jsomers

Yeah, and it's really worth checking out https://dynamicland.org/, because Bret Victor is actually doing this -- slash pointing the way to what such a world could look like. It just seems like now might be a good time for specific smaller parts of that vision to be carved off and developed further. I say that largely because of the advances in multimodal AI, which maybe haven't been fully applied yet in this area.

This was posted when it came out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45802029. It generated a lot of comments -- more heat than light, possibly -- and I wonder if instead of just taking the title as a jumping-off point, folks could engage with the meat of the article itself.

(I wrote the article. I'm a longtime HN user. I find that threads here lately have gotten very jumpy-offy -- commenters use a specific article about e.g. icebergs melting to have a conversation about climate change and climate change denial, instead of to talk about the merits of the particular article -- and I was hoping to nudge folks to read the full piece, then comment on specific parts of it. I'm not sure that'll work but figured it's worth a try!)

I thought the HN crowd would appreciate this story I wrote about the keeper of a university's lab animals. In reporting articles about science, and being a biology-watcher generally, I’ve had an uneasy time squaring my enthusiasm for cutting-edge biomedical research with the fact that this research so regularly involves breeding animals just to give them diseases and kill them. This is done as humanely as possible, of course.

The contrast hit me most vividly during the pandemic when I was writing an article about the immune system. [1] One of the scientists I spoke to told me about putting hamsters on warming plates, picking them up gently — in general, caring for and about them — and then feeling grief at their deaths. But of course understanding the immune response during infection with covid was a worthy cause. I felt no judgement towards this scientist; they are in a difficult position.

There was another more direct bit of inspiration, when I read this article [2], in 2023, about the toll that caring for laboratory animals could take on people’s mental health:

> Besides the symptoms Sessions experienced, those who handle lab animals may face insomnia, chronic physical ailments, zombielike lack of empathy, and, in extreme cases, severe depression, substance abuse, and thoughts of suicide. As many as nine in 10 people in the profession will suffer from compassion fatigue at some point during their careers, according to recent research, more than twice the rate of those who work in hospital intensive care units. It’s one of the leading reasons animal care workers quit.

That left an impression on me, and also armed me with a character: the forgotten-about, somewhat miserable vivarium worker.

The story obviously takes many liberties with fact — it is fiction — but I also tried to ground it in reality, and stuff that you might think I made up (the guillotine, the crazy VR sphere in the first paragraph), I did not.

I hope you enjoy! If nothing else I expect you’ll appreciate the illustrations, done by my friend Ben Smith [3].

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/09/how-the-corona... [2]: https://www.science.org/content/article/suffering-silence-ca... [3]: https://www.stephenbonesproductions.com/

Hi, author here. This article was many years in the making. It's ostensibly a story about reading minds but really it's about the unreasonable power of high-dimensional vector spaces.

That made it pretty tough to write: how do you explain dimensionality reduction, PCA, word2vec, etc., and the wonders of high-dimensional "embeddings" (of the sort you find in deep neural nets) when a lot—or all—of these ideas might be new to the reader? I'm not sure—but this was my attempt!