Hacker News: indrax

New comment by indrax in "I'm Not Sure I've Ever Enjoyed Programming"

indrax — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 16:07:33 +0000

https://www.shadertoy.com/

* Low friction, nothing to install, near instant feedback.

* Fun starting at simple shapes, gradients, distortions, all the way to absurdly good looking rendering.

I did have that experience of growing up with fun programming, for me shader programming brings that back.

New comment by indrax in "Brain implant translates paralyzed man's thoughts into text with 94% accuracy"

indrax — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 15:31:23 +0000

For many cognitive processes, I don't see a clear survival value to conscious awareness of that process, so I don't expect that awareness to be a reliable feature. The survival relevant result of that cognition can still come through.

I also think that an internal voice that doesn't get conscious awareness is likely to become a process that doesn't present as voice. So it's not like someone can just pay more attention and hear something, because it stopped talking a long time ago.

New comment by indrax in "Simula One – office-focused, standalone VR headset based on the Linux Desktop"

indrax — Tue, 09 Nov 2021 16:23:51 +0000

I look at this like Multimedia and the web in 1995. Yes some of this is a shadow of Microsoft Bob. We don't know what we're doing with VR yet but the technology has crossed over the line from being a toy or experiment. Skeuomorphism is a temporary workaround until we (users and designers both) learn what conventions are most powerful and port more applications to VR.

New comment by indrax in "It's hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is"

indrax — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 02:50:31 +0000

They're paying for credibility, but assigning the credibility to an organization instead of an open and understood process of vetting. This confuses me.

New comment by indrax in "The age of machine learning as code has arrived"

indrax — Sun, 24 Oct 2021 00:35:49 +0000

I think this is a reference class problem. One could also say software replaced work done in offices with work still being done in offices. (until recently) Most of the work was still done on literal desktops. but significant changes have been happening within the subset of the office and within the use of the desk.

New comment by indrax in "The age of machine learning as code has arrived"

indrax — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 21:02:13 +0000

Software is also part of the world, just a very different part.

New comment by indrax in "After the pandemic, we can’t go back to sleep (2020)"

indrax — Fri, 22 Oct 2021 14:12:52 +0000

Do you think abundance requires the current system?

New comment by indrax in "Steal This Comic"

indrax — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 14:08:49 +0000

Mirror: https://imgur.com/OPVQstH

New comment by indrax in "Open Source Tractor"

indrax — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 15:20:33 +0000

It's conceptually gridbeam. https://gridbeam.xyz/

General construction kit for real world applications. In theory you could take a machine apart and use the beams for some other machine. A smaller kit could build any of the machine designs as needed.

New comment by indrax in "Fossil fuel industry gets subsidies of $11m a minute, IMF finds"

indrax — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 18:09:48 +0000

This is the relevant paper.

https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2021/09/23/Sti...

New comment by indrax in "Met Police: Run away, call 999 if you feel danger when stopped by lone officer"

indrax — Sun, 03 Oct 2021 00:09:53 +0000

If someone is subsequently charged with fleeing, having a reasonable belief that someone was impersonating officers could be an easier defense than merely fearing danger, however founded those fears may be.

New comment by indrax in "Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research"

indrax — Sat, 25 Sep 2021 18:54:50 +0000

Friendly suggestion to all that Bayes Theorem is the right way to deal with this kind of weak evidence. We should not adhere to arbitrary legal standards in our own thinking about the truth.

New comment by indrax in "Teenager on TikTok Disrupted Thousands of Scientific Studies with a Single Video"

indrax — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 14:38:54 +0000

I just signed up to prolific. Their onboarding tutorial/example survey references prescreening and eligibility. I'm guessing it was on researchers to filter the demographics to what was relevant to their study.

I think this is actually the right approach. Some 'balancing' algorithm would have to make assumptions about what's normal, then then the excluded participants wouldn't even show up in the research data.

New comment by indrax in "Workers are often told not to talk about pay. That's not legal"

indrax — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 18:02:43 +0000

If 2x programmers are paid ~2x then the company is using some performance metric to influence pay, but then for pay to remain secret the performance metric also has to be secret.

New comment by indrax in "If Loud Aliens Explain Human Earliness, Quiet Aliens Are Also Rare"

indrax — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 17:29:27 +0000

You have to weight the validity of the reasoning across all turtle observers through history. If you reject probabilistic reasoning because it sometimes tell you things that are wrong, then you have no way to reason about uncertainty.

New comment by indrax in "No-bullshit tenets for faster decision-making"

indrax — Sat, 18 Sep 2021 17:20:51 +0000

What's an alternate to that which would make sense in a different context?

New comment by indrax in "Ask HN: What is your strongest contrarian opinion?"

indrax — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 21:22:28 +0000

There is virtually no real diversity in experimentation on social decision making processes. (Governments, Economies, Science) So debates devolve into some form of e.g. capitalism vs. socialism, but both system are governed by similar variations of a sovereign nation state, which are adapted from monarchies. Compare this to the space of all possible government descriptions and we're only looking at a weird narrow slice.

Because evolutionary pressures on governments produce stability and power instead of 'goodness of people', I suspect any random system that sounds remotely sensible would probably be superior to anything we have now. If we actually designed something that took into account new knowledge and technology, we could do much better.

Expectation of future profits is equivalent to belief that markets are inefficient. (Which of course they often are.) Open source economic planning could yield massive economic gains and doesn't require centralized power or use of force. (Pacifist governance is one of those unexplored spaces) An open public ledger would allow for resource allocation and incentivizing work without needing a monetization strategy.

If we track and account for externalities doing a good thing funds itself. You don't need a way to take money from the people you're helping. This also disincentivizes negative externalities.

As an example of how bad things are: We still debate on natural language forums instead of using structured arguments that link to common datasets and simulations. These comments get 'points' instead of bayesian probabilities, and there's no way to filter or rescore anything based on it's epistemological support or new data.

New comment by indrax in "Ask HN: What is your strongest contrarian opinion?"

indrax — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 19:17:58 +0000

I agree with incentivizing health in general. Doing so without providing healthcare seems wrong.

Doing so through income tax rates is muddling the issues. The rich would hire dieticians and trainers just to save money. If public health is actually a priority, those kinds of services would be subsidized.

New comment by indrax in "Ask HN: What is your strongest contrarian opinion?"

indrax — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 19:04:40 +0000

It is unpopular among university and research institutions that get federal grants. Also development companies that win contracts to create government websites/backends.

I agree with it, but it would disrupt a whole industry.

New comment by indrax in "Project MKUltra"

indrax — Sun, 05 Sep 2021 23:35:23 +0000

MK here is a just a digraph, not an abbreviation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_cryptonym