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vandreas2's comments

vandreas2 | 2 years ago | on: Never waste a midlife crisis

On the other hand, very few jobs these days in the West are about survival anymore. It's true to some extent that you need to pay for your mortgage but at the same time the amount of bullshit jobs is staggering. People work for work for organizations that provide the service of allowing others to like photos of your holidays. Very few people are employed in farming these days as opposed to the entertainment industry. I'm not saying that working in the gaming industry is without value but compared to historical data it looks like it's very hard to die of a famine these days.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: British pound hits record low against the dollar

Not really Italian lira suffered from inflation, a lot of people push this narrative that somehow Italy was forced to join the Euro against her will. From Wikipedia:

Lira pesante Due to the lira's low value after the war economic calculations and price displays became unwieldy because of the large number of zeroes. As early as the 1950s suggestions were made to redenominate the lira but no serious efforts were made at that time. In the 1970s a plan known as lira pesante [it] (English: hard lira) or lira nuova (new lira) was proposed. The lira pesante would have redenominated the currency at 1,000:1, removing 3 zeroes. However the project went dormant for several years before being revived in 1984. Ongoing heavy inflation saw the lira pesante pushed back until it was permanently abandoned in 1991 because of plans for a single European currency.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: Queen Elizabeth II has died

Soft agree with you about the secular ideologies, I keep wondering if the alternative was actually better. Pre globalization with hard borders, little travel, suspicious of your neighbours, long distance travel reserved for the rich. Is the old situation of social pressure to comply to local social norms better? I am not so hot about the culture of places with abject poverty. As you correctly pointed out it's amazing for a poor kid from Hyderabad or rather millions of other poor kids from similar places. I don't think there can be any kind of positive culture without peace, jobs and people getting along well.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: Queen Elizabeth II has died

> Notably, we have seen a massive failure in the EU to not only protect itself, 100% dependent on US military defence, even in 2020 - but one of the 'root problems' was the EU powerhouse, Germany, abdicating it's defence responsibilities, and selling out the entirety of the EU to Russian energy dependence which put the EU in an existentially weak position vis-a-vis Russia. If the US did not exist, Putin would be dominating the EU via it's vast tentacles (like it is in Hungary, but much worse, and all over).

There is no 'massive' failure in the EU to protect itself as it has no such objective nor a mandate to protect itself. It's up to individual countries to spend on their armed forces as was up to Britain to spend when it was part of it and the EU didn't stop it, it did so just fine. If the US did not exist that would have been taken into account by the member countries themselves and acted accordingly.

> Instead - UK, Turkey, Ukraine, Finland, Georgia, Switzerland will possibly join the 'expanded' EU (by another name), which will mostly be trade focused. The interesting thing about that however, the other nations, notably Spain, Italy, Greece will definitely start to wonder about 'the grass being greener' in those countries.

Spain, Italy and Greece have all joined the Eurozone (Italy is a founding member btw) for their own good reasons. If they wanted less integration they could have not adopted the Euro just like a number of other countries. People seem to forget what inflation looked like for their national currencies of these countries before getting the Euro and it was not very green.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: Germany pushes for ‘pay as you fly’ model

I hate to use the word 'privilege' but it applies the other way as well. Like someone is probably in a privileged position to demand immediate refund and a handsome EU compensation on top of that, many people in more unprivileged parts of the world wouldn't be so lucky to get any of that at all. Privilege arguments can go so many ways.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

Exactly this. Not sure how much of the scientific messaging reaches the lower socioeconomic subsets of society either, I don't think kids' obesity is because they 've tried everything to lose weight and can't help themselves or rather their parents don't really understand the intricacies of how processed food works. There's something that defies intuition about a 50g mars bar having the same calories as a 300g potato even if most people vaguely understand that 'sugar is bad for you' but can't really put it in perspective, what does that mean in practice? The dosage makes the poison.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

Has worked for me. I find the UK food labels on most products quite informative as a rule of thumb. I remember initially being very surprised at some food contains when I started paying attention and how very small things like Mars bars can have so many calories comparatively of course. I think there's something sinister about not wanting the consumer to know what your product contains.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

I live in Europe. For employment that demands physical stamina it makes sense that fat people would not be favoured at the extreme level of obesity. My healthcare provider differentiates between overweight and obese and you can't treat triage as discrimination. There's a whole lot of middle ground between staying in your home not eating cake and promoting yourself on Instagram. Date and dance as you see fit.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: U.S. life expectancy drops sharply, the second consecutive decline

The "you are beautiful no matter how you look" social campaign probably doesn't help here. There are literally visual cues that you 're doing something in excess and your doctor tells you to lose weight but Instagram says it's ok to be obese. I wonder if there's a limit to it, is it still ok to be twice your normal weight overweight?

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: Software engineering research questions

Perhaps the disastrous outcomes were not a result of central planning per se, but the skewed incentives that central planning mandated. Not sure if central planning can work differently though, probably it's first goal is self preservation.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: More content by people, for people in Search

Feels like the early days of the internet when the computer savvy knew how to find what they were looking for (possibly even using early google) and everyone else was condemned to sifting through trash to get something useful. These days I find myself reaching more often for specialised search like going straight to wikipedia or amazon if I want to get a direct answer.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: OnlyFans bribed Meta to put porn stars on terror watchlist: lawsuits

Probably people people who don't fit a certain profile, in the extreme people like kids, old people, billionaires, most politicians, priests, disabled people. Sure kids could grow to become terrorists but I doubt there are any 2 year olds in those lists. I don't know how many women fit the profile of a terrorist though.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it

But it would be even funnier if the advice was something like "to start working don't start working", although I can see how this advice can be very attractive if you 're into counter intuitive zen aphorisms that make you feel smart.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: Against Discipline

Play and exploration are not mutually exclusive, in fact they seem intertwined. Children discover by playing. Exploration and staying in your comfort zone do seem mutually exclusive however, I wouldn't think playing prevents you from learning or doing new stuff. Or that any kind of joy is actually detrimental to your personal development.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: SF’s Black Market Thrives Off Retail Theft

I would think that people care more about things that directly affect them rather abstract financial crime and high level wrong doing. Low level administrative corruption like government officials "fast tracking" applications if you pay them off, doctors asking for "extras" to operate on you and your kids being mugged or stabbed on the way to school affects people's lives in a way that Nancy Pelosi's insider trading probably doesn't.

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: Thoughts on ML Engineering After a Year of My PhD

OK I think I got what you're saying, is that memorizing means that it will perform only on data it has seen in training that is exactly identical to the current one, and it will fail on even slight variations. My question then becomes what's the boundary of that extrapolation in order for it to be considered learning vs memorization? For example to come back to my earlier example, let's say a model is trained on photos of cars taken from only some angles, then it should be able to extrapolate to the intermediate ones without having seen the exact same photo. A large dataset would ensure that it has enough angles to be able to do that right? But there is no amount of photos that will make it identify a car from an underneath photo if it hasn't already seen one from underneath I wouldn't think. So this is the limit of 'learning' as opposed to 'memorization'?

vandreas2 | 3 years ago | on: Thoughts on ML Engineering After a Year of My PhD

What is the difference between memorization and learning? Could you please elaborate on this? It always seemed to me that a lot of learning is in fact memorization otherwise you wouldn't need a large dataset of cars photos from every angle (or some angles so that ML can work out in the in-between poses, no amount of 'learning' of photos from the front can work out what a car looks like from the side) to be able to recognise them. Also in what context would you get expensive ML disasters? If you keep retraining on cars as new car models come out then you get 100% recognition memorization notwithstanding, which in the end is what you would want.
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