noslenwerdna (u/noslenwerdna)

noslenwerdna commented on Florida is letting companies make it harder for highly paid workers to swap jobs businessinsider.com/flori... · Posted by u/pseudolus

OkayPhysicist · 2 months ago

Noncompetes are a scourge. If your company requires them to survive, then it deserves to fail. Any argument in favor of them can be trivially nullified by pointing at California's unrivaled economic success, "despite" (or perhaps in part because of) its complete ban on noncompetes dating back to its founding. Indentured servitude has no place in the modern world.

noslenwerdna · 2 months ago

What other states have had non-competes similar to California? North Dakota and Oklahoma.

It's possible that other factors might be more important in driving California's economic success...

noslenwerdna commented on Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase cnbc.com/2025/07/02/adp-j... · Posted by u/ceejayoz

kasey_junk · 2 months ago

Your first query is simply real wages. There are several real wage metrics in the bls data set. Here is a commonly referenced one: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Your second query is more subjective. Most people would probably point you at the U6 underemployment number as that’s the most famous one. I like the employment projections series for this kind of question though https://www.bls.gov/emp/

noslenwerdna · 2 months ago

For the second one I was hoping there was something like employment satisfaction, but thank you!

noslenwerdna commented on Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase cnbc.com/2025/07/02/adp-j... · Posted by u/ceejayoz

kasey_junk · 2 months ago

You of course know that we have a diverse set of metrics for unemployment that capture all of what you are talking about right?

And that is before we talk about alternative signals like the ADP number this like references.

Anytime someone says “we need better ways” you should just read it as “I should do more reading”, because this is a very well studied, understood and measured set of data.

noslenwerdna · 2 months ago

This response is a bit less than helpful. Could you provide an example of a metric from this diverse set that fits what the OP is asking for? I feel like there are at least two use cases from their post:

* a metric that measures if people's jobs are paying enough to put food on the table

* a metric that measures whether people's employment matches their education?

noslenwerdna commented on If you are useful, it doesn't mean you are valued betterthanrandom.substack... · Posted by u/weltview

noslenwerdna · 3 months ago

I feel like everyone is going to think they are useful. Not sure how meaningful this is.

noslenwerdna commented on Human coders are still better than LLMs antirez.com/news/153... · Posted by u/longwave

vouaobrasil · 3 months ago

Difference is though AI does it much faster and has much fewer central sources that provide the service. The speed and magnitude is important as well, just like a crash at 20km/h is different than a crash at 100km/h. And those other inventions WERE also harmful. Cars -> global warming.

noslenwerdna · 3 months ago

My point is every invention has pros and cons, and tends to displace people who were very tied to the previous way.

noslenwerdna commented on Human coders are still better than LLMs antirez.com/news/153... · Posted by u/longwave

bachmeier · 3 months ago

I suspect humans will always be critical to programming. Improved technology won't matter if the economics isn't there.

LLMs are great as assistants. Just today, Copilot told me it's there to do the "tedious and repetitive" parts so I can focus my energy on the "interesting" parts. That's great. They do the things every programmer hates having to do. I'm more productive in the best possible way.

But ask it to do too much and it'll return error-ridden garbage filled with hallucinations, or just never finish the task. The economic case for further gains has diminished greatly while the cost of those gains rises.

Automation killed tons of manufacturing jobs, and we're seeing something similar in programming, but keep in mind that the number of people still working in manufacturing is 60% of the peak, and those jobs are much better than the ones in the 1960s and 1970s.

noslenwerdna · 3 months ago

Sure, it's just that the era of super high paying programming jobs may be over.

And also, manufacturing jobs have greatly changed. And the effect is not even, I imagine. Some types of manufacturing jobs are just gone.

noslenwerdna commented on Human coders are still better than LLMs antirez.com/news/153... · Posted by u/longwave

vouaobrasil · 3 months ago

> Again, if a good AI could take on a lot of that work, maybe that means I don't have to sit there in dependency hell and fight arcane missing symbol errors for the rest of my fucking career.

