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tarr11

3,842 karma · joined March 6, 2011

douglastarr.com
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tarr11··on The High Heel Problem
Also see the "Door Problem"

https://lizengland.com/blog/2014/04/the-door-problem/

tarr11··on I'm a neuroscientist. Here's the surprising truth about TikTok 'brain rot'
I appreciate that the article spent a significant amount of time explaining the flaws of this research.

This headline is clickbait, though.

tarr11··on Six, and the art of staying in the game
Is there a version of the Fred indeed job postings list that goes before 2020? I wouls be interested to see similar data since 2000 or 2010

The narrative that software engineer jobs are going away is confused by cherry picking the start of covid as the start date.

tarr11··on Math Academy, part 1: My eigenvector embarassment
yes if your kid loves math - my kid benefited from Math Academy (currently in college studying CS). Started with Math Academy as a HS freshman and finished BC Calc 2 years early with a 5 on the AP Exam. While he did Khan Academy for many years (which is a great resource) it didn’t really motivate him as much and seemed designed for a broader more generalist audience.

We also tried some other programs like Art of Problem Solving (great program, but required very synchronous classes which were hard to fit in)

My suggestion would be try it for a few months,

tarr11··on What enabled us to create AI is the thing it has the power to erase
> Eventually we will pull the black ball out of the urn

What is this reference?

tarr11··on It's not a crime if we do it with an app
The article referenced in there about Lamb Weston and MvCain foods and goes into a lot of detail about how prices get determined in this market.

The “behave themselves” comment was certainly juicy, but the entire multi thousand word article is about how these companies are in an intense competition in a low margin industry. Here’s an example:

> Former VP of International at Lamb Weston Well, McCain came in at a better incentives than Lamb Weston, and Lamb Weston maybe felt complacent and said, no, we're going to keep this account, and they lost it. That was a blow to their ego. They lost the Wendy's business. They lost the majority of their Wendy's sales to Cavendish Farms, which was 200 million pounds plus. So they've lost some major accounts. Tegus Client Because they refused to concede on the price mostly? Former VP of International at Lamb Weston That's correct. They could have kept the business if they conceded on the price. But there's a cost to conceding on the price as well. I mean there's a cost, but there's also cost to not to concede. I'm not sure when they're going to get the Aramark's business back or if they ever get it back. They've got to pay us to get Aramark's business again. They're going to have to do exactly what McCain did, try to maintain it. Tegus Client Right now, this sounds more like a good competitive market. So how does this tie back to just Lamb being silent on the price increase and McCain like leading again? Former VP of International at Lamb Weston Well, they felt that they're not going to give McCain Foods the price increase. The price increase never happened. Even though it did get announced, it never did happen. So this is one of those battles that may be short-lived, but it could be long-lived. It could be a couple of years because McCain, a privately held company, they're not subject to the stock market or the analysts asking them difficult questions, even though most of them don't ask difficult questions to Lamb Weston. So they're independent. They can do what they want to do. The 2 major shareholders are the second generation, Scott and Mark McCain. Their EBITDA exceeds $1 billion a year, not bad for 2 young men that inherited the business. So they're not really in any hurry to concede to Lamb Weston or to say, okay, I'm just going to forget this. It could be tit for tat down the road, could be. Or they may just say, let's not go there, let's just try to raise the price. If Lamb tries to raise their price in September, you asked the reason why would they raise prices if they had a cost reduction on potatoes, they're going to raise prices because inefficiencies in the plant, COVID costs, they're going to mention that. They're going to talk about ingredients, oil consumption, cardboard up and all. So their COGS have increased even though potato prices would have been reduced.

https://app.tegus.co/guest/document/view/67Hf3DiMGQ944SkfpRh...

tarr11··on Bench accounting services shutting down
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1872724231999381790.html
tarr11··on Trellis – 3D mesh generative model
You’d have to combine it with one of the text to image models.
tarr11··on Trellis – 3D mesh generative model
Saw this submitted a few days ago [0], but it's a very impressive demo and would like to see it get discussed here.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42342557

tarr11··on Personality Basins
Idle musing - maybe some genetics is for stored environment?

Eg, perhaps some of your genes’ purpose are to encode memories in DNA.

tarr11··on Shaderblocks: Block-based image editing
Nuke and DaVinci Resolve are the industry standards for compositing. Node based editing graphs are often called “non-destructive” or “procedural”. It’s basically pure functions in a programming sense.

Blender geometry nodes take this approach for modeling. The rest of blender is destructive in that any operation permanently changes the state.

https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke-family/nuke

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

tarr11··on The decline of the working musician
> Most critical is the disappearance of dance.

