Despite the meaning of the Greek word underlying it, aphantasia does not mean that you can’t imagine. It means you can’t create mental images.
As an aphantasic, I can imagine just fine. If you consult the Wikipedia page on the subject, you’ll find a number of famous authors listed.
generally referred to as persistent memoization.
maybe persistent futures in this case, since you’ve got these intermediate “place” values.
If upfront assessments are provided, I expect the defense bar would gleefully keep track of such things.
They already informally track the behavior of the DA’s offices they deal with. They’re extremely organized in some areas and in near-constant communication with one another.
If a person receives a static, permanent QR code, then some QRs will leak (or be deliberately leaked) and will be used en masse. And some QRs will be given out to friends and family.
...who cares? The QR code contains a cryptographically signed attestion that “DanArmak” is vaccinated. Not “whoever displays this code is vaccinated”. You only need a program for decoding it, and verifying the signature against the signing keys from states.
Photocopying them would be only slightly more useful than photocopying somebody else’s drivers license. Sure, if they’ve got the same name or look just like you, they can use it, but if I photocopy my drivers license and put it online, there’s not a lot of people who could reasonably pass as me.
With permanent codes, the application presenting the QR can’t prove it’s the genuine application, so people could just as easily show an image.
You absolutely do not need anything to display it, you could print it out on paper. The genuine-ness comes from the cryptographic signature.
Saying that such an un-trustworthy system
It’s extremely trustworthy, but unfortunately the mechanism of trust isn’t clear until you understand public key cryptography.
Including photos in the QR is possible; a B&W photo would fit. If you want to include more data, you can put a copy of the photo online
The whole point of the suggestion was a scheme which was not traceable. That means not fetching people’s pictures.
QR bandwidth is surprisingly high.
I understand how QR codes work just fine, but being on a piece of paper in somebody’s wallet, we’ve got to turn the ECC up to max, and I’ve also got an estimate for the size of the rest of the data that needs to go in there in order to make it useful.
The mechanism doesn’t need to be perfect, it’ll just mostly work, and this one also perfectly preserves privacy. (It can also be tweaked and tuned in a variety of ways which I’m not going to take the effort to explain to a non-software engineer.)
the QR code can just have a cryptographically signed attestation from a government agency that the person has been vaccinated. that can be verified by an app which does not need to communicate with a central authority. if the authority released the corresponding public keys, open source apps could do the job. and the vaccination doesn’t expire, so the code doesn’t need to. (but perhaps you could include some vaccine lot number info if you’re super excited about such things, so apps could know about bad batches? that’s probably not worth the effort to discuss.)
the hard part is figuring out who to attest has been vaccinated, and what information you can cram into the attestation which will satisfy people viewing the QR code. (an entire photo wouldn’t fit.)
To further detail the exact amount of effort: I get paid once a month, so once I month I go in, look at what I’ve got, subtract off my estimate for everything else, leave a few hundred dollars of slush, and come up with some excess amount. I then go over the brokerage site and issue the transfer for that excess. At the same time, I review the state of the brokerage account. I think it’s pretty minor, and it gets my cash over to the brokerage firm where it can sit in a money market account. That pays a pittance these days, but it has been a significantly larger pittance than anything my bank would offer me for the last 15 years.
(And then you’ve got access to a variety of bond funds, so you can easily transfer the cash into a fund which matches your exactly risk tolerance. Or otherwise invest it. All useful things to be doing, which your bank does not usually facilitate.)
I’d be surprised if exactly what you want is possible.
To accomplish a similar effect, I keep the bulk of my assets with a large, reputable brokerage firm, and just leave the most recent paycheck’s worth with the local bank. I can transfer to/from the bank and brokerage firm, and every other organization (employer, power company, credit cards, etc) only gets to know about the bank account. That limits the amount transfers can get ahold of. I suspect, but am not sure, that the brokerage firm doesn’t even accept outside requests for transfers. I think all transfers in/out of them have to be initiated on their end.
Certainly NVDA will drop briefly if there’s a widely publicized AI winter, even if it doesn’t actually affect their bottom line. Probably the safest way to profit (as in, the downside is bounded, as opposed to shorting, where the downside is unbounded), then, is to identify companies that will experience short term drops because of publicity, without actually being harmed, and buy the dip(s).
Security and privacy seem like useful footnotes here, too. The security situation with standard wireless protocols has improved to “acceptable” in recent years, but right as soon as you get some one-off link (between your mouse and the proprietary dongle?) then nobody knows how bad the situation is. You’re just trusting the manufacturer to have accomplished a feat that piles of smart people screw up on a regular basis.
I’m with Viliam, as regards the MOOCs. If we looked at statistics about how many people go from searching for javelin throwing videos on Youtube to successfully throwing a javelin without injuring themselves or others, the percentage is probably quite low. We’d see MOOCs doing better if we looked at whatever subset of the population who click the “start” button cared fractionally as much about the material as those who jump through the process of applying to a university, paying piles of money, and waiting until the start of a semester to begin learning.
The US government could nearly implement this by mandating that military firearms be pink. That’s perfectly within its purview. That’s were the trend setting comes from. Not action movies, where many of the firearms are non-existent bodged together things, or where they’re used in hilariously wrong ways.
it’s an area where the government could force people to act in their own long-term interest instead of responding to shorter-term incentives
When governments are actively complicit in damaging the financial interests of citizens, it is perverse to legislate fixes before ending the active harm.
