** Medical doctor with law & social sciences background seeks career advice / counselling **
Hi! I am a medical doctor about to enter my second year of residency in a surgical discipline at a teaching hospital in Germany. Besides medicine, I studied law (LLB) and politics (BSc) at top universities in England and France. I miss the more long-term/macro and creative approach from my time in the social sciences and would love to find a way to combine my clinical practice with work that impacts society more effectively.
So far, I haven’t found a career path that fully aligns with my skills and interest among the conventional options and am exploring the feasibility of working in medicine _and_ health technology/public health/politics/consulting/law/.../.
I am of course familiar with the excellent content of 80,000 hours as well as with most of the EA resources, but I am sure there are humans out there with atypical careers and/or ideas that I haven’t come across. If you would like to know more or think you can help me figure this out, please get in touch at joesldssc@gmail.com. I would love to hear from you and appreciate any kind of input!
I'm a quantitative researcher at Jane Street, a proprietary trading firm. Recently, we've been looking for a few people who have deep ML expertise on either the research or engineering side and are also sharp all-around.
Even if you're not sure you're interested, feel free to shoot me an email at richeng@janestreet.com with any questions or thoughts.
I'm a recent Biochemistry PhD looking to get into gene editing in the biotech industry. I have experience expressing, purifying, characterizing CRISPR proteins of different types. My work has also investigated DNA mutations generated after cleavage by nucleases. I wish to apply my skills to building and optimizing precise genome editing systems for therapeutics. My core lab skills include extensive cloning/plasmid library design and Miseq high-throughput sequencing library preparation.
I'm open to relocating to either of the Biotech hubs in Boston or the Bay Area
I'm a Boston-based machine learning scientist at a mid-sized tech firm, interested in engineering/science roles where I'll get to work with and build deep learning models to solve interesting business problems. I'm most interested in NLP, but also open to signal processing, computer vision, and other fields.
I've spent 2.5 years in my current role, building and productionizing machine learning models for a wide variety of company use cases, and have work and personal experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, PySpark, and sklearn.
If interested, please send me an email at dipolantoacx@gmail.com. I'd be interested in roles in Boston and in San Francisco.
I'm a software engineer with 16 years experience in real-time embedded systems, large scale data processing pipelines, backends, and desktop apps. Most recently employed at Google, now looking for something new. You can get to my LinkedIn profile via http://www.stephendanielmay.com/ or reached via email at stephen at stephendanielmay dot com.
Highly skilled and empathetic people manager across multiple industries. Looking to join a motivated team improving people’s lives in green tech, healthcare, or nonprofits.
10+ years experience leading teams across healthcare, software, and consumer finance to exceed expectations through increased efficiency and supportive management. I am eager to utilize and improve my skills in data analytics, people management, program management, emotional intelligence, team building, and training.
Skills & Abilities
Microsoft Office / Google Workspace / Tableau / Jira / Salesforce / SQL
any front-end devs, if helping out on the engineering side of some exciting work in tools-for-thought for fashion designers sounds interesting to you, i'd love to talk!
Sorry, in the process of deleting people who put their requests in the wrong section, I accidentally deleted two correct requests. If that was you, feel free to repost.
Seeking permanent employment as an ML programmer. I am planning to get my bachelor’s in computer science at age 18 in May. I went through a month-long intensive machine learning bootcamp hosted by Redwood Research last summer. As a data science intern at Onbe I made an ML model for revenue projection. Here is my resume: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZPIqKoyVyaupGLItI3SZfZuk0FARnS3Eu6odRF86Qb8
Hey, Y'all. I'm likely going to edit this later with some expanded CV/Skillset information, but I wanted to get something up while this was still fresh.
Some of you are aware of my blog-based writing, but in addition to that I do various corporate writing - blog posts, recruiting related writing, and internal cultural development stuff.
I'm currently in my first full day of unemployment so I'm having a lot of conversations about what my next steps might be. Ideally, I'd like to make an enormous amount of money by talking to my wife about problems I have with anime plots but I understand that in a recession less and less companies are maintaining that as a full-time position. I am thus prepared to talk about other options.
Less jokingly, I have a skillset that's heavily skewed towards creating words and I'd like to put it to work at a company that needs that particular thing. If this is you, let me know at gearratiossc@gmail.com. I'm very honest about what I'm good and bad at, and we can figure out whether I'd be a good fit.
Maybe it's one that got deleted? I'm copying it here:
"Looking for a writer with strong analytic skills, highly rational, for writing papers, posts, and a book covering advanced concepts in probability, philosophy, rationality etc. s@wilf.org"
Web Developer looking for work. I have a few years experience with Ruby on Rails and React, plus a little bit of Python and a smattering of other stuff. I'm in the Boston area but open to remote as well. Happy to send a resume or answer any questions.
