All of Sean Aubin's Comments + Replies

Excited to see everyone today. Re-reading through the links, I think they might be a bit too pro-nuclear. I'm going to recommend a reading from the last meetup, Safe Enough which argues we're thinking about nuclear risks incorrectly. A key excerpt:

Still. The advocates who intone solemnly on the importance of analyzing nuclear energy in terms of dispassionate numbers, as above, use the wrong models. To estimate the potential impact of cascades, we cannot simply average what has been. Our models have to consider the total damage possible - the number of ri

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Mars is locked due to the Santa Claus parade, so please gather at the Elizabeth St. entrance. We'll accumulate there until 14:15.

1loops
Could you post coordinates next time? I can't find the entrance on Elizabeth St. you're referring to

Event is happening November 24th. Accidentally set the date wrong when initially making the event.

The door from the Queen's Park subway entrance is unlocked, so use that entrance. I'll be waiting outside University Avenue entrance until 14:15

MARS building locked due to protest. Meet outside West entrance on University Avenue. I'm still wearing the neon jacket.

1Sean Aubin
The door from the Queen's Park subway entrance is unlocked, so use that entrance. I'll be waiting outside University Avenue entrance until 14:15

Because some of you were asking, here's the yearly review template I use: https://alexvermeer.com/8760hours/

Its integrated into productivity website I use: https://intend.do/?r=u0hywhp1rz

To find the meetup, look for a woman wearing a neon jacket. I am ill, so my partner is running the meetup in my place. She'll be wearing the neon jacket and handing out name tags.

MARS is closed due to the Santa Claus Parade, so we're going to gather nearby at https://what3words.com/fizzle.relating.title

which is outside the Mercatto cafe. I'll still be wearing a neon jacket. We'll relocate to somewhere warmer at 14:30

1da_revo
Where are you guys now?

I forgot my neon yellow jacket, so look for a black baseball cap instead.

FYI, Terraform Industries published a new blog post about the cost of their hydrogen electrolysis, which is significantly less than you're linked estimate of around $7/kg. They claim they can get $3/kg using current legacy solar, but with current solar cost trends continuing (which I know you're skeptical of) could reach $1.12/kg. They accomplish this by optimizing the cost/efficiency trade-off of the electrolysis setup.

I'm assuming Casey Handmer is being overly optimistic, but I can't tell by how much.

1bhauth
I don't think Terraform can produce 50% efficient durable electrolyzers that cheaply. So, who's right? You've seen my blog. I linked to a post that linked to some papers on electrolysis costs. Casey also has a blog. Here's the background of their initial team: So, how would you go about evaluating who's right, here?

I previously mangled the event time. For the sake of clarity, let me mark it down in this comment so people are notified: Sunday, March 26th from 14:00 to 16:00 EST

I am irrationally/disproportionately insecure about discussing my mediocre/generic goals in a public forum, so I'd rather discuss this in-person at the meetup. :apologetic-emoji

1Viktor Riabtsev
No, that's fair. I was mostly having trouble consuming that 3-4-5 stage paradigm. Afraid that it's a not a very practically useful map; i.e. doesn't actually help you instrumentally navigate anywhere. But realized half way through composing that argument, that it's very possible I'm just wrong. So decided to ask for an example of someone using this framework to actually successfully orient somewhere.

I think David's primary concern is choosing the goals in "systematically finds a better path to goals" which he wants to name "meta-rationality" for the sake of discussion, but I think could be phrased as part of the rationality process?

1Viktor Riabtsev
So the premise is that there are goals you can aim for. Could you give an example a goal you are currently aiming for?

I truly do not know. I have many friends (Hazard) and acquaintances (Malcolm Ocean) in those communities and only understand their blog posts and investigations/discussions 20% of the time, but maybe that's because I'm a stage 4.5 dweller.

Hilariously, this meetup is motivated by the sentiment/discomfort/uncertainty expressed in Ellie Hain's reply to the tweet you linked:

the problem is though, that the more meta you go, the less concrete solutions you get. A lot of talking but very little doing

Aside: I've met Ellie Hain in person and like the School for... (read more)

Due to surprise concert, we've moved to the roller rink which is quieter https://what3words.com/resold.burn.hitters

Even though it is raining, The Bentway is sheltered so the meetup location is unchanged.

1Sean Aubin
Due to surprise concert, we've moved to the roller rink which is quieter https://what3words.com/resold.burn.hitters

There's going to be snacks in the form of muffins and some samosas.

Started reading this book and made it to chapter 3 before giving up. Mostly ends up being a tour of various pitfalls when pursuing something ambitious. For example:

  • Your data can come from a fraudulent source.
  • Confirmation bias can blind you to potential sources of failure.

