thirdwave

Github Mirror

Week 37

“It’s estimated that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill resulted in the loss of more than 10 million user-days of beach fishing and boating activities... If you Drill, you spill.”

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"Deep learning excels at learning statistical correlations, but lacks robust ways of understanding how the meanings of sentences relate to their parts. Reading isn’t just about statistics, it’s about synthesizing knowledge.

At TED, in early 2018, the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, currently a director of engineering at Google, announced his latest project, 'Google Talk to Books,' which claimed to use natural language understanding to 'provide an entirely new way to explore books.' Quartz dutifully hyped it as 'Google’s astounding new search tool [that] will answer any question by reading thousands of books.'

If such a tool actually existed and worked robustly, it would be amazing. But so far it doesn’t"

Wired

Twitter.. What's going on over there? It seems centrists took a big dump in the place, and their CEO is powerless to do anything, essentially a figurehead.

"@dancohen3000

Twitter just suspended the accounts of the biggest media outlets in Cuba and has given no reason. This is the equivalent of silencing CNN, Fox, WaPo and NPR’s accounts, but Cuba is a target of the empire so these arbitrary suspensions don’t generate outrage"

@NorthmanTrader

$SPX is less than 1% from all time human history highs and therefore in dire need of central bank intervention.

The comments are so good

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"@Todd_Spence

Someone combined John Bolton with Michael Bolton and I can’t unsee it"

"@NorthmanTrader

Make the top 1% much greater: Trump Again Mulls Capital Gains Tax Cuts"

In an earlier share from #appelbaum book "by the 1970s the two [Rep] camps had found a sufficient patch of common ground: social conservatives who feared for their moral values and economic conservatives who feared for their property values both felt profoundly threatened by the expansion of government".

So an artificially created fear of gov is used as a glue between two faction of Reps. A side-effect could lead to the gun issue, bcz "fear gov, buy guns", "fear gov, oppose backgr checks, licensing bcz gov's gonna git you".

Centrist Dems are culprit #1 for cuckoo Reps, item above could be #2, perhaps related to #1.

Herbie Hancock - One Finger Snap #music

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Licensing considered better for the gun issue

Video

Haha.. that's good. Is there any chance of reviving that?

"Did you know in 2010, @nntaleb tried to sue the [Sweden CB Riksbank] because the prize winners theories contributed to the

2008FinancialCrash?"

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THE KING

And you had the queen sign that thing.. This is what I am talking abt with delegitimation effect. End this charade NOW!

"Brexit in chaos after court rules PM's suspension of parliament was unlawful"

"@VAruffo

... First utility scale #greenhydrogen project in the #MiddleEast just broke the ground"

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#UBI is also about rewarding non-paid social work, like fathers and mothers. Making every mother a government worker would be hard.

"@ra

It is f[@#$] wild that @Twitter's business model involves pushing racist anti-BDS zionist propaganda and calling it an "ad""

"@davidallengreen

The Scottish court decision shows that Johnson and Cummings cannot even abuse the UK constitution competently. The absence of a witness statement as to true motive for prorogation was telling. A political decision, clumsily executed by those not as clever as they think they are"

"Mr. Mosley, it has been reported that you used the n-word in the writers’ room"

"[Mosley] replied, 'I am the N-word in the writers’ room.'"

Too funny. And not. #SJW

No wonder Star Trek Disco, or STD is ground-zero for lots of this non-sense. BTW the actor who "told on" Kevin Spacey is from this shit-show (literally, a show that is shit). I was watching a Spacey mov the other day, and wondered, was that accusation made-up?

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Janko Nilovic - Drug Song #music

Wah-wah 👍

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"@MerrynSW

[T]he idea that you might Vote Leave but Get Remain doesn't seem so silly any more does it?"

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"China Is Throwing Open Its Market Door. Be Wary: The country is heading for fiscal and current-account deficits amid an escalating trade war. No wonder it wants more overseas cash"

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Did he just pull a Trump on Trump?

Mustache gone

West Bank is 5 times as large as Hong Kong, but has 1/3 of HK population. Earth is large.

"Years of expansionary fiscal and monetary policies have left the world economy overburdened with debt. In the next downturn, much of that debt will become unserviceable. This should be dealt with now.

