tobiasSoftware

"I find it useful to think “what can I expect from speaking with the dataset of combined writing of people”, rather than treating a basic LLM as a mind."

I've been doing this as well, mentally I think of LLMs as the librarians of the internet.

One of the weirdest things Einstein discovered is that time is relative, but cause and effect are absolute.

For example, muons should decay before they hit the ground, but they don't due to time dilation. We see the time dilation when observing the muons, but the muons don't, so you would think that for us, the muons make it to the ground but for the muon it would decay too fast. However, the muons experience length contraction, so they do make it to the ground from their viewpoint as well.

So cause and effect is preserved, even though we would disagree with the muon on the relativistic reason why it is preserved.

Honestly I think the root problem is that universities have a degree in computer science, whereas what most people want is to learn to build computer software.

The two overlap most of the time in subtle ways where the science gives an important foundation, such as learning Big O notation and low level memory concepts where exposure helps. I've personally seen this with a smart coworker who didn't go through university and is great at programming but I'll catch him on certain topics such as when he didn't know what sets and maps were and when he tries to sleep a second instead of properly wait on an event.

However, the differences between computer science and building software are problematic. Watching my wife go through university, she's had to struggle with insanely hard tasks that will not help her at all with software, such as learning Assembly and building circuits. The latest example is the class where she's learning functional programming is not actually teaching it to her. Instead, they combined it with how to build a programming language, and so instead of giving her toy problems to teach the language she is having to take complex code she doesn't understand well that generates an entirely different programming language and do things like change the associativity of the generated language. In the end, she feels like she's learned nothing in that class, despite it being her first experience with functional programming.

On the flip side are the things that are necessary for software that aren't taught in university, like QA. For me personally, back when I was in university a decade ago I never learned about version control and thought it was just for back up. Similarly, I never learned databases or web, as the required classes were instead focused on low level concepts as Assembly and hardware. My wife is at least learning these things, but even then they often seem taught badly. For example, when they tried to teach her QA, instead of hardcoded unit tests, they made her give random inputs and check to make sure the output was correct. Of course, checking the output can only be done by rewriting all of your code in the testing files, and if there's a bug in your code it'll just get copied, so that kind of defeats the purpose. Even when the assignments are relevant there is often no teaching on them. For example, her first ever web code was a project where they told her to hook up 6 different technologies that they had not gone over in class, with only the line "I hope you've learned some of these technologies already".

Perhaps you should consider wearing an N95 while visiting the hospital. You can a pack on Amazon for $15 (even in stylish black), and they really aren't that bad wearing. In my opinion, the practice of wearing N95s in medical settings is the one response to Covid that should be permanent. Unfortunately even in peak Covid medical advisors were too scared to advise proper masking and settled for cloth and surgical masks, while KN95/N95 offers far more protection for yourself. Looking back, we could have done away with social distancing, quarantining, shutdowns, and all the other extreme procedures if we had just ramped up N95 production and told everyone to wear them in public while we were waiting on the vaccines.

" I don't think there's a JRPG more accessible than this one"

I'd argue there's one more, though I may be biased as it's what got me into RPGs - Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. It's a relatively unknown title as it was an attempt by the Final Fantasy franchise to get beginners into RPGs. It's like Super Mario RPG in a lot of ways, including seeing monsters on the overworld. However, it's much more like table-top RPGs, without mechanics such as timed hits and with more standard RPG monsters and spells. Personally I love the art style they went with in the game, it's the peak of pixel art IMO.

I agree that "throw everything in a hashmap" should be straightforward and is a good interview test. However, his further steps to "optimize" it by saying "Poor candidates load the contents of both files into memory." are terrible. Yes, that might optimize resources, but first it hardcodes the requirement that there are exactly two days breaking the solution if the requirement changes, and second it adds a bunch of finicky fragile code about "if there are two pages or more from day one or if the first page from day one is different from the page from day two".

Great candidates treat software like a business with changing requirements and code that is read by multiple people, poor candidates treat software like a math challenge where the only goal is to use as few resources as possible.

I agree. I hate how these interviews always focus so much on algorithmic time at the expense of flexibility of the code. I agree with the first part about avoiding the n^2 algorithm by using hash maps. However, making your algorithm use half the memory but hardcoding the requirement that a user visited on two days is bad design, especially when it's only halving the memory used. Also not only does it hardcode the requirements, it also makes it much more complex logic wise as you need that "if pages from day 1 >= 2 or first page from day 1 != page from day 2".

My design was to create two hash maps, one for customer to a list of days and one for customer to list of pages, though after reading the article I realized my lists should really be sets. Then you can easily account for any change to the definition of a loyal customer, as all you need to do is use two O(1) lookups and then check the size of the lists. Easy, flexible, and little room for error.

The SMTM theory is that obesity is not directly about counting calories, but more like a contagious disease due to a contaminant that causes people to be hungrier and eat more calories. Many people will dismiss this outright, but consider these things:

1. 40% of US adults are obese, which is insanely high for a willpower issue (gambling addiction is 1-2% for example)

2. The vast majority of weight loss attempts fail miserably long term, with success rates somewhere between 5-20%

3. There is precedent for this type of idea with stomach ulcers. We thought they were a psychological cause but the main cause turned out to be H Pylori bacteria

The problem is that even if they are right, it is very difficult to detect a difference between directly eating less calories and not eating a contaminant that makes you hungry so you indirectly eat less calories.

