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mobeets

53 karma · joined December 8, 2023

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mobeets··on Automating Immersive Reading
This is really impressive! One thing I’ve often wanted is a way to listen to an ebook (say, while cooking), and then later be able to sit down and read from where I left off. This essentially requires the same functionality that Storyteller offers (syncing progress through an ebook and audiobook), though arguably overkill for this use case (since I could handle a more coarse alignment). In any case, is this something Storyteller would be good for? Or are there other tools for the job?
mobeets··on Microduck
I genuinely could not tell if this was a parody/satire or not, I think because the aesthetic reminds me of how a product like this would be presented in a horror movie or something
mobeets··on The Dunning-Kruger effect is probably not real
Agreed. Also it seems like, if the actual test scores and perceived test scores were both sampled iid, the “perceived” line should just be flat, with everyone being at 50th percentile. The fact that the displayed graph deviates from 50 in a way that more resembles the empirical data makes it seem like a cherry-picked random sample
mobeets··on Claude Science
Por que no los dos? Scientific review times are up, it’s harder to find reviewers, and many reviews are AI generated anyway. Auto-generated research publications will arguably make the replication crisis worse, because there will be more slop to clog up the review system, and these papers will presumably be just as (if not more) not reproducible than human written science
mobeets··on US bans differential privacy in Census data
Thank you for writing a much more thoughtful reply to this comment than I was drafting
mobeets··on Behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity rewires the brain after an experience
Good point, this is probably the author assuming a little more context on the reader’s part. The cases where you can record from neurons in humans are very rare (basically only in treatment resistant epilepsy), and most of the work on hippocampus uses rodents
mobeets··on Points on a ring: An interactive walkthrough of a popular math problem
This approach implies the probability doesn’t depend on N. It only happens to be 1/2 for N=4 (the article goes into this). The trick is that you don’t know beforehand which semicircle all the points can land in, but your unwrapping step assumes you do.
mobeets··on In Defense of Matlab Code
Matlab is annoying for many reasons. But to me the main advantage of using Matlab over Python is the plotting.

Plotting in Python is still a pain. Notebooks help, but they still don’t let you add to a plot piece-by-piece; and 3D plots are possible but nowhere close to as simple as it is in Matlab.

mobeets··on Every mathematician has only a few tricks (2020)
One surprise of reading this thread was learning that Terry Tao is an active user of Math Overflow!
mobeets··on The Anti-Pattern Game
I was confused also. My guess was that maybe a “sequence” has to be 4 or more pebbles?
mobeets··on The Article in the Most Languages
I totally agree but unfortunately it really is one of the fundamental laws of wikipedia. To me this becomes especially silly when editing math wiki articles, where you might be tempted to connect mathematical concepts (eg with a few lines of algebra), but writing this yourself in a wiki article is not allowed unless you can find a link to an external source making the same derivation!
mobeets··on I avoid using LLMs as a publisher and writer
I’m with you—-I think you did a good job of summarizing all the places that LLMs are super practical/useful, but agreed that for prose (as someone who considers themselves a proficient writer), it just never seems to contribute anything useful. And those who are not proficient writers, I’m sure it can be helpful, but it certainly doesn’t contribute any new ideas if you’re not providing them.
mobeets··on Getting a paper accepted
I was surprised to see the author claim that citations in the Introduction are a bad thing. I do think ML papers are generally pretty bad at acknowledging other relevant literature, but this makes me think it’s an active decision somehow
mobeets··on Inside ArXiv
I have no idea (but wish I knew). I’m embarrassed to admit it took me years to even notice that it wasn’t being updated anymore
mobeets··on Inside ArXiv
Scihub hasn’t been updated since 2020! But anyway arxiv has a lot of important features specifically for academic papers (eg quality control, categories, browsing, issuing dois, etc)
mobeets··on The Chaos in Higher Ed Is Only Getting Started
without paywall: https://archive.is/eu8te
mobeets··on Shmøergh Hog – The making of a simple analog synth
Wowwww I had no idea this was a thing. Thank you for sharing, this is perfect
mobeets··on Shmøergh Hog – The making of a simple analog synth
This is amazing and super inspiring. I love how such a professional looking enclosure is actually a repurposed Ikea flowerpot—-brilliant.

Does anyone know how one would print the black text on the flowerpot? I have an acrylic enclosure from a project but could never figure out how to get text printed on it.

mobeets··on World’s oldest tree? Genetic analysis traces evolution of iconic Pando forest
The fact that Pando is a single organism is so confusing to me. I’m guessing there are more forests like Pando that are also a single organism? Is this something unique to this particular species?
mobeets··on Number 16 (spider)
Probably this (awesome) paper: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2019/hash/e98741479a7b9...
mobeets··on The Ballmer Peak: An Empirical Search
This paper was published in this year’s issue of sigbovik, the best satirical academic journal you (may) have never heard of: https://sigbovik.org/2024/
mobeets··on ASCII Theater
Can anyone explain how this works? I made this app that converts video to emojis (https://gifmoji.github.io/) and would love to know if I could somehow do a similar thing over ssh (so with emojis rather than ascii art)
mobeets··on Researchers have identified new elements of whale vocalizations
There is a big effort to do that actually, called Project CETI: https://www.projectceti.org/