HN user
From recollection, I believe, "The Book of Why", https://a.co/d/aYehsnO, is the general audience introduction to Pearl's approach to causality.
"Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference", https://a.co/d/6b3TKhQ, is the technical and researcher audience book.
Haha, Yup, I've done exactly that. If the menu was dark, I'd try to pinch zoom in. I briefly felt like a baby trying to figure out the world again.
I'm not really a gamer, but I experienced something maybe similar with the ipad. When I first got one, of course, I was reading news and swiping away and it was completely natural.
Then I'd go to a restaurant and when reading the menu, I'd start swiping at the paper or vinyl menus like it was a tablet. It's a curious phenomena to have that brand new tablet gesture overtake decades of behaviors and perceptions with real paper.
Kudos to Apple, I guess.
Technically correct, the best kind of correct.
I don't recall Maple Leaf Rag in the movie, but Solace and the Entertainer by Joplin are there.
Solace in particular is magnificent.
Incidentally, I know of a few people, friends of my parents, that have gotten a shunt for NPH. They suffered from one of the 3 "W" symptoms of NPH, wet, wobbly, wackiness, that you're certainly aware of.
One had a dramatic improvement very quickly, where one or more of the Ws was resolved. Another had the spinal tap indicating she was a good candidate, but the shunt is still not resolving all the issues even after 2 months.
Do you have any clinical experience with the success rates of the shunt?
Yeah, the eargasm ones do get a bit itchy and warm after a while.
I’ll check out the ones with custom molds. Thanks for the suggestion.
I can't help with tinnitus itself, but I highly recommend "Eargasm High-fidelity Ear plugs", or similar devices, to help prevent further damage.
They work really well to dampen loud sounds and, importantly, they let conversation through, though it sounds muffled. But you can feel the difference. They are much better than using foam ear plugs, which muffle everything.
I used to go to a lot of concerts without any ear protection, when I was young and dumb. I REALLY wish I had these things back then, since I've acquired mild tinnitus as a result.
Now I carry them on my keychain all the time and use them even in restaurants and bars or whenever I'm some place where I have to speak at an elevated level.
Well, crap. My mom complained about tendon damage issues after taking Cipro. I don't remember which tendons, probably legs, but I don't think she ever felt recovered from that. She probably only got generic warning statements that some people may experience side effects.
Anyway, antibiotics causing damage like this sounds like it could have triggered an auto-immune problem. If so, then that is a large quagmire.
We (or at least I) may base our estimates on the happy-path.
That is, I can see how to solve a problem in the common case. But as I code, I encounter the myriad of error cases, exceptions to the common problems, and especially the interactions of all these. Then add in performance considerations and the complexity can multiply quickly. The long-tail of those errors and exceptions can be very time-consuming to solve, so the mean is likely to be way off.
It's obviously much easier to estimate when you're experienced with a problem space. This should mean that you know how to solve a particular problem as well as the likely exceptions (non happy-path) you'll encounter.
If you're experienced with the domain, you can fit the relevant partial solutions in your head and more accurately judge what could go wrong with your code. But more generally I think this is similar to solving problems in other domains as well, such as architecture, building a car, or anything with many moving parts. These domains do not usually have loosely coupled sub systems.
I'll add my anecdata. I'm dark skinned and an engineer, so sunlight and me are strangers at best.
I've taken 5000 IU/day (with vitamin K2) and have my blood levels tested every year. I don't remember what my serum levels are but they were on the high end of healthy individuals. Last I checked, my levels matched what a person reaches who spends the day in the sunlight, perhaps like a outdoor worker.
Whatever you try, if you have an annual check up, you should get you blood levels tested to verify you reach sane levels. I think most studies and articles fail to mention how dark the subjects are.
The AI one is spot on, but could use more bile.
But I'm stealing the last line on reasoning about software, "If Tony Hoare were not alive today he would be turning in his grave."
Needs an entry for Crypto. Used to be cryptography, now it means ponzinomics, or something...
I fully agree. I haven't tried them yet, but there is another company that uses GraalVM to allow building iOS apps.
https://gluonhq.com/create-native-javafx-applications-using-...
Their website docs suggest that you can build static libs that could be linked to an iOS app. But I haven't had time to try this.
[Simons Institute] https://www.youtube.com/c/SimonsInstituteTOC - my favorite source for current research on theoretical CS, AI, computational sciences.
[MITCBMM - Center for Minds, Brains and Machines] https://www.youtube.com/c/MITCBMM - great lecture source for AI, cognitive science, neuroscience.
[Steve Brunton] https://www.youtube.com/c/Eigensteve - great lecturer on applied math for engineering and computation science. Like an advanced Khan academy
[The Royal Institution] https://www.youtube.com/c/TheRoyalInstitution - science talks for lay audiences, like Ted Talks but more advanced.
[Mathologer] https://www.youtube.com/c/Mathologer - misc math topics, like 3blue1brown. This guy is quirky and funny and good at explaining some advanced math topics.
[Numberphile] https://www.youtube.com/c/numberphile - topics on mostly math, but also CS adjacent.
I second this recommendation for Insight Timer. I just use it as a timer that’s nicely customized for meditation, though it has guided talks and recordings that others may find useful.
