9oliYQjP's comments

To be fair it's not a real Nobel prize. It's paid for by a bank and it was first issued in 1968. One of Nobel's descendants is on record speculating that Nobel would never have agreed to the award. It's very much about public relations for the field of economics. The field's effect on the world has been to undermine democratic governments through the establishment of treaties that people never voted for and organizations comprised of people who were never elected. Governments merely act as middle managers to the "market" and their role is to keep their people within the constraints of these supposed universal truths. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Science is a way for the field to convey prestige, expertise, and authority.

My personal take is that the field is stuck in an existential local minima and are self-conscious about it: similar to how astronomy was stuck on the model of concentric spheres. I think everybody who practices the field is unconsciously aware of it too which is why they lean on hand-waving charts and opaque math that anybody in a harder science would instinctively call bullshit on. How psychology got to be the poster boy for the replication crisis in the social sciences and not economics is baffling given the scope and depth of influence the field has had on the world.

But don't take my word for it... https://academic.oup.com/ej/article-abstract/127/605/F236/50...

  We investigate two critical dimensions of the credibility of empirical economics research: statistical power and bias. We survey 159 empirical economics literatures that draw upon 64,076 estimates of economic parameters reported in more than 6,700 empirical studies. Half of the research areas have nearly 90% of their results under‐powered. The median statistical power is 18%, or less. A simple weighted average of those reported results that are adequately powered (power ≥ 80%) reveals that nearly 80% of the reported effects in these empirical economics literatures are exaggerated; typically, by a factor of two and with one‐third inflated by a factor of four or more.

The 'M.B.A.-ization' of the corporate west -- it's not just the U.S. where this is happening -- is in some ways a specific example of a more general problem in which professions that just don't need robust credentialism aspired to do just that. They wanted to seem as important as the medical or engineering disciplines were. There are very valid reasons we don't just let anyone design a bridge or prescribe medicine. We make people who aspire to do that jump through a bunch of hoops to protect all of society from the downside risk that would follow if we didn't do this. In return, society confers on these people prestigious credentials so only they can perform medical duties and professional engineering tasks.

Universities just so happened to be a practically convenient location for medical doctors and professional engineers to get their education. But universities were never supposed to be general vocational learning institutions.

Business schools are just one department in a long line who wanted to push the notion that people need to jump through their hoops to learn a particular discipline well enough to perform a role professionally. Nothing could be further from the truth and in pushing this myth, they've helped contribute to systemic fault lines that could ultimately undermine western society and democracy itself. They've heavily indebted learning that people were traditionally paid to do via apprenticeship. They have invented credentials for disciplines which don't need them and offer no financial path to ever provide a return on the learning investment. They've promoted the idea that useful learning can only happen within their walls and under their syllabus.

But I'm off on a tangent. Business schools specifically have essentially been cosplaying as something they are not: schools teaching a rigourous applied science. As Medical School is to Biology, Math and Chemistry, Business School is to Economics. But economics as a social science had just not advanced far enough along to provide meaningful insight. So business schools did the next best thing which was to create the illusion of an advanced science by helping backfill, promote, and apply bullshit economic theory. This went hand-in-hand with a conscious effort to create prestige like the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science.

But the illusion is starting to all fall apart under the scrutiny of disastrous political policies, gutted zombie corporations, and a broken social contract, all under their direct sphere of influence. The irony is that in aspiring to have the same prestige as doctors and engineers, business schools have actually done far more damage to society, the environment, and our future than they could have hoped to imagine if they went back to their traditional proprietary school roots.

Business schools are very worried that society will realize that being a smart autodidact is a better recipe for success in business than paying six figures to earn an M.B.A..

If this rant resonated with you, here's an interview with the author of book, called Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/10/04/author-discus...