Have you looked at TikTok? It is full of young people performing incredibly complex dance moves.

tarr11··on AI has created a 'fake it till you make it' bubble that could end in disaster
Clinical machine learning for cancer diagnosis is one promising area

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(23)00094-6.pdf

tarr11··on A small studio made a game based on a Stanislaw Lem's novel
Kind of off-topic, but I always find it weird to see people's hands and arms in first person games like this. Like, if I think about it, I know my hands are almost always in view, but they almost always fade away and I ignore them.

Whereas whenever I see a first person game, it's almost all I can focus on and it breaks the illusion.

tarr11··on Servant Leadership Theory
When I see someone advertise themselves on LinkedIn as a “servant leader”, I am skeptical.

Seems like a title bestowed by your peers, not by yourself.

tarr11··on Anxious Generation – How Safetyism and Social Media Are Damaging the Kids
I am interested in how scientists can isolate the increase in mental health problems from the more sophisticated diagnoses that we have now.

How do we know there is more mental health problems (a “bad” thing) vs more mental health problems are diagnosed and treated (a “good” thing)?

tarr11··on My weekend project turned into a 3 year journey
Even though it sounds like the journey was the goal, you may want to look at TouchDesigner, which is a powerful tool for this use case.

https://derivative.ca/

tarr11··on In Praise of 5-Over-1 Buildings (2019)
> This ends up recreating housing crises of big cities because people that live and work in the town are getting priced out of living there.

Here is research that contradicts this assertion.

"We ultimately conclude, from both theory and empirical evidence, that adding new homes moderates price increases and therefore makes housing more affordable to low- and moderate-income families. "

https://furmancenter.org/files/Supply_Skepticism_-_Final.pdf

tarr11··on Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent
> destruction of the creative industry is already pretty noticable.

Can you explain what you mean by this? I’d be interested to know what jobs have been lost to AI (or if you are talking about something else)

tarr11··on Like Diogenes Across the Atlantic (2018)
Sadly, looks like his next adventure, rowing across the Atlantic in 2022, was fatal.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60097918

tarr11··on I got tired of hearing that YC fired Sam, so here's what actually happened
Paul Graham's blog is the Poor Richard's Almanack of startups.
tarr11··on The People Deliberately Killing Facebook
So you’ve chosen to use more emotionally charged language to increase user engagement with your content?
tarr11··on AI copilots are changing how coding is taught
My kid built an 8 bit cpu based on some YouTube videos he found when he was in high school and some cheap circuits he bought on Amazon.

I’d argue that there are more self-taught kids who know low level programming than 20 years ago.

The information to do this is so much more accessible now and LLMs are a very powerful tool in the hands of someone who is curious and motivated.

tarr11··on 30% of Children Ages 5-7 Are on TikTok
I’ve heard it.

Some of these now-adults felt left out. They resented that they weren’t part of any conversations with their peers about what was on tv etc.

tarr11··on Equinox.space
here’s another one by the same studio

https://demos.littleworkshop.fr/infinitown

tarr11··on Hawaii moves to ban short-term rentals to address housing crisis
I think this depends on the size of the group you are traveling with and how long you are traveling. If you have a family of 4 or more, AirBnb tends for be more cost effective.

A lot of the costs tend to spread out as you get more square footage or spend longer periods of time.

tarr11··on Need Help Selecting University
The only school of those I’ve heard about is Santa Cruz. But it can be difficult to get housing there as an undergrad and classes can be large.

Don’t optimize 100% for your degree and job. College is an opportunity to learn new things and have new experiences. I hire a lot of software engineers- being well rounded is a rare trait.

Find a school that you enjoy and suits your personality. You will be there for 4 years and you won’t just be studying the whole time.

tarr11··on What Was Sora Trained On? Creatives Demand Answers
Software developers don’t seem to care that their code is used to train LLMs. It seems most programmers have embraced it as a tool to make themselves more efficient, even if that means some jobs may get automated away.

I am not really sure why the reception is so different with “creatives”.

tarr11··on My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file (2020)
OP uses their calendar as a supplement for their the todo file. There is a lot of functionality implied in that decision:

- calendars have mobile apps which enable quick and precise entry

- calendars understand time spans

- calendars have many options to display events

- calendars have cloud syncing

- calendars are backed by a queryable data store

Not saying using a text file is good or bad, but I think a more accurate title would be “my productivity app is a never ending txt file and a calendar app”

tarr11··on Amazon is chopping jobs at its One Medical and Pharmacy units
I was looking at them and gave them my contact info. The aggressive sales techniques- many calls and texts within a week - really turned me off.
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