photon_lines

'The bigger the slope (in space), the faster (in time) the temperature changes at that point!' - Sorry but I'm not really reading you here. If the points around an 'atom' a symmetrically and equally far away when it comes to the point in question but are opposite in magnitude (i.e. imagine having a point with temperature 12 degrees Celsius which is surrounded by a neighboring points which have temperatures of 8 degrees and 16 degrees (so the delta is +4 and -4) then the temperature here will stay the same. The slope of the temperature field has nothing to do with this - unless maybe you're alluding to the slope of something else? I think I should have maybe explained this equation in terms of 'concavity' instead of using the methodology which I used - you can get a good grasp of this in this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-LKPtGMdss

I actually took a look at doing this, but most human minds aren't tuned to 4D space-time, so if you have ideas on presenting this sort of thing to most people let me know and I'll be more than happy to modify my approach!!

Those visuals are directly pulled from Grand Sanderson (3Blue1Brown). I gave him full credit and linked the videos at the end of the article but in case anyone needed a reference you can view the visuals here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly4S0oi3Yz8&list=PLZHQObOWTQ...

If you haven't had a 'humbling' moment, I recommend you read about Euler. He really was the master of us all :)

Thanks a lot man - I'm really happy to have this kind of feedback. The reason I wrote this is because I found most of the modern explanations lacking in intuition behind the equations - along with also not explaining what the actual equations meant. If you found this useful please share and subscribe - I'm also trying to provide intuitive guides to other concepts (Schrodinger's equation, Black Holes, Quantum Mechanics, other complex topics) and eventually I'm hoping to write books on some of these topics which present math and physics in a much more clear and intuitive manner. Math shouldn't be hard to grasp. At the very bottom level it's very simple but presenting it in a clear and intuitive manner I will admit is very hard. Also full credit to a lot of the material as well goes to Grant Sanderson (3Blue1Brown) and most of the diagrams there were generated using Vexlio which I also highly promote: https://vexlio.com/

I don't disagree with you - but this also explains the determining factor in which product wins and why today's markets or sofas are lower quality than they were 30+ years ago. If price doesn't matter - what's going to be the driving force in buying behavior? Consumer behavior in other words is no longer driven by quality or long-term cost: today, people will simply choose the lowest cost items and deal with the pain of having to replace it every X years. This drives the market to place a premium on what then? LOWEST COST. Lowest cost = the manufacturers that cut corners and reduce quality, so the market driving force (consumers) lead to a game where the lowest cost producers win and thus saturate the marketplace with junk.

Yes but this is once again where the free-markets and economics come in: if the mass-produced ones match the custom-made ones in price, consumers will start switching to custom-made sofas. The mass-production suppliers will either have to 1) lower the price of their sofas or 2) increase the quality of production to match the quality of the custom-made ones. Both 1 and 2 are great for consumers and this is why competition is so great :). Notice that all of this is driven by the choices the CONSUMER (me and you) make.

'The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently.' - Sorry to interject here, but this is extremely wrong and nowhere did I find this take-away from the posted article. There are massive businesses that do sell extremely high-quality products - in fact, Japan went through a transition where their businesses went from producing absolute junk (i.e. just like the stuff we import from China today) to producing extremely high quality products (see Juran, Crosby, and cost of quality measures etc...). The key point of the article is that consumers today choose low-priced products since the market gives it to them. If you allow a person to buy a $800 sofa which looks great on the outside and is made in China albeit with extremely low quality materials vs. a sofa which looks almost exactly the same but is priced at $1500 but is of much higher quality - most consumers will obviously choose the $800 dollar sofa vs the $1500 since that's how the free-market functions. Is this rational though?

Well - the consumer will need to buy 4 of the $800 dollar sofas just from having to replace them throughout a 20 year period vs. having the ability to buy one (the $1500) one but that's not obvious to the consumer and it's not clear how to even make this type of judgment. Which sofa really costs the most to you given the information I just provided? The high-quality $1500 one or the $800 dollar one? To a rational person having all of the above information - the more costly one is cheaper - but to an average consumer not having this information the clearly cheaply made product is the better choice. People also are prone to more short-term thinking in many societies which also doesn't help things but the takeaway in general which you posted there is very wrong: mass production and scale usually result in higher-quality products not lower quality ones.

Yeah - most of the online descriptions aren't even remotely accurate nor close to explaining how LLMs like ChatGPT actually work. They are not simple 'next-word predictors' and most of the online tutorials / info don't go into fine-tuning nor the intricate details of chain of thought reasoning (which I personally believe plays a huge role in ChatGPT's amazing performance). If you want my own detailed description you can find it here: https://photonlines.substack.com/p/intuitive-and-visual-guid...

