stochastician

Other story, for balance: My father was diagnosed (again, in Idaho) with a rare ocuclar melanoma. Very few cases, but highly treatable. The specialist was in SF where I lived at the time. We went there, and it was a very different experience from Dana-Farber. The clinician was an academic who only saw patients like once a week. People were sitting on the floor lined up out the door.

His staff was gruff, there was such limited information as we progressed through the system, there were so many patients there from all over the western part of the US. For many of them it was their first time with cancer, and sitting there in the waiting room with my (non-medical!!!) bio training my Dad would often offer my services to "explain" something. Which I did, and I think I helped, but it was all rough.

The main doctor was so gruff and obnoxious that I emailed my MD friends in Boston (was still in grad school) asking how I could file a complaint.

But at the end of the day that process helped my father (and many of those other people ) get state-of-the-art proton beam therapy, covered by insurance.

Sadly my dad's cancer came back a short time later and he passed away (miss you too Dad).

But now, 15 years later, having been through the healthcare system in so many ways, and having many friends who are academic specialist MDs, I recognize that the doctor in SF was operating with incredible constraints, finite resources, and probably tired. And my Dad got the best possible treatment technology as a result of the second opinion.

But at the time I wanted to strangle the doctor.

I'm writing this just to say that sometimes the second opinion is tough. Sometimes it's in a far-away place or the doctors are jerks. Maybe even borderline unprofessional. They're the bastard operator from hell in their own little world. But again, this is life-and-death.

GET THAT SECOND OPINION EVEN IF THE DOCTOR IS A DICK.

Yes because everyone will want to share records / data. The specialized clinics / centers are used to this role! Especially if you are going from a more-generic to a more-specialized center, but even if you're walking down the street.

This is literally life-and-death. My recommendation is for full transparency, it was crucial for us.

The second opinion advice is great, and what I tell everyone I know who gets cancer.

My mom was diagnosed with stage 1 cancer in 2006 in Idaho. I was a PhD student at MIT at the time and a friend in lab helped me get an appointment at Dana-Farber. I thought it was probably overkill (it was a common cancer) but we did it anyway. They said everything in Idaho was standard of care but suggested one extra test, which Idaho team then reluctantly did, which revealed distant metastasis (stage 4! ), dramatically changing her treatment trajectory. She lived another 15 years (I miss you Mom).

Asking for a second opinion sucks. A lot of us are preconditioned from birth to trust our clinicians. But you're going on a journey and your life (or the life of your loved one) is on the line. Insurance often covers it. Your doctor will NOT be offended.

Think of it this way : if you were deploying code to the mars rover, and your colleague asked to do a code review before you pushed go, would you be offended? This is even more important than that.

Is there anything like this for more commodity arm cores (neoverse v2) or do we think the insights from apple silicon cores will generalize well to those other ARM architectures?

I am somewhat rusty on my undergrad quantum, but I'm not entirely sure I agree with this analysis. Could you perhaps explain it more clearly in baa-ket notation?

> At some point my daughter, who is now 12, and is a crucial person in my life, enlightening my days with her intelligence, creativity and love, wanted to visit NYC for her birthday.

I know this wasn't the point of the post, but it was the most beautiful thing I've read all week, and really sums up how I feel about my own children. A small aside in a much longer post but incredibly humanizing and wonderful.

Author of that paper here -- What an incredibly nice comment to wake up to at 3am, thank you! This paper made me quit neuro and switch to systems that are easier to model (small molecules) which it turns out are still annoyingly difficult!

This is an incredible post, and thank you for the mission critical work that you do. I'm always curious what other people's work lives are like -- can you talk a little bit about your job, the tasks you're working on today, and how the people you interact with on a day like today (customers, clients, coworkers) could make today a little easier / more fun?