seb's recent activity
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Comment on Tim Cook’s email to employees about Apple’s $1trillion milestone in ~tech
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Comment on Tim Cook’s email to employees about Apple’s $1trillion milestone in ~tech
seb Link ParentPretty bleak :/ I've spent my not-so-long tech career working at small companies, and I've enjoyed it. I've focused on finding companies where the nature of the work was interesting to me, rather...Pretty bleak :/ I've spent my not-so-long tech career working at small companies, and I've enjoyed it. I've focused on finding companies where the nature of the work was interesting to me, rather than the pay or the job title or the company's name. Maybe the path to enlightenment is finding work you like in situations where you're not a drone at the bottom of a huge ladder?
I should mention, in the interest of full disclosure: I am white, and male. Apologies.
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Comment on Tim Cook’s email to employees about Apple’s $1trillion milestone in ~tech
seb Link ParentOh yes, people with technology skills are ripe for exploitation given how few companies would employ them! Not to mention how interchangeable they all are - if a software project isn't working...Oh yes, people with technology skills are ripe for exploitation given how few companies would employ them! Not to mention how interchangeable they all are - if a software project isn't working well you can just swap the engineer out for a new one. No need to eye their resume, they're basically all the same. That's why we need to UNIONIZE!
If enough people fetishize the intangibles of working for the big 4 or 5 tech companies, those companies are going to try to pay you less because they know you'll take the job. It's economics. Non-competes are BS, but they're in the contract that you sign. Calling that exploitation just seems... adolescent.
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Comment on What's your game that you'd really like to see made? in ~games
seb Link ParentHey I meant to respond to this a couple weeks ago and never hit the post button, but just wanted to let you know I appreciated the feedback! The idea of the chemistry lab is exactly the sort of...Hey I meant to respond to this a couple weeks ago and never hit the post button, but just wanted to let you know I appreciated the feedback! The idea of the chemistry lab is exactly the sort of idea I was going for. I can give you one example of how I thought a "mathematical" potion system might work:
Think of each magical ingredient (hair of unicorn, eye of newt, nightshade! etc.) as a vector in a very high dimensional vector space. If you take integral combinations of each of the ingredients, they together form what is in mathematics referred to as a lattice, which is a subset of the vector space. So what you could do is choose points in the vector space that represent hotspots, and assign to each one a magical effect that the potion might have. When you put together your ingredients into your potion pot, underneath the hood it's adding a bunch of vectors together into one, effectively selecting one of the points in the lattice. You could then measure the distance between that point and all of the different magical effect hotspots, and the closer you were to a hotspot, the more of an effect that potion would have to the associated magical quantity. For enough dimensions it would be hard even for the game designers to know which combinations of ingredients produced the strongest results, because finding the closest lattice point to another arbitrary point is in general an NP-hard problem. So you would have a genuing discovery process where the community was learning things the designers could never have anticipated.
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Comment on What's your game that you'd really like to see made? in ~games
seb Link ParentHoly shit, I completely independently had a very similar desire. You should check my post lower for a take on this. My idea is that the spells themselves are vectors in an 'effects-space', and...Holy shit, I completely independently had a very similar desire. You should check my post lower for a take on this. My idea is that the spells themselves are vectors in an 'effects-space', and then you would use a complex mathematical mapping from input trajectories to spell-vectors to make the 'rules of magic'.
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Comment on What's your game that you'd really like to see made? in ~games
seb (edited )LinkMMO RPG VR game set loosely in the Harry Potter Universe, but without any reference to the actual Harry Potter characters. The player could brandish a wand and hold down a button and then make a...MMO RPG VR game set loosely in the Harry Potter Universe, but without any reference to the actual Harry Potter characters.
