biofox

Thank you. You just unlocked a repressed trauma.

I ask for confidence scores in my custom instructions / prompts, and LLMs do surprisingly well at estimating their own knowledge most of the time.

There has certainly been an overreaction, and it continues to be the case even after efforts have been walked back.

I have yet to hear a good justification for why people who are not interested in programming should be encouraged to become interested purely in the name of equality, yet my institution is still spending huge amounts of public money on trying to achieve exactly that.

Flaky when under pressure? Irritating results? Sites look and feel better without it?

Sounds appropriate to me.

R and Matlab workflows have been fairly stable for the past decade. Why is the Python ecosystem so... unstable? It puts me off investing any time in it.

The red queen effect. We'll end up all driving flood-lit bulldozers.

The most egregious example is old CGA games that were written to work on composite monitors. Without the composite display, they appear monochrome or cyan and magenta.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7229541/215890834-...

It blew my mind when I finally learnt this, as I spent years of my childhood playing games that looked like the examples on the left, not realising the colours were due to the RGB monitor I had.

I hate that languages have become fads. The concepts have not changed, but there is a constant churn of languages.

I don't have to relearn natural language every 5-10 years, but for some reason I'm expected to when it comes to programming.

>Never underestimate the value of play!

I don't. It's my boss who doesn't see the value :(

For those wondering, here's the excerpt:

"There's been a big debate about the very use of the word Anglo-Saxon, so much so that people in our field of scholarship are not using the word [...] because of the connotations that Anglo-Saxon now has with the far right"

Soon we won't be able to use the word "right" to indicate direction. It'll be left and not-left.

Nope. He's typing that from an old Amiga over a 600 baud connection.

Just read his post where he describes receiving his diagnosis and initial treatment.

https://itila.blogspot.com/2015/08/unexpected-signs-of-malig...

Now I feel emotionally exhausted. I really hope I live long enough to see cancer eradicated.

Key sentence:

"Analyzing fairness ideals, we find that MBA students are less likely to be strict meritocrats than the broader population"

"Error: You do not have sufficient permissions to access this project."

:(

They also make for great retro PowerPoint backgrounds :)

That's absolutely horrifying! Glad to hear you've managed to move past it, as it would have absolutely broken me.

My home was searched by the police for something much less serious (buying lab equipment, completely legally), and the experience left me having panic attacks every time there was a knock at the door.

> [Maxwell] entertained guests at parties with booze, cigars and sailboat trips. Scientists had never seen anything like him.

> “We would get dinner and fine wine, and at the end he would present us a cheque – a few thousand pounds for the society. It was more money than us poor scientists had ever seen.”

Similar to what Jeffrey Epstein did.

It's a somewhat selective history. Off the top of my head:

Kepler developed his ideas while at the University of Graz. [16th century]

Galileo built his first telescopes while a professor at the University of Padua. [16th - 17th century]

Newton did all of his work while at Cambridge (although, admittedly, it took the plague and a lockdown for him to have his annus mirabilis). [17th century]

William of Ockham (of Razor fame) did his work at Oxford. [14th century]

Giordano Bruno did the work that got him burnt at the stake while at the University of Paris (and briefly Oxford). [16th century]

Roger Bacon developed the scientific method while at Oxford. [13th century]

Agreed! Skipped it, as it's one that divides the fandom, but it hits all of the notes for a slow, cerebral, sci-fi thriller.

Similarly, in the Star Trek universe, the original films captured all of the local optima:

Wrath of Khan - Star Trek does a Shakespearian tragedy.

The Voyage Home - Star Trek does a family-friendly time-travel romp.

The Undiscovered Country - Star Trek does political allegory.

And just like The Matrix, later films do not exist.

I'm a neuroscientist by training, and that doesn't match my understanding (although the definitions might have changed).

Inflammation would be an instance of nociceptive pain, and an NSAID would alleviate it by reducing the inflammation; and most tissue damage will result in inflammation.

Neuropathic pain, on the other hand, would be due to damage of the nerves themselves, and NSAIDs are completely useless here (ask anyone with sciatica or other nerve entrapment)

If you contextualise the outmoded ideas as part of the Great Conversation [1], and the story of how we reached our current understanding, rather than objective statements of fact, then they becomes a lot more valuable and worthy of study.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Conversation

Two more examples of exchanges that were kept secret:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchor_telephone_exchange

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_telephone_exchange

This is an impressive feat of cataloguing!

Considering the telecom system is at the bedrock of almost all modern technologies, it really doesn't get enough love or attention in the public mind.

The dull derelict-looking, and often graffitied, buildings that house the system doesn't reflect just how cool the infrastructure is.

I used to follow dozens of blogs back when most sites supported RSS.

I love reading thoughtfully crafted content, but I don't want my inbox filled with email alerts, and I don't have time to check every blog's website to see if they've posted anything recently.

Will RSS ever make a comeback? :(

How is turning it into fuel pellets not recycling? It's giving it a second life, rather than going into a landfill.

And those grant awards need to demonstrate how they benefit the USA. Many are (were) related to disease surveillance in developing countries to prevent pandemics, or collaborations with countries that are more advanced than the US in niche areas.

>If you don't need statistics, you did the wrong experiment.

~Psychologists

>What are statistics?

~Computer scientists

This has been repeated in several places, but it's not entirely accurate. Having looked through a partial list of the studies that were cancelled, many of them seemed to be looking at the effects of sex hormones (e.g. on memory or wound healing). These could involve transgenic mice that overexpress hormones or receptors, but also injection of exogenous hormones.

Still a ridiculous reason to defund medical research.

The design is sound, just not the order of assembly shown. For the bench, the lower bricks are suspended by the upper ones, so would need to be assembled separately before connecting to the legs.