Zolmeister

Karma: 199

Zolmeister Nov 4, 2021, 2:57 AM
10 points
in reply to: Raymond D’s comment on: The Opt-Out Clause
Follow the white rabbit

Zolmeister Oct 31, 2021, 9:41 PM
1 point
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: How Much is a Sweet?
The source makes explicit reference to refined starches:

c All foods are assumed to be in nutrient-dense forms; lean or low-fat and prepared with minimal added sugars; refined starches, saturated fat, or sodium

Though to be clear, I do not endorse the ‘system’ as proposed. I do not believe that it adequately reflects nuance in health effects of food consumption, nor do I believe it accurately represents modern food health science (where are their sources?).

For example, the hard-line stance against saturated fats is questionable [1] [2] [3]. Not explicitly mentioning glycemic index is another obvious failure, for which I assume ‘added sugar’ is a proxy.

There are gut-microbiome differences across carbohydrates with similar GI [4], but I do not have enough information to recommend one sugar over another.

Zolmeister Oct 31, 2021, 6:31 PM
−1 points
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: How Much is a Sweet?
Yes I count most (by GI) flour as equivalent to sugar [1]. As for keeping high GI carbs under 10%, I have insufficient information. To keep all carbs under 10% would be ketogenic, which while not specifically recommended (unless trying to lose weight), has shown interesting results in the literature [2].

Zolmeister Oct 31, 2021, 9:32 AM
−1 points
on: How Much is a Sweet?
Pancakes contain significant quantities of carbohydrates (sugar), with glycemic index comparable to that of table sugar. Those pancakes look like they’re closer to 3 sweets than 1 (sorry kids).

Zolmeister Oct 26, 2021, 7:56 AM
5 points
on: Mental health benefits and downsides of psychedelic use in ACX readers: survey results
For those looking to learn more, erowid.org is an excellent starting point.

Zolmeister Jul 23, 2021, 7:13 PM
3 points
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Fire Law Incentives
I think it balances prescribed burns with other methods of fire-suppression (fire-breaks, thinning), and incentivizes local coordination among neighbors.

Zolmeister Jul 22, 2021, 8:12 PM
1 point
on: Fire Law Incentives
Hold land-owners liable for fire-damage caused to their abutting neighbors.

Zolmeister Jun 18, 2021, 2:18 AM
2 points
in reply to: MikkW’s comment on: MikkW’s Shortform
I recommend Ample (lifelong subscriber). It has high quality ingredients (no soy protein), fantastic macro ratios (5/30/65 - Ample K), and an exceptional founder.

Zolmeister May 20, 2021, 4:48 AM
11 points
in reply to: gwillen’s comment on: Saving Time

Since time is the direction of increased entropy, this feels like it has some deep connection to the notion of agents as things that reduce entropy (only locally, obviously) to achieve their preferences

Reminded me of Utility Maximization = Description Length Minimization.

Zolmeister May 5, 2021, 1:56 PM
4 points
in reply to: ocdtrekkie’s comment on: Why I Work on Ads

It’s hard for me to credibly believe that this harm happened due to the algorithm, that no humans at Google were clearly aware of what was going on, when Googlers were being sent out to events to pitch to this market

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It sounds like the fraud involved was extremely sophisticated, as it was hiding behind state negligence. Google now requires these advertisers to be licenced by a reputable third party.

The problem I see here isn’t just that the Ads team gets paid for participation in criminal activity, but they have no incentive to really stop profitable illegal activity

In 2011 Google settled a negligence case regarding illegal pharmaceutical sales for $500 million.

Scams and malware end up running rampant whenever ads are involved, that’s where the money for the business segment is coming from

I find it hard to imagine this is true within reputable ad networks, though I agree that such content is endemic to online advertising.

Zolmeister May 4, 2021, 6:52 PM
1 point
in reply to: df fd’s comment on: Why I Work on Ads
You have not produced evidence that billboards are generally ‘criminal mind control’, only that they violate norms for shared spaces for people like Banksy. Ultimately this boils down to local political disagreement, rather than some clever ploy by The Advertisers to get into your brain.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you.

This is strictly true in the sense that advertisement is negative cost and negative value, but that is exactly why it is used as a tool for producing otherwise difficult to coordinate public goods.

To quote David Friedman:

Consider one example of the public good problem: radio and television broadcasts. By producing and broadcasting an entertaining program, I provide a benefit to everyone who listens to it. Since I cannot control who listens to it I cannot, as in the case of ordinary production, collect my share of that benefit by charging for it. The public in question is a large and disorganized one so it is clear, on theoretical grounds, that programs cannot be privately produced.

Yet they are. Some clever person thought up the idea of combining a public good with positive production cost and positive value with a public good of negative cost and negative value and giving away the package: program plus advertisements. As long as the net value is greater than zero and the net cost less than zero, people listen to the program and the broadcaster covers his costs.

Zolmeister May 2, 2021, 1:58 AM
1 point
in reply to: Randomized, Controlled’s comment on: Dark Matters
I was interested in her claim that the Bullet Cluster is evidence against dark matter.