Because the story was misrepresented and it wasn't truly voted on in the normal sense.

In the US Congress, how many people are present matters to the vote. So if a bunch of Congressmen take off, it would give enormous power to the few people who remain. Because of this, there's a gentlemen's agreement that on those sorts of days, the people who are there just clock in and don't actually vote. My understanding is that the daylight savings "vote" was this type of situation where someone violated the gentlemen's agreement and voted on it without a planned vote. It doesn't really affect anything though because it would need to pass both sides of Congress and this was just one of them.

As far as why anyone be against it, I'm not sure, but it wasn't "almost" passed as the media made it sound like.

The delayed choice quantum eraser is misunderstood (even by PBS Spacetime) to invoke time travel/retrocausality. The truth is that the pattern seen on the screen is the same whichever set of detectors you send it to, and as such, there is no evidence of time travel.

The more plausible explanation behind the delayed choice quantum eraser involves Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that you cannot obtain position and momentum to a high degree of accuracy at the same time. Einstein's EPR paradox "proved" quantum physics incorrect by setting the Uncertainty Principle against Entanglement. He did this by a thought experiment that entangled two particles, and measuring the position of one and the momentum of the other to thwart the Uncertainty Principle.

The delayed quantum choice eraser is a realization of Einstein's thought experiment. However, what Einstein didn't realize was that while the standard double slit experiment produces a pattern at the screen that gives you the momentum information, entangling two particles creates a different pattern at the screen that causes the particles by themselves to give neither momentum nor position information. The delayed quantum choice eraser initially recovers the position information by combining information from both particles, but by choosing the other set of detectors you can "give up" that information to gain the momentum information. Either way, you are still unable to obtain both pieces of information at the same time.

Source: I am writing a book on Quantum Physics and have spent months doing research and finding out that even many quantum physics Youtubers routinely say misinformation. By far the worst is the incorrect idea that a which-way detector on the double slit experiment will produce two bands as if the particles are marble-like. It doesn't, it destroys the interference pattern, producing a single slit pattern. This sounds like a minor detail, but it contains the realization that quantum physics particles ALWAYS act like waves, even after a measurement, and wave-particle duality is a misnomer.

Looking around, it does look like she's explained things better in other videos than the one I saw, so maybe I was too harsh.

The video I saw at the time is "Why is quantum mechanics weird? The bomb experiment" where she describes entanglement as a photo being torn in half and then sent apart, and then vaguely says that it is a "stronger" correlation than that.

On looking for that video though, I watched "What did Einstein mean by “Spooky Action at a Distance"?", where she describes things a bit more thoroughly with socks, where she explains that the correlations were created locally but when you measure the one particle on one side the other particle's wave function changes. She then goes on to actually explain that the sock explanation does not work as it does not sufficiently create strong correlations, which I think is a much better explanation

Looking back, I think I've learned a lot more about quantum physics since I last watched her videos. Back then, I think I saw her repeated use of explaining entanglement as a "stronger correlation" to be a cop out. Now that I've dove into the actual Bell Inequality experiment and understand how it works, I actually quite like that description as a placeholder for a very strange phenomenon that none of us really understand yet. Still, I do think she should have clarified just a bit better on the first video I mentioned, but I guess when you make lots of videos on one of the most complicated topics of all time it's rather easy to omit a crucial detail here or there.

I have substantial layman's expertise in quantum physics and while she correctly points out many mistakes that are even in textbooks, she also follows the very niche Superdeterimistic viewpoint and then presents hypotheses that follow from that viewpoint (Hidden Variables and Einstein's gloves) as if they are facts. For a science educator, this is a massive problem, and so she's become my least popular quantum physics educator even though she explains many quantum physics concepts very well.

Unfortunately, her physics videos are worse than people realize too, at least the quantum physics ones.

I've been learning a lot of quantum physics and she's a mixed bag. On the one hand, most people's (and even textbooks') understanding of quantum observation and the quantum eraser experiment are incorrect, and Sabine is one of the few voices on Youtube that calls them out instead of joins them, which is why I suspect why she is so popular.

On the other hand, she embraces the very niche superdeterminism hypothesis. This hypothesis basically says that cause and effect and reversed for any Bell's Inequality related experiment in that using uncorrelated data as inputs into the experiment causes them to become correlated because you used them for the experiment. In other words, she believes that the universe is puppeteering Bell's Inequality experiments so that we can't trust results from those experiments. This has serious issues related to non-falsifiability, where we could technically do this with any experiment we don't like the results of.

However, that's not even the worst part of it. The worst part is that she does not explain her niche viewpoints in her videos. If any of the more popular hypotheses about entanglement are correct, then Einstein's hidden variables hypothesis where entanglement acts like a pair of gloves will be disproven. However, in her videos about entanglement, she constantly refers to entanglement acting like a pair of gloves like it is a fact, because her niche viewpoint is the single viewpoint where it is not disproven.

The CDC was recommending against KN95 and N95 masks even after Omicron, so it was more like 2 years, not one month. I was also someone who wore proper masks against the advice of experts.

I agree that going with the experts is the best course of action for the general public. We need to be able to disagree with experts, but we need to be able to do it in an informed manner, with proper research to back up the ideas. However, most of the general public is unable to do so.