shoguning (u/shoguning)

shoguning commented on AI is changing chemical discovery thegradient.pub/how-ai-is... · Posted by u/andreyk

uejfiweun · 4 years ago

Don't mean to sound cynical here, but is AI actually gonna change chemical discovery? Or is AI gonna "change chemical discovery" in the same way that it will "make radiologists obsolete", or "revolutionize healthcare with Watson", or "put millions of truckers out of business"? There's certainly a lot of marketing, technical talent, and hope behind modern "AI", but I'm not really aware of any major part of our economy that's been THAT changed by it.

shoguning · 4 years ago

Advertising and media? Robots bid on the ads that billions see every day, and decide what videos billions of people watch.

shoguning commented on GitHub Copilot copilot.github.com/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

hn_throwaway_99 · 4 years ago

I think this will result in classic Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox . As the price of writing any individual function/feature goes down, the demand for software will go up exponentially. Think of how many smallish projects are just never started these days because "software engineers are too expensive".

I don't think software engineers will get much cheaper, they'll just do a lot more.

shoguning · 4 years ago

I'm guessing low expertise programmers whose main contribution was googling stackoverflow will get less valuable, while high expertise programmers with real design skill will become even more valuable.

shoguning commented on There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic economist.com/briefing/20... · Posted by u/pranshum

greggman3 · 4 years ago

Here in Japan they've never really had lockdown. Restaurants have remained open the entire time, just asked to close at 8pm. I could/can walk by them at 7pm and see them full of people talking and eating without masks. I was invited by Japanese friends the entire time (didn't go) and would see them posting pictures of their restaurant dinner gatherings on Facebook.

Further, as a comparison, Tokyo Metro has 38 million people, California has 38 million people. Tokyo Metro has ~6500 people per square mile, California has 240 per square mile. Tokyo Metro had and still has people commuting in very crowded trains every weekday. California mostly people drive cars. California closed restaurants. Tokyo Metro never closed restaurants.

Yes, Tokyo is going through a "spike" right now but compared to California it's still tiny. Compare Tokyo Metro's current "spike" (~2k people per day) with any of California's spikes at 40k per day, 20x more.

Some people will claim testing but that doesn't fit the facts either. Deaths from COVID in Tokyo Metro. California 62k death, Tokyo Metro, 2k dead. And, if you believe the attribution of death by COVID is bad then all you have to do is look at the death rate from all causes and see that Japan is doing much better than the USA

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...

I have no idea what Japan did right or got lucky with. Various speculations abound. Japanese don't shake hands, hug and kiss friends. Japanese may be commonly taking some medicine for unrelated things that happens to provide protection. Japanese might have more people with genetic immunity. Japanese mask compliance might be higher. Japanese aren't obese (I'm sure there's some other non-obese country they can be compared to). Japanese have a different diet (not sure what other countries have similar diets)

I recognize that even with restaurants open it's possible just the various other factors are/were enough to keep R low enough.... I really have no clue. Personally I mostly stayed locked up. I live alone. Saw less than 1 person a month in person, usually an outdoor walk with masks on.

shoguning · 4 years ago

What you're saying is consistent with my hypothesis. Ie that casual public transmission on subways and in restaurants is low. Rather, it's "behind closed doors", at extended private gatherings, via domestic workers and so on. Those are the only such cases I have direct knowledge of (California USA). It could be that Japanese don't gather as much, or have chosen to skip it during pandemic.

shoguning commented on There have been 7M-13M excess deaths worldwide during the pandemic economist.com/briefing/20... · Posted by u/pranshum

mattnewton · 4 years ago

I don’t have anything to add except that California is huge and very unevenly applied “lockdown” - there are many towns a where businesses remained open or reopened frequently, but the big cities did have large shelter in place efforts. It would be interesting to compare on the municipal level if the data was that granular.

shoguning · 4 years ago

According to a study in PNAS, shelter-in-place policies in the US did not work: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/15/e2019706118

Another study in Eur J Clin Inv had similar findings comparing countries: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484

COVID went wild basically everywhere. There were a few strong exceptions: China (apparently), Australia, New Zealand and some others. What these had in common was very strict police enforcement, which led to some dramatic scenes like people getting welded into their houses in China, or houses in Australia getting broken into by police on suspicion of too many people gathering.

In my _opinion_, lockdowns didn't work elsewhere because most cases are not from casual public transmission in places like stores, restaurants etc. Rather, events like kickbacks, dinner parties, and practices like in-home workers (nannies, cleaners etc) continued throughout the pandemic, or resumed shortly after the original March 2020 shockwave. While strident police enforcement of physical distancing could eliminate cases, and seemed to in a few places, the half measures used by most of the world did little-to-nothing positive while being an economic and cultural disaster.

Personally, I never caught COVID and rarely socialized during the pandemic. All the cases I heard of stemmed from the kind of thing I mention above: private dinner parties, nannies and so forth, rather than casual public transmission.

You, or any individual may have taken social distancing seriously but it's clear many or most did not, including people on both political "sides", up to and including governors, members of congress etc.

shoguning commented on After working at Google, I’ll never let myself love a job again nytimes.com/2021/04/07/op... · Posted by u/donmcc

tombert · 4 years ago

About 7 years ago, I worked at a startup that very close-knit. All the coworkers were friends with everyone, the CEO and CTO were fun to be around, so I would make a point to go to all the team outings and lunches. I really liked it there, felt that they were my "family" in some sense.

About 9 months into my job, the company was hit with two lawsuits, and the leaders became very secretive and elusive and started changing rules to save money of questionable legality. For example, a rule was added to state that we had to work 40 billable hours a week.