Having a portfolio definitely does help and I can attest that it doesn't take all that long to build a solid one. I spent a few weekends on most of my Github projects, albeit I did clean them up and some of them luckily took off on Hacker news propelling them to the front page. The open repositories did lead to some interesting interview conversations and people do pay attention to them -- actually, prior to being offered my current job the interviewees commented on some of the content I open sourced. Most people should spend some time and do their best to 'hack' something over a weekend or two -- don't simply post garbage though - do something interesting and spend some time cleaning up what you post (and pay attention to the little details when it comes to code quality). Doing this will definitely boost your chances in landing a job. (Edit - my repository in case anyone is interested: https://github.com/photonlines)

Lol...great one. When you put the joint down - what is it? What is the chemical reaction which makes you feel what you feel and is it real?

I'd say the biggest reasons recently are:

1) The approval of various ETFs (so demand is heightened). It's much easier to invest in it than in was in the past.

2) Traders expecting the supply to tighten (see bitcoin halving which is due very soon) and the demand there also heightening due to supply constraint expectation.

3) A lot of the uncertainty in terms of exchanges is gone. Coinbase looks like it can stand up to scrutiny and this furthermore boosts demand.

When you have huge demand vs. constrained supply, bubbles form. Of course, are all of the factors I mentioned enough to keep the bubble going for a very long time? Well, that I can't answer. No one knows how long this will last. I can tell you though that this to me looks like it is the next Tulip bubble. I see almost no reason to use bitcoin as a store of wealth. As a decentralized currency it has tremendous value, but treating it as gold I have reservations on since a lot of corrupt gangs and regimes are currently using it as a method of payment and laundering (including North Korea), as well as it being a huge drain on the world's energy supply due to mining energy needs...I don't really see what value it brings to the world at all, so treating it as 'virtual gold' (the way the world has been treating it) makes 0 sense to me, but in general, the world in the short-term sometimes makes very little sense. Over the long term, things tend to clear up. Hopefully that helps.

Sorry I know this is a relatively late comment, but I recently did a summary on Sam Altman's recommended reading list and I had a great time reading 'How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success In Selling (by Frank Bettger).' I actually provided a full book summary near this end of the post: https://photonlines.substack.com/p/sam-altmans-startup-advic...

Information compression (edit sorry you said no one knows why the need to symmetry groups and I provided the answer).

I made a little write-up on getting an visual intuition behind calculus / the derivative here, although I'm not sure that it's really that well done and I should have maybe provided a few more examples: https://photonlines.substack.com/p/visualizing-the-derivativ...

Location: Toronto, ON, Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to Relocate: Yes

Technologies: I’m generally language / technology agnostic and love learning new things. I have a huge interest in anything relating to machine learning and automation! I'm also currently self-studying particle physics / applied math.

Github: https://github.com/photonlines

Blog: https://photonlines.substack.com/

LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/nickmiljkovic

Thank you for the clarification. I'm still a bit confused on how this replaces databases. Your write-up claims that this solution is a replacement for modern DB systems, but I've seen a need for all 4 transaction isolation levels among various systems that I've implemented for different clients. In essence, your solution provides a 'one size fits all' scenario and different isolation levels for different components which I don't see replacing databases...I'd say your solution more-in is a great and extremely efficient implementation of event-sourcing. Either way - good luck with your company and thanks once again for the clarification :)

Sorry, but can you elaborate on what type of transaction isolation-levels your solution supports (i.e. read committed, repeatable read, serializable, read uncommitted)?

The same to you. If you feel like you're best contribution to tell someone to 'not engage' - then you should look at not engaging at all yourself :)

My comment tries to give the PCA to what contributes to males taking more risks than females within the human species. This isn't a hypothesis - there have been a lot of studies which have shown human males to engage in risk-related behaviors when other females are present. It's also supported by other male-dominated species as well - the males have one single 'alpha' male which females choose to mate with -- but that 'alpha' male will need to take more 'risks' and be more aggressive in order for him to be in such a position in the first place. I'm not sure what you're expecting me to also list out in a hacker news discussion, but this is the best I can do. If you feel like you have counter-arguments -- feel free to post them and I'll be happy to take a look at them and reconsider my position OR post studies which show that you're wrong. Cheers.

It may not impress women, but there are lots of studies which show that men expand a lot more energy in engaging risk-related behavior when other females are around. Whether this is biologically adaptable or not may be a question which needs to be probed further, but risk-related behavior and competition have been closely linked in humans...

