ilya_m

> Which would explain why current treatments don't really work ... [they] at best slow the rate of decline

This is called working! I am struck by the double-standard applied to assessing treatment options for Alzheimer's vs cancers. Many (most?) Stage IV cancers are incurable, and the main goal of treatment is to slow progression of the disease. Adding years to patients' lives is absolutely worth it, assuming the side effects are not overwhelming and the costs are not prohibitive.

To wit: Moderna added ~30B to its market cap on the news that it observed _statistically significant_ improvement in its primary endpoint for treating metastatic melanoma. Great! I'm as excited about this development as anyone. A new treatment option for a terrible disease that meaningfully improves on the current standard of care (Keytruda). Sadly, Stage IV melanoma is still considered terminal, and no one suggested that Moderna changed that.

Why not reset expectations for Alzheimer's? If we manage to slow its development enough so that most patients (who tend to be elderly) would die of other causes while maintaining decent quality of life, that's a win in my book.

The Science article here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeh0665

It's not the simulator, it's the simulator-assisted researcher who refuted the theorem ;-) The paper is here: https://zenodo.org/records/20189708

I venture a wild guess that the somewhat implausible "Yaroslav Murai" is a pseudonym, up there with Satoshi Nakamoto.

Your definition of an expat matches undocumented immigrants from Latin America to the US perfectly, and yet somehow the word is never used in that context.

How come a person living abroad is an expat only if they are white and an immigrant if they are not? I would expect better from the NYT... How about "undocumented Mexican expats" for a change?

Click-bait alert! It's not "federal data breach" (it's UnitedHealth, not gov't), and it happened 2 years ago. This fits the pattern of other "news" articles from the same site, see https://morningoverview.com/russian-satellite-shatters-into-... dated Feb 24, 2026, which reports on the Russian test from 2021(!).

A fine for faking a license plate, may be? ÁÀÂÀÄ are not in the Danish alphabet.

I am sure if she could pull the wool of JP Morgan's eyes, she could convince Scientist-1 that it was legit. "I want to expense it under Marketing not R&D, which would let us pay you more. My CPA's eyes glaze over, can you uplevel it?" or something

No, not for international students. Stanford (I haven't checked others) is very explicit about having a limited number of scholarship for international students: https://financialaid.stanford.edu/undergrad/how/internationa.... Admissions for US applicants are indeed need-blind.

> I wish I'd put $1,000 into bitcoins then; I'd be a billionaire. I thought bitcoin was a Ponzi scheme.

These are not mutually exclusive statements. Actually, this is how Ponzi schemes work ; -)

(Somehow I never connected Bayer et al. and Bayer & Diaconis. Wow!)

Do I think it's the best use of taxpayers' dollars (ie, mine) to screen for objectionable content on social media? No.

Do I trust the government to police opinions? No, especially when there's no accountability and appeals process.

Do I believe the overall benefits that harassment-free international travel brings to this country outweigh the costs of letting in some visitors whose views I disagree with? Yes.

> in Australia where individuals are expected to fund their own retirement,

I'm looking at the official statistics, and this is not what they say:

The government pension is the main source of income for 47% of retirees vs superannuation's 33%. Moreover, the proportion of those relying on the pension has increased between 2020 and 2022 by 3 pts.

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/employment-and-unem...

Please change the title to "Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018)".

> That reads like ww2 german propaganda. What did you expect. People in moscow to starve also? "Lashings of caviar"? Give me a break.

For better or worse, anecdotes of the caviar delivered by the crates to the top party officials appear in many Russian sources. I don't know whether independent historians confirmed these stories but they are believed by many. For very good reasons, since this is what the party did all along - it's the brutal conditions outside the party HQ in Leningrad that make these anecdotes especially poignant.

> Also, once the soviets repelled the german attack on moscow, didn't the soviets liberate leningrad?

Not until more than two years later. (It was not for the lack of trying - in 1942 an unsuccessful operation led to a complete loss of two full armies.)

It's not about front-running investments _in_ passive index funds, it's about front-running investments _by_ passive index funds, which, of course, ultimately comes out of the investors' wallets.

As a practical matter, since dealing in mutual funds' shares is settled after market, "front running" these transactions would be problematic. (Impossible, I'd say?)

_Workshop_ is definitely a verb, as in "workshopping a play". Its meaning in performance arts is different from office use, but they are not too far apart.

Easy! It won't work and it would make things worse.

I recommend Frank McSherry's real-time log of working through AoC 2023 using a SQL dialect:: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2024...

The most powerful primitive that the dialect has is (mutual) recursion, which is effectively a mechanism for outputting a fixed-point of a query.

The paper is here: http://www.daemonology.net/hyperthreading-considered-harmful...

As its author noted, the paper has done fine ciation- and impact-wise.

Beautiful, thanks for sharing it!

I think the portfolio argument is an unnecessary detour though. There's a two-line proof by induction.

1. The payoff in the base case of (0,1) or (1,0) is 2.

2. If we are at (r,b), r >=b , have $X, and stake (r-b)/(r+b) on red, the payoff if we draw red and win is X * (1+(r-b)/(r+b)) * 2^(r+b-1) / (r+b-1 choose r-1) = X * 2^(r+b) * r / ((r+b) * (r+b-1 choose r-1)) = X * 2^(r+b) / (r+b choose r).

Similarly, if we draw black and lose, the payoff is X * (1-(r-b)/(r+b)) * 2^(r+b-1) / (r+b-1 choose r) = X * 2^(r+b) * b / ((r+b) * (r+b-1 choose r)) = X * 2^(r+b) / (r+b choose r). QED

> Oh yeah, and that anecdote you told about tectonic plates screams survivorship bias; that's the problem with anecdotes.

Very good point. For every tectonic plates theory or heliocentric system or H. pylori causing ulcers there are thousands of claims that are plain wrong. Statistically speaking, knowledgeable critics acting in good faith (eg, not having strong conflict of interests) are correct with the overwhelming probability.

The only problem with this business model is that once you factored one number, you kill your market - people will stop using pre-quantum crypto. (The obvious retort is that NSA would have harvested a ton of RSA/EC-encrypted traffic by then and would keep cracking ciphers going back decades. Unfortunately, old secrets is a rapidly depreciating asset class.)

Is having a stable, democratically elected government a requirement for permitting a nation to keep its heritage? What about having Starbucks on every corner - is this necessary or just optional?

Greece or Egypt had their share of occupations, coup d'etats, and military juntas over the last 200 years. Does it mean that there's an open season on their treasures each time there's a regime change? Oh wait...

Are we in a recession? I don't think so. There was (still is) a possibility of a recession, due to elevated interest rates, but the way fiscal policy works, through Congress's appropriations, it is hopelessly lagging behind monetary policy (the Fed).

I would add to this list Bernard Russel who won the Nobel in literature for being a public intellectual.

It's a chapter from here: Rumelhart, D. E., McClelland, J. L., & the PDP research group. (1986). Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Volume I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

We are talking about different kinds of "probabilistic" proofs. Igor Pak's blog post and the root message in this thread refer to statements that are validated only probabilistically. The probabilistic method, by Erdos and others, is a proof as rigorous as any. "Probabilities" in the this method are just a convenient apparatus for counting objects.

(As an aside, there's important distinction with statements that are believed to be true based on empirical evidence, such as hardness of factoring or the Riemann conjecture. If the bunkbed conjecture was refuted based on Monte Carlo simulations, it'd be possible to reduce the level of uncertainty arbitrarily low by throwing more resources at running more simulations.)