John BS @johnabs@qoto.org

@FredBarraquand @sortee @royalsociety I think this, along with Registered Reports, could be an excellent path toward improving many of the systemic issues with academic publishing. Any thoughts on integrating these two approaches?

Well, it's good to know that fantasies can become a reality, that is, if your fantasy is to wonder what it's like to have a cartoon villain run your healthcare system 😂 ....😭

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2sDx0Y_I-k

@art4857@101010.pl @freemo DAVx5 is available on Fdroid, have you tried that option because it works great for me :)

I've never used Orgzly, but I'm gonna try to get it all integrated with WebDav though that or some other option, as I'm not the biggest fan of syncthing, personally.

@freemo I think it's the expected number of bits, in that they can determine the most significant bit of the nonce but with probability <1.

@freemo Well yeah, but <1 bit is pretty rough, no? Admittedly, I don't have anything to compare that number to, so some perspective would be great :)

@freemo I don't regularly use this stuff, particularly for signing, but I did see an interesting paper recently that illustrated how ECC can be broken with < 1 bit of nonce leakage.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/615

Which seems to be caused by the need of uniformly distributed nonce values, which can unexpectedly broken via modulo bias as shown: https://research.kudelskisecurity.com/2020/07/28/the-definitive-guide-to-modulo-bias-and-how-to-avoid-it/

@TheStrugglingScientists Thanks for the advice! I've considered it, but I don't think I can right now due to my research load, though after I graduate that may be a different story 😅

Also, I was going to email you guys about possibly being a correspondent on your blog/podcast regarding academic writing and productivity tips.

I can send more details soon, but would you possibly be interested in having someone come on at some point regarding these topics? Just let me know! 😁

@TheStrugglingScientists I like woodworking, and I've made some beautiful pieces, but I don't have enough time due to research...but someday, I'm making myself some beautiful barrister bookcases. I just need a sponsor or I'll never make any money with it 😭

@Pat @freemo @rbreich I do have to say I like this "ultra-flat" tax idea pat is proposing here, it seems very clever: every time dollars change hands, 0.25% of that goes to the government, but I do think there are good reasons for tax exemptions (such as for groceries and other necessities).

However, I also know that regardless of the highest margin tax rate, the government has consistently only received around 16% of GDP, due to increasing corruption caused by the wealthy paying for laws that benefit them and are cheaper than the tax rate.

I think until we solve the corruption problem (maybe programmatically? but that opens up a completely different can of worms) it seems like we're stuck.

@freemo I found the problem in your algorithm: goto is considered harmful, and in this case its apparently harmful to the eggs 😂

@Paulos_the_fog @freemo @rbreich That's quite the generalization there that I'm *sure* is healthy for political discourse 😛

Fundamentally, wealth should be earned according to value production. Some skills are more valuable at a given time in any arbitrary society, and those who are capable of producing the most value should be rewarded accordingly to incentivize them to continue to do so. When this doesn't happen, you get places with high economic inequality due to high rates of political corruption (e.g. the curse of natural resources) rather than alternative, less insidious causes of wealth inequality, and by the Pareto principle, this is the expectation.

Of course, this is assuming the economic system works in a vacuum of purely rational entities with long term thinking being the dominant form of thought. But in the absence of perfection, principles must suffice. I think people should be monetarily rewarded for how much they make society a better place and improve the lives of those around them, and so long as the rules/laws/morals aren't being skirted around in the process, I think that's fine. Once things like patent trolling, pharmaceutical patent extensions, copyright extension lobbying, etc. become a problem then they must be addressed, but these issues are consequences of greed and what I referred to as the "idolatry of money", not wealth itself.

(And of course, I think the wealthy have a moral obligation to help the less fortunate, but I'm less amenable to the government forcing that to occur and in a way that often dilutes the impact the funds have on those individuals who are supposed to be aided due to the impact of middlemen on this redistribution: all those IRS agents have to be paid after all. Not that all taxes are bad, but many are paradoxical in effect.)

@freemo @rbreich I'll push back on this one, if only because I don't want to look at my dynamic programming assignment 😂

I agree wealth inequality itself isn't the problem; however, I don't think the market is good at assigning value judgements to things, which leads to a whole bunch of really screwed up stuff, and the subsequent conflation of benefiting from capitalism with worshiping mammon.

For example: the CCP has been torturing religious and ethnic minorities for decades, mass surveilling their people, murdering political dissidents, and *MOST IMPORTANTLY TO INVESTORS* preventing individuals or corporations from withdrawing assets from the country "illegally". Yet, our investors, companies, etc. speculate that China is "the next big thing" and lose their asses while enriching a hostile country. People continue investing in Nestle and Tesla despite the provable child labor in their supply chains, (and of course the rest of the atrocities Nestle got away with). Why? Because making an extra 2% ROI is all that matters.