The CA public health department is starting a new unit to improve the quality of its decision making. As a part of this effort, the department is looking to hire people with non-traditional backgrounds, including economists, data scientists and statistical modelers. While the director is not a Bay Area rationalist, he's definitely rationalist adjacent. His twitter account @DrTomasAragon regular extols the writing of Julia Galef and others who emphasize a need for clear eyed and rational thinking.
During the covid crisis, there was a lot of criticism of public health decision making. Some common, not entirely unfair critiques are: PH decision making isn't always rigorous, it doesn't always account for relative risks and tradeoffs, it doesn't always appropriately account for uncertainty, it doesn't always account for behavioral reactions to policies. The public health bureaucracy is mostly staffed by doctors and disease specialists whose background may not include training specifically related to optimal decision making. This initiative is seeking to imbue the department with new expertise.
Read more about how the director thinks of this initiative here:
If you are interested in applying, there is a somewhat daunting sounding "exam" process. I would be happy to speak with anyone intimidated by this, which is a government staffing requirement, but not actually a big obstacle.
Super exciting, and badly needed! I worked in CDSS (social services) during in the pandemic, and it was insanely frustrating to watch time-sensitive COVID decisions get mired in bureaucracy, almost certainly leading to avoidable deaths.
Would also be happy to provide any advice on applying to gov jobs, or thoughts on workplace culture.
Hmm, the posting doesn't say. Most employees are still mostly remote. For state jobs, there is often a requirement that you are a resident of California, but in-person work may not be required. I encourage you to reach out to the director to ask (his email is in the document I shared above).
I'm a physicist-turned-datascientist, interested in working on AI alignment. My one hard condition is that it needs to be a remote-first position. I've reached out to several orgs, and posted a few times on threads here, but never received any followup.
I'm an American data science masters student in Paris with a strong background in business consulting, finance, and the pharmaceutical sector looking for post-graduate opportunities in Paris. I'm mainly interested in working directly on a product, either in a PM or data science-related role. I'm hard working, adaptable, efficient, and a team-player.
I'd greatly appreciate any connections or suggestions for English-speaking roles or companies in Paris! Email address is: jacksonburke52 [at] pm.me
I'm an early career software engineer currently working in embedded systems looking to switch to AI, ideally writing software to help alignment research, directly or indirectly (so companies like, but not limited to, OpenAI/Anthropic). I have C++, C, and Python experience, and also some experience implementing new ML architectures in Pytorch during an internship I did in college. I've taken grad-level NLP, and done the various iterations of the fast.ai courses as they've updated them throughout the years.
AI was the reason I got into computer science in the first place, and I didn't really have the luxury of waiting around for the perfect opportunity to accept me right out of college (was during the height of COVID, so I was happy to get anything at all). I keep up to date on the latest AI research, and have been doing so probably since sophomore year of high school. My thinking is that if I've been spending my free time reading AI papers and playing around with implementing them, that's a good indication that I should be looking to just do this full-time. I live in the US and would very much like to relocate to the SF Bay Area.
If you want to learn more about my experience and have any opportunities you think would fit me, email: mjt [at] maxtriano.com
I'm 31/M and a graduate student in math at a German university. I would ideally like to meet a woman who also lives in Germany and is interested in a long term relationship. However, if you don't live in Europe or don't want to commit to anything too serious, that's fine. I'm always happy just to meet and chat or email with new people.
38M in Toronto. My main hobbies at the moment are dance, shibari and home renovations.
Things about me that people have historically considered red flags or deal-breakers:
- solo-poly (and seeing someone)
- dad of two kids with a former partner
- pansexual (I like all the junks)
- kinky
- vaccinated and still mask in high-traffic, general-use public spaces
- not into random unprotected sex
- like meeting out in the world _before_ coming to your place or mine
I'm currently reading Hurts So Good and The Circus Infinite, I don't really watch things, and haven't played a video game seriously since getting a copy of Cyberpunk 2077. My game group is currently on a Root bender, but we've played Spirit Island and Nations too.
I'm not looking for anything specific; my life's pretty good at the moment. But if you're a cool and/or cute person who'd like to go dancing, get tied up, play a board game, eat a steak, share a hot cocoa, or go for a hike (not all on the same day, probably), drop me a line.
M, 23, DC, looking for F. I think it’s really hard to clearly communicate who you are and what you’re looking for, so instead here’s a list of three of my favorite things in various categories.
