robryk @robryk@qoto.org

@timorl

Have you looked at fly.io? They're doing infra that others use, so it's kinda hard to estimate value to society. Everything else seems true of them.

@LukaszOlejnik is there a description of what direct means somewhere? I don't see a very clear line that makes this direct and e.g. ensuring delivery of tap water to a military base not direct.

@LukaszOlejnik

How should I interpret direct causation? If I use my intuitive understanding, I would conclude that setting up an automated observation post does not satisfy the wording, which would surprise me.

@christmastree @fasterthanlime what about the stations that are in the zone that doesn't support standard oyster because the zone number is too large?

@grimalkina

To me (with my worldview currently skewed by working in infosec bordering systems reliability) estimates by default mean probability estimates or frequency estimates.

@grimalkina @jenniferplusplus

Hm~ I'm not sure what exactly workplace caring about something means (majority of employees caring about it? employees being rewarded for it? something else?). Roughly which (nonacademic?) workplaces would you expect to care about learning true things in the way you mean?

Disclaimer: quarter-baked

Roughly half of primary school students have some experience with the concept of braids and maybe with the practice of making them. At the same time braids are nice objects to study, because they form a noncommutative group with infinite order elements.

So, would it be possible to pose some interesting-but-approachable problems about braids[1] to primary school kids? Obvious ideas for me are:
- how can we describe a braid?
- do two braid descriptions describe the same braid? what does this even mean? this can naturally introduce a concept of "invariants" (in the sense of a function from a braid representation that is equal for all representations of the same braid) and the concept of transformations of descriptions (and then maybe completeness of that)
- is every braid a commutator of two braids? (sadly this doesn't seem very natural here),
- what generator sets are there? is it sufficient to flip adjacent strands only?

[1] morally similar to "how many isometries does a cube have?"

@grimalkina @jenniferplusplus

I'm afraid of having single statisticians in random places in an organization due to incentives: I don't know how to prevent them from being pushed into finding arguments for a preselected conclusion.

@grimalkina

It's IMO even worse with logic ("these two things are similar enough so that we can call them equivalent, no?").

@rysiek

E-Mail

@thomas

oder "Unsere Infrastruktur ist teilweise Scheisse und zusätzlich mangeln wir am Personal."

Wisset ihr, wie Verspätungen aufgrund Suizidversuche erklärt werden? Ich würde überrascht sein, wenn diese auch so direkt beschrieben würden.

Silly me, obviously for any larger exponent the thing diverges and for any smaller it converges to constant 0 (at least pointwise). It's sufficient to look at stddev of position at some fixed time.

@b0rk Does `git log -1 --oneline $COMMIT` do something that's close enough?

@b0rk

What do you mean by "corresponds to"? That it's the tip of that branch/tag/..., or that it's somewhere in that branch's/tag's/... parent closure?

I'm curious if this is some common writing system that I'm unfamiliar with. Anyone recognizes it? (A person from my city's road construction office signs announcements like this.)

TIL that the sequence of increasingly finegrained random walks that converges to Wiener process has walks that increase their speed as they get finer (speed grows with square root of scale). Post factum it seems kinda obvious: you'd otherwise converge to a constant function. I haven't yet figured out how this changes as one adjusts the exponent.

@rysiek

There are a few cases that I can think of of such decisions affecting more powerful people, but in a way that's less important for them (e.g. credit scores).

An interesting case is the US college admissions system and the history of its reliance on SAT/ACT scores. IIUC its reliance on SAT (or any kind of standardized testing) decreased over time in the last decade+, but I can't find any good overview sources on this.

@freemo @digastricus

Then Japan didn't really acquire the writing system from China. The grammar is iiuc very different, and at some points in history characters were imported for the pronunciation, ignoring their meaning.