For many years, the macroeconomic policies of the major, advanced countries have been forcing their economies down a dangerous path. Economic downturns were met with fiscal expansion. Similarly, monetary policies were eased to induce more private sector borrowing and more spending. From the perspective of each moment, these policies seemed eminently sensible. However, in the recoveries that followed, fiscal and monetary policies were never tightened in an equally vigorous way.

Looking at the global economy today, there are ample grounds for concern. Growth has been slowing in most of the major regions, and profit expectations are declining. Corporate leverage has been rising, as have worries about the quality of corporate liabilities. In many markets, equity prices and the prices of high-risk liabilities seem elevated. In some areas, the price of houses and commercial properties are at record levels, as indeed are associated debt levels...

[O]ur economies would benefit greatly from more voluntary debt restructuring by creditors, and the sooner the better. Orderly solutions are better than disorderly solutions, and half a loaf is better than no loaf. Moreover, there is a political advantage in forcing those who have made imprudent loans to pay a price for it. It would take the sting out of the populist cry that the elite always get off, while ordinary citizens suffer" -- William White (former CB head of Canada)

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"In the last three years alone, HSBC has poured £43bn into fossil fuels,"

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Dialectic considered unsuitable as a systemic approach for science. Popper wrote about it who is famous for defining the modern philosophy of science.

Sure Marx used dialectic but let's not forget Marx "had issues" in the realm of hard-sciences. You don't "synthesize" for the new thing, you smash one theory (falsify), and build another (falsiable) theory in its place. You might pick up some pieces of the broken model here and there, but you don't usually combine "the finished theory 1" with "finished theory 2" and come up with "better finished theory number 3".

H2 is already cost-competitive.

"Our analysis shows that current hydrogen production costs range from US$2.6 to US$12.3 kg−1 and can be significantly reduced through flexible operation if dynamic tariffs are used. Hydrogen production costs for the 81 utility rates in 20 states are already less than US$4.0 kg−1 and competitive with the fuel cost of gasoline vehicles. Thus, under the right conditions, hydrogen fuel is already cost competitive in the US energy sector and has several interesting possible roles to play in future energy and transportation systems"

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"HyperSolar, Inc. (HYSR), the developer of a breakthrough technology to produce renewable hydrogen using sunlight and water, today announced that development of its Gen 1 hydrogen generation system has progressed to the point at which it can move from the lab to manufacturing engineering before full commercial production of the hydrogen panels. This will lead the way to the Company’s first pilot-scale solar-hydrogen farm"

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"@jasonhickel

Lithium mining for electric cars is already generating an ecological crisis in the Andes, burning through water tables, draining lakes, destroying ecosystems"

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"@marcfriedrich7

We are back in 1999: cash burn rate. #wework Remember this is the last stage of the very late boom cycle. Prepare for the impact"

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#DHL #H2

"Like many others, Deutsche Post DHL Group believes that H2-based fuel cell vehicles are the best option in the [long-distance] case. That is why it has ordered its subsidiary StreetScooter to build about 100 Work L vans with a hydrogen power plant by 2020."

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Interesting: Julius Ceasar dabbled in banking before he became genocider-in-chief.

Dude's last name is Iceman in Kraut.

Eisman (of The Big Short fame) on rates.

Video

#rates

This guy is a financier, fine; but are you adding so much more value than, say, a parent, who works for free?

"New generation wants to earn money without [a job]"

Debt Deflation (by Keen, doc has math on government spending too).

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Michael Hudson

Video

MH mentions Jesus' first sermon being about debt jubilee (writing off debts). This connects with the theory that monotheist religions are left.

Time idx 27:56, he says he was tasked with firing Greenspan while at a bank. Haha.

Hudson crossed paths with some strange characters, he has great stories.

Yes. NN architectures have been around for a long time, we made computational advances recently and some new structural improvs. The nature of these advances are almost identical. We made no headway on the nature of the universe and no headway on the nature of intelligence, but we can compute some stuff. We COULD have made advances, that just wasn't apparently in the cards.

We need to be aware of where we stand, so instead of embracing this staticity, starting to like the lull we can know when and where we can start digging.

"Is the application of Cop QM to different fields akin to recent developments in neural nets?"

Hey that Carroll article wasn't half-bad. The points he makes are verbatim to Smolin's. Thankfully he doesn't go into his own little pet theory, alternative QM, which is a boondoggle.

