darksaints

vor 7 Tagendiscuss

As someone who worked on logistics optimization algorithms for Amazon, I’ll just say that the one thing Amazon did best was have clueless upper management continuously make poor strategic decisions that continuously nullified all of their improvements from optimization.

darksaints

vor 8 Tagendiscuss

> At one time, the stock market was closed at night and yet market indices often changed dramatically, even without a single share being traded. A hundred years ago, the Dow might close one day at 243 and open the following morning at 227, reflecting bearish overnight news. In that case, it is fairly obvious that the market moves on new information, not trading activity. To the extent that trading activity has any impact on prices, it is due to what the trading reveals about information held by various participants in the market.

Markets open using an auction: before the market opens, a bunch of bidders declare the price/qty they’re willing to buy at, a bunch of sellers declare the price/qty they’re willing to sell at, and at the moment the market opens, a single multi-party transaction happens immediately at the implied market clearing price. That transaction is special: it’s not attributed to any particular buyer or seller in transaction data feeds, and typically has a tick volume 1000x (or more) higher than the median tick volume during trading hours.

It may appear that markets are opening at different levels merely on new information, and new information absolutely affects it, and that market jump may not appear to move like the typical brownish motion of active markets… but that opening price is nonetheless the result of buying and selling.

darksaints

vor 8 Tagendiscuss

One of the things about fiction is that it gets almost everything wrong. It isn’t just guns. It’s professions like spies and snipers, cars, boats, planes, programming/hacking, radios, technology, etc. And those are just the areas that I personally know they get wrong, because I know more than the average person in those areas.

Some people judge fiction way too harshly for inconsequential but inaccurate details which only serve for narrative structure. There are actually tons of authors who get all of these details right, but you almost never read their books because if they can get them published at all, nobody reads them, because they absolutely suck. An author that gets these details right and is actually a good storyteller is extremely rare. It’s basically a list consisting of Tom Clancy and John Le Carre.

It’s just a pet peeve. At some point you have to let it go, or you’ll end up wasting your time writing blog posts begging authors (who largely don’t care) to talk to you so they won’t get inconsequential details wrong.

darksaints

vor 11 Tagendiscuss

The president of the European Commission is practically an inconsequential figurehead because of how the EU is structured. The president of the United States is the most powerful person in the US because of how the US is structured. It might be fine for them to have an electoral college like system for that but it absolutely is a disgrace that our most powerful person is elected by a handful of swing states.

darksaints

vor 11 Tagendiscuss

Voter ID laws would not be a problem if said IDs were free. They’re not, and nobody that ever proposes such laws ever proposes a way to make IDs free, because they aren’t actually caring about election integrity, they only care about the practical disenfranchisement that would result from it.

darksaints

vor 29 Tagendiscuss

I develop some deep learning models. They don't compete with Anthropic, nor are they language models. They mostly enable mathematical optimization systems to approximate actual the actual physics of radio propagation models with a fraction of the latency/compute of a high resolution simulator. Technically that should be safe for me to use with Claude Code, but how the fuck am I supposed to know? You're degrading/malware-ing your responses silently!

I won't ever trust Claude Code again. It's too late. I'd rather trust a less-than-frontier chinese model that takes a little longer to get to correct than a frontier model that deliberately deceives me at its own whim.

darksaints

letzten Monatdiscuss

Yes yes, all fine and good. I love SQL, think it is incredible how relevant it still is as a high level language, and think it should be the basis of almost every data storage and retrieval system out there. And I love that the foundation is relational algebra, which is an extremely useful abstraction for data management.

But for the love of god, get rid of the ternary logic. It is only mathematically sound to the extent that mathematicians are masochists and will try to formalize anything regardless of how painful it is for normies. Boolean logic is good enough and doesn't feel like an exercise in retroactive continuity.

darksaints

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Definitely not an expert here, but I was always under the impression that dolphins can only be trained in captivity. If they aren't reliant on you for food, they have no need to perform for you.

darksaints

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

You have to get the lidar down to the scan range, which they do with drones. The effective scan range of that particular lidar model is 1.5 to 15 meters. Compare that to 1000+m for aerial lidar. That means that they had to get the scanners to extremely low depths and were using very expensive drones, and the process was still extremely slow. They still had to target the search area using probabilistic models based off of available historical records, as a general search would have been way too expensive.

darksaints

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Yes exactly. I'll add that most shipwreck discoveries haven't actually been discovered by archeologists, they've been discovered either by amateur divers by accident, or by treasure hunters, who by default only seek after specific ships with known cargo. It's just too expensive for academic archeology organizations to pursue. Take away the quest for profit, and almost nothing gets discovered, no matter how historically significant.

darksaints

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

I've actually had this conversation before with an archeologist with some naval archeology experience.

