brownbat (u/brownbat)

brownbat commented on Gottlob Frege: The machine in the ghost (2017) prospectmagazine.co.uk/ph... · Posted by u/cacher

ofrzeta · 3 years ago

Yeah, he is discussed in seminars as a kind of proto analytical philosopher.

brownbat · 3 years ago

We studied him too, he kicks off most of the major anthologies. Seems he's almost universally considered an overlooked founder of analytic philosophy. (There's the famous story about how Wittgenstein showed up on his doorstep to move in and study and Frege said, "no just go to Russell," he even underrated himself.)

So he is partly famous for not being famous, a paradox he would hopefully appreciate.

brownbat commented on Amazon has a book piracy problem twitter.com/fchollet/stat... · Posted by u/tosh

codeslave13 · 3 years ago

Amazon has a piracy/counterfeit problem. And has for a very long time. I have basically stopped buying there as much as possible. My current trend is to use them as a search engine then got to the companies site. At this point you might as well shop alibaba as thats where half the crap is from anyway.

brownbat · 3 years ago

Counterfeit DVD box sets are pretty rampant. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zwa9uKIYhM

I remember getting obviously burned DVDs run through terrible label makers back in the day. Now they're copying all the the art and packaging for box sets.

I'm both impressed at the work they put in, and also confused why they occasionally leave obvious errors like typos on the box after all that work.

brownbat commented on Show HN: Keyboard Drill – Minimalist Typing Drill to fix common mistakes keyboard-drill.com... · Posted by u/kuehle

kuehle · 4 years ago

Do you have any ideas for the feedback when your speed is to low? I am not a designer and struggle to find ideas that keep the UI as minimal as it is right now while improving the user experience.

brownbat · 4 years ago

A hint at what wpm I just typed at would be nice. So if I only hit 50 wpm a 50 off to the side or below the dotted line.

This is fascinating when picking a liminal wpm. Single hand words are so much harder.

I can cruise along until I hit words like "exact"

EDIT: You could make a list of bigrams as people type and average the wpm for words with that bigram, then you could weight the randomly chosen words by the difficulty of the bigrams, to really help people focus on their biggest stumbling blocks.

brownbat commented on What’s entering the public domain on January 1 smithsonianmag.com/smart-... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

throwawaycities · 4 years ago

> Copyright holders should declare the value of their copyright, and have to pay an escalating fee based on that value (1% per year for the first 10 years, 2% per year for the next 10 years etc) as a tax.

I hope this doesn’t come as a surprise but copyright holders do in fact declare the amount of money generated on their copyright and pay taxes on it annually, it’s called…taxes and it’s usually going to be a minimum of 10x all the way up to 40x your suggested rate.

Realistically for a company like Disney to pay $150M/year on Star Wars would be a joke and drop in the bucket compared to the amount of taxes attributable to Star Wars annually. All this would do is benefit big business that brush off those extra costs and harm new properties that couldn’t afford these taxes to protect their copyrights.

brownbat · 4 years ago

> copyright holders do in fact declare ... and pay taxes on [IP]

Or they sell the IP to a shell company in a tax haven and lease it at an artificial price, so the balance sheet shows no profit or even a loss. It's one of the largest sources of tax evasion out there.

A system like the one midasuni proposed would actually be an interesting patch for the tax system.

Here's a similar (but different) idea from some IP law professors: https://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/62-1-1.pdf

It's not perfect or fully fleshed out. Derivative works would raise a bunch of questions. And you couldn't use one regulatory framework for all different types of intellectual property, obviously, even though different kinds of IP can be used in this sort of tax dodge.

It's a proposal to enrich public access to orphaned works while closing a major corporate tax loophole. Saying "all this would do is benefit big business" is a surprising take here. It'd probably have some unintended consequences, any change this big would. Might be unworkable in practice. But it certainly wouldn't ONLY help big corporations. A ton of ordinary people would benefit immediately from something like this.

brownbat commented on Fastmail, Runbox, and Posteo under DDoS extortion attack therecord.media/ddos-atta... · Posted by u/conjuredbytes

TacticalCoder · 4 years ago

We still hear about DDoS attacks like this once in a while but it seems it's not anywhere near as common as it used to be. What happened? It looks like the bad guys are really having more and more trouble mounting succesful DDoS: how comes? It also looks like, in despair, they're targetting smaller fishes. Why? Smaller botnets? Cloudflare and OVH and the likes just being too good at absorbing everything and anything you can throw at them? Simple firewall rules getting rid of 99% of the crap? What's the reason it's not as prevalent as it used to be?

brownbat · 4 years ago

Maybe ransomware.

