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kgarten

2,134 karma · joined November 25, 2010

mad scientist
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kgarten··on Neovim 0.8 Released
Neovim user here. I also use VS Code and especially the Jetbrain products for IDEs. Yet, Neovim is for me just an editor.

- I like I can use the same editor on any platform. I'm a wearable computing nerd having several HMDs and small devices (devterm, raspberry pie, etc.).

- If it's my own platform, it's easy to compile it. It runs in a console and most of my plugins work on embedded, desktop and server systems. (could even compile it and use it on my hacked google glass .. with a twiddler one handed keyboard :D ).

- I like the use of keyboard-only and mode switching. It's more an hobby than anything else. I also use qtbrowser and Nyxt.

Also growing up with a very different Microsoft ("Linux is evil communism"), I still feel uncomfortable using VSCode.

kgarten··on Open Source PC That Fits in Your Pocket
I found emacs to be an amazing operating system. It just lacks a good editor.
kgarten··on A neurologist’s quest to solve Covid-related neurological disorders
data point of 1: one of the friends who has brain fog now does not drink caffeine, alcohol, is a health nut (eats healht, cares about sleeping enough and does regular e exercise... more than me). again data point of 1.

thanks for the "very helpful" suggestion.

kgarten··on A neurologist’s quest to solve Covid-related neurological disorders
I have friends who have long COVID (brain fog) since they got the disease ... yes it's probably overhyped and there might be a lot of misdiagnosis out there, but it is a real sickness.

it makes me sad to read on hackernews how it's probably just depression, anxiety and we should not believe what "the media is telling us."

kgarten··on Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis
agree with some of your statement, not with your sentiment. I find your comment slightly off topic. I asked the original commenter if they read the thread, because they answered with a link to a horribly weak rebuttal of the first paper and a even worse personal attack on the author of the tweets. so I should care if she attacks somebody "viciously" yet not if she is attacked in an even worse manner? Interesting.
kgarten··on Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis
please elaborate... you seem to know more than the Scientific community ... your emphasis on Justice seems you have a direct connection to God and you seem to know what happened + can make moral judgments about people.

what to do if your Justice is wrong?

kgarten··on Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis
it's not really apolitical unfortunately.

"We believe in holding the Chinese government accountable for changes in regulations and poplicies that can prevent another laboratory accident. "

why not focus on international standards?

kgarten··on Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis
Did you read the thread? The counter just takes the first paper she cites into account ... Not the second: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337

Both of them are interesting reads. I find a natural cause now more plausible after reading them.

Yet, of course nobody knows and we might not for a long time (or never).

kgarten··on Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis
I was talking about the second paper she mentions in the twitter thread:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337

kgarten··on Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis
why is this downvoted? this is an excellent thread with links to a paper that seems to show strong evidence against the lab leak ...
kgarten··on Scientific grant applications are getting heavier on hype
My point: There was and there still is a lot of racist, misogynistic stuff published in the past and today. The trials were just an example of that: assuming informed consent does not apply to Black people is racist, isn’t it? If you don’t believe me that race science is still publishable, there’s the Mankind Quarterly peddling race science since 1960. Do I want to see these papers in Nature? No! You want to?

> My concern is that legitimate science will be suppressed in the name of "diversity, equity, and inclusion".

Ok, valid concern. I am concerned that scientific publications due to bad generalizations support racist ideology as they did in the past. I can show you that racist stuff is still published in academic journals (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mankind\_Quarterly ). Can you show me where legitimate papers with decent studies (and decent methodology) are suppressed and not published? There are a lot of people screaming "We are silenced by the establishment." However, if you look at their work, it's often flawed and horribly wrong (in terms of methodology). Like I pointed out about the Bell Curve in another thread.

I read the Nature editor notes, as "be careful with your assumptions as we cannot explore and know some causation as controlled experiments in those fields would be unethical." especially highlighting the problems from the past (oh man... there are so many horrible sexist and racist papers published).

kgarten··on Scientific grant applications are getting heavier on hype
The Nazis were not about Ethnic conflict, they believed to be the master race ... that's very different.

It's interesting you bring up Blank Slate and the Bell Curve. The first I agree with the second I find horribly flawed.

For [1] who are "They" in "They are coming for behaviour genetics"? Nobody in their right mind in the Sciences refutes that our genes and biology are the underpinning of our behavior and that these change in terms of populations .

I'm friends with way too woke Social Science majors and they have a copy of the "Blank Slate" on their book shelf (signed by Pinker) agreeing with this. Even Science and Nature do: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1075989

Can you find a biologist or behavior scientist who publishes in Nature/Science and believes in the blank slate (that genetics don't matter only education does)? I really doubt it, that would be absurd.