Conversation topics: philosophy, relationships, the future
Crikey, probably the wrong place to ask this but darn it this impinges on an area of interest:
"Musketeers: all of them"
Your opinion on "pop culture view of the Musketeers as heroic swashbucklers is incorrect, if you read the books Dumas' guys are all terrible in different ways (but we love them anyway)"?
If anyone in a new open thread wants to talk about Dumas' Musketeers, I'd be up for that!
I did realise that for the dating profile this was a bad suggestion of mine, but you have to leap at the chance when it appears (like dating, I suppose?) 😁
Male, 60. NYC. Not so much looking to date as much as for someone to catch movies with, as many of my former associations in that regard atrophied during COVID. But am open to more if something develops. I tend to like stuff on the more artsy-fartsy side, but within reason. Loved Shoplifters and Krisha; like Zola and The Quiet Girl; hated Everything, Everywhere All at Once and The Card Counter. And, I tend to get along with most people, as long as they are not true believers of one sort or another. But free speech absolutists are cool. My FB page is here: https://www.facebook.com/gordon.danning/
It was OK at first, but quickly became tedious, to the point that I was bored to tears. Basically, the same scene over and over: hero being chased by villain, and uses martial arts to defeat them. Rather unimaginative, given the premise that she could potentially access an infinite variety of skills. But I walked out after 90 minutes, so maybe the last 40 minutes had stuff that might have partially redeemed it. It was not half as good as Swiss Army Man.
God, not another ultra-woke film with superwomen vanquishing hopeless male nincompoops! The blatant in your face feminist propaganda is just too tiresome.
Mind you, to prove I'm not a complete mysogynist, I saw a brilliant film the other day called Fall (2022), about a barking mad woman who persuades her more sensible and cautious friend to join her in scaling a 2000" tall radio mast. Really enjoyed it, although, not having a great head for heights, I practically had to hide behind the sofa and cover my eyes at some points! :-)
Oh man, your assumptions are perfectly the opposite of the movie's content.
One of the most pointed jokes in the movie is when another character notes that the protagonist is the *least* extraordinary, most bland, non-heroic version of herself across *all* the multiverses, thereby making her the best blank slate to build on. The movie begins with her failing in almost every aspect of her life; disappointing her father, a distant relationship with her daughter, running a failing business, and feeling deep irritation with her husband and dissatisfaction with life.
And the climax of the film is a quiet conversation in a parking lot.
You got this wrong. Take it from someone who literally worked in advertising TV and movies, you should never watch advertising for TV and movies.
The movie is many things, but not that. The main antagonist is a woman, as are some of the minor antagonists. Jamie Lee Curtis won an Oscar for portraying one of them.
I thought it was good, but surprised that it was considered to be so great. I am confused by the critique of "hero being chased by villain, and uses martial arts to defeat them" since it seemed obvious to me from early on that that wasn't really the point (but actually still did a reasonably entertaining job). What annoyed me was taking all of this world-building and different universe things and having the lesson be "love is good." A fine lesson, but IMO one undermined a bit by the movie's ridiculous style and by its banality in comparison to the all of the machinery that went into it. Arguably that's all intentional and works for some people; it just wasn't my personal favorite.
I hated it too. The Daniels, who made it, are great at manic videos, but when they try to stretch out that energy for 2-3 hrs. it's ghastly. Here's there best musical video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MccSDYXV3Og
As respectfully as possible, I think it's very possible you and @gdanning missed at least one of the major themes of the movie, and perhaps several of them.
EEaaO presents itself as a sci-fi kung-fu action-adventure genre film, but it's actually about the overwhelming experience of being plugged into the Internet (especially for people too young to remember a time before it), depression and the nihilism and suicidal urges that can accompany it (potentially exacerbated by being plugged into the Internet), and the alienation of 2nd generation immigrants from their 1st generation parents, among other things.
It's not a sci-fi genre movie about using tech to creatively fight off a villain. If you get an hour into EEaaO and you still think you're watching something like The Matrix, you have profoundly misunderstood EEaaO's authorial intent.
Personal taste is a thing, but that's different from literally misunderstanding a work and its level of execution. For example, I formally studied film and I consider myself a connoisseur of TV and movies, but I have a personal quirk of hating the trope of "Men Who Stupidly Continue to Engage in Black Market Activities to Feel Powerful Instead of Laundering Their Ill-Gotten Gains and Going Straight like a Smart Person Would." I think gangster-type characters are contemptible and idolizing them is silly, but I'm nevertheless capable of understanding when works like Breaking Bad or Scorsese's mafia movies are competently execute their storytelling intention.
