144 karma · joined July 11, 2022
2. Think about what challenges are generally faced in the field in whatever capacity you're interested in (network security, hardware security, etc.) and what organizations (public/private/solo hacker groups) are actively working towards addressing these challenges.
3. Do some work, reach out to people, ask some questions, assert your solutions.
Much of the data is noisy and I won't even get into the gory details of data ingestion. I was wondering the other day why hedge funds and etc. aren't using them as an early indicator and I can speculate why. On the other side of the spectrum, your average Joe is at times inconvenienced by Equifax's inaccurate record keeping.
Albeit, much of the boilerplate was in place. Students were tasked with maximizing bandwidth via the optimization techniques mentioned in the article and other literature.
- Noise cancelling headphones
- Raspberry Pi
- Ergonomic Chair
- Ergonomic Mouse
- Means to purchase high quality prescription lenses that filter out blue light
- E-Ink Tablet
- Pledge $250M in exchange for $4M collateral and $X in interest (?) - Near certain outcome of SBF showing up into court, unless some 4-D chess plan has already been contrived to have him and parents flee (what career do they flee to? Each of them?) - Collect risk-free interest
In the case that this trade blows up, you then call Talib Nassem and tell him you have another anecdote of underpricing tail risk and he'll write about it in his next book on the folly of underestimating black swan events.
The point I'm trying to make is that for certain technical concepts (mathematics, programming, etc.), it's not the technical detail that must be remembered. Sure, you forget exactly the syntactical details of implementation, but you do remember (assuming you understood it at the start):
1 - How do I traverse the tree? 2 - Is there any ordering required among the nodes so that my traversal is 'correct'? 3 - How do I maintain such an ordering and establish correctness after my new node is added? 4 - Can I make any improvements so that locating the position of the to-be-added node doesn't take forever?
You don't begin to touch on these higher level "computationally minded" ideas until you can understand the primitive action of adding a node. And once you've grasped it, you forget the primitive details, only the essential concept remains.
The author seems to suggest that the next generation doesn't need to make an attempt to understand the fundamentals. I argue that unless you're a genius, you need to first add a node to a binary tree before labeling yourself a computational thinker.
An extreme case from earlier this year, in which a university employee was caught stealing: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/29/1089525660/a-former-yale-empl...
How much of this happens on a per-employee basis? What is the expected value of loss if everything is tallied and reconciled?
At least in my department, you have to re-apply on a quarter-basis for TA positions, which are generally highly sought after for its material compensation (no tuition, fee remission, and a small stipend). For research positions, contingent on you being able to 1) produce results, 2) the duration that the research proposal runs. Unless you're a PhD student/PostDoc/PI with a compelling research narrative that is novel and impactful, it can be hard to land grants (many individuals from many schools each competing for the same dwindling pool of funds).
So I completely understand young people striking for more benefits, but truly, it has to come out of the university administrations' pockets. Professors and PIs are like cash strapped entrepreneurs who have no way of raising additional funds for students unless they leverage industry connections. EDIT: I don't have any visibility on the "under-the-table" finances of PIs and professors, however.
Throwback to Keynes forecasting that we'd all be working 15 hour work weeks.
But it's apparent to me that academia is straining under the system in which it exists. Incentives are misaligned, from the bottom of the hierarchy to the top. Economic strain puts pressure to produce rushed research, at the expense of PIs and the students and limits the allocations of grants to proven institutions and individuals.
The issue is so complicated that I don't even know where to begin to address it without sounding like a Kacyznski-nut. From a naturalist's perspective, maybe this was bound to happen as 'real' innovation dries up.
It seems that the only rational conditions to pursue a graduate degree in this economic climate is 1) purely for intellectual reasons, the challenge and the growth, 2) to put a small pimple on the butt of your field and given that it takes off, pick the fruits until the tree is bare. To expect glory and honor is setting yourself up for bitterness and from a purely vocational perspective, many have remarked at the negative opportunity cost.
1 - Higher testosterone, generally correlated with higher amounts of DHT as testosterone is metabolized into DHT. This obviously depends on some intermediary metabolic process and all of the dependencies involved there.
2 - Certain hair follicles are DHT resistant. Why does MPB follow a M-shaped pattern and devolve into common patterns across those afflicted?
3 - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26622151/ Mechanical stress points on the scalp seems to map injectively to the areas that see hair recede.
Takeaway: mechanical stress induces chronic inflammation on the scalp, localized in areas that correspond to MPB hairloss areas. Chronic inflammation begets androgen binding and those with high amounts of systemic DHT/vulnerable follicles develop MPB.