wintercarver

Your humble repo owner here: I wanted to compile a list of prompts used in math and science research in a single area to make review of said prompts easier, if only to hope that some "methods" or styles could be reviewed and applied.

Is quite nascent, but with the jacobian conjecture news (amidst other recent AI-driven results) and odds that folks may go burn some AI credits on trying their hand at random open problems, I thought I'd share.

You can clone the repo and have your agent review some of the styles or prompt guide summary to try and refine an approach.

Can confirm - worked on Super-K as a grad student and a regular part of shift work was to go through simulated supernova alert testing. Was always kind of fun, in the lotto ticket sense (alarm goes off, review to see, ah yes, simulated test, back to shift monitoring).

Would love to read any of the scientific papers that McCarthy supposedly edited diligently, should anyone happen to know of some. Very curious to see what they read like.

First thing that came to mind when I read this was the quote attributed to Haruki Murakami "If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking." Turns out this is a quote from a character in one of Murakami's novels, but sentiment stands. Kind of gets to the essence of what "creativity" may be.

Nice post! Enjoy your blog's overall aesthetic too. Perhaps correlation in sense of style, though, as I also used RTK to learn to write Kanji, loved it, and now, ~15 years after that escapade, am kind of in a similar bucket (can write some characters, but mostly just read). I still think RTK great overall method and would do it again!

Also, shoutout to Fabrice, creator of Kanji Koohii -- that was my first foray into SRS back in ~2007/2008, after which I found Anki (pre-mobile).

Wait WHAT?! I’ve been buying ebooks off BookWalker and it’s so annoying. Their reader app sucks and they have these faux-protective constraints like not permitting a “copy” function on any highlighted text and limiting a book to no more than 50 highlights. It’s so silly… Edit: damn, had assumed you meant maximum nerd mode and that these books were available in Japanese… looks like it’s all English translations. So it goes.

Nice and thank you! Will now go head my head in shame for not having bothered to click the “menu” icon on the main report :facepalm:

Being lazy here, but would love to know more about how testing for all of these plastics chemicals that are omnipresent is done in a way that ensures the measurement process or tools themselves do not contribute trace chemicals (e.g. lab tech wears latex gloves while handling the sample, whoops, etc).

Congrats David & the whole team! Really enjoy everything Sakana AI produces and always look forward to your research results.

If you enjoyed this article I’d recommend checking out the book _Moonwalking with Einstein_ by Joshua Foer. Great read and fascinating dive into the lives and practices of individuals that participate in memory competitions.

Data team manager here, qq: how do you handle type conversions between different systems? Nice work overall!

For someone familiar with the science can you comment on the typical uncertainty/variation in epigenetic age measurement? I love error bars, wish they were mandatory.

Plus one, scrolled through waiting for someone to mention this one.

I don’t typically reread fiction but the poetic style of writing, combined with great scenes and characters makes almost any page worth a reread from time to time.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever find a book as good across so many dimensions…

Awesome, I read this years ago and have always kept it in mind ever since. Just wanted to say thanks for writing/co-authoring it!

I think this quote from a recent New Yorker article[1] sums up a subtle difference that’s easy to overlook. Topic has been on my mind a bit lately[2]:

“Chandlee, who spent more than twelve years at Mark Zuckerberg’s company before moving to TikTok, dismissed the idea [of concern over competition from Facebook]. “Facebook is a social platform. They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph,” he said, referring to the network of links to friends, family, and casual acquaintances that Facebook users painstakingly assemble over time. “We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.””

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tiktok-an...

[2] self plug, short set of questions on the recent Instagram makeover flop: https://kvncnnlly.bearblog.dev/copy-to-copy-copy-to-change/

I thought it was a nice summary, concise, organized, with examples and references. Will revisit it should I need a reminder on scraping. Would not call it low quality at all.

Would recommend you ignore passing comments with no constructive criticism. The title is going to be a point of contention as it’s a big claim and probably being misinterpreted as not “everything you need to know [to get started]” but rather “everything you need to know [ever is in this one article and you’ll need not read anything else]”.

Fair question and good point. Our Slack isn’t absolutely quiet - we do have a channel for coordinating on customer issues (meets our urgent and ephemeral criteria) and it might be that some matters are raised by other processes outside of Slack but Slack itself is a good fit for in-the-moment collaboration. But in short we aren’t absolutists, it’s a mix of a few specific channels for certain contexts, channel-specific muting, and updating one’s Slack status - all under the guidance that Slack immediate responsiveness is not generally expected but more the exception. It sounds like a lot as I write that, but as a broader cultural norm within the company it does (so far!) support itself.

