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patagurbon

526 karma · joined September 11, 2019

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patagurbon··on Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
I don’t know how adult 22 is considered but yeah. A younger sibling got it when they were ~13.

When we noticed the signs and went into the ER a few of the (younger) doctors thought it was Type 2, while the attending knew it was just late onset Type 1.

patagurbon··on Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust
I highly recommend Julia for (scientific) GPU programming but it would be nice if there was a larger community and/or funding behind the GPU side of things. It has very few core devs for what it is.
patagurbon··on No Man's Sky Cosmos
By the end of it's lifetime Bungie had created quite a bit of variety in the Destiny 2 content library (although there's always a bit of orb dunking, plate standing, and symbol reading). And if they hadn't rebuilt the engine from scratch it would've been even bigger.

There's like 30+ strikes, ~8 pinnacle ops/exotic missions, 11 dungeons, 10 raids, and many campaigns. But more to the point of the original comment: it's quite engaging to spend an hour or two a week mastering one of those missions at the hardest difficulty. The modern difficulty knobs are really neat and complement the immensely fun gameplay loop very well. NMS, unfortunately, has no real enjoyable gameplay loop.

We are still years off of an LLM creating a gameplay system even 1/4 as good as Destiny IMHO.

patagurbon··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
> two years under Biden with Democrat control of the House and Senate

Nobody has controlled the Senate since ‘09. The veneer of bipartisanship created by the filibuster meant that Congress has done nothing since ‘09 (outside of a few stimulus bills and the Green New Deal which was probably a good bill in the long run hampered by bureaucracy). It turns out that’s great for the party that wants to do nothing, and really bad for the party that wants to do something.

You could say that Dems should’ve killed the filibuster. But there was no appetite for it until Trump 2 because things weren’t going great but they weren’t going belly up

patagurbon··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
I think a lot of these beliefs are downstream of some perceived aloofness and intellectual elitism in the party combined with sour grapes about how 2016 turned out for certain grassroots demographics in the party.

I don’t think the vibes argument there is incorrect, Dems have failed to deliver for a long time, but the claims themselves really just make a conspiracy out of the shitty electoral situation Dems / progressives have been in since the creation of the senate 250 odd years ago.

patagurbon··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
They help launder this idea that every issue has two reasonable sides. Which is patently false

There is some kernel of value to seeking out information from diverse sources. But groups like Ground News pervert that to mean that the left and right are on equally good terms with fact and reality (nevermind that collapsing politics and news media down to left and right is balderdash)

patagurbon··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
Dubya did some of the most horrific things in modern American history, and filled the pockets of many of his associates im sure.

But in terms of the letter of the law unfortunately he couldn’t be held accountable for much of it because it was legal! The US legal system has largely agreed that the president, especially with a bloodthirsty Congress behind him, can torture, kill and maim as much as he pleases so long as it’s outside the border.

patagurbon··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
100x is dramatically undercounting here.

The most corrupt things Biden has done were: 1. Hide the extent of health issues. Par for the course in politics at this point for some reason. This is broadly just downstream of him believing he could continue before a precipitous health decline as election season began 2. Pardon his son who was teed up by the Republican world to be target number 1 for low level drug and tax charges.

Trump on the other hand has made literally billions of dollars since starting his presidency, not to mention the fortunes of his family and various associates. 100x is not even just a few orders of magnitude off.

patagurbon··on GPT-6 Astra
.NET has not been a particularly Windows specific framework for almost a decade now.
patagurbon··on GPT-6 Astra
I was about to argue against this with something like "soon everyone will just follow the average Claude/GPT generated trip to every destination"...

But I realized that this is mostly a strict upgrade to how many many people are planning trips these days. It will probably do a pretty good job of accounting for your preferences, probably better than most/any travel agent unless they're very very local.

patagurbon··on How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language
They dictate what their employees are paid to work on, there are no VC investments in The Julia Programming Language

It’s true that MIT and a few other organizations have more influence than others simply because they employ more developers with time/scope to work on the language. Just like every programming language.

But this becomes less true all the time. And most of the direction that is “paid for” is an unadulterated good: JuliaC ahead of time compilation has been requested for over a decade and has made enormous progress.

patagurbon··on How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language
There are no language share holders, and note that this account was created an hour ago just to post vague nonspecific gripes about Julia.

There are some real issues in the ecosystem. Specifically there is a high proportion of “gradware” because much like other scientific languages there is a high proportion of graduate students doing their projects and then moving on.

The language also encourages relying on packages which can break. But juliaup makes this easy enough to solve by downgrading.

patagurbon··on Relm4 makes developing beautiful cross-platform applications idiomatic
Not sure what the dev intended, but the title and page imply that writing the app is idiomatic, not that the app itself is idiomatic (to the host platform)
patagurbon··on A US military exercise to launch a satellite on short notice
We have the physics but not the engineering. See the Breakthrough Starshot project for instance
patagurbon··on How to earn a billion dollars
The whole problem with CalHSR is precisely that they can’t spend any real money… There were governmental barriers like CEQA and local NIMBYs but the primary cost culprit is that the legislature has continuously kicked fully funding the project down the tracks for the past two decades. Funding it fully with a 10-20 year construction timeline in the early 2010s would’ve far cheaper at this point.

