Fishysoup

Relevant: some interesting insight into the inhumanity of it all https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/03/jeff-bezo...

There's no such thing as an "immune booster". The immune system is incredibly complex and nuanced, and there isn't a knob (or 10) that you can tweak to turn it up or down. It exists in a continuum of largely understood configurations, and it can learn and adapt (not always with good results). If anything, "boosting" it as in turning up immune activity is usually terrible (think auto-immune disorders, inflammation, cancer).

The "misinformation" people are battling is about a) unsubstantiated health claims and b) the fact that supplement manufacturers don't need to provide any evidence or follow any regulations regarding what's actually in the supplements. That means they can say they're selling e.g. Vitamin C but it's just sugar.

John Oliver has a good video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA0wKeokWUU

Try therapy and, if necessary, medication. Both of those have completely turned my life around. Things are still shitty sometimes (esp. during Covid), but way better than a few years ago.

The classification is done because rogue planets etc. tell us things about the process of solar system and planetary formation. Yeah nature tends to have a continuum of things, but the classifications are primarily used as place holders so that people know what everyone's talking about.

I think emergence and complexity are important topics here. It's important that we actually understand how the pieces come together though. Maybe that's a place for functional programming/logic and frameworks that make composition easy

Wonderful!!! Can you point me to any textbooks/resources that go into more depth on this (or if that's too specific, dynamical systems in general at the early graduate level)?

Something I've had trouble finding resources for is how to apply probabilistic/Bayesian techniques and thinking to chaotic dynamical systems. People keep telling me "Look up MCMC" but I don't see the relevance to dynamical systems (further than the notion that you can maybe sample from them with MCMC somehow?)

Anyone care to compare this to Clojurescript?

Hy got my attention a while ago but I haven't played with it yet. Would you find yourself turning back to Python due to missing/annoying features? And is there an easy way to turn your code into a Python script so your co-workers can read it? :D

Leisure time etc. is very important to creativity and productivity as well. There's a lot of studies that I'm too lazy to link to, but you can find them pretty easily.

Julia seems to get around this by making macro syntax explicit [1]: e.g. the macro "code_native" is used as @code_native (expr)

This makes macro wizardry easier to spot, but restricts how "plastic" the language is somewhat.

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/metaprogramming/

From what I understand, this relates closely to the "Lisp Curse"

People have been floating the idea of doing this for the life sciences too, where the cost of performing an experiment can be very high (animals, enzymes, local permitting and legal considerations etc. on top of the man hours). It would be very useful to see the results of an experiment you want to do(or something resembling it) but didn't follow up on it for whatever reason and would definitely accelerate research. And would probably help with the weird incentive structure and secrecy issues academia is pointlessly built around.

Under any other administration I'd support this (i still do, provided the motivation is legitimate anti-trust concerns). But it's pretty obvious that the cheeto prince just doesn't want his hate speech banned or his dissidents having a platform.

Is the map accurate a few stars out of the sun? Star concentration seems to be higher near the sun. Or is that just something done for visualization purposes?

Maybe you meant something slightly different, but I will agree with other comments that this wouldn't hamper progress. Most people don't enjoy doing nothing for protracted periods of time. We like to create things and make stuff happen. I think we'd make more progress, if anything.

My experience has been the opposite: things have been much easier and faster to set up in Julia. Yes, "time to first plot" is annoying after you update the plot package, but that's the only annoying thing for me.

Julia is a thinly disguised Lisp, offering all the wizardry associated with that language family - so it's very expressive.

I would like it to be multithreaded and for Org mode to have some more UI features (and I think a lot of people would - at least the former). From what I understand it's really hard to do that by building on the existing C base ELisp base.

Unpopular opinion: we should write the "new" Emacs in Julia (and maybe Rust).

Who wants to write the next generation of the Emacs concept in Julia (and maybe Rust)?

(mostly kidding but I would like to see it and work on it if there's people who wanna do it)

I think Numpy made it easier for people to integrate with a ton of open source libraries. Since everything is proprietary and the users are in a few specific niches, Matlab can't be as versatile. Also, each of the Matlab add-ons are another expensive license people are reluctant to pay. Sure, there are a bunch of contributed libraries for specific tasks, but comparatively the community is pretty poor.

Theoretically Julia is better for scientific computing, the only issue is its package ecosystem isn't as mature as Python's. But it's growing incredibly fast and there have already been libraries available for a few years that would be really impractical to write and maintain at such a level in C++ for Python. I assume that for science at least Julia will catch on a lot.

Maybe they're trying to promote a move from Matlab (which is close to exclusively used in a lot of academic fields) to Python, and not to Julia. Or maybe that's too far? Either way yeah I also find it slightly weird that this was somewhere in Nature.

I just discovered I've always wanted this.

That's a ridiculous system. "Everybody knows when it's ok to have more baby diapers in the trash" as a temporary hallway pass is a symptom of a failed mindset.

Right. If your job as a Phillip Morris or Nestle exec (both headquartered in Switzerland) makes people's lives a lot worse in some other part of the world but you don't leave your garbage bin out before 8pm the day before it's collected, then you're a model citizen.

Conversely if you need to do laundry in your apartment building on a holiday because you're a single parent, that's an outrage. The person leaving all the racist and xenophobic notes about respecting local traditions is a model citizen.

This has been my experience with Germany / Switzerland as well. Very punishment-based

Yeah I'm also pessimistic about misleading thinking + demagoguery. I do think that there's a good contingent of society that has a decent bullshit detector though. I guess we'll find out.

Maybe we ought to "summon" people semi-randomly to work in politics for a few years, the way you get summoned to a jury or get drafted in a war. It's gonna suck for many of these people, but at least it's gonna make it harder for career politicians and predators to assume office.

Issue is you have to protect the "choosing" process from interference.

Eugenics isn't the logical conclusion of the "leader caste" because we know that not only is it deeply unethical, it also doesn't work. We don't really know what makes someone "better", we don't know how to do it, and we don't even know how to define "better". Stephen Hawking contributed an enormous amount to society despite having a devastating genetic condition. Note, correcting devastating conditions in newborns (somatically, not in the germline - i.e. for individuals, not their descendants) might be OK, the only issue is where you draw the line. If you correct for sickle cell anemia or cancer prone-ness, should you also correct for depression? (assuming we ever figure out how to do that).

I think you have a good point about democracy maybe not benig the full answer. It seems to be a very flexible/enduring system so far (more so than e.g. fascism or communism), but technology might poke huge holes in it regarding free will (manipulating people's emotions to vote for someone, for example). Yuval Harari talks about this a lot in "21 ideas for the 21st century".

Awesome! Is there any kind of resource where you can meet people and brainstorm about a project you might want to develop? Is this resource one of the better places to do that?

I'm new to software development (have so far only done scientific computing or machine learning and haven't had to spend much time thinking about the many facets of software engineering), and it would be great to join and learn from people on fun projects.