Shipwreck hunting is ridiculously expensive. The resources required to exhaustively explore 100 sqm of space is probably 1000x of the resources required to do it on land. There aren't any easy shortcuts: radar doesn't work underwater, sonar does but is extremely low resolution, lidar works pretty well but only if the water is very shallow and clear, underwater drones have extremely limited mobility and communication capability. A lot of funding in archeology tends to go to easier or higher probability wins, which has mostly been aerial lidar in heavy vegetation areas for the past 10-15 years.

The best shipwreck hunters rely almost entirely on probabilistic models for where they might find shipwrecks, and the most useful probabilistic models have all developed in the last 30-40 years. In fact, some of the best probabilistic models like Bayesian Search Theory actually originated as a formalization of heuristics that were already used in treasure/shipwreck hunting.

In that respect, I would argue that this find is actually the result of recent advances in probabilistic modeling (along with other advances in data engineering with respect to extremely messy historical data sources) that have just barely gotten accurate enough to start getting the funding it needs to do the harder work of actually working on the sea floor.

darksaints

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

They have to put on a show to hide the fact that the corruption is coming from the top.

darksaints

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

I would gladly see that bet through because that's not zoning, even if its effects are the same as zoning. Subdivision rules are a restrictive covenant (much like how HOAs work). Zoning is not a restrictive covenant, it is by definition a municipally-reserved restriction on land uses, and can be changed at the discretion of the jurisdictional authorities.

I've actually encouraged NIMBYs to use those HOA-style restrictive covenants if they're so adamant on their "zoning" never changing, because a restrictive covenant is actually a volunatory restriction. A city cannot come in and remove them willy nilly (they do in special cases like red-lining, but it is a politically arduous process). Someone with a restrictive covenant by definition has more protection from their neighborhood changing than they would if they just relied on zoning.

The problem is, nobody likes restrictive covenants, and they don't like the HOA-like structures that govern them, and they really don't like the punchable-faced people that seek power in those kinds of organizations.

darksaints

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

If your neighborhood's zoning isn't in your deed, how are you going to claim it was taken from you?

Zoning is a restriction on your rights...when they are lifted, you are gaining more tangible rights, not losing them. If anything, the takings clause should have applied to properties where zoning was introduced...not where it was removed.

darksaints

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Correction: zoning had good reasons to exist, but it doesn't anymore. Everything that we used to solve that problem is better solved by environmental laws than it ever was by zoning. It turns out that if you make companies pay for their environmental pollution via noise, chemicals, air pollution, etc., they tend to locate their industrial capacity where it is easier to solve or less impactful.

And while every single reasonable but outdated justification for zoning has slowly disappeared, zoning has been thoroughly co-opted by greedy sociopaths and meddlesome wannabe HOA presidents who want to control their neighbors and police aesthetics and keep out undesirables and inflate the value of their investments.

darksaints

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

San Diego would be a very popular city at lower prices, but simply put there isn't enough population in the US to even think that demand could grow anywhere close to those levels. It would take a 50 year long gold rush, draining of other American cities, etc. The fastest growing city in modern history, Shenzen, grew 6000% in 30 years, and it could only do so because China simultaneously had the highest population growth in the world and the highest urbanization rate in the world.

At some point, demand is saturated, and it takes an extremely delusional belief that demand can perpetually grow so that prices never drop. We have proof in the article that prices can drop with even moderately fast construction rates. Keep going.

darksaints

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Housing price is a function of supply and demand and your argument had nothing to do with price of housing, you were only talking about density and its effect on livability. And it's very clear that people value living in cities that are much denser than San Diego. If people genuinely do not want a denser San Diego, there wouldn't be any point to restricting that growth.

I personally would love to live in a city like Tokyo. People have different preferences. Don't force your preferences on me. If people "generally prefer" midrise cities, they will move there. There's a reason why so many people live in Tokyo when there are plenty of less dense cities in Japan. The great thing about allowing density is that people will stop moving in when they don't like it anymore.

darksaints

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

At the density of Kowloon Walled City, the entire population of India could fit within the city limits of San Diego. Nobody is asking for that, silly.

We could 1.5x the density of San Diego and still have the livability of Copenhagen. We could 3x the density of San Diego and still have the livability of Vienna. We could 5x the density and still have the livability of Paris. 8x and still have the livability of Tokyo. We have a ridiculously low bar to pass, all we have to do is allow it.

darksaints

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

I'd be willing to bet you every last dollar on the planet that if you read your deed, you will find zero claims to any particular zoning. Zoning is not a transferable property right. It can be changed for any reason at any time.

darksaints

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

TFA shows that it was zoning changes that allowed the influx of housing and lower prices. You can find similar articles across the country everywhere that has had significant relaxation of zoning restrictions, like in Minneapolis, Austin, and Seattle (just off the top of my head). This includes places where building code and permitting processes have gotten more arduous while the zoning was relaxed.

I don't care if it is a panacea or not...If you want to convince me that restrictive zoning is not the most significant cause of our housing affordability crisis, you'd have to find some better proof than "developers like upzoning and developers are bad people".

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