The problem is with the population, I doubt that the population can correspond to anything vaguely resembling a race concept. Here the Scientific establishment disagrees with the Bell Curve and for a good reason (as Melanin does not tell you much about other genes and our identical ancestors point is not so far out ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point ).

To the Bell Curve, it cites over 5 articles from the Mankind Quartely, the Journal you found so influence-less (non from higher impact journals). It also refers a lot to work from Arthur Jensen, he published a paper in the 60s about that differences IQ tests between black and whites might be because of genetics. In the 80s it was found out that the Pioneer Fund subsidized the work (grants for the works were more than a millon dollar). At the time of the writing there was no evidence to support Jensen's work. The authors knew that Jensen did scientific misconduct (with taking the money), yet didn't care ... There are more stories (also in terms of statistics) about the Bell Curve like that ... Bad Science, don't even need to address the flawed arguments ... If you cannot work on decent scientific methodology you are screwed. If you then complain that you are silenced or not taken seriously, you don't get any sympathy from me.

If there is an intelligence gene, where is it? Plomin (the professor whose book got critized in a Nature Review [1]) hasn't found it even though he put a LOT of effort in it. Shouldn't we call him out on that if he claims stuff that's not there (like the Nature review did)? Or should we just ignore it because we still believe in stuff that was published in the 1960 in Mankind Quaterly?

> But do you think you could conceivably publish a paper in Nature which cites something from that journal in a noncritical way?

No, because that journal has shown since the 1960 that it peddles racist pseudo science ... Yet, your statement that you cannot publish this stuff anymore is just not true. It becomes irrelevant because it's wrong (not because there's a secrete elite that does not want to talk about it).

kgarten··on Scientific grant applications are getting heavier on hype
As it is inevitable that there is an influence, should we discourage or encourage misogynist, sexist, racist views? (or should we be very careful when we make claims about such views, in the past authors weren't careful and it led to a lot of misery ... kind of WW2 type of misery ...)

You didn't define worse ... For me the most obvious examples where science went wrong is probably eugenics and other Supremacist beliefs. People completely misrepresented Darwin. A lot of people died based on these misrepresentations.

What cannot be published today? I mean Journals like Mankind Quaterly still exist ... you find still a lot of horrendous, bad science and racist work out there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mankind_Quarterly

It's harder to publish papers like that in Nature or Science (as the Scientific Consensus moved away from a flawed view), yet I would argue that's a good thing.

edit: typos

kgarten··on Scientific grant applications are getting heavier on hype
Again, it's in the discretion of the editor. There has been and still is a lot of sexist, misogynistic, and racist stuff published in the past and today ... horrible stuff.

So you want people to continue publish racist, misogynistic etc. assumptions and implications? Want to understand what your goal is here.

I learned in my methodology class, if you didn't do a controlled experiment it's not possible to claim causation (that didn't stop people in the sciences to put out the wildest claims ... for example in genetics it would be pretty unethical to do a controlled experiment).

My point: in the past it was worse in terms of scientific integrity, racism, sexism (e.g. 60s versus now) etc. Seeing also the progression of the sciences. Show the opposite if you can.

There were scientific trials on poor and black people in the US without informed consent, because they were seen as lesser ... there were horrendous crimes against humanity done in the name of science. I think today it's better, yet you seem to disagree :)

kgarten··on Scientific grant applications are getting heavier on hype
Again, politics is part of science.

Your politics and beliefs will shape the research questions and hypothesis you are asking.

Please define worse. I think it was worse in the past (and can give you examples if you really want to read them), there was a lot of sexist and racist work done under the term "Science." I don't see that much work like that anymore ...

Yes, maybe some fringe gender science folks are overstressing sth. but come on, I don't see a problem in that (compared to how people misunderstood Darwin in the past ...).

kgarten··on Scientists, Not Doing Science
the author seems to have a flawed understanding what science is about ...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03067-w

kgarten··on Germany to Keep Last Three Nuclear-Power Plants Running
looking how bad things are in France, I'm surprised that nobody who thinks Nuclear Power is a solution to global warming discusses the high needs for cooling ... nuclear power plants need large amounts of water.

https://m.dw.com/en/french-nuclear-plants-break-a-sweat-over...

kgarten··on Working in the software industry, circa 1989
tangent: my mind went to a different Jim Grey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Gray_%28computer_scientist...

(the ACID properties database guru)

The about page of the blog does not tell me much about the author (it would have been nice to mention some projects or other milestones).

kgarten··on Put That There [video] (1983)
Nice to see Chris' work here. He's an amazing indivdual, hacker, and geek.

Check also some of his later works. Early Audio Augmented Reality work: https://www.media.mit.edu/speech/papers/1997/sawhney_ISWC97_...

