IIIIIIIIIIII's comments

IIIIIIIIIIII | 8 years ago | on: “Markets Today Are Not What We Believe” – The Façade of Competition

> The challenge is to have the right reactions when you are sitting in a comfortable office and the moral dilemmas inherent in your work are entirely hidden by metrics, and all your bosses ask you to do is to drive the graph up and to the right.

And that is where I refer back to my comment: Pretty much nobody will become the whistleblower or the guy who prevents their company (or their country) from landing that billion dollar arms sale or from raising drug prices to levels unaffordable to many sick people even if they are perfectly well aware of how bad it is. There is one Snowden outlier for a million other people. "If I don't do it somebody else will" is just one of numerous rationalizations (and it even is actually correct).

Statistically speaking the impact of ethics education vs. incentives is like 1 : 1 billion or worse.

IIIIIIIIIIII | 8 years ago | on: “Markets Today Are Not What We Believe” – The Façade of Competition

Whenever a police officer beats someone up of shoots an unarmed guy there quickly are the "they need more training" comments. Pretty much all of these stories including the one here is about basic decency, not about complex matters, and that is what I address. You can always invent some complex outlandish scenario, but this isn't what this is about right here.

IIIIIIIIIIII | 8 years ago | on: The Dark Side of Doctoring

I repeat:

> The idea that doctors ... are somehow immune to those effects defies logic.

That claim was never made by OP.

It doesn't matter that you responded with "evidence" to a claim you yourself made-up. Just stick to the topic and don't invent stuff.

IIIIIIIIIIII | 8 years ago | on: “Markets Today Are Not What We Believe” – The Façade of Competition

It doesn't matter how many ethics courses are offered and taken.

The only thing I ever retweeted on my otherwise completely empty and unused Twitter account so that I could copy and paste it when needed:

"For evil to triumph, all that is required is for good men to respond rationally to incentives."

You learn all your basic ethics during early childhood, not in university courses. Most of the rest is the quote above. University classes talk to and train parts of the brain whose involvement in the ethics of your decisions is minimal.

IIIIIIIIIIII | 8 years ago | on: All About Recursion and Tail Calls in JavaScript

> With timeEnd I get the number I want but would like to see a "safe" approved way of where to place the timeend while dealing with async/promises/recursion separately and together.

Measuring asynchronous code? You are not measuring your code. Your code is only the synchronous parts, the time spent in asynchronous parts are "environmental factors". Your code doesn't run during those times, it sits in the event loop waiting for an event so that it can continue.

IIIIIIIIIIII | 8 years ago | on: The Dark Side of Doctoring

> The idea that doctors ... are somehow immune to those effects defies logic.

That claim was never made by OP. Can we have a discussion without attacking a straw man, please? You yourself acknowledge you only know one side of equation. If the other components are larger it would not matter that you have shown one aspect - that nobody disputes, incl. OP! - to be negative.

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2016/02/longer-shifts-...

> A new [...] study [...] showed allowing surgical residents the flexibility to work longer hours in order to stay with their patients through the end of an operation or stabilize them during a critical event did not pose a greater risk to patients.

> “It’s counterintuitive to think it’s better for doctors to work longer hours,” said principal investigator Dr. Karl Bilimoria [...]. “But when doctors have to hand off their patients to other doctors at dangerous, inopportune times, that creates vulnerability to the loss of critical information, a break in the doctor-patient relationship and unsafe care.”

I have no doubt that overall the long hours are bad, I only respond because you attack a position OP didn't take. Also, the long hours may still be a logical conclusion and even beneficial - within the twisted logic of dysfunction in the larger system: "For evil to triumph, all that is required is for good men to respond rationally to incentives."

IIIIIIIIIIII | 8 years ago | on: All About Recursion and Tail Calls in JavaScript

Why exactly was my reply downvote-worthy guys?

Yes I know asking for an explanation causes a lot more nasty voting. This is ridiculous, the site is getting more and more like reddit, and I blame the site's maintainers: There are soooo many things that could be done for a more civilized discussion culture. Like making votes public, meta-voting, requiring explanations for downvotes, a very small downvote pool (e.g. no more than three downvotes per day), etc.

How about somebody would tell me what exactly is missing from those tools I linked to, or what is supposed to be wrong that I wrote? It's not like I insulted anyone. The guy I responded to had a lot less substance in his (short) comments. "It's very superficial" - what is superficial? What is missing? Also, "all I want are two numbers at the end of the process. How long did this take and how much memory did this take." -- well, he gets those number with the DevTools! So what exactly is the complaint? For someone with a question he doesn't seem to try very hard to get an answer. Then someone downvotes posts that try to get more out of him.

IIIIIIIIIIII | 8 years ago | on: All About Recursion and Tail Calls in JavaScript

But then you are looking at the wrong thing: You are no logger profiling/debugging Javascript but the Javascript runtime. Those tools do tell you the Javascript part, why do you say "superficial"?

Example (memory profiling with heap snapshots): https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/memo...

Profiling functions (V8, Chrome, using the CPU Profiler): https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/rend...

What is missing there, I can see how long each function took, even more so when I combine it with the flame chart?

I assume you are still talking about the Javascript part. What the C++ based subsystem does can be examined using tools for that language on the respective platform.

IIIIIIIIIIII | 8 years ago | on: All About Recursion and Tail Calls in JavaScript

Google has a lot of content, for example "Chrome DevTools => Analyze Runtime Performance => Get Started With Analyzing Runtime Performance" [0].

