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amdsn

99 karma · joined May 29, 2018

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amdsn··on Nearly 200 people under observation after Irkutsk lab worker dies from plague
So far I have seen claims of her contracting it doing fieldwork in Buryatia only in telegram groups with no sources. The head of Buryatia Tsydenov released a statement saying she had not been there and that the republic doesn't have animals that carry it.
amdsn··on GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks
I had several small requests for moderation (deleting and banning spammers posting spam/crypto scam issues/PRs in my repos and ones I contribute to) answered within a day earlier this year after more than a decade of never needing to request moderation. I'm not defending GH here as it's obviously unacceptable that the OP's issue took this long, but they definitely do or at least did have mods. I would guess they need a lot more of them if something this serious went unaddressed, or maybe the ones I interacted with are now gone and have not been backfilled.
amdsn··on Autism mutations drive neurodevelopmental pathology
>It still frustrates me to no end that almost every neuroimaging study you read by default excludes those with IQs less than 80, while our cohort has managed, through very hard work, managed to image individuals with IQs in the 20-60 range with regular success.

I appreciate the effort it takes to include that group. My brother has severe/low functioning autism and he also has very limited language capability (limited vocabulary with simplified grammatical constructions, mix of ASL/SEE signs and spoken words, difficulty producing certain sounds). I've always found it odd that even studies that mainly use data gathered by imaging or other medical tests that don't rely on the subject's mental capacity to participate almost always have no subjects that resemble him at all. I've always assumed it's because it's significantly harder to manage such subjects and probably also very likely for their families to be unable to bring them in for testing in studies that span years.

amdsn··on A week of using Codex more than Claude
If they have in mind what I think of when I think of claude comments then frequently they are only relevant to the back and forth that produced the code and are exaggerated to the point of being misleading. A very common example is to land on something that isn't quite right or doesn't quite work, prompt an adjustment, and then the adjustment will have some grandiose prose about "preventing the critical bug that shipped once." People just need to clean up such litter manually but it would be nice if the models generated less of it.
amdsn··on DHL Set to Transport Goods on New Wind-Powered Cargo Ships
I find it hard to believe that you wouldn't lose any time you gain in loading/unloading to transit time inconsistency when you have to rely on wind. This is not even to mention the fact that these ships cannot make good use of big modern ports with cranes and the best logistical connections and that it would take 100+ of them with hundreds of crew to move as much as a single container ship can with 20 people. I could see them being useful in niche scenarios like cabotage within island/archipelago nations or shipping small loads on irregular schedules, but for anything else it is very hard to beat a container ship.
amdsn··on The Case for Free Online Books (2014)
The best textbooks I used in uni were either free or extremely cheap (Linear Algebra done right comes to mind, it was 30-40$, and at least the most recent edition is completely free online. I can't remember if the edition that I bought had that option). More than once I had a professor who was in the process of drafting a textbook or had already written one and it was simply given to everyone in their section for free. Paying hundreds of dollars for intro mathematics books that were glorified collections of practice problems just to get access to the online homework was insulting compared to the care put into those texts some professors gave out for free.

I wouldn't expect every professor to write their own, but I think universities should at least work on some sort of in-house solution for the intro text problem that all the instructors could use, especially public ones. It is absurd that most of those courses are structured to gate homework grades behind an expensive purchase of what is usually a sub-par text.

amdsn··on Please Use AI
I really don't understand taking the author's silly hyperspecific examples of unique humans in his life as berating the reader for not knowing exactly those same people. I read it as "remember all the unique people you know and try reaching out to them instead of going to AI or the internet."
amdsn··on New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
I find slovio to be jarring. It's like someone took vaguely slavic words and slammed Esperanto-inspired grammar onto them. Something like Interslavic at least has noun/verb morphology that is much more familiar to all Slavic language speakers. I could imagine myself actually speaking Interslavic, but not the case for Slovio. It's simply too strange.

Straight from the Slovio website:

>Slovio es novju mezxunarodju jazika ktor razumijut cxtirsto milion ludis na celoju zemla.

