importantbrian

I used to think I wasn’t very good at math, because I struggled to route memorize formulas and the like. Then I had a calculus professor in class that took a bunch of time explaining how to derive the formulas we were using and it unlocked everything for me. I’m much better at deriving from core principles than trying to remember a bunch of formulas and algorithms for solving problems.

For the US? No. The mandatory retirement age is 64. The fall of Saigon was 1975. So the youngest you could be to have served in Vietnam is 69. The last general with Vietnam experience retired in 2010.

I think we shot ourselves in the foot by calling machine learning AI for so many years and now calling LLMs AI. We have a bunch of non-technical folks in our company who are convinced if we just give them access to claude with a connection to the data that it can make all these predictions for them.

I recently had a similar discussion with my BIL who owns a construction business. He was saying he was glad he didn't have to worry about AI, because even if it automated everything about the business he'd still own it. I was like not so fast. In that situation access to capitol to pay for compute is going to be how businesses compete. Are you confident you're going to be able to have enough capitol to out compete the other businesses in your industry? Not to mention if AI and robotics get good enough why would I need to hire any construction company, let alone yours?

I'm not sure this is entirely fair. When I was in college I genuinely enjoyed learning and now that I'm out of school I still spend time learning about the subjects of my major and minor in my free time, but this would have described me pretty well in school, "they're relieved when their professors cancel class, and they need to be bullied into studying outside of class." I love to learn, but something about being forced to do it makes me rebel against it.

In some ways offering the diploma and all the requirements that go with that take the joy out of the learning for me.

For some reason I thought they had already dropped Star Trek when it all moved to Paramount+. That's how I watch Star Trek these days anyway. If all you watch is Star Trek it's probably worth switching, because Paramount+ is cheaper than Netflix.

I had a long winding road through academia. Went to a big selective R1 state school in a different state after high school. Had an existential crisis, moved back home with my parents and went to community college for a year, finished my undergrad at a large, less selective R2 and then did grad school at a large, very selective private R1. I would rank the quality of instruction:

1. Community College 2. Probably a tie between the R2 and grad school. However, that grad school focused a lot on grad students, so it's possible the undergraduate experience isn't quite as good. ... 3. After a very large drop off the R1 state school.

You obviously can't extrapolate too much from my personal experience, but it does seem to line up with man others.

They increased their defense spending because of Russia invading Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. It didn't have anything to do with US bullying. The biden administration certainly wasn't going around bullying Europe between 2021 and 2024.

Something similar to this actually happened to a friend of mine. His kid managed to buy a cheap burner phone with a prepaid data plan. You can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good with these things though. Just because you can't perfectly enforce a boundary doesn't mean you should give up and just not have boundaries.

This is not how it works. The weighting is based on the Consumer Expenditure Survey. BLS does not arbitrarily assign the weights. If they change the weighting between butter and bread it's because they found that people were buying more bread in the CES not because they assume that's what will happen.

CPI's methodology is transparent and the data is available if you wish to reproduce it. They aren't playing games with the data. There are all kinds of reasons your personal inflation rate might differ from CPI but it's not because BLS is putting their thumb on the scale to try and show less inflation.

Sure I’ll pass your email along to her and see if she wants to do that.

Wife is a nurse. They eventually go 2 computers working for her unit. I don't think it impacted patients already being treated, but they couldn't get surgeries scheduled and no charting was being done. Some of the other floors were in complete shambles.

I think almost exclusively through inner monologue, and I find I can't speed read at all. If I'm not vocalizing I'm not thinking, so when I try to not vocalize in order to speed read I don't retain anything. It's like my brain is incapable of processing the words if they aren't being vocalized.

I wonder if to get rid of the fans they could use a control moment gyroscope or reaction wheels.

As someone who is not an academic myself, but likes to listen to podcasts where academics discuss issues with each other, I often find that the conversations feel contentious, and sometimes they are, but the vast majority of the time the academics themselves feel like they're having a perfectly cordial and productive conversation. So I do think there is something to the idea that academic discussion comes across as being negative.