The scientists estimated the probability for a Bullet-Cluster-like collision to be about one in ten billion, and concluded: that we see such a collision is incompatible with the concordance model. And that’s how the Bullet Cluster became strong evidence in favor of modified gravity.

Zolmeister May 1, 2021, 3:16 AM
3 points
on: Making Markets Over Beliefs

Technically, the market I should make corresponds to what I think other people’s probabilities are likely to be given they can see my market. I might give a wider market because only people that think they’re getting a good deal with trade with me

Technically, market making is betting on price volatility by providing liquidity. To illustrate, I’ll use a simple automated market maker.

Yes * No = Const

This means I will accept any trade of Yes/No tokens, so long as the product remains constant. Slippage is proportional to the quantity of tokens available. Profit is made via trading fees.

There is a risk that the underlying assets diverge more quickly than what slippage/fees can cover, which can cause losses. There are various tricks to mitigate these effects, such that profit can be guaranteed within certain bounds.

The point being I’m no longer betting on Alice’s height, but instead betting that predictors will trade against the current height.

Zolmeister Apr 22, 2021, 8:37 PM
3 points
in reply to: SatvikBeri’s comment on: Two Designs

Each of these functions takes ~30s to run, so it ends up being more efficient to put them in one job instead of multiple.

This is a perfect example of the AWS Batch API ‘leaking’ into your code. The whole point of a compute resource pool is that you don’t have to think about how many jobs you create.
It sounds like you’re using the wrong tool for the job (or a misconfiguration—e.g. limit the batch template to 1 vcpu).

The benefit of the pass-through approach is that it uses language-level features to do the validation

You get language-level validation either way. The assert statements are superfluous in that sense. What they do add is in effect check_dataset_params(), whose logic probably doesn’t belong in this file.

The failure you’re talking about here is tripping a try clause.

No, I meant a developer introducing a runtime bug.

Zolmeister Apr 22, 2021, 6:52 PM
4 points
on: Two Designs
The reason to be explicit is to be able to handle control flow.
```
def run_job(make_dataset1: bool, make_dataset2: bool):
    if make_dataset1 && make_dataset2:
        make_third_dataset()
```
If your jobs are independent, then they should be scheduled as such. This allows jobs to run in parallel.
```
def make_datasets_handler(job):
    for dataset in job.params.datasets:
        schedule_job('make_dataset', {dataset})

def make_dataset_handler(job):
     {name, params} = job.params.dataset
     constructors.get(name)(**params)
```
Passing random params to functions and hoping for failure is ~~a terrible idea~~ great for breaking code (‘fuzzing’).
The performance difference of explicit vs pass-through comes down to control flow. Your errors would come out just as fast if you ran check_dataset_params() up front.

the first gives us a 5x faster feedback loop

A good way to increase feedback rate is to write better tests. Failure in production should be the exception, not the norm.

Zolmeister Apr 20, 2021, 7:33 AM
2 points
on: [Letter] Advice for High School
I dropped out of high school. It’s not a place for smart people.

Zolmeister Apr 7, 2021, 6:02 PM

3 points

on: Vim

Some highlights from my .vimrc

" Prevent data loss
set undofile
" Flush to disk every character (Note: disk intensive, e.g. makes large copy-pastes slow)
set updatecount=1

" Directory browsing usability
let g:netrw_liststyle = 3 " tree list view
let g:netrw_banner = 0

" Copy for X11
vnoremap <C-c> "cy <Bar> :call system('xclip -selection clipboard', @c)<CR><CR>

Also worth checking out CoC (language server)

Zolmeister Mar 18, 2021, 11:02 AM
12 points
on: What are fun little puzzles / games / exercises to learn interesting concepts?
The Evolution of Trust

An interactive demo of the prisoners dilemma.

Zolmeister Feb 16, 2021, 8:05 PM
1 point
on: Promoting Prediction Markets With Meaningless Internet-Point Badges
Twitch has recently begun experimenting with predictions for streamers using their channel-points currency.

Zolmeister 8 Feb 2021 2:38 UTC
6 points
on: Democracy, Bureaucracy, Central Banking
The history of central banking (and large scale monetary policy generally), is fascinating. This lecture I found particularly enlightening (George Selgin): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeIljifA8Ls

Noteworthy remarks:
- Even before central banking, government regulation required banks purchase junk assets (causing failures)
- Nonuniform currency price slippage (when each bank issued its own notes) may have been < 1%
- The National Bank Act taxed private bank notes at 10%, effectively destroying private currency circulation
  - National Bank notes were backed by US debt. As the debt shrank, currency became scarce, leading to crisis.
- Canadian banking at the time (not centralized until 1935) was both deregulated and did not suffer currency crises (see 17:54 for graph)
Now, it turns out that the Fed was designed not by politicians, or bureaucracy, but instead by special interest groups (namely Wall St.). See The Meeting at Jekyll Island