vjk800

This is a weird perspective, considering that university education was originally meant for the upper classes, who didn't have to do jack shit if they didn't want to.

I'd argue that even endless leisure is better if you're smart and educated. Gives you better decision making (even if the AI makes your decisions, you still have to make the meta decision of which questions to ask the AI) and something other to do than just mindless hedonism. More art exhibits and intellectual conversations, less drug abuse and trash food.

The older I get, the more I feel it's better to just chase the money. I mean, everyone needs some amount of money and all the stuff other than the job can be made so much easier with money. Also, high paying jobs tend to be more comfortable in other ways too: nicer offices, more slack allowed, less horrible people.

I've always been smart enough to pick any jobs I want, and, if I'm perfectly honest, I've never liked any of them in the long run. All jobs start feeling like chores after a while. In every job, the stuff surrounding the job (waking up early, commuting, talking with people I might not like, the general office setting, being told what to do, etc.) is awful enough to make even the good bits worthless.

On the flip side, anything can become somewhat interesting when I spend some effort to learn it.

So yeah, I'm not a big fan of "do whatever interests you".

With some analysis, it might be possible to figure out which accounts were Russian trolls by comparing tweet frequency with the timing of these bombings.

There's of course the obvious, low effort trolling, but I'd think there are also more subtle, maybe more intellectually equipped information warfare going on.

Quality does pay off, however.

You could say that the entire selling point of Apple is that it's better quality than the competitors (even though it's still pretty bad if you compare it to a bicycle).

I guess it's more difficult to spot quality when it comes to software. I would definitely pay for high quality software. It's just that usually the crap quality of a software I'm using only shows slowly over time in little bugs and bad usability and there's no way for me to check for it beforehand.

Same observation from Finland. Additionally, being even slightly drunk in front of children has become very no-no. I recently had a small gathering of other families with children at my home and I made the mistake of offering them some beers. Everyone declined and the looks I got were the same as if I had offered them crack cocaine.

I don't think it's all good, though, since a lot of social events that were previously facilitated by alcohol just disappear. Like who the fuck actually enjoys acquantainces' children's birthdays without a beer or two? Turns out people suck at socialising without alcohol, and if alcohol disappears, people just stay at home and play video games or something.

It's funny how people talk about "teaching" getting more difficult with LLMs.

Clearly teaching got a lot better, since we now have a new teaching tool at our use, the LLMs. It's evaluating that got harder, because students can use the same tool to cheat in traditional forms of evaluation.

If "teaching the students" means the same as "evaluating the students" to you, maybe you shouldn't teach in the first place.

> Besides, a lot of non-fiction just isn't that great. Many books should have been a blog post. These books are rarely a rewarding experience for me, unless it's from a rare combo of historian and good writer.

Many non-fiction books are essentially PR material for the author. They don't write these books, because they have interesting thoughts that are too complicated and long for a blog post, but because their career plan involves being some kind of a public intellectual and writing a book is a part of that. They often have a single idea, that in itself might be an interesting one, but it's simple enough that it could indeed be entirely fleshed out in a blog post or an essay rather than a book.

I read a bunch of pop psychology books (by supposedly respectably authors who were academic researches on this stuff) on child development when my kids were in that age. Weirdly, the author of this leaves out a completely relevant variable from the discussion: the child's age.

As far as I recall from my readings, daycare might be harmful for very small children (around age 2 and below), who are still very attached to their mothers. Above that, it is a matter of how large the group size is and how professional the daycare teachers are. Children below the age of 6 or so benefit from very small groups, because they don't yet have the social intelligence to navigate multi-person interactions. All children left on their own tend to develop anti-social behavioural patterns (such as taking toys from other by force, etc.), and a qualified daycare professional is supposed to watch for and weed out that kind of behaviour.

Do you personally buy everything from the telemarketers? If not, how do you find the products you want to buy?

There doesn't need to be any kind of technical solution. If a telemarketer wants to sell something, they must declare the name of their company. The company name can be reported to police (or whatever authorities are going to handle this) who can then fine the telemarketers.

Again and again nerds coming from maths/CS/etc to finance are surprised to find that financial time series are actually impossible to predict. After spending almost a decade in finance now with a similar background, the arrogance of the "let's just throw in some neural network/whatever and be done with it" attitude now amuses me. After all, if it was easy - or even possible with any kind of effort - to predict (even within some error margins or probability) what the stock prices are tomorrow, anyone doing it would quickly become a billionaire or trillionaire. If the person could keep doing it, at some point they would own enough of the stock market so that their actions would affect the prices and whatever pattern they found would vanish.

Financial markets are not a natural phenomenon that exist unchanged regardless of whoever is observing them. Their dynamics continuously change in response to collective actions of all of the humanity.

Oil price changed quite a bit when the US attacked Iran. If you are trying to predict the price of oil, your model would have to be able to predict Trump ordering an attack on Iran. Does your model include a full simulation of the mind of the president of the United States (and every other person who have any kind of impact on the world events)? If not, then your time series forecasts are not going to be that great.

World is full of empty houses. It's just that people want to live in New York and not in some other place where housing is cheap or, occasionally, even free. And New York is already pretty full.

That's how it was maybe 100 years ago. Now PhD is just another bit of school work. Sometimes people manage to do really great PhD work, but most of the time it's pretty mediocre or straight garbage.

In some ways, people doing research now have it way more difficult than people of the past. They have hundreds of years worth of research to study before they are on top of things and making an original contribution that stands out among the huge amount of research that already exists is really hard. If we want to keep PhD as a proof of meaningful work, then we ought to lengthen the graduate studies considerably. How about a 10 year PhD program, at the end of which you can really say you have mastered the field?

In other words, Meta (excepting maybe the bought departments) has become just like any other traditional mega-corporation. Ugly, inefficient and disorganized, but terribly good at doing the one thing that makes it money.