And skin interfaces: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2971763.2971777

kgarten··on Writing like a pro with Vale and Neovim
It seems openly is just a folder with rules on your hard drive. Vale is also offline ... don't really understand your comment.

I would not use anything closed source and bloated as Word. I wrote my BSc. thesis in it in the 2000s. Could not open it correctly anymore after 5 years. It took ages to open.

Switched to vim and latex for my master and phd thesis. Never looked back ...

kgarten··on Tobii Pro Glasses 3
+ 1 using their devices since a long time and know the founders. It's stable and nice, yes the hardware of tobii is a bit better, yet the extensibility of tobii is terrible.

Pupil Labs have their code on github (you can also use it with none pupillabs cameras :). It's python and easy to change /extend. here's the repo: https://github.com/Pupil-Labs/Pupil

Check also the branches and who forked it ... there are a lot of experimental eyetracking and other algs implemented.

We already used them for a lot of research projects (implementing smooth pursuit interactions and similar).

Edit: added the github repo of the desktop software.

kgarten··on Tobii Pro Glasses 3
way way more :) The earlier versions cost around at least double to triple the amount.
kgarten··on Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources
"Conservatives" also believed that there is a "liberal bias" in social media. Pretty ridiculous seeing that there is an rise of autocracies world wide.

Citation for Chomsky?

kgarten··on Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
Have a Fold 3 and love it ... stopped using the iPhone 13 and switched (for phone/messaging a pixel 5 with graphenOS for the rest the fold 3).

Apple is no longer innovating for me in terms of interesting features in a phone. The camera is the only thing improving.

kgarten··on Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years
Long time iOS user and spare-time developer.

Switched from iPhone 13 to a Google Pixel running GrapheneOS for my phone and Samsung Fold 3 for mobile Internet. I love the freedom to develop and sideload apps.

Syncthing for Android is amazing! (all my pictures/music/files are synchronized between devices without any cloud service, no longer Apple Music deciding to delete some of my music and replace it with less ).

Gadgetbridge is amazing too. No more accidental cloud sync ...

SwiftUI is a mess and for the small apps I write for myself Flutter/Dart makes much more sense, it was easier for me to understand, learn, and write quick apps.

Don't think I will ever go back to Apple's ecosystem.

The fold 3 is the future formfactor of phones for me (I don't need a tablet after I got one, I can read/annotate papers, watch lectures using vlc on the go ...). The only negative point is the battery life, yet I get over the day.

kgarten··on Pattie Maes and the foundations of social networks
Maybe it's just my bubble, yet I would not consider her a "hidden" hero ... She's a celebrity in the research areas of Human Computer Interaction and Augmented Humans. She's a Prof at MIT with an impressive research career. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=r81Ss1cAAAAJ&hl=en...

Yes, she's not as famous as a Mark Zuckerberg, yet for me definitely not a hidden hero.

I love Pattie's work, nice to see it mentioned on Hackernews. Looking forward to a Dagstuhl Seminar we hopefully will co-organize: https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=224...

kgarten··on Ask HN: Share your personal site
https://kaikunze.de/

used Hugo as site generator. Source is here: https://github.com/kkai/web-source

kgarten··on Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?
Good question ... I spent a long time trying to understand probabilistic graphical models. Using them to make sense of time series data (more specifically on-body wearable sensors to detect specific activities in maintenance). E.g. Kevin Murphy's and Daphne Koller's work (highly recommend their books).

The type of problems in that space usually didn't work well with linear control theory, although I'm not strong in theory ... at the time mostly playing with some signal processing packages in matlab (e.g. Kalman Filtering).

Recently, I got interested in group and social dynamics (we recorded a couple of large scale datasets). I found an approach found in some of the non-linear dynamics practitioner's lectures/works intuitive and fun for me. You could call it "Explorative Experimental Computational Mathematics": 1. find an interesting phenomenon 2. record data, run simulations and plot data 3. look at the visualizations 4. fit a model /formulas based on the visualizations Iterate.

If I have completely misrepresented a field/research please forgive me. Just an enthusiast amateur here.

kgarten··on Ask HN: Which book can attract anyone towards your field of study?
Not really my field of study, just on a hobbyist level I got into nonlinear dynamics.

All started with Steven Strogatz' book sync. https://www.stevenstrogatz.com/books/sync-the-emerging-scien...

I then found the amazing intro course on Complexityexplorer:

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/136-nonlinear-dyn...

by Liz Bradley.

Since then I am hooked :)

kgarten··on I wrote a program that sends cats to my phone when I'm sad at the computer
It‘s important to make the distinction between facial expressions and emotions …

A while back we made some glasses with photoreflective sensors to detect facial expressions, got so many requests about using it for emotion detection.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9PMzpsDg518

Yet, that’s not what it does … maybe I was just naive and it didn’t help we called it affectiveWear.

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