a_tartaruga

Look at the pictures

There are a lot of different twitter accounts that are fun to follow. @Lvision_trading on twitter is doing particularly great work counting ships. Danny Citrinowicz analysis on Iran and Carnegie Connects media for how the foreign policy establishment thinks. Sparta "trade with conviction" podcast for more detailed market things. Commodity Context podcast / news letter is not bad. A lot of refreshing Al Jazeera.

That book is just so cool.

The recent major geopolitical shifts and their intersection with energy commodity markets.

The book Virtual Barrels by Ilia Bouchouev.

The details and mechanics of financial option pricing.

I don't disagree with everything you are saying. But you seem to be assuming that contributing to technology is a zero sum game when it concretely grows the wealth of the world.

> If everyone had an oil well on their property that was affordable to operate the price of oil would be more akin to the price of water.

This is not necessarily even true https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here

I recently went down this rabbit hole a bit thinking this was the obvious solution and was surprised to learn that the Reagan administration legalized all illegal immigrants in the USA in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control....

State control over employment and borders in the US is just too weak to prevent people coming over and so 30 years later this leads right back to the initial state.

Out of curiosity why has the LLM math solving community been focused on the Erdos problems over other open problems? Are they of a certain nature where we would expect LLMs to be especially good at solving them?

Pain relief is a major reason to go to a hospital. There is no safe way to get pain relief in a home birth. It is obviously a very personal choice.

> if anything goes even a tiny bit sideways you just throw your hands up and expect to lose both the mother and child

Of course not. This wrong in two important ways. Midwives are medical professionals. They can administer medicine. Most notably they can administer Pitocin to stop hemorrhage after the placenta is delivered. This is the most common cause of maternal death during labor.

The other way this is wrong is it ignores the option of transferring to a hospital in an emergency. Midwives assess medical risk and can make the call to transfer. Delivering mothers who are overwhelmed can also make the call.

> And you actually pay for this?

The midwife model of care has many advantages over common OBGYN practices. As one example midwives are often delivering 2-3 babies a month instead of many every day. As another example the person delivering your baby is someone you have actually met before and have built a rapport with. Some hospitals try to make this happen with doctors but it is commonly not the case.

Overall the tradeoff is worth it to many people -- it's about 1% of births in the US.

The two biggest benefits are reduction of iatrogenic harm and comfort for the mother delivering.

Midwives are medical professionals who have the equipment and expertise to intervene in the most common scenarios that require it.

Home birth is absolutely a rational choice in many cases. The author had a very strong reason to require hospital birth but in scenarios with lower risk it is safer in some respects to avoid the hospital.

It will still cost you 5 - 10k for a good midwife and you'll still want to be insured in case you need to transfer. So it only knocks off 5-10k from the total.

Me neither. David Deutsch had some interesting thoughts on why finitists are wrong in TBOI but I never fully understood it.

> He wanted to show that every efficient local algorithm can be turned into a Lebesgue-measurable way of coloring an infinite graph

To me this is quite surprising. Distributed systems were not designed to solve measure theory problems.

It is an expensive research project. Actually doing this starting from no experience or tools you're probably looking at 6 months - 1 year and 10k. A little support from trained biologists would help a lot though.

Using DIY tools and not being a trained biostatistician or whoever usually looks at these things you are very likely to face errors you don't know how to account for. I would guess the odds are high you'll encounter scary false positives for example.

It sounds really fun though, something I've always wanted to do with more time.

It's a bad idea for a bunch of reasons but you could always do it yourself: https://nanoporetech.com/products/sequence/minion

No major changes professionally other than that I have become a bit more careful about keeping my geopolitical opinions to myself. Also having some coworkers living in the Middle East makes the two recent Qatari strikes feel scarier. I had a lot of trouble doing anything during the week of the Iran war besides refreshing the news. I felt quite awkward around my Iranian coworkers knowing that my tax dollars were funding the bombing of their families.

It has taken a small but noticeable toll on my personal life. Amongst my family we find ourselves talking about the state of the occupation and how hopeless it makes us feel about humanity probably once a week. I can see my liberal Jewish friends having a lot of trouble being criticized and rejected from both sides of discourse in USA. I recently saw two jewish people shouting obscenities at each other while waiting to get off a plane and talking about Israel. Antisemitism on the street seems to be increasing -- I met someone a few days ago who started saying baseless hateful things minutes into our first conversation.