The timer is MUCH better than the built in iOS timer. It has pleasant (less jarring) bell/gong sounds and customizable presets.
It also keeps track of your sessions which is useful as a subtle nudge to keep a routine practice.
It’s not essential but is nice, useful and free.
As another commenter noted, there's a general internet standard defined already for cryptographically timestamping and signing digital artifacts, like JARs, PDFs, dotNet assemblies, and many others.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3161
Many large certificate issuing orgs run timestamping authority servers. Tools like Java jarsigner, Adobe Acrobat, and many other tools are designed to work with them. Search for "rfc3161".
I thought this was really interesting and a fun read, like something you'd see in a sidebar in a magazine.
I like the style. It reads like something that Spock, Commander Data or the HAL 9000 would say, which IMO is a good thing.
Maybe it was in the Free Solo movie or other interviews, but I thought he said that his route during Free Solo was a difficulty level of about 7/10 for him. So he was comfortable enough that it was not the hardest climb for him; after a ton of practice on that route, with ropes, of course.
So to be statistical about it, the difficulty level for him was at the edge of 1 standard deviation of the mean of his capability. Maybe that's enough margin that he could detect when he's really in trouble.
Interesting, thanks for the info.
I was always somewhat concerned about the abundance of critical raw materials for ARC or other fusion projects. I had assumed that the rare-earth elements in the REBCO tape, e.g. yttrium, would be constrained. I didn't suspect that beryllium could be a limiting resource. But I wonder if the lack of supply is related to true scarcity or just to a lack of a profitable market currently.
These are all questions I'd want to ask domain experts in mining and fusion.
But I agree that fission would be a better solution for baseload, at least for the next 10-20 years. If only newer modular designs were actually approved...
I added a link above to a good talk from Dennis Whyte. I think it will help address your question about the additional engineering issues in a commercial reactor based on ARC.
In short, from my basic understanding, there are quite a few additional major challenges involved with fusion power generation. e.g. After creating net-positive fusion, the heat must be efficiently extracted without stopping the reaction. Also tritium must be continually extracted from the FLiBe (fluorine-lithium-beryllium) bath that stops and collects neutrons and extracts the heat.
Since I'm a total novice in all this, I don't know if these require incremental innovations or major advances. But from the video, the problems mentioned seem to be more tractable than achieving fusion ignition or Q>10.
Ah, yes, I understand what you meant with your wording. Proof-of-concept by 2025, and commercialization after that.
I think this take is too skeptical to apply to all the startups. For all the talks from CFS I've seen, they've been very measured and sober about the viability of near-term fusion.
The game changer here is not very new reactor designs, but cheap high performance high-temperature superconductors that enable very high field and therefore much smaller size.
Other fusion work, like ICF or the LLNL laser fusion or Lockheed or General Fusion all seem to be built on designs that are far less understood and less Q performance so far.
I've seen various youtube videos from their employees and CEO. From what I remember, Dennis Whyte (head of the fusion lab at MIT and CFS cofounder) says you need about Q>5 at least, to make fusion economically viable. So that must mean Qplasma > 5. SPARC is working towards that by 2025.
And so far, the company, CFS, has been achieving their milestones for the performance of their magnets. The HTS magnets and coils is the main ingredient that the startup is optimizing for. Sometime in the last year, they implied that their Qplasma was much better than they minimally hoped for. I think they achieved Qplasma > 10, but Dennis was keeping the details proprietary.
From all the talks I remember, they are targeting power on the grid with the ARC reactor by 2035.
Edit:
This is the best recent video I've seen, about SPARC and ARC. Jumped to 2:25 for Dennis Whyte.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHJyoqDO0zw
It's targeted to MechE students and gives a lot of details about other aspects of a potential ARC reactor design, e.g. how to get the heat out.
No ones mentioned the Dygma Raise, yet. I HIGHLY recommend them. It has a great solid metal build that doesn't flex. It's very compact. And it has hot-swappable switches which are very easy to replace. That was critical. I put in Zilents v2 67g switches and it feels great; very tactile and buttery smooth. I tried speed switches and Cherry browns too, but the zilents were the best for coding.
It's marketed as a gaming keyboard, but it's fantastic as an ergo. It's the best keyboard I've ever had. Previously I used the Microsoft ergo, forever.
Another subtle consideration is the placement of the Alt/Option keys next to the space bar. A deal breaker with a lot of other split keyboards, like the Kinesis, is that they have space bars that are too wide, so the modifier keys are too close to the outside edges. But the Raise has a compact space bar, so your thumb doesn't need to contort as much to use them. The software to reprogram the layers is decent, somewhat obtuse, but easy enough for basic remappings. For example, I reprogrammed some letter keys to be arrow keys when pressed with a modifier.
Oh, the only downside so far is that it really could use a row of function keys on the top, to mimic the macbook laptop layout.
They haven't released a keyboard tilt/tenting kit yet, so I had to make my own to give the inner edges a height of about 1.5 inches. Also, I place an elevated magic trackpad right in between the two halves. It's a frankenstein keyboard-mouse setup, but now it's very comfortable.