I'm running it on GeForce NOW with all settings turned to highest possible (Ultra where possible, High, and one Psycho). I also have ray tracing on Quality mode and I am at an utter loss for how well this thing runs. This is the first game I've played through GeForce NOW and to be honest...I'm not sure if I need to drop money on a new GPU like I had planned to. I really wanted ray tracing support to replace my aging AMD card but the shortage of GPUs meant I couldn't find one. I'm on FTTH and my goodness even at 1080p it runs at what I'm guessing is 50-60 fps and looks stunning. There are very rare audible pops/hitching when I guess there's a network hiccup...maybe once every 30 minutes or so. But I'll take it, the game runs flawlessly for me otherwise.

I'm so sorry to hear a bunch of gamers on Reddit are having issues getting this thing to run well on their systems. There appears to be an older Nvidia driver issue that's limiting utilization to low tens causing weird glitches in the rendering for people. But I tested it on my aging AMD card in an eGPU on my MBP i9 at 1080p with all the settings turned to Ultra. Even there it runs well for the complexity and liveliness of the city; about 30-40fps.

Comparing the GeForce NOW remote rendering with ray tracing against my locally AMD rendering, I much prefer the GeForce NOW version with ray tracing. The game makes really good use of lighting and seeing subtle reflections throughout the game as they would be in real life makes me prefer the GeForce NOW version.

NOTE: I went with GeForce NOW because it supports ray tracing. Stadia does not, so just be aware of that.

I agree. Even releasing the original videos showing the UFOs being tracked was likely sending a signal to an adversary. The fact that the objects were being tracked by commodity Navy fighter jets and not something more advanced might send the message “Look, our basic radar can easily track this thing, not to mention our more exotic classified equipment. If we can track it we can shoot it down.” I think this is an attempt to de-escalate a space-based weaponry race that may be getting out of hand.

Here's an interesting video from another MD who provides some much needed nuance to Kyle-Sidell's insights.

https://youtu.be/Fz2gyhto-iI?t=767

I keep hearing that masks make people touch their face. I put to you the following questions:

1. Do frontline healthcare workers also "touch [their] face" when wearing these masks for the same reasons regular people do? I imagine it's to adjust the fit? If the answer is no, is it because they have been educated not to? People, at least where I am in Canada, are being told not to touch our faces already. Can we not just extend the messaging to be "avoid touching your face, even when wearing a mask"?

2. If increased face touching when wearing a mask is truly a problem, would we not expect Hong Kong and Taiwan to have a worse community spread situation? Why is it that they have this contained? Again, the example is anecdotal. But coincidentally, they're both locations that learned from SARS and H1N1 and mask wearing is a foundational part of their public health response.

I hear you and understand in theory things like surgical masks allow coronaviruses to pass through them. But we've got to stop thinking about wearing masks in absolute terms of "it works" or "it doesn't work". Just like computer security, wearing a mask is one layer of protection. I don't think any reasonable person expects a mask to be foolproof. But when used in conjunction with thorough and frequent hand washing and social distancing measures, I suspect we'll find that wearing a mask is a prudent thing to do, even if it's just a home-made one out of cotton pillowcases or a surgical mask. Masks should not be relied upon in the absence of social distancing and hand washing just as airbags should not be relied upon without wearing a seatbelt.

There's anecdotal evidence from places like Taiwan and Hong Kong that masks are somewhat helpful and very little real evidence that they're harmful except in terms of making masks unavailable to frontline health workers. I firmly believe that in hindsight, public health agencies in the west will realize they did a lot of harm by saying masks were worthless.

It was a Conservative government responsible for this debacle. The previous Liberal government which had started legalization would have sold cannabis at LCBO stores which are in every neighbourhood and are run quite efficiently. Under the Conservative retail rollout, you can only buy cannabis via the online store (i.e., a 2-3 day wait for shipping) or a handful of physical stores. Toronto has a ridiculously low number of stores. There are roughly half a dozen stores with a capacity of about 40 people each to serve a greater Toronto population of more than ~6.5 million people. These physical stores which are the only legal way to obtain cannabis the same day, often have 20-30 minute wait line-ups outside.