The player could brandish a wand and hold down a button and then make a gesture to cast spells. Internally there would be a complex mathematical backend that took as input the pose trajectory of the controller and gave as output a vector in an abstract space that determined the properties of the spell that was cast. There would be no in-game guide to learn how to do magic, and indeed even the game designers would be unable to fully predict the complexity of the 'magic-function', so players across the world would have to collectively backwards engineer how to do magic, or learn it from their friends.
There would be an inventory, loot and crafting system similar to many RPGs, but here "crafting" would be potions. There would be a complex underlying mathematical system for mapping ingredients to effects, again creating a large discoverable and undocumented space for people to explore. The spells you can perform with your wand could also be used to cast charms on your items, just as the items you collect could influence or augment your baseline magical powers. Items in the game would be explicitly rivalrous - no multi-drops for the whole party or anything like that. There would be an elder wand in the game, with mechanics for motivating the holder of the elder wand to expose themselves to risk.
Once you learned how to cast deadly spells, you could obviously kill other players in all areas besides, say, Diagon Alley. There would be natural stimuli within the game to push people towards either becoming aspiring dark wizards, whose goal is increasing their power and self aggrandizement, or aurors, who join up in teams to try and win the bounty on particularly nasty dark wizards. In general, dark wizards could make dark bargains that increase their power but make them permanently unwelcome in common spaces, forcing the division. The goal would be to make people be the bosses - "raids" would be attempts to kill and steal the loot from another person playing the game. Think EVE. One explicitly included gameplay element would be the creation of horcruxes, which would be difficult but possible to pull off. You would have to leave your horcrux in the gamespace out for anybody to find it, making convenient "sub-quests" for aurors who are trying to take down a super powerful dark wizard.
Direct movement would be restricted to a local area, but you would be able to quickly apparate around the environment. This would be one of the few spells handed over to the player early on and made easy to cast. You would also be able to acquire a broomstick, which would be controlled using a handheld controller held in the natural broomstick-y way. Floo networks would be used to take you around the main pre-generated parts of the game, whereas the wilderness full of beasts and dark magic would be procedurally generated, and generally have to be explored manually. Occasionally, random items that one found would secretly be portkeys that took you to long-forgotten caves, tombs, etc.
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Comment on One country, two radically different narratives in ~misc
seb Link ParentIt's because they live in the liberal media bubble. A bubble that's very much designed around brainwashing it's audience into only accepting "the right kind of news". MSNBC and others like it...It's because they live in the liberal media bubble. A bubble that's very much designed around brainwashing it's audience into only accepting "the right kind of news". MSNBC and others like it should be abolished.
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Comment on Elon Musk calls British diver who helped rescue Thai schoolboys 'pedo guy' in Twitter outburst in ~news
seb Link ParentYou is a rhetorical device. I'm asking the reader to show a little empathy (how would you act in this situation?) and then I'm trying to make a point by anticipating a counterpoint (I bet you are...You is a rhetorical device. I'm asking the reader to show a little empathy (how would you act in this situation?) and then I'm trying to make a point by anticipating a counterpoint (I bet you are tempted to say this, however...). My point isn't about literally you, yes YOU user @flip.
Yes, we know you think you would act like a good and honorable person if somebody criticized your idea. Everybody thinks that. Elon Musk thinks that. It doesn't always happen that way when tempers flair and emotions get the better of you. Just proclaiming "I would never do that" is worthless.
Don't forget, by the way, that it's not just your idea that's being criticized, it's your executed idea. It's like if you built an app for a local business for free and they just said "This won't integrate with the accounting back-end that we have. Fuck you for trying!" More than a little annoying, I'd say.
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Comment on Elon Musk calls British diver who helped rescue Thai schoolboys 'pedo guy' in Twitter outburst in ~news
seb Link ParentI think you're being really glib about the complexity of the situation. This wasn't a routine rescue operation, and they were publicly worrying that there might not be a way to get them out. When...I think you're being really glib about the complexity of the situation. This wasn't a routine rescue operation, and they were publicly worrying that there might not be a way to get them out.