"Even Physicists Don’t Understand Quantum Mechanics... Our best attempts to understand fundamental physics have reached something of an impasse, stymied by a paucity of surprising new experimental results. Scientists discovered the Higgs boson in 2012, but that had been predicted in 1964. Gravitational waves were triumphantly observed in 2015, but they had been predicted a hundred years before. It’s hard to make progress when the data just keep confirming the theories we have, rather than pointing toward new ones"

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Interesting.. now picking winners and losers are we?

Hammer time?

"@scot_work

$TWTR is now muting $TSLAQ accounts"

"@amlivemon

An oncoming 2008 style global recession needs a trigger(who knows) to ruin the global financial system suffering dollar shortages. China being decoupled from the US & its asymmetric defense against US actions failing means they will suffer near systemic collapse"

"@lisaabramowicz1

Global debt is up nearly 50% since before the financial crisis. This is weighing on growth and will make it harder to ever have much higher interest rates"

I can't see what use they'd have for them. IMO early humans had a very practical existence, embedded in nature, with already lots of stimuli to keep them busy / entertained, with main goal being to stay alive. But a villager is surrounded by objects of his creation, in many ways creates his own entertainment (as well as his food) but then becomes trapped by these creations. Ancestral relationships get weird (directly tied to land and survival), you worship weird shit because you are constanly surrounded by objects and being told stories about them. This disease still persists today.

But the subconcious is in open rebellion towards the static existence, a lot of game shows, movies revolve around being in nature, surviving.

"Why wouldn't the hunter-gatherer become a pagan, worship stuff?"

Actually paganism comes after hunter-gathering, and smack in the middle of settled / village life. This is what these f-kers did.. in their little villages, worship bones, weird objects, and sacrifice children while they were tending to their "crops". Religions arrived to save them from their pitiful existence. We can argue the origins of these religions, but noone can argue they were an advancement compared to what these sheeplovers practiced beforehand.

Now some encyclopedic info from Wikipedia: "Paganism is a term first used in the fourth century by early Christians for people in the Roman Empire .. Ritual sacrifice was an integral part of ancient Graeco-Roman religion and was regarded as an indication of whether a person was pagan or Christian .. Paganism was originally a pejorative and derogatory term .. implying its inferiority. Paganism has broadly connoted the 'religion of the peasantry'"

"People living before settled life must be pagans. Sounds barbaric".

Ow! Ow! Major burn.

"But flying requires an incredible amount of energy, and presently, batteries are too heavy and too expensive to achieve liftoff. The technology that allows Tesla to squeeze 300 miles of range out of a Model 3 or Chevy to get 200 miles out of the Bolt isn’t enough to power more than a two-seater aircraft with a flight range limited to only a few miles."

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"@trevornoren

Debt owed by governments, businesses and households around the globe is up nearly 50% since before the financial crisis to $246.6 trillion at the beginning of March"

In a way yes. He would have been a certifier in my system, volunteering time at nearby school for kids learning physics from frickin FEYNMAN (videos).

I am sure he is a good enough teacher and passionate abt it, but we can't scale his passion. Systemic vs. one-shot, "heroic" solution - systemic wins everytime.

"My Lyft driver was the kindest and smartest man who was a former Boeing aerospace engineer who decided to become a high school physics teacher. He drives at night so he has enough money to get by and teach our kids physics. We have it backwards"

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"@binalkp91

Me tuning hyperparameters"

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True.

"@benedictevans

Reminder: IBM claims to have received more patents than any other US company every year for the last 26 years, and yet I don’t think anyone believes IBM is really an innovation leader within tech"

Yes back in the day for a while, Biden was known was for his anti-Iraq War stance. But it turns out his ducks weren't exactly in order on the issue. He dropped the ball when it mattered most.

Adafruit 9-DOF Absolute Orientation

Yes turning accel data into abs orientation is hard.

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Python on a little board. Has acc, grav, magneto, even IR comm.

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#curcuit #electronics

Naah I think they got it all right son.

"At the recent climate town hall for the Democratic presidential candidates, both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders displayed an excellent command of the facts, and better still a serious appreciation of the extreme urgency of the subject — particularly in contrast to their rival Joe Biden, who was rambling and unclear (when he wasn't literally bleeding from the eyes). Either Sanders or Warren would be head and shoulders above any previous president on climate, Barack Obama very much included.

