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Re:So You Think You Could Be an Electrician? on Sunday October 04, 2026 @12:59AM (#49950786)
I’ve worked trades. I loved a lot about it! But I’m so glad this article pointed out the range of status: not all trades, or roles within one are equal. If you are an incredible welder who can run a perfect seam every time you can command a huge salary. For the rest of the welders it is quite different. If you can handle customers and a crew you can run a quite lucrative electrician shop, for the rest of construction it is quite different. Repeat.

I’m not saying it should be that way, but people need to be clearheaded that a top blue collar job is not as easy as showing up. There are real performance differentiators - reliability, judgement, skill, etc - and the numbers touted often belong to the top performers.

And anyone who thinks office politics go away in a family owned shop is extremely naive. Nepotism is default (and frankly reasonable. Why wouldn’t someone leave their business to their daughter if they were interested?). Large places are like that, too. Someone on a union job asked me point blank who I knew, the implication being that I’d have to know someone to get hired on.

I loved the camaraderie, being on the move, and building something physical. But it wasn’t a nice relaxing stable existence, either.

Re:Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D Scan Verdict on Saturday October 03, 2026 @10:37PM (#49950070)
Because you could use the point clouds to make great reproductions. iPhones could make make these point clouds soon anyway.

Of course, reproductions are how basically how all of his statues we see today were made anyway, using and scaling up the clay sculptures. The musee rodin still makes authorized “original” reproductions, up to 12 can be called original. These are authorized by the musee rodin, and account for 30-45 percent of their annual budget.

So a perfect point cloud could be used to make your own molds, and from their your own bronze statues. I wouldn’t call it “counterfeit” because that’s basically how they were done even back in the day, and why there are many “authentic/original/authorised” Thinkers/etc across the world.

Probably at some point walking around with an iPhone will be good enough to make a near indistinguishable point cloud, so the result of this legal process could be kinda moot unless they stop folks from using iPhones near the statues all over the world.

https://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/museum/institution/self-fundin...

“a more user security-conscious LLM is a good idea. I don’t know why it needs to be wrapped in novel-lengths of LOTR quotes and Sci-fi speculation” <-> “This post is like the ultimate expression of the idea that the only valuable thing writing has to offer is information, and not personal experience, poetry, advice, humor, etc“
Re:How to Exist on Saturday August 01, 2026 @06:39AM (#49133100)
Hired hands, serfs, migrant workers had all of that and more for most of human history.
Yeah I’m checking - I saw several other oncologists suggesting song a separate discussion.
Here’s a link to the abstract: https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/JCO.2025.43.16_suppl.85...

apparently it was prospective and randomized. I’m a little shocked by the effect size.

I'll grant that we could send humans to mars sooner if we really wanted to. My point is that not achieving a bigger dream doesn't make current progress a hype wave followed by a winter.

And "LLM's just make plausible looking but incorrect text" is silly when that text is more correct than the average adult a large percentage of the time.

this attitude is so ridiculously disingenuous. Surely if a computer can score incredibly well on math olympiad questions, among other things, "a computer can make plausible-looking but incorrect sentences" is dismissive at best.

I have no idea about AGI but honestly how can you use claude or chatgpt and come away unimpressed? It's like looking at spaceX and saying golly the space winter is going to be harsh because they haven't gotten to Mars yet.

What nonspecific advice do you have for immigrants who want to (co)found companies but are on h1b’s or student visas?
Re:Reflected Diffusion Models on Monday May 08, 2023 @04:03PM (#35866342)
they didn’t submit it here - I’m not sure they bear a responsibility to make sure their work is accessible to HN or any other target audience. If you don’t find an otherwise respectful and substantive blog post useful, perhaps best to leave it be.
An unsophisticated person looks at this and says golly I better get tan!

A somewhat sophisticated person says something like the above.

People who change the world will wonder there’s something there. especially given the sober and candid examination of possible confounding factors and mechanisms of action.

“There are approximately seven scanners per million inhabitants and over 90% are concentrated in high-income countries. We describe an ultra-low-field brain MRI scanner that operates using a standard AC power outlet and is low cost to build.”

This is fantastic. What a sentence to get to write.

> There are few good passive investments right now. There's so much capital available in search of returns that all the good ones and most of the mediocre ones have been taken.

This is one of the more insightful comments in this thread. The risk is not merely that Sam’s investments are not diversified, it’s that Sam has competition from more sophisticated capital. Truly passive investments often scale (and get more passive with scale). That scale attracts a lot of capital that can afford lower revenue, higher risk, and better expert knowledge.

