I like, as it is quick to decide, and you can see font names afterwards (some indeed looked similar).
At the same time, it would be wonderful if window sizes were more consistent (now things are obstructed, with scrolling, etc). And I would love to download the ranking graph!
I used to think that in Buddhism, the pursuit of the Void is existential masochism, a glorified search for doom. It brought to my mind Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and such.
Thanks to "Buddha-Dhamma For Inquiring Minds" by Buddhadasa Bhikkhu (an ADHD-friendly question & answer format, https://www.suanmokkh.org/books/121), I understood that it is an unfortunate coincidence of words. These two concepts of Void or Emptiness are very opposite, as opposite as Hell and Heaven.
To my understanding, I would use the word "Clarity" instead. Light passes through, interacts with it, but does not cling to anything.
Reminds me of the movie Man from Earth (don't watch the sequel). The precepts of both Christ and the Buddha are quite striking in their similarities, but perhaps both are a manifestation of an even deeper principle, of what it means to be a good person.
“To most people who are even moderately experienced with entheogens, concepts such as awe, sacredness, eternity, grace, agape, transcendence, transfiguration, dark night of the soul, born-again, heaven and hell are more than theological ideas; they are experiences.” - Thomas Roberts
I recommend the book "Sacred Knowledge" by Willian Richards and the concept of cosmic unity (as the first "birth matrix") from "Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD" by Stanislav Groff.
The source of that comes from somewhere too, as it's still a human made construction. It seems like being "good" is simply advantageous to us as a species, hence why it is in all religions.
I dislike the premise. I mean, good data is wonderful.
But if institutions are expected to release clear data or nothing, almost always it is the later.
What is important, is to offer as much methodology and caveats as possible, even if in an informal way. Because there is a difference between "data covers 72% of companies registered in..." vs expecting that data is full and authoritative, whereas it is missing.
(Source: 10 years ago I worked a lot with official data. All data requires cleaning.)
But surely we should expect some basic sanity checks on published data? This isn't some petrol stations being placed in the middle of a field due to minor typos or bad rounding, or some petrol stations' prices being listed as all 1.00 £/l out of laziness, or even a case of all unknown locations being listed as 0°0'0" N, 0°0'0" E by default. What the author reports appear to be mistakes which should be rather trivially detectable on input.
The problem is stats can actually do more with all the data including obvious errors. If you start filtering out data where they miss entered lat log you might introduce a new bias.
Sure we should indeed expect that they do that. But look at enough data and you'll learn that those expectations are a path towards never-ending frustration. I've been there, spending >100 hours cleaning data... that never got published because I was too damn focused on the dozens of years of errors that many, many people created.
To be clear, I'm not saying that we should accept messy data. Just, reality is messy and it's naive to think we can catch and remove all of reality's messiness -- which includes the bureaucratic slop that led to the data being published in the first place.
I don't think these issues are close to the issues the article talks about. The author does not talk about data coverage, data collection methodologies or missing values or whatever, but data that is actually wrong, ie location coordinates, prices, numbers that make no sense. Including swapping latitude/longitude and wrong decimal points in numbers.
On the other hand, I agree that bad (but usually fixable) data is better than no data.
There is a fine line between "following my instructions" (is what I want it to do) vs "thinking all I do is great" (risky, and annoying).
A good engineer will also list issues or problems, but at the same time won't do other than required because (s)he "knows better".
The worst is that it is impossible to switch off this constant praise. I mean, it is so ingrained in fine tuning, that prompt engineering (or at least - my attempts) just mask it a bit, but hard to do so without turning it into a contrarian.
But I guess the main issue (or rather - motivation) is most people like "do I look good in this dress?" level of reassurance (and honesty). It may work well for style and decoration. It may work worse if we design technical infrastructure, and there is more ground truth than whether it seems nice.
reply