lalaland1125

It's very interesting that the group level results (table 1) of this analysis seem entirely opposite when comparing western and non-western countries.

As noted by table 1, all the group level results indicating that fluoride has a negative impact on IQ come from China, India and Iran.

When you look at the studies done in western countries, in particular Canada, New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia, Sweden, Denmark or Spain, you do not see negative IQ effects (Australia, Sweden, Denmark and Spain studies were not included in this meta analysis, but you can find links to studies from those countries in https://www.statnews.com/2025/01/06/fluoride-iq-jama-pediatr...).

Americans overeat unprocessed food as well. Look at portions and calorie counts in restaurants.

The problem is really quite simple: Americans overeat

Processed foods are part of the problem (in that they are tastier and easier to consume than "rawer" foods), but increased wealth and ability to consume food is also a part of the problem

Food has literally never been cheaper and tastier

Cuba has no money to purchase said solar panels.

China, the main seller of solar, has publicly stated that Cuba is not paying their bills

https://www.ft.com/content/9ca0a495-d5d9-4cc5-acf5-43f42a912...

Cuba has been going through a crazy major decline ever since COVID. It's pretty rare for a mostly developed country to collapse into poverty without a war.

Roughly 5% of the population is fleeing the island each year: https://miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cub...

A lot of research labs run consumer hardware for cost reasons and we are still quite far away from non-Mac ARM desktops being available to consumers.

The problem is that most of the consumer hardware manufacturers, from motherboards, to CPU coolers, etc are all geared towards AMD and Intel.

Ubuntu has more updated packages, which is better for a desktop system

Debian has testing, which can sort of get close, but it's not debian's specialty

I think you mean the buffer interface?

I think the buffer interface is too complex to provide directly to users. I think an API that returns numpy arrays is simpler and easier to understand.

Optimizing Python extensions is becoming increasingly important as Python is used in more and more compute intensive environments.

The key for optimizing a Python extension is to minimize the number of times you have to interact with Python.

A couple of other tips in addition to what this article provides:

1. Object pooling is quite useful as it can significantly cut down on the number of allocations.

2. Be very careful about tools like pybind11 that make it easier to write extensions for Python. They come with a significant amount of overhead. For critical hotspots, always use the raw Python C extension API.

3. Use numpy arrays whenever possible when returning large lists to Python. A python list of python integers is amazingly inefficient compared to a numpy array of integers.

> If it's that simple, do you have a theory for why it's not the go-to solution that gets implemented?

Most of the voting population are homeowners who have a vested financial interest in the cost of housing always going up.

So anything that makes housing cheaper is politically difficult.

> current economics cause a lack of stability for people to move forward in their lives

All of our data points in the opposite direction. The more wealth you have, and the more stability you have with government safety nets, the less likely you are to have children.

1. You want an odd number so the median is the middle element of the sublist.

2. One and three are probably too small

The key to understanding the difference is that transformers are attention models where tokens can "attend" to different tokens.

Encoder models allow all tokens to attend to every other token. This increases the number of connections and makes it easier for the model to reason, but requires all tokens at once to produce any output. These models generally can't generate text.

Decoder models only allow tokens to attend to previous tokens in the sequence. This decreases the amount of tokens, but allows the model to be run incrementally, one token at a time. This incremental processing is key to allowing the models to generate text.

I think the big reason why BERT and T5 have fallen out of favor is the lack of zero shot (or few shot) ability.

When you have hundreds or thousands of examples, BERT works great. But that is very restricting.

Truncating a UTF-8 codepoint is not fine because most software is not tested with partially broken UTF-8 so international users will likely run into many bugs.

Especially because concatenation is a very common operation so those sliced codepoints will be everywhere, including in the middle of text.

The whole field seems to be having issues with comparisons right now.

We really don't even know how Mamba vs Griffin compare.

FlashAttention is completely orthogonal to this. This work is about speeding up the computation of Q, K and V vectors while FlashAttention is about speeding up the attention algorithm itself.

You could combine the two.

> The Transformer models, used in this experiment, all have a single attention layer with model dimension and context length 32.

I think we are going to need to see more experiments here, especially because the theoretical motivations here are weak

> procreation a luxury

The data actually points in the exact opposite direction. People with the least wealth are the most likely to decide to have more kids.

Biased in what way? The authors provide solid arguments for why they think Hudi is a good tool.

The main disadvantage of sqlite compared to these other formats is that sqlite is designed for single machine processing. This can be problematic for huge datasets or complex queries.

These other formats easily support using clusters to process your data.

This is a Trump admin thing, with a delayed fuse so his successor gets blamed

The real solution is quite simple: trash cans

The reason why NYC has such a rat epidemic is because they literally throw their trash bags on the street. Which leads to some getting ripped open and leaving food for pests.

YouTube's anti adblock efforts are a good thing. For too long have a huge number of users been freeloading off free content

This is quite an interesting "recession"

The market does by pricing the land at a certain value

Giving investors a greater incentive to build big things is the exact point

The solution is clear. We have to ban the production of luxury cars. It should be illegal to build any car that costs more than $15k

The article has a very misleading title. It doesn't discuss or provide evidence of any "campaign" to convince people.

> who as of last year have no representation at all in local government

It's very misleading to mention this without stating the reason: they boycotted the elections

If you don't vote, you don't get any representation