That said, I’ll pass your question on to the team as feedback, we should make the answer more clear.

At my company we have a “thoughtful communication” guide[1] that addresses Slack and other communication tools. The simple rule for Slack is it’s for ephemeral or urgent communication only. All “conversation” material essentially routes through email and it works great. Takes some getting used to but our Slack instance is very, very relaxed. Most employees silence all Slack notifications and are encouraged to do so to (try our best to) preserve focus.

[1] https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/company/thoughtful-communicatio...

Nice. Great book.

Tangential, but for those interested in large-scale neutrino physics projects check out the successor to Japan’s Super-Kamiokande experiment, Hyper-Kamiomande: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-Kamiokande

Hard-hitting piece, tho not a cancer survivor myself my father is. As his ambassador of sorts to the rest of my extended family I recognize the unsolicited opinion tsunami the author describes.

However, the part that really caught my eye was the reference to David Spiegel and positive mindset research (or lack thereof). By pure coincidence, I had recently come across the self hypnosis topic via the Huberman Lab medical podcast. One app mentioned was Reveri, created by David Spiegel’s lab. I looked up the science references in the “about” section and found a 1983 and a 2000 paper reference. Seems a bit flimsy to me, but am wondering if there are not any more noteworthy publications to cite over the last ~40 years?

I stumbled across this documentary and found it captivating. Great coverage of a really ambitious, challenging goal and teamwork over the years. Really inspiring stuff across the board!

Thank you for the compliment, glad to try and contribute a sliver of truth (researcher to the core lol).

Yeah, and there is path dependence in learning, too! The Feynman lectures are quite deep and insightful, but because of that probably good to circle back to at different times, as an example.

But the real kicker for me was just breaking through the impression that “understanding” is a function of rereading, getting stuck, and focusing on one explanation as if parsing the syntax of some author’s statement was how you got information and understanding of a subject. My general rule now is to simply read different explanations. That, imo, is how you develop pedagogical awareness, too, as you then begin to see what authors are not saying in their attempt to convey a subject.

Anyway, thank you for reading and the comment!

I studied physics as an undergrad and then went on to get a PhD from UW (Seattle), which has required courses for physics education that all graduate students must take. With ~10 years of physics study/practice/teaching, I think the one meta lesson I've carried with me is it's not about which book or which method, but rather the marathon process of ongoing exploration, which is often fueled by genuine interest and joy in exploring the subject. Exploration here applies to the subject itself in spirit, but in reality means exploring the resources to gather perspective and understanding.

The above probably sounds obvious (sorry!), but a lot of learning recommendation seems to focus on "the best" resource, which in my older years strikes me as kind of odd. In the grander scheme of studying something in earnest, time spent with any one book will not be the determiner of success. That's not to say there are no great books or resources, but rather if something is hard or not making sense you should try to approach the topic from another angle: read the chapter on the same topic from another text, or a few others, find some alternative lectures online, etc -- these days the resource list is near limitless... So, start somewhere, don't worry too much about how you start, and keep going!

A lot of the above opinion was motivated by a kind of serendipitous conversation I had with a physics professor. I returned to that convo often enough that I finally decided to write it down last year. Pardon the self plug, but intent was to help share a learning perspective: https://medium.com/@kevinconnolly/effort-neglect-and-the-sec...

Part of Michael Lewis’s book, _The Fifth Risk_, features Kathy Sullivan and her life story. The focus of her story in the book is mostly about her work for NOAA, in the context of Trump’s administration, but gives a fun overview of her path to becoming an astronaut, too. Overall, a fast read and a generally inspiring view into the scientific and engineering work done by many people and various departments of the US government.

Additional recommendation: _Talking to my daughter about the economy_, by Yanis Varoufakis. It’s a slender, engaging read that explores the history of economics and works its way to some modern day questions. In general, while learning I think it’s important to keep things fun, and I thought this was a fun read. Once these books get you warmed up with some concepts and footing you can take that fun curiosity and apply it to digging deeper.

I really enjoyed Thomas Sowell’s _Basic Economics_. It’s a fun read that covers a variety of economic concepts with logical analyses in a narrative format.

This is a bit of a personal plug, but as for examining trends of funding and startup activity in the “AI” realm, I wrote up a brief summary of some CB insights investment data earlier this year [1]. I thought it was interesting to examine the difference between investment activity and entrepreneur activity, as there is always some inherent information asymmetry between entrepreneurs and investors. Not a deep analysis, but a few basic charts :)

[1] https://medium.com/@kevinconnolly/the-top-100-ai-startups-91...

Can't get behind the paywall - anyone so kind as to summarize the key points?