Thanks. Everything is completely stateless at this point and there's a defined close time with everything being on the server side in terms of timestamps.
Could you give me a link to what you're referring to and what you have seen in the past with this specific problem?
I think I have it solved but would like to know more as words can have multiple definitions.
Basically, this is software that allows you to deploy your own prediction market platform from scratch that you own and control. You can invite friends and add users, anyone can add questions and make bets toward those contracts.
Most importantly, anyone can host this completely for free either on a local machine or a VPS.
The setup process includes a command line interface which allows you to enter a few options and it sets everything up for you...assuming you have a server such as Digital Ocean and a domain you can use.
I do this in my free time with some others who are of course listed on the Github repo.
We will be moving to a services based architecture at some point soon, but for this release it's basically a, "pretty good monolith."
We have been through a few different release cycles since the last time I posted. I added some GIFs to the readme to clearly show how easy it is to get it going. I would love it if anyone wants to give it a try. We included automatic SSL establishment via Traefik.
First off, I'm glad we all got our daily thought about the Roman Empire in today. Secondly, this author is much more qualified than me to either agree or refute this; I believe we need to be incredibly skeptical when reading about Roman Engineering failures. I wrote and researched about this, using some of Vitruvius' writings last year: https://patdel.substack.com/p/why-didnt-ancient-rome-have-a-....
* Rome was incredibly paternalistic, so pointing out the failures of others without appropriate aristocratic station might not have been quite the exercise in pure engineering that we might consider engineering to be today, even though Rome obviously made great engineering accomplishments and one might think that celebrated Roman architects could not be writing anything other than in a strictly professional manner. I think that when we read Vitruvius through a modern lens, we might think, "Oh this dude was a real professional, he makes good points," when in reality I think, at least in the example I point out in my blog post, I think he might have been using an example of failure to say, "See? Only royals, aristocrats and rich people should even try to innovate."
Granted, there wasn't liability insurance for architectural or engineering failures as far as I am aware so this belief may have been prudent in terms of saving lives, but I think there was probably a primarily social-religious reasoning for it.
The idea of the rich, hereditary classes, the father of the household, the ones in charge being the only ones, "allowed," to innovate was deeply held in Ancient Rome, much like in Confucianism and other agricultural societies that have formed through human history. "Don't rock the boat."
I don't think it was until the 1500's or so that humanity started to collectively emerge out of that type of mentality as pre-industrialization and the scientific revolution began. Eventually the aristocrats (in Europe) saw non-royals being so successful at being industrialists, they wanted in on the game and removed laws that prevented them from engaging in capitalism.
The author writes:
> Its failure became a cautionary tale of an unrealistic project that sought to go beyond what nature allowed. Five decades later, the Roman senator and historian Tacitus claimed that evidence of this ‘futile ambition’ could still be seen in the rock faces near Avernus. Interestingly, Tacitus did not blame the vainglorious and weak-willed emperor alone, but also the architects who conceived the project and were judged to have ‘frittered away the resources of a Caesar’.
I read that as the author saying that Tacitus was angling the engineering failure analysis in a political way, not a purely engineering post-failure-analysis way. E.g., the project might have even been a success but then Tacitus just lied about it, we don't know.
As a both devops and ML professional at my job (it's a small company), I viscerally cringe at the same kurtosis for this company (which I just learned about). There could be some kind of latent jealously/projection causing that cringe, but here's my rationale (could be very specific to my career):
* Devops folks don't seem to tend to like math and often got there by practicing, "computers, IT, having fun hooking things together and getting them running."
* Data science folks don't tend to like devops and prefer to bash around on a jupyter notebook that's already given to them and then maybe extract that python and see if it runs, but they tend to come from more of a science background and got into python as a hobby or incidentally. They do not like bashing around and getting things running.
So now this company is combining a math term that has a specific meaning to an ML ops space, which is going to cause confusion.
Different sets of data can have different kurtosis measures. Sets can be platykurtic (flat gaussian curve or high kurtosis) or leptokurtic (tall gaussian curve, low kurtosis).
Now this company is coming in and telling a bunch of devops people, "Kurtosis means helm but automatically migrate data too." So they are applying the idea of, "leptokurtic deployments," presumably with the metric being, variation between the code and data parameters on those servers. Data science people who are told about it from devops people are going to initially hear, "somehow dealing with cleaning the data, like an ETL pipeline, perhaps an Airflow with data cleaning tools built in or something."
It's very confusing and not helpful to customers, I hate it. There are going to be meetings where ML/Devops people are very confused.
Naming is hard though -- but I wish they would have gone with something like, "platypus" and just have a cute little platypus baby as the logo and say, "yeah we liked the word platykurtic because we like making things regular and platykurtic sounds like platypus."
Hi! Founder here…thanks for the feedback, deeply appreciate it. Especially the last bit about how hard naming is haha.
To give a bit of context on the name, our first set of use cases was all about test engineers using this tool to testbeds for end to end or large scale integration tests.
Since we are pretty mathy ourselves, we called it “Kurtosis” because we imagined the distribution of errors arising from service to service interactions to have a high Kurtosis - in the sense that there’s a lot of errors you wouldn’t “expect” to happen from a first principles understanding of each component. You’d have put them all together to see those, they’d be “far off the mean”. There’s also a lot of stuff about how we view our work, where we like exposing ourselves to outlier opportunities that we hadn’t previously imagined to produce results that would only happen in a “high Kurtosis results distribution”.
Now that being said, I definitely hear what you’re saying. It’s not obvious that’s where the name came from…and just because we were thinking that when we named it doesn’t mean it resonates with our users the same way!
That feedback came straight from my basal ganglia.