A bit speculative, but my hunch is --

IOT and some other advancements still create opportunities for new DDoS attacks, but attackers herd. And the "X as a service" support infrastructure is mostly supporting ransomware right now, likely because its safer and more lucrative. You can walk away from a ransomware target, fire and forget, so you can do it at scale. DDoS you have to pick your victims, and monitor and maintain the pressure, choose how to allocate your resources to targets while they're investigating or waiting you out.

Cloudflare might be part of the story, maybe that was enough of a headwind to stop the trolls, but for the professional criminals, I suspect this is about lucrative alternative attacks.

brownbat commented on Ask HN: Was there a Show HN about a Reddit product reputation aggregator? · Posted by u/brownbat

brownbat · 4 years ago

Ah.

https://redditfavorites.com/

Came up in a random DDG search for something.

brownbat commented on What Internet Memes Get Wrong About Breezewood, Pennsylvania bloomberg.com/news/articl... · Posted by u/tosh

brownbat · 4 years ago

Breezewood is mostly fine, you're on a giant empty stretch of road for hours otherwise.

If you want a truly dystopian moment, drive I-64 at the border of Kentucky and West Virginia in the middle of the night. Towering smokestacks all around you, lit up like daytime for 24 hour processing, it's like you slipped into a 70s sci fi film.

There are some pictures online, search for Catlettsburg Refinery. It's like the opposite of Breezewood. Whereas the Breezewood photos make it look worse than it actually is, none of the photos of Catlettsburg quite capture the awe and foreboding you get from staring directly into a city-scale refinery.

If a place could be a Hans Zimmer soundtrack...

brownbat commented on 'Miraculous' mosquito hack cuts dengue by 77% bbc.co.uk/news/health-574... · Posted by u/Zenst

brownbat · 5 years ago

This is weird to read as if it's a sudden new discovery, I had the impression wolbachia was well established as part of the toolkit.

Thorough history of mosquito control techniques and where we stand today, including some comparisons of pros / cons / applicability:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28869513/

brownbat commented on Are You Trading or Gambling? investinglessons.substack... · Posted by u/christopherjgan

ramblerman · 5 years ago

Interesting, given he is such a prominent Economist I'm a little surprised by the simplicity of the analogy though.

It seems strange that he has reduced it to one where there is no objective value at all. As an equity at the first level is still about how the company will perform in the future, no? And thus has an objective value.

brownbat · 5 years ago

This is a really important puzzle. In other terms, basically the efficient markets hypothesis vs, well, a week of GameStop prices.

At certain extremes, a stock price is clearly objective.

If the company is bankrupt and wiping all stock, that's objective. If the company does so well the shareholders demand an immense dividend or buyback, that's objective. Those are the fixed points where stock price is set to money in hand.

Are the swings in the market just irrational participants between those extremes?

We could imagine purely objective superintelligent AI dominating a market, investing only to those "true" values. Such AIs might determine p(bankruptcy) and p(payout), knowing those are the "true" outcomes of the prop bet, and set expected price as the ratio of those two probabilities.

But both those p()s are vanishingly small for most companies, and infinite precision will be impossible. Even if you were nearly omniscient about all current factors within a company, the slightest possible change in either probability could swing the ratio in dramatic ways.

(Add on to that the graveyard of companies that performed well, got fat, and failed to adapt... current performance is somewhat but not fully predictive of longevity.)

So basically, what if EMH is true, but stock pricing is a debate at an arbitrary level of precision, to make it close to meaningless in short time windows?

I'm not an expert so I'm sure professionals or academics would roll their eyes and offer something even more explanatory, but that's my best hunch at resolving this tension so far.

(The upshot of this theory is that it seems to validate strategies that help you zoom way out: low fees, broad diversified indexes, long time windows... those are the real value trades.)