Probably like other people here I've spent a lot more of my free time in the last year learning about the history culture and politics of Israel, Palestine and Iran.

I have no idea the current status but five years ago I knew an acquaintance who was building this: https://sourcecred.io which I think is pretty close to what you're talking about.

TAN ETF is basically this if you think about it

Blockchain people consider Ligero as a modern construction worth using. At least last I checked 6 months ago. This work isn't reinventing the wheel and appears to be targeting a nice problem in service of a practical system. The author's country of origin also makes the work seem more legit because everyone knows Italians are the best at zk.

The surprising part of STARKS and SNARKS comes down to the nature of polynomials. It's surprisingly easy to tell two polynomials apart with a small number of random checks (Schwartz Zippel lemma). In light of this it's not surprising there is good reading comparing them to erasure codes which rely on exactly this property of polynomials.

The non-interactive piece is pretty straightforward you just simulate challenge response conversation with unbiasible public randomness and show the transcript (Fiat Shamir transform).

Another area worth exploring is how some of these proof systems can have such incredibly small proofs (192 bytes for any computation in groth16 zk snarks). That relies on the much more difficult to intuit theory of elliptic curve pairing functions.

This is my setup too. It's nice to keep the Claude tasks on a remote machine with no important state so there's no chance of privacy leaks or in case you accidentally allow them to rm -rf ~

You're probably leaving speed on the table but these tools are not hard to pick up in the future if you have good engineering fundamentals. If your career is going well and you have no need to go faster don't worry about it.

Basically everything is just faster and I can focus either on solving things that matter more or I can work less. I've never been a great developer but now it feels like I have the option to be one as defined circa 2020.

Code base is weird so maybe my situation is too unique to generalize. Overall its systems engineering across 10s of OSS repos in 3-4 languages and a decade of abstractions operating a biggish open system at scale. A strange mix of work doing both in depth slow critical maintenance of the system and fast shoddy prototyping on top of it.

3 weeks ago pair programming with Cursor in "Ask" mode and ignoring all agents was the most productive I could get with these tools.

Since then I've noticed this triple working really well:

1. Ask mode Cursor for my main track of development

2. o3 for learning about or checking up on approaches when more rigor is needed

3. Delegating parallel tasks to claude code on a separate machine

* small work I can describe in <3 sentences

* parallel debugging / explaining running at the same time I'm trying to figure something out to cross check work or preemptively give me some new ideas on debugging

* starting on bigger work that I'll mostly need to throw away and do myself but I'm going to procrastinate otherwise

Putting delegations somewhere else is key because I don't want my local environment to be polluted with a separate task.

Genetic engineering and synthetic biology. Synthesizing DNA and transforming cells. Designing better methodologies to improve efficiency, robustness, cost or scale up of common bio lab processes. Mapping out all bio lab processes used in genetic engineering. Unfortunately without going back to school to PhD options are very limited. The Thought Emporium guy and the 4-6 community bio labs in major US cities are the only counter examples I know of doing this outside of academia / industry.

I have a theory that if society could unlock a hobbyist class of synthetic biology tinkerers it could unleash rapid growth similar to the computing industry. I'm not sure if the problem is technology not being low cost and high safety enough or a lack of social institutions supporting people like this.

Don't worry you will still get to do plenty / more of the most fun thing: fixing code.

Came here to post this it is precisely right.

I have to disagree with this strongly. Git is probably the perfect software. It is designed around a mental model that is exactly matched to its use case. Far from copy pasting experienced developers are often fluent in the git model and use it intentionally. I took a look at the man page out of curiosity given your 95 percent comment and I would agree that the majority of ancillary and log level commands are unused. But looking only at the main porcelain commands I would say I regularly use 80 percent of them.

Reduce what you are trying to build as much as possible. Then reduce how much code you use to build it. Build something you can use as soon as you can. If you're writing a ton of code before this thing is getting used then how do you know that you actually need all that code?

It sounds like you're doing the normal sort of things that systems people do to get started. The fact that you have lots of ideas to jump off of is very good. In general just follow all of your ideas down as far as you can to the base systems. Write the TCP implementation for your HTTP server and run it over the internet for example. You've only gone too far when you start worrying about noise and debugging looks like randomly grounding metal things.

Some especially good ones

Sipser -- Theory of computation

Pinter -- Abstract algebra

Kleppner and Kolenkow -- Mechanics

Klein -- Organic Chemistry as a Second Language