Recent submissions

Comment · 8 months ago
This reads like an LLM generated response that simply restates the comment it's replying to
Comment · 9 months ago
"map of NYC" does not include Staten Island. That's how we like it
Comment · 9 months ago
This is cool, but more as a demonstration of interesting CSS techniques than optical illusions in my opinion.

Also, interestingly, I seem to be able to force myself to "see through" all of these illusions except for induced gradients, which I can't stop seeing unless I cover part of the screen.

Comment · 3 years ago
Can someone give an example use case of this? I'm not sure I understand why a very public long string of random characters on a block chain is useful, except as a way to prove an event didn't happen prior to a certain time
Comment · 3 years ago
Why would the author even make a point about the different seasons between hemispheres and then immediately get it wrong? He tells the reader to "reverse the seasons and add six months to the dates," but doing both of these operations cancels them out. "The summer solstice in June" becomes "the winter solstice in December," which is still the northern perspective.
Comment · 3 years ago
Beginning to think you're actually incapable of understanding what I'm saying so I'll be as clear as possible.

You said, "the point of a command economy is to reduce individuals freedom." I have provided numerous arguments that a command economy could serve another purpose -- survival in extremis, provision of public goods at a loss, and creation of a communal sense of obligation.

I made no argument about the specific context of this thread. I made no argument that it does not decrease individual freedom. It does, as does any situation where the principal decision maker and executive agent are not the same person. But that is not always the purpose. Your inability to understand your own words and their implications astounds me.

Comment · 3 years ago
Claiming that you've made an unsupported generalization, and then making one, is not a contradiction; it's hypocrisy.

In any case, your statement still fails to hold water. Consider the ISS: there is central planning and command of the entire economy of the vessel, from its air, water, and food to its electricity and the time of the astronauts themselves. But the 'point' of this command economy is not to limit freedom; it is to keep the astronauts alive. This is the most extreme example, but obviously there are other situations (ships at sea, camping trips with a group, military operations) where centralized control of the goods produced and services performed serve the goods of the group's goals, and have nothing to do with intentional limits on freedom.

Comment · 3 years ago
Any memoryless continuous function between two Euclidean spaces, I think you mean. The experts-and-manager model would need to be able to do more than that (as do most neural networks).

And part of the reason why single-hidden-layer networks aren't enough even in continuous memoryless Euclidean cases is, again, because of how loss functions work; you're unlikely to converge on a good approximation with very few hidden layers.

Comment · 3 years ago
After some reflection, it's maybe more accurate to visualize this in reverse: all expert models see the problem and attempt a solution, and then some "manager" model decides which expert model has the best solution and outputs it.
Comment · 3 years ago
It's not a likely solution given how loss functions work, but in theory a single model could learn to perform exactly the function you describe. When you say "just do X" where X is any function (in this case, a piecewise function), a large enough model could do it.
Comment · 3 years ago
If you pointed out any contradiction, you did an unfortunately poor job of elucidating exactly where that contradiction occurred. Furthermore, you failed to support your claims even a little bit.

But I hope you sleep well! It's crucial for proper brain function.

Comment · 3 years ago
It looks like we're working off fundamentally different definitions of central planning, so of course we disagree. Central planning, in my vernacular, does not at all imply government control. It simply means that most decisions are made by some sort of central authority and executed by decentralized agents, rather than plans being made by the agents themselves. This is how most non-franchise businesses operate.

If you require central planning to retain an element of planning by the government in your definition, then I agree, energy is not a good example of this.

Comment · 3 years ago
Regardless of whether this is a "problem" that gets "resolved," surely you understand you have failed to support your conjecture that my command of the economy is purpose-built to limit freedom.

What if there is no profit? What if I operate at 100% loss, year after year, propped up by the subsidy of a fiat currency, to provide something everyone needs, and don't think the goods and services which sustain life should come at any cost? I am overwhelmingly popular. Nobody is going to seriously compete with me, although they're free to try. Nobody is forced to work for me. Whose freedom have I limited? Doesn't this sound like a lot of things we take for granted every day which are centrally planned?

Comment · 3 years ago
> I own all factories that can produce X, and am by some benefit of scale now the only one reasonably able to make an X-factory. If I didn't do it, probably nobody could.

> I have command of the X-economy and can mandate the production and distribution of these goods

> The intended point of all this is somehow to deny individuals their freedom to fail to create an X factory, rather than to ensure that X gets created and distributed at all

Comment · 3 years ago
Right, so let's say Duke Energy is a private profit-seeking company in the eastern US. In many areas it is the only energy company in town. Are you trying to say that, just because it's a private company, it's not centrally planned? That each section of its business is in some sort of free market?

Private corporate ownership and central planning are not mutually exclusive. Texas is maybe the only place in the US where energy production isn't centrally planned, for any reasonably local definition of "central."

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