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RandomWorker

982 karma · joined July 8, 2019

I'm currently at the intersection between computer science and engineering based out of Vancouver bc. Christiaanse.ca
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RandomWorker··on Dutch central bank moves 86 tonnes of gold from US citing 'geopolitical unrest'
On the grand scheme of things this is 12bil usd worth of gold. The GDP of Netherlands is 1.4 trillion USD. So, this is honestly a foot note.
RandomWorker··on Writing by hand is good for your brain
That’s what kept me from going iPad. At the price of a 1000 setup you can buy about 25 Moleskins with, 280 pages each, + pens. If you fill 10 pages a day, that’s two years of high quality paper. My rate is more like 3-4 pages a day. So, I’m just so far out. My sense is that an iPad would last 3-4 years then it needs a battery replacement.
RandomWorker··on As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work
Classic explore versus exploit. When I was a young researcher I was given a lot of impossible opportunities. Tried 10 and did two pieces of disruptive work. That work has accrued hundreds of citations and whole research groups have received millions to continue to work on it. I didn’t see any meaningful money from that work. Now, I have a family and my research is based on requests that have deliverables and pay the bills. My skills in fact finding, synthesizing, and presenting the work is 1,000,000x better. But the risks are 10x less in this work and the pay is 100,000x more.
RandomWorker··on LLM Writing Tropes.md
It's a beauty. We can easily detect the issues with Youtubers that generate scripts from this tool. I've noticed these tropes, after 30 seconds, remove, block, and do not recommend any further. I hope to train the algorithm to detect AI scripts and stop recommending me those videos. It's honestly turned me off from YouTube so much, or I find myself going to my "subscribed" tab and going to content creators that still believe in the craft.
RandomWorker··on France Endorses UN Open Source Principles
It will take time but yes. There are already numerous case studies. Libre office is already running on more than 500k gov computers. Anecdotical story, as a researcher I worked with a few French PhD students and they tend to send me documents Libre documents and spreadsheets.
RandomWorker··on I hacked my clock to control my focus
I love the idea of hourglass! Thanks for sharing I’ve ordered mine on Amazon today. It’s about a foot tall. This is also a great way to signal to other people in the office that I’m busy.
RandomWorker··on Stability by Design
As a recent Clojure convert of 3 years or so, I love reading how amazing Clojure is. As a solo Dec there is simply no alternative. It’s so nice to return to a project 2 or 3 years ago and everything is still running and humming along smoothly as it did when I started the project.

I previously worked in PHP, Perl-cgi, Java, and Python- webtools mostly based on MySQL and other SQL database flavours.

I worked in a Clojure only shop for a while and they taught me the ways after that you don’t go back. Everything can quickly click into place, it’s daunting to start the learning curve is very unsteep, takes long to get anywhere, but as a curiosity it was fun, then I started to hate how everything else was done now I’m sold my soul to the Clojure devil.

RandomWorker··on Makers Knowledge, "in the age of LLMs we don't understand what we make"
That might be true but at the level of understanding that the Greeks had of things - making fire does give you a lot. Flint, dry grass, fuel source wet versus dry wood, wind and soil conditions- how to deal with them, once you have a fire how do you control, manipulate it, and keep it going. All those things are learned through making fire. Then you can also piece together which fuels work best, that leads to more understanding and experimentation followed by more learning. I think it’s what I take away from this article. I think those ancient people know more and understood more about keeping a fire going through the night than i ever will.

When you use an LLM and don’t have any understanding what you asking about it presents a huge problem. I see more and more people just using what it provides. And then when asked about it they can’t defend it because the didn’t read it or even tried to understand it. This is in proposals and business cases worth multiple millions.

RandomWorker··on I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual revenue without investors
True, and the author also said that they are working with a 20 person team. But looking at those growth projections they will likely double in a few years.
RandomWorker··on I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual revenue without investors
What I took away from this story is that I forget that there are ecosystems outside the Apple App Store. I’ve become so accustomed to thinking of releasing on Apple first that I didn’t even know you could make money through Teams addons.
RandomWorker··on Presentation Slides with Markdown
The company behind the minimalist writer is writer had a presenter app called iA Presenter. https://ia.net/presenter

I’ve had it for a while and it’s awesome to write all the notes and stuff in markdown. They also provided a good amount of content on how to write good presentations.

