This company in a company idea reminds me of the classic "The Front Fell Off" sketch (3 minutes you won't regret on YouTube if you haven't seen). The oil executive explains that the leaking oil tanker is no longer in the environment--"It's been towed outside the environment."
Very insightful piece of analysis. Why don’t you email the Ars editors your theory that they are corporate Condé stooges and see what they say? As I mentioned in a sibling comment it’s actually Advance that owns Ars, not Condé, and it’s a different leadership group.
Your revised theory is that Ars is actually a Condé company because of the logo in the footer? Not sure that’s how corporate law works.
Take a minute and do some research. Advance owns Ars and the terms of the acquisition allow it to have total independence.
But again, I recommend you contact the Ars editors directly and share your theory that the Condé logo at the bottom of the page proves that they are in fact Condé stooges and have no editorial independence. See what they say. Their DMs are open.
Databricks' core value proposition is Apache Spark in the cloud, optimized with their special sauce (eg Proton engine).
Running your own Spark, especially on prem, is a lot of work. Most companies would prefer to just provide their data and let someone else handle the query engine.
The parent is right however that Databricks has a feature store (tokenization) but it's not simple to set up and just getting content in and out of it is a major pain point right now.
"Validity of the SAT for Predicting First-Year College Grade Point Average"
TL;DR: High School GPA + SAT score produce correlation coefficient values between 0.44 and 0.62, depending on the population. How strong are those values?
> A general rule of thumb for interpreting correlation coefficients is offered by Cohen (1988): a small correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.1; a medium correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.3; and a large correlation has an absolute value of approximately 0.5 or higher.
From Dr. Shaw's paper on page 7, linked above.
In other words it's very strong, the strongest correlation coefficient that has been found for any signal associated with first year GPA at college.
This has been well understood in the academic community for decades, it's only outside of professional education circles that the validity of the SAT and ACT (when combined with high school GPA) as a predictor of future performance at college is even questioned.
Counter-example: Jenkins. It does what you ask of it, its base install is "naked" and only contains the minimum functionality in the core.
Everything then becomes a plugin. Git. GitHub. Branch for multi-branch pipelines. Credentials management. And on and on and on.
Now you have stay on top of maintaining the plugins in addition to the core. Also, many plugins require other plugins so just to do some basic stuff like set up a multi-branch pipeline from a GitHub repo you're suddenly staring down the barrel of dozens and dozens of bespoke plugins with varying levels of quality and support.
A monolithic application like curl is a dream to me by comparison. Everything is tested in every release. Sub-components are kept up to date by the maintainer. No plugins fighting each other's plugins.
From afar it's easy to see the praise simplicity and modularization but honestly monoliths can be undervalued too.
I can definitely see your point, having experienced the same thing with plugins for SBT, the Scala build tool. I didn't really consider the case of a small core with a multitude of plugins as a twist on the small, simple tool. I think you're right that a plugin architecture lets a thousand flowers bloom, but you don't get long-term stability, because people move on to other tools and stop maintaining the plugins they wrote.
For example, VSCode plugins are great because VSCode is thriving, and Emacs packages are a crapshoot because many of the programmers who wrote them have moved on. Eventually VSCode plugins will be like Emacs packages.
Also: node. Everything is a module, and every module requires a hundred more. Projects with thousands of dependencies become common. No one understands what is actually “under the hood” and hardly anyone cares. “It just works” most of the time. Good enough.
The good news is we can already test this hypothesis by looking at the countries that already enforce compulsory voting [1]:
Argentina
Australia
Belgium
Bolivia
Brazil
Ecuador
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
Nauru
North Korea
Peru
Pitcairn Islands
Samoa
Singapore
Swiss canton of Schaffhausen
Uruguay
Which one of these is a democratic paradise that the author would like to emulate?
Australia is probably the best of the bunch but it's demography and geography are not comparable to the US, a lot of things that work there don't translate here and vice versa.
The author theorizes:
> When the only question voters face is whose ideas they prefer, politicians will naturally focus on developing and debating real world ideas rather than fantasies, and democracy can live up to its moral and practical potential.
O RLY? Is that the situation in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador? TL;DR: No.
This article also presumes the bedrock of democracy is elections, but in fact that's just one dimension and not necessarily the most important one -- rule of law, civil institutions, a functioning state are all equally if not more important than the selection of specific leaders.
