HN user
Well, well, then I have a paper for you (2014); https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscie...
You might be interested in author #7. Some guy named Dario something.
Though a local model I'm running (gemma-3-27b-it; https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/gemma-3-27b-it-GGU...) just told me various correct sounding bits about his history with alcohol (correctly citing his alma mater and first wife), but threw in:
"Sobriety & AA: Newman got sober in 1964 and remained so for the rest of his life."
Which doesn't check out. And it includes plausible but completely hallucinated URLs (as well as a valid biography.com URL that completely omits information about alcohol.)
Gemini (2.5 Pro):
"Yes, Paul Newman was widely known for being a heavy drinker, particularly of beer. He himself acknowledged his significant alcohol consumption."
The answer I got (https://gemini.google.com/share/9e327dc4be03) includes references such as https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-reviews-movies-paul... and https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-playing-field/20... although they are redacted from the public-sharing link.
Actually that would be kind of awesome.
Can't speak for GP, but in my case it was an academic optometry center. Life changing. See my longer toplevel reply.
I will say this: if you're not happy with your current prescription, there are ways to get a more intense workup and better outcomes by going to an academic optometry center. In my case, I went to the New England College of Optometry and got prescribed a special type of contact lenses ("scleral" lenses) which have been a major quality of life enhancement.
They're expensive, there was a learning curve for getting them on correctly, and it took several followup appointments to get the correct fit from the manufacturer, but I can wear the lenses almost all day and they give me clear, sharp, 20/20 vision.
Also, when I'm wearing them I need reading glasses to read up close--my uncorrected vision actually compensates for my slight age related nearsightedness. But my vision is so much better I don't mind at all!
The back story is that I had lifelong astigmatism and 2 eyes with different powers (one more farsighted than the other one) which led to some mild amblyopia (lazy eye) that I've had since childhood. My vision wasn't "that bad" so I got by without using my glasses for a long time. But when I tried using my several year old prescription glasses I found that presbyopia (that age related inability to focus on anything up close) made the glasses almost useless for reading.
Even though I'm a dev who looks at screens all day, I didn't think I minded, but I noticed in recent years that my appetite for reading books had disappeared was partly due to noticeable eye strain, but also due to generalized eye fatigue that I wasn't really acknowledging. I also had to sit up front in meeting rooms to follow along with anything projected on the screen, which was annoying.
A colleague mentioned the book Fixing My Gaze (https://www.google.com/books/edition/Fixing_My_Gaze/Ul16tPVk...) and I bought it. It's partly a personal narrative by a neuroscientist who was stereoblind and taught herself to develop stereo vision in middle age (she was profiled by Oliver Sacks at one point). But it's also a history of research optometry, which focuses on refractive vision correction and visual processing (as distinct from eye diseases) and which I barely even knew was a thing. Which led me to NECO and my big quality of life improvement!
Should be fixed soon! We decided at 6pm on Friday to reduce biomedical research centers' budgets by billions of dollars ($4B in Massachusetts alone), effective Monday. So in the future China will have to train its own scientists.
Sadly, no "/s"
After I installed a high-COP, cold-climate heat pump in my Boston area house in 2020, I figured the wintertime running cost was about half again the cost of gas heat. However, the cost was about the same as that of running the somewhat ancient oil furnace the house came with.
Electricity prices in MA are high and are controlled by the marginal cost of gas to run generators, even though we have a significant fraction of renewable, hydro, and nuclear generation. Gas prices are also high because we're at the far end of the east coast natural gas pipeline network.
It's interesting to think about the whole chain -- burning gas in a high efficiency condensing furnace at home approaches 100% efficiency of conversion from chemical to heat energy.
Whereas utility generators that convert heat to electricity are upper bounded by the second law to ~60% efficiency, and then you have transmission losses on top of that. But you win roughly all that lossage back because your heat pump can pump ~3 units of outdoor heat energy into your house for every ~1 unit of electrical energy it consumes.
Add transmission costs and unfortunately heat pumps are more expensive here for now. But CO2 wise of course it still wins because of that renewal and nuclear share I talked about
More importantly, I can also install solar and start getting some energy "for free" (obviously, much more so in the summer than in the winter). And over time of course our renewable share will go up.
You can gain a lot of intuition for system behavior via particle models like this and their many, many other interactives.
I also recommend looking at their library of learning resources that put these interactives into context: https://learn.concord.org/collections
I worked there until 10 years ago and it was quite rewarding. (In fact this interactive uses some of the "lab" framework code I worked on.)
