outlace

Highly recommend looking at Jacob Barandes’ formulation of quantum mechanics as non-Markovian stochastic processes. It was the first introduction to quantum mechanics I could actually follow.

https://www.jacobbarandes.com/

I never said LLMs will not be able to do X. I gave my summary of the article and my anecdotal experiences with LLMs. I have no LLM ideology. We will see what tomorrow brings.

For example, ever since the first GPT 4 I’ve tried to get LLM’s to build me a specific type of heart simulation that to my knowledge does not exist anywhere on the public internet (otherwise I wouldn’t try to build it myself) and even up to GPT 5.3 it still cannot do it.

But I’ve successfully made it build me a great Poker training app, a specific form that also didn’t exist, but the ingredients are well represented on the internet.

And I’m not trying to imply AI is inherently incapable, it’s just an empirical (and anecdotal) observation for me. Maybe tomorrow it’ll figure it out. I have no dogmatic ideology on the matter.

The headline may make it seem like AI just discovered some new result in physics all on its own, but reading the post, humans started off trying to solve some problem, it got complex, GPT simplified it and found a solution with the simpler representation. It took 12 hours for GPT pro to do this. In my experience LLM’s can make new things when they are some linear combination of existing things but I haven’t been to get them to do something totally out of distribution yet from first principles.

Well one could make the argument that Musk is a short or medium term problem and that in 4 years when Trump is gone everyone will forget about hating on Tesla and it will be a great car company again. Musk is in his 50s and won’t be CEO forever. So if your investment horizon is 10+ years and you don’t predict total company collapse then it might be a bargain time to buy.

That's not how it works for Tesla. Totally different buying experience. You order online, get a notification some days or weeks later that it's ready, go to the store sign a couple of documents and drive off with the car. Maybe 10 minutes total. (Source: bought a Tesla a few years ago). I just recently got a Kia EV9 and it was a 3-4 hour marathon of paperwork, talking, more paperwork. Really terrible buying experience. Nice car though.

The president can’t just unilaterally cancel a piece of legislation already signed into law. But maybe he gets the new congress to repeal it.

“America’s ethos of “school achievement above all else” is part of the problem, says Stephen Hinshaw of the University of California at Berkeley”

This may be the ethos in elite circles but I don’t think it’s the case in general.

All American car companies would be

Yeah I tried it too on HuggingFace and was not impressed.

I would argue that the main benefit of democracy is not electing "the right people" by a free and fair election, but by having a mechanism to remove bad leaders without violence. So a propaganda machine influencing elections is not ideal, but if it results in bad leaders, then that will become obvious to people at some point and they will vote them out. Elections will always have some random factors. Not everyone is going to vote. There will be fads. So election isn't the important part, UN-election is.

It's varied. Taking as little as 1mg per day with 1 day off worked well. But so does spot treating with 4mg every week or so when symptoms flare.

This is not medical advice, but I have used rapamycin for an as of yet undiagnosed autoimmune condition (likely psoriatic arthritis vs rheumatoid arthritis) and it almost completely cures the condition while taking it, at the cost of mild-moderate hair loss and acne (which recovers on cessation of the drug). I cycle on and off rapamycin every few weeks to minimize side effects and whatever unknown long-term risks.

Summary of article: A single NPR link got automatically flagged by X to display a warning after NPR changed the URL for an unknown reason. It was reported to X who said it was a false positive and corrected it.

It looks like the gel “learns” to get better at the game because if it correctly positions the Pong paddle over time then the dynamics of stimulation become predictable rather than random. since the system tries to naturally minimize its free energy, it will eventually start to model the ball dynamics enough to better control the paddle, all making the input dynamics more predictable and thus minimizing the energy of the system.

Highly relevant book: Modeling Life by Alan Garfinkel. Assumes only knowledge of algebra and teaches the foundational skills of differential equation modeling. Best book I bought this year.

This is only talking about a launch in China.

But Amazon also contracted with SpaceX: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/12/01/amazon-buys-spacex-rocke...

Which deck?

I would guess most single family home owners have two or more cars. This is a total guess based on my own situation and those of people I know who own EV’s but most EV owners with a single family home will also own a gas car.