To give you an idea of what we're dealing with in this government, it is headed by a complete shit show of a politician. He's the older brother of the late crack smoking mayor and is a cheap dollar store equivalent of a populist. He basically got voted in because the Liberal government was long in the tooth having governed for 15 years. People wanted change for the sake of change and if that meant throwing out a well researched cannabis legalization plan, then so be it. Of course, the asme people that voted for the premier are some of the loudest to complain how shitty the current legal cannabis situation is.

I found my problematic quick look plugin by running ```qlmanage -m plugins``` and doing a hack binary search where possible. I identified 3rd party plugins, assumed the problem was there, then disabled half of them by temporarily removing the associated apps. It only took a few iterations over a couple of days of casual use to pinpoint the culprit and the problem has not returned.

I actually run my setup in clamshell mode while connected to the eGPU and just use one big display. So I'm not a great person to provide a testimonial there. But I have periodically run with the MBP display open and enabled. The biggest difference is a subtle but noticeable improvement in user interface latency, which is interesting given the video signal is going out over an additional cable.

My understanding is that for the 15" MBPs, the built-in discrete GPU would always be used to drive an external display. So the following doesn't apply for them. But the 13" MBPs have the built-in Intel graphics and you can definitely feel a difference driving even one bigger external display using Intel graphics vs something more substantial like an AMD Polaris (RX580/RX590) or Vega cards.

Mantiz Venus: https://mymantiz.com/products/mz-02-venus. It can do 87W power delivery (so you can run a 15" MBP at full tilt while charging up the battery), has a number of USB 3.1 Get 1 ports on front/back, GbE ethernet, and a SATA adapter that can house a SSD.

While researching eGPUs I couldn't find one that was spec'd out quite like the Mantiz, particularly with respect to the 87W PD. Do keep in mind that like all the other eGPUs out there, the USB ports and anything connected to them share 5 Gbps of theoretical bandwidth. In the case of the Venus, that means the SATA SSD, GbE ethernet, and connected USB devices all share that bandwidth. But I have never seen my ethernet throttle while doing reads/writes to the SSDs and I have 1 Gbps up/down fibre optic internet. I just point that out as a lot of people were upset that all these devices hang off the USB for the Mantiz. But if they didn't they'd just eat into the TB3 bandwidth available to the GPU itself.

In case it helps, you might want to see my comments about QuickLookUIService preventing seamless eGPU disconnects here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20340602

I've been using an eGPU (15" 2018 MBP i9, RX 580, 10.14.x) for over half a year and only ran into connect/disconnect issues once. If you're having disconnect issues I'd urge you to see if killing the QuickLookUIService process causes the eGPU to immediately disconnect. If it does, you probably have a buggy QuickLook plugin with one or more apps. In my case there was a QuickLook plugin from a recently installed trial app that was preventing the eGPU from disconnecting. I uninstalled the app and everything went back to normal. I've googled around and it appears like other people are also having this issue with QuickLookUIService. Hope this helps.

I love my 2018 MBP + eGPU setup to the point that I chuckle whenever I see people claiming how awful these MBPs are. I've finally reached computing nirvana. The i9/32GB RAM in my MBP is powerful enough for me needs at home and on the go. The eGPU makes for a great dock and access to a more powerful GPU at home. It has built-in gigabit ethernet, an SSD, and several USB 3.1 ports.

The Canadian government routinely enters into contracts with foreign companies with the requirement that those companies create Canadian jobs while executing the work under that contract. These cover a diverse range of industries from defence (e.g. Boeing) through technology (e.g. Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft). In this respect, CanCon isn't philosophically inconsistent with the government's other policies. Those that support CanCon would say it's a defence of Canadian culture at an existential level.