Looking at these two offerings the iA presenter tries to look great out of the box straight away versus this one where you have to mess with the layout. It helps you focus on the content. I’ve done a few presentations with iA presenter and it’s been well received — note I’m a good speaker but not a great slide maker.

RandomWorker··on Natural occurring molecule rivals Ozempic in weight loss, sidesteps side effects
On Google I find that this is already used to treat diabetes: https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/semaglutide-sub...

here are the side effects;

Side Effects Along with its needed effects, a medicine may cause some unwanted effects. Although not all of these side effects may occur, if they do occur they may need medical attention.

Check with your doctor immediately if any of the following side effects occur:

More common Belching Bloated, full feeling Constipation Diarrhea Excess air or gas in the stomach or intestines Gaseous stomach pain Heartburn Indigestion Nausea Passing gas Stomach discomfort, fullness, or pain Vomiting Less common Recurrent fever Yellow eyes or skin Rare Burning feeling in the chest or stomach Stomach upset Tenderness in the stomach area Incidence not known Anxiety Blurred vision Chest tightness Chills Cold sweats Confusion Cool, pale skin Cough Darkened urine Difficulty swallowing Discouragement Dizziness Fast heartbeat Feeling sad or empty Headache Hives, itching Increased heart rate Increased hunger Irritability Lack of appetite Large, hive-like swelling on the face, eyelids, lips, tongue, throat, hands, legs, feet, or sex organs Loss of consciousness Loss of interest or pleasure Nightmares Pains in stomach, side, or abdomen, possibly radiating to the back Puffiness or swelling of the eyelids or around the eyes, face, lips, or tongue Redness of the skin Seizures Shakiness Skin rash Slurred speech Tiredness Trouble breathing Trouble concentrating Trouble sleeping Unusual tiredness or weakness Some side effects may occur that usually do not need medical attention. These side effects may go away during treatment as your body adjusts to the medicine. Also, your health care professional may be able to tell you about ways to prevent or reduce some of these side effects. Check with your health care professional if any of the following side effects continue or are bothersome or if you have any questions about them:

Less common Hair loss Rare Bleeding, blistering, burning, coldness, discoloration of the skin, feeling of pressure, hives, infection, inflammation, itching, lumps, numbness, pain, rash, redness, scarring, soreness, stinging, swelling, tenderness, tingling, ulceration, or warmth at the injection site Change in taste Loss of taste Other side effects not listed may also occur in some patients. If you notice any other effects, check with your healthcare professional.

RandomWorker··on ADHD Didn't Break Me–My Parents Did
Totally it’s all about the kind games, trying to frame every paragraph, sentence or even word as a first draft. Don’t need to wipe an entire document imho.
RandomWorker··on Introducing deep research
I’m a researcher and honestly not worried. 1. Developing the right question has always been the largest barrier to great research. Not sure OpenAI can develop the right question without the Human experience. The second biggest part of my role is influencing people that my questions are the right questions. Which is made easier when you have a thorough understanding of the first. That being said, I’m sure there will be many people here that will tell me that algorithms already influence people, and ai can think through much of any issues there are.

I do use these systems from time to time, but it just never renders any specific information that would make it great research.

RandomWorker··on ADHD Didn't Break Me–My Parents Did
ADHD and PHD here. Somehow I survived and thrived. I think for us it’s important to know that we are extremely slow on one aspect which is reading/acquiring knowledge/editing drafts, but really fast at making connections, writing a first draft, coming up with new ideas. I’ve always felt my input bandwidth is like dial up, but the output is high speed glass fibre. You will meet many people that are the opposite in academia. Just don’t get frustrated when people pull past you at the start, you catch up later
RandomWorker··on Cognitive load is what matters
This is the best article I've read on programming in a while. When I code all I do is work on one object or one function at a time. Working usually on the end result. The key here is to develop a quick and easy solution without too many issues. This is also the difference between new and experienced developers. Experienced developers have less fluid intelligence so build reliable simple programs.
RandomWorker··on Timemap.org – Interactive Map of History
Honestly there is so much more to North America than just Maya for decennia's. You can review the indigenous people territories back centuries ago. There are some really good organizations that are tracking this.

https://native-land.ca/

I don’t know much about USA/Australia and New Zealand but I can imagine they have similar recourses.

