d136o

encouraging these sorts of sting operations could lead to all sorts of weird stuff down the line.

See: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/stash-house-st...

Interesting, for the read (decompression) case I wrote this a while back:

https://github.com/d136o/StreamingUnzip

Basically, if you have a big zip file with many files in it (csvs for example), you can pipe out the decompressed data…

It’s a bit obtuse to use since it calls for the end chunk of a zip archive (it may come from s3 for example).

It seems to me that it’s not just the price of a single treatment that is too high, but also that the patients are fully recovered and don’t have to pay a recurring annual subscription fee to live normal lives. Or is that too cynical?

I am equally curious. Fatty liver can be a consequence to high alcohol consumption, but people can also have NAFLD. My guess (IANADr) is that alcohol leads to excessive build up of fat in their bodies.

NAFLD is also highly correlated with diabetes, so I wonder if there could be something to learn from studying this or related genes.

Sigh… It’s interesting that they blame the ML models, on the one hand it seems like a perfect example of ML gone wrong, on the other hand losses at this scale (hundreds of millions) don’t just signal that some data scientist’s model was not accurate enough… who’s running the ship over there? The ML model?

Also I’m really curious about the geographic distribution of their inventory… let’s do some Data Science on this blow up!

The book documents multiple direct instances of Richard Sackler being told that his drugs were affecting people in his community (an anesthesiologist in his kids school told Richard Sackler he would be a modern day Pablo Escobar for example). There is a Sackler family member who had addiction problems and committed suicide. A receptionist an aide to the upper circle of the family/company became addicted.

If there is a positive part to the book it is indeed some very small sense of social justice outside of the legal system (which failed to hold them to account). Nan Goldin is an artist who lead the way in organizing protests and press that would lead to their names being taken off the very museums and universities they had paid to put their name on. They had worked hard, over multiple generations, to have clean name despite their business. Nan and others did a lot of work to make sure that changed.

At the heart of the opioid epidemic was a company run by medical doctors, with a sales force targeting medical doctors, and a budget to not only buy themselves positive medical literature but also the government agencies that were supposed to watch out for the public, oh and also they had enough wealth to buy themselves immunity from criminal or financial liability.

I am not sure that the solution is a pharmaceutical product…

And I say this as someone who has been pro-science his whole life. It’s just that training people that a pill will solve their problems is a recipe for creating addicts?

I’ve just finished reading Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty , and I highly recommend it.

An amazing multi generational history of how the Sacklers inflicted opioids on the US, made a fortune, and got away with no consequence.

It was pretty interesting to read this during pandemic times, and it’s a prime example of how institutions lose legitimacy in the public’s eye. The Sacklers had the FDA in the palm of their hand, as well as the highest reaches of the justice department, as well as large numbers of medical professionals who patients trusted to make decisions that wouldn’t harm them.

What gives me hope? That I can surround myself with people who I can help and who will help me if I need it, not any type of fancy concept or title (Governor Agency, BigCo, professional title etc…).

I wonder what’s being peddled these days as completely safe but survivors will look back on as absolutely foolish.

””” There is no equivalent for anything that can be run on a turing machine. You can't mistreat an abstract mathematical concept. ”””

How do you feel about denying the “turing machine” the electric power that it needs to continue computing?

’’’ None of the 3nm node process orders will be for its consumer market processors, namely Raptor Lake, which is expected to launch in mid-to-late 2022. ’’’

Haha thank you for noticing! Gun for hire here ;)

Typing the domain into the url box is exactly what I did a week ago (game 3 or so of the series), and it seemed like too good of a chance to pass up, so I bought it.

I had fun pondering the possibilities, but figured a little bit of self promotion was the most appropriate and least likely to offend anyone.

I was impressed by the Person class it created. It contains a dictionary which would point to other instances of Person. It knows friends are just other Person instances.

would anyone agree that being a professional programmer encourages this type of OCD behavior?

I enjoy getting lost in the code/algorithms/craft, but sometimes I'm afraid of going all in for fear it's not so healthy/balanced.

mad science

decades of effort have gone into making this type of treatment safe, but mistakes or lack of understanding have resulted in patients’ death and set the field back before, see for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger

Amazing story, to think that this type of expertise has been lost and now the US is struggling to kick start domestic chip production.

Sure, at the invention/research step, after that’s done it’s all about sequencing the exact series of steps (robots following the recipe) to get to the output.

I recommend this read about the origins of the semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley: They Would Be Gods [1].

Making a chip has been something that has been done completely methodically since their invention (I wonder if the less disciplined or less methodical and messy shops simply went out of business).

Add decades of automation and scaling in every part of that process and we get to AMSL machines sold for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Making software can feel so ad-hoc in comparison.

I am also reminded of the Such Great Heights music video by Postal Service filmed in a clean room. [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71705

[2] https://youtu.be/0wrsZog8qXg

I use a physical pager when I’m on-call for our team. I get peace of mind knowing that I don’t need to worry about my phone being charged or being set to silent. I also prefer not having to install any work apps on my personal cellphone.

When it beeps, I hop on the computer and ack via web interface, alternatively I can ack back via sms. The whole point is that I need to be able to look at a system immediately so internet access is a requirement during oncall rotation.

It’s a single purpose device and it works great, I highly recommend it!

I have a suspicion that many many prospective computer science students go to other majors because they can’t set up their development environment in their first CS class, even though they might be perfectly capable of coding. Getting all sorts of things (dependencies) in the right place (paths) is always a pain, but when you’re getting started it helps to not have that be a problem. I think tools like repl help remove that barrier to entry into the field.

Yes, with passengers I feel like it makes people nervous with all the beeping (I’d rather sounds on than disable it). It’s why I’ve leaned towards only using it on hwy driving after getting a feel for it.