When he announced that he was bringing a submarine to the site, was the whole world laughing and saying what a dumb idea? No, people thought it was a pretty cool act. So at least to the average layman, it seemed plausible. Your example falls down if you replace super-soakers with, say, fire extinguishers. Maybe it would still be a bad idea to have a bunch of people trying to use fire extinguishers around a burning house, but it's not immediately and obviously stupid. How would you feel if the fireman told you to go shove your stupid fire extinguishers up your ass?
Now imagine there were children stuck inside the burning house.
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Comment on Elon Musk calls British diver who helped rescue Thai schoolboys 'pedo guy' in Twitter outburst in ~news
seb Link ParentNo doubt it was ridiculous! Totally uncalled for, asshole thing to do. All I'm saying is it annoys me that this is being whipped up into a narrative about how this is who he really is underneath,...No doubt it was ridiculous! Totally uncalled for, asshole thing to do. All I'm saying is it annoys me that this is being whipped up into a narrative about how this is who he really is underneath, or he's manic depressive, or the entirety of SpaceX needs to hold a moratorium on this, or whatever the hell drama people are dreaming up.
One of the other posters is saying that the reason this is a problem is that people are going to take the accusation that he's a pedo seriously. But the irony is that those reactions fall under the same purview of what I'm complaining about: people getting way too serious about stupid flamewars on Twitter. Why are random pronouncements on Twitter of any concern when we know that basically everything on Twitter is trivial, context-less noise?
It's recreational outrage, plain and simple.
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Comment on Elon Musk calls British diver who helped rescue Thai schoolboys 'pedo guy' in Twitter outburst in ~news
seb Link ParentMaybe he just lost his cool and responded like an asshole because somebody was accusing him of being a shill when he was really trying to help? Ask yourself what you did to help those kids stuck...Maybe he just lost his cool and responded like an asshole because somebody was accusing him of being a shill when he was really trying to help?
Ask yourself what you did to help those kids stuck in a cave. If you had access to a good mechanical engineering team, and you had decided to build a submarine in your garage and fly it over there, wouldn't you be pissed if somebody then told you it was a stupid idea?
I bet what you're thinking right now is - "Ah, but I'M not arrogant enough to think that I could just build a submarine to solve this problem. That's Elon Musk's whole problem! He thinks he's master of the universe." Is that really what makes you better than him though? The fact that you just wouldn't even try this? Just like all of the brilliant engineers and rocket scientists who knew it was impossible to start a private space company in this day and age?
Sometimes you have to be overconfident and just try stuff. I'm glad Elon Musk arrogantly takes on these challenges without listening to naysayers, and I'm not surprised that the positive feedback loop of SpaceX and Tesla's success led him to think "Hey, maybe I'm the only one smart and audacious enough to just build a frickin submarine". And so he flew off the handle and made some childish comment. Big freaking deal. This is the epitome of a Twitter mob forming over totally inconsequential trash talk, and I'm frankly sick of the meme that every rich and powerful person is secretly an unbearable bastard just waiting to show their true colors.
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Comment on Daily Tildes discussion - thoughts about the site's activity level in ~tildes.official
seb Link ParentB-b-but... isn't telling people that their inner nature is not conducive to civil discussion... not a very great position to start a discussion from?B-b-but... isn't telling people that their inner nature is not conducive to civil discussion... not a very great position to start a discussion from?
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Comment on "The book was better than the movie." How important is the medium used in the storytelling? in ~talk
seb LinkI'd say the medium and the story are inextricably linked into one, call it.. experience. I don't think of there being one platonic story that you're trying to glimpse through various media. The...I'd say the medium and the story are inextricably linked into one, call it.. experience. I don't think of there being one platonic story that you're trying to glimpse through various media. The movie is one artifact, the book another. If they both have the same plot, that's really a small similarity in the scheme of things.
