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fermisea

48 karma · joined February 4, 2023

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fermisea··on Sixteen Years After Deepwater Horizon, Deep Sea Life Shows Few Signs of Recovery
Is it close or adjusted close?
fermisea··on Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
What about this? Consider a toy system: everyone gets issued a UUID, everyone can see how every UUID voted, but only you know which one is your vote.

This is of course flawed because a person can be coerced to share their ID. In which case you could have a system in which the vote itself is encrypted and the encryption key is private. Any random encryption key works and will yield a valid vote (actual vote = public vote + private key), so under coercion you can always generate a key that will give the output that you want, but only you know the real one.

fermisea··on Google Workspace CLI
https://www.supyagent.com

We’re trying to create a single unified cli to every service on the planet, and make sure that everything can be set up with 3 clicks

fermisea··on NanoClaw moved from Apple Containers to Docker
Shameless plug: https://www.supyagent.com - we basically want to give away the integrations for free. For Claude users you just need to run `supyagent skills generate` and you get all the integrations. Works well with cursor and codex as well, and if you want a UI to go with it that can be tinkered, just run `npx create-supyagent-app`
fermisea··on How did the Maya survive?
What a bunch of nonsense. I really urge you to look into more contemporary research on it.

By which measure were they less advanced? Tenochtitlan had a population of north of 200k when the Spanish arrived - bigger than most European cities at that time, bar a couple. When you read the chronicles of the conquistadores you realise how advanced they were in many ways compared with Europeans.

Th Maya were contemporary to and very similar to Greece in many ways - definitely more advanced in some aspects of mathematics and astronomy, and had an extremely complex architecture.

The gap wasn’t so big, and in some cases American cities were even more advanced - probably the complex sanitation system of most mesoamerican cities contributed to the biggest asymmetry of all - European cities were a Petri dish of filth and disease.

fermisea··on John Carmack on mutable variables
pandas has a .pipe operator which works exactly like this
fermisea··on Ask HN: What's your experience with using graph databases for agentic use-cases?
"After trillions spent in GPUs and data centers, the AI gold rush was finally over when a developer in Lithuania built the pg_thinking plugin - turns out postgres was all you needed all along."
fermisea··on Ask HN: What's your experience with using graph databases for agentic use-cases?
I'm building https://www.ergodic.ai - and we are using a graphs as the primary objects in which the intelligence operates.

I don't think every graph needs a graph database. For 99% of use-cases a relational database is the preferred solution to store a graph: provided that we have objects and ways to link objects, we're good to go. The advantages of graph dbs are in running more complex graph algorithms whenever that is required (transversal, etc) which is more efficient than "hacking it" with recursive queries in a relational db.

For us, I've yet to find the need for a dedicated graph db with few exceptions, and in those exceptions https://kuzudb.com/ was the perfect solution.

fermisea··on Goldman Sachs doesn't have to hire a $180k software engineer–meet Devin
Lol, considering that the entire pricing and risk system of the company runs on a proprietary programming language, I'm pretty sure this is just publicity
fermisea··on New tools and features in the Responses API
Not only that. I have an agent product and I’m currently blocked from using their reasoning models on Azure for having asked for a chain of thought, which apparently is against the ToS.

The customer service itself was surreal enough that it was easier just to migrate to Anthropic

fermisea··on Ask HN: Anyone working in traditional ML/stats research instead of LLMs?
Yes, (ergodic.ai) working on causal inference applied to process mining and event logs. Basically: something happened, why did it happen and how can I avoid it/get more of it?
fermisea··on An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip
Why? Replace the context and not having that property is now called a hallucination.

Overall the model is tra

fermisea··on Ancient DNA Shows Stone Age Europeans Voyaged by Sea to Africa
It's a question of timelines. While I agree with Amazon, we know pretty well the periods in which Rome and London have been inhabited, but the question is more about understanding pre ice-age human settlements, of which we know nothing about because these are more likely submerged now.
fermisea··on Man's brain turned to glass by hot Vesuvius ash cloud
Not sure about squids in particular, but the easiest way isn't necessarily to find remains, but to see negative prints on sediments.
fermisea··on "The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab" – a "study"
Also a type of collider bias in causal inference, which generates all sorts of Simpsons paradoxes
fermisea··on Classic Data science pipelines built with LLMs
Can I ask you to beta test my product? I'm building something like this and I want to focus on medical data (from omics to RCTs)
fermisea··on Engineered waterways helped Ancient Amazonians became master maize farmers
When it comes to the Americas, the entropy of the entire field of Archaeology is way too high.