RandomWorker··on How can I grow as an engineer without good seniors to learn from?
Getting thrown into the deep end is awesome. This is a great opportunity to apply things you can learn. Keep studying and reading, ultimately solving problems even not perfectly you will learn a lot.
RandomWorker··on Wiby – Search Engine for the Classic Web
After clicking on the surprise me button 20 times or so, a few things popped out to me.

1) I remember this time, we had delightfully nerdy hobbies back then. Little side projects and no one really cared how it was presented. It reminds me of my Southpark website that I maintained with each episode a summary and some screenshots. I spend quite a bit time on it, with my little counter hitting 1,000 views at some point(maybe I was half of that).

2) the web was not created for mobile. Everything is pretty awful, and not accessible. Reader view is not functional and it hinders absorbing the knowledge from these pages.

But I do feel there was a larger diversity, maybe I’m too locked in to social media and Google.

RandomWorker··on Math is still catching up to the genius of Ramanujan
Caffeine is the most used drug in academia.
RandomWorker··on OpenAI Is Growing Fast and Burning Through Piles of Money
In the article they said that there goal is to raise it from $20 to $44 so there’s your number. Honestly, I can’t use it for work because of the privacy and confidentiality concerns we have with the prompts.

OpenAI showed the way that AI is great. But, they will also need to improve their service. I don’t know how much time they have until other players come in to eat their lunch. Apples new features look great and run on device. There is also such much time before open source models do 90% of what OpenAI does and run on device. Facebook is giving it away for free. If profitability is going to be achieved in 2029? That’s five years for players(Apple/fb/microsoft) that are making money today to run and catch up.

RandomWorker··on The 4-chan Go programmer
There is also the fact it’s much easier to write something when you know where you are going. When you start you often just make lots of items general in nature to improve later on.
RandomWorker··on Building a highly-available web service without a database
Honestly SQLite is just a great option. Stored locally, so you have that fast disk access. Does great for small medium and even larger databases. And you just have a file.
RandomWorker··on Texas woman gets 15 years for stealing $109M from Army to buy mansions, cars
In for penny in for a pound
RandomWorker··on Import and Export Markdown in Google Docs
Thanks for doing this! It’s amazing feature to use docs to compose and paste to my Hugo blog. Very good workflow
RandomWorker··on Philip Morris International has funded Japanese academics
They are now called global action to end smoking. Makes you think about all the so called good organizations that just don’t seem to be able to solve the problem. Quite smart though; fund an opposing team, market them , they become a lighting rod for all activism, then make sure to knee cap their ability to do anything through highly burrocratic and convoluted power structures, ensure your team is the CEO. And, ensure that they consider so many variables such that they can never make decisions. Or endlessly have good people write reports that no one reads. In fact, make sure that no one reads them and, have authorization on the final draft to ensure only vague and implausible solutions are proposed. So smart. laughable really.
RandomWorker··on The joy of reading books you don't understand
I had a huge complex in my youth , I simply couldn’t read as fast as my peers. Now, I realize that I was going too fast, and by slowing down, taking my time and reading slowly I could absorb more, and understand, and I had this amazing ability to never forget anything I did read (at least for an extended period of maybe 2-3 years). I realized over time that going fast isn’t for me. Better to go slow absorb, digest and ultimately retain more would get me where I needed to be. Never did well in school in terms of grades but ultimately I got better and better doing a masters and actually got sponsored to do my PhD. Many years I read but could not understand, but ultimately it was the joy of reading slow that got me further than the joy of reading and not understanding.
RandomWorker··on Twitter and the spread of academic knowledge
Honestly it hasn’t happened for my two micro communities that I follow related to my PhD and postdoc work. We are still all on X and mastodon, even though I have an account, it just doesn’t serve the messages properly and I’m unable to easily find new people. That network effect is super sticky..
RandomWorker··on Spreadsheet Assassins – A short history of "software as a service"
These saas do innovate, what will I do without my confetti animation when I drag the issue to done.
RandomWorker··on IKEA's retailer's solved global 'unhappy worker' crisis by raising salaries
In the article they said it cost the company $5,000 per employee that left before the first year. So, before they took action they probably measured the money.
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