I edited my comment thanks to you. If you have refutations or other arguments - feel free to write about them in LONG detail and I'll do my best to get back to you. Otherwise the explanation I provided above is the best I could do given the circumstances.

It's not a single hypothesis. If you want me to write an essay on hacker news on all the behavioral differences between males and females - it's tough luck :) If you have counter-arguments - post them so I can refute them. Cheers.

Yes, because they have more to gain from taking the risk. Think about it for a moment.

I don't feel like there needs to be a discussion on 'why' they take more risks. Females expand way more energy in having and raising kids than males do (within the human species). In other species (like sea-horses) - the females actually compete for males since males are the ones that expand way more energy in raising / producing children... (i.e. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/seahorse.html).

I didn't finish these in the last year, but some of my favorite ones are provided below:

Economics of Money and Banking: https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking

Lectures on the Geometric Anatomy of Theoretical Physics: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPH7f_7ZlzxTi6kS4vCmv...

Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos: https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/98-introduction-t...

Discrete Optimization: https://www.coursera.org/learn/discrete-optimization

Haha...I'm surprised to find this on HN. Just to comment on a note made in this study: "While MIT provides a parsimonious explanation of differences in idiotic behavior and may underlie sex differences in other risk seeking behaviors, it is puzzling that males are willing to take such unnecessary risks—simply as a rite of passage, in pursuit of male social esteem, or solely in exchange for “bragging rights.” Northcutt invokes a group selectionist, “survival of the species” argument, with individuals selflessly removing themselves from the gene pool."

The reason this happens is due to risk-taking behavior. Males take way more risks than females do - and you can find other studies which confirm this (i.e. for example this one: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470490800600...). When I read the Northcutt explanation for this I laughed -- it makes absolutely 0 sense and I can't believe that someone expanded energy in proposing this. It's absolutely ridiculous that someone would even suggest this, but meh.

James Baldwin as a writer is master class. He writes incredible stories and incredible prose. If you like him, I'd also recommend Fernando Pessoa and Primo Levi as well.

I'm not debating whether it's useful or not -- I'm debating whether it brings a net positive to society. So far, its been used to avoid sanctions and currency loss by nutty regimes running countries -- as well as massively used by criminals to conduct fraud -- not to mention the few exchanges which are shady as hell one of which has just been revealed to be a giant scam (FTX). It turns out that regulation can come in to be useful when stuff like this happens -- no? I've personally seen a few firms attacked by ransomware criminals demanding bitcoin as payment and I've seen countless of new outlets reporting corrupt regimes using it to fund their programs (like North Korea using it to fund their nuclear program: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/06/north-korea-hackers-stole-cr...) with none of the crypto-enthusiasts reporting on this. Add in the enormous energy expenditure used to keep the charade up and you have a worthless pyramid scheme being hyped up and branded as 'the next Rosetta stone' of asset-classes or currencies or whatever it is that they're branding it as by people who have 0 understanding of how economics nor money nor banking work. These days though all the above doesn't matter. As long as someone gets theirs and 'stonk only go up - GME and AMC' wave of 'investors' is here so I'll just watch this and take notes, but mark my words: this idiocy will be branded as one of the most illogical and delusional pyramid schemes ever crafted by man when we look back through history.

Credit default swaps: were initially created as a way for banks to manage their exposure to credit risk. They were essentially insurance contracts against the default of a borrower defaulting so they played and to this day play a huge role in mitigating risk -- their use in speculation etc.. only became prominent after 2008.

Collateralized debt obligations: created as a way to pool and securitize various types of debt, providing a means for financial institutions to manage risk and enhance liquidity. Just because a few banks and institutions used them to create complex tranches of debt which 'attempted' to reduce risk while massively misusing statistics and increasing it which resulted in 2008 doesn't mean that CDOs aren't useful.

Gold: I suppose you haven't heard about its applications in electronics and connectors, bonding wires, connectors, switches, thin film applications and coatings and hugely used in the production of medical devices and in the aerospace industry?

Diamonds: this one I agree semi-agree with. The only reason they have value is because the De Beers limited supply and there was demand -- but the demand is there because people use them as a status symbol and men use them to show their 'love' or commitment to their partners so this one is questionable.

Sorry but why the downvotes? Because some techno-bros here like being part of a giant pyramid scheme? Seriously - can anyone even counter or give some sort of benefit that bitcoin brings to society that isn't already available by the existing systems we use? I'm really interested in hearing them - because so far, I'm not really sure that I see the light at the end of the tunnel. What value does bitcoin bring to society?