And if people want to nitpick exceptions, many exceptions could be written into the law.
In the event legislation like you suggest ever becomes even remotely plausible, please find me, I’d be happy to wager that it’ll pass with exceptions for the purchase of government-sponsored lottery tickets.
So some organization will still cough up the initial budget, and then some set of potential shareholders will decide that this project will be the first megaproject to run under budget. They’ll then give the project more money, in exchange for getting that money back, plus whatever the project doesn’t use out of their original budget?
I don’t feel like incentives are aligned very well, here.
The organization sponsoring the project is going from the current situation where they can at least lie and pretend that the possibility exists that they’ll come in underbudget, to one where they’re guaranteed to burn >=100% of the budget if only because they’ve got to give away the leftovers at the end. In exchange they get maybe a few percent more budget. Do shareholders even get to elect the board of directors?
Middle managers on the project could now easily benefit financially by shorting the equities and sabotaging the project.
i don’t think anything prevents corporations from being created with a limited lifespan, it just doesn’t come up.
how are the shares supposed to return value to the share holders?
I remember the tutorials as focusing on easy mode, and treating it as the thing to start with. With Charles refreshing my memory about how easy mode behaved (thank you), I think there was plenty of time for a slow and cautious user to come in and perhaps question the nature of easy mode before they’d done any damage to their account. Certainly I used it a bit at the start, and still recovered nicely.
Hoping that your users will be slow and/or cautious isn’t an ideal plan, though.
i’m not sure if it would fix easy mode, but i feel that the points that go into a trade should be some function of the points that have already gone into that question, such that a user’s total loss on a given question is capped.
I realized after my initial comment that it was a bit too terse to be productive. Sorry.
(pre-note: Metaculus is not a market, and I don’t consider it interesting. I’m addressing and interested only in the case of an actual market where binary securities on events are being traded, with other market participants directly, or all through a market maker like SciCast.)
SciCast had two (major & relevant) modes for placing a trade, I remember them as “easy” and “normal”. Normal presented you with a slider from 0% to 100%, you could move the slider back and forth, and as you moved it, you were presented with a continuously updating quote for the “cost” of making the trade. The cost could be negative (equivalent to selling a previously held long position, or closing an existing short position), or positive (going long, or covering a short, whatever). After you made a trade, the interface immediately reflected the percentage that you’d chosen as the new value of the market. While you could go terribly wrong with this interface (and a lot of people did), it was at least possible to do reasonable things.
The Very Bad interface was the “easy” one. Instead of a slider, and instead of being given any feedback about the costs of your trade, you were presented simply with five choices, probably something like <20%, 20-40%, 40-60%, 60-80% and >80%. I don’t remember the exact equations that were used at this point, but it caused you to submit a trade that moved the market from wherever it was to as close as it get to the midpoint(?) of the region, without spending more than 1⁄2 (1/4? something) of your remaining points.
You weren’t shown how many points the trade was about to cost you. And neither interface showed you how many points you already had invested in the positions you were adjusting!
About the worst thing (I remember) that happened to naive users (through no fault of their own, IMO) was to come along to a question where the current state of the market was maybe 5%, and then do an easy mode trade for “<20%”. The system would spend their points to move the market from 5% to 10%.
The worst thing (which the bad interface encouraged), was users who thought that they should be trading until the market forecast matched their forecast. So if the easy mode trade didn’t move the market to where they wanted (or I’d moved the market back in the seconds following their trade), they’d do another easy mode trade. Over and over, with no idea of the position they were building up on a single question.
The short version of the problem, in real-world stock market terms, is: just because you think APPL is only going to go up in the long run doesn’t mean that you dump the entirety of your savings into it via market orders.
Think about kelly betting for a minute, just because the user has given you what they believe the odds to be isn’t enough to compute the correct bet for them. You also need to know their bankroll. And if you’re letting them trade on lots of questions simultaneously, you should be taking in a lot of probability estimates from the user, comparing them all to the state of the market, and making the trades that are profitable: ones where 1) the user believes the market is very wrong and 2) where corrections can be made inexpensively.
(For bonus points the user gives you the conditional probabilities between all those things, too, so that you can avoid betting too much on correlated trades.)
thats, uh, probably enough for now. i’ll keep an eye out for any questions.
I made an astonishing pile of points on SciCast from people who did not understand what the simple “user friendly” interface was doing. Turning “what i think the the distribution is” into a single trade is a fraught process; permit the user to do it repeatedly for a given question and I will actually show up and take absolutely all of their money.
there’s been some work on adding linear types to programming languages, to do things like ensure that you can’t use a resource after it has been closed/freed. similarly you could prevent the use of a resource before it has been fully opened/configured. (useful for sockets since they require multiple steps.)
wadler’s “linear types can change the world!” might be an appropriate starting point. https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/linear-logic.html#linear-types
apologies, i have not read it. linear types are outside my area of interest.
Having been a part-owner in an analytical chemistry lab, this attitude continues amongst workers to this day.
No shortage of folks who didn’t want to wear closed toe footwear, didn’t want safety glasses, would move compressed gas cylinders unsafely, or fail to secure them, etc.
(There were minimal time pressures on the staff; we were more concerned about mistakes that ruined entire batches of work rather than how long anyone took at a given task.)