P-values are almost always taught poorly, but it's not actually that difficult of a concept. I took statistics in high school, again in undergrad, and it wasn't until the third time in grad school that it actually made intuitive sense (thank you Julia Yang!). When you're testing a hypothesis in statistics, it's easier to formulate a "null hypothesis" which is the opposite of what you're testing, and then try to disprove that null hypothesis.
A p-value is the probability, assuming the null hypothesis is true, of obtaining a result at least as extreme as the one actually observed.
Put differently: if the null hypothesis were true, then for p=0.05 you'd see <things at least as far from the test statistic as what you just observed> at most 5% of the time.
Put differently again: If the null hypothesis you are testing is true, then for p=0.05 random sampling would not return an observation as far from the test statistic as you just observed, 95% of the time.
Just like Kyrie Irving is a talented basketball player but also a catastrophically-deluded flat-earther, it's just as possible for gifted software engineers to have flawed reasoning about the economy.
A truly free market is also free of regulation and embraces predatory actions by monopolists. Think being paid in company scrip instead of dollars. Think a single food supply monopoly with patented seeds you can be prosecuted for propagating, and harmful additives in food because it's cheaper. Think better education inaccessible for those nincompoops who weren't born into wealth. Serves them right for choosing to be born poor, amirite?
Some amount of regulation is required if you want a just, healthy, society, with economic mobility.
People say they want 100% free markets but they don't really comprehend what that looks like.
> A truly free market is also free of regulation and embraces predatory actions by monopolists.
This is a non sequitur and also makes no sense. A free market doesn’t “embrace” anything, it’s the sum of the decisions individuals make absent external coercion. That you might be unhappy with the decisions others make doesn’t necessarily make it a problem.
But every single economy is heavily controlled, regulated, and interfered with, and the so-called “free market” examples people use like healthcare in the States are examples of the most tightly controlled and regulated markets (if you can even call them that) on the planet. So when people complain about “free markets” they’re complaining about heavily controlled markets without even knowing it.
Did you know that paychecks are private money? They aren't legal tender. RSU's are company scrip, too. Besides, nobody can make you take a job you don't want.
> patented seeds
Patents are a government invention, and I'm on record opposing them.
> harmful additives
Harming and/or defrauding customers is against the law and is actionable.
> better education inaccessible
Government run schools are pretty much bottom of the barrel.
>Did you know that paychecks are private money? They aren't legal tender.
I did know this, actually. Thankfully your banks are not free market profiteers. They're subject to stringent regulations to ensure a more orderly and efficient market, and thus they'll dependably convert cheques to dollars. Another point against free market absolutism.
>Harming and/or defrauding customers is against the law and is actionable.
That's why Big Tobacco was dismantled and are no longer advertising and selling harmful, addictive products to teens, right?
Teenagers after all are well-known for their astute abilities to assess risk and make rational, informed decisions that are in their long-term best interests, right?
More regulation is needed here, not less.
>Government run schools are pretty much bottom of the barrel.
In the USA, certainly. That's not an indictment of public education as a whole, though, only of American society's "Fuck you, I got mine" values. If Americans were less selfish they could have the most highly-educated citizens on the planet, with global-elite schooling available to every American schoolchild.
In any case, free market absolutism is delusional for all but the billionaire class (for whom it's optimal) and I'm not interested in continuing this conversation further.
Oh, heavens no. I'm human, so I almost certainly make logic errors all the time, whether in terms of truth or validity.
However, one thing I am very careful about is that the definitions I use are falsifiable, which makes them minimally empirically testable. ("A hypothesis forbidding some observations means that hypothesis is testable.") In the best case, I can proceed a priori with my reasoning and entirely sidestep needing to approach a posteriori, but real life is very often not that nice.
I generally find capital-L Libertarian free markets less than useful for analysis because the syllogism tends to break down thus:
1. Free markets produce prosperity.
2. Prosperity indicates the presence of a free market.
3. Therefore, free markets are prosperous.
Like, that'd be a perfectly valid form of proving both directions of a biconditional if it were possible in this framework to show the presence of a free market that doesn't produce prosperity or that prosperity happens without a free market. Unfortunately, they're taken as axiomatic, so they don't admit the reasoning required for such a proof.
I want to be wrong though. Perhaps I'm missing something?
> Free markets correspond with prosperity, in case after case.
I'll caution that correspondence does not admit causal inferences.
I'm in the minority and think the tutorial is awful. "Here's this software everyone says is so great. Before you can actually use it, be sure to spend 20 minutes doing a bunch of stuff for which you don't have context/don't have motivation for"
No thanks.
Instead, literally just start using it and ask an LLM for help as you go.
An LLM is great at writing a first shot at key bindings to suit your taste, and recipes for Emacs' four syntactically different yet functionally overlapping configuration schemes.
The maybe complementary, or at least deterministic source of advice is old school 'M-x info'.
I don't understand. Billions of non-technical users are loading URLs like `https://cdn.foo/?guid=deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef` all the time. Why would they care if those URLs became `ipfs://deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeef` instead?
Pronounceable names can point to a content address, the same way they can point to an IP address. For example, https://dnslink.dev points a DNS name to a content address; git refs point to git objects; etc.