> Australia is probably the best of the bunch but it's demography and geography are not comparable to the US, a lot of things that work there don't translate here and vice versa.
Americans say that about literally everything. Sure comparisons are always imperfect, but its kind of silly how americans dismiss every comparision on the basis of "we're unique". America is not that unique.
> but it's [sic] demography and geography are not comparable to the US, a lot of things that work there don't translate here and vice versa.
You should have started you post with that... discounting any other place because their demographics "are not comparable" to the US makes any additional argument moot.
The country on the list most similar to the US is the best? That's very American of you. As someone not in any of those countries (US included) I could pick four or five before I got to Australia.
>O RLY? Is that the situation in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador? TL;DR: No.
I've had 5 orthopedic surgeries and they were transformative -- and this article is written by an orthopedist!
There's some data [1] against these operations:
- Arthoscopic knee surgery
- Subacromial shoulder decompression
- Acromioplasty for rotator cuffs
- Vertebroplasty for the spine
That's 4 techniques out of...how many exactly?
It's just an n=1 anecdote but my surgeries absolutely changed my life for the better. I don't want to get into the gory details but I feel incredibly grateful to have had such talented surgeons.
You can argue placebo but my years of ineffective physical therapy suggest otherwise.
Instead of saying "Surgery, the Ultimate Placebo" this article should say "A handful of specific surgeries shown to be no better than a placebo" -- generically describing all surgeries as a placebo is clickbait, in my non-medical-professional opinion.
> It's just an n=1 anecdote but my surgeries absolutely changed my life for the better. [...] You can argue placebo but my years of ineffective physical therapy suggest otherwise.
They don't though, do they. You can't disprove placebo with N=1.
If the placebo is the act of surgery then anything not surgery not working doesn't mean that the surgery worked by not placebo means.
So cynical. I hope you're never in debilitating physical pain, only to have other people dismiss the effect of surgical intervention as a figment of your imagination.
It's not just about the sample size, I could get into the anatomy of my injuries but I don't want to divulge more of my medical privacy than I already have.
Suffice to say that when certain things are torn or detached surgical intervention is often the only way to re-attach or restore function to the affected joints. No mount of wishing it way mentally is going to change that.
I think you're misunderstanding what "placebo effect" means. Colloquially it's applied to things that "do nothing," or have only a psychological impact but in reality the placebo effect continues to work even when people are fully aware that what they are taking is a placebo:
So the situation is more complicated than "figment of your imagination" or "wishing it away" (this doesn't work and isn't what placebo is referring to by they way - you have to actually receive a treatment even if that treatment has no direct effect) - it's clearly a real biological effect. Just the mechanisms are more obscure.
There's obviously a limit to what placebo effects can accomplish even if they can be positive, and I think the goal & point made is that because surgery is inherently risky, there should be an expectation of benefit over and above what can be accomplished with risk-free methods; ie., that surgeries which are shown to be only as effective as placebo should probably not be performed.
I find those studies problematic. In the ones I read from your links, the doctor says something along the lines of "this pill is a placebo. It means it has no active ingredients. However, the 'placebo effect' is known to be powerful and if you take these pills as instructed they can still help you..."
As I understand it, a big part of the placebo effect is setting the expectation that the treatment will help. And it is only known to help in subjective conditions, such as pain.
I expect we might see different results if the doctor said something more like "This pill has no active ingredients and does nothing. We are giving it to you to see if you will imagine that it worked anyway."
Kissing a child's scraped knee is not a treatment but, it along with a reassuring "there, all better!" works wonders for the child anyway. They are comforted and relived.
There is as yet no reason to think placebo is a 'real' effect, except for cases of subjective symptoms or body functions under conscious control (directly like breathing rhythm or indirectly like pulse).
For all other cases, like infections or tumors, the placebo effect seems to only be a measure of poorly understood differences in natural processes, which can cause spontaneous remissions at unpredictable rates.
The act of giving fake medicine to the control group has no direct effect on the people taking it - the idealized study results would almost certainly be the same if the control group received no medication at all. However, the reported data would be much harder to trust, as it would be obvious for the data collectors and pacients which group they are part of, making it trivial for them to misreport data and symptoms to influence the result in the direction they desire (whether consciously or not).