These points felt obvious/familiar and I was hoping for a more systematic treatment.

I do appreciate her disambiguation and would also like answers to the questions in her conclusion!

Answer by Sean Aubin20

My friends have recommended:

  1. Reading Elinor Ostrom to get a theoretical grounding.
  2. "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty" by Acemoglu & Robinson

Note the location has changed to the Bentway, which is underneath the Gardiner Expressway, due to forecasted rain. Despite being underneath a highway, it is still quite easy to have conversations in this setting and it is well ventilated.

I apologize for the last minute change and will send people to Norway Park to collect anyone confused.

Feedback

In the "Preprint" example, you use @wraps without explaining it. I think it's worth noting it is imported from functools and it's general purpose?

The section "Branching without if" is a bit confusing, because it is unclear if those examples work or need more code.

Discussion

This might be out of scope of the mentorship, but I'd like gilch's opinion/heuristics on:

  1. Good decorator use vs. abuse
  2. The argument "Python would not need decorators if it supported multi-line anonymous functions"
3gilch
The relevant context is the earlier definition of @if_. def if_(condition): def decorator(c): if condition: return c.then() else: return c.else_() return decorator So def if_(condition): def decorator(c): return [c.then, c.else][not condition]() return decorator would have the same behavior, and does not itself have an if statement. I've implemented if without using if.
5gilch
Re #2. The multi-line lambda one always makes me want to facepalm. I hear it a lot, but this one is so confused that it's not even wrong. First, lambdas in Python can have as many lines as you want. That makes the premise invalid. Seriously. My Hissp project is a Lisp compiler that targets a subset of Python. Its lambdas have the implicit PROGN typical of Lisp, and they compile to Python lambdas just fine. You could wrap your entire Hissp module in a progn and it will compile to a lambda expression that goes on for pages. So why are people confused about this? I think they're conflating "lines of code" with "statements", which are not at all the same thing. It's true that certain kinds of Python statements typically fit on one line, but none of them have to, and many kinds (block statements, e.g. try-except/try-finally) typically don't. So let's try to steelman this: even multi-line lambdas in Python can't directly contain statements. (Or, from a certain point of view, they contain only one: an implicit return. But they can call exec() on a string that does, or call other things that do.) Second, true functional languages don't have statements to begin with, only expressions. (Or, from a certain point of view, they only have "expression statements".) Statements are a holdover from assembly, when the original Fortran mixed math expressions with machine code instructions (the "statements"). When programming in the functional style, which is when you want lambdas, you don't use statements anyway. Expressions are all you need! You don't even need a progn unless you have side effects, which is also not functional style. So then the argument becomes "Python would not need decorators if anonymous functions could have statements." Now what does the "need" part mean? Decorators are just syntactic sugar. You can get exactly the same behavior without them, so what use are decorators at all? Let's look at what the sugar does: def <name>(<args>): <body> <name> = (<
8gilch
Re #1. This part of Python's culture was a reaction to Perl's motto, "There's more than one way to do it". Perl has been derided as a Write-only language, and despite its initial popularity, has been far eclipsed by Python. We can speculate about the various reasons, but I think this is one of them. Other ecosystems have their own cultures which emphasize different tradeoffs. Ruby, for example, seems to have inherited Perl's take. The Zen is full of allusions and apparent contradictions. It's not meant to be obeyed as much as meditated upon; less about answers, and more about which questions to ask in the first place. So take my commentary as interpretation, not law. Among other things, this part of The Zen is pointing out that code is read more often than it is written. It's more important to make code easy to read than easy to write. It's possible to write bad code in any language, but "bad" is partly a cultural interpretation. (And partly not.) In Python, in the interest of readability, one should first do things in the most obvious way, until one has very good reason to do otherwise. But "obvious" is also cultural. What is idiomatic in C is not, in Python, idiomatic (or "pythonic"), the "Dutch" part alluding to Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, who made a lot of judgement calls about how Python was going to be, and what counts as "normal". So "obvious" here means "obvious to acculturated Python programmers". It's a warning about being "too clever", and thereby being obtuse. But clever is OK when it's easy to read! Are you trying to show off or are you trying to write good code? If you are an acculturated Python programmer, then you can judge what's obvious and isn't. But culture isn't a static thing. If you're a part of it, and you know better, you can push boundaries a little. (To read all of The Zen, import this.) My exercises for konstell are not necessarily pythonic. They illustrate particular points I was trying to teach; weaknesses I noticed
2konstell
Ah, I missed a section on @wraps. Added it here. Also renamed "Branching without if" to "Making Branching Statements without Using if" Also added some command line outputs for a couple examples at the end.