This is irrelevant. The point I'm responding to is this:
>I think something like IPFS is definitely needed. There is nothing stopping you from distributing a webapp on bittorrent but you'll also need to add a README for instructions on how to run the webapp on localhost so a browser can render it. So thats not something that any non-technical user wants to do.
This quoted comment assumes there's a web app that is sufficiently complex as to require a readme to run it, but that's too complex for normal people.
But somehow, a link that looks like `ipfs://12340-9q5ui1j2;lk3rjq;ladksfj` won't scare those same people off?
Yes it is. But there are many things it can still be used for. In Holland for example they use microwave connections to create a backbone network to do things like repeater linking and to distribute amateur TV without using the internet like most current repeaters do.
Only if it's used to obscure the meaning of a message.
You can encrypt passcodes and remote control commands for sattelites and other radio control codes for various craft or devices. You can also still use message authentication codes for integrity of plaintext messages.
Telemetry is fair game for encryption IIRC as well.
The secret is nobody can tell. There are probably like 5 people playing with that band who have the equipment to receive it and as long as you don't do anything too obvious within literal line of sight of those 5 (very old) dudes the world is your oyster.
I don't know enough about the Tea Party to confidently give my opinion, I am a bit too young to have been politically aware when they were in their heyday as far as I know.
I think it's pretty obvious what parent poster was implying. Pedantic nitpicks add nothing to the discussion.
edit: sigh, fucking rate limits are such a dumb mechanic if you want quality long-form discussion. By the time I can reply nobody will be looking at their replies.
anyways LLMs might displace "programmers" in the way that 3D CAD software replaced draftsmen, but software engineering, the actual design and architecture skill, isn't going anywhere. I can use carpentry tools to build a bridge over a creek but I'm not qualified to build a bridge carrying Interstate traffic.
It is obvious what the parent poster is saying, and it's substantively wrong. Give someone a table saw and they're essentially no closer to being a woodworker. It's tricky to use a table saw (trickier still to use it safely).
These tool analogies are self-soothing for programmers who see agents is simple tools of their trade. But the point of articles like this is that AI agents are more like spreadsheets --- only more so. They're devices that allow normal people without training or aptitude to do things with computers that only programmers were doing before. They displace programmers.
In that sense, the closest physical analogy to a coding agent is probably a 3D printer. But: a really good 3D printer, into which hundreds of billions of dollars had been invested entirely for the purpose of making the printer work weirdly well even for people who have no interest in the different kidns of filament spools.
My thing got a little heat but I didn't see for a couple days, so I thought I'd just let it stand. But it's late and I'm reading through my old comments and, while it's necro, thought I'd do a reply here.
I'm more than OK with people writing their own software, indeed the main thing I like about the free software movement is that it makes it much easier for people to do that. It's empowering. I don't have a 3D printer, but I like the idea. I think people should be able to build as much of their own stuff as they want. I have a caveat though, which I'll get to at the end.
As far as my personal motivation, I--and most SWEs I know--don't really want to build the kinds of things people are using LLMs to build: audio players, billing software, whatever. I also don't think most backend apps, frontend apps, web frameworks, whatever should exist, and whether they were written by people or LLMs doesn't really factor in. More to the point, I think it's crazy that SWEs and tech workers generally make 8474x what other people make, and I think we've provided dubious value for that remittance, to say nothing of the investment, so knocking us down a peg would be putting things to rights. But, candidly, while I wouldn't love losing my job because of LLMs, I don't think that's happening writ large and I don't think it will happen to me specifically, at least not directly or any time soon. Maybe it matters to you that I don't make beaucoup bucks, maybe it doesn't. Anyway, do with all that what you will.
Kara Swisher has this great line--dunno if it's originally hers--where some social media person is going on about citizen journalists opening up news and how great it is, and she says that makes about as much sense as citizen surgeons. In the same vein, I don't think a person unaccustomed to designing complex systems should try, just like I don't think someone inexperienced at building a house or a car or a plane should try. I still think this even if we have a one-button mystery machine that play-doh's out an object that seems like it may actually fly a couple of people one town over, and even usually safely does. I think we oughta slap a huge fucking label on the side of that machine that says "we have no idea how this works, and we vouch for it not at all" (I've not yet been goaded into reading the ToS for OpenAI or Anthropic, thank Dark Lord Satan, but I would put $5 down that they assume no liability for anything their models do).
So my caveat, and the point of my post, curtly and regrettably expressed via analogy, is that people should feel free to build whatever they want, but they shouldn't build anything they'll seriously rely on. They won't know enough to verify that whatever they build is fit for purpose (and, sweet Satan give me strength, you can't just ask the LLM to verify it for you). Only experts can do that.
Also for color, I do own a table saw, as well as some others, which I used very (very, holy shit) unsafely to do a terrible finishing carpentry job on my house and some other odd jobs. My warning to all readers is Google how table saws can fuck you up, and do not ever stand behind the wood you are sawing because the blade can literally shoot it into you, or IDK at least shoot it at you really fast.
A p-value is the probability, assuming the null hypothesis is true, of obtaining a result at least as extreme as the one actually observed.
Put differently: if the null hypothesis were true, then for p=0.05 you'd see <things at least as far from the test statistic as what you just observed> at most 5% of the time.
Put differently again: If the null hypothesis you are testing is true, then for p=0.05 random sampling would not return an observation as far from the test statistic as you just observed, 95% of the time.
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