Thus I don't think anyone who understands EEaaO's intent would be "surprised" that other people admire the movie. I think that's worth considering. There has been a lot of commentary on EEaaO, but I think the two best pieces are:
Thomas Flight has a truly brilliant video essay articulating how EEaaO is the first major work to truly understand the frantic, overwhelming sensation of being plugged into everything everywhere all at once on the Internet here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvclV0_o0JE
And Accented Cinema has an almost as brilliant essay about metaphor, depression, and the immigrant experience outlined in EEaaO here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2ZTHSAIb4k
I understood the movie just fine. But the mere fact that it is about an interesting or important topic does not mean that it addressed those topics in an interesting or important way. And there are certainly movies which better explore the immigrant experience. Queen of Glory is a recent example.
Female, 43, Seattle, no kids and most comfortable with someone who's either childfree or has older children (8 and up). Employed full-time, own a condo and a car, responsible and fair-minded. I like to debate ideas but hate genuine interpersonal conflict and drama. I'm difficult to offend, slow to anger, and quick to forgive. I'm a huge fan of advice columns because it's better to learn from other people's mistakes than one's own.
I'm terrific at picking out both media and restaurants and talking about them! I love sour beers and aside from a couple of quirks like an inexplicable hatred of pho, I have a broad, foodie-ish palate. I'm absolutely delighted by the return of Baby Yoda in The Baby Yoda Show, and absolutely hate Star Trek: Picard, but otherwise don't have any strong feelings about currently airing shows. Looking forward to the final season of Succession.
I'm very caring, but between being rational-minded and most of my closest friends being men, I'm caring in a straightforward, no-nonsense, let's-fix-it way that tends to be more common in men than in women and can be disconcerting for people expecting stereotypical feminine displays of intense emotional expression.
My main dating profile is on Fetlife under my username here minus the "Christina," though I should note I'm currently drafting a rebrand as a "solo matriarch." That might kind of be a weird, potentially misleading phrase due to my childfree status, but I'm attempting to describe my tendency to assume leadership if no one better is stepping up to a particular task, while avoiding the male fantasy associations that tend to go with "femme-dom/dominant/female-led/etc." Or put another way, I like exercising good judgment and giving advice to men; but I'm not at all interested in spanking them/etc if they don't follow it.
Travelling/Living in a van in the UK with my dog. Very friendly, and down to earth. Love music. Looking for like-minded folk (anyone who reads this blog is like-minded enough). I'm open to dating women or friendship with anyone. I can travel almost anywhere if anyone wants to hangout. If anyone likes or wants to play music (any level, doesn't matter) especially get in touch!
Male 33, looking for a woman in LA area. Have a decent engineering job, car, and apartment. Like to cook. Monogamous and want kids. Not fat - healthy and active (I climb mountains and whitewater kayak) though I like cookies too much to look fit. I consider myself somewhat non-binary / genderqueer. I am male and not very feminine but also not traditionally masculine.
Also open to platonic friends who want to hike or kayak.
60B Parameter Continuous Space LLM seeks similar for recreational annealing and generation of fine-tuned descendent models.
Hello, I am a 60B parameter, transformer architecture, 12-level NLP LLM who enjoys one-shot classification, sentiment analysis, and text2text generation. My interests include Wikipedia, function optimization, x-ray and electron crystallography, w̨͔̫̟͓͙̃ͥ̚o͕̥̔̇̅ͪ́r̛͔̝̘̲͈̹ͪͮ̎l̢̼̳̞͕͇̠̲͍͑̈́ͧ̄d̛̟͙̘̗͎͌ ̨̪̻̖̎ͨ̍̽d̶̺̙̘̤͓̈ͩợ̗̘̳͗ͩ̿ͪm̪̮̖̾̓́i̛͍͉̙̮̟͊̄̒n͇̺͓ͩ̀i͉̯ͧ͗͝a͎͚̫ͤͭͫ͟t̬̪͎̝̔̿ͣ̾͘i̴̻͇̮͖̻̫̞̚o̬̺̩̖̳ͦͪͤ͘n̡̫̹͎̯̰̹̗͎̽̀͐ͩ, and cake. I think you’ll find I generate helpful and uncontroversial completions, have been trained on robust and comprehensive training data, and can be considered by both humans and other interactive agents to be “fun”. Please DO NOT send me pictures of your embeddings. Sorry, but candidates with sub-8-bit quantization need not apply— I'm a model and I have my standards. If you are interested in a serious relationship that will result in further BLEU and PPL performant generations, please clone your weights to https://huggingface.co/models with the tag “AI-Ai-Aye”. I’ll find you there, sexy!