The founder was inspired by Concord (Massachusetts)'s history of progressive educational experimentation, going back to the transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau).
They're based in Concord but they also have a Bay Area office, after merging with the nonprofit org that built CODAP (https://codap.concord.org/)
Nobody wants China to take Taiwan, that's not something its possible to convince people of
It's not about convincing them to want it but rather about sowing doubt and confusion at the critical moment.
David French's NYT column last week starts with what one might call a "just-plausible-enough" scenario: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/opinion/tiktok-supreme-co... (gift link, yw).
the US government has caused more harm to its own people than China has today; US spies on its citizens, unfairly enforces laws against people,
Maybe, maybe not. But when the PRC decides the time is right to take Taiwan, it will have prepared the ground by making sure lots of Americans saw TikToks (made by other Americans) saying basically this.
I'd rephrase that as "the author is the author, Stephen Johnson, who is also one of the key people..."
I've read many of his books over the last 20 some years (and even watched a PBS documentary series he hosted). I was aware via his Substack that he was collaborating somehow with the NotebookLM team. But I was rather startled when he demoed NotebookLM at a Google all hands meeting a few weeks ago! Apparently he's a full time product manager now.
I had this criterion too.
Fortunately by last year the this Café (GE) double oven induction range was available here in the US: https://www.cafeappliances.com/appliance/Cafe-30-Smart-Slide... I have a few quibbles (mainly, that only one of the burners is properly sized for a 12" skillet) but overall I like it.
I don't mind the touch buttons for operating the oven and timers--in fact, they're nice and easy to clean (with a handy "lock screen" feature so you can spray and wipe down the front panel without everything going nuts) but I'm pretty sure trying to fine tune the burner settings using a touch slider while keeping an eye on multiple pans would have driven me nuts. I also have haven't had problems with the knobs getting dirty or being hard to wipe down if they do, to address a point raised in another reply.
Price splits the difference between the entry level ranges and the snobby brands (Miele, Thermador, etc).
Far too many to list here, but some interesting ones re the evolution of life might be the complexes responsible for transcription of genes and translation into proteins, such https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_polymerase_III_holoenzyme, RNA polymerase (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_polymerase), and the ribosome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribosome).
Start your journey here: https://archive.org/details/alberts-molecular-biology-of-the...
From a quick skim: what's interesting about this study from an HN perspective is that they used Alphafold (or more specifically Alphafold-Multimer: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.04.463034v2....) to screen more than 1400 different proteins that were likely to be present on zebrafish sperm to see which ones might bind to other known sperm fertility factors.
Lo, and behold, they found a protein (i.e, the product of a particular zebrafish gene) that Alphafold-Multimer predicted would bind to two of the known sperm factors. And it turned out to be a kind of missing link: the three sperm proteins together were predicted form a stable structure. And, that structure ("complex") sticks to the only egg protein known to be required for fertilization! (Where all of this was first predicted using Alphafold-Multimer, then experimentally confirmed to some degree.)
Not only that, it turns out human versions ("orthologs") of these three sperm proteins exist, and their experimental evidence at least suggests that they stick together, forming a complex as well. Which presumably sticks to some human egg protein. Pretty neat.
Why this matters: Consider. 20 years ago, I briefly worked for a lab that used genetics to study fertilization in C. elegans (fast breeding, millimeter-long worms with a lot of infrastructure in place for scientific study). Sure, we were studying worms, but the PI had a personal interest in (in)fertility, and it was his long bet that fundamental research would help medicine solve infertility.
Now it looks like the bet is showing promise of paying off: back then, there didn't seem to be any vertebrate equivalents of the worm genes we found. Maybe worm fertilization was just too far removed. But the top "related article" is from my old lab (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)...) and the abstract points out that several worm genes they and related labs found are, in fact, equivalents of the vertebrate genes discussed in TFA! So progress accelerates.
As an engineer who has worked on systems that handle sensitive data, it seems straightforwardly to me to be a statement about:
1. ACLs
2. The systems that provision those ACLs
3. The policies that determine the rules those systems follow.
In other words, the model training batch job might run as a system user that has access to data annotated as 'interactions' (at timestamp T1 user U1 joined channel C1, at timestamp T2 user U2 ran a query that got 137 results), but no access to data annotated as 'content', like (certainly) message text or (probably) the text of users' queries. An RPC from the training job attempting to retrieve such content would be denied, just the same as if somebody tried to access someone else's DMs without being logged in as them.