But an important piece of advice is at the bottom of one of their pages [1]: "Avoid micro-optimizing your JavaScript". Apart from their argument there, keep in mind you are programming for a number of very different runtime environments. An optimization that gives you a big boost in one implementation may slow you down on another one. That is true not just between various vendors but also among runtime versions from the same vendor.

[0] https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/eval...

[1] https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/r...

IIIIIIIIIIII | 8 years ago | on: CPU Utilization is Wrong

It also is reasonable to know about cache misses so that you can do something about that if you decide that's possible. Do you think because it is not always valuable information, maybe even rarely (when you average over all programmers worldwide, most of whom do web stuff) that it never is, for anyone ever?

IIIIIIIIIIII | 8 years ago | on: CPU Utilization is Wrong

This is a gross misrepresentation of the article. It is in your own head that he solely focuses on this one thing. When somebody says "this soup needs more salt" you start talking about how there always is too much salt in processed food these days? The article is a about a concrete narrow subject, not about "performance" (the entire field).

Can't some people read an article without extrapolating to the end of the known universe and just stick to just the article's actual narrow subject?

IIIIIIIIIIII | 8 years ago | on: CPU Utilization is Wrong

Which is mentioned in the article (which few people fully read of course)!

See under "Other reasons CPU Utilization is misleading"

> Spin locks: the CPU is utilized, and has high IPC, but the app is not making logical forward progress.

IIIIIIIIIIII | 8 years ago | on: CPU Utilization is Wrong

It's always nice to see when people take even less than a complete sentence and pretend that this is what the author said and that this was all.

IIIIIIIIIIII | 9 years ago | on: More Robots, Fewer Jobs: capital vs. labor in production

Revolutions require organisation - very good organisation. All you'll get from ordinary workers is, possibly, a riot, quickly subdued.

You are also up against an extremely well-organised and well-armed government, but that may not even be the most salient point:

A lot of people for very good reasons do not want to see the government overthrown. They know the result will only be worse. Our societies are far too organised and interconnected over large distances, with all their widely distributed and interconnected creation of everything from basic food to almost all goods except for the most primitive ones.

Only if you can fully replace a government with a new one could you have a "revolution". So, elections and parties still are the best option. I think they actually work too, it's just that there is very little successful effort in organizing something better. Yes of course there have been plenty of attempts, but they all fail even more than the current system: None of those attempts manages to get enough people "on board", and they scream and insult everybody they don't like - so they are no improvement at all (not even mentioning the wild and unrealistic ideas they usually have).

For example, I think an alternative new movement would have to start calmly instead of yelling loudly. The latter only attracts the crazies, while the thinking people are pushed away. So, no mass demonstrations against this or that, "being against" is not a good start for the alternative. Instead work on what and how things should/could work instead of working on how to best insult and score points against the "political opponent". Or, if you start talking about revolutions I will assume your main goal is destruction.

By the way, I would posit that many people who are "greedy" are that way because of the environment, not because "that's what they are". Soooo many people, with advancing age, grow disillusioned. In particular, I know quite a few medical doctors who got into the profession with idealism - but now they actually sell "BS" to people who want it. From homeopathy to network marketing stuff like (branded) vitamins or "energy mats". Of course they don't believe in any of it, it's just that they have given up and now go with the flow.

IIIIIIIIIIII | 9 years ago | on: Ways to Read More Books

> There's practically _zero_ of these mega-successful people (Gates, Buffett, Zuckerburg, Musk, etc.) who don't read

Citation needed, as well as a definition of "don't read".

For example, for several years now I have been reading a lot less books than ever before in my life, almost zero. However, I took several dozens of courses on edX and Coursera and read a lot of documents on the Internet. Just no books, and a lot less newspaper and magazine articles.

IIIIIIIIIIII | 9 years ago | on: Why Germany Still Has So Many Middle-Class Manufacturing Jobs

As a German I of course (quite irrationally) like the praise for "my" country (I actually feel I'm human, and being German is just birth luck, especially since I benefited enormously from the reunification).

On the other hand, OP has a point. This is once more an example of what works for anyone vs. what works for everyone. The countries you name all are very small. Imagine Asia getting even better (they probably will), and imagine African countries getting their act together (as unlikely though it may be). Who would buy all those machines and parts?

Also, another great potential for future trouble is that an oversized part of our economy is bound to making cars. The "Zulieferers" (component suppliers) are much larger than the actual car makers, and they are all "Mittelstand". If they have to find new customers some day... electrical cares require a lot less expertise and less parts I'm told, plus ever more "growth", meaning ever more cars, isn't such a promising model (looking at Asian city traffic...).

IIIIIIIIIIII | 9 years ago | on: With latency as low as 25ms, SpaceX to launch broadband satellites in 2019

To get an impression I think it's a good idea to start with these pictures taken from the ISS [0], which is at about 400 km altitude (it varies a bit but not that much)

- https://twistedsifter.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/nasa-earth...

- Spain: https://twistedsifter.files.wordpress.com/2015/04/nasa-earth...

Note that they are to the side, straight down you would see a much smaller area!

So the SpaceX satellites would be three times higher. Still, you can see you may need quite a few stations on the ground, and also why you need so many satellites. They will fly over the area very quickly and by then the communication will already have to have been handed over to the next one. There is so much earth to cover, with satellites much higher up you cover a much wider area and you can have them in a stationary orbit. Earth has a diameter of 12,742 km, I have to keep reminding myself that even the ISS is barely above the surface if you were to look at earth from a distance.

[0] Source: http://twistedsifter.com/2015/04/earth-day-gallery-by-nasa/

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