details
There’s a preliminary paper circulating at Brookings, looking at American infrastructure construction costs. Authors Leah Brooks and Zachary Liscow have tabulated the real costs of the American Interstate program over time, from the 1950s to the 1990s, and find that they increased from $5.3 million per km ($8.5 million/mile) in 1958-63 to $21.3 million/km ($34.25 […] Last night a friend of a friend invited us swimming at a private pond in a Boston exurb. Part of me felt suspicious of the place. Something about the feeling of “this is something rich people do” and the knowledge that the adults chatting in deck chairs were doctors and professors made me almost allergic. […] Boston has been on a commuter rail infill binge lately; it has opened four stations on the Fairmount Line this decade, with general success, and is now eying the Worcester Line, where the MBTA has already opened a single in-city station called Boston Landing. The next station to be opened is called West Station, serving […]
This is a psuedo-transcript for a talk given at Deconstruct 2019. In order to make this accessible for people on slow connections as well as people using screen readers, the slides have been replaced by in-line text (the talk has ~120 slides; at an average of 20 kB per slide, that's 2.4 MB; in Nigeria, 1GB of data costs ~1.2x median daily income).
Let's talk about files! Most developers seem to think that files are easy. Just for example, let's take a look at the top reddit r/program… Every year that passes, climate change becomes a more urgent problem to solve: every year that emissions do not fall means that future emissions will have to fall even faster to avoid catastrophic global warming and ocean level rise. This aspect makes climate change different as an issue from air pollution, health care, education, etc., […] Within the effective altruism community, people often talk about “long-termist” vs “short-termist” worldviews. The official distinction between the two is that short-termists prioritize problems by how they affect people alive today, while long-termists prioritize problems by how they could affect humanity’s entire future trajectory. In practice, people usually treat … This is a partial data dump from an in-progress database I’m compiling for subway construction costs around the world. The key point is that costs are rising: in cities with enough historical data points we can see a secular increase in construction costs. The difference between expensive cities like New York and London is that […] Three weeks ago, the consultancy 6t released a study about dockless e-scooters in France. The study is available only in French but there is an executive summary in English. It has convenient demographic profiles of e-scooter riders in Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, and generated some media controversy over the fact that scooters are barely displacing […] cw: teaching to learn I have a long history with anxiety, and I’m pretty good at noticing when it’s happening. The problem is that I’m always anxious. Noticing anxiety doesn’t snap me out of anxiety– in fact, it often produces meta-anxiety, anxiety about feeling anxious. So I’ve tried a simple reframe lately, and I’m liking […] It has been argued that blackmail should be legal if gossip is legal, and even that there are no good consequentialist counterarguments (!). I think this isn’t obvious because the disclosures incentivized by blackmail are systematically worse than gossip. Gossip has costs and benefits: on the one hand people learn information they can use to make better decisions … More Checkmate on blackmail? I’ve been listening to a lot of the Watersons and Waterson:Carthy this week. It’s reminded me how absolutely full British folk music is of songs about unintended pregnancy. Most commonly the result is unhappy motherhood: “But if I had kent that I now ken And taken my mother’s bidding o I wouldn’t be sitting by […] Suppose that I’m considering investing $1 in EvilCo (ticker EVL), but decide I don’t like the company’s activities so I refrain. Or maybe I decide to short EVL. Is this effective in reducing EvilCo’s activities? In this post I’ll argue: Divestment can be reasonably effective, despite replaceability. My best guess: I can often sacrifice <$1 … More Analyzing divestment This was a 5 minute talk, so I basically only had time to read the slides (dynamically!). I’m going to provide the slides and whatever extra info I said at the time in italics and give commentary and context in plain text. Obviously, this is a matter of degree. It’s not a disorder unless it’s distressing […] I think I'm pretty good about ignoring what I'm "supposed" to be doing with my appearance to the extent that I don't find it useful or fun. But I've been at war with my belly since it came on the scene at adolescence.
Let me tell you about the still-not-defunct real-time log processing
pipeline we built at my now-defunct last job. It handled logs from a large
number of embedded devices that our ISP operated on behalf of residential
customers. (I wrote and presented previously about some of the cool wifi
diagnostics that were possible with this data set.)
Lately, I've had a surprisingly large number of conversations about logs
processing pipelines. I can find probably 10+ already-funded, seemingly
successf… Everyone dwells in their own universe– a dream made up of sense data, culture, beliefs, historical contingencies, and idiosyncrasies. We all share an external reality (as far as we know), but none of us actually lives there. We live in our own universes in our minds. Dreams, delusion, and psychosis vividly demonstrate the extent to […] Because of my illness and Ales’s graduation, the Harvard Effective Altruism student podcast, the Turing Test, had about a two year hiatus. Julia Edsparr and Jen Eason have stepped up to help me finish what I started. There are several unreleased interviews from before the pause, but one less today, because we released Episode #7 […] Last weekend, I called my first techno contra (as part of a double dance at CDNY to celebrate the wedding of two of our lovely dancing humans 😍). It turns out, to no one’s surprise, that calling techno is a fair bit different from calling a regular evening dance. Here are my reflections on calling my first techno (including a bunch of great advice from folks on SharedWeight’s Callers’ Listserv).