Every American economic miracle has been precipitated by the government building basic infrastructure and doing basic research.

patagurbon··on Starship V3
Kinetic strikes sure. It seems like space marines would be incredibly easy to shoot down. They would be on a ballistic re-entry and must slow down without extreme g-forces before they reach the ground.
patagurbon··on Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
SRY testing was done at the 1996 games and for a while before that. 8 cisgender women tested positive at that games. Far more than the number of transgender athletes who have ever participated. This resulted in genetic testing being changed from all women to on-suspicion.

The bottom line is these tests will catch dozens of people who are phenotypically women, who can even give birth. Why should men be allowed to compete as genetic freaks but not women?

patagurbon··on Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events
There is no evidence of widespread electoral fraud in the US.

There is a political talking point that “aliens are voting” in our elections but it has been proven false again and again. The purpose of this is to put up barriers for legitimate citizens to vote, not to truly fix an imaginary problem.

patagurbon··on John Carmack about open source and anti-AI activists
In reproducing code that requires the license be reproduced alongside it.
patagurbon··on Better JIT for Postgres
What does specialized to the process mean? Lots of JIT tooling these days readily supports caching and precompilation. Invalidation is hard but things like reloading global references are hardly intractable problems especially for an org as large as pgsql.
patagurbon··on Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them
That Erdos problem solution is believed by quite a few to be a previous result found in the literature, just used in a slightly different way. It also seems not a lack of progress but simply no one cared to give it a go.

That’s a really fantastic capability, but not super surprising.

patagurbon··on US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
The zoning laws are far from the only tool used by municipalities to dramatically reduce supply. Permitting, requiring expensive changes at various points in the process, local building boards requiring extraneous modifications and often forcing scope reductions, affordable housing requirements, etc all make building more expensive. Often by a very large amount.

These processes are intentionally labyrinthine

patagurbon··on NSF announces initiative for new generation of research organizations
I'm not opposed to alternative research organizations, funding structures, etc. But this does seem like a fairly direct attempt to shift funding from universities into private firms, a funding structure which IMHO is much easier to abuse.

> Tech Labs will provide entrepreneurial teams of proven scientists the freedom and flexibility to pursue breakthrough science at breakneck speed, without needing to frequently stop and apply for additional grant funding with each new idea or development.

This sounds great, but has a few issues. #1 only funding proven scientists risks destroying the training pipeline which is the crucial edge that the US has over any other country in the world. It's also something that can and should be applied to universities as well. Lab groups or centers should be given much more runway than they are now.

> coordinated, interdisciplinary teams to achieve success

There are two places where this can really happen today: universities and national labs. The NSF should be fostering more cross-disciplinary and product engineering research across different departments at universities which already have deep talent pools across the board.

> The Tech Labs initiative will support full-time teams of researchers, scientists, and engineers

This sounds great, more university labs should have full-time researchers attached. Research Software Engineers are one somewhat common example in the computational sciences.

In general I support the overall mission statement but I am extremely wary of this kind of rhetoric from this government. They have failed to walk the walk on the sciences in any domain. This seems like a Trojan horse to transfer more money from the research apparatus into industry.

patagurbon··on Home Depot GitHub token exposed for a year, granted access to internal systems
The store I worked at for a while had a surprising number of real bearded experts, alongside at least a few younger folks who really understood the internal systems. It was great, but clearly was eroding as the experts retired and young folks with no experience were hired to replace them.
patagurbon··on Home Depot GitHub token exposed for a year, granted access to internal systems
Their internal setup was also an absolute mess as of 4 years ago. A horrific hybrid of extremely legacy systems and new systems created around COVID which are both nicer and also deeply lacking in features we needed as floor workers.

I understand that upgrading and migrating to new systems takes time but this process never seemed like it involved anyone on the ground.

patagurbon··on HipKittens: Fast and furious AMD kernels
Do you have evidence for this? I don’t think Nvidia is switching to Ultra Ethernet, just adding it to the product line-up
patagurbon··on With deadline looming 4 of 9 universities reject Trumps pact to remake higher ed
> are women just poorer?

Within living memory absolutely 100%.

patagurbon··on With deadline looming 4 of 9 universities reject Trumps pact to remake higher ed
What parts of the biology of sex mandates different treatment? Do you mean that medicine should be tailored to biology? Yes obviously, and even very progressive research hospitals take great pains to ensure the treatment is tailored to biology. Perhaps more so than conservative hospitals. You would know this if you engaged with the research outside of the news.

Outside of medicine? What different treatment does “biology” merit?

patagurbon··on With deadline looming 4 of 9 universities reject Trumps pact to remake higher ed
I bet they’re reading the room. They will have some problems if they’re the only ones who sign, but fewer if there’s at least two others who join them.
patagurbon··on With deadline looming 4 of 9 universities reject Trumps pact to remake higher ed
Who, what? Elaborate. Waving your hands like this is meaningless.

What are these progressive views? What is this scientific evidence? Who are these people trying rigorously?

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