But both have committed a serious policy error. They both disavowed the use of nuclear power, and worse, said existing nuclear power plants should be gradually dismantled"

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"Warm ocean temperatures are one of the key factors that strengthen hurricane development when overall conditions are conducive for their formation and growth.

Hurricanes require high humidity, relatively constant winds at different altitudes, and can occur when surface ocean temperatures exceed about 79°F (26°C). The rising of warm, moist air from the ocean helps to power the storm.

Two other factors may also be contributing to the rising intensities of hurricanes. First, warm air holds more water vapor than cold air—and the rising air temperatures since the 1970s have caused the atmospheric water vapor content to rise as well. This increased moisture provides additional fuel for hurricanes".

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"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats" -- Aiken

Khan on TV. The key point is "everyone learning at their own pace". Which means teachers presenting to the whole class idea is now defunct. The recorded lecture content presents the lecture, not the teacher.

I'd say at higher grades, do away with teachers completely. Student takes the self-guided course, only at the end (whenever that is, completely up to the student) student asks to be graded on pass/fail basis. Then a certifier can be involved (who knows the same content herself). Simple. Everyone wins, less "teacher" time required, and every student gets quality. School in poor neighborhood or rich neighborhood all get the same content.

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Unemployment (reverse of labor force p.) is at about 37%, never went back to the lows it was at in 2001.

Wage acceleration present, yes (since 2011). But then where is inflation? My guess is ppl, comps are paying down debt. Weak PMI confirms this. People are up to their necks in debt.

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I missed all that hoopla on hurricane path, sharpie whatnot. I can completely shut it all off, no problem.

That's Abaco Bahamas, after Dorian.

"@tictoc

Amazon wants to launch 3,236 communications satellites in a bid to offer internet service from low orbits"

"In other news, the UK government and its various security services are trying to draw as little attention as possible to the fact that the guy who carried out the Manchester Arena Bombing was one of the mercs the Cameron government sent to murder Gaddafi"

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"Disclosures show Exxon Mobil is funding a centrist Democratic think tank"

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This is nice but worthless in terms of AGI. Imitation learning.

Tech is still enough to displace workers, just not enough for other avenues.

Which should say something about the kind of work most are engaged in.

"This paper reports unprecedented success on the Grade 8 New York Regents Science Exam, where for the first time a system scores more than 90% on the exam's non-diagram, multiple choice (NDMC) questions"

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"A description of Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg by Sir Nicholas Soames [Churchill's grandson] MP: An “absolute fraud” who is “a living example of what a moderately cut double-breasted suit and a decent tie can do with an ultra-posh voice and a bit of ginger stuck up his arse”"

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Debt Deflation

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"British politics today is what results from the collision of an unstoppable force, an immovable object and a clown car.

The unstoppable force is the dominant faction of Britain’s Conservative Party, which insists on not just an exit from the European Union, but the most catastrophic exit possible. It’s a plan for national self-defenestration. The immovable object is reality – the reality that a no-deal Brexit will play havoc with the economy and hurt real people; the reality that a majority of Parliament and the people will not back it; the reality that the Brexit-at-any-cost crowd can’t press the detonator without majority approval.

And the clown car is Mr. Johnson"

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"@paulmcleary

43 confirmed dead, 70,000 homeless from Dorian"

Comfort!

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"The global investment community needs to stop asking central banks to address issues for which they are neither suited professionally or politically. The Dudley rant illustrates the collective madness."

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#tslaq #batteries

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There might be some truth to streotypical millenial's wanting to "magically learn stuff, really fast". Things should not be this hard to teach. We are all failing on ed.

First of all, in its current form, it can't.

Second, discovering known physics from data (usually created from simulations made possible thanks to the known physics of that data) is not interesting. Physics is not about fitting a model to an overabundance of data - the regular case with Deep Shit approaches. In the bleeding edge of phy there are only a few data points. Modeler will derive and derive and arrive to a result for which maybe a few data points are available. The check against that should be decisive, so the theory must be falsifiable. But if it is, that is enough. An overabundance of data is not necessary. What's needed is imagination, a good hunch and mad math skillz.

"AI can discover physics from data, even make new advances"

Prefering regulation was a mistake. That's one demerit badge to Nader.