This is because each medium is trying to accomplish different things. Visual spectacle and introspective imagination are such different beasts. Comedic television and comedic writing are both funny, but they fundamentally have to manipulate expectation and punchline in such a different way that comparison is always going to be thin.
I think this is why it's rarely a good idea to "port" a written story into a movie. The written story is doing things within its medium to create an experience. Things like telling you explicitly what different characters are thinking. Or only spelling out a hilarious detail about what one of the characters is wearing long after it would have been obvious in an on-screen conversation. Or giving long, expansive background for world-building. A movie has to go about its general task of story-telling in a completely different manner, using "show, don't tell". All of the little details and flourishes from the writing are scarcely guaranteed to transfer to that visual format.
In my opinion, making a movie out of a book is like translating a rhyming poem into a different language. Much of what made it good is liable to get lost, and if it does turn out to work, it was mostly a coincidence.
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Comment on Civility is on the decline and we all bear responsibility in ~life
seb Link ParentAgreed, the first step to reclaiming civil discourse is for everyone to agree that diversity is always good. Otherwise, the diversity of thought on this topic will tear us apart.Agreed, the first step to reclaiming civil discourse is for everyone to agree that diversity is always good. Otherwise, the diversity of thought on this topic will tear us apart.
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Comment on Daily Tildes discussion - figuring out some early details of the group hierarchy in ~tildes.official
seb LinkFor each node in the topic tree, each user has an opinion - subscribed, neutral, or muted. A new user starts out with defaults defined recursively by the moderators of each topic. So the...For each node in the topic tree, each user has an opinion - subscribed, neutral, or muted. A new user starts out with defaults defined recursively by the moderators of each topic. So the moderators of books will probably just leave you neutral on all subtopics. The moderators of ~tildes will have you subscribed to ~tildes.official, while ~tildes.dev will be muted.
The posts that you see listed when viewing a given topic must have been posted to that top-level topic or one of its children. When you look at a given topic, you are asking tildes to show you a view of the hottest posts at this level or lower. You can always drill down to show a narrower and narrower scope of postings.
For a given view, a list of posts with scores is returned recursively from each of the subtopics. Each topic has an implicit subtopic, call it "top", that contains all of the posts made directly to the view-level topic. All of these postings are arranged into a flat pool, and their scores are scaled based on the total number of subscribers to the subtopic they were posted to. (Thus, if something gets 300 votes in ~books.scifi.asimov which has 1000 subscribers, this is valued more than 300 votes in ~books.scifi.top which has 10,000. It may be desirable for this to be a non-linear effect). The posts with the highest weighted score make up what you see when you visit a certain topic.
Your subscriptions are saying "I am interested in this topic - if there is something hot going on in here, bubble it up to its parent views more readily." This doesn't mean you always want to see posts from this topic, but you are disproportionately interested in it compared to its neighbor topics. If you subscribe to ~books.scifi, you are explicitly favoring content from ~books.scifi.top and ~books.scifi.asimov, (in equal measure) when you visit ~books. If you are looking at your front page ~, then the ~books content that you see there will be preferentially scifi.
Your mutes are saying "Don't show me this topic unless something truly extraordinary is happening there". I don't want to hear about politics news, but if World War 3 is literally starting, I'll make an exception. A muted topic and its subtopics get a large negative weight added to them. If you mute ~books.scifi, then neither visiting ~books nor visiting ~ will show you scifi. If you explicitly visit ~books.scifi, of course, then you will see the posts as any other user would because there's nothing for them to lose out over, highly negative though they are.
Neutral topics inherit negative weighting if their closest parent is also negative. If their closest parent is positive or also neutral, then they are neither upweighted nor downweighted.
The result should be that you can shape the experience of each topic in a fine-grained way, with sane and intuitive defaults for how these preferences propagate down the topic tree. You can encourage certain types of content within a particular genre, you can silence particular content you don't care for, and you can whitelist particular content you do like inside of a topic you generally don't. Moderators can tailor the default experience at a topic / subtopic level so that obviously undesirable content is filtered out from day 0, while users can always twiddle with this as befits them.
