wsowens

Like many other people in this thread, I feel like passing what would essentially be a hobby project off to Claude robs the creator of most the fulfillment and gives the viewer less reason to appreciate it. But with the models being as good as they are today, I genuinely feel conflicted. If your end goal is to share something with others, why spend a weekend on a project like this when you could just hand it off to Claude?

Agree the essay has a suspiciously Claude/ChatGPT-like organization. This comment perfectly articulates my distaste for AI-generated text with words I've been struggling to find.

This is a pretty essay, but it also reminds me of this meme[1]. To paraphrase:

    Wheel is invented...
    "bro, the whole world is a wheel!"
    Books are invented...
    "bro, the whole world is a book!"
    Gears are invented...
    "bro, the whole world is a mechanical clock!"
    Computers are invented...
    "bro, the whole world is a simulation!"

As a scientist, it definitely easy for our current context to seep into our perception of science. Maybe our perception of metascience too.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyMemes/comments/12clqm7/br...

I've always been intrigued by Warhammer 40k but never really knew how to get into it. What's the best way?

Despite writing most of my procedural code in Python, I've always preferred doing my data analysis in R. For all of R's warts, the ergonomics of the dplyr + ggplot + the rest of the tidyverse are very tough to beat. My few attempts to use Pandas and matplotlib/seaborne have always proved frustrating. Based on this cheatsheet though, it seems like Polars addresses some of the friction of Pandas. Looking forward to trying it!

I looked briefly, but is anyone aware of the differences between Yew[1] and Sycamore[2]? Presumably they are both Elm-influenced(?) Rust web UI libraries named after trees, but it's unclear to me why I should use one versus the other.

1. https://github.com/yewstack/yew

2. https://github.com/sycamore-rs/sycamore

Rendezvous with Rama was one of my favorites as a teenager, hopefully the film adaptation does it justice.

People are often boring in conversation. Therefore, an AI agent doesn't need to be interesting to seem human enough in a Turing test.

It's disappointing to see the myth of the "Christian Dark Ages" still repeated so often.

It's true that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire led to a regression in social order. To blame this complex collapse entirely on Christianity is overly simplistic. There's obviously some casualties during this period of upheaval (like the Palimpsest you mentioned), but if anything the early Christian monasteries deserve some credit for preserving knowledge during this period of tremendous upheaval.

Many have also pointed out how Eurocentric this view is. Mathematics and science continued to flourish in Arabic and Chinese places of learning as well. Algebra, modern astronomy, and the printing press did not pop out of the aether the moment Europeans decided to start printing Greek gods again.

At the risk of sounding like a hater, I feel like the AI art doesn't add much to this listicle

There were many attention grabbing things (Cold War escalation, civil unrest, etc.) in the world when Feynman wrote those papers. I can't find the exact clip, but I remember seeing an interview where an older Feynman reflected on that time. He described a sense of hopelessness and impending doom hanging over him for years after his involvement with the Manhattan Project. Here's a similar quote to that effect[1]:

  ...I can't understand it anymore but I felt very strongly then. I'd sat in a restaurant in New York, for example and I looked at the buildings and how far away, I would think, you know, how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth. How far down there was down to 34th Street? All these buildings, all smashed, and so on. And I got a very strange feeling. I would go along and I would see people building a bridge. Or, they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things, it's so useless?

Our times are certainly challenging, but I hope we can muster the strength and focus to keep building as others did in the past.

1. https://books.google.com/books?id=WO9D_BaDDhkC&pg=PA91&lpg=P...

This is neat! I was wondering if someone would make something cool like this.

As someone who knows nothing about sentiment analysis / NLP, what do the units on the x-axis mean? Number of positive mentions?

There could be epigenetic or environmental factors to blame for a disease.

But even so, assuming this is a genetic issue, proposing gene therapy in this case is putting the cart before the horse. It's like if you had a memory leak or segfault in a 3.4 billion line codebase, but the issue was only reported a few times (out of 7+ billion active users) and you can't replicate it. Obviously, a patch for this issue would be nice, but first you need to find out what's causing the issue.

I feel like a lot of people in this thread are missing the point of the potatoes with no salt or oil.

The entire idea is that this diet is incredibly boring and will make a well-balanced vegan diet seem for more appealing by comparison. This way, the author's new diet will seem more exciting and interesting than if they jumped straight from steak and ice cream to rice and beans.

A diet of pure potatoes is obviously unsustainable and unhealthy, but this is only temporary. (IMO the keto diet that I've seen other commenters pushing is also unsustainable, but whatever works for people.)

Based on the article, we don't even fully understand the mechanism behind the disease. Hard to do gene therapy when you aren't sure what genes are to blame.

I guess I'm a member of this "No-Code" generation? My friends and I were playing Minecraft when we were 12 years old, and we're entering the workforce now.

I share the skepticism from other commenters in this thread. Maybe it's just anecdata, but I don't see my peers using super high level GUI replacements for data analysis. My friends in marketing, engineering, biotechnology, and using the same tools as the millennials before us: Excel / Google Sheets. In fact, most learned how to use those tools on the job or in college, not from their earlier education.

> Whereas just a few years ago, a store manager might... put their sales data into Excel and then let it linger there for the occasional perusal, this new generation is prepared to connect multiple online tools to build an online storefront (through no-code tools like Shopify or Squarespace), calculate basic LTV scores using a no-code data platform and prioritize their best customers with marketing outreach through basic email delivery services.

I have seen people using Squarespace, but again, I've seen older millennials pick up such software just as readily. My friends that are fluent in data analysis acquired their proficiency through traditional, code-heavy approaches (R, Python, a good dose of command-line interfaces).

I guess my point is that, if you want to fill this "missing productivity gap in the global economy", mere exposure to Minecraft and website builders is not a substitute for a comprehensive C.S. curriculum.

> It would be really nice if these teams focused on creating an interoperable standard for chat instead of trying to lock in users. Basic protocols like chat should be decentralized, and will probably end up being so.

Have you heard of Matrix? Because it sounds like you're describing Matrix almost perfectly.

https://matrix.org/

This is really cool and will probably fill the void that Firefox Send left for me.

Out of curiosity, how do you deal with all that bandwidth? Are you self-hosted?

For the example of H(X) where X ~ Geom(p), shouldn't the second term be multiplied by (k-1) after breaking up the logarithm? That is, shouldn't

  pq^(k-1)log(q)

be

  (k-1)pq^(k-1)log(q) 

Apologies if I'm off base here, I'm pretty rusty on infinite series.

Great piece, this is really making this concept more intuitive for me.