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manimino

514 karma · joined May 11, 2022

Need to index some Python objects? Use ducks! https://github.com/manimino/ducks
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manimino··on Poor sleep drove me insane, and my long path to recovery
Promethease (1) is a great site for doing this. You upload a genome (which they promise to delete), and download an HTML interactive report. The report spans thousands of studies, and it will tell you about any rare genetic disorders or interesting findings.

The cost is about $18, one time, iirc.

(1) https://promethease.com/

manimino··on Poor sleep drove me insane, and my long path to recovery
I have used Nebula. Did a group buy of the kits with several friends to obfuscate shipping address. Signed up via a protonmail address, and accessed the site only through VPN. Then deleted my data after downloading all of it.

I believe it would be very difficult to tie my identity to my genome because of these steps.

manimino··on For Chat-Based AI, We Are All Once Again Tech Companies’ Guinea Pigs
Yep. Standard clickbait formula, stir up emotions, add no new information. So easy an AI could do it.
manimino··on OpenAI bought the domain ai.com for $11M
Which is a bit surprising, given that RL is the most likely path to the scary AI future everyone loves to blog about.
manimino··on [dead]
An article criticizing the US with a .cn domain. Chinese propaganda.
manimino··on Pre-seed, seed startups with employees in office have higher revenue growth
"Average % Revenue growth in pre-seed companies" is a very noisy metric.

Example:

Suppose you had one company doing $10 in sales a year, now it's doing $100 per year. 900% growth!

When you average 900% with the rest, it will skew the results wildly.

manimino··on Google cautions against 'hallucinating' chatbots
An AI model that can only repeat its training data would be no better than normal text search.

AI models are useful precisely because they can interpolate - make guesses that incorporate information from many examples.

And this interpolation is called "hallucination" only when it happens to be a wrong answer?

manimino··on Google cautions against 'hallucinating' chatbots
All these AIs are doing is sampling from some continuous space. Every answer is a "hallucination".

AIs are useful because many (most?) of those hallucinations happen to be useful.

manimino··on Ask HN: AI “white mirror” – what are some inspiring future visions you've seen?
Selling it as "free up the parents to do other things" is not going to fly. But enhancing the baby's experience or learning is fine.

An AI-powered rocker that plays soothing music till the baby sleeps would be great. People already use rockers, it's very accepted.

I would never have trusted a computer to be in charge of my infants. Even trusting another human adult is pretty tough already.

manimino··on American Dream For Rent: Investors elbow out individual home buyers
If you rented out that house, what would you charge? Would you charge 3k, and lose 2k / month?

That doesn't make sense; so how are landlords surviving in your market then?

manimino··on Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream
No opinion on whether the US did it.

But Hersh's essay indicates there were last-minute changes to the detonation method. That adds risk, which could have manifested as failure of some detonations.

manimino··on Blowing Holes in Seymour Hersh's Pipe Dream
When the evidence is thin, it's best to avoid committing to a belief either way, despite the temptation.

Related Paul Graham essay, "Keep your identity small": http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

manimino··on Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon
Apple hasn't cut employees so far. But nothing is stopping it from announcing layoffs tomorrow.
manimino··on Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?
If you want zsh that acts like fish, try "fizsh".
manimino··on ‘The Battery’s Dead’: Burnout Looks Different in Autistic Adults
This is the right question to ask. Caffeine causes mood swings, anxiety, and poor sleep.

After over a decade of regular caffeine use, I stopped it entirely last year. The benefits were tremendous. The "decaf" subreddit is full of people with similar experiences.

manimino··on Why would a 21st century warplane shoot a balloon with a missile?
Referential humor should stay on Reddit. It's chuckle-worthy, sure, but this forum is one of the few places we have for serious discussion.

When people upvote jokes, the high-value expertise people freely share here gets drowned out, and will eventually disappear.

manimino··on Protocol Labs is laying off 21% of staff (89 people)
Laying off X% of your staff can be required to raise capital. Gotta show the investors you aren't being frivolous.

You can, of course, hire the same people back (assuming they are still willing to work there).

manimino··on The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners
Sounds right. Around 2.2 million, your money starts to generate more income than your labor can, unless you have an exceptionally high paying job.
manimino··on The plateauing of cognitive ability among top earners
Businesses solve the problems people have right now. It is good at scratching itches.

