jessriedel

Joined 17 years ago

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21,130
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6,593
Member since
Jan 24
Physicist at NTT Research Physics & Informatics Lab. Interested in quantum information, decoherence, rigorously defining wavefunction branches, and classically undetectable soft-particle detection.

Postdocs at IBM Research (under Charlie Bennett) and at Perimeter Institute. UCSB Ph.D. 2012 (advisor: Wojciech Zurek). Princeton B.A. 2007. TJHSST 2003.

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Recent submissions

Comment · 6 months ago
Besides making the airport more pleasant, targeting announcements to the relevant travelers also means they are much more likely to be heard. When 99% of announcements are irrelevant, we just mentally screen them out.
Comment · 8 months ago
If that were really the risk they would spin them out.
Comment · 8 months ago
Cruise was being operated as a separate company though. As a default, GM could have just not done anything and let Cruise operate as if it were independent. Any synergies (personnel, manufacturing expertise, etc) would have just been a bonus. And if they didn't want the financial exposure, they could have spun it out again.

Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.

Comment · 10 months ago
The UN security council is one reasonable and popular choice, although it has lots of problems.

But enforcement is not even my point. I'm referring to a moral principle.

Comment · 10 months ago
Most of the people who make the argument I described probably believe the UN is the only legitimate body that could make this decision, based on some combination of practicality, historical precedent, and international agreement. And the UN absolutely has a mechanism for doing it (the security council). But one alternatively might argue the UN is broken/dysfunctional/corrupt enough that it can't be relied on despite having the "proper paperwork", just as national democracies can be for national affairs.
Comment · 10 months ago
I think the (disputable) argument is that, for global stability and equilibrium reasons, there should be a general prohibition against kidnapping/assassination of de facto heads of state, regardless of whether they were legitimately elected or are dictators.
Comment · 10 months ago
Comment · 10 months ago
Cancers aren't perfectly optimized to metastasize, and metasteses (rather than, e.g., bulk pressure from the original tumor) are usually what kills you. It's perfectly possible that the procedure kills 90% or 99% of the cells in the original tumor but increases migration of the remaining cells such that the net effect reduces patient survival.
Comment · 10 months ago
If that's your honest impression, it's incorrect and I urge you to spend more time working with frontier models.
Comment · 10 months ago
Do you have a source on that? The current article describes the software very differently:

> In any case, the software updates rolled out by the company appear to be quick and easy to install. Many airlines completed them within hours. The software works by inducing "rapid refreshing of the corrupted parameter so it has no time to have effect on the flight controls", Airbus says. This is, in essence, a way of continually sanitising computer data on these aircraft to try and ensure that any errors don't end up actually impacting a flight.

Comment · 10 months ago
I'm quite aware of the limitations. That's why I bothered to post a comment. But it's definitely better to do due diligence by asking first, since many responses can then be checked. Mentioning it in the comment shows the effort, similar to "Google turned up nothing".
Comment · 10 months ago
I thought some combination of error correction and redundant systems was already widespread in airplanes to prevent cosmic-ray induced errors. (GPT agrees.) What am I missing? I've read multiple articles on this, and none of them address the fact that the problem, at the level of detail described in the article, should have been prevented by technology available and widely deployed for decades.
Comment · 11 months ago
I check Google maps ETA estimates when I get in a car in SF; they are accurate for Uber or Lyfts, but Waymos are absolutely slower there. This is especially, but not exclusively, true for routes where a human would take the 101 or 280, for obvious reasons.
Comment · 11 months ago
I have normal vision. I wouldn't say completely identical when they are side-by-side, but they are very close. It's effectively impossible to discriminate them when they are not side-by-side, which for this plot is very important.

The author's mistake was this: "[my colors] are equidistant in the hue circle". The problem is that the hue circle (at least under the parameterization scheme he used) is not uniform over discrimination, i.e., the ability to discriminate two hues is not invariant under displacing them an equal amount along the circle. (I presume this is one of those situation where it's misleading to think about three primary colors on equal footing because of quirks of human vision biology.)

First, the author could have chosen 7 hues at max-saturation that were easier to discriminate than this. But more importantly, he should have used the other color axes: saturation and brightness. dark red (~maroon) and light red (~pink) are a lot easier to discriminate, even when not next to each other, than the two shades of green he used.

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