Viewing profile — Bartweiss

> in both cases someone could accidentally optimize the test I think this is what I disagree with. The water heater story is about a viable-for-market design which also optimized f…

This is omnipresent even where regulators aren't involved: every graphics card benchmark out there is 'manipulated' relative to real world performance. At this point it's so univer…

I do think that manipulating a purely instructive measure is less extreme than manipulating a compliance test; consumers can seek alternate tests and reviews, but the state emissio…

Crash test dummies have basically this problem also. They're designed for realism in certain very narrow ways, and then the very small number of approved dummies are used for testi…

Citing Maven also feels a bit circular. It's an important Java application, but being a build tool it's only because there's lots of Java out there to build. Minecraft and a lot of…

Wait, which countries are we referencing outside of those three? Thailand looks straightforwardly exponential so far and has fairly heavy mask use, agreed. But Singapore, Taiwan, a…

> you had to be logged in to the web interface already with another account Obviously I don't know specifics, but if this applies to any router which has multiple tiers of login th…

I don't think this is uncharitable at all. I'm sure Kinsa has made a good effort at controlling for testing frequency, and I'm sure it's helped. But there's no reason to think the …

Good point. The TARP bailout in 2008 involved buying a ton of stock from troubled companies, but it was sold back to them as soon as they could buy the money back. And this will be…

There's also a fairly good argument for this in the line of trains and highways. Planes aren't physically trapped on one course, but pretty much every nation heavily regulates who …

The third option is "because they don't want to be blamed for model error". Governments aren't necessarily competent, but you can try to get them to understand 5%/95% confidence in…

It's been fascinating to see the rise, fall, and rise of digital watches among techies. I remember 1990s Dilbert having an entire storyline about the engineers getting into a calcu…

> The CEO will be under tremendous pressure if he/she tries to optimize for a 1 year timeframe (for example) as opposed to quarter-by-quarter. Its bizarre to talk to well-meaning e…

For any business with decent size, absolutely. There are a thousand ways to claw back options, and the reason they don't get used is that doing it even once would make hiring pract…

Not only is an easily discovered public event poor leverage, it becomes much worse leverage if it comes up in an interview. When companies (or governments) try to manipulate employ…

I notice this pattern all the time in guides to "polite" workplace communication. Their examples are hypothetical, so they look at how positive something sounds without considering…

Eh, it probably buffers against overreaction, especially when a correction in fundamentals is being mixed with a reaction to new pressure. But this is still a good point: if the ma…

This is why the whole idea of "in the public interest" exists. If a reporter received these same recordings in the mail, they would quite likely publish them. If they received a re…

This is a novel and important result in antibiotics . It's also a proof-of-concept for using ML to produce vital drugs with novel mechanisms, rather than incidental alterations or …

I think the criticism is that it's not obvious whether success here was a function of improved performance, expanded throughput, expanded testing, or sheer luck. Chess engines have…

> How am I confident that this is realistic if you literally say its generated? This is a particularly good question since it's recently been shown that even neural nets trained on…

A related interpretation: your debugging tools need to be at least as good as your programming tools. Ideally, better. Debugging a K8 cluster with print statements is hopeless, but…

> had you built a tractor for a company they would definitely want to know why you want to build a brand new tractor when the old one is working fine. You're not wrong about the co…

Truly gnarled legacy code can be almost impossible to understand just by reading, so that truly grokking it requires writing something in the codebase. (Mind, that's necessary for …

> Why not use this power to secrete chemicals that help you gain more control over yourself? If you haven't tried it yet, you might be a fan of Nancy Kress' Beggars in Spain . Inst…