Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
The next decade will be the decade of survelliance. Nearly dust size receivers will cost nothing and will be generously used everywhere: from concrete blocks to clothes. The US will come up with a clever use case so people will buy this themselves (finding a matching pair of socks will finally become a trackable problem, thanks to receivers in all socks), while authoritarian countries will implant these chips in lieu of passports and credit cards. Paired with 5G, this will be a perfect always online monitoring system.

I don't think there will be any notable advancements in science: we won't create AI, we won't cure cancer and we won't switch to electric cars.

Comment · 6 years ago
Regarding escalation of school shootings, it seems plausible, but only because (here is an unpopular opinion that will get 20 downvotes) the rich want to disarm the poor and use school/kids/safety as an excuse. And that's understandable: if I was rich enough to afford private schools for my kids in a classy neighborhood, I'd want to keep weirdos with guns far from my family, while at the same time Id have 24/7 former-marines guards armed with full auto weapons.
Comment · 6 years ago
His plan was to get into big politics and an exec role was a way to find his campaign. 10 years is a totally believable planning horizon. I doubt he cares much about the petty issues with his former boss, but I'm sure he'll flex on them in the future.
Comment · 6 years ago
Chances are, he (Ross) has outplayed the senior execs at Google. He was in the CA governor's team before and thus knew about the new trend to regulate tech, so he went to Google to build some wealth for his political campaign, skillfully played the victim's role, and precisely before the 2020 elections got himself fired for being too concerned with human rights. His next step will be to get into the Senate, make it clear to the new president that their views are aligned, acquire an even more powerful position and then come back to the Google execs who talked down to him.
Comment · 6 years ago
So the high-level sociopaths have taken over to increase profits at any cost, and Ross has chosen to leave for big politics and use the moment to show his principled approach. P.S. everybody should read the gervais principle book: it's 101 of the corp politics.
Comment · 6 years ago
They aren't. It's just a very coarse point where to stop.
Comment · 6 years ago
Afaik, a union can tell you what you can and cannot do, while I only want a team of well funded lawyers to change some laws. And the u word attracts unnecessary attention. Let's call it a club, actually.
Comment · 6 years ago
We need a stronger law: any employee should be able to choose how many hours or days per week to work AND work for any other company at the same time (NDA applies, but non compete bs doesn't). Execs do this all the time: they can be on boards in multiple companies, run other companies, while possessing material information about them all.

The way I see it's working is the total comp negotiation goes as usual, but the employer isn't allowed to ask how much time the employee indends to work and whether one works for other companies. The salary and other comp is paid bi weekly as usual, but is pro rated to the number of hours or days worked. All the machinery is already in place: big corps have very detailed per minutes compensation for vacations, various on call duties and so on.

This will be strictly better for the IRS, because more competition means more taxes, but much worse for the dividend seeking investors.

Obviously, this will be a decade long legal battle with tens of millions in expenses, and it can't be done without a full time team of motivated and very expensive lawyers. However if 100k engineers spend 1k/year as membership fees, this organization will have a 100m/year budget and can keep courts busy forever.

Comment · 6 years ago
That's why we need lawyers on a payroll that would figure out all the details.
Comment · 6 years ago
Study calculus, from the definition of real numbers and to taking complex integrals via residuals; then study linear algebra to some theorems about eigenvectors. 1 month total, assuming you're somewhat talented and determined to spend 12 hours a day learning proofs of boring theorems. After that you'll realise that most of the ML papers out there are just ad-hoc composed matrix multiplications with some formulas used as fillers. At that point I think it's more useful to learn what ML models work in practice (although nobody will be able to explain why they work, including the authors) and mix this practical knowledge with the math theory to develop good intuition.

I'd compare ML with weather models: we understand physics driving individual particles, we understand the high level diff equations, but as complexity builds up, we have to resort to intuition to develop at least somewhat working weather models.

Comment · 6 years ago
Good for them. As for the tech workers, they need something like a guild with membership fees and staff lawyers that would sue the state for allowing binding arbitration and non compete agreements (i.e. do what California did).
Comment · 6 years ago
My hunch is that 1on1 is time when a manager tries to build a working mental model of his/her report: the manager tried to use empathy to read the employee.
Comment · 6 years ago
Why can't you do it under lsd? Is it the skill to think is somehow disabled or it's just a flood of distracting events that make it hard to stay focused?
Comment · 6 years ago
There is a simpler explanation. Assuming our world is discrete, like a mathematical graph, every world state has one or a few next possible states. If we imagine all possible states from past and future linked together by causality links as a huge mathematical graph, any two states have a shortest path between them. The length of this path is what we perceive as time or as the speed of light. Same idea applies to chess: there is large, but finite, number of chess board states and they are linked by moves allowed by the chess rules; the number of moves on the shortest path connecting two positions is what we'd call the speed of light in chess.
Comment · 6 years ago
In its current form, ccpa is useless. The companies will just demand all personal data for any purpose or deny access.

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