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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Maybe we use these terms differently in different domains. In my field, stochastic means that repeating the same experiment under the same conditions doesn’t guarantee the same results (e.g. rolling a die). The opposite of stochastic is deterministic. Something that changes depending on the day would be “a function of the date” or something that is “conditional on the date”. This can either be a deterministic function (e.g. calling date.today().day in Python, or a mapping from the date to a uniform distribution ranging from 0 to date.today().day) or a stochastic function (e.g. sample a uniform random integer between 0 and date.today().day).

    Edit: I think what you’re talking about is the deterministic mapping from some variable into a distribution. We (as in my field specifically) do sometimes call that “stochastic” too, even though that mapping is deterministic. There may be a bit of terminology overloading here because what we care about in the end is the sample drawn from that distribution, which is actually stochastic.






  • There are many things here in Canada that suck. Is it better or worse than that of other countries? Should we try to copy what someone else is doing or come up with a different solution altogether? The way to figure that out is to critically evaluate what’s going on elsewhere, and that comes with engaging in discussions with others on those topics, which can come in the form of criticisms. We may also want to convince others that the state of things in those countries are bad and we should not try to model them, and that also often comes in the form of criticism for that foreign country.






  • These kinds of small wording differences are one of the most common ways for news outlets to intentionally spread misinformation. If you already know what the current laws are, you’ll know what actually happened. Otherwise, “declines to block” tells you that there exists pressure to prevent something that is currently allowed. “Allows” tells you that it wasn’t previously allowed without their approval and they granted that approval.

    It could either allow or disallow […]. There isn’t an in-between.

    So in summary, there are exactly four "in-between"s.

    • It was previously allowed, and it is still allowed
    • It was previously allowed, and it is now not allowed
    • It was previously not allowed, and it is now allowed
    • It was previously not allowed, and it still not allowed

    Which would map to each of the following respectively

    • “declines to block”
    • “blocks”
    • “allows”
    • “declines to allow”

    What you’re saying is that it should map to

    • “allows”
    • “blocks”
    • “allows”
    • “blocks”

    Which, besides being inconsistent with how those words are used in every day English, also reduces how much information you receive.




  • Pressure cook a whole rotisserie chicken (bones, meat, and all) for 20ish minutes for amazing chicken stock.

    Better yet, eat the meat and pressure cook the bones. You still get great chicken stock, and also get to enjoy some good chicken. If one bird doesn’t give you enough bones, freeze it until you accumulate enough.