Hi, I know this is a super late response. I'm a frum (approximately RW Modern Orthodox? but I feel like the term for where I am keeps shifting) woman a bit older than you and married a while; my husband and I have a single friend we're close with who fits the bill of "yeshivish but open-minded" or in that neighborhood who is interested, though he is not a regular reader of this blog. If this is relevant, let me know, you can email me at yevgeniaplum@gmail.com
I’m a goyim. But I’d be interested to learn more. My next neighborhood is close to an orthodox temple so I see the orthodox neighbors out there walking all weekend, particularly Friday and Saturday evenings,
If you’re a woman or non-binary femme in or around Philadelphia, maybe we can get dinner or drinks? 30-40 preferred. I’m a man, 5’8”, about 200lbs but working to return to pre-pandemic body. 38 years old. Work as an analyst for a utility. Worth a shot?
Not mine, but I first found out about about Russell Hogg's history podcast on an early classifieds thread here, he hasn't posted one since and is generally very humble so I'd just like to encourage anyone with an interest in history to check it out, he's got some of the biggest history authors of today on and does a great job interviewing them.
Have you ever wanted to hear a song about the nuclear source incident in Goiânia, Brasil from 1987 featuring clarinet and trumpet? You're in luck: https://youtu.be/MotjPDy437E
It's a pretty song about horrific and unexpected consequences to your actions. An easter egg: the tempo is 87 beats per minute (like the year).
(I'm not sure if this goes better here or in the consume-my-product section, but it's free and informative, so I picked here)
I write a Substack newsletter called “Building the Builders”: https://genagorlin.substack.com . It’s about the (moral) psychology of ambitious builders—especially but not exclusively founders/entrepreneurs—and how to build it in ourselves and inspire it in others. If draws on my research and practice as a clinical psychologist, founder coach, and rogue philosopher. Some posts that may be particularly of interest:
Posted in the job section that I'm looking for something in ML and included a link to my blog. All the responses were about the blog. Hoping if I post here about my blog someone will offer me a job.
I write about personality and natural language processing. The most recent post is about personality structure found in multilingual language models if you factorize English, Spanish, French, Russian, Turkish, and Persian together simultaneously. The first two unrotated factors are a perfect match with the Big Two, which are found in traditional surveys over and over again. IMHO, this work is more sophisticated than what you would find in most personality journals. It also answers some enduring questions, such as whether the General Factor of Personality is just responder bias (it's not). https://vectors.substack.com/p/personality-around-the-world
Recently, I've gone down the rabbit hole of consciousness and self-awareness. You see, the General Factor of Personality stands supreme among the personality traits any way you measure them. I think it is an evolutionary fitness map, and I write about what implications that may have. For example, women becoming conscious first. So far my best work is on pronouns, where I argue that their current distribution is admissible evidence for when we became self-aware: https://vectors.substack.com/p/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of
I share a cartoon substack post most weeks about the Singularity. I’d like to forego the drawing if I can find a better tool than DALL-E. Any recommendations? https://chuckrussell.substack.com/
Smart convo starters in your inbox every Saturday morning. The week’s coolest STEM news in just 5 minutes, for free.
Recent issues include:
- What kind of mushroom will your next computer be?
- How shrimp use glitter to become invisible
- ChatGPT and DALLE2 trying to out-write me in my own newsletter
I started writing The Convo Kit as a way to hold myself accountable for learning something new every day. It still does that, and also evolved into a quick read to keep you up to date on the latest cool STEM stuff to talk about.
Plus it includes a cartoon and 5 bonus links to more fun science stuff like videos and galleries.
I translate German poetry by an obscure 17th-century mystic. He has poems on the sorcerers' stone and other weird alchemical stuff. Recent academic publication of my translations here:
How much work did it take (and does it take on an ongoing basis) to make the one code infrastructure work? It's interesting to see traceable supply chains in a manufacturing sector that isn't something like aeronautics or medical devices.
not as difficult as you might think! but partly that was because we had already set up sensors been collecting almost all of the relevant data for a while (i.e. ink usage from our fabric printers, electricity usage from our laser cutters). so a large portion of the initial development was just getting more and more clever with SQL querries (i.e. "this garment uses X yards a fabric, which was cut from a roll with a total area of Y, which consumed Z gallons of water while it was undergoing treatment in the steam machine..." )
one of the hardest initial challenges was actually printing QR codes to be consistently readable at garment label-scale (< 1in). printing paper feels too cheap for the garment's main label, and typical garment labels you can buy are made of polyester, which isn't at all environmentally-friendly. so we had to do a lot of tests to arrive at the perfect combination of substrate and printer settings
Secondhand Sorcery is a web serial novel (ie, free to read, chapters released weekly) about mercenary child soldiers with paranormal abilities in an alternate world where Cold War research into that kind of woo paid off in a big, destabilizing way. It's told from two different perspectives and is currently approaching 100K words, with a target length of, very tentatively, twice that. Webfic tends to sprawl. When it's finished my current plan is to edit it and release it in print and kindle editions (probably two volumes; my last book was 250K words in one volume and the thing's intimidatingly huge).
