HN user

manimino

514 karma

Need to index some Python objects? Use ducks! https://github.com/manimino/ducks

Posts2
Comments99
View on HN

I have used Nebula. Did a group buy of the kits with several friends to obfuscate shipping address. Signed up via a protonmail address, and accessed the site only through VPN. Then deleted my data after downloading all of it.

I believe it would be very difficult to tie my identity to my genome because of these steps.

[dead] 3 years ago

An article criticizing the US with a .cn domain. Chinese propaganda.

An AI model that can only repeat its training data would be no better than normal text search.

AI models are useful precisely because they can interpolate - make guesses that incorporate information from many examples.

And this interpolation is called "hallucination" only when it happens to be a wrong answer?

Selling it as "free up the parents to do other things" is not going to fly. But enhancing the baby's experience or learning is fine.

An AI-powered rocker that plays soothing music till the baby sleeps would be great. People already use rockers, it's very accepted.

I would never have trusted a computer to be in charge of my infants. Even trusting another human adult is pretty tough already.

No opinion on whether the US did it.

But Hersh's essay indicates there were last-minute changes to the detonation method. That adds risk, which could have manifested as failure of some detonations.

Businesses solve the problems people have right now. It is good at scratching itches.

Academics solve long-term problems. They do not need to chase profits, so they can tackle bigger ideas. The risk is higher, but the rewards to humanity as a whole can be far greater - just less immediate.

Note that there is a significant amount of "academia" that happens inside large tech co's, such as Google / Facebook / Microsoft, just as Bell Labs did in yesteryear.

This is one of the great disconnects between computer scientists and biologists. Computers are man-made, and fundamentally knowable - answers will be definitively, provably, right or wrong.

Biology is different. Sure, at a molecule level, you can make definite conclusions. "This drug binds to that receptor."

But the kind of biology that is immediately useful to humans - where it touches on psychology or sociology - is too complex to get 100% right. So how do you do 'science' in these fields?

The answer is that you make up some cohesive theory based on existing research and do studies in that direction. You try to prove yourself right.

And it works! Theories that come out of this sort of research can turn out to be 100% true. Or 90% true - where they are wrong under some conditions, but still very useful. Or they can be complete bunk - not predictive, and a waste of time.

When anyone presents a cohesive theory of a complex system, they are probably not 100% right. Doesn't make them entirely wrong, though, and certainly not useless.

It's not really that binary, though - job or death. There's an awful lot of space in between the two.

There's this conveyer-belt view of life: we are supposed to go directly from birth to school to job to kids to bigger job to death. Some people really do live that. Most people don't.

But we're expected to fit that mold, so anyone who's stepped off the belt will usually keep quiet about it. So it's easy to start believing that the only valid life is some linear path.

Still. Unemployment is stress and uncertainty. But bad job markets aren't forever. Good luck with finding a job, or managing to enjoy the interim.

Nyanpasu.

LANL definitely needs and uses generalist engineers. I interned there as one, many years back. Standard CRUD-app stuff to help the lab do its main goal of nuclear stockpile stewardship.

But it will help if you enjoy research culture. The location is rather isolated and you will probably be friends / co-workers with people doing research. (I say this because not everyone likes being around PhDs; I've met several people in software who disdain academics.)

It's hard to remember now, but the US's war on Iraq was declared with widespread popular support.

Many people today seem to feel that Taiwan and Ukraine are interests worth using military force to defend. I do wonder how well that support would hold up if either of those potential wars becomes reality.

This depends heavily on how good you are at setting boundaries. How good are you at saying no to your boss and teammates? Depending on culture (yours and the company's) this can feel impossible.

Being unable to say "no" is also a great way to burn out in the first place. The advice of "just slack off" is often given in cases like these, but... if the person could do that, would they be burned out in the first place?