thelamest (u/thelamest)

thelamest commented on Staying ahead of censors in 2025 forum.torproject.org/t/st... · Posted by u/ggeorgovassilis

Considering the staggering number of arrest for online/offensive communications in England & Wales, we should add Britain to the list of Russia and Iran

2017: ~5,500 arrests

2019: ~7,734 arrests

2023: ~12,183 arrests

thelamest · 3 months ago

Florida, 2020: 63,217 domestic violence arrests

The British arrest stats subsume DV harassment cases, and the original Times reporting quoted a police officer stating that they are the bulk of these numbers. I haven’t found an apples-to-apples comparison in the US, but the FL number gives a point of reference.

thelamest commented on Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently arstechnica.com/gaming/20... · Posted by u/doppp

FredPret · 6 months ago

Not saying you need the above, but you’ll feel like you do. It’s certainly the easier way

thelamest · 6 months ago

Addressing the hypothetical person you’re describing: car infrastructure may solve some needs, but it is in direct conflict with other needs. Give every adult a guaranteed parking space just at home and at work, and the physical space required for that alone is an unbelievable double-digit percentage of the city area. Cities are so valuable because they pack a lot of amenities and markets (including your family’s schools and workplaces) in a compact area. Place everything significantly further apart, add more concrete and noise, and you’ve lost on all fronts: safety, charm and efficiency.

thelamest commented on How to avoid P hacking nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/benocodes

AstralStorm · 10 months ago

You use full both sided ANOVA F test with multiple comparison correction for that. Even these tests are sometimes not conservative enough, because the correction is a bit of a guess.

You will end up with much higher number of trials required to hit the P value than the version with predetermined number of trials and no stopping point by P.

Say, in a single variable single run ABX test, 8 is the usual number needed according to Fischer frequentist approach. If you do multiple comparison to hit 0.05 you need I believe 21 trials instead. (Don't quote me on that, compute your own Bayesian beta prior probability.)

The number of trials to differentiate from a fair coin is the typical comparison prior, giving a beta distribution. You're trying to set up a ratio between the two of them, one fitted to your data, the other null.

thelamest · 10 months ago

The general topic and some specific ways to estimate a correction are described under this term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_analysis

thelamest commented on Chongqing, the Largest City – In Pictures theguardian.com/world/gal... · Posted by u/tosh

yorwba · a year ago

The strong state capacity collects the resources of large areas and concentrates them into large-scale construction projects in a handful of places. China has a small number of megacities with large, wealthy, modern urban cores and a very large population that lives somewhere else. There are about a hundred cities with more than a million inhabitants but only 47 have urban rail transit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_rail_transit_in_China That's inequality.

thelamest · a year ago

(Maybe I’m reading too much of a narrative into what you wrote, but–) I don’t think it’s causal like that; it doesn’t have to be. In particular, “wealthy, modern urban cores” tend to be self-sustaining economic force multipliers rather than parasitic resource sinks or vanity projects. Each specific megaproject might be one of the latter, of course. In general, however, I’d be careful about mixing up different public choice failures. How easy it is to: (agree on a fair way to) collect public money, identify and agree on some kind of public benefit, allocate resources to further that interest, execute projects without snags – etc.

thelamest commented on Reasoning models don't always say what they think anthropic.com/research/re... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

semiquaver · a year ago

That’s holding LLMs to a significantly higher standard than humans. When I realize there’s a flaw in my reasoning I don’t know that it was caused by specific incorrect neuron connections or activation potentials in my brain, I think of the flaw in domain-specific terms using language or something like it.

Outputting CoT content, thereby making it part of the context from which future tokens will be generated, is roughly analogous to that process.

thelamest · a year ago

AI CoT may work the same extremely flawed way that human introspection does, and that’s fine, the reason we may want to hold them to a higher standard is because someone proposed to use CoTs to monitor ethics and alignment.

thelamest commented on Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working economist.com/leaders/202... · Posted by u/pseudolus

lurk2 · a year ago

America isn't overpopulated. The pyramid scheme you're describing is not a Malthusian constraint but the product of bad monetary policy privileging non-productive investments in real estate. There's still no better place on earth for normal people to build wealth, unless you're playing the digital nomad game.

thelamest · a year ago

It does not come about magically from monetary or even fiscal policy. The demand for housing (and other construction) was and is real. People find use for, and like having much space, while being close together. What was and is lacking is supply.

thelamest commented on A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter noemamag.com/a-radical-ne... · Posted by u/Hooke

xg15 · a year ago

Maybe the definition of what "intelligence" is could be sharpened by having a look at LLMs and "traditional" computer programs and asking what exactly the difference between the two is.