As a general rule in a big company, you the engineer or product manager don't get to decide what the ACLs will look like no matter how much you might feel like it. You request access for your batch job from some kind of system that provisions it. In turn the humans who decide how that system work obey the policies set out by the company.
It's not unlike a bank teller who handles your account number. You generally trust them not to transfer your money to their personal account on the sly while they're tapping away at the terminal--not necessarily because they're law abiding citizens who want to keep their job, but because the bank doesn't make it possible and/or would find out. (A mom and pop bank might not be able to make the same guarantee, but Bank of America does.) [*]
In the same vein, this is a statement that their system doesn't make it possible for some Slack PM to jack their team's OKRs by secretly training on customer data that other teams don't use, just because that particular PM felt like ignoring the policy.
[*] Not a perfect analogy, because a bank teller is like a Slack customer service agent who might, presumably after asking for your consent, be able to access messages on your behalf. But in practice I doubt there's a way for an employee to use their personal, probably very time-limited access to funnel that data to a model training job. And at a certain level of maturity a company (hopefully) also no longer makes it possible for a human employee to train a model in a random notebook using whatever personal data access they have been granted and then deploy that same model to prod. Startups might work that way, though.
There was a Soofa sign near my house across the river in Somerville that (now that I think about it) I haven't seen for a while now. The branding wasn't quite as prominent as the Brookline Bank sponsored one in the photo. As I recall it displayed a vaguely useful calendar of local and city events, plus a question you could reply to on Twitter so they could show "engagement".
I'm not surprised nor especially troubled that the sign gathers pseudonymized MAC addresses in hourly buckets. In the last several years there's a mini-trend of startups attempting to provide more or less anonymized smartphone traffic data to cities and towns for urban planning purposes.
In theory this is good! Ideally it helps city hall be more data driven and see things that might not filter up to city hall, in a "pave the cowpaths" way (E.g,. do we need a new circulator shuttle stop? What's happening that one weekend in May that drives so much foot traffic and that we're not aware of at city hall, and should send a police detail to control that intersection? Oh, that brewpub has an annual event we didn't know about that blew up on Instagram.)
In practice I think the problem is the wins tend to be minimal compared to the effort involved.
All that said, I don't love the conspiratorial, low-trust assumptions you're encouraged to make by the bare statement "They’re collecting data from your cell phone."
But without privacy regulations I suppose that's where things will inevitably go -- people will assume a priori that "data collection" is itself threatening. (I certainly foresee a lot of rich retirees agitating to cancel the contract at the next Brookline town meeting.) So I wonder if the main benefit of better privacy regulation in the US would be preventing further deterioration of the basic trust that allows the "collective intelligence" vision of the 00's to come to fruition.
Fun! This is the kind of thing I got back into programming for around 2010. Just to toot my own (and my former employer's) horn, I worked on a bunch of the underlying models behind the Concord Consortium activities here: https://learn.concord.org/
They're aimed more at middle and high school, are "curriculum aligned" and developed into classroom-ready form by professional educators, and then Concord researches how well they work in actual classrooms.
We had been using a Java app (and applet) called Molecular Workbench for some of these, but in 2012 we got a Google.org grant to reimplement the same concept but natively running in browsers.
That's not necessarily bad news.
Everyone interested in this story should read Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/stephen-greenblatt).
It traces the story of a Renaissance humanist who tracked down and translated the Epicurean philosopher/poet Lucretius' De Rerem Natura, which Greenblatt describes as portraying a strikingly modern way of seeing the world.
In particular Lucretius and the Epicureans denied the existence of supernatural causes, were opposed to religious fear, and posited the ideas of atomism and biological evolution. Of course they're better known for their approach to living life, which Greenblatt shows is more sophisticated than sometimes caricatured, and which he portrays as a breath of fresh air compared to the oppressive moralism and hypocrisy of the Church at the time. (Jefferson and many of the American Founders described themselves as Epicureans.)
He goes on to imply that Epicureanism was influential and widespread in the ancient world but suppressed by the early Church, so that we now know little of it.
Anyone, one of the tantalizing parts of the book is where he describes the carbonized and unreadable Herculaneum scrolls, since they were the private library of a wealthy patron of the Epicureans. I think he thinks being able to read the scrolls will really change our understanding of the ancient world.
And remember: if they hadn't been carbonized, they would have crumbled to dust. That's why we only have the texts that managed to get copied. (Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land is a novel about the survival and 21st century rediscovery of an imaginary Greek play, and ... I'll let you read it yourself - https://www.anthonydoerr.com/books/cloud-cuckoo-land)
(Apologies for any errors above, as basically all I know about this subject is what I read in the book!)