Re:When Feynman met Dirac (2020) on Monday April 05, 2021 @08:51AM (#26698272)
This comment may be unpopular because it's not tremendously useful.
Re:Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms on Tuesday September 22, 2020 @10:12PM (#24562240)
I'm not sure that's necessarily true. It is true (at least with a non-constructive proof) that if you pick a 'random' real number then it contains all possible PDFs with probability one ( or that the set of numbers for which this is not true has lebesgue measure zero). But I'm not sure it's known that pi has this property.
It says mAP right above the table. If you know what mAP is then you know the units.

Professors will rail against imprecision to undergrads and young graduate students but they use it all the time in real life.

I can already hear my professors saying "stop commenting on style, what do you have to say about substance?"

Where do you work if you don't mind my asking?
I think I missed your overall point?
Surely there's something to learn here though. I haven't read the original paper but a quantity that's preserved across brain scales is either an artifact or a neat insight.

Your criticism reads like someone accusing economists of being outrageously misleading when they don't sample individual households but measure macro indicators. It's like saying Ramon y cajal was ridiculous because he couldn't image the neuropil effectively. Or like saying early optogenetics experiments were ridiculous because who knows if you're stimulating a neuron in a realistic manner?

And in any case, it's true that synapses are comically small relative to voxel size, but we also have some reasonable information about projection patterns and synapse number from various tracer or rabies studies with which you are no doubt familiar.

I haven't read the nature paper the press release is about and I'm not a huge fan of many d/fMRI practices or derived claims. And I've worked with enough mammalian dwi data to be skeptical of specific connection claims. But this strikes me as a rather interesting result even if you can't measure all the synapses at the right resolution: either the tractography method has connectivity conservation artifacts baked in, or there's something interesting going on.

Re:A billion medical images are exposed online on Saturday January 11, 2020 @05:50PM (#22022943)
In my experience, you are way off base. Doctors can be very arrogant but I've never met someone from another profession who could point me to research articles regarding their proposed plan of action. Doctors at major hospitals are often either a) residents who are in their nth year of leaning post med school, or b) expected to publish at least case study papers regularly or communicate with those that do.
Re:A billion medical images are exposed online on Saturday January 11, 2020 @05:44PM (#22022902)
Your analogies would make more sense if you spent 2 hours on documentation for every hour you spent coding or bug finding.
Re:The revolution of machine learning has been exaggerated on Friday November 22, 2019 @02:23PM (#21609040)
"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." This was true for a few years, until it wasn't.
I'm not sure that logic holds - swimming in the ocean isn't the same as eating swordfish with respect to mercury, for instance.
Your description of the localization approach is accurate, but this system is almost certainly Brainsight, given the screen shown in the image at the bottom, the IR camera in that image, and the shape of the tracker arm.

The general approach is straightforward: MRIs are have real-world coordinates. Anything on the head (TMS, EEG, a surgical instrument) also has real-world coordinates. To co-register the two, you need to associate 1) markers at MRI time 2) markers at TMS time.

Once you have that correspondence, you can position any other objects relative to either one, like surgical instruments with reflective markers or TMS systems or whatever.

FWIW, it's not like the doctor is going to send you home with a diagnosis based on this screening. The psychological burden would persist only until further testing and analysis. And in any case, human radiologists have FPs and FNs, too. The question is how close and in what circumstances are we approaching current human radiologist performance.
I'm saying that even within neuroscience there is large variation in publication frequency and expectation.

So if person from neuro discipline A and neuro discipline B are applying for the same job in data science, discipline A could get screened out because they spent years training a monkey to do a brain machine interface task while person B published five fMRI papers in three years. Neither candidate is going to use their specific neuro expertise, but rather their general data science skill set. One will be at a huge disadvantage unless she is hired directly by people who know her field.

FWIW that social standard, and the mindset behind it can really penalize some fields. FWIW, in some fields of neuroscience it is common even for very successful phds to not publish before defense, and a single paper requires massive amounts of work, while other neuro fields churn out short paper after short paper because the culture is focused that way, and the experiments less time consuming.

It puts some students at a severe disadvantage for hiring because they get screened out because they chose a field that publishes 50 page papers instead of 2 page papers.

> They'll page them to consult on something, usually waking them up.

IME they're usually not asleep.

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