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patrickcollison.com

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Re: Fast

#291

Post by CamperBob2 »

mymac wrote: post #277
mike_hearn wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the debunking is that there's good evidence many of the participants realized they were in an experiment and the other person was an actor, but Milgram hid this in order to get a famous paper.

Does it matter? If someone may or may not be an actor by your judgment is going to cause you to possibly commit an atrocity then you should play it safe and refuse. Just in case...

And of course if you were a participant in the original experiment, you'd tell people, "Of course, I knew it was just an experiment, and it wasn't really happening."

You'd start by telling yourself that, so it would be easy enough to convince people looking to "debunk" the experiment later.

Re: Fast

#292

Post by czDRZ-akk »

easyThrowaway wrote: post #267
carabiner wrote: post #73

Major one missing: China built 5,000 miles of high speed rail in 6 years. In California, it's been 15 years and we have 0 miles complete. Also built numerous hospitals during pandemic in a couple weeks. Demolished and replaced a bridge in 43 hours: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a... . General pattern of completing infrastructure projects at a blistering pace - and they work. Also landed a…

> Autocracy gets shit done. Yeah yeah, I've heard that story before. "He made the trains run on time." Then we found out there were no trains at all. Autocracies have always had a knack for really good marketing, gotta admit that.

This would be a valid point if it wasn’t for the fact that you can go to China and ride on a high speed train to see for yourself. Failing that, you can watch one of the many vlogs in which people take HSR to get around the country, or just talk to anyone who’s been to China in the past decade.

Chinese HSR does its own marketing. The material benefit to people around the country, particularly in rural areas, cannot be overstated.

Re: Fast

#293

Post by rsync »

fragmede wrote: post #91
anonymousiam wrote: post #53

This may be one of the best (worst) examples of how bad things are today. The California High-Speed Rail was funded over 15 years ago and they haven't begun building it yet. They are 82% of the way through their environmental studies. https://hsr.ca.gov/about/capital-costs-funding/ https://twitter.com/cahsra/status/1674900759677227012

It may delight you to know, then, that they've started building, and in fact they've built a bunch of stuff for it already! As of March 2023, 50 miles of guideway are complete, 39 are underway; 41 structures are complete, and 29 are underway¹. Some of the completed structures include: - The Cedar Viaduct, a 3,700-foot-long bridge over State Route 99 in Fresno, which features a signature double arch design². - The Han…

"It may delight you to know, then, that they've started building ..."

Unfortunately, "high speed" is a misnomer.

This would have been high speed rail had it been deployed before 1990.

At this time it is just "rail" and when it is finished we will be back where we started: 40-ish years behind the state of the art with a product inferior to other modes of travel.

Disclaimer: I want very badly for a real HSR between SF and LA[1] and am deeply disappointed at the - sometimes comical - concessions and degradations that have accompanied this project since day one.

[1] Non-stop express service in less than 120 minutes.

Re: Fast

#294

Post by systemvoltage »

RandomLensman wrote: post #272
systemvoltage wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point: Autocracies are actually extremely efficient, but we don't like to admit that. So, we come up with various narratives. Let's be honest, there is plenty of corruption in democracies and autocracies are pretty damn good at infrastructure. Just not an ideal governing structure for individual freedom and things like property rights which we value higher than efficiency of building things fast.

Which autocracies were/are efficient? Were East Germany, the USSR, Mussolini's Italy, or Nazi Germany efficient - not sure they were. They could get certain things done, but that is very different from being efficient (or even effective) in broader sense.

UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Singapore? I loosely say Autocracies I guess.

Re: Fast

#295

Post by mike_hearn »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #291
mymac wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? If someone may or may not be an actor by your judgment is going to cause you to possibly commit an atrocity then you should play it safe and refuse. Just in case...

And of course if you were a participant in the original experiment, you'd tell people, "Of course, I knew it was just an experiment, and it wasn't really happening." You'd start by telling yourself that, so it would be easy enough to convince people looking to "debunk" the experiment later.