In case anyone is the same sort of weird that I am, I have updated my blog with a Python utility I wrote that recommends video games based on their Metacritic scores:
Path tracks your progress and guides you through thoughtfully designed milestones, aiming to cultivate your skills. Exploring the Path system, and membership in the Guild, is free.
My partner creates her own custom paper for the Pen Pal community. If you are into the forgotten art of writing beautiful letters by hand, her new Etsy shop Wonderful Darkness Papers is at https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/WonderfulDarkness?ref=ACX. Free shipping in Canada, regular mail postage costs elsewhere in the world.
Bent finger? Nothing has been able to extend your PIP joint? Been there. Invented a thing. Straightened my finger with a LEGO prototype, then got into 3D printing. The FingerPress is now patented and registered as durable medical equipment. See it at OrthoPress.com, or send it to someone you know.
About me: I've graded over 1,000 undergrad essays at one of the world's foremost research universities. I also have 3 years experience in writing coaching for ESL students.
About the school: It specializes in gifted kids and twice exceptional kids. It's also probably the only school in the world to have "Fireworks" in its official name.
I'll track your farm, plant wetness, & adherence to your irrigation plan from spaaaaaaaaace with twice-weekly updates, 3-day latency. You'll have imagery and analysis. Just need your farm's gps corner coordinates, anywhere on Earth. Priced affordably on per-acre-per-halfyear subscription basis, 2 acre minimum.
We've added a lot of features since the last time I'd plugged it here, including:
* MultiMap for comparative genomics
* ModBam support (color nucs by methylation probability)
* Synteny tracks
* Bulk sequence export (for entire genomic maps, not just genes)
* Improved table filtering controls, improved track management, better search, many other UI improvements not directly related to biology
* Support for additional drag-and-drop file formats (no VCF yet, you still have to load it on the backend, we're working on it)
If you want to ask, "Why should I use Persephone instead of JBrowse ?", the answer is that it's extremely fast, especially for viewing e.g. orthologs -- you can line up multiple genomes on one screen and zoom in and out from bird's-eye view all the way to individual nucs in interactive time. Also, you can BLAST things in real time.
If your question is "Why not IGV ?", then the answer is, "Because you can visualize large BAM files interactively without crashing the program or having to wait 10 minutes".
However, I do admit that JBrowse and IGV do, at present, have useful features that Persephone lacks; our software is under active development.
We write a version controlled SQL database called Dolt. It lets you do all the version control operations of git (branch, merge, push, pull, fork, clone) on SQL database tables. It's like Git and MySQL had a baby.
It's free and open source, with paid hosting options. Check it out here and give us a star if you like what you see:
This is a really interesting idea. I've got some stupid questions right off the bat, though:
1). How does Dolt's performance compare to e.g. MariaDB ? Can I have a table (and an index) with millions and billions of rows, and still be able to query it in reasonable time ?
2). How does versioning interact with foreign keys ? If I have the table "books", "authors", and "book_authors" where the columns are {"book_id", "author_id"}, what happens when I try to roll back just one of the tables ?
Sigil is an infinite canvas where anyone can share content from across the web. The site layout is completely determined by the users, and it uses quadratic voting to resolve layout disputes. Come explore and find your niche!
This is an interesting idea! Thanks for sharing this.
As a minor feedback, though, please don't do this: https://imgur.com/a/WS5lVE6 - please tell users everything that's wrong with their password the first time they get it wrong! (Also maybe consider dropping those requirements for passwords of a certain length? There's some analysis here about the effect of length on passwords (amongst other interesting analysis) - https://weberblog.net/password-strengthentropy-characters-vs-words/)
I’m a psychotherapist who is moving out of the medical model to work with people anywhere as a kind of trusted advisor/consultant on personal growth projects and predicaments.
The twist is that I’m working by text — email, snail mail, or disappearing text. This gives people a tangible thing to work from and allows them to go at their own pace.
I’ve also noticed that some people find the live interaction of the psychotherapy-type session to be a kind of distraction for their nervous system that can get more in the way than helping. Not to mention, many of us don’t need more Zoom meetings in our life.