+ If you can, listen to the tracks in advance!
I worked with DJ Flourish (Mark Moore) from Philly—he’…
I made a little flow chart of mainstream programming languages and how
programmers seem to move from one to another.
There's a more common kind of chart, which shows how the
languages themselves evolved. I didn't want to show the point of view of
language inventors, but rather language users, and see what came out. It
looks similar, but not quite the same.
If you started out in language A, this shows which
language(s) you most likely jumped to next. According to me. Which is not
very scie…
I was recently recommended to read the book Accidental
Empires by Robert X.
Cringely, first published in 1992 (or was it
1991?) and apparently no longer in print and also not in e-book format. To
my surprise, it turns out archive.org has a solution for this, an epically
user-unfriendly "virtual library
card" (which is still worth it if
you need to read a book) in which they apparently receive one physical copy
of a book, scan it, and lend it out digitally, one person at a time, using
an ag… I’d prefer it if states took from the rich to give to the poor. But I wish they did it in a reasonably efficient way, such that poor people get about $1 of utility for every $1 of utility a rich person loses. I think we often fall short of that goal. (An expansion of … More On redistribution
Multi-factor authentication remains hard-to-use, hard-to-secure,
and error-prone. I've been studying authentication lately to see if it
might be possible to adapt some security practices, especially phishing
prevention, from big companies to small companies and consumers.
Here's what I have so far.
(Sorry: this is another long one. Security is complicated!)
The three factors aren't independent
The traditional definition of multi-factor authentication (although I
couldn't find a ref… When people come to an effective altruism event for the first time, the conversation often turns to projects they’re pursuing or charities they donate to. They often have a sense of nervousness around this, a feeling that the harsh light of cost-effectiveness is about to be turned on everything they do. To be fair, this is a reasonable thing to be apprehensive about, because many youngish people in EA do in fact have this idea that everything in life should be governed by cost-effectiveness. I&…
A recurring discussion in Overwatch (as well as other online games) is whether or not women are treated differently from men. If you do a quick search, you can find hundreds of discussions about this, some of which have well over a thousand comments. These discussions tend to go the same way and involve the same debate every time, with the same points being made on both sides. Just for example, these three threads on reddit that spun out of a single post that have a total of 10.4k comments. On … A friend of mine was looking at some job offers from startups recently and asked me for advice on how to think about the equity awards he was offered.
This depends a lot on details that companies often don’t give you unless you ask. So I ended up writing …
I don't mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get
something useful in exchange. But that's not what happens.
A former co-worker told me once: "Everyone loves collecting data,
but nobody loves analyzing it later." This claim is almost shocking, but
people who have been involved in data collection and analysis have all seen
it. It starts with a brilliant idea: we'll collect information about
every click someone makes on every page in our app! And we'… My theory: they’re actually the optimal point in language design space, for a few underappreciated reasons. It’s time for a valentine exchange! Here’s how it works: email me with your name and mailing address (julia.d.wise at gmail) I’ll let you know who you’re exchanging with make or buy about 4 valentines and mail them by the end of this weekend enjoy checking the mail! As per usual, I’ve forgotten to announce […] I really enjoy using RSS to get updates from my favorite writers. But recently I noticed that my RSS feed was starting to get the same distracting pull as Hacker News. I was still under the thumb of the little red badge!
To escape, I decided to experiment with reading … Hey experienced contradancers! Have you been looking for a new way to contribute to your dance community? Here’s one that I’ve been trying. It’s really small, and has the potential to make a really big impact on the quality of our dances, especially as more and more of us get on board with it. Ready? Here it is:
Be quiet when the caller starts talking, and don’t talk through the walkthrough.
That’s it. Really. If you want to go one step further, you can be the person who gently reminds people to … I’ve been contradancing for over eight years, and can jump into even the most complex and falling-apart of contras and still have some idea of what’s going on. But last summer at English-Scottish-Contra Week at Pinewoods, I tried Scottish Country Dance for the first time and I had an experience I haven’t had for quite a while: I was completely at sea in a set dance.
