gumbojuice

I did a machine learning PhD while working in a smaller town in India. (not from US, but came from a research position at a lab at AAU in Denmark, my native place)

It's fun to read the piece, I worried about many of the same topics, but with completely different reasoning (e.g. I dislike megacities, crazy work culture, and I'm likely not google/stanford/top-tier material).

But in general I think going abroad for anything, not only a PhD, is a good exercise.

At which scale are you looking at? We have used Miyawaki to create a microclimate around our house, perhaps 120m^2, in a tier-3 town in Andhra. I have heard someone saying the minimum is around 10m2, in order to have room for proper diversity.

I hope there would be enforced regulation around this kind of thing in cities in India. In residential areas, it's common that your house takes up almost all of your available plot space, and on top of that mostly constructed from concrete.

Air temperature is already high (e.g. 36C at my location just now), and radiant heat from sun and concrete can make the felt temperature more like 60C.

It's sad that new real-estate layouts continue to be approved, which will only be good for this type of dense concrete hell.

Why is it called a deal instead of eg. a treaty? Less formalism may make it easier to achieve but sounds like easier to discern as well.

I don't use aliases, but abbreviations that expand to the actual full command. Helpful to type less and history has the exact.

I'm sticking with LaTeX, not as a fetish, but because journal/conferences still do not accept e.g. typst. Will they ever do? I don't know, depends on their willingness to integrate it into their toolchains I guess?

Every sci-fi is a contemporary author's idea of the future. The further our the more unlikely the idea. Would love the site to be extended to any sci-fi. The percentages could be automated. How close to Dune are we?

I'm on a relatively large Indian ISP, and my home network gets an IPv6 network assigned, which is directly routable. Didn't think about it until tailscale told me it was connecting over a direct IPv6 connection and I wondered how that was possible. Sounds like 90s network rampage may be back here.

I like to use llm to produce code for known problems that I don't have memorized.

I memorize really little and tend to spend time on reinventing algorithms or looking them up in documentation. Verifying is easy except the fee cases where the llm produces something really weird. But then fallback to docs or reinventing.

I feel like blog posts auto -adjust posts to some recent date for seo optimization, so most dates on blog posts are useless.

It's not great news for my old phone used for wifi at our guesthouse (let's a few security cams and our smart lock get online)

I find myself very rarely using window features of emacs. Am I missing out on something? I value mostly screen space dedicated to the one thing I am doing.

For one of my first papers during PhD, I had a blatant bug in my implementation. Only realized while doing further research building on that previous paper.

I think in any field it's natural to start out naive with an idea that may just be a few steps away from solving something important. Somewhere in the middle only to realize you're not, and then scramble with the ethical dilemma around your work, is it "good enough" or not. I was there anyway.

I occationally use chrome (not chromium) to get the cast functionality -- in order to bring a website to my tv.

As someone who is already happily using JuuceFS, perhaps you can provide a short list of differences (conceptual and/or technical). Thanks for a great product.

Are there journals/conferences that accept typst for typesetting yet? It is probably my main reason for staying in LaTeX.

Having composed pieces of academic writing, I would like that, journals would start to supporting typst, or, plugins/bridges to LaTeX/Word would fall in place.

For now I would not chose to write a paper in typst, because I most certainly need to convert it once it leaves the institution (even arXiv require LaTeX source).

Tooling around LaTeX is quite good today, with a plethora of IDEs helping. Personally I use Emacs' Org-Mode which compiles to LaTeX.

My isp does not use "ai", but presents me with their decision tree, which is hooked up to some automation along the way to e.g. check my speed. It works well, indo not have to guess phrases, and I usually end up with the option to lodge a ticket, which will be resolved by a human. (Better the human is almost always a local technician).

I could imagine a problem here in India, where there is no funding for publishing papers, especially for graduate students.

Emacs on my system is ~8sec load time, vs ~5sec load time for Code. I have not optimized either (but I have decided on using Straight as package manager on Emacs, which is arguably faster than the built-in).

I use LSP a lot (through eglot with Emacs-29). For each "mode" in Emacs there are alternatives to LSP, mostly what was there before LSP, which may be equally good. However, I found that switching to LSP simplified my setup, and having the same functionality/keybindings between modes is great, e.g. my projects switch me between Python, Rust, and Java, earlier that was basically three different "IDEs", while today they're very similar.