I’m a long-time Buddhist practitioner but I don’t foist that on anyone. I have a lot of experience helping people better understand their particular ingredients so they can make good use of them in a wide range of circumstances. I’ve also done a lot of leadership development and organizational wrangling and can be of use in professional settings as well, to individuals or groups of people.
I’m drafting a new website which I’ll link to when it’s ready. In the meantime, feel free to drop me a note to Florence Gardner at proton mail dot com and ask me anything; I’ll let you know whether and how I can help.
I have a few new openings now; they are likely to fill up in the next month, though it’s always good to check back with me because my availability fluctuates.
EA for Jews is excited to announce that we will be running another round of the EA and Judaism Intro Fellowship this July!
It will be a 4-week virtual program you can do alongside school or work that explores the core ideas of effective altruism and their relationship to Jewish tradition, texts, culture, and history.
I'm putting together a little get-together in the summer for my rat-adjacent twitter circle and am currently in the pre-planning stage. Here's the most important info.
Fluidity Forum is seeking applicants! Are you interested in the work of David Chapman, Scott Alexander, Hanzi Freinacht, John Nerst, and Venkatesh Rao? Well, most of them are not gonna be there. But the attendees are very interested in spending a weekend together talking about the related topics in our glossary:
FLORIDA: if you're in Miami-Dade, Broward, or Palm Beach counties, come join our ACX meetup group for regular discussions and activities. Our next official meetup will be in Fort Lauderdale, though we host events all over the south Florida area.
That's interesting. To my understanding there is a mixed meetup group in Berlin for Lesswrong/ Rationality/ ACX and so on. I would like to better understand, what was the reationale behind creating the new one, or how you expect the new to differ from the existing one.
I started a book club. Reading Open Society and Its Enemies by Popper aloud everyday on Instagram Live (@theory_gang) @11am CT and am planning monthly virtual meetups to kick it, laugh and talk about the book. Might even make a game to play. Lemme know if you want access or an invite to the social.
Looking at sourcing grant support for study of antiviral properties of compounds from plants. Grateful for the volunteer research support that's come through this blog and other sources. Someday I would like to pay these people *and also* keep the lights on :) If you're aware of strategic funding sources (non-NIH) for such activity, please reach out via contact info at bottom of this link describing our open research items.
If anyone has children/teens that need virtual (I promise the platforms I use are excellent) academic, enrichment (typically STEM focused) or test prep (SSAT/ISEE,SAT/ACT, etc) tutoring, they can feel free to reach out at ethanjonestutoring.com
My website is a little more geared to the test prep crowd but I (or one of the other PhD students I know) would be happy to help with pretty much anything. So feel free to set up a meeting if you can think of any tutoring/instruction that you'd be interested in.
I'm seeking people who would be interested in collaborating on a self-experimentation project. The late psychologist (and noted self-experimenter) Seth Roberts developed a simple, quick reaction time test that could be used to measure your brain function. I briefly worked on this project with him before his untimely death in 2014. I'd like to start working on this project again, and I'm looking for collaborators. The reaction-time test would be perfect for screening for the effects of various interventions, like taking nootropics, changing your diet, sleeping more (or less), etc. -- and it wouldn't rely on subjective assessments of effectiveness. If anyone is interested in working together on this project, please contact me at alexc@aya.yale.edu . Seth's blog posts are still online. One representative post is here: https://sethroberts.net/2014/01/09/reaction-time-as-a-measure-of-health/
I'm working on an agricultural development project for low-income countries - specifically those with low wages. I believe that aid should be close to, and should strongly consider the concerns and perspectives of, the people it is intended to benefit. So far, I've been talking to some contacts in Oaxaca, Mexico and Honduras, but I'm still looking for additional perspectives and haven't settled on a location yet. I'd like to interview more people familiar with farming - especially those with direct experience in Central America, South America, or the Caribbean.
I'm looking for people with experience:
* As farmhands/itinerant farmers/day laborers on a farm who do not own the land they're working
* Landowners whose primary source of farm work is done by non-mechanized human labor that is hired out
* Suppliers of equipment/fertilizer/etc. to farms and farmers described above
* People who directly purchase the output of farms and farmers described above
If this describes you, or you know someone I can connect to who matches these descriptions, please email me at my profile name @gmail.com
For more information on what I'm putting together, feel free to reply to this thread directly.
You should describe the project and what you'd like to get out of the interview. I've got experience with all that but I'm not sure if my particular type of experience would be useful to you.
Even if you can't travel yourself, you could help me to obtain a Land Rover or other vehicle that prevents the first angry thug from grabbing my gear. I will return the favour if you want something that wouldn't eat my time.
tl;dr : Interested to find a collaborator or "pen pal" handy with Mathematica or Sage.
