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reedf1

2,755 karma · joined October 4, 2019

Quant/Dev in Trade. Formerly Software Engineer with a focus in computer vision and machine learning.

Trained as a Physicist.

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reedf1··on Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample
"I’ve activated pro. Can you continue to look for a potential geometric explanation of the X_3 ~ A3 miracle that avoids coordinates or other unmotivated constructions ?"
reedf1··on Mac gaming is finally getting the overpowered upgrade it deserves
It is, and has been for a long time, a concious choice for apple to avoid gaming.
reedf1··on AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the death of real news
Wait how many levels deep is this...
reedf1··on Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time
I guess you're fine commuting home in the dark? But regardless, you can navigate without light an hour before sunrise.
reedf1··on Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time
To be clear if I showed up to a company running their own company NTP server that they desync twice a year to make timings work - I would absolutely try to migrate them away from that. Now if they are doing that there is probably bigger fish to fry... but it would be on the list.
reedf1··on Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time
What people usually mean by abolishing DST is permanent summer hours. If your problem was sunrise timing, then problem solved - DST actually moves that earlier than you require twice a year for normal working hours (i.e. less sun in the evenings). Source: my own high latitude life.
reedf1··on Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time
I guess that is what I'm trying to show in the above example. You could technically shift your UTC jobs by running your own NTP server and desyncing it from UTC by the offset you want. It would work, but it would be nightmare fuel. And possibly this is an even better example of what DST is doing.
reedf1··on Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)
If you are looking for an example I did some contract work for a company in Turkey that implemented winter hours and summer hours for their office after abolishing DST in 2016. As far as I understand it, it's fairly standard across the country.
reedf1··on Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)
It's pretty astounding to me the number of pro-DST advocates in this forum. If you had hundreds of daily jobs on your platform and you happen to have some regular requirement to change them in unison, if a junior engineer said "let's just change the system clock to adjust for when we want the jobs to run", you would say no, because while it might be easy compared to changing the config for each of the jobs, the risk of ongoing errors, side effects, introduction of jobs that need to fixed in absolute time that you have to make the inverse change... It's a system nightmare.
reedf1··on Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)
"Working hours will not change". Except they have in most countries where they have got rid of DST...
reedf1··on Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time
You've said this repeatedly, but it is largely not true.
reedf1··on Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)
Except it's not like Chesterton's fence, it was created at the edge of living memory for known reasons. If anything it's an example of the opposite effect, something like Chesterton's field, do we really need to build a wall here, it's been a field for a damn long time...
reedf1··on Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time
Ever lived at high latitude? It's normal.
reedf1··on Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)
Hol up, don't fix time, there's a few guys in Seattle without curtains. Sorry everyone.
reedf1··on Why does kinetic energy increase quadratically, not linearly, with speed? (2011)
this is implicitly an is-ought question and it is pedagogically necessary to give an unsatisfying answer. you can watch the interview with feynman answering "why do two objects attract" for the best version. The top answer selects an arbitrary resolution in the hierarchy of the unlimited series of 'whats and whys' but the true answer to any why question in physics is "because it is".
reedf1··on Britain's prime minister to step down, Burnham puts himself forward as successor
I know you probably didn't mean it that way - but people with aphantasia are often very creative, and visionary despite.
reedf1··on Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures
From the perspective of someone with some experience in consumer advocacy via the EU is that SKG did not do this the right way, or at least the right way right now. The EU expects radical compromise. The right starting point for SKG was to enter talks with games industry lobby groups to discuss possible solutions. If that fails - you will need to be able to prove that it isn't because you were unable to compromise. Your next step is to find individual game developers and publishers who agree with your proposals and can back them at some (hopefully negotiated) level. Any one-sided proposal is a non-starter.

The EU will view this this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers.

reedf1··on The hallucinogenic mushroom that contains no known psychedelic
Huh weird. When I have a high fever, usually from the flu, sometimes I start to hallucinate. The typical hallucination is lots of "little people", usually doing something I don't like. I wonder if it triggers a similar part of the brain?
reedf1··on Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day
$135M a day is almost nothing (~$50b/yr) for an area with combined GDP of ~$30T.

Edit: People's general understanding of the scale of economies is genuinely terrifying to witness.

reedf1··on To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks
We can't put the genie back in the bottle.
reedf1··on Why Japanese companies do so many different things
Did you read it? I can see how you can come to this conclusion devoid of context. This is actually a topical article - mainly because it is a surprise to many that a toilet company could be one of the biggest winners in the AI pick-and-shovel trade. These names have just recently been hoisted into the spotlight. It's not really a romanization but an explanation of why.
reedf1··on Why Japanese companies do so many different things
The writing is a joy and the context is useful. Hardly buried.
reedf1··on Was my $48K GPU server worth it?
Buy one of these next time, https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox. At least geohot knows what he is doing.
reedf1··on Lost Images from the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test Restored
This very much overstates the certainty of the scientists in the outcome of the explosion. They could be pretty certain it would work - but they were not at all certain about the result of producing energy, pressures, temperature and forces that have never been tested on earthly reality before. There were many unexcepted outcomes of the explosion, we are just lucky (as we usually are with new science) that they weren't particularly bad.
reedf1··on Which country voted the best at Eurovision?
I think a correlation matrix would have been a more suitable general representation for identifying interesting voting characteristics between countries. Then this analysis (and any others you want to do) just drops right out of a dot product.
reedf1··on Avoiding and reducing microplastic false positives from dry glove contact
I've heavily couched my language and not claimed authority. If you are looking for examples of irresponsible communication, look inward. You've mixed real quotes from me with ones you've injected ""bombshell"". I purposefully did not use such language. I get this is an issue that can emote, and I respect your view. Perhaps you've underestimated how much of your view I share.
reedf1··on Avoiding and reducing microplastic false positives from dry glove contact
Actually this is the shocking part - it actually is enough to move the needle. Incidents of young people with cancer is small so a 100% increase can be driven by a small absolute number of patients. There has been an absolutely enormous increasing in high endurance sport something more like 20x (or 1900% increase) and ultramarathon/marathon runners are 7.5x more likely to get colon cancer, so this leads to a surprisingly large relative increase in colon cancer.
reedf1··on Avoiding and reducing microplastic false positives from dry glove contact
I respectfully disagree, this was a commonly cited technique for measuring microplastics, which is why it calls into question many studies. Thanks for calling me weird :) I guess the suggestion though is I'm paid by big plastic or something, no infact I'm just a guy reading papers who is scared of death like everyone else.
reedf1··on Avoiding and reducing microplastic false positives from dry glove contact
I agree that there is not evidence to "not worry", but many explicit worries are being accounted for.

Also - in terms of human tissue:

"The problem is that some small molecules in the fumes derived from polyethylene and PVC can also be produced from fats in human tissue. Human samples are “digested” with chemicals to remove tissue before analysis, but if some remains the result can be false positives for MNPs. Rauert’s paper lists 18 studies that did not include consideration of the risk of such false positives." (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/micropla...)

and Rauert's paper (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c12599)

reedf1··on Avoiding and reducing microplastic false positives from dry glove contact
There is growing evidence that there is much less to worry about on microplastics on several fronts.

1. A whole cohort of core studies have been judged to have invalid methodology due to not recording baseline microplastic levels (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2411099121)

2. Young-onset cancers (especially colorectal cancer) which were inferred to be caused by a rise in microplastics are being linked explicitly to other mechanisms and cohorts. (https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2025.43.16_suppl.3619)

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