RangerScience
Joined 12 years ago
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Member since
Mar 3
nicktbarone at gmail
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Comment · 28 days ago
IMO, whatever the new / dominant engineering paradigm is, is what we use to understand everything else.
Architecture, then clockwork, then steam, then machines, now computing.
I don’t think it’s wrong in anyway to do this, but I do think it’s interesting!
Comment · 1 month ago
I wouldn’t expect it to; better information, without power to act on it, doesn’t do much.
That said, this’d be one of those things where you can say “this is my prediction”, and if it doesn’t come true, go looking for the forces and factors you missed from your initial prediction.
Comment · 1 month ago
Pro tip: Every other slide (ish) is a joke referencing / setting up the next slide. Gives you a beat to change gears, keeps the audience really engaged, and lightens the mood. Also ensures you’re breaking things up into bite-sized pieces.
I gave a talk with a section on curried functions and interspersed the content slides with pictures of Tim Curry, for example.
Comment · 1 month ago
Anecdotally / personally experienced; bad trips happen “when you get stuck”. The #1 thing to do in such a situation is to change the music. The #2 thing to do is, quite literally, go to the bathroom and take a shit.
It’s extremely analogous to anything that would make a normal day into a bad day.
Comment · 6 months ago
What comes to mind is how the cure for scurvy was simply… forgotten, causing it to come back.
Comment · 7 months ago
> but don't look "reproducible" or "repeatable".
IMO, "ish". You can reliably and repeatedly produce good teams _if_ you reliably and repeatedly invest in your people.
IMO, what's really happening is that small, effective teams aren't _fungible_ - you can't just swap people around without breaking the magic in a team, and you can't just move a team around an organization without similarly breaking the magic (although the latter _is_ way more possible).
IMO, it's sort of an organizational version of "context switching". It takes time for a team to get up to gel and get up to speed. If you're swapping out team members, you break that cohesion. If you move around teams, you (somewhat) reset that "getting ramped up" process.
Comment · 8 months ago
I remember (the one time I snuck into NIPS) a buuunch of papers on "fairness", and it was basically: "We have decided that this input should not affect the outcome. Does it? If so, how?"
So that seems like a pretty good actual "what's DEI?" - Does race/gender/sexuality/etc affect some outcome? Should it? If it does affect it and shouldn't, what we can we do about it?
That said... yeah, not gonna get a room full of anyone to agree on that. Starting with that "should".
Comment · 10 months ago
Mostly agree, but I’d advocate for a carve-out for DropoutTV; maybe; exempt if (1) only hosting your own content and (2) that content can be licensed by other services?
Comment · 11 months ago
I don’t know how much of this paper I can understand but
I find it pretty interesting that, AFAICT, the dominant engineering paradigm of an era is also the dominant “this is what reality is” metaphor: cathedrals and architecture and the spheres; steam and clockwork and mechanical; now - computation and information!
Comment · 11 months ago
It’s more than twice(1) as easy to make a rocket-propelled bullet than a rocket-propelled vehicle!
1) It’d be exactly twice as easy but for Tsiolkovsky!
Comment · 11 months ago
Consider that context heavily impacts how you show up, and in a therapy context, you’re likely to be a lot more relaxed.
So I’d bet it’s not that you’re masking that terror when you’re with your therapist, but that it isn’t present.
Comment · 11 months ago
I think this means you didn’t read the piece, as it addresses this concern of yours in perhaps the simplest way possible: it’s about why each prior modality has issues.
Comment · 11 months ago
Yes, survivorship bias is probably happening here; but I’m not doing anything like “sorting by paid”. Each of these authors I discovered “organically”; generally through Reddit or Royal Road, any many I’ve been following (on Patreon!) since before they started making $$.
From what I can tell on RR+P; if you write a decent story regularly (or a tremendous story occasionally) you can make some money. If you then also strike a nerve with the audience, you can make a lot.
Comment · 11 months ago
Maybe it’s a semantics thing (if we have different definitions for “gate keeping”)… but, I’ll fight you on that hill:
Gate keeping is one of the primary means by which a community defines itself; it both requires that the community have some idea of “us/not us”, either deliberately and explicitly, or incidentally; and it is a primary means of implementing that identity.
It can also be a means for induction; the “gate” is one of the best places to introduce someone to the cultural norms, etc, of the community they’re entering. Related, it can also be a way to catch people who’ll have a bad time in that community, even if they’d otherwise be welcomed.
It can be done well and it can be done poorly.
Positive examples that come to mind:
- New Zealand has aggressive biological border control
- Costume parties that turn you away at the door if you’re not in costume
- Men’s and women’s circles - Everyone on the boat has to know how to sail
- Everyone on the ski trip has to WANT to be in winter weather
Comment · 11 months ago
looks at Patreon
Depends what you’re writing about. The chicken xianxia is something like $10k/mo, a Friren-inspired fic is a whopping 30k (and like 3mo old from a complete unknown), and Dungeon Crawler Carl has fully broken out into mainstream.
“Fun” things do seem to be making money, and if they hit a nerve they seem to be wildly successful.