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Comment on 3 Arguments Against Socialism And Why They Fail in ~talk
seb Link ParentI fear it's not that simple. Lobbying isn't really the root of the problem, so far as there is a 'problem'. The issue is that large corporate interests simply stand to win or lose tremendous...I fear it's not that simple.
Lobbying isn't really the root of the problem, so far as there is a 'problem'. The issue is that large corporate interests simply stand to win or lose tremendous amounts of money based on the political action of a very small set of people. No matter how many barriers you put up in their way, people must always be able to speak and act on their own behalf. If you take this right away, then you are lost. And so these corporate interests are going to try to influence political decisions however they can, whenever it befits them, just as average citizens try to influence political decisions when they think it befits them. Today this happens to be by paying people to talk ... "persuasively" ... to the politicians, i.e. lobbying. Tomorrow it will be to run a public ad campaign. Hell, next week, they will just send $1000 to a majority of voters in each relevant district. There's no amount they won't pay if it saves them from having an even greater sum legislated away from them in taxes and levies.
To truly solve this problem, you need representatives who genuinely represent the fears and interests of their constituency. And even then, you may find them approving some big mining project or whatever it is that the electorate is against. That's the point of having a representative though: sometimes the mob gets it wrong. You put a well-educated, down-to-earth, politically savvy person in that role because they can make the hard decisions that popular vote will never make.
Right now, I would argue that there are too few representatives and too little local power to make meaningful changes. If you have a representative for a small number of people, you will feel much more personally accountable to them. Only then will you turn down the promises that a lobbyist is whispering in your ear.
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Comment on 3 Arguments Against Socialism And Why They Fail in ~talk
seb Link ParentOne of the interesting complications is that as you improve the reps/people ratio by increasing the absolute number of reps, you create a miniature pure democracy amongst the representatives,...One of the interesting complications is that as you improve the reps/people ratio by increasing the absolute number of reps, you create a miniature pure democracy amongst the representatives, along with all of the issues that entails.
It's almost as if the only clean solution is to simply not have such a big country.
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Comment on 3 Arguments Against Socialism And Why They Fail in ~talk
seb Link ParentI actually agree 100% that the anti-federalists were prescient here. I want to say more on the topic, and right now I’m stuck on my phone, but to start: can’t we both be right? I think it’s...I actually agree 100% that the anti-federalists were prescient here. I want to say more on the topic, and right now I’m stuck on my phone, but to start: can’t we both be right? I think it’s absolutely clear that the sheer size of the country has precipitated many of the anti-federalist fears about disconnected-ness, and representatives who don’t represent their constituents. The ratio of representatives to populace has ballooned astronomically.
The size of the country has also scaled the stakes of business, making the biggest fortunes bigger. This naturally creates stratification between the landed class and the working class, which eventually becomes fuel for discord and a devolution of political discourse - again, just as the anti-federalists feared.
The federalists, on the other hand, rightly worried about the tyranny of the mob. They perceived that the impassioned faction would be harder to form as the country scaled, and that good representatives would be easier to find, creating better representatives in an absolute sense. And my take is that these were good arguments at the time, but they simply didn’t anticipate the ease of mass organization in the internet age, nor the perverse dynamics of winning an electorate as gigantic as the one we have now.
So in other words, I think both the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists has fears that materialized. The Federalist agenda was by and large the one that was realized (and who knows what other problems we’d have if it hadn’t), and it turns out the Anti-Federalist concerns were warranted. On the other hand, some of the problems the Federalists thought they were fixing get worse again once you scale to a truly huge electorate in the Information Age.