My argument really had nothing to do with you and your hobby. It was that AI is signficantly modifying society so that it will be hard for people to do what they like to make money, because AI can do it.

If AI can solve some boring tasks for you, that's fine but the world doesn't revolve around your job or your hobby. I'm talking about a large mass of people who enjoy doing different things, who once were able to do those things to make a living, but are finding it harder to do so because tech companies have found a way to do all those things because they could leverage their economies of scale and massive resource pools to automate all that.

You are in a priveleged position, no doubt about it. But plenty of people are talented and skilled at doing a certain sort of creative work and the main thrust of their work can be automated. It's not like your cushy job where you can just automate a part of it and just become more efficient, but rather it's that people just won't have a job.

It's amazing how you can be so myopic to only think of yourself and what AI can do for you when you are probably in the top 5% of the world, rather than give one minute to think of what AI is doing to others who don't have the luxuries you have.

noslenwerdna · 3 months ago

Everyone should do the tasks where they provide unique value. You could make the same arguments you just made for recorded music, automobiles, computers in general in fact.

noslenwerdna commented on Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court axios.com/pro/tech-policy... · Posted by u/c420

michaelt · 5 months ago

The government just kinda forgot that competition law existed for a few decades.

They were busy doing things like bringing freedom and democracy to Afghanistan, having a financial crisis, stuff like that. Very important stuff. Social media? Oh yes I think my grandson told me about that.

noslenwerdna · 5 months ago

I didn't know the FTC got involved in Afghanistan

noslenwerdna commented on Maybe Bluesky has "won" anderegg.ca/2024/11/15/ma... · Posted by u/GavinAnderegg

roenxi · 9 months ago

The people aren't on Twitter, pretty sure every time I've checked the stats Twitter users are a relative minority. It caters to the sort of people who enjoy communication without discussion - that might be the police's target audience for their communication but it isn't most people.

I've been annoyed over the years because (not having an account) sometimes Twitter won't let me look at Tweets. Hopefully none of them contained useful info.

noslenwerdna · 9 months ago

Journalists are (or were) on Twitter though

noslenwerdna commented on Yes, we did discover the Higgs theoryandpractice.org/202... · Posted by u/EvgeniyZh

BeetleB · 10 months ago

> when in reality this field is one of the strictest in terms of statistical procedures like pre registeration, blinding, multiple hypothesis testing etc

I'm not in HEP, but my graduate work had overlap with condensed matter physics. I worked with physics professors/students in a top 10 physics school (which had Nobel laureates, although I didn't work with them).

Things may have changed since then, but the majority of them had no idea what pre-registration meant, and none had taken a course on statistics. In most US universities, statistics is not required for a physics degree (although it is for an engineering one). When I probed them, the response was "Why should we take a whole course on it? We study what we need in quantum mechanics courses."

No, my friend. You studied probability. Not statistics.

Whatever you can say about reproducibility in the social sciences, a typical professor in those fields knew and understood an order of magnitude more statistics than physicists.

noslenwerdna · 10 months ago

As an ex-HEP, I can confirm that yes, we had blinding and did correct for multiple hypothesis testing explicitly. As Kyle Cranmer points out, we called it the "look elsewhere effect." Blinding is enforced by the physics group. You are not allowed to look at a signal region until you have basically finished your analysis.

For pre-registration, this might be debatable, but what I meant was that we have teams of people looking for specific signals (SUSY, etc). Each of those teams would have generated monte carlo simulations of their signals and compared those with backgrounds. Generally speaking, analysis teams were looking for something specific in the data.

However, there are sometimes more general "bump hunts", which you could argue didn't have preregistration. But on the other hand, they are generally looking for bumps with a specific signature (say, two leptons).

So yes, people in HEP generally are knowledgeable about stats... and yes, this field is extremely strict compared to psychology for example.