orbifold

PostDoc salaries in BayArea Universities are 1/2 or less of what a junior engineer makes. You can literally consult the tables at https://www.hcd.ca.gov/grants-funding/income-limits/state-an... that a NIH postdoc would pay you an extremely low - low income. Other countries like Germany or Switzerland at least pay somewhat decently (Germany 3x above media income).

I got an offers to work on several really cool projects, but the pay is at poverty level basically.

I greatly appreciate your work, by the way, I just have not been able to make use of it effectively. Some of the problems revolve around the question of how to best proceed in a situation, where you have a high dimensional state space, but it is naturally partitioned in some way. There are several solutions for this (SubArray etc.), but the burden is entirely put on the user. I had the impression that there was a tension between what I would have preferred to write and what I could easily write as soon as I attempted to generalize from the examples that I could find. With JAX the corresponding libraries operate on Pytrees and as a user you can specify equations pretty naturally and easily without much fuss. If you want to use XLA, MPI, CUDA in Julia it typically is the same, in theory it should be possible to make things work in practice I have struggled tremendously to do anything productive.

When I looked at the adjoint event handling code last, I couldn’t figure out in the implementation, whether the general case was handled correctly, especially since parts of it still seemed in flux. Writing similar code in JAX leaves close to no room for interpretation that the code is correct. I am sure most of it is down to familiarity. But since ultimately I want to do ML relared things, right now JAX and related libraries ties up things that are there much more neatly even though overall SciML implements a more comprehensive set of techniques. I am still closely following the work around it especially in the area I am interested in and have some prototypes written in it, but it just hasn’t clicked yet.

Yes I am aware :) it is missing a few things but I might end up contributing.

I was bit by trying to figure out of how to combine unit of measurements with other numerical computations. Ultimately a lot of the features look great on paper, but once you start using them, I only ever was able to produce an ungodly mess instead of what I could accomplish in Python in roughly the same time. Everything that goes beyond what Matlab does, sometimes looks great on paper but is not very pleasant to use / sometimes badly broken unfortunately. That being said I work in an area of scientific research where Julia or more specifically DifferentialEquations.jl would seem to walk away with the win, but I find myself searching for alternatives implemented in Jax.

I would still think most of this is my failings, but it is also extraordinarily hard to figure out what is going wrong.

Have you seen a project that actually extracted it?

It is kind of interesting how deeply involved his foundation is in German political "think tanks" as well. Recently a group of intellectuals published an open letter opposing delivery of heavy weapons to Ukraine. Shortly after a different group of intellectuals lead by two former Green-party politicians, that are now heading a think-tank, published an open letter in support of it. Guess who initially provided significant funding to their think tank: The open society foundation. The German public broadcaster regularly interviews experts on Ukraine. Yesterday they ran with the headline "Regime um Putin zunehmend faschistisch” - "Putin's regime is increasingly fascistic". The guy they interviewed was Stefan Meister, employed by dgap.org (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik - German Society for Foreign Policy), sounds benign, but they are known for financing luxury trips of >350 parliamentary aides to German weapons manufacturers. The Open Society Foundation is again a major donor: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Gesellschaft_für_Au....

The UI in the mod was honestly working better and the mod had more features, better working zombies than the standalone game for a long time. The zombie mechanics was mostly a distraction and what the main draw was the long realistic weather and survival mechanics in a vast well simulated world, with realistic weapons / injury mechanics.

What Gate has done also seems largely a tax avoidance scheme that supports his BioTech and other investments. If you have a foundation which does investments and invest yourself I am sure there are really well worked out ways of avoiding capital gains tax indefinitely, while not giving up control on where any of your money really goes.

Although the part where non-Jewish poles were in concentration camps, while true, also led to them being forced to participate in the genocide, which still was primarily directed at Jews, while everyone else was doing (mostly) forced labor. The conditions in the forced Labour camps were obviously horrible and children especially routinely starved while in captivity with their mothers.

All 6 siblings of my partner’s grandmother were killed on arrival in Ausschwitz, as were her parents. She was spared by Mengele and subjected to experiments.

Ultimately weighing atrocities against each other is not super productive. But the myth of a “clean Wehrmacht” had been so persistent and convenient that it took decades to root out in German main stream opinion.

Some academics are experts in also being science influencers. In those cases I actually know their non-scientific work better than their actual scientific contributions. That is I know Scott Aaronson from Shtetl optimised not from any particularly memorable scientific accomplishment, which he might well have.