It's not dissimilar to the U.S. requiring that Toyota build cars in Alabama if it wants to keep selling to Americans. These things happen under the most business friendly governments and are expected to increase in the U.S. under President Trump's desired new regulations of private sector trade.

Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon all have Canadian-specific offerings operated in Canada and backed by actual Canadian employees that would be analogous to CanCon productions such as X-Files. There seems to be a misconception that CanCon means pure 100% offerings from the CBC. But that's not the case at all.

For example, here's a good take on many Canadian actors who were part of X-Files while it filmed in Vancouver. Actors ranging from Cancer Man to the Lone Gunmen were all Canadian. https://etcanada.com/photos/119349/the-x-files-canadian-conn...

I don't think my comment was claiming what should be done. I was merely explaining why such a popular meme of "CanCon sucks" is so widespread yet hasn't been fundamentally dismantled by any government of any political stripe.

One thing Canadians miss in the “CanCon means shitty TV” meme is that CanCon rules mean Canadian creative talent is cultivated. You don’t just become a great TV writer overnight. You write a lot of shitty TV until you get good at it. This is not unlike programming. Why do you think there are so many successful Canadians in Hollywood? A bunch got their start in productions that wouldn’t be around if not for CanCon. I mean for crying out loud, Drake, who is possibly one of the greatest cultural entrepreneurs of our time got his start on Degrassi. It’s not perfect by any means but Canadians tend to forget this aspect of the system whereby Canadian talent is cultivated, they go to the US to learn even more, then return to help educate the next generation of Canadian talent (eg Norman Jewison and the Canadian Film Centre)

As a subscriber, I find it unfortunate that this issue has been dragging along for the past year or more. This is not the first time we're hearing about it. But it doesn't appear that there has been any material change in the situation.

I've stopped receiving my print copies of the magazine. I mind, but I haven't raised the issue because I want the publication to survive and assumed they might be focussing their efforts on more existential threats. As an otherwise happy subscriber, I'd rather miss a couple of paper copies now and let some sort of fundamental business restructuring happen in order to allow for the publication to survive. But I suspect this isn't happening now, at least in an effective way.

I have first-hand knowledge of how similar publications operate. They're kept alive by a publisher who lacks the business expertise needed to do more than keep their baby on chronic life support. It will never thrive on its own, and consequently, never realizes its full potential either.

As a publisher, if it gets to the point where you're so in debt to people who have otherwise contributed in good faith to the business, your livelihood and baby, you owe it to them to admit that you need help. Not help in the sense of asking customers for donations or by having fire sales on subscriptions, as Nautilus has. This is just a way of chasing future debt obligations. Rather, you owe it to them to get help with fundamentally restructuring the business itself.

I'd prefer to avoid speculating too much on why that hasn't happened yet. But I suspect this all boils down to good old publisher control and/or equity. For the publication to have a future, all options should be on the table no matter how undesirable they might be for the publisher.

Windows 95 supported preemptive multitasking for 32-bit applications. Mac OS kept using cooperative multitasking for an embarrassingly long time through all versions of 7, 8, and 9. Macs didn't get preemptive multitasking until OS X came along although there was a half hearted API that some apps could opt into in OS 9. By that time, a lot of Windows users were already on Windows 2000 or moving up to XP, both of which made classic Mac OS look downright archaic. But not to be mistaken, Windows 95 was a lot more advanced than classic Mac OS in a lot of important characteristics.

It looks like somebody put an iPhone on a photocopier to take screenshots. Is that what happened? Is there a legal reason why this was done versus using the home button/power button combo?

Oh I completely agree. SRED shouldn't be difficult. I think the actual practice is more complicated though, having had to go through it. If you do it on your own you risk leaving a whole lot of money on the table, opening yourself up to a filing which won't stand up to an audit, or both. It's just one of those things I'd rather leave to somebody who deals with Revenue Canada on the same issue day in and day out. There are pretty scummy companies doing SRED returns but there are also decent ones who are professional and above board.