Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
Most? Almost all my requests to the "Auto" model end up being routed to a "thinking" model, even those I think ChatGPT would be able to answer fine without extra reasoning time. Never say never, but right now the router doesn't seem to be optimising for cost (at least for me), it really does seem to be selecting a model based on the question itself.
Comment · 2 years ago
You can distribute to "internal" testers (people you add to your developer account) without any review process. The app is only reviewed if you want to distribute to external testers.
Comment · 11 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
People with depression do not generally have low serotonin levels, and it's unlikely low serotonin is the cause of chronic depression. If it was, serotonin agonists would be effective much faster than the 4-8 weeks they currently take. There's some evidence that increased serotonin levels modulate glutamate after about 4 weeks, and glutamate antagonists like Ketamine are effective on depression more rapidly than serotonin agonists (as quick as 40m in some studies).

Also the depression effect of alcohol is completely different to chronic depression, any mood effects you feel during a hangover are likely related to reduced dopamine.

Sleep is very important though, and, in Australia at least, melatonin is commonly prescribed for sleep issues that have a psychiatric cause.

Comment · 13 years ago
You possibly didn't fool them - they may have suspected you were faking the symptoms, but when a patient shows up to a psychologist/psychiatrist on their own volition it suggests they're in distress. It could be considered malpractice to turn someone away who's seeking treatment.

A friend of mine spent two weeks in a hospital psych ward (in Sydney), and requested his records after he was discharged. It was surprising how much detail the doctors noted in the records, and how often they (correctly) picked up on avoidance and lying (yet they didn't give this impression in person). Based on this experience, it's possible the psychs your class visited gave you the diagnosis you wanted, but privately noted something very different you weren't aware of.

There has been a lot of progress in objective diagnostic tools recently - e.g there's a clinic in Sydney that diagnoses ADHD using EEGs, and selects medication based on response to the med (also measured using an EEG). And I read a paper last year that described a machine learning model trained on MRI images that could diagnose some of the organic psych diseases (bipolar, schizophrenia, depression etc.) with very high accuracy (70s/80s from memory), and distinguish between the diseases in borderline cases.

Psychiatry won't rely on symptoms alone forever, and don't think psychiatrists aren't already aware of the problems. But every psychiatrist who looked after my friend used whatever tools they had at the time to try and help. It's far from perfect, but they did their best and they really did help. And I'm really glad they did because he's finally a genuinely happy person.

Comment · 16 years ago
It's interesting seeing differences between countries. Like the author said in the comments, 401k isn't an "issue" in Australia. I don't know how 401k works, but Superannuation in Aus is a compulsory 9%-10% of your salary that your employer sends to your super fund (that you can't access until you're 60). If you're a contractor you don't have to pay yourself super (so you could have more immediately available money), but you could also put away 9% just like your employer would. There's no insurance issues because we get government provided healthcare, and depending on the contract structure you go with there's actually a few decent protections an employer is required to provide you (if you structure it that you're a company contracting to another company then you're out of luck there).

So realistically the major difference is "security", which to be honest there isn't much of regardless you being an employee or contractor. So at least in Australia, unless you're getting an increase in your hourly rate, or a company says they'll only continue to send you work if you're an employee, there's no major advantage to switching to be an employee.

Comment · 16 years ago
Re #1 and #3, that's not really true. They performed a manual landing, and the procedure in any emergency is to 'follow the book' regardless of the type of plane being flown. Their job was to evaluate the damage & take actions informed by their experience, ensure the plane was in a state to land, and then land it. That's what they did, a computer didn't do that for them.
Comment · 16 years ago
Other implementations you haven't mentioned like MacRuby are much faster. In my totally unscientific and completely biased benchmarks (small tests related to the type of work I do mainly - Machine Learning) MacRuby is now faster than Python (2.6) and is closing the gap on V8 (which, in the tests I wrote, was even faster than Go, and less than twice as slow as C).
Comment · 16 years ago
"By lacking sophistication, I mean a system of alternative capital (VC) that fully recognises Startups as a serious way to generate wealth"

That's definitely changing, e.g Innovation Bay, Startmate, the Sydney Angel Sidecar Fund, and others. VC/Angel investing is not at the same maturity as overseas yet, but it's definitely changing.

Comment · 16 years ago
Take a look at some of the other projects on Kaggle - a lot of them have no money or roughly similar amounts. One of the main crowds Kaggle attracts is University students and staff, and they do these projects because they're interesting and fun. It's similar to a shared task at an academic conference, which is the sort of thing most of the active ML/KD&DM community are interested in.
Comment · 16 years ago
That's really a comment about your distro, not about Ruby or Rails. It /should/ be as simple as installing Ruby, then `gem install rails`. If it's not then something is broken with your distro's package.
Comment · 16 years ago
You already have a lot of advice :) But I'll add that if you focus on negative memories a lot you may need to consider if you have OCD or an anxiety disorder, and the anhedonia could be a sign of depression. The best treatment for these disorders is a short term medication with longer term psychological treatment (normally cognitive behavioural therapy).

But, if a psychologist or psychiatrist is out of the question, you can try some cognitive behavioural therapy online for free and in private: <http://moodgym.anu.edu.au/welcome>; The study behind this website actually showed it was more effective than visiting a therapist in person! There's a decent number of CBT exercises to complete, and it seems quite a few people get better simply by using the site without any psychological intervention.

But more importantly: it's sometimes possible to channel your negative emotions to good use. But sometimes it's not, and that's OK. Forget the advice that you should just 'man up' - if you feel the need to reach out here then it's a sign that what you have may be more than just a low attitude. It's OK to ask for help, it's OK to get it, and regardless of whether there's a stigma attached to mental ill health, it's OK to get professional help. There's nothing 'wrong' with you, but you can get help for everything you've mentioned if you feel you need it.

Comment · 16 years ago
Yeah their credits are a bit sneaky :) Twilio only supports US numbers which is a problem. If you're looking at telephony companies, Tropo (https://www.tropo.com/) is only 2c per message and sorta supports international numbers. Their 'support' is basically "if it works, awesome, if it doesn't, well we never said it definitely would". It's worked well to Australia for me so far. International support is coming at some point, though I don't know if it will still be at 2c per message.
Comment · 16 years ago
That doesn't scale to the rest of the world though. At least here in Australia you're free to port your number to any carrier at any time (I'm on my third carrier with the same number I've had since I was in high school), so you can't use the number on its own to know what network you're sending to. I'm sure this is the same in other countries as well.

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