internet555

That’s so cool! I really miss Chicago some days.

Frankly, I only go on Facebook a few times a month to occasionally check in. I feel like logging in daily is not the point of the service.

I’ve thought the same thing

One of my colleagues spent a lot of time working on combination anthropological/aid missions. According to him, toilets/waste disposal was usually the number one way to help people in remote or less developed areas.

Strong agree. Unfortunately, it seems that many sites do this. Many I know refuse to use them for this reason.

This general area (epigentics) is what inspired me to take up a more serious routine of lifting. I’m not sure if it will have any particular effect, but I suppose I am significantly healthier now than in my 20s either way.

As a former employee of one of these (quite famous), the curricula are oftentimes relatively good, with an emphasis on practical skills. But it’s difficult for me to see them as a good thing given the issues marked out. Many of them take lots of government money (through GI bill etc) as well

I would have loved this during my post-doc!

As a kid I always thought spandex or whatever bike riders were huge dorks who got scammed into wasting their money. If you’re driving around your home area a few times a month (or even week) I doubt that you’re anywhere near good enough that your clothing matters this much.

Similar with people who suck at guitar but own a $3000 Gibson or whatever. I feel like good equipment while you’re bad just makes you look like a joke. Perhaps this is a blue collar ethic though

Really? I had one sort of similar because I took as many cross listed math electives as possible and avoided any software type courses, but even then I learned a lot less analysis, algebra, geometry than a good math student would learn

What was the Greek story (Plutarch? Idk) where some guy being hunted by some army captain crashes on some island and the local pseudo intellectual sophist says they need to kill him before the army captain comes or else they’ll be punished for either aiding him or letting him go. Then the army captain finds out they killed his target for no reason so he kills all of them for being corrupt idiots

I agree. Many view self improvement as being a jacked millionaire genius or whatever. Self improvement for me is if I managed to do some small stretching routine to keep my legs a bit more flexible that day, did a small walk, had good oral hygiene, and maybe read the newspaper a bit in the evening. I was never in the running to be a jacked millionaire genius or whatever the fantasy is.

That is also very true. I worked with someone like that who was really wonderful (and a wonderful person)

What’s funny to me is how many incompetent “thinkers” appear in meetings. Obviously, thought (even removed from implementation entirely) often has immense value. Eg, many people spent a lot of time thinking about arithmetic, linear algebra, floating point, compilers, and now I can go run whatever cool algorithm on my computer. But I continually seem to run into these people who seem borderline incompetent at anything but spewing out whatever pops into their head. Half is nonsense, one-quarter would be actively destructive if you tried to implement it, they always seem to know everything about everything but whenever it’s something you know really well you can tell that they are very confused, etc. when I meet these people now I just think “oh, you’re one of those guys who is good at saying a lot of things” and then move on. Oh well

Don Quixote

I could be quite wrong but wouldn’t a course in Bayesian statistics be a lot more useful for someone interested in inference or however you will say it?

Idk, on the job I was in at that point I worked my specified amount and then worked on developing my skills and education outside work. I watched as my boss’ project floundered, he ran out of budget for contractors, employees who were less weak started leaving and their positions not filled. As my boss started trying to tell me I needed to fulfill more of a “leadership role” I could tell he was trying to pass off a terrible project to me so I demurred. Anyway, I got laid off, got a big severance, got to continue educating and doing things like that while collecting unemployment as I applied for jobs after, and ended up getting basically a position at more or less my dream lab.

I understand it’s different if you’re older with kids and a mortgage or lot of health bills or whatever but I haven’t really felt like my fate has ever been tied to any of my employees.

I feel like it’s just headgames for your manager to try and convince you that making him look good is essential to your career.

Edit: in case this is relevant the shitty project was actually the best project in our department as far as I was concerned before my former manager ran it into the ground by trying to look good by promising dozens of features for people who didn’t use it instead of building something that worked and was extensible

Your boss is entrusted with other people’s money, resources, employees to manage it in a way that generates value for them. How he looks and how his image impacts you feeling like you got an interesting project is irrelevant except exactly insofar as it influences this.

“Make your boss a hero” is one of the most deranged things I hear managers say. At my first job out of university, my manager told me my job was to make him look good. I instantly wrote him off as a moron. We worked for a publicly traded company. Nobody cares about how you look or your little empire. This isn’t your money. You are hired to manage it for the shareholders, not to look cool or be a little rentseeker

For one example the notion of a generalized inner product and its induced norm is important for the derivation of conjugate gradient algorithm. My smarter friends have told me that anything involving cost functions and covariance matrices (as might arise in a log likelihood thing for a multivariate normal random variable) will probably end up with weighted norms as well, but I have likely mangled this. So to mangle things further I think that this is very important to many fields eg control or statistics

Certainly you would want a more abstract follow up for many cases. Even engineering or computer science students may have to learn about e.g. inner product spaces and orthogonal polynomials for their numerics class.

“Tv is ran by money; how am I supposed to be?” - Lil B

I work with a guy like this. The rest of us laugh at him but he thinks we are intimidated by his technical genius and immense capability for Machiavellian political maneuvering. In reality he doesn’t take direction well but he’s around because if you let him call you stupid a few times he’ll do a bunch of your work to try and show off.

Loeb library is like this but I’ve never seen anyone walk around reading them. Maybe this is because of who I hang out with :)

How to teach yourself ML in two easy steps

1) Have a strong knowledge of undergraduate mathematics, probability, statistics, numerics

2) read a book about machine learning

When I was a teen I ended up in a lot of outpatient mental health stuff (similar story, abusive parents who were very convinced they were normal) and the girls I was friends with there would outcast anyone who started diagnosing people colloquially like that from the main group. If anyone does it to anyone in my life I instantly write them off as a moron and probable manipulator.

I always figure if I should take something my doctor will just prescribe it

That’s what all my posts are about

I got in trouble for everything! And everyone hated me

This is why I think much of Christian thought is actually quite intelligent.

(Summary by a very intellectually and spiritually deficient moron): I am pathetic, my desires are all almost certainly evil, I can probably not even think one good thought let alone have a good intention without divine help. God, please please please please have mercy and grant me some very much needed horror of self and conformity to your will and help me to not become a puffed up moron who is full of himself if one seemingly desirable thing happens to me, which is certainly what is going to happen unless the literal creator of the universe helps me to do it a little bit less.

Of course none of the American Protestant Christians I know will like it if you say that since they seem to think Christianity is about being a millionaire who gives 30% to charity and doesn’t have premarital sex too much