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blackbear_

2,124 karma · joined April 27, 2017

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blackbear_··on Android's sideloading limits are its most anti-consumer move
GOS allows you to install and use apps from the Play Store and the vast majority of them works flawlessly.
blackbear_··on Matrices can be your friends (2002)
Yes; I wrote linear transformation on purpose not to remain constrained on spatial or geometric interpretations.

The (discrete) Fourier transform is also a linear transformation, which is why the initial effort of thinking abstractly in terms of vector spaces and transformations between them pays lots of dividends when it's time to understand more advanced topics such as the DFT, which is "just" a change of basis.

blackbear_··on Matrices can be your friends (2002)
The fundamental truth is that matrices represent linear transformations, and all of linear algebra is developed in terms of linear transformations rather than just grid of numbers. It all becomes much clearer when you let go of the tabular representation and study the original intentions that motivated the operations you do on matrices.

My appreciation for the subject grew considerably after working through the book "Linear Algebra done right" by Axler https://linear.axler.net

blackbear_··on Why Wikipedia cannot claim the Earth is not flat
But not all fringe beliefs lead to progress, in fact most of them don't.
blackbear_··on Women portrayed as younger than men online, and AI amplifies the bias
I would have expected this to be exceedingly obvious to anybody who ever went to a shopping center, but anyways...

> The Global Anti-Aging Products Market size is [worth] USD 47.4 Billion in 2023

> Women Dominate Anti-Aging Products Market with Over 80% Share in 2022

https://market.us/report/anti-aging-products-market/

blackbear_··on A PhD in Snapshots
> I don't get why invest time in PhD if your work afterwards seems totally unrelated to your expertise

Depending on how the supervision chain is arranged, a PhD can a journey of discovery, of new science but first and foremost of yourself and your interests. It can be very self-directed and the only mandate is to discover something new. For this reason it is common for people to dip their toes in a few distinct but related subfields during those years until they find something that sticks (if at all), and the person that comes out of a PhD can be very different from the person who started it.

blackbear_··on An illustrated introduction to linear algebra
Not sure I am following; typical neural network training via stochastic gradient descent does not require Jacobian inversion.

Less popular techniques like normalizing flows do need that but instead of SVD they directly design transformations that are easier to invert.

blackbear_··on An illustrated introduction to linear algebra
Strang's Linear algebra and learning from data is extremely practical and focused on ML

https://math.mit.edu/~gs/learningfromdata/

Although if your goal is to learn ML you should probably focus on that first and foremost, then after a while you will see which concepts from linear algebra keep appearing (for example, singular value decomposition, positive definite matrices, etc) and work your way back from there

blackbear_··on Show HN: Write It Down – Personal finance tracker
Some time ago I wrote a Telegram bot that copies messages to a Google Sheet (can be personal & private). The rationale is to quickly capture data in a semi-structured format and tidy it up at a later point. Expense tracking in conjunction with this spreadsheet would be a great use-case; it can also upload pictures (for receipts) and other file attachments.

https://t.me/gsheet_notes_bot

blackbear_··on Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025
As a general introduction I quite like this one: https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/products/immune-a-journey-int...
blackbear_··on The (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh
The link is wrong, I believe they meant to link this one: https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...
blackbear_··on The collapse of the econ PhD job market
The purpose of a PhD is not to train people for "appropriate jobs". PhD students perform a large part of academic research, and while most of it is grunt work and produces incremental results, some brilliant people end up discovering a gold nugget and carrying their field forward many times over.

Innovation is hard, most ideas do not pan out, and most people aren't made for it. It really is a number's game: to stay competitive and innovative as a country you need enough people pushing against the frontier, including taking bets that are too risky for the private sector.

blackbear_··on Writing an LLM from scratch, part 20 – starting training, and cross entropy loss
The two ways are equivalent (it's always next token prediction) but the latter is way more efficient as it computes the loss for N tokens in a single forward pass.
blackbear_··on Warming climate–not overgrazing–is biggest threat to rangelands, study suggests
Absolutely!
blackbear_··on Warming climate–not overgrazing–is biggest threat to rangelands, study suggests
However if you go further back in time (50 million years or so) it seems possible that the Earth was hotter than today, modulo all uncertainties and approximations needed to get to these figures: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
blackbear_··on Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement
Fly-by-vibe?
blackbear_··on 1-year risks of cancers associated with Covid-19 vaccination
Fig1B is quite interesting. It seems like the overall cancer incidence in the non-vaccinated group increases much more slowly in the first 90ish days, but then stabilizes at a similar or very slightly lower rate in the middle of the graph at 180 days. I would not expect any non linear time effect in the control group.