That is the real reason for the double blind study design in most tteatments - fear of fake data, not any mysterious healing/detrimental effects from the act of taking sugar pills.
Regarding something like your rotator cup issue: it's not simply a question of doing no treatment (you just having a painful shoulder) vs. having your surgery. It is more does having your rotator cup surgery and associated post-op rehab statistically work better than having a "sham" placebo surgery and doing the associated post-op rehab. People can begin to feel better after having placebo surgeries where nothing was actually repaired.
Below is a study seeking to measure the efficacy of rotator cuff surgeries. The point is that even this surgery, which I think you had performed and were happy with, does not necessarily have clear, proven efficacy vs. a placebo surgery.
The improvements from okeechobee
Placebo are demonstrably real. We don't always understand why/how, but... the sugar pill, for example, in combination with your body and mind are very literally resulting in improvement. Placebo does not mean fake nor tricked. The efficacy is absolutely fascinating, though.
That is only true for subjective symptoms like pain or anxiety, or for objective symptoms where there is some measure of conscious control, like blood pressure or pulse.
But there is no proof whatsoever of any kind of real placebo effect for body functions with no direct conscious control, such as immune function improvements from placebos.
I’ve seen debilitating physical pain gone by “meditation.” I myself have had pain in my chest and throat out of anxiety. Pain is ultimately a perception the brain makes, not a physical attribute.
Orthopedic surgery is, IMHO, one the most "controversial" medical fields. Ask an orthopedic surgeon, and the answer will be in most cases surgery. Ask a non-surgeon orthopedic, and the answer will be therapy. Source: Having gone through some consultations, and having family that spent their professional career in orthopedic rehab.
Thing is, for every case one of the above might wrong there are two cases they might be right. Sometimes both are right.
Personally, I choose to forgo surgery. I have no intention to become a professional athlete or compete again, so I stick with my original parts, so to say. I did stop snowboarding and kickboxing, so. My knees really don't like these sports anymore. And I don't like them enough to go through surgery. I switched to boxing and skiing. I am rather sure that I would chosen surgery like 10 years or so ago.
If a surgery’s effectiveness has not been evaluated vs a placebo, you cannot assume it to be effective based on anecdotes. Obviously there are many surgeries that are effective (repeating broken limbs, emergency surgeries, etc). Those surgeries having to do with pain relief are more nebulous.
My partner is a physical therapist, and in cases where it’s ineffective, it’s often because the patient is noncompliant or is doing it just to check off that “attempt” prior to surgery. A relative, as an example, goes to PT for all sorts of issues, but her real problems are psychological/neurological (due to brain damage); no amount of PT will ever heal her mind or change her excessive perception of pain.
It's really interesting how people with theoretical knowledge of what the placebo effect is can still refuse to believe in it in practice. From my experience, I think a lot of doctors don't really believe in these effects.
> I couldn't believe my eyes – so many people in NYC (Manhattan specifically, the place I always wanted to live in) live like rats, an order magnitude worse than what you can get in Odessa for $300-400.
Odessa is a city of less than a million people while 8 million are crammed into New York. The more apples-to-apples comparison would be Moscow (12 million).
Plenty of people are willing to trade space for location. They want to be in the center of all the action.
Fascinating, when comparing rat-holes New York is the expensive one, Moscow a bit less....it nearly sounds like unlimited communism was not much worse the unlimited capitalism.
Silver's 2012 book "The Signal and the Noise" discusses our inability to rationally process probability, pointing out that commercial weather forecasts (e.g. Accuweather) never list a probably of rain under 20-25%. A 5% chance of rain is a mathematical possibility but people "feel" like 5% = "will never happen" and get angry if it rains.
Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman's life's work is about this, what he calls "System 1" and "System 2" of our brain, where System 1 is a fast responder that provides insta-feedback but is largely incapable of processing mathematical inputs. His 2011 book "Thinking Fast and Slow" summarizes his work well.
I'm not sure popular media can be trained to frame statistical probabilities in a way that doesn't provide people with the certainty they crave. But who knows?
But the media is not Nate Silver. He said Trump had about as much chance of winning as the Cubs had that year of wining the World Series, and obviously both happened.
The depth of articles or the decision to pull in Wired content is strictly an editorial decision made by Ars editorial leadership.