct link.

• renato 21 Mar 2019 2:35 UTC

  8 points

  on: Prospect The­ory: A Frame­work for Un­der­stand­ing Cog­ni­tive Biases

  The images are not working anymore.

  The wayback machine has a stored copy here.

• renato 1 Dec 2018 2:01 UTC

  6 points

  on: Ap­plied Picoeconomics

  The original website is down. This is an archived version around the same time the article was published: https://​​web.archive.org/​​web/​​20090703042537/​​http://​​www.picoeconomics.com/​​breakdown.htm

• renato 6 Oct 2018 14:16 UTC

  6 points

  on: The Valley of Bad Theory

  Well… not necessarily. We’re talking here about a wheel, with weights on it, rolling down a ramp. Mathematically, this system just isn’t all that complicated. Anyone with an undergrad-level understanding of mechanics can just crank the math, in all of its glory. Take no shortcuts, double-check any approximations, do it right. It’d be tedious, but certainly not intractable. And then… then you’d understand the system.

  I guess the idea was to emulate a problem without a established theory, and it was chosen to provide a simple setup for changing the parameters and visualizing the results.

  Imagine that instead of this physics problem it was like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s problem to find the rule that explain a sequence of numbers, where you cannot find someone who already developed a solution for it. It is easier to generate a set of numbers that satisfies the rule (similar to the iterative optimization) than the rule/​theory itself, as each of those proposed rules are falsified by the next iterations.

  If it was modified to generate an output to be maximized instead of a true/​false answer, the iterative optimization would get a good result faster, but not the optimal solution. If you played this game several times, the optimizers would probably get good heuristic to find a good solution, while the theorizers might find a meta-solution that solves all the games.

  For me it looks like that if that experiment was extended to more iterations (and maybe some different configurations of communication between each generation and between independent groups) you would get a simple model of how science progress. Theory pays in the long term, but it might be hindered if the scientist refuse to abandon their proposed/​inherited solution.

• renato 31 Jul 2018 19:38 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Logan Riggs’s comment on: Sav­ing the world in 80 days: Epilogue

  Thank you for the information.

  I’ve finally finished some kind of mandatory material I had to cover for some exams.

  Even as I probably failed them, I still learned some stuff in the process, and now I’m almost free to pursue something more interesting.

  Thank you for the invitation.

  Although, the artificial intelligence and related topics interest me a little, I’m still lacking several of the basic requisites.

  I will try to focus on them first, and then decide what to do next.

• renato 29 Jul 2018 11:34 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Logan Riggs’s comment on: Sav­ing the world in 80 days: Epilogue

  I understand your first equation 3*30= 90 hr (3 hrs/​day* 30 days = 90 hrs to complete a book). The second one is a bit confusing. 3*eff*90 = ~30 hours. (3 hrs/​day * ¹⁄₉ efficiency * 90 ? = ~30 hours) Was the second 90 supposed to be 30 to make efficiency 30%?

  Yes, I put the wrong number.

  I would say my average was 4 hours during almost two months. I could notice it slowly increasing, but every time I need to change to a new subject/​different kind of activity (from reading a non-math book to one that requires more exercises) my time plummeted. After a few days I could increase it again.

  I think it was not tiredness per se, because I did not have any problem with stopping studying and starting reading fiction or blogs. I guess it was more that I took too much information and needed to left it organize itself into my mind.

  I wanted to compare the study paces because 3 hours of effective study is much more demanding than a 3 hours study slot time.

  I can easily reserve 3~6 hours a day for mainly studying, if that includes taking some breaks to reply emails, or fix some small unrelated bugs. I can probably divide it into different subjects and try them for some time and eventually drop what does not work.

  However, 3~6 hours of effective or pure study per day is something that would make me much more tired. In that case I would try to focus on just one thing now, while trying to work on some meta-techniques/​skills to focus on long-term.

  It is more a planning question to adjust how much I should focus on a subject or on a broad range of topics/​bugs. But it actually is not that important.