They told Milgram himself and he hid the interviews. From the second link above,

The new research builds upon findings from a previous study, which analyzed recordings of 91 conversations conducted immediately after the termination of the experiments. The recordings showed that most of the obedient subjects justified continuing the experiment because they believed the learner was not really being harmed.

Re: Fast

#296

Post by terribleperson »

chrisco255 wrote: post #170
terribleperson wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Runescape was crazy for the time (pre-WoW). A full-featured MMO you could play on a wide variety of computers without downloading or installing anything. All you needed was Java.

All you needed was to download a new monthly version of 50MB of JRE and install it on your virus-prone Windows XP machine and open up about 7 new holes in your system with each patch.

You probably had the JRE installed already, unless you were particularly security-conscious. Even many who were security conscious had it installed. Runescape was also compatible with the MSJVM, though the window of time where that mattered was short.

Re: Fast

#297

Post by terribleperson »

chrisco255 wrote: post #168
cornfutes wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, Runescape one of the most successful MMOs ever was a Java applet. Java is much more effective at complex object-oriented modeling and an MMO is a canonical example of where OOP not only shines but is necessary. Before ES6, there were half a dozen styles of approximating classes in JavaScript, the main one being with closure-returning-functions. Even utilizing these clever tricks to make JavaScript a decent…

If Java was perfect, Jagex the creator of Runescape, wouldn't have felt compelled to create its own custom scripting language, RuneScript, in 2004, which it very much did: https://web.archive.org/web/20080615044119/http://archive.th... https://runescape.wiki/w/RuneScript Far more apps were written in Flash than in Java Applets. Java Applets were problematic for their large file size and memory requirements. You would…

The idea that the creation of a game-focused scripting engine somehow reflects on the qualities of a programming language seems a bit silly (I mean this not in an insulting manner but am a bit tired and can't figure out how to structure this sentence) to me. Scripting engines show up in game engines all the time, regardless of the underlying technologies they're built on. Game-specific scripting engines allow you to have people who aren't really programmers, or programmers who aren't knowledgeable in the internals of the engine or the underlying language, to create content.

Re: Fast

#298

Post by electriclove »

underwater wrote: post #276
electriclove wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely agree regarding ISPs and Intuit/TurboTax but Boring is not a good example.

Some people think that Hyperloop was purely intended to sabotage the high-speed rail project by creating the false impression there was a cheaper, easier, option on the horizon.

There is a lot of Elon Derangement Syndrome out there. Our failure to implement any high speed rail is simply due to our ineptitude and bureaucracy.

Re: Fast

#299

Post by RandomLensman »

systemvoltage wrote: post #294
RandomLensman wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which autocracies were/are efficient? Were East Germany, the USSR, Mussolini's Italy, or Nazi Germany efficient - not sure they were. They could get certain things done, but that is very different from being efficient (or even effective) in broader sense.

UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Singapore? I loosely say Autocracies I guess.

All fairly small places... the comparison is then maybe Switzerland, some of the Nordics etc. They all seem to be doing much better in building fast than their larger neighbors.

Re: Fast

#300

Post by yencabulator »

gwd wrote: post #153
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. But Git was initially written by one cranky Finn, in ten days. It totally changed the way we all work.

> But Git was initially written by one cranky Finn, in ten days. It totally changed the way we all work. To be fair, Linus was trying to replace Bitkeeper, a proprietary DVCS which he'd been using to maintain the kernel for several years at that point. Mercurial, which runs on similar principles, was around at the time too. He didn't just make a quantum conceptual leap straight from SVM to git on his own in 10 days;…

I've also read that Linus was pretty influential in BitKeeper design too. As in Larry McVoy would sit down with Linus to talk about the design of it. Git's core data structures had probably been bouncing around in Linus's head for months before first line of code was written.

If you know both BitKeeper and Git internals, you can think of their data models as near identical, with BitKeeper implementation using text files and SCCS, and Git using from-scratch data structures.

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