"In 1960, the top four firms had brewed 27 percent of the beer; by 1980, the top four firms brewed 67 percent. And economists pointed out the price of beer had steadily declined.

Consumer advocates like Ralph Nader increasingly took the existence of large corporations for granted; rather than trying to break companies apart, they sought to strengthen federal regulation.

The rise of the Japanese economy also began to shift public debate. Japan treated industrial conglomerates as a source of strength, not a threat to society and the state. American corporations argued consolidation was necessary to compete, and some politicians began to sound sympathetic notes." #appelbaum

One merit badge for Nader.

"Nader [in 65] argued accident victims were hurt not by the initial crash but by the “second collision” with the interiors of their own vehicles. Accidents were inevitable, but injuries could be prevented — and car companies were hardly trying...

Nader’s attack on the car companies was an attack on the primacy of markets. He was rejecting the idea that unhappy consumers should simply buy other products. In the idealized world of economic models, consumer choice was a sufficient mechanism to force improvements in the safety of automobiles. In a nation with three big automakers, where driving had long passed from luxury to necessity for most people, Nader recognized the need to find another way of forcing companies to make safer products. He recognized the need for regulation". #appelbaum

"Throughout this period, American policy makers showed little interest in the views of economists. When in 1920 the government had the novel idea of calling an economist to testify in an antitrust case against U.S. Steel, the Supreme Court mocked the man's 'philosophical deductions' as an inferior grade of evidence...

Meanwhile, the government continued to treat size itself as un-American. A dominant company might provide the best service at the lowest price, but economic efficiency was not the goal of public policy. In 1962, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Brown Shoe Company could not buy the G. R. Kinney Company because the deal would let the combined company sell shoes at lower prices, and that would place its smaller competitors at a disadvantage" #appelbaum

"Meanwhile, the optimists insisted that we must have faith and follow where the theory led. String theory appeared to do so much that was required of a unified theory that the rest of the story would surely reveal itself in time.

In the last several years, however, there has been a complete turnaround in how many string theorists think. The long-held hopes for a unique theory have receded, and many of them now believe that string theory should be understood as a vast landscape of possible theories, each of which governs a different region of a multiple universe.

What led to this reversal in expectations? Paradoxically, it was a confrontation with the data. But these were not the data we'd hoped for — they were data that most of us had never expected.

A good theory should surprise us; it means that whoever invented it was doing their job. But when an observation surprises us, theorists worry. No observation in the last thirty years has been more upsetting than the discovery of the dark energy in 1998" -- Smolin

Yeah; I dont think so.

"China says new digital currency will be similar to Facebook's Libra"

"John Major, a former Conservative prime minister who supported the court challenge against suspending parliament, said Brexit was a deceit that would undermine the United Kingdom’s standing and could even split it asunder"

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#rushhour

DOOO YOUUUU SPEAKAAAA ENGLISH?

"Bystroshodyashchiesya metody resheniya lineynoy zadachi bystrodeystviya"

"@RealSaidov

Unpopular Opinion:

3rd generation protocols such as @avalabsofficial , @CardanoStiftung and @Algorand will make #BTC and #ETH look like cute little experiments."

Good question. I guess bcz it was more recent and it took place in the largest econ America it had more presence in culture.

But, like I said before, slavery was prevalent in world history. China had slavery. In 2000 BC, nearly 5% of the population in China was a slave.

"If slavery is agro-related, practiced by many countries, why do we always hear about black slavery in America?"

I hear some "graviton" talk in scifi shows.. Gentle reminder that the graviton theory as a whole never worked (see Smolin).

Weird. I dig it.

"Tetris and roguelike/lite dungeon exploration".

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Reveal.js based HTML presentations look really good. I could probably generate these things from markdown. Time to throw out old PDF based presentation system.

MJJJ MJJJJJ JJJJ MJJJJJ AJJJJ AHJJJJJ... Sputnik-ass mot..f..ka.

Russkie sci ppl got some game on purely mathematical approaches, like doing little more math to avoid some computation. Maybe as a result of not having invented computers back in the day? Cool tho.

"In reinforcement learning the objective is to maximize reward, and in control theory objective is to minimize cost"

"Chinese demand threatens to wipe out Kenya’s donkeys"

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"Corbyn better than no-deal Brexit, say investment banks as anti-capitalist Labour wins unlikely new City fans"

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