>Slovio is a new international language that 400 million people on the planet understand

I am a Russian speaker so the copula "es" being written is strange but obviously I speak other languages that use their copula in the present tense so that's not so bad, but to 100% of slavic speakers "jazik" (tongue/language) is masculine, yet the adjectives here are reminiscent of ones for a feminine noun in the accusative case which is doubly weird as that case would also make no sense here. The second half of the sentence isn't so bad aside from "ludis" (-s plural is alien to the entire family) and "na celoju zemla" (more confusion where my brain expects a different case form). It's just odd that it completely drops noun cases on the floor when almost all the Slavic languages still have healthy productive inflection systems.

amdsn··on How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post
I'm not sure about all of the ones they host, but for the crossword app you need to subscribe for full access.
amdsn··on American Dialect Society 2025 Word of the Year Is "Slop"
I remember slop, sloppa, etc. were frequently used terms on /ck/ (the cooking board) long before any nouns and adjectives were prepended to them. it is unfortunate that most 4chan lingo nowadays enters the mainstream via the /pol/ -> twitter human centipede, which usually means the words pick up a certain awful flavor from that board.
amdsn··on Kitchen optimizations
An appropriate oil (canola/peanut) and having everything that's going to go in the pan prepped before you even get the heat going are the main things to minimize smoke, but if you're cooking something that really calls for max heat you'll get smoke periodically as the oil returns to that temp unless your burner can't get the pan up to the smoke point of the oil. Prep is very important since adding ingredients absorbs a lot of heat so if you're cooking something that needs smoking hot oil you can immediately add ingredients in when the oil hits temp and that will absorb energy to bring the temp back down. It also helps you get it done asap. If you have to fumble around for stuff or prep ingredient 4 on the side while the pan is already in use for ingredient 1/2/3 it's very easy to loose track of things and end up with a pan that just sits there smoking. Also add the oil just before you start cooking, don't let it heat up with the pan.

Practically speaking in a home kitchen you also don't have to cook with heat that high, even if you're using a wok. There are plenty of recipes that call for lower temps, and you can often even make things that do call for high temps on a lower one instead. If you're dedicating to cooking that way you could also look into improving your vent hood if that's an option in your housing setup.

amdsn··on End of Japanese community
Yeah it's really jarring to be reading a text in not-english that seems somewhat normal and then to trip over some extremely American reference that makes it obvious it was auto translated. I just want things to have explicit language toggles or maybe allow me to hover over some text to see the translation. Google even allows you to set multiple languages and they still insist on auto translation between 2 languages I have told them I know.
amdsn··on The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy and four times subprime
I don't share your doubts. Even people not directly exposed to the bubble may be indirectly exposed by way of funds they've invested in or retirement accounts, or even just by having invested in something that invested in something that may evaporate with the bubble. Not to mention jobs that may disappear, which will result in the people who held those jobs being less able to spend their money, which has knock-on effects in the rest of the economy if it happens at large enough scale.
amdsn··on PEP 810 – Explicit lazy imports
I think a feature like this sees best use in short lived programs (where startup time is a disproportionate percentage of total run time) and programs where really fast startup is essential. There are plenty of places where I could imagine taking advantage of this in my code at work immediately, but I share your concern about unpredictability when libraries we use are also making use of it. It wouldn't be fun to have to dive into dependencies to see what needs to be touched to trigger lazy imports at the most convenient time. Unless I am misunderstanding and a normal import of a module means that all of its lazy imports also become non-lazy?
amdsn··on A recent chess controversy
Getting any kind of information from a chess engine would be sufficient to gain an edge for a good player. Even something as simple as a nudge that there is a high value move in a position with no information about what the actual move is could be enough. Big chess tournaments tightly control phones and other devices for this reason. That's on a single-match level. On a tournament level there have been allegations of collusion where players will intentionally arrange their own matches to either be quick draws (to get a break to focus on other matches) or to give points to a designated player to help them win the tourney, Fischer famously accused Soviet chess players of doing this.
amdsn··on They tried Made in the USA – it was too expensive for their customers
>The changing conditions are self-imposed

They are right now sure, but the scenario as quoted in the previous post could just as easily have risen from China's side as a response to some geopolitical drama and the US would have been just as unprepared for it as it was for the current self foot shooting. A strong manufacturing base is a national security asset and the US has mostly allowed it to rot out. Some niches have been propped up by defense spending like weapons design and manufacturing or military shipbuilding, but even those are downstream industries that need a general base to stand on that they no longer have and it shows.