So an EV is more convenient than a gas car for daily commutes because you never have to go to a gas station. For the rare times you go on a long trip, you just take the gas car or you put up with having a longer trip in the EV.

EV’s currently make the most sense for people who own a single family home or otherwise live in a community with readily available near-home chargers, where EV’s are on average more convenient than gas cars. People who rely on street parking and apartment dwellers would likely find EV’s more inconvenient than a gas car.

We may be close to saturating the market for the former group.

Another factor that could be at play is that all the non-Tesla EV makers have recently announced they will switch their chargers to NACS, but this will take a couple of years to roll out, so it’s not a great time to buy a non-Tesla since it already has legacy charging hardware.

Nothing is owned with unrestricted rights. I “own” my house but if I don’t do what the HOA says they can sue me. If I don’t pay my property taxes it can get taken away. Ownership is really just a specification of rights. So you’re paying for a set of rights and those can be negotiated.

MD here. I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, obviously there's a bit of defensiveness since I went through 12 years of school and training to be an independent physician (4 years college, 4 years medical school, 4 years residency) and I've definitely seen subpar care from other "providers" (not a fan of the term) with less training. The wide variety of different "providers" is also confusing to patients who have little idea the differences in training and scope. The training for non-MD "providers" seems very variable, unlike the quite standardized MD training. I definitely think residency training is a much more robust and you need to have that critical feedback from supervising physicians to improve, which I think can be lacking in non-residency based training. Overall, nothing against PAs/NPs, I know some great ones.

On the other hand, a lot of what I do doesn't require 12 years of training, so I am sympathetic to making health care more accessible. I am also a bit jealous that my non-MD colleagues can easily switch from e.g. being a primary care PA to being dermatology PA, whereas as an MD I'm pretty much stuck in my specialty unless I go through another 4+ year residency. Instead of MD-training getting shorter to compete, it's actually getting longer in many cases. Residency trainings are getting longer not shorter for a number of specialties (e.g. neurosurgery, interventional cardiology, pediatric hospitalist).

But OpenAI appears to have some sort of data moat. I doubt their model is the best in the world, but more/better data generally beats better model, and GPT-4 definitely beats Claude, Bard, Bernie and the rest probably because they curated the best quality and largest data set. Maybe that moat doesn't last long but perhaps they have exclusive rights to some of that dataset through commercial agreements that could be a more durable moat.

It looks like this is just a reporting requirement and no quotas are mandated. I imagine the intent is to indirectly push companies to improve diversity through embarrassment by public numbers.

However, these are private individuals funding private ventures with private money, as far as I know, so why the government should be involved at all in that process other than taxation isn't clear to me.

The following paragraph clarifies: " “Kia does not and has never collected ‘sex life or sexual orientation’ information from vehicles or consumers in the context of providing the Kia Connect Services,” says Kia spokesperson James Bell. He adds that the brand includes the category in its privacy policy to define “sensitive personal information” under the California Consumer Privacy Act. "

It's not as bad as it sounds. It seems just like legalese making things sound more dire than they are.

If you're interested in algebraic topology to do topological data analysis, I wrote a series of blog posts about it that I believe is quite accessible even to those with limited math backgrounds: http://outlace.com/TDApart1.html

Maybe if the battery is critically low on power it should show how to manually exit the vehicle on the screen for people who never read the manual.

Yeah but there’s big a difference between mental health issues in China being driven by intense academic competition and pressure and, as the Haidt article claims, lack of enough unstructured playtime.

I haven’t looked into the data carefully but this strikes me as implausible at first impression for a few reasons.

One is that cultures with highly structured time for kids like China do not have the same dramatic rises in mental illness, that I’m aware of. Two is that this seems to only apply to middle class or rich western kids (unsurprising for academic studies). You really think poor kids are spending too much time at piano lessons and not playing? No they have the opposite problem of too much lack of structure.

Overall this seems quite narrow minded to me. The only part of this that rings true is the cultural phenomenon of wanting to make feel everyone safe all the time, even from mere ideas and speech.