There have been very few semi-symmetrical conflicts in the last ~70+ years. The fire-bombing of Tokyo, Dresden and total destruction of a substantial number of civilian infrastructure in Germany and Japan were considered absolutely necessary to win the war. Similarly the mind-number number of casualties the Soviet army sustained even in the battle of Berlin, at the end of the war or the losses it absorbed in the battles of Kharkiv, in the defense of Moskau and St. Petersburg have no parallel in modern warfare.

As a German who got some first / second hand accounts from children of Polish survivors and Polish survivors I disagree. The German army and other occupying forces did awful things in Poland and not just to the Jewish population. Just because the violence and killing was maybe more methodical and less unstructured like randomly raping civilians, doesn't make it any less awful. Even the initial attack that resulted in the occupation of Poland was done without regard to the lives of the civilian population.

It will be called „Neural Harmonic Analysis“, it will cite one paper by a Russian and otherwise ignore any prior work which didn’t include the word neural network.

High end restaurants measure everything both quantities, time and temperature extremely precisely and have strict quality control for the ingredients they use in order to ensure a consistent experience.

It is optional but the alternative is also a pain to figure out and setup.

I've struggled tremendously with this for years and many ideas I had either have ended up not being published or just forgotten. By now I'm the co-author of ~16 (peer-reviewed or in review...) papers, with varying time investment, contributions and success. I still haven't published any informal writing under my own name, but co-lead the development of a moderately successful software package.

My recommendation would be to focus on one idea or one project and figure out whether you understand the problem space and the existing solutions well enough that you are sure that what you are doing meaningfully improves or goes beyond the current way of doing things. If it does, people with the same problem will take notice, give feedback etc. Some of the research papers I was involved in even lead to several job offers, invitations to give talks, interviews and quotes in popsci literature etc. (and briefly were on the front-page of this site). Twitter is surprisingly useful for this purpose as well, although of course this sort of already implies you have an existing network of people that know you or know what you are working on.

Of course peer-reviewed scientific contributions might be on the extreme end of content production. But at least to some degree my guess would be a similar logic applies to the creation of other content as well. Beginning with an idea, the idea has to pass through several filters for it to be considered worthy of a research effort and ultimate publication. Ideally you should be able to scrutinise an idea yourself, maybe do a prototype or begin writing a few paragraphs based on the premise of a piece. I regard ideas as separate from the actual manifestation in writing or code, however it can be extremely difficult or impossible to get an idea into a concrete instantiation. Ultimately you should be able to trust your own aesthetic or scientific judgement first, otherwise any kind of negative feedback can deter you.

I also strongly believe that quality is really the first thing to focus on, producing high quality content quickly should be a secondary optimisation goal, because as you gain experience, you will (hopefully) be able to naturally produce high quality writing / content with less effort and time investment. People will be able notice attention to detail and especially in the case of software you have to assume that for every issue that is raised a larger number of people encountered the same issue and never returned.

If you are primarily intending to write, there obviously is no better way to get better at writing than to actually write. Even if most of what you write you do not intent to publish.

There is more to be said, but in any case I can only encourage you to start. Since I have had a moderate amount of success in some instances, it has given me confidence to more freely share other work.

I think JAX effectively demonstrates that this is indeed possible. The approach they use is to first linearise the JAXPR and then transpose it, pretty much in the same fashion as the Elliot paper did.

Gold seems like one obvious answer. The other could be crypto.

I answered above in relationship to foreign interference and how sophisticated it can be. Ukraine has been of interest since the end of WWII to American intelligence, with many former Ukrainian Nazi Collaborators and Resistance fighters being approached by British and US intelligence.

The US propped up pro-western governments in Ukraine and sentiment as a wedge issue in particular between Germany and Russia, but also France Russia. They invested upwards of 5 billion to do so. Relationships between Russia - France - Germany were good in the early 2000s they began to deteriorate from 2004 (Orange revolution) onwards. It has been a long standing strategic goal of both the British empire and now the American Empire to keep these three countries non-aligned. Both project power by controlling sea trade routes, an economically integrated Russia would eventually significantly reduce American influence.

The natural resources of the Russian Empire / Soviet Union / Russia together with the industrial base of Germany and France would have been no match at any time of the 20th Century. Both world wars were fought in part about gaining control of the Ukranian (then Russian) resources. The separate peace of Brest-Litovsk split off essentially Ukraine and made it a protectorate of Germany. In many ways the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attempts at integrating former parts of the Russian empire are analogous.

