biophysboy

God help us if they ever become one

Based on the discussions in this thread, they aren’t alone

It’s common in scientific/stats publishing to have the headline state the avg/median, the main text plot the errors, and the supplementary give the explicit numbers. They have a big page about std errors.

Based on their July 2026 report, there were tiny increases in several sectors. The big declines were in service providing, leisure and hospitality, and government (bc of a summer decline in local gov education).

The bureau of labor statistics publishes confidence intervals in their reports

What do you mean by scientist-heavy orgs solving everything in token space? I feel like they use them to make or run tools almost exclusively.

There’s definitely didactic art made post 2016, but I wouldn’t write everything off beyond that date forever. Online review aggregators are less reliable for recent movies, so you might want to find individuals that you trust for >2016 recs, instead of algorithmic scores.

Counterpoint: my entire physics phd cohort is doing great now and it didn’t ruin our lives.

I think better advice is “do you want to work in this specific lab for 5 years?”, not “do you really want to do physics”? Talk to the lab members, learn what they do.

As many others have said here, you should just think about transactional vs analytical as well as single user in-process vs multi-user client-server when making choices.

That said, I do think duckdb has a wider range of use cases than people here might think. It can whip through fairly large datasets (I use it for ~1B row tables all the time)

You can have multiple read only processes. But yes, concurrent read mode and write mode is blocked

I think you would magically see more (edit: wealthy) people collect an income

People need to stop conflating evil intentions with evil capacity. It is done regularly with Elon, Thiel, etc. As arrogant as they may be on X, they are drooling imbeciles when it comes to politics. Remember Blake Masters? Remember the Wisconsin supreme court election? How is the admin they endorsed doing? Has Lutke thought about how high-income individuals in metro areas vote?

They have failed again and again. There is no reason to believe Lutke's worthless dreams will go unchallenged if they are ever attempted in the first place.

Low effort products will be used by low effort companies. In the case of restaurants, this might not necessarily be bad - I’ve been to amazing taco/burrito shops w abysmal menus. But if I went to a “high end” place with an AI menu and instagram decor - bad, bad sign.

I genuinely think AI companies need to worry more about their brand. Just through how their products are used, they are perceived as a marker for low quality.

I did the same research in elementary school! My parents were my seed investors. They asked for 25% of equity - all I ended up giving them was some collectible artwork for the fridge.

Isn't it just a different form of private capital designed for the later stage of a tech company? I'm not saying its good, but I am not remotely surprised by tech's transition from growth/disruption/hiring to cost-cutting/M&A.

Do you remember some of the studies this book cites? I always thought the drug development lag times and success rate made patents necessary. Do the authors make exceptions for rare disease or CNS therapies?

Give me a break - tech is not remotely interested in comprehensive “systems” thinking about the problems that motivated these age verification policies

I agree with this (I want to be a parent very soon). I think I'm trying to articulate that while its possible to make a quiet place for your kid at home, they still live in a very internet-driven world.

I actually am curious about your experience on this. Basically, I'm worried that I'll try to make restrictions in the future, and it'll just be a war of attrition that I lose, since internet platforms touch so many parts of social life, especially for the young. Maybe things will be different in a decade.

In my opinion, none, but many parents disagree. Also, its more about the secondary effects, where all of their friends at school are talking about internet things they are unfamiliar with.

Its a tragedy of the commons situation. The benefits of being offline are dampened by the kid being out of the loop

Bell labs and IBM made gobs of money in their respective hey days

Yes exactly. It’s like advertising a car by saying “it uses gasoline!” Obviously gas helps the car go, but the user of the car just wants to go places cheaply and reliably

Thats very interesting to me that Watterson remembers his childhood as a difficult time. Calvin’s moments of sadness/anxiety/anger are a big part of why I found those comics so relatable and endearing as a kid.

Two things can be true at once: one group cut funding early 2025, and another group added funding later. The former group, DOGE, was less responsible, and the latter group, USDA, is more responsible. I do not know why I have to ignore the former group to be fair to the latter.

The argument is not that cutting funding caused the problem; the argument is that you have to use money to solve the problem.

I used to order $10 oligos all the time. The extra length is cool, but I was honestly more impressed by the claims on sequence accuracy in the article. Even a single base pair change can affect the genetics and physics of DNA.

I broadly agree with you on the AI hyping. Data quality and quantity is not high enough in my opinion.

That number is for the United States, not the United States government

There is evidence that high-frequency, 50% accurate bot traders make most of the money on prediction markets simply due to being able to make bets faster.

Is the 5% rule for total rent per year?

Protein structure is not a rate-limiting step in drug discovery.