amdsn··on Evolving OpenAI's Structure
it is opt in until they manage to convince some government to allow them to be the contracted provider of "humanness verification" that is then made a prerequisite to access services.
amdsn··on Ergo: Erlang-inspired event driven actor framework in Go
NIFs have the downside of potentially bringing down the VM don't they? It's definitely true that the glue code can be a pain and may involve warping the foreign code into having a piece that plays along nicely with what erlang expects. I messed around with making erlang code and python code communicate using erl_interface and the code to handle messages pretty much devolved into "have a running middleman process that invokes erl_interface utilities in python via a cffi wrapper, then finally call your actual python code." Some library may exist or could be written to help with that, but it's a lot when you just wanna invoke some function elsewhere. I also have not tried using port drivers, the experience may be a bit different there.
amdsn··on Weak supervision to isolate sign language communicators in crowded news videos
Think of it more like "why is it important to have Spanish as an option for captions in an area that knows it has a large audience of L1 Spanish speakers?". English/<insert dominant local language> is pretty much a foreign language to many signers. Their native language is ASL or whatever other sign language they know, and these languages aren't just 1:1 mappings of words in the local dominant language to hand signals. They have many dimensions of expression for encoding meaning like facial expression/body motions, speed of the sign, amount of times they repeat the sign that have grammatical meaning that spoken languages express with inflection (noun cases, different verb forms) or additional words. For example, where an English speaker would use words like "very" or "extremely" or choose adjectives with more intense connotations an ASL signer would repeat or exaggerate the sign they want to emphasize (often by signing it more quickly, but it frequently involves intensifying multiple parts of the sign like the entire motion or the facial expression as well).
amdsn··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2024)
Location: US (EST)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Java, Kotlin, Python, docker, Typescript, Javascript

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11hiU4zrcpO7MPuUYiru8io-M...

Email: dodsonn[at]gmail[dot]com

Strong preference for backend work, but I am open to full stack work that leans backend. I have a particular interest in working with BEAM languages (erlang, elixir) if anyone using those in their stack is looking for devs.

amdsn··on $5.6B cloud company Fivetran acquired its way to survival
I can confirm I've encountered this as well. In our case it was with shopify. There are some product_* tables that cannot be turned off without turning off product entirely and they can be incredibly expensive to sync. It's a very poor experience compared to something like airbyte where you pretty much get full control and can even edit the connectors if you have the dev manpower. The fact that adding new tables to your schema is on by default also really rubs me the wrong way. If you don't disable this or very closely monitor what new tables get added a reasonable connector can suddenly balloon in costs.
amdsn··on Why Arabic Is Terrific (2011)
> So much so, in the process of modernising Turkish, about 90 years ago, whatever little concept of gender Turkish had was completely stripped from the language, leaving only 'it'

Do you have a source for that at all? Lack of grammatical gender is a feature of the entire family so I would be surprised if there were somehow "remnants" of it that were present as recently as Ataturk's reforms. Removing loans that happen to be gendered in their source language don't really count.

amdsn··on Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Search
Another frustrating thing with google search is when it translates (or attempts to translate) queries for you and then fails to show you any results in the language of what you typed in. Even with languages specified in my google account I can't get it to stop without quoting part of search. I've switched to using yandex for a lot of searches just to avoid it.
amdsn··on The Museum of Soviet Space Travel
I think the Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow near VDNKh would fit that better. I'm very biased as I've been dozens of times due to it being free to students and conveniently located to where I lived in Moscow, but it's massive and directly under a huge monument to the space program, plus the park around it is full of dedications and smaller monuments to various figures in the program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_Museum_of_Cosmonautic... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmonauts_Alley

amdsn··on With more students boasting flashy GPAs, academic honors lose their luster
Except now STEM courses are weighted as of 2017 in all GA university system schools:

Effective fall 2017, when calculating the HOPE and Zell Miller Scholarship postsecondary Grade Point Average (GPA), an additional weight of 0.5 will be added to grades of B, C, and D for approved degree level science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses

I think it's good since it doesn't affect their Institute GPA but can help them keep the scholarship. I knew a lot of people who lost HOPE/Zell and the increased financial burden made keeping their grades up that much harder.

amdsn··on Advice to read before buying a course from Udemy
/j/ is the IPA for the English consonant "y" sound, /y/ is a vowel.