But yeah this doesn’t explain putins actions. I would mostly agree with your analysis of his motivations.

Nordstream is in many ways just s bargaining chip, strong German and Russian interest in it, US obviously opposed. Instigating as much instability in Ukraine and making sure that German, Russian cooperation becomes untenable, was surely part of the US plan. Germany will now import US / US client states LNG and build corresponding terminals. US imposed various sanctions and the pipeline was held up for various reasons even before the war started. Obviously that doesn’t justify Russian aggression. This is just to say that the whole Gas thing is an excellent example of foreign interference in a country both in Germany (Russia & US) and in Ukraine (Eu & Russia & US). Note how it also played a role in the maidan revolution.

The 2014 one was basically an association agreement with EU fell through, in part because they / the IMF were unwilling to extend a line of credit without massive cuts to government subsidized gas / energy and Russia threatened to cancel the Tarif agreements between Ukraine / Russia (as they otherwise would have given unrestricted access to EU goods to Russia. Russia instead gave a ~15 billion credit. Various NGOs then followed a typical playbook, occupy a central square, agent provocateurs showed up and created violent incidents, the Kiev mayor ordered a violent removal of protestors in order to install christmas decorations. Some protestor was shot, turned into a martyr, the investigation who was responsible has been inconclusive afaik. Various neo nazi groups (right sector) started arming themselves and attacking security forces, trying to storm government buildings. In total I think roughly ~120 protestors and ~20-40 security forces were killed. Janukovitch narrowly escaped the storming of his residence. Orange Revolution I don’t really remember any details.

A coup supported by the west in 2014, a color (orange) revolution before that. In both cases there was overt support for the anti-government protests and vetting and planning for the US favored successor (“Fuck the EU”).

A former Georgian prime minister (same that got Georgia into an armed conflict with Russia and who came into power in Georgia by a flower revolution) became head of Odessian Oblast with US support some time after 2014.

Various paramilitary groups were funded / backed by Russia / US / other people. Among them obviously the “peoples republics”.

Years of investment in “pro”-democracy NGOs many of which are known to be affiliated with the State Department and intelligence fronts, to the point that many maidan protesters / organizers were essentially paid to be there.

The Crimean referendum happened under Russian influence obviously.

The whole Nordstream 1/2 project came into existence because Ukraine was annoying to deal with and some German politicians were more than a bit too friendly and open to Russian suggestions.

In turn there was a lot of planning by the US happening to slow down Nordstream 2.

There are a lot more examples like that. Ukraine is an excellent case study how large blocks / nations follow through on their foreign policy goals over decades.

I am almost certain these masterminds exist. There are just very few countries with these kinds of imperial ambitions left. It doesn’t take much to find examples of French and US intelligence and militaries interfering in various countries in South America, Africa and Indo-China for the purpose of securing mining rights etc. The genocide in Rwanda involved ethnic militias backed by / advised by French and US on either side with the French foreign legion training the genocidaires for example. There are well documented cases where French plots to secure copper mining rights through bribery were uncovered by cia counterintelligence. Most German heavy industry when operating in Africa / South East Asia / Middle East does so by mix of bribery, political interference and cooperation with intelligence fronts like the GTZ. Africa has countries that still use the Franc and whose infrastructure is firmly in the hands of large French cooperations.

We are just witnessing in Ukraine how years of foreign interference can go horribly wrong.

That is assuming you restrict yourself to a radical simplified model of each neuron. The actual biochemical processes going on in a single synaptic density go way beyond something that could be represented by a scalar weight that assemble into a linear transformation. Instead we are talking about 10^15 dynamical systems. This then still neglects most of the time /spatial extended nature of neurons, the fact that calcium stores in the endoplasmatic reticulum play a role etc. Some of this might be only relevant to learning, but non-linear dendritic processing is believed to be relevant for example for inference aswell.

Yes but in doing so you will also build the supporting C++ library. I imagine it would be relatively easy to do the same for the serenity javascript engine / browser. The serenity standard library https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master/Meta/Lago... has support for other platforms.

To be fair both JavaScriptCore and V8 heavily rely on the base C++ libraries that are part of Chromium and Webkit.

It is almost as if most of western media just actively engages in propaganda, or reporting "objectively" on propaganda by citing "cope cages" ...

That is a cool idea :)

The collapse just stands for the unknowable details of the interaction with the environment during measurement, a good quantum physics course will explain that and include experiments that make that clear. For instance the Stern-Gerlach experiment illustrates this well.