This doesn't sound that bad, but because of the lawsuits and attempts to settle them, any work done for the plaintiffs in the aforementioned lawsuits was not counted as "billable", and most of that work would eat up multiple hours of my day. This meant that in addition to the eight hours I had to work on a billable client, I would also end up spending an extra three to four hours working on non-billable stuff. This went on for multiple months, I started feeling depressed, but I put up with it because I really liked the company.

Eventually, the company laid off 2/3 of the staff without any notice to any of the workers. I went from "employed" to "unemployed" overnight, and when I managed to get in touch with the CTO, he basically told me "thems the breaks. Sorry". I felt pretty betrayed, because I had spent two months working 60 hour weeks, all to be laid off because I was working on the wrong projects.

After that, I made a bit of a vow to myself to remember that a job is, at its core, a business transaction. You sell your time and expertise for compensation. It's great if you really like your boss and your coworkers, that'll help avoid depression, but remember at the end of the day, a company is not your family, and if they don't think you're creating enough value for them, they will end this transaction.

shoguning · 4 years ago

I think there is a proper level of conviviality/cordiality and fun that you can bring to work without getting too personally invested. A lot of first-time employees may have trouble with this balance, but after a tough break or two you learn the ropes.

shoguning commented on We created a fake language to root out resume liars facebook.com/groups/CFpro... · Posted by u/rmason

brigandish · 5 years ago

> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it.

I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchange 2000. I had no experience with Exchange 2000, so I told them, and watched their faces drop.

That was specifically why they wanted to speak to me. The recruiter had inserted it onto the copy of the CV he sent to them. I'm surprised I'm not still doing time for murder.

What I'm not surprised about though is why they do it. I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been given more than a glance. At moments like those I feel a deep sense of pessimism. The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and has been for a while.

shoguning · 5 years ago

Is there any reason to use a 3rd party recruiter? The listings are all public, just submit a resume.

All my offers came from applying direct. Always got the runaround from recruiters.

shoguning commented on “Location-Based Pay” – Who are we to complain? blackshaw.substack.com/p/... · Posted by u/whoooooo123

dmitryminkovsky · 5 years ago

Location-based pay is remarkably offensive, and for the exact reason you state:

> you have basically handed your wallet to the "wallet inspector"

By accepting location-based pay, you concede that your employer has the right to treat you like a child receiving an allowance; that your remuneration is based on the lifestyle that they think is appropriate for you, and not on the market value of your work. But your choice of lifestyle, your needs, etc, are strictly none of their business and it's exceptionally inappropriate for employers to act like your parents. Once you let these people "inspect your wallet," you are establishing an abusive relationship and will get hustled around the clock.

shoguning · 5 years ago

Or they believe (possibly correctly) that you don't have as strong a negotiating position because there are fewer options for you based on location.

shoguning commented on Bumble S-1 sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da... · Posted by u/tempsy

tedsanders · 5 years ago

The reason excess deaths are only 3x higher is because of our precautions. If we let it burn through the US, millions would die and the ratio would be more like 100x (30,000 vs 3 million). Obviously depends on some hard-to-model assumptions. Your conclusion might be right, but your argument is terribly misleading.

(Plus, letting it burn through the whole population comes with downside risks of more mutations.)

shoguning · 5 years ago

> The reason excess deaths are only 3x higher is because of our precautions.

It's a hard case to make. Sweden for example has had less excess death than harsher lockdown countries like Spain & UK.

Lockdowns have done little if anything in US states. New York and Florida have similar stats (worse in NY if anything).

shoguning commented on Bumble S-1 sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da... · Posted by u/tempsy

tedsanders · 5 years ago

We also outlaw speeding because speeding increases the odds that you kill someone else. Catching COVID, even if you recover, increases the odds that you kill someone else through a chain of infections. Remember that R is above 1 in most locations in the world right now. Tens of thousands of people are dying a day right now because not everyone is taking the precautions they have been asked to take. In countries with high compliance, death rates are very low. Mass death is not inevitable.

Note that the OP said it was selfish to be out and about, not against self interest. So your statistic is irrelevant to the point made. Selfish means you're benefiting yourself while harming others. That's exactly what happens if you catch COVID, pass it on, and then recover. You're fine. Others may not be.

shoguning · 5 years ago

> We also outlaw speeding because speeding increases the odds that you kill someone else.

We could go further and outlaw cars that don't have speed governors. That would save lives. Lower speed limits would save more lives as well. Now we have a balance between freedom and safety.

> Tens of thousands of people are dying a day right now because not everyone is taking the precautions they have been asked to take.

That was true during the flu season of 2018 as well. The excess deaths from COVID are higher, but not orders of magnitude higher (more like 3x) [1]. The response is off the charts, economically and culturally devastating. Not the right balance.

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps

shoguning commented on Bumble S-1 sec.gov/Archives/edgar/da... · Posted by u/tempsy

kjakm · 5 years ago

>> I know a lot of you are married so let me put this out here: I (and most young people) will not put their romantic life on pause cause of a virus.

Most people I know have put their dating lives on hold. Not all of course, but most. It’s like any of the rules people have been asked to follow during the past year: most people have followed them, it’s only a selfish minority that have not.

Edit: My point is not to excuse shitty behaviour by pretending everyone else is doing it. Consider the world doesn't revolve around you and that occasionally people need to work together for the greater good, each making a variety of sacrifices.

shoguning · 5 years ago

It's not selfish to be out and about if you are young and healthy. The recovery rate for 20-30 YO is 99.99%+, and if you are healthy it's likely higher[1].

It's on the same order of risk as driving. Many young people die driving every year, yet we still do it plenty, with reasonable precautions. If you take reasonable precautions, are young and healthy, it is a risk worth taking to many.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0/figures/2