Scottish isn’t too different from contra and English, and I got along okay when I had a walkthrough. (Not great, mind you, but I ma… This year I met my donation goal again, and donated in the same proportions as last year. Jeff is redoing our bathroom, which involves taking down walls with old lead paint on them. He’s sealed off that portion of the house, and when he’s doing leaded work he doesn’t come back in the rest of the house until he’s taken off his coveralls, changed clothes, washed his hands in the basement, showered, […] We did an estimate on how much our first year of having a baby cost. Four years and another baby later, we decided to do an update on how much the first five years have cost. TL;DR: Over 5 years we’ve spent about $106,760 in cash, or about $150,000 including lost earnings. By far the […] (Epistemic status: quick speculation which matches my intuitions about how social things go, but which I hadn’t explicitly described before, and haven’t checked.) If your car gets damaged, should you invest more or less in it going forward? It could … Continue reading → I’m late to the party, but I've been thinking about the documentary “The Life Equation” about how people use data to decide make life-and-death decisions. The central example is a woman named Crecencia, a mother of seven who lives in rural Guatemala and has cervical cancer. The doctor treating her knows that screening other women for cancer is more cost-effective than treating this woman, and that the community doesn’t have enough money to fully fund both. The filmmaker writes: “Crecencia’s… In my last post I presented a basic argument for EDT, and a response to the most common counterarguments. I omitted one important argument in favor of CDT—that EDT can involve conditioning on a measure zero event, yielding either undefined or undesirable behavior, while CDT is always well-defined. In this post I dive into that argument … More EDT vs CDT 2: conditioning on the impossible Avalon has many complexities that become irrelevant given good enough play. If we remove those complexities the game can be played much more quickly (personally I also find the simpler version more aesthetically appealing): Only play the three largest (non-*) quests. (Skip the easier two quests.) The good players win immediately if a quest succeeds. … More Simplifying Avalon These are some intuitions people often have: You are not required to save a random person, but you are definitely not allowed to kill one You are not required to create a person, but you are definitely not allowed to … Continue reading → Many people seem to find themselves in a situation something like this: Good actions seem better than bad actions. Better actions seem better than worse actions. There seem to be many very good things to do—for instance, reducing global catastrophic … Continue reading → We’re often taught about the importance of “finding your purpose” as you set out into the world and choose your pathway forward. The words change–sometimes it’s ‘purpose’, but you might also find your ‘bliss’, your ‘passion’, your ‘voice’, your ‘career’, or your ‘calling’–but the narrative remains the same. Whatever it is, you’ve gotta find it. And … Continue reading On Finding Purpose →
The post On Finding Purpose appeared first on Hollis Easter.
What if… …after you died, you would be transported back and forth in time and get to be each of the other people who ever lived, one at a time, but with no recollection of your other lives? …you had … Continue reading → Matter can experience things. For instance, when it is a person. Matter can also do work, and thereby provide value to the matter that can experience things. For instance, when it is a machine. Or also, when it is a … Continue reading →
This is an archive of the original "fsyncgate" email thread. This is posted here because I wanted to have a link that would fit on a slide for a talk, but didn't want to use a link shortner
From:Craig Ringer
Subject:PostgreSQL's handling of fsync() errors is unsafe and risks data loss at least on XFS
Date:2018-03-28 02:23:46
Hi all
Some time ago I ran into an issue where a user encountered data corruption
after a storage error. PostgreSQL played a part in that corruption by
allowing c…
I've had this nagging feeling that the computers I use today feel slower than the computers I used as a kid. As a rule, I don’t trust this kind of feeling because human perception has been shown to be unreliable in empirical studies, so I carried around a high-speed camera and measured the response latency of devices I’ve run into in the past few months. Here are the results:
computerlatency(ms)yearclock# T
apple 2e3019831 MHz3.5k
ti 99/4a4019813 MHz8k
custom haswell-e 165Hz5020143.5 GHz2G
commo…
A statement I commonly hear in tech-utopian circles is that some seeming inefficiency can’t actually be inefficient because the market is efficient and inefficiencies will quickly be eliminated. A contentious example of this is the claim that companies can’t be discriminating because the market is too competitive to tolerate discrimination. A less contentious example is that when you see a big company doing something that seems bizarrely inefficient, maybe it’s not inefficient and you just lack… Purpose I play music on stage, and that usually means using amplification (PA) systems. The bands I play with (Frost and Fire, The Turning Stile+, and others) typically have a bunch of musicians playing a host of instruments, each with their own microphones. Consequently, we need a lot of mic mute switches. The enemy of … Continue reading XLR Mic Mute Switch with LEDs – Proof of Concept →
The post XLR Mic Mute Switch with LEDs – Proof of Concept appeared first on Hollis Easter.
How to test thermostat and thermal fuse units on kitchen appliances (espresso machine, coffee maker, rice cooker, pressure cooker) with a multimeter.
The post How to Test Thermostat/Thermal Fuse in Kitchen Tools appeared first on Hollis Easter.