Almost all the traditional criteria of intelligence - reasoning, planning, decisionmaking, memory etc - are exhibited pretty trivially by standard computer programs. Nevertheless no one would think of them as "intelligent" in the sense that humans or animals are.

On the other hand, we now have LLMs, that sent the entire tech world into a multi-year frenzy, precisely because they appear to possess that human-like intelligence.

And that is even though they perform worse than classical programs in some of the "intelligence" measures: For the first time, we have to worry that a computer program is "bad at math". They cannot reflect on past decisions and are physically unable to store long-term memories. And yet, we're much more likely to believe that an LLM is "intelligent" than a classical program.

This makes me think that our formal decisions of "intelligence" (the ones that would also qualify fungal networks, swarms, cells, societies, etc) and what we intuitively look out for, are really two different things.

thelamest · a year ago

>This makes me think that our formal [definitions] of "intelligence" […] and what we intuitively look out for, are really two different things.

Just two? You can name so many more terms in this concept cloud, e.g.: personhood, moral agency, consciousness, self-awareness, processing power, wit, autonomy, feeling-and-experiencing capacity, and so on… We don’t seem to agree on what’s separate from what, and yes, it would be useful.

thelamest commented on It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds berthub.eu/articles/posts... · Posted by u/Sami_Lehtinen

cogman10 · a year ago

This does raise a valid question of what secrets can or should the government have.

I think it's obvious that some secrets should be kept. It makes little sense to expose our nuclear secrets, counter espionage, or ongoing investigation efforts. But how far does or should that extend? Should everything the NSA/CIA/FBI/IRS does be secret? Should they stay secret for years or decades or forever?

IMO, the US goes too far in it's secrets. Stuff gets classified that just makes the government look bad and that's dangerous.

And that's where I'm somewhat less concerned about putting US secrets into the cloud. Sure there's highly sensitive stuff that shouldn't go there, but there's also a lot of stuff that shouldn't have been a secret in the first place.

thelamest · a year ago

“Transparency” as leaks from abuse is very, very different from transparency as a policy of easy access – and neither makes you necessarily better informed. In short, a biased selection of information can leave you worse off than having no information.

thelamest commented on Pricing Money: A beginner's guide to money, bonds, futures and swaps jdawiseman.com/books/pric... · Posted by u/mhh__

plandis · 3 years ago

The thing that I’ve always found wild is that the money people make on markets seems to be so much higher than the money people who actually make goods/services.

Why has the global economy put such a high benefit from investment bankers compared to, for example, family doctors?

thelamest · 3 years ago

For one, finance is a macro force multiplier; it can make or break entire other industries. There’s also a bit of selection (global top) and survivorship (plenty of less visible non-success stories) in the wild money stories you can see out there.

thelamest commented on Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU mullvad.net/nl/blog/2023/... · Posted by u/Frisiavones

lo_zamoyski · 3 years ago

> Before "nations" people didnt regard borders, states, etc. as they do today. "citizenship" of a "nation" is a relatively recent phenomenon.

"Nationalism" had more to do with the relationship between the state and the nation, not the existence of nations. The word "nation" is very old.

Nation comes from the Latin "natio" meaning "birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe"[0]. Thus, the essential basis for nationality is familial, a matter of common descent (as all human beings form an extended family, where you draw the line on this blurry map will depend on other factors like culture and language and ultimately the good held in common; note how Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians speak basically the same language, it is the religious and therefore cultural differences that separate them). Naturally, people migrate all the time between nations. That is normal to the degree that migration does not harm the common good of the host society. But immigration is effectively a matter of adoption. We can adopt children. We can also adopt nations.

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/nation#etymonline_v_2309

thelamest · 3 years ago

To expand just a bit more, the map is very blurry. Nation states tap into some real and old sentiments, but are not just a translation of those to a modern political language. They are their own new political projects, with a shape that is a result of historical happenstance and personal ambitions of specific people. It is surprisingly malleable – depending on what common enemies appear, what leaders and writers become popular, etc.