Giancarlo Angulo's Blog
Big Fucking Deal!
OpenAI API We’re releasing an API for accessing new AI models developed by OpenAI. Unlike most AI systems which are designed for one use-case, the API today provides a general-purpose “text in, text out” interface, allowing users to try it on virtually any English language task. You can now request access in order to integrate the API into your product, develop an entirely new application, or help us explore the strengths and limits of this technology.
Source: OpenAI API
I first encountered Bruno Maçães when he was interviewed by Tyler Cowen (Bruno Maçães on the Spirit of Adventure, Episode 50. Conversations with Tyler [September 2018]). With Maçães having recently completed a six-month overland journey across the Eurasian supercontinent while researching for his book, The Dawn of Eurasia (London: Penguin Random House UK, 2018), Cowen asked him to design a dream tour for someone with two or three weeks to spend in Eurasia. Maçães responded “the best would be fly to Kashgar in China…then cross the border into Pakistan, and perhaps go down all the way to Lahore and then Delhi,” in the process making “one of the classical trips, to go from China to India by land.” Hearing this, I was struck with the sense that Maçães was a thinker with a uniquely credible perspective worth paying attention to, having spent significant time on the ground in locations across Eurasia where China has a growing presence. Having undertaken the first part of the route described by Maçães myself during the summer of 2014, traveling south from Kashgar down the Karakoram Highway to the Khunjerab Pass (the border of China and Pakistan), my curiosity was piqued to begin a more systematic investigation of the role of China in the developing world. This serves as the entry point to my interest in Maçães’ Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order, the subject of this book review.
Source: Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order: The Independent Review: The Independent Institute
Saez: Yes. Kansas is an interesting case study, and I think it illustrates beautifully from a research perspective even though it’s a disaster in terms of public policy. This issue with tax avoidance, the second aspect that I discussed, is what Kansas experienced when it lowered or even effectively eliminated taxes on the profits of pass-through businesses under individual income taxes. The state provided huge incentives for high-income earners to reclassify, say, their compensation from wages toward pass-through businesses.
Source: In Conversation with Emmanuel Saez – Equitable Growth
Loewy had an uncanny sense of how to make things fashionable. He believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible. Loewy called his grand theory “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable”—maya. He said to sell something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it surprising.
Right now, however, my biggest concern in this context is somewhat different: the past decade’s policies of anemic recovery are apparently not perceived as a failure by either those at the tiller at the time or by their successors. With a few honorable exceptions, Fed policymakers tend to say that they did the best they could, given the fiscal headwinds imposed on them. With a few honorable exceptions, Obama administration policymakers say that they stopped a second Great Depression, and that during the recovery they did their best given how they were hobbled by the Republican majorities in Congress.
For their part, conservative economists tend to either be silent on the subject or say that the policies — both fiscal and monetary — pursued by the Obama administration and by the Bernanke Fed were dangerously inflationary, and that we have been lucky to escape the fate of Greece — or Zimbabwe.
Economic analysis has made the rise and fall of economies easier to understand and easier to manage — or at least I thought it had. Yet once again, policymakers (including the decision makers at the top in the Obama administration) abandoned modern economics in favor of discredited policies born of a mixture of so-called common sense and 19th-century misunderstandings. We are all paying the price — well, the bottom 99 percent of us, anyway.
Source: Was the Great Recession More Damaging Than the Great Depression? – Milken Institute Review
I shift a large part of my offering from church-based offering to more NGO/charity giving when I am irked at …
WITH a six-figure salary from a London private equity firm, it could be expected that Grayden Reece-Smith would be living it up on eye-wateringly expensive holidays or driving a suitably flash sports car around south London, where he lives. Instead, the 28-year-old lives a very different existence to his peers and gives away everything he earns over £42,000 – a figure he calculated he could comfortably live on. Over the past five years, Reece-Smith has handed over more than £250,000 to organisations such as
Source: The millennials donating 10% of their pay to save the world | Money | The Guardian
When You Should Avoid Node.js in Back-End Development
As I have noted, the primary strength of Node.js is its single-threaded nature. It significantly decreases the complexity of handling various requests when you have hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of users with limited requests when it comes to sheer computational power.
The trend shifts significantly when you have a small number of client-side requests that, however, demand significant computational power. Let us imagine a situation in which you build a complex web application for rather complicated mathematical calculations. In specific scenarios, even two simultaneous inquiries can quickly overload your server CPU.
Only multithreading can offer you a robust solution to the problem, as it will dedicate more “firepower” to complex processes, immediately initializing calculations on multiple cores of a CPU.
However, this situation is highly hypothetical. The majority of the programs that involve heavy calculations are always desktop-based. The complexity of the calculations is often so high that even the multithreading server back-ends cannot deal with a relatively small number of user inquiries.
It is easier to offload all calculations to user PCs, making offline programs for some of the most complex tasks such as video rendering or mathematical calculations. Thus, I do not recommend that you use web platforms for any type of complex calculations. This situation may change in this decade; however, the future solution is likely to involve some radical innovations. Node.js is clearly not an option in this case.
Node.js is a niche product that is oriented at the everyday needs of non-advanced PC users; if you go outside of this safe zone, you are essentially shooting yourself in the foot. Complex calculations should be dedicated only to classical development solutions.
Source: When To Use Node.js as a Back-End – Simple Programmer
Conflict with my parents and wife revolve around my being the only one who figured this out.
If managing the demands of working and parenting in the 21st century feels impossible, Christine M. Beckman and Melissa Mazmanian argue, that’s because the ideals that many working parents subscribe to are impossible to fulfill.Three core myths animate much of American life, according to Beckman and Mazmanian, professors at the University of Southern California and UC Irvine, respectively. The first myth, they explain in their recent book, Dreams of the Overworked: Living, Working and Parenting in the Digital Age, is that of the “ideal worker,” who “has no competing obligations that might get in the way of total devotion to the workplace.” The second is that of the “perfect parent,” who “always puts family first.” And the third is that of the “ultimate body,” which is cultivated through diligent dieting and exercise, and doesn’t deteriorate with age. “Achieving even one of these myths would be impossible,” Mazmanian told me in an interview, “but achieving all three is ludicrous.”
Source: America’s Ideal of Working Parents Has Become Unattainable – The Atlantic
I have enrolled in 4 online courses during the 60 or so days of the pandemic that I was able to concentrate on studying.
I enrolled in the most successful online course of Learning How to Learn and then Mindshift from the same professors and providers (Coursera).
Due to the medical nature of one of my consultancies specifically interoperability layers for health care data I enrolled two related courses that have been very useful for my consultancy work.
and
which are both from EdX.
Here are some of my notes on how I made the most of online learning and what strategies online course makers should have to make their courses effective:
For African Americans and First Nations populations, the correlations are very robust. Surprisingly, for these two groups the racial disparity does not seem to be due to differences in income, poverty rates, education, occupational mix, or even access to healthcare insurance. A significant portion of the disparity can, however, be sourced to the use of public transit.
Source: Racial disparities in Covid-19 outcomes – Marginal REVOLUTION