Academics solve long-term problems. They do not need to chase profits, so they can tackle bigger ideas. The risk is higher, but the rewards to humanity as a whole can be far greater - just less immediate.

Note that there is a significant amount of "academia" that happens inside large tech co's, such as Google / Facebook / Microsoft, just as Bell Labs did in yesteryear.

manimino··on Ask HN: What's the best lecture series you've seen?
This is one of the great disconnects between computer scientists and biologists. Computers are man-made, and fundamentally knowable - answers will be definitively, provably, right or wrong.

Biology is different. Sure, at a molecule level, you can make definite conclusions. "This drug binds to that receptor."

But the kind of biology that is immediately useful to humans - where it touches on psychology or sociology - is too complex to get 100% right. So how do you do 'science' in these fields?

The answer is that you make up some cohesive theory based on existing research and do studies in that direction. You try to prove yourself right.

And it works! Theories that come out of this sort of research can turn out to be 100% true. Or 90% true - where they are wrong under some conditions, but still very useful. Or they can be complete bunk - not predictive, and a waste of time.

When anyone presents a cohesive theory of a complex system, they are probably not 100% right. Doesn't make them entirely wrong, though, and certainly not useless.

manimino··on Steve Wozniak used to tip from printed sheets of $2 bills
People often refer to the Scandinavian countries or Japan as examples of low ethnic diversity and high trust.

Are there any quantitative studies on this topic? It would be a stronger argument if a clear trend was observable over many countries.

manimino··on Training Stable Diffusion from Scratch Costs <$160k
It is a fair point though - there's no utility in training an openly available model from scratch. Finetuning is far more practical.
manimino··on We tried to run a social media site and it was awful
That description just sounds like regular news and social media.
manimino··on Ask HN: ML Papers to Implement
I enjoyed doing this through the Coursera deep learning specialization:

https://www.coursera.org/specializations/deep-learning

The lectures take you through each major paper, then you implement the paper in the homework. Much faster than reading the paper yourself.

manimino··on Ask HN: With recent layoffs, how would you advise new grads entering the market?
It's not really that binary, though - job or death. There's an awful lot of space in between the two.

There's this conveyer-belt view of life: we are supposed to go directly from birth to school to job to kids to bigger job to death. Some people really do live that. Most people don't.

But we're expected to fit that mold, so anyone who's stepped off the belt will usually keep quiet about it. So it's easy to start believing that the only valid life is some linear path.

Still. Unemployment is stress and uncertainty. But bad job markets aren't forever. Good luck with finding a job, or managing to enjoy the interim.

Nyanpasu.

manimino··on Ask HN: Has anyone worked at the US National Labs before?
LANL definitely needs and uses generalist engineers. I interned there as one, many years back. Standard CRUD-app stuff to help the lab do its main goal of nuclear stockpile stewardship.

But it will help if you enjoy research culture. The location is rather isolated and you will probably be friends / co-workers with people doing research. (I say this because not everyone likes being around PhDs; I've met several people in software who disdain academics.)

manimino··on Losing Taiwan Means Losing Japan (2020)
It's hard to remember now, but the US's war on Iraq was declared with widespread popular support.

Many people today seem to feel that Taiwan and Ukraine are interests worth using military force to defend. I do wonder how well that support would hold up if either of those potential wars becomes reality.

manimino··on GPT-3 is the best journal I’ve used
There is a lovely game called ELIZA that is about using chatbot AIs for therapy. It is also about tech ethics and startup culture. It's made by Zachtronics.

It presents a realistic vision of AI-driven therapy, and leaves it up to the player to determine what their views on the topic are.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliza_(video_game)

manimino··on Show HN: Terra Firma, a playable erosion simulation
This is a fantastic idea. I would buy it for my kids so they could learn to manage money.
manimino··on Ask HN: Should I quit my job?
This depends heavily on how good you are at setting boundaries. How good are you at saying no to your boss and teammates? Depending on culture (yours and the company's) this can feel impossible.

Being unable to say "no" is also a great way to burn out in the first place. The advice of "just slack off" is often given in cases like these, but... if the person could do that, would they be burned out in the first place?

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