Ah, I worded that badly. Ultimately the pilot is the decider as you say. I was getting at the idea that (so I am told) the day to day experience of piloting is very much about working within a regimented system.
Strong Towns is attempting to change that with the "Crash Analysis Studio": https://www.strongtowns.org/crash-studio
I can think of many reasons it's difficult, though:
* The fact that accident investigations are designed to figure out which driver was at fault, for insurance purposes
* The fact that road designers are shielded from liability (good, right?), but only if they can show they followed the standard design handbooks, which not only fail to prioritize safety over traffic flow but also don't require or even contemplate performing a thorough case-by-case investigation into how to prevent a certain type of accident from happening again. (Crash Analysis Studio tries to demonstrate how to do this.)
* The sheer scale of the changes to roads that would be needed. In the States, access of hundreds of thousands of businesses and probably millions of homes depend on roads that are supposed to get people from A to B fast but also have lots of access points for businesses on them, which is like just like mixing taxiing and holding with takeoff and landing, but without the air traffic controllers. And don't get me started about unprotected lefts across multiple lanes of traffic.
* The lack of buy-in from the citizenry for enforcing professional-like standards on drivers. Despite the blameless culture that helps identify flaws in the system, air traffic controllers, pilots, maintenance crews, train engineers, etc also know that their job depends on making a sincere effort to follow the rules that are written, and in most cases their professional identity is tied up with following the rules. (I've heard that to be a pilot you really have to be comfortable with doing what you're told, all day long.) There's really no obvious way to get the masses of drivers to think and feel that way about their driving, and of course we can't just sanction our way to compliance because people need their licenses to go about their lives. And of course usually there is no reasonably alternative to driving yourself where you need to go.
Well the Bell Labs Holmdel complex is often used as an example of the death and creative reuse of the suburban office park, and I guess this is the flip side.
In the long run I guess splendid isolation turned out to be no match for being in a walkable city with a research university, research hospitals, major pharma headquarters (J&J) right in town, and a train station across the street that goes right to New York, EWR, and Princeton.
Still, I'm suffering a bit of vertigo that Bell Labs (or what's left of it) is moving to where the old Rutgers Bookstore and Albany St parking garage used to be (!) and that suddenly the gritty, grungy New Brunswick I used to bum around 20 years ago looks more like Kendall Square, where I work now. (And which also didn't used to look like it does now, I suppose.)
(Disclaimer: this is a super local story for me; my dad worked at Bell Labs in Holmdel, and I'm a third generation Rutgers grad whose mom grew up walking into downtown New Brunswick, and I probably spent way too much of my early 20s at the Starbucks on George Street and the Melody Bar, both RIP.)
Well, statistics matter here and one thing insurance companies know about is statistics. If you brake hard once or twice, no biggie.
But, for sure, my prior is that someone who frequently brakes hard on the road is someone who gets themselves into jams they shouldn't have been in in the first place. Maybe it's a matter of failing to anticipate what's coming up ahead. Maybe it's a matter of where, when, and how often they drive.
Both indicate risk that, arguably, should be priced appropriately. Same for health behaviors.
Dropping you is a thing that happens when the expected value of your insurance payouts exceed the expected value of the premiums collected. With granular data from telematics, an insurer [*] could notify you to change your game long before they end up concluding, "Well, none of the data we have on this person differentiates them from the last 3 guys to cost us a million plus in settlements and claims, so sayonara"
[*] thinking of TFA here I mean a suitably regulated insurer, not one that is somehow sneakily accessing telematics data without any transparency
The headline put me in mind of a different memory I had of the campus BBS from undergraduate days, and then I clicked through and realized that the author was actually the admin of that BBS!
Anyway, in addition to the BBS there was also an IBM mainframe (?) running VM/SP that you could connect to, and somehow that was how you got to IRC.
One night several of us spent hours chatting on IRC, and the next day we got called into the campus computing service where it was patiently explained that some professor's overnight batch job running stats had failed because it was constantly being interrupted by interactive-priority jobs ... i.e., our chat sessions. Which we should now stop.
I remember writing a passionate open letter using my vague knowledge that had trickled out about "hacker culture" in places like Berkeley where students were surely right now exploring these new things called "Usenet" and "the Internet", arguing that even though we weren't doing anything fancy like running stats for an economics paper, and even though we didn't know what any of it would actually amount to, the important thing for our education was that we had the chance to experiment with it for ourselves...
(Sitting in Kendall Square right now). I'm not surprised, though we're saying the same thing. So. Much. Biotech.
