bkandel

Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)

Has the author read A Clockwork Orange? It is filled with made-up "slang" that's basically just Russian. Needing some help to understand that is totally reasonable to me -- I definitely looked up a bunch of the words when I read it!

As far as I can tell, my kids and their friends never actually play the game either, they just collect the cards. I don't think they even know the rules.

China's greatest weakness is that their working-age population has already peaked and is in the process of plummeting, which will continue over the coming decades.

From https://www.cochrane.org/evidence/CD004816_statins-primary-p...:

Of 1000 people treated with a statin for five years, 18 would avoid a major CVD event which compares well with other treatments used for preventing cardiovascular disease. Taking statins did not increase the risk of serious adverse effects such as cancer. Statins are likely to be cost-effective in primary prevention.

This is fascinating! Would it be possible to add some explanations for some of the gay ads? I feel a little clueless but I don't really understand why some of those are targeting the gay community.

I think it's just always hard to find stuff you like, and time is a great filter. There are tons of new series that my sons like: the whole Percy Jackson world, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dog Man, Lemony Snicket, Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, etc. Lots of books out there!

It's an oversimplification of how the body works to the point of not being useful. For example, if you eat 2500 kcal a day and maintain a steady weight of 150 lbs, it is not the case that if you change your diet to 2200 kcal you will consistently lose X pounds per week. You would more likely lose a bit, then plateau at some level that's hard to predict, because now your body adapted to an input of 2200 kcal a day. Add to this the complication that where those calories come from matters a lot, because when you increase your blood sugar, your body increases insulin which builds up body fat, but if you have eat a low-sugar/carb diet, that happens less. And if you eat sugary foods, you will tend to get hungry more quickly than eating protein-based foods. It's all so person-dependent and food-dependent that just saying "eat less calories and you'll lose weight" does not accurately describe most people's reality.

I think this is pretty common! More sleep makes everything better -- attention, immune system (getting colds less often), mood, etc.

This is so off-base I don't even know where to begin. "Maybe you just don't get to ... ride on planes" -- so the kids never get to meet their grandparents or great-grandparents who are too unwell to make the trip because you won't give them a screen for an hour or two? Like everything else in life, dealing with screens is a balance. Every day for multiple hours is too much; a couple hours on twice-yearly trips is not going to have any effect on them.

I actually had the exact opposite conclusion from the analysis: Dreidel is a great kids' game of chance, because it's easy to come back from a few bad rolls and it's almost impossible to lose.

I get that the author really dislikes UHC, but most of these are just really not interesting. For example, of course they want media inquiries to go to the media relations team. That's why they exist! As for referring to a recently deceased CEO as an "esteemed colleague" -- I guess esteem is in the eye of the beholder, but that's such an anodyne way of referring to anyone that I'm having trouble seeing anything noteworthy in it.

Yes! Especially if you have kids -- minors go through TSA pre-check lines with parents with pre-check, even if the kids don't have pre-check on their own.

I suppose this is true in some abstract sense, but not in companies of any reasonable size when it comes to hiring. There are lots of things that are firmly set company-wide, like the type of health plans offered and the company contribution, that are pretty much non-negotiable. Not knowing this makes you look naive or runs the risk of just confusing the hiring manager/HR.

How is this by accident? He was specifically looking for datasets for this purpose and found a good one, then loaded it into a program to find man-made structures.

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. It changed the way I think about what's important, both to me and to other people and societies.

There's a huge difference between when we know how an organ system behaves in a particular circumstance vs. when we don't. Take, for example, the hepatic function in biogears: https://github.com/BioGearsEngine/core/blob/trunk/projects/b... If you know all the constants and how the liver reacts to a given stimulus, then sure, you don't need to test anything out in vivo. But the reason we do experiments is that we don't know how the liver will react in a given circumstance, so we can't rely on known equations to tell us the answer.

I also think that while there are circumstances where animal models are not helpful, those tend to make the news because they are the exception rather than the rule. There are many, many diseases where animal models were critical for figuring out at least where to look for human disease processes. In addition, a lot of the issues with mouse models are not due to the fact that mice are inherently a poor substitute for humans, but that the models (the specific genes mutated) were a poor mimic of human diseases. For example: "Measurements of gait and grip strength showed that their muscle deficits were in fact mild, and post-mortem examination found that the animals died not of progressive muscle atrophy, but of acute bowel obstruction caused by deterioration of smooth muscles in the gut." [https://www.nature.com/articles/507423a]

If we had stayed on the Adams curve, we would be consuming 2-5x more energy than we do today. For the US, that means that GDP per capita today would not be the current amount of $65k, but $100k-$200k. It is a catastrophe that we don’t have more energy: We should be much richer.

I'm sorry, what??? Correlation != causation. We have become more energy efficient, and it does not follow at all that cheaper energy will increase our GDP by 2-3x.

It's a bit strange that the author doesn't mention the population projections published in The Lancet a few years ago (https://www.thelancet.com/infographics-do/population-forecas...). They note a lot of the problems with the UN projections, which include the modeling but also include other factors, like the effect of female education. In the few years since their study came out, their numbers appear to be more accurate than the UN approach of assuming fertility ends up at 1.69 everywhere.

https://xkcd.com/1845/

I had a strongly negative emotional reaction to the ad. Dwelling on crushing musical instruments, kids' toys, books, sculptures, and then the paint spurting out at the end into a depressing post-industrial warehouse -- something about it really affected me. It's not like I'm debilitated for the rest of the day, but it definitely makes me feel less positively about the ipad advertised.

I was amused!

Matzah pizza!! Super convenient, you can just leave a box in your pantry and take one out whenever you need a quick and easy crust.

I use the Azure GPT-4 offering. It's not always 100% correct, but for technical questions in areas I'm not very familiar with, it's close enough. I can get much more done in a given amount of time than I would have been able to reading docs and SO.

I know lots of people will point to examples where it's wrong, but I'd suggest trying it out yourself. If you're not intentionally trying to trip it up, it really works quite well.

When I was in a Tesla Uber, I found watching the front screen that shows where cars are around you frightening. Cars would frequently move around and change position unexpectedly and in a way that had nothing to do with actual car movements, lane markings would be totally off, etc. If that screen is at all representative of what FSD "thinks" is going on, I'm not at all surprised that there are lots of crashes when relying on the system.

Although, as noted above, the instructions for the narrative section of the SGO report require submitters to “[p]rovide a written description of the pre-crash, crash, and post-crash details,” some Cruise interviewees expressed their belief that the requirements were narrower. In their view, the narrative called for a description of the collision itself, and thus did not include post-collision actions like the pullover maneuver and pedestrian dragging.

speechless here

"So far this year, 99 percent of measured ad placements have appeared adjacent to content scoring above the brand safety 'floor' criteria set by [the Global Alliance for Responsible Media]."

This is ... not entirely reassuring.

No one's calling into question that there was an explosion. The question is over the cause and the extent of casualties, which people who lived next door likely wouldn't be in the best position to evaluate.

Analog watches are the best.

Can't speak to all games, but I have found that the Mortal Kombat/Tekken style fighting games really aren't that much fun to me anymore. Smashing buttons is fun for like maybe ten minutes, but it gets boring real quick.

Another underserved group of users is people with ADHD. I think a "minimize distractions" mode at the OS level would be very welcome by a lot of people.