Viewing profile — SeanAppleby

One thing I've been tossing around in my head is: - How quickly is cost of refactor to a new pattern with functional parity going down? - How does that change the calculus around t…

Animal studies seem like the best tool for untangling this, and they indicate that high plastic doses cause a variety of health effects, some of which seem to align with broad heal…

I am quite confident that at least some use cases for injecting context in at inference time are going to stay for at least the foreseeable future, regardless of model performance …

This is my problem with every end to end system I've seen around this. I find that, even building these systems from scratch, all of the hard parts are just normal data infrastruct…

I grew up working class and found that VCs were more accessible than, in my experience, any other upper class institution I have seen. When I was younger I had an easier time getti…

The implicit assertion is that this behavior wouldn't happen if not for Zuckerberg personally causing the behavior. As someone who has worked at large tech companies though, I find…

Eichmann in Jerusalem is the book that coined the phrase for anyone passing through, and it's a pretty wild story. It's essentially Arendt, a Jewish exile from Berlin who fled the …

I believe the point is that the answer begs another question of "why". In their drinking example, alcoholism literally is overdrinking, but we accept that there is an underlying me…

I promise you that you have a vastly higher opinion of people who work at google than people who work at google do.

I think it depends purely on your definition of "tech". Impossible engineering soybeans to produce more heme to make fake meat behave more like meat is a technology, in that it is …

My understanding is that SAT scores are significantly correlated with wealth (resources, time, externally imposed motivation), but not by as much as other admissions criteria, and …

People want to provide a stable home for their children. Having to move can mean your kid has to find all new friends, and if buying a home is a complete impossibility for you, you…

Particularly, most kinds of inequality tend to follow a Pareto distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

I think the point was, if you're going to invest in someone reckless, you might as well invest in a reckless company where at least if they deliver what they claim, the returns wil…

IMO engineer implies the same direction of thing it implies anywhere else: a deep understanding of the fundamentals of what you're building, an ability to rigorously model and opti…

Yeah, this seems game theoretically problematic. We clearly want a deep warchest of antibiotics, but new antibiotics won't sell in any meaningful quantity likely, or even hopefully…

When you say "low impact factor", you're referring to a combination of lack of prestige and lack of readership that leads to few citations and subsequently little influence on the …

The consequences are so low that I would seriously question calling it a collapse. It's just been shuffled under a new banner as Emerdata under the same parent company with really …

You're completely correct, diminishing returns of income on happiness is well established, and I would be surprised if people here were not aware. This community skews very hard to…

This is how I see it too. Technology is inherently about dynamic navigation of unknowns. Having your employees laser focused on things the company knows it needs leaves your compan…

My understanding is that the most significant nonconventional heuristic that Cambridge Analytica got from FB data and exploited was by using FB like data to approximate OCEAN perso…

While I agree that it should be possible to mention nationality without being labeled racist, what legitimate value do you think his nationality adds to that sentence other than to…

Is there substantive evidence that studying humanities or even ethics is causal to people behaving more ethically?

Couldn't you just use income reported to the IRS? Then any odd payment scheme to get around repayment terms would necessarily be tax evasion, which is much more serious and lets yo…

Are you allowed to switch between them at will, or is there a legal inertia that pushes you to continue reporting using the same one?