f154hfds (u/f154hfds)

f154hfds commented on Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective worksinprogress.co/issue/... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

f154hfds · 17 days ago

As a Pittsburgh resident who exclusively used bus for 5 years, this certainly seems like a reasonable take. In Oakland and Squirrel Hill the bus almost stops every single block - which always seemed kind of crazy. It's a _very_ common sight to see a beleaguered student miss their bus and successfully chase it down across multiple city blocks.

I will give the PRT (formerly Port Authority) a shout out though:

1. Bikes are quick and convenient to bring along

2. The numbering system is intuitive enough that you can almost guess how to get to new neighborhoods

3. Accessibility is clearly a priority, and they successfully serve many disabled people

f154hfds commented on Is it a bubble? oaktreecapital.com/insigh... · Posted by u/saigrandhi

f154hfds · 3 months ago

The post script was pretty sobering. It's kind of the first time in my life that I've been actively hoping for a technology to out right not deliver on its promise. This is a pretty depressing place to be, because most emerging technologies provide us with exciting new possibilities whereas this technology seems only exciting for management stressed about payroll.

It's true that the technology currently works as an excellent information gathering tool (which I am happy to be excited about) but that doesn't seem to be the promise at this point, the promise is about replacing human creativity with artificial creativity which.. is certainly new and unwelcome.

f154hfds commented on Schools Should Pursue Excellence educationprogress.org/p/s... · Posted by u/apsec112

unstyledcontent · a year ago

"Those who study education quickly realize the surprising shallowness and inaccuracy of existing knowledge and practice: the curriculum and research output of education schools are driven by ideologically driven visions and fads. Most of the best information is found on isolated blog posts, within neighboring disciplines like cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, and in books written decades or centuries ago. As our project develops, we will organize and expand this knowledge to create a framework education schools have not."

This is absolutely true. I worked as a secretary at a university that churned out teaching degrees. It took 2 years to finish the degree (which was in addition to a bachelors) and was almost entirely non scientific fluff. I wish more educated, experienced people could become teachers without the beaurocracy of being certified. I think many people would choose to serve their communities as teachers for a few years, especially in retirement. A lost opportunity.

f154hfds · a year ago

In many states private schools don't need the same certifications as public institutions [1]. I'm sure they would prefer it in applicants but beggars can't be choosers.

[1] https://www.pa.gov/agencies/education/programs-and-services/...

f154hfds commented on Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths bbc.com/news/articles/c0j... · Posted by u/vinni2

wruza · a year ago

It is pro-social if you can separate objectively. And even then, who is that “social” to decide it? Some people aren’t social.

If the separation line gets drawn across questionable cases, then it’s authoritarian for them. As usual, any scalable implementation will look like a very jagged asterisk-shaped circle and some financial or political interest around it, acting far away from the real needs of people. And those who pick edge cases on its less certain side will push the whole setup further until it stops making sense. Systems like this are inherently vague, which is prone to “oh, we had another case, must regulate more”.

I’ll rephrase myself from the previous thread about suicides: the “society” keeps a blind eye on the fact that it is it who drives people to end their life and then puts a big “dying is prohibited and offensive” sign at the end of this road. If “society” wants to keep “healthy but confused” (subjectively to it) people from leaving, it should look to the root of the problem, not put a barrier at the end.

Ofc teens should be kept away from this for obvious biological reasons.

f154hfds · a year ago

> Ofc teens should be kept away from this for obvious biological reasons.

Why of course? Is the reason this is obvious to you unique to teenagers? When they turn 18 (or 20) do the reasons to restrict their freedoms immediately go away? Is there no possibility the 'obvious' reason in your mind couldn't occur for a different person in a different age bracket?

f154hfds commented on No evidence for inequity aversion in non-human animals: a meta-analysis royalsocietypublishing.or... · Posted by u/squeezer

llamaimperative · a year ago

You don’t mind if someone doing the exact same job as you at the same quality gets a 10x larger holiday bonus?

If you go play soccer and other people’s goals are worth 3 points while yours are worth 1?

I’m doubtful.

f154hfds · a year ago

These are not fair analogies to wealth inequality unless you think all people who have more than you got it by cheating people. A better analogy would be the movie Moneyball, about baseball's inequality.

Effectively the problem is that wealth is an inherent feedback loop that naturally creates Pareto distributions instead of normal distributions. People don't have to be 'unfair' for this phenomenon to occur.

f154hfds commented on No evidence for inequity aversion in non-human animals: a meta-analysis royalsocietypublishing.or... · Posted by u/squeezer

naming_the_user · a year ago

The question I always have to ask about inequality causing “unhappiness” is why I don’t feel that way.

Celebrities having private jets doesn’t upset me at all. Seems quite cool. I’d be more upset if I had nothing, sure, but I’m easily a factor of 100 away from jet land if not 1000. Fancy cars are cool but again, you can just… decide to not care?

It just seems intuitively obvious that what actually matters is the minimum standard, not artificially limiting the maximum.

If a study says that blue is red I’m still going to believe my eyes first hand.

f154hfds · a year ago

It seems to me that democratic society runs best where the distance is minimized between individuals with maximum agency vs. individuals with minimum agency. Agency is power, the ability to move other people to get things you want done, to make purchases, to amplify certain viewpoints over others.

In this regard, I usually think of wealth as a proxy for agency. There are other (negatively correlated) proxies that can be conveniently disregarded by certain political persuasions:

* Debt - effectively going into debt is sacrificing future agency for the sake of the present. In the moment of obtaining a loan you will of course have more liquidity at your disposal but after that moment in time your freedoms are limited due to your debt obligations. It's more obscured with purely financial loans - the way it negatively impacts democracy is more obviously seen in quid pro quo arrangements.

* Welfare dependence - like any other dependency relying on welfare decreases an individual's agency. They cannot afford to live without the welfare apparatus they depend on for survival.

In a democratic system we want every voting individual to have as close to the average agency as possible so that there isn't a non-democratic force continually applied corrupting the democratic process. Conversely we know that human beings are strongly motivated by agency maximization which society also needs for progress - in other words, humans need opportunity. The job of a statesman should be to manage these competing priorities.

f154hfds commented on Rust for tokenising and parsing xnacly.me/posts/2024/rust... · Posted by u/thunderbong

seanw444 · a year ago

Man, Go gets a lot of hate on here. It's certainly not the most flexible language. If I want flexibility + speed, I tend to choose Nim for my projects. But for practical projects that I want other people to be able to pick up quickly, I usually opt for Go. I'm building a whole product manufacturing rendering system for my company, and the first-class parallelism and concurrency made it super pleasant.

I will say that the error propagation is a pain a lot of the time, but I can appreciate being forced to handle errors everywhere they pop up, explicitly.

f154hfds · a year ago

So much of language opinion is based on people's progression of languages. My progression (of serious professional usage) looked like this:

Java -> Python -> C++ -> Rust -> Go

I have to say, given this progression going to Rust from C++ was wonderful, and going to Go from Rust was disappointing. I run into serious language issues almost daily. The one I ran into yesterday was that defer's function arguments are evaluated immediately (even if the underlying type is a reference!).

https://go.dev/play/p/zEQ77TIP8Iy

Perhaps with a progression Java -> Go -> Rust moving to rust could feel slow and painful.