I wonder (pure speculation) if this is because many in the non-vaccinated groups die because of COVID and so don't get a cancer diagnosis?

blackbear_··on Ask HN: Software jobs with high barriers of entry?
You are looking at jobs where you are paid to deliver something and where coding is just a tool towards that end, but not the deliverable itself.

For example, consider computational research in a domain like healthcare: the job is to find new insights about patients or diseases that allow you to develop better treatments. Most of the time is spent on coding data analysis pipelines, but the truly vauable professional also knows enough about the domain that they are able to interpret the results, conduct follow up analyses and talk at eye level with medical doctors and biologists. The skill ceiling for this kind of position is thus quite high since you need to be proficient in three distinct domains (coding, biology, statistics).

blackbear_··on Study Exposes How Travel ESIMs Reroute Data Through China
And then, in the middle of the post, a wild LLM appears...

> Would you like me to also connect this to user risks (e.g., extra roaming charges, privacy breaches, spoofed SMS trust issues), so the section feels more practical and less purely technical?

blackbear_··on We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds
> They are more skeptical of propaganda than ever before.

Of boomer propaganda. But don't worry, as voters evolve, so does propaganda.

blackbear_··on U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier
> dropped from 147,000 initially to just over 70,000

That is well within the confidence intervals published along with the numbers and entirely unsurprising to anybody who is really paying attention.

> reduction of approximately 52% from their data

And of 0.04% of the actual number of employed people. Seems to me way too thin of a margin to get so worked up.

blackbear_··on Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
> When you look often enough or at the wrong times, there is nothing to observe.

Is this because atoms don't exist, or because we are looking in the wrong way due to partial (mis)understanding?

The "new truth" that you talk about is just a different understanding of the concept of atom, but the actual thing that we call atom and that exists in the real world (whether as matter or in some other form) has not changed.

blackbear_··on Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
I think you are confusing what we believe to be the truth at a point in time and how the physical world is.

Either atoms exist or they dont. Our idea of atom has evolved over time, but the thing that we call "atom" has always been there (at least on the time scale of human civilization).

The probabilistic nature of quantum objects isn't really a problem either. Electrons may be particles, waves, both or neither, but the "thing" is a real phenomenon of this world regardless of how we talk about it.

Similarly, the truth value of alien existence is well defined: either they exist at this time or they do not. We don't know it for sure, but this doesn't change whether they are actually there or not.

blackbear_··on A new layer of security for certified Android devices
Great opening quote:

> You shouldn’t have to choose between open and secure

"... and that's why we chose for you." So kind!

blackbear_··on De-Googling TOTP Authenticator Codes
Just consider that storing TOTP codes in the password manager negates the advantage of two factors authentication, namely the added security of needing a second device. This would keep your logins safe even if somebody managed to breach your KeePassXC database.
blackbear_··on Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything
> Popular vote does not matter to americans

The question is whether and how much these policies are supported, and the popular vote is obviously relevant in this regard.

> 36% of voters said: I support every outcome of the election, no matter what

That's not really true, for all you know those voters didn't support either outcome. You would expect a "loud and clear" victory not to leave one third of people unconvinced enough to avoid voting altogether.

> but not one single person seriously opposing him and his politics

Almost four hundred lawsuits have been filed against his administration, thousands of public protest events are happening, and the tariffs themselves were just ruled illegal. What does "serious" opposition look like to you? In any case, this is certainly not what "full support" looks like.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/projects-series/trials-of-the-t...

https://time.com/7312601/anti-trump-administration-protests-...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgj7jxkq58o

> If the things he does were really that unpopular, he would not be able to do them.

What is the logic behind this?

blackbear_··on Six months into tariffs, businesses have no idea how to price anything
Loud and clear? Trump didn't even get half of the votes (49.8%) and almost 36% of eligible voters didn't vote, meaning that not even one third of the American public voted for this.
blackbear_··on RSS is awesome
Does anybody know if there is a RSS reader with embedded recommendaions based on previous likes and/or user-specified keywords?
blackbear_··on Bland,for fans of everything: what has the Netflix algorithm done to our films?
> Through the mass production of cultural goods, the culture industry created a situation where individuals were passive consumers rather than active participants in cultural life. This, they argued, led to the homogenization of culture, where difference and critical thinking were stifled in favor of conformity and consensus.

https://journalism.university/media-and-communication-theori...

blackbear_··on Tipping point in Gulf Stream may be reached as early as mid-century
Classic logical fallacy: A=>B does not mean B=>A
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