BrannonKing

I know someone with what we thought was MCAS, but it actually ended up being Alpha-gal Syndrome. Knowing that made the whole thing much easier to deal with.

I know someone with what we thought was MCAS, but it actually ended up being Alpha-gal Syndrome. Knowing that made the whole thing much easier to deal with.

The thing with all these autoimmune diseases: they have the same foundational problem. Their is something in the blood that doesn’t belong there and it resembles some part/cell of our body. Our body builds white blood cells to destroy this thing and inadvertently destroys part of the body. The important questions: what is it and how is it getting into the blood?

The most likely way it gets into the blood is through the digestive track. Some possible mechanisms: 1. Some detergent or similar chemical (e.g. PFAS is a solvent) dissolves the food (or the oil carrying the food) into water. The stomach pulls water back into the blood stream, bringing dissolved things with it. 2. There is some damage to the stomach or intestinal lining, stemming from physical injury, things getting stuck (lack of fiber), acid damage, some other chemical destroying mucus lining, etc. 3. You also have some autoimmune damage on your intestines. 4. You eat certain foods that require a symbiotic digestion with gut bacteria, but lack that bacteria or have killed it with eating preservatives or pesticides or artificial sweeteners, etc. The undigested food makes it to the larger absorption holes at the end of the intestinal run.

It’s also possible that a brain injury caused some brain cells to end up in the blood stream. Normally, though, the body has a mechanism to avoid attacking its own cells, the CD47 mechanism. Maybe that can become damaged or malnourished in some way. I’m sure that there’s a host of other things that can go wrong with that.

I'm not saying the article is wrong, but here's why I think we've struggled to have the year of the Linux Desktop: the corporations want control over users and computers that are on the network. They like their Windows domain user and computer GUI controls, that let them add/remove users and computers at will. They like the control of that centralized management. Centralized user management is more work on Linux, and tools for it aren't as pretty. The Hypervisor GUI is another tool that executives like to see.

It's the "sodium benzoate + ascorbic acid = benzene" problem. Watermelon + Dr. Pepper = cancer.

AMC should start showing Chinese and Korean dramas. That would help them a lot. I'm sure that they could work a deal with those studios that would let AMC set the ticket price. There hasn't been an American-made movie since Lord of the Rings that has compelled me to go see it in the theater. The movie studios seem to be pushing more extremes on immorality, violence, gore, etc, being completely disconnected from the average American's values. And then Disney and others make musicals with actors that can't sing -- mind-boggling. Hence, my wife and I watch Chinese dramas instead, a few episodes per week being my complete TV/Movie intake. They're paced better, develop characters, include a few kung fu moves, have nice visuals, aren't afraid of religious topics, etc.

The whole place-and-route thing is completely wrong for using FPGAs as accelerators. We don't need an optimal layout, we need a tiled layout (like the GPU does). All that we need for this to happen is for the companies making the FPGAs to open up the board layout file spec. They don't need to even make/ship any software at all. Just ship the dang file that says where the resources & timings are and some instructions on how to toggle the LUT config.

My feeling is that hardware companies do better when they ship the software needed to utilize their hardware for free. (You need a little margin in the hardware price to cover the software development). However, the FPGA companies haven't figured this out. They try to make way too much software and charge exhorbitant fees for it, somehow thinking that their hardware is useless without that. In fact, their hardware is useless because I can't put anything on it without a 1-to-20 hour compile time. That makes it impossible to use it as an accelerator. I can compile OpenCL for my GPU in a few milliseconds; that's what we need for the FPGA. Even thirty seconds would be easily tolerable -- there's many a game that still requires 15 seconds to load a level and compile its shaders.

FPGAs could be much more useful than they are at present. They've artificially limited themselves to ASIC prototyping alone.

So Intel bought an FPGA company -- nobody knows why. AMD got scared and did the same thing with no clue what to do with it. They've both let them rot. Intel did start incorporating it into its compiler targets, but it was only half-baked. Now they've wisely divested themselves of the company, but it should have never happened. They should have just focused on selling the hardware at a small margin whilst opening up the data to use it.

Note: please don't turn your screenshots and digital art into JPG. JPG uses compression based on natural lighting. It works well for photos, but it's the wrong solution where run-length encoding will do much better (e.g. in screenshots). Black text (or cartoon art) on white backround always looks lousy when converted to JPG.

This helps me: don't do social media or any news or any thumb-memory-based anything in the morning. Don't grab your phone first thing. Just let your mind slowly warm up to work -- the legit work that you need to do. When your brain is pulled in many directions it feels overwhelmed, and starting the day that way compounds it.

What I want: take scan/photo of a document (including a full book), pass it to the language model, and then get out a Latex document that matches the original document exactly (minus the copier/camera glitches and angles). I feel like some kind of reinforcement learning model would be possible for this. It should be able to learn to generate Latex that reproduces the exact image, pixel for pixel (learning which pixels are just noise).

Try fasting. Go 24 hours without food and little (water) or no drink. Do this once a month when you don't have cancer, and maybe more when you do. The theory behind it: Some cancers such as Chordoma are reliant on mTOR, which fasting inhibits or modulates. (This is also why Rapamycin is being researched for cancer treatment, though its mTOR effect is mild.) Theory part 2: tumors tend to have a lot of glycogen, which is unavailable when fasting. The body still needs it so it will pull some from tumors if necessary.

I sold a house when I moved and used that equity money to make the house payment at my new location while in school. If you don't have a lot of kids and/or your spouse brings in just a little money, you can make it okay on the graduate assistantship alone. My assistantships have been paying $2500/mo. The problem right now is that housing in the USA is very expensive almost everywhere, so you'll need a smart plan to deal with that.

