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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • It’s not deeply rigorous but it’s correct reasoning in principal.

    The scientific and statistical standard interpretation of the null hypothesis is that there’s no relationship between the variables in question. It’s up to the researcher to establish an evidence based argument that the null hypothesis should be rejected in favor of some alternative.

    When we “fail to reject” the null hypothesis, we haven’t proved it’s true, we just continue to assume it is until someone proves otherwise.

    In this case, the alternate hypothesis is that there’s a correlation between incarceration and crime rates and the null is that no such correlation exists.

    As of now, the bulk of the research has failed to find such a relationship https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=correlation+incarceration+crime&btnG=


  • If we’re just talking math, triangles can be defined in terms of 3-element subsets of all 3 (A)ngles and 3 (S)ides:
    SSS - unique
    SAS - unique
    ASS - may be unique depending on the lengths of the sides
    ASA - unique
    SAA - unique
    AAA - infinite solutions

    Maybe someone cleverer than me can figure out how that maps on to love and gender.








  • We’re likely to see a variant of Moore’s law when it comes to satellites. Launch costs will keep going down. Right now we have Starlink with a working satellite internet system and China with a nascent one. As the costs come down we’ll likely see more and more countries, companies, organizations and individuals will be able to deploy their own systems.

    A government would need to negotiate with every provider to get them to block signals over their country. Jamming is always hard. You could theoretically jam all communications or communications on certain frequency bands but it’s not clear how you would selectively jam satellite internet.


  • There’s a much bigger story here.
    Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.

    Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they’ll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.

    As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.


  • The effect is mostly from the total number of computer users increasing.

    That is, the total number of “tech-savvy” users keeps increasing (https://datausa.io/profile/cip/computer-science-110701) but the number of “non-tech-savvy” computer users has absolutely exploded (https://semiconalpha.substack.com/p/global-semiconductor-sales-increase) (that actually undercounts computers since every dollar in 2020 buys you much more computer power than a dollar in 1987)

    You had to pass a nerd gauntlet just to get online in the 80’s or 90’s that meant that everyone you met online had also passed that gauntlet and was tech savvy. Even if you looked in the social usenet groups, a lot of non-technical users were just filtered out. So it looked like everyone was tech savvy but that’s because we were sampling a tiny, tech-savvy portion of the population.

    Now anyone can get online. The tech savvy gen-zers are still there but their hidden in a sea of non-technical users. If you go to places like Github or Hackernews (or even more specifically technical fora), you’ll find plenty of enthusiastic young people poking at technology and trying to make it better. They no longer have to mess around with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get their mouse working but they can (and do) get a bunch of Jupyter notebooks and start playing around with Tensorflow.

    A great modern example of this is 3-D printing. Modern 3-D printers suck. If you’re a big company you can get super expensive 3-D printers that take up giant rooms and need a team of experts to run. If you’re a home user you can get a cheap FDM printer but you best be prepared to tinker with it. The first thing most people do with their Ender is print mods for their Ender. Bambu Labs is a big improvement but they also attract a lot of users who at least could mod their printer https://forum.bambulab.com/c/bambu-lab-x1-series/user-mods/19

    Some day we may have little boxes like in “Diamond Age”. Kids in the future may not even know about crap like bed adhesion and stringing and they’ll concentrate on whatever the new problems are revealed once the current ones are taken care of.



  • I think that true “tech-savvyness” isn’t really a generational thing.

    Some people are just really curious about how stuff works. When they see something they aren’t satisfied with, “Just do it.” or “Shit just works.” They want to know how and why it works. When you hand those people a computer, machine or flower they’ll poke at it and try to understand it better.

    It’s not clear that typing skills are actually needed for that.

    I max out at around 80-100 WPM but I only sustain that when I’m transcribing something. When I need to learn about technology, it’s much more about reading than typing. When I actually need to do some coding, I spend much more time staring at the screen and looking up stuff on Stackoverlow than I do actually typing.

    Most of Z is not savvy at all, just like with every generation. And just like with every generation, some of them will push the envelope of technology. I doubt that lack of typing will slow those folks down.



  • That seems to be highly dependent on where they are.

    In some cities, everyone on public transport behaves themselves. They’re clean and there’s no fear that they’ll be harassed or assaulted. Some people really like that and get afraid or skeeved when they think about some public transport systems.

    In other cities public transportation riders are expected to “live and let live”. Officials won’t stop you from doing anything unless it presents an imminent danger. Some people love the freedom from that sort of system and hate the idea of someone forcing them to behave a certain way.

    There are, of course, many reasons why certain public transport systems are more like one than the other; money, age, geography, preferences, etc. While there are great arguments for public transportation and I’m a huge fan of improving the infrastructure around it, I can also recognize that a lot of people’s actual experience of public transport doesn’t paint it in a good light.





  • A lot of people have come to realize that LLMs and generative AI aren’t what they thought it was. They’re not electric brains that are reasonable replacements for humans. They get really annoyed at the idea of a company trying to do that.

    Some companies are just dumb and want to do it anyway because they misread their customers.

    Some companies know their customer hate it but their research shows that they’ll still make more money doing it.

    Many people that are actually working with AI realize that AI is great for a much larger set of problems. Many of those problems are worth a ton of money; (eg. monitoring biometric data to predict health risks earlier, natural disaster prediction and fraud detection).