Meanwhile, private equity firms in the US buy up failing companies for pennies on the dollar, try to squeeze *every* *last* *drop* of capital out of them, and cause lasting damage in the process (see the environmental damage caused by rail issues across the US, alongside the mess of our hospitals, many of which are owned by private equity). Their M.O. is to run things so lean, and to cut so many corners, that the business fails anyway, but at least they didn't let any of that money go to the worke- I mean-down the drain.

The impacts of our modern values in relation to money go on and on, because nearly everyone has a price but not a spine: they'll sell out their employees and the business they built up to get rich, and leave the people they employ in the hands of a board who never sees them, and frankly doesn't care about them at all. For most, it's not about loyalty, purpose, effecting change in the world, and eking out a living (even a good one!) in the process; it's solely about the number of 0s on the check. It's so bad to the point that peoples lives and finances are ruined for "shareholder value", while disregarding the people who actually generated value for the company and the economy.

Finally, the reasons that the poor "cannot create wealth" is that often it is taken from them while the wealthy are given kickbacks in an almost perverse way: banks charge more fees for lower account balances, accessing credit with lower APY is more difficult, etc. Of course much of this boils down to financial literacy, but when a single car accident can bankrupt a family due to exorbitant healthcare coverage, adversarial insurance companies can screw anyone who can't sue them (by not paying out), etc, it's easy to see that there are not enough legal protections for the impoverished when the penalties for victimizing them are a pittance or even nonexistent.

So while I can agree that money *itself* isn't the problem, the modern "idolatry" of it is such a perverting influence that people conflate the two, because frankly it's difficult not to.

@andrew @franconomics@econtwitter.net There's a *nix tool called pdftotext, have you tried that one per chance?

@kristinmbranson Interesting! I've used python before in a similar way(and R and Julia, for that matter), but I find that long simulations with "inconsistent" runtime bugs just demolish my productivity and lead to a whole goose chase.

One of the advantages to lisp that I'm trying to realize for myself lies in the debugging process: you can fix runtime errors *after* they occur, but *without* restarting the entire process. For example, 30 minutes into a sim, you get a divide by 0 error from some weird overflow or something. So long as you compiled the code with maximum debug settings, the debugger let's you go through the stack (without dumping it and killing the process) find the error in the appropriate function, recompile JUST that function, and resume the process from the exact point before it failed, rather than wasting another 30 minutes praying you actually fixed it (my life for a month last year 😑). I can't tell from your original response, does the python debugger allow stuff like this?

Oh, and once you fix any remaining bugs, you can speed up the code just by changing the compiler settings to optimize for speed and/or space. Boom, you're on par with c/c++ in many cases, much faster than pure python or R, and it let's you use an iterated workflow like the more modern languages too!

I must admit, it definitely doesn't feel as polished as python/R/Julia in terms of certain language features and scientific computing (yet), but I think with enough TLC it will get there...I hope (or some other language will implement the awesome debugging protocol, lol).

@kristinmbranson If you don't mind me asking, what langauge/tools do you use to write/debug?

I've been looking into Lisp specifically for the interactive debugging experience that doesn't blow the stack when it errors, but it's scientific computing facilities leave much to be desired IMO.

@Pat P.S. Sorry if that came off as a bit curt, I've been in "shortening mode" for months w.r.t my writing. I've taken an academic article I'm editing and contributing to, and shrunk it by nearly 23 pages. Hence, my brain is hyper-motivated to be more laconic than I probably should be 😅

@Pat

Hey Pat!

1. I appreciate your careful consideration. Now I just need enough of our highly educated Qoto peers to start using it in their work, and it'll end up in the dictionary!

2. HAH, I OUT-WORDED THE GERMANS!!! I have long awaited this day 😂

I am henceforth proposing the word "ambiative" (plural "ambiatives") to refer to either a positive or negative attribute of a given system, or a set of positive and negative attributes in the plural case.

There are no words I have been able to find that succinctly encapsulate the idea of "pros and cons" or "positives and negatives" in a single word, so I'm making one up. "Tradeoffs" comes close, but I don't think it's precise, and carries some undesirable baggage.

Even the roots make sense: -ative means "related to or connected with" and ambi- meaning "both". Similar to the definition of ambivalent: having both positive and negative feelings, but in this case it is the set of both positive and negative attributes.

Intended usage: "I'm weighing the ambiatives of the situation." Or similar, just replace pros and cons/positive and negative/etc.