I went back to school for a PhD at the age of 41. I was burned out on programming, I was lacking in theory, and I was ready to see the other side of the country for a few years. I'm now in my fifth year of that. It might take me another year for the PhD or it might not happen, but it has been a great adventure either way. It has opened up some other opportunities for me and helped me to recognize the areas of programming that I truly enjoy.

I've pondered on this question some. Is there such a thing as an objective talent rating? For example, if you take a group like Dream Theater, and look at the skill of each member of that group vs the skill of each member in the typical heavy-metal band, there is a distinct and obvious difference in skill level. Whether or not you like their style or their music's message, Dream Theater's skill is astounding. And you don't have to like all of their songs to appreciate some of them. But the difference might not be noticeable to someone who hasn't attempted to master a musical instrument. Such a person might just go with the flavor of the day; they won't be able to incorporate the amount of work that went into that flavor into their appreciation of it. (Dream Theater's singer has lost his vocal prowess over the years, which is sad but not unusual.)

In a recent concert (at Carnegie) Lang Lang brought out a melody in Chopin's first Scherzo that was very innovative though subtle. If you have any appreciation at all for Chopin, you would want to hear that rendering. It made a show piece into something both beautiful and astounding. But can a machine be made to tell the difference? The song is so fast and notes so blurred that it's almost noise from a reverse-engineering/transcribing standpoint.

Similarly, Sarah Brightman (in her early years) and Loreena McKennitt have far superior vocal skills to the typical modern pop singer. But if you're never exposed to real vocal skills, or if you've never attempted to sing an pure open vowel on pitch and hold it there for a sustained amount of time, why would you care? You wouldn't even know what to appreciate. So is it the algorithm's job to expose people to artists of higher skill and talent? I would like it to. That's absolutely a feature I want. I want to be exposed to those people. I'd like it to go even beyond that. I want to be exposed to talented composers regardless of performer.

37 seems like a high number; turn some of them into apartments instead. Put shops on the bottom floor like they do in Europe.

So who manages Pypi? This document seemed vague on that. Maybe that's the problem with Pypi's progress in life.

Most packages on Pypi are complete crap. It's also heavily burdened with domain-specific applications and one-off student projects. They have no standards for what makes a useful package, and no ranking system aside from the number-of-downloads. I think package maintainers should be required to push an update every other year or have their package get dropped. I think frameworks should be separate from applications. I think packages without a lot of downloads should utilize endorsements and code-cleanliness metrics.

GLPK or GLPK_MI? GLPK is probably the worst tool you could pick. I tried it before on some of my problems, and it would not ever finish. Use OR-Tools, if it will work for your problem, or maybe one of the other free solvers with CVXpy will help you (https://www.cvxpy.org/tutorial/solvers/index.html), if you really need a free tool.

GLPK should not be used as a guide for the general field. The commercial solvers will do infinitely better than GLPK.

This book has software engineering concepts that I never did see or hear anywhere else: "Expert C# Business Objects". Its concepts are language agnostic, even though it has C# examples. You might try some videos by the author of that book too.

Related to this book is what we call "vertical feature slicing". (I'd be curious to know what other books cover this topic.) There are some Youtube videos on the topic. There was a great 2-hour video from 20 years ago that influenced me. Unfortunately, I don't remember the title and cannot find it today.

The video "Simple Made Easy" had a profound influence on my programming: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

As a graduate student, I have decreased my note-taking-during-lecture over time, especially if I know I'll have access to the professor's notes. However, I now take notes on papers I read, some textbook and lecture notes I read, and instructional Youtube videos (since you can pause them). For papers with algorithms in them, it helps me to write out my own copy of the algorithm. It's a similar mental process as if I were to code an algorithm from a paper -- that's when I really understand it.

I don't need AI to make art; I need it to extrapolate. Suppose I want to make a movie or a game. I can come up with some distinct art for characters and places and things. I want the AI to extrapolate from that information and build the rest of the world. I don't have time to make the artwork for the entire world/movie/etc. I want to feed it some minimal amount of artwork plus a bunch of scene scripts and end up with a unique-looking movie. I could then go back and enhance areas of the movie by uploading additional artwork (or descriptive text) to scenes that I feel were lacking something.

In that vein, take a look at Datalog and Egglog.

For something completely different, try the old Viva/Azido stuff. It looks like there's a stray MSI file online: https://github.com/abdullin/viva-tools/tree/main/files . Be sure to get the subfolders near it. It will run on Wine. You could learn Verilog alongside it, just so it you appreciate what Viva tried to do. Also, you should learn LISP or Scheme.

Yes, Gattaca somehow stuck with me over the years. It helps me value every team member.

If a person wanted to transcribe sheet music from recorded audio, do you know which library and features would be the best starting point?

So are they going for feature parity with librosa? I think that would be great.

Some books that changed me: R. W. Emerson's Essays, The Bastiat Collection (the why of free trade), Boortz's Fairtax books.

Like my friend said, we need anonymous on/off ramps: https://x.com/LBRYcom/status/1628105970122358801

The article doesn't go into pointers to interfaces, which is a place of many footguns. It also leaves out generics. Suppose I have this structure:

  type State[TValue cmp.Ordered, TCost any] interface {
    TransitionTo(context Context[TValue, TCost], value TValue) State[TValue, TCost]
    ... other methods

where Context is also a generic interface. I should add a TContext generic type to State instead of casting it inside my State implementation. It definitely leads to a proliferation of generic types being required on all methods that touch these things. I used to use Go for its terseness. Generics make it much less terse, but I like what they enable.