Recent submissions

Comment · 4 years ago
Is it common for editors to add to a writer's text? My naive assumption was that they often cut and re-structure and maybe suggest re-wording, but I'm surprised to see an editor actively add content that wasn't there at all
Comment · 4 years ago
Good point yeah, I think the switch from indefinite to definite article also makes it feel less dissociated/bleak too somehow
Comment · 4 years ago
People are rightfully pointing out how ridiculous some of the overt substantive changes in that end poem are, but I was pretty amazed by how even the quite minor changes totally alter the feel of the thing too.

"Sit on a couch and look at a wall"

to

"Laying on the couch and looking at the wall"

loses a lot somehow in a hard-to-pin-down way. It's almost an impressively efficient butchering

Comment · 4 years ago
In a way that proves the point as well though - not only are there inconsistent rules there are also seemingly under-determined rules where you can use one of many options (but only sometimes!)
Comment · 4 years ago
Especially if enough Amazon internal tools rely on it - would be funny if there were a repeat of the FB debacle where Amazon employees somehow couldn't communicate/get back into their offices because of the problem they were trying to fix
Comment · 4 years ago
Is there a correlation between wealth and loneliness? I could definitely imagine it being effect for the poorest in society but I wouldn't be surprised if, once you've reached a threshold of being able to keep your head above water, money and loneliness had very little relationship if at all
Comment · 4 years ago
Unless I'm mistaken (very possible), the existing cubic Newton method they discuss already has this convergence guarantee, but introduces a lot of extra expensive work at each step. The specific contribution of the paper is finding clever regularization tricks to keep this guarantee while sidestepping the extra hassle the cubic method needs
Comment · 4 years ago
>Scientific progress is amazing today, far faster today than at any point in history

What're you basing this on/how're you defining the growth rate here? Not rhetorical, would be interested to see your data since it seems quite a common argument to hold that it's slowing in lots of areas

Comment · 4 years ago
Dolphins are notoriously imprudent mortgage lenders though
Comment · 4 years ago
If my plants ever stop photosynethizing you best believe they're getting a beating
Comment · 4 years ago
How much of that is revenue from actual crypto-related business vs. just appreciation of crypto the company owns? Feels like the impressiveness of this trend really depends on that
Comment · 5 years ago
You can be honest and accurate without being needlessly nasty/mocking as the quote seems to be

Your sentiment is a really common and insidious one that way too many people use to feel smug and "rational" about being mean

Comment · 5 years ago
The analogy to companies doesn't work because there isn't a legal mechanism by which you can make your short predictions come true. It's illegal to manipulate markets and most ways by which you could destroy a company (without spending more than you hope to gain) are also probably illegal. If you can think of any legal ones I'd be curious to hear

If it were legal to take a short position in a company and then take actions which blew the company up AND there existed cost-effective ways to do so, then you would definitely have seen more legitimate companies taken down by short-attacks. In contrast, here you have an entity where (a) there isn't the same legal safeguards and (b) there exists a claimed cost-effective way to tank the entity after taking a short position

If you disagree with (a) or (b) empirically then cool but it's clearly a totally different scenario to regular companies

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