us-merul

I submitted the article. I agree that much of the language and style is one-sided and partisan. If I could tone that down, I would. I submitted it because the outlined logical consequences stood out to me that I hadn’t encountered elsewhere—- the announcement itself, regardless of its underlying merits, opens the path to reduce vaccine access for all.

Another commenter here missed that point, thinking that people should just ignore what Trump says. The point is that what Trump says can be used to influence downstream policy in ways that might appear unexpected, but are certainly intentional.

I agree! You make a good point about how regulatory power can shape consequences in either direction.

I submitted this because I thought the article made insightful points about how an announcement like this can pave the way for downstream policy changes. I’m not trying to start a debate about the announcement itself.

The point of the article addresses this. A directive on Tylenol like this then gives pretext to dramatically reduce vaccine access, which affects everyone.

I really haven’t had a problem with my Lemur Pro from System76, which I got in spring of 2022. I did have to replace the battery once when there was noticeable swelling. Prior to this, I had always used a MacBook.

I see you edited your response after my reply. I’m not denying that you’ve read about those observed differences. I’m trying to say that those differences don’t need to be driven by biology, and evidence suggests otherwise. Behavior can’t be reduced to genetics, and the mechanistic link isn’t there. You are claiming that morphological differences explain the variation. Besides, by your reasoning, you could look at the NBA before Bill Russell and make very different claims.

And how are you able to rule out that societal or environmental effects are the primary driver? How is your argument not circular, that observed differences are therefore the result of biology?

> We know for a fact that sex or ethnicity impacts body yet we seem unable to cope with the idea that there are also differences in how brains work.

Here is your error. You’re assuming that a physical difference in morphology is linked to behavioral or neural correlates. That’s not the case, since observed statistical- or group-level differences need not be driven by biology. You’re assuming biological determinism, and the evidence for direct genetic effects on behavior isn’t there.

I think the benefit of the “weird path” need not be monetary but instead a way to stay afloat of the burnout and find motivation to keep going. While I agree with many things in the article, I found in my experience that these feelings are not responsive to rational arguments, and rest doesn’t help after 6+ months when recruiters’ first questions to you are “what have you been doing since your last position?” That’s why I think the “weird” route can be a good way to answer by keeping up with new projects, etc.

I found the following article interesting the other day. A retired couple with a four-bedroom home concerned that they couldn’t sell their home at 1.3 million, so they lowered it to 1.28 and were surprised it still didn’t sell. The owner then considers renting it out instead.

https://apnews.com/article/real-estate-housing-market-home-p...

I really don’t know! The author of the video I linked to describes one game as having full-motion video 3D environments, unlike many games on the Sega CD that were just FMVs without real gameplay. That would be funny if the best games in this genre (if you can call it that) are stuck on the LaserActive.

I highly recommend this video for an overview of the LaserActive: https://youtu.be/vK0rGekPOpo?si=6XRVtA0FTRGo5sYH

Until this emulator, there are 15 games that were only playable on the physical device, never released elsewhere.

I had to show up for something 10 minutes early or else the appointment would be cancelled (at least according to the form). Kind of defeats the purpose of setting the time I chose.

I totally get the author’s frustration. I think such motivation and talent is a sign that there would be plenty of other groups happy to have the applicant. The trick to is connect with them, and not get so hung up on Anthropic specifically. Easier said than done though.

I’ve had an iPad since 2013, and went through the phases of thinking it was awesome to unnecessary. Then I was gifted an iPad Pro last year with the Apple Pencil and everything changed. It’s now my favorite Apple device by far, and exactly for why the author describes; it’s become a digital canvas that enables an input function unavailable anywhere else. If you’re skeptical, you really need to try one out for a brainstorming or creative activity. (Yes, I know that paper still works for this, too.)

The author of the article is a bit more than an “award-winning mathematician.” If it can happen to him, no one is safe.

I found this starting with the recent XKCD comic about Tom Bombadil in LOTR, seeing he appeared in a 1991 Soviet TV adaptation that’s now on YouTube, checking here if anyone had posted it, and someone had provided the link to this book in that thread. Really cool find.

Exactly. The author makes that point in the comment section of the article as well.

Thanks for your response. Getting feedback like "hot or cold" in the algorithm's mind is exactly what I'm thinking of. It's a tricky issue and reminds me a lot of this: https://www.datcreativity.com/

I had tried hard to pick a set of fairly simple words, thinking I had an intricately unique association in my head, only to find out that the reported connections were nothing more than average. My partner obviously landed in an extremely high percentile by instantly picking the first words that came to her without much thought.

I really liked this article and these types of analyses always capture me. I just had to try out the game then. I nailed the link to "moon" from "rise" on my first try. Then I was a bit let-down for my first real task to get to "chill" starting from "chain." I went first to conglomerate, then corporation, then management... thinking I would at some point encounter "cold," and then "chill". Unfortunately not. Then I tried from chain to something like (my memory is imperfect here), necklace, jewelry, brilliance, glow, tranquil, calm-- and on a couple of other tries, appease, mollify, relax-- but could never get to "chill." I was able to win eventually by appealing to temperature which led me to chill.

Is there anything the user could do to modify the next steps, other than picking a word? Perhaps selecting some sort of valence related to metaphor or meaning? "I want to pick 'pacify', but in the sense of calming down, not to utterly destroy."

Thanks for this! I had come across Child’s hypothesis after doing a search related to Old Prussian and Slavic languages, so I don’t have much context for this solution, and this is helpful to see.

I’ve found this to be one of the most interesting hypotheses: http://voynichproject.org/

The author made an assumption that Voynichese is a Germanic language, and it looks like he was able to make some progress with it.

I’ve also come across accounts that it might be an Uralic or Finno-Ugric language. I think your approach is great, and I wonder if tweaking it for specific language families could go even further.

Thanks for the recommendation! I've definitely come across her name while learning about Jung, and this will be a good way to start with her.

I really enjoyed that piece. Have you taken a look at the worldview/framework of Carl Jung? Although I'd always encountered it as a footnote in the history of psychology, I've come to appreciate it as a unique blend of analysis and spirituality, particularly in relation to human creativity and despair. Your summary of multiple philosophies at the end of the article definitely aligns with Jung's thoughts on a collective human narrative (whether it literally exists in a metaphysical sense or not).

I think this is an exciting opportunity at the intersection of bioinformatics, data science, and data engineering. I emailed my application, with the beginning of the last name matching the last 5 letters of this username. I'm wondering if your platform for omics analysis, which is species-specific [0], could also identify commonalities across species, like with the recently released TranscriptFormer [1]? Also, I think your platform is really useful for understanding the "native language of biology", which I think is covered well in an article I came across recently as well [2].

[0] https://epistemic.ai/platform.html [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.25.650731v1 [2] https://decodingbiology.substack.com/p/machine-learning-the-...