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Comment on 3 Arguments Against Socialism And Why They Fail in ~talk
seb Link ParentSurely you both have a point. People prefer idleness and leisure to working for subsistence. But they enjoy earned leisure the most of all. The problem is that when left unforced, most people have...Surely you both have a point. People prefer idleness and leisure to working for subsistence. But they enjoy earned leisure the most of all. The problem is that when left unforced, most people have a hard time convincing themselves to get up and do something for future reward. Thus, given the option, many people will slip into depression and addiction. I don't think that this is showing their revealed preference: if you could take a drug addict out of their life and ask them if they'd do things differently, they'll say yes. It's just a discipline problem.
This is the crux of the matter that perhaps we can all agree on. People would like to feel accomplished, but given the option, they can't muster the motivation and determination to earn that accomplishment. By my lights, this makes a good argument for keeping society organized in a way that forces people to work a little bit to earn their leisure. Most people need a little push, but they appreciate it in the end.
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Comment on 3 Arguments Against Socialism And Why They Fail in ~talk
seb LinkI found zero convincing argumentation in the article. (No particular offense meant @moriarty - I suspect we disagree on matters political, but that doesn't mean this article isn't a good object of...I found zero convincing argumentation in the article. (No particular offense meant @moriarty - I suspect we disagree on matters political, but that doesn't mean this article isn't a good object of discussion!)
The first point he wants to disarm is that socialism is a vague term that refuses to stand still when you want to criticize it. I found this an odd choice of topic, because he fails utterly to dispel this notion and in my eyes strengthened it. By the end of this section, all we are left to conclude is that the author actually agrees that Socialism can mean many things. The author is trying to argue that so it is also with "Love" or "Democracy", and we still find use for those words. But notice: nobody would ever be tempted to argue in favor of Love! Love is a complex concept, and so our feelings about it can only take shape with more concrete details and examples. If being a Socialist is just as meaningless as being in favor of "Democracy", then I reject the proposition that this vague label is useful.
I wouldn't have chosen this point to dwell on if it weren't for the fact that I suspect many people politically aligned with "Socialism" are using it as a buzzword precisely for the reason that it generates push-back. They know that people react a certain way to the socialism moniker, and they're actually taking those reactions on board on purpose, because they want to cast their intellectual opponents in a negative light. They're saying "Look how close-minded my political opponents are! As soon as I say the word socialism, they see red! Have you ever seen such anti-intellectual bigotry?" But of course as soon as you explain your criticism in the context of states that might be considered socialist, or some of the more radical associations with the ideology, you get exactly the same sort of responses the author is making. "Ah, but I'm not actually proposing that!" "Those states aren't a good representation of what I'M proposing!" And eventually we find out that he's just a garden variety social democrat that wants to plug a couple so-called progressive policies. If that's all you really have to say, then you've made it patently clear that the only reason you ever took on the socialist label is for the shock value you knew it would create.
Beyond this complaint, I don't see the article engaging with the criticism of socialism that is proffered most frequently: the information problem. The central state hasn't the privilege of information that the distributed market has. This is a low-level, economic problem with the concept of a centralized state who plays a stronger role in re-allocating wealth distribution.
By the time you make it to the end of the article, I find the only concrete organizing principle that it admits is indispensable is the idea that wealth needs to be redistributed more fairly. I know a lot of people that seem to find this idea convincing. We need to tip the scales back towards the poorest - what could be more clear? But I would remind that this trend of a majority faction demanding wealth redistribution is exactly the kind of thing that the federalized and representative government was supposed to prevent. It's spelled out quite clearly in Madison's 10th Federalist paper (https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers#TheFederalistPapers-10). Mobs of the under-served class are always going to be predisposed towards clamoring for these debt holidays. The constancy of this and the utter predictability should give the careful thinker pause. Just because many people want it to happen doesn't make it a good idea. It's altogether more likely that our representative government simply needs to do a better job of serving their constituency's interests.
Ah fair enough, that is an important distinction and I actually remember that being the case now.
I still think unionizing the tech workers is dumb, but I'm definitely happy to concede this was a case of genuine malicious behavior.