It would be nice if it would engage in some sort of tutorial mode as ones first learning the system. I feel like I was a bit eager to try it everywhere at first and tried different things which maybe now I wouldn’t, a bit of in city usage of it for example.

Yes, that wall looks like the type of pattern that would trigger the false positives. High visual noise or something. The street view shows pretty well why it might be hard, the shadows on pavement and the wall. I think it might also be confusing for humans, but we got a little bit of extra something that allows us to continue driving.

I got a 2020 forester at the start of the year and did three round trips to LA and Bay Area which allowed me to learn how well the eyesight system works right now.

I took Interstate 5 along the San Joaquin, pretty much a straight drive (I wouldn’t call it boring because the farmland is pretty beautiful).

It works very very well in predictable highway situations. Basically something I felt safe and comfortable using while in the leftmost lane, where there were no exits. It helped maintain the set speed subject to the constraint of maintaining a distance to the next vehicle. It also did lane keeping pretty well.

But it’s not a perfect system and it’s important not to trust your life to it:

* once, when on the right lane of two lane I5, it veered towards an exit ramp while going 60 mph+. I had looked away to grab a French fry.

* the detection of the car ahead of it isn’t perfect, I’ve had cars merge into my lane, which weren’t detected immediately, and distance wasn’t added until the system self corrected eventually.

* false positives on obstacle detection. It’s happened a few times, where hard sun lighting on the highway, combined with shadows on the payment from bridges/trees/other seem to make it pick up an obstacle and make the vehicle start to break hard.

* I get the sense that the control system doesn’t account for the physics of the car. For example, it’ll take highway turns at high speeds, because that’s the set speed. But we humans know to slow down as we enter such turns. They need to add a bit of fear of the unknown to this thing hah.

All in all it’s a neat system that makes highway driving fun. But one needs to closely monitor it or it’ll lead to a new class of accidents.

For city driving the only time I might consider using it is for bumper to bumper really slow traffic. Again with close supervision. But there hasn’t been much city driving during pandemic.

I think the ability to detect eavesdropping seems useful?

(As part of KQD, not sure if useful or feasible as part of some “quantum internet”)

There seems to be research exploring links between blood sugar regulation (diabetes) and aging. I guess that shows up in metformin <-> aging correlations/links.

Do you have pointers to research linking liver function to diabetes and perhaps to aging research.

It’s known that non alcoholic fatty liver is common in people who will develop type 2 diabetes. But the link is not well understood. (There doesn’t seem to be a consensus on how the two are linked?).

Any solid references would be helpful, I’ve only found older nature reviews from 2006 and 2010. Maybe that’s the state of understanding but curious to get any additional pointers.

Asking for a friend :)

nice, I’ve been toying with it recently because I wanted to get some video on the Apple TV I’ve got connected to my TV.

In the process I was reminded of how important Intellectual Property is in our field.

I dowloaded a video from youtube [0] and learned that the video is in a WEBM container for certain types of video compression formats (VP8/9 + another one) as well as vorbis/opus audio. It turns out that to get the best quality on the Apple TV, I should encode to HEVC (H265) video and I guess aac audio.

There’s some sort of history behind this divide. A pain in the neck for people who want to toy around with video, but huge decisions for these companies in choosing the formats they use to move these bits around.

So I can use ffmpeg to re-encode into the new format, and I can play it on my apple devices if the file is local, but I can’t shoot it via UDP to the TV. When VLC (app on apple tv) is listening on a port for UDP I only get choppy audio:

Doing this on the sending side doesn’t seem to work:

  ffmpeg \
      -re -i video_stream_ready.mp4 \
      -c:v copy -c:a copy \
      -f mpegts udp:$APPLETVIP:2300

has anyone toyed around with shooting pre-generated (or even real time generated) video at their TV this way?

Being stuck at home makes me want to make something artsy that could be fun to look at through the day.

[0] https://youtu.be/wPXSFVruIHI

That's part of how this all works, if you wield influence it's not necessarily by way of telling people exactly what they should do, rather you convey your vision and others work to make it happen.

And I think that this can yield very effective teams, but it can also result in cult like herd behavior. Two sides of one coin?

What are the long term prospects for freedom of expression there? [1]

As a first generation immigrant I just don't think the opportunities for socio-economic mobility would be present for my (future) kids anywhere but in a liberal democracy.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/poland-...

Bialek is an amazing explainer, you'll be left convinced it's all so simple and straightforward. He wrote a book and taught a graduate level class around it, you'll find a draft of the book available at [1]

Chapter 1 cover photon counting:

``` 1. Photon counting in vision (Lectures W 8 Feb through W 22 Feb 2012)

In this Chapter, we will see that humans (and other animals) can detect the arrival of individual photons at the retina. Tracing through the many steps from photon arrival to perception we will see a sampling of the physics problems posed by biological systems, ranging from the dynamics of single molecules through amplification and adaptation in biochemical reaction networks, coding and computation in neural networks, all the way to learning and cognition. For photon counting some of these problems are solved, but even in this well studied case many problems are open and ripe for new theoretical and experimental work. The problem of photon counting also introduces us to methods and concepts of much broader applicability. We begin by exploring the phenomenology, aiming at the formulation of the key physics problems. By the end of the Chapter I hope to have formulated an approach to the exploration of biological systems more generally, and identified some of the larger questions that will occupy us in Chapters to come.

```

[1] http://www.princeton.edu/~wbialek/PHY562.html

I've not really been a fan of sci-fi or fantasy, but this was an amazing reading. It straddled the line between what we see online today and that outlandish but seemingly very possible malfunctioning future.

Specially timely in light of the open.ai work shown yesterday on advanced language models [1]

[1] https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/#content