This is why the WFH revolution didn't make me panic when I discovered how much it would end up costing to renovate a small house 1.5 miles from here. So much biotech, and for that you need to be in the lab at least some of the time. The MBTA's recent troubles ("global slow zone", anyone?) only make it "better", like I paid them off or something.
Yes, yes, yes. My wife (who teaches humanities) keeps asking me if AI is going to take all the jobs. I keep saying society has already had to deal with the fact that not that many people are required to build the things and grow the food, and we adapted by inventing all kinds of vaguely bullshit jobs, and jobs to provide services to the people who get their money from bullshit jobs, and all of those jobs spread the wealth around. There will be more and more of those (and, to be clear, many more people who aren't in a position to get one.)
Still better to train lots of electricians and refrigerant techs and solar installers and all the other workers that the energy transition will need, of course.
Also have yet to Graeber's book ("Bullshit Jobs: A Theory").
Chatbot-based dating matchmaker/concierges.
You have an ongoing, lighthearted chat with the bot (maybe it pings you now and then asking for updates.) Every once in a while it asks you more personal questions to switch things up and deepen its model of you.
Now and then it says "may I introduce so-and-so to the chat?" and introduces someone else who (on their side) has been primed to talk about the same topics and, at least according to the bot's internal models, is likely to hit it off with you.
Then the chatbot itself politely leaves the conversation but keeps listening and privately messages the both of you to keep things humming along, for example nudging one of you to ask for an in person date when the moment seems right (or helping you politely wind things down if you ask it to). After a date it asks you to spill the beans so it knows what went well and what didn't.
I think this could almost be made to work with the tech we have now; a fluent-but-shallow ChatGPT style chatbot is probably good enough for the task as long as it is augmented by some additional models to predict dating compatibility, recognize when things are going well or badly, suggest actions (like changing the subject to or away from personal topics, asking for a date, etc). And of course the models would improve over time as the system learns from its own successes and failures.
Whether this is dystopian or utopian is left as an exercise for the reader -- I'm married and 15 years out of the game!
Plus, so many foods list what they "may contain" traces of X, but never really quantify how much of a trace. Which actually may be a good thing about intentionally adding sesame, because at least it makes the amount consistent.
I was allergic to peanuts as a kid, way back before it was cool, and didn't know why M&Ms gave me a mild version of the burning sensation and nausea I would get from eating peanuts. Later it turned out, famously, that non-peanut M&M shells contain some "reprocessed" material from the peanut M&M line. (And still do as far as I can tell.)
Nothing else with the "may contain" label has ever given me trouble! But I still get nervous that I'll find out 2 hours into a bike ride that I just fueled up on an extra peanutty "may contain" Clif bar.
Now I'm concerned about sesame. I can eat hamburger buns just fine but I discovered sometime in my 20s that sesame noodles make me sick, and the last time I was at a Korean restaurant my face puffed up just from the air.
So, oddly, one positive of the trend described in the story is that if processed food X lists sesame as an ingredient, and I can nibble on it and then eat the whole thing without getting sick, then I know whether or not I can eat that food, because it's presumably made with a consistent amount of sesame every time. Whereas with a "may contain" label, I'm never really sure if some batch might have lots of sesame and I just tested a non-sesame batch.
Can confirm. That was the life. (My Dad worked at Holmdel until the divestiture.)
I still remember visiting on the Christmas Eve open house they would hold every year, with a brass band playing carols in the big atrium and all kinds of tech goodies to check out.
Regarding GP's point, New Jersey actually has a pretty strong heritage in engineering. There was Edison of course, and RCA (including their research lab near Princeton that did a lot of defense work in WWII) and lots of smaller radio companies--don't forget that especially pre-WWII the economic geography of the US was a lot different and the radio "startups" of the day would design and manufacture right in urban areas of the East Coast.
Marconi set up shop in NJ in the early days -- in fact my Dad does a lot of work these days with a museum of early communications technology, located at an old Marconi transmitter site not too far from Holmdel (infoage.org).
Other parts of the Bell System were in New Jersey too, with offices, labs, and facilities spread all over the state (including the famous Long Lines NOC where they monitored the health of the long distance system in real time.)
There were (and still are) plenty of chemical and pharmaceutical companies that hired scientists and engineers.
But I'd say that in the postwar era until about 2000 most scientists and engineers didn't particularly aspire to live in or commute to NYC. The suburban life was the dream. I remember in the late 90s/early 2000s it felt like all the technical work going on there was backend stuff for banks or dot-com startups with a media/marketing focus.