Up until 5 years believing that humans were there more than 12k years ago was heresy. Today 30k is the accepted number, while some people are pushing it past 60k.

The belief that there were "civilisations" in the Amazon was also heresy, but now with LiDAR and deforestationthere's megalopolis being found that probably predate both the Andean and Mesoamerican cultures. There's also a set of anthropological elements connecting Andean and Mesoamerican cultures that seem to have their elements in the Amazon - like they share the same origin stories, a very similar god, etc

Anyway, Hancock is a a bit of a crackpot, but he's probably less wrong than everybody else, because we only have access about 1% of all the stuff that can be found in the Amazon, whatever written records that existed from Mayans and Aztecs was destroyed by the Spanish, and every single piece of new evidence seems to point in the direction that there were large organised cities in the Amazon

fermisea··on Why the weak nuclear force is short range
Actually upon further reading I realize that the author actually goes deeper into what I thought, so it's not nonsense, it's actually a simplified version of what I tried to write.

But I don't particularly like the whole "mass vs not mass" discussion as it's pointless

fermisea··on Why the weak nuclear force is short range
It's nonsense. The fact that the particle is massive is a direct cause of the fact that the interactions are short ranged.

The nuance is this: Naturally, in a field theory the word "particle" is ill-defined, thus the only true statement one can make is that: the propagator/green function of the field contains poles at +-m, which sort of hints at what he means by stiffness.

As a result of this pole, any perturbations of the field have an exponential decaying effect. But the pole is the mass, by definition.

The real interesting question is why Z and W bosons are massive, which have to do with the higgs mechanism. I.e., prior to symmetry breaking the fields are massless, but by interacting with the Higgs, the vacuum expectation value of the two point function of the field changes, thus granting it a mass.

In sum, whoever wrote this is a bit confused and just doesn't have a lot of exposure to QFT

fermisea··on KAG – Knowledge Graph RAG Framework
We're trying to solve this problem at ergodic.ai, combining structured tables and pdfs into a single KG
fermisea··on Probability-generating functions
As a physicist, the moment when everything just clicked was when I realised that connected Feynman diagrams were basically the cumulants of that distribution. Then almost everything in physics is about "what is the characteristic/moment/cumulant generating function?" and associated Legendre transforms
fermisea··on Moving to a World Beyond "p < 0.05" (2019)
And it's usually discouraged by regulators because it can lead to p-hacking. I.e., with a good enough choice of control I can get anything down to 5%

The fundamental problem is the lack of embrace of causal inference techniques - i.e., the choice of covariates/confounders is on itself a scientific problem that needs to be handled with love

fermisea··on What Is Entropy?
Entropy is a measure, it doesn't create anything. This is highly misleading.
fermisea··on Ryanair wins screen scraping case against Booking.com in US court ruling
So you believe poor people shouldn't be allowed to travel?
fermisea··on Researcher finds flaw in a16z website that exposed some company data
One thing is true about what you said: you're definitely not an expert.
fermisea··on XLSTMTime: Long-Term Time Series Forecasting with xLSTM
Most of the hard work is actually feature construction rather than monolithic models. And afaik gradient boosting still rules the world
fermisea··on Python toolkit for quantitative finance
Nope, all critical internal models for pricing and risk management are written on top of SecDB in a language called slang. This package is something so that hedge funds can access GS data APIs
fermisea··on NYU professors who defended vaping didn't disclose ties to Juul
Linking nicotine to dementia, which study?

For all the other things, the same can be said about coffee. Are we banning coffee?

fermisea··on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
They definitely do, I'm planning to release a new package to do that in a couple weeks
fermisea··on Could humans alter the moon's orbit significantly with current technology? (2016)
Potential energy is twice the kinetic energy in a stable orbit. Changing the orbit by epsilon/r would require roughly U*epsilon/r energy. Which means that a tsar bomb would only move the moon distance to earth by 10^-10
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