conciselyverbose

joined 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 20 points 54 minutes ago* (last edited 53 minutes ago)

Shockingly, your brain and productivity improve when you get regular downtime.

(Yeah I know most people want something shorter than a book. It's a solid read though.)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

And when it's junk out of the box because random no-name Amazon cables are universally terrible?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (3 children)

It's $10 and high quality. How much do you think you're saving with a junk off brand one?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

That's a helpful perspective. I appreciate it.

I still have a lot of work on the underlying math because I didn't put in near the effort I should have in any of my actual classes, but I do genuinely want to get over the hump.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I think speculation and guesswork is perfectly fine. It's part of a path towards an answer. However, that speculation and guesswork needs to have its uncertainty clearly indicated.

I'll give an example using football.As "analytics" have emerged, everyone has their own model to give a guideline on decisions. This is done using things like "win probability" of all the possible choices and outcomes. You can do out the math, using a model, to say something like "going for it gives you a 35% chance to win, and kicking the field goal gives you a 33% chance".

And that sounds great. But, all the numbers that go into that math are incredibly noisy, with very small sample sizes. A great kicker has a better chance of making a field goal than a bad kicker, and they can account for that, to a point. But they can't really account for that, plus the specific weather conditions, plus the kicker is a little sore today, ...

And the chances of a stop, and of scoring if you're successful, etc, are even worse, because it's specific to how your offense matches up to that defense, plus the context of the game, the context in the game/moment, etc.

It's perfectly fine, and reasonable, to use a model as the best indicator you have and make a decision aided by that model. But the correct way to present statistical models is provide some guidance on how uncertain it is, in addition to the raw number. If you phrase that "35% +/- 10% if you go for it, 33% +/- 10% if you kick", you realize that there's a significant range where a better model might tell you to make the opposite decision, and it's a lot closer to a toss up.

But despite the inherent uncertainty due to the limited sample sizes used to create the models, you see "analytics experts" all over the place calling coaches morons for decisions that are pretty ambiguous because their specific model gives one decision a small edge and it didn't work out. If they had explicitly evaluated and acknowledged the uncertainty of their model given the factors it can't account for, they would have a much clearer picture of what the decision actually was.

Make guesses. Speculate. But make it clear (to others, and yourself) what you're doing so the guesses aren't given more weight than they deserve.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

All the time.

Pretty much never intentionally, though. I'm just bad at keeping up with people.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Your general explanation is all good, but it never seems like any of the platforms built for live events really have issues delivering content. I don't think the issue is so much that streaming live broadcasts is insurmountable as it is that Netflix specifically doesn't have their architecture managed in a way that works well with big live events. They lean heavily on having their content cached close to the end users and don't have a lot of experience at real time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

I said it elsewhere but it felt like he meant for the final empire to be standalone, then was scrambling a bit in the well of ascension to keep the plot going.

But then some of the part I thought felt slow paid off in the conclusion, so IDK. I like the pacing in most of the rest of the stuff. It's just the introductions. Like Tress of the Emerald Sea, for example, it took so long for her to actually start her adventure.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I love his work and bought physical copies of all of Stormlight, Mistborn, and just a couple days ago the pretty "premium" hardcovers for the secret projects, just to have on my shelves.

My one thing is that his introductions are almost always slower than I'd like. Though ironically he did better in the Wax and Wayne Mistborn arc and I like the Vin arc more.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

Right now I'm way down a Brandon Sanderson rabbit hole, so I guess the Cosmere? I'd say Stormlight Archive, but Mistborn is really cool because they're set at the inflection points in the planet's history. The first arc is excellent, and it changes the world. The second arc is set in the future, with mythologies based on the first arc and scientific progress based on secrets uncovered in the first. The changes in the use of magic are really cool. There's a third arc planned to be set in the future from there.

But the Cosmere as a whole shares some core concepts and characters can move across it, and that comes into other standalone works like (3 of 4) secret projects and a bunch of other stuff.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

TorrentFreak has really been spoonfeeding Nintendo's nonsense positions about emulation everywhere lately.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

If those sites think that being linked to is a service they're providing Google (which demanding payment implies), then Google is just fulfilling their wishes.

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