Delicious crispy caramelized zucchini with garlic, basil, mint, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. Easily scales up to use all the zucchini in the house, and it's quick! Googootz!
The post Use Up That Zucchini – Googoots / Cucuzza Recipe appeared first on Hollis Easter.
Jennifer Battle asked the National Association of Crisis Organization Directors’ mailing list for some uplifting hotline memes to use in training, since there didn’t seem to be that many available. Here are my first responses. (please feel free to use these if you like)
The post Hotline Memes appeared first on Hollis Easter.
Here are three places Jeff and I are donating this year. The first two are similar to what we’ve been doing for years, and the third represents a change.Direct workJeff and I want to support work that directly makes the world a better place. (Some arguments against falling into a “meta trap” here.) As usual for us, this year we’ve given just over half our donations to direct work. We made these donations to the Against Malaria Foundation, one of GiveWell’s top picks, except for small amounts th… Last week the Boston Effective Altruism group had a discussion on self-care for altruists. I've written about the topic before, but I wanted to share some of the more practical advice people had. Think beyond day-to-day choicesSelf-care isn’t just short-term decisions like whether to make time for yoga tonight. It’s larger life decisions too, like what job to take, where to live, how to budget money, and how to make time for partners, friends, and family.For me, having children was self-car… Almost four years ago, I pledged with Giving What We Can. Members pledge 10% of their incomes to the best charities they can find (with students and those with no income pledging 1% of their spending money).In the time since, I've felt good about making this commitment. I like having it as part of my routine, something that I know is part of my plan in the years to come. It's a confirmation of what I value—a safe and healthy life not just for me and mine, but for all families around the… My latest blog post helps to explain a few statistical/ML models by whether they learn an interaction in a toy example Since Github Pages is way nicer than Blogger, I'm writing over there at http://davidchudzicki.com now. To keep old posts alive, these pages at http://blog.davidchudzicki.com will remain as is. I was converting a PNG (which represented partials sums of the Weierstrass elliptic function) to a GIF and was confused about why the PNG looked fine at low resolution but the GIF looked bad. Then I learned that GIFs can only use 256 colors and we have to do something to map the many colors to the fewer colors. We could just use the closest available color in the new set of colors, but that results in sharp jumps and "color banding" where the colors change. So instead we use (and Image… On a visit to San Francisco's Exploratorium, I saw an oscilloscope they had making Lissijous curves. So I decided to make a version in d3: You can play with it (and see the code) here This post will describe a way I came up with of fitting a function that's constrained to be increasing, using Stan. If you want practical help, standard statistical approaches, or expert research, this isn't the place for you (look up “isotonic regression” or “Bayesian isotonic regression” or David Dunson, whose work Andrew Gelman pointed me to). This is the place for you if you want to read about how I thought about setting up a model, implemented the model in Stan, and created graphic…
Costs are Rising, US Highway Edition
Nice things
West Station is an Overbuilt Mess
Deconstruct files
Climate Urgency
*Why Nations Fail* and the long-termist view of global poverty
Costs are Rising
Scooters
Instead of “I’m anxious,” try “I feel threatened”
Checkmate on blackmail?
Unintended pregnancy in folk songs
Analyzing divestment
Scrupulosity: my EAGxBoston 2019 lightning talk
Alternative beauty: my tummy pokes out
The log/event processing pipeline you can't have
Multiverse of minds
The Turing Test podcast is back with Bryan Caplan!
Reflections on My First Techno Contra
Programmer migration patterns
Quotes from 1992
On redistribution
Factors in authentication
You have more than one goal, and that's fine
Randomized trial on gender in Overwatch
A checklist for stock option offers
Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway
Why are gradual static types so great?
Valentine exchange 2019
The best RSS reader is Kindle4RSS
Improve Your Community With This One Weird Trick!
Words Don't Help Beginners
My 2018 donations
Contractor mindset vs. homeowner mindset
How much do kids cost? The first 5 years
Worth keeping
No one is a statistic
EDT vs CDT 2: conditioning on the impossible
Simplifying Avalon
Are ethical asymmetries from property rights?
Personal relationships with goodness
On Finding Purpose
Realistic thought experiments
The fundamental complementarity of consciousness and work
Fsyncgate email thread
Computer latency: 1977-2017
How good are decisions?
XLR Mic Mute Switch with LEDs – Proof of Concept
How to Test Thermostat/Thermal Fuse in Kitchen Tools
Use Up That Zucchini – Googoots / Cucuzza Recipe
Hotline Memes
Two standard donations and one new one
Practical steps for self-care
Why I pledged
An Interaction or Not? Understanding a Few ML Algorithms via an Example with No Evidence Either Way
dithering
Interactive Lissijous Curves in d3
A Bayesian Model for a Function Increasing by Chi-Squared Jumps (in Stan)