Though I'm guessing that was a pretty expensive domain name. So in lieu of changing it, on this issue I can be bought off.
But I will accept a bribe in the form of a medium sized T-Shirt to not make fun of you further. The T-Shirt must include an anthropomorphized gaussian curve in a math meme format and the curve-person must be clearly labeled as being name, "Kurt Osis."
Any Kurtosis logo must be either non-existent or super non-prominent so that I can at least pretend that it's a meme and then maybe tail into where it came from. A huge emblazoned Kurtosis logo on the back or front will be unacceptable (although Kurt Osis could have that logo on his or her or their shirt).
> * Devops folks don't seem to tend to like math and often got there by practicing, "computers, IT, having fun hooking things together and getting them running." * Data science folks don't tend to like devops and prefer to bash around on a jupyter notebook that's already given to them and then maybe extract that python and see if it runs, but they tend to come from more of a science background and got into python as a hobby or incidentally. They do not like bashing around and getting things running.
Everyone likes cool sounding terms though! Any such term will eventually end up being co-opted. We have isomorphic Javascript and all kinds of stuff like that.
Not saying it’s good or bad, it will just happen.
Are customers really going to be confusing a CI system vs a data statistic? It’s a bit like being confused about apple the fruit and an Apple iPhone. The confusion will clear up pretty quickly.
Something that we Americans are very conveniently forgetful of is that America didn't just pop out of no where on July 4th, 1776, there was in fact a huge history of us being England and that includes every single quote from every single founding father, there was additional historical context and ignoring that is basically propaganda on the level of Soviet Union or North Korea style propaganda, it's just that we don't think it's propaganda because we think we're exceptional.
I became more skeptical of this piece of propaganda when I saw the top comment from prominent COVID origins conspiracy theorist and statistics misuser on Substack (who evidently uses the pseudonym Yuri Bezmenov?) on the post, as well as likes from Academic Capture extroidinaire Richard Hanania, of the Salem Institute at UT-Austin (a business school whose name is emblazoned by a now dead billionaire to whom I as a Minnesota citizen, personally pay taxes to his estate to every time I buy food, in the form of subsidies to his Vikings stadium).
Basically I'm sitting here being lectured by people about Aristocracies while I, as a nobody schlub, pay taxes to a private party they are friends with every time I get groceries, and meanwhile see schools nearby me go on strike, there is no free daycare in Minneapolis while there is in other cities nearby because, "it's not fiscally responsible?" Ok, well I'm not an "economist," at an, "institute," so what do I know?
Anyway, I was very confused after reading this by the claim that Jefferson would not have considered himself part of the Artificial Aristocracy so I had to read about his family history. From Monticello.org:
> The origins of Jefferson's ancestors might be uncertain, but there can be no doubt that within a couple of generations the family had risen from the humble rank of "middling planter" to the county elite, and within another to the very pinnacle of society. Their spectacular rise in fortune was the result of hard work, advantageous marriage, and sheer good luck
So what I read this is, is his family were not part of the English Aristocracy, (like Washington) but go in early on Virginia Real Estate in the 1600s, which allowed Jefferson to become part of the Colonial Aristocracy (though not the formal English Aristocracy). So Jefferson is saying, "no, that Aristocracy is not cool, bro, our Aristocracy is the cool one."
It also seems that some of Jefferson's ancestors were very anti-monarchy during the English Civil War, and lost a lot of fortune upon the restoration of the monarchy, so it's super understandable why Jefferson would take this position.
The thing is, I believe Jefferson may have become a dinosaur in his own time, writing letters to Adams to re-assure himself, but actually just discussing the types of ideas that would have appealed to some of the characters straight out of Barry Lyndon. E.g., he probably was witnessing Aristocrats getting their heads cut off in France and going, "no we're not those guys, we're a natural Aristocracy, it's totally different man!"
Jefferson was a huge Ancient Rome nerd because he was interested in creating a society that was durable, where other societies had failed an while I believe that some of his ideas that lead to a sort of weighting of rural areas does provide stability, because cities always end up being more powerful than rural areas, I'm pretty sure that the 1800's and early 1900's was a round rejection of Aristocracy, but of course there's no way he could have seen that. Venture Capitalists, pretend Professors from UT-Austin business school who are hired help to form an intellectual framework behind Rick Scott's agendas, they know better than this, and they should do better. This is basically a circle jerk with almost zero self-awareness about how Universally hated Aristocracy of any kind is, it's like how John Bolton has been talking about running for President in 2024, there is absolutely zero self awareness about how hated and loathed a particular idea is.
Edit: Oh yeah, and also, you can't mention that Jefferson owned slaves and so maybe not every idea that came off of the top of his head should be celebrated because evidently just acknowledging that fact might be considered, "woke" according to Hanania, most likely.
Since reading this book I have also read, "Programming Ecto," as well as having actually programmed in Ecto/Elixir and have some thoughts on people's insistence that Elixir is bad at IO. I believe people who are coming from other languages are misusing functional programming in the context of Elixir, it is meant to be used to create state machines, and you can always optimize your IO within that context.
OK, so there's misinformation from industrial scale propaganda dissemination, there's misinformation from hallucination, but I think a less talked about aspect of LLM generalization of misinformation is to look at LLM's as a tool that will actually train us to think in a certain way. LLM's coupled with desirability bias could lead to a decrease in critical thought.
American founding fathers were huge Ancient Rome nerds. Did they know what the ensuing two centuries had that Rome didn't? Of course they did not, but with hindsight I can certainly bullshit on the topic and put together a hopefully entertaining article. Happy 4th!
Could you give me a link to what you're referring to and what you have seen in the past with this specific problem?
I think I have it solved but would like to know more as words can have multiple definitions.