kajic

No

Green cards

It’s much easier to reverse engineer a solution that you don’t understand (and discover important underlying theories on that journey), than it is to arrive at that same solution and the underlying theories without knowing in advance where you are going.

For this reason, discoveries made by AI will be immensely useful for accelerating scientific progress, even if those discoveries are opaque at first.

Thank you!

I have a green card and will be applying for naturalization towards the end of the year. Would you recommend hiring a lawyer to help me with my application, or just do it myself? I’m planning to do it myself but would reconsider if that typically helps (significantly) speed up the process and/or avoid any common issues that people encounter when doing it without legal assistance.

One of the complications described by the author is performance. Personally, I find stdlib graph libraries extremely useful even if their performance is poor because it’s often the case that my dataset is small enough, and even if performance turns out to be an issue, first spending time on the problem with a underperforming graph library is a very worthwhile exercise before trying to write my own optimized implementation. By analogy, many programming languages are far from being the fastest, but they can nevertheless be very useful.

That said, I’m not surprised performance came up in interviews with experts; they probably have tons of interesting performance-related stories to tell from their extensive work on graphs.

It’s happened to me a few times lately that I’ve heard music playing that was as vivid as a recording. As soon as I became aware of the fact that it was playing in my head and not in reality it stopped. I can’t make it start at will. I’d love to hear of other people’s experiences with this.

I just learned from this article that AirPods can be charged by the Apple Watch charger. Wow, I had no idea.

Yeah, I’m sure many spammers “fixed” this a long time ago. The logical next step would be to bounce all emails which go to the plain version of an email address, but I guess also anything after + which one hasn’t “whitelisted”.

Some people set filterkeyword to name-of-business, to know who sold them out if they start receiving spam on that address.

And yet lists of things often allow dragging of individual items to rearrange them. I wonder if thinking of paragraphs of text, and perhaps even sentences, in a similar way might make the dragging of text feature more appealing (I also dislike it).

Sure, but why would more knowledge lead to more danger, rather than less?

I come to think about the adage that scientific answers often bring with them more questions. Those ever expanding questions I sometimes imagine as an exponentially growing circumference of unknowns, surrounding a circle of what’s currently known.

Perhaps those unknowns could be thought of as corresponding to the gray and black balls, so that what’s dangerous is essentially that which we don’t fully understand and therefore cannot fully control.

Finally, I’m thinking that the area covered by all previously gathered knowledge (area because knowledge synergies with itself) will increasingly likely outweigh the danger that we uncover as the circumference of unknowns grows and dangers are discovered along the perimeter.

What if each drawn white ball makes the gray balls yet to be drawn a little more white and the black balls a little more gray?