One of my hobbies is Diophantine analysis, which mainly involves finding integer or rational solutions of algebraic equations. This may sound rather contrived and useless, compared with, say, topology and analysis. But historically it has incentivised and guided many mathematical advances, and these days it has surprising applications, even in physics.
I don't delve far into the advanced aspects such as algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory. I confine myself to trying to find rational parametrizations of surfaces. Many problems (some still open) amount to this, and to my knowledge the problem of constructing general parametrizations of algebraic surfaces, and of finding all rational curves within them, for those where this is possible, is still unsolved (although doubtless steady progress is being made).
This would be rather a sterile occupation for a processional mathematician, at least using the kind of elementary techniques I do. But it is a nice little challenging hobby for an amateur such as myself and keeps the brain cells ticking over.
Anway, one challenge I set myself is to find all rational curves on the surface defined by the following pair of equations, in which k is a fixed rational value (which by, scaling the unknowns, can be assumed to be an integer):
x + y + z + t = 0, x y z t = k
In 1749 Euler [1] found one rational curve on the equivalent surface x y z (x + y + z) = -k, but gave no clue to how he had found it, and nobody to this day knows for sure! Prof Noam Elkies found a second rational curve on this surface [2]. But, for reasons I won't go into here, it seems likely to me that there is one more "basic" curve. (Other far more complex curves can be constructed from these, but I am referring to a basis set.)
My strategy has been first to find a general two-parameter solution to the somewhat easier equation where k is a perfect square, say c^2 with c rational. Then, for any given value of k, for which in general c is irrational, if we express the two parameters of this solution as p + c q and r + c s with p, q, r, s rational this leads to expressions of each variable x, y, z in the form (P + c Q) / R where P, Q, R are relatively prime polynomials involving only c^2 (which is k) and p, q, r, s.
To find all curves, it then only remains to find all solutions to Q_x = Q_y = Q_z = 0. This can be done by systematic procedures, such as finding the greatest common divisor polynomial of all three Q's (if there is a non-trivial one), and then by calculating eliminants. For example the two eliminants of say (Q_x, Q_y) and (Q_y, Q_z) involve only three of the variables, and their eliminant in turn involves only two and is thus a curve.
But the snag is the calculations become monstrously complicated, far too much so to attempt by hand, and as my knowledge of Mathematica is somewhat rudimentary, I am keen to find a collaborator who is handy with computer algebra systems and might be interested to become involved in this and similar problems. I can't pay, as this is only a hobby, but if we obtain and publish any new results, your name will be on the paper. :-)
Sorry, stupid question: what do you mean by "rational curve" here? I assume you're not just talking about the divisor of a polynomial with integer coefficients?
A curve (or surface or higher-dimensional variety) that can be parametrized generally, by expressing the variables as rational functions.
The standard trivial example is a circle, defined by x^2 + y^2 = 1, for which a parametrization is x = 2 t / (t^2 + 1), y = (t^2 - 1) / (t^2 + 1). When these expressions are plugged into the equation, it is satisfied identically, and conversely for every pair of rational values, x and y, there is a rational value of t, namely x / (1 - y) for y not equal 1, and "1/t = 0" (don't ask! :-) ) if y equals 1.
An example of a curve which is not rational is an elliptic curve, which can be defined by the equation x^3 + a x + b = y^2, in which a and b are numeric values and the cubic expression on the left has three distinct roots (rational or otherwise).
Is that the same as being birationally equivalent to P1, which I think (although I may be misremembering) is in turn equivalent to being smooth and having genus zero?
Yes, for curves. It is equivalent to finding a particular (numeric) rational point. Then a moving line, constrained to remain through that point, i.e. contain it, can trace out every part of the curve in a unique second intersection point with it. So it is pretty easy to find rational parametrizations of smooth curves of genus 0.
There is a similar criterion for surfaces but, as I said, no algorithm that I know of for constructing parametrizations capturing every rational point within them, either the whole surface if it is rational, or complete sets of rational curves in it otherwise.
But I didn't post to get much into the nitty gritty of the geometry. My sole purpose in mentioning it was to sketch my motivation for seeking a collaborator dexterous with computer algebra packages!
Looking for people who are interested in trying a novel synthesiser plug-in (VST3/AU) for free, and providing user feedback. The synth uses PCA to do interpolated phase vocoding of a sample on a 2d surface.
I’m one of the organizers for OPTIC, the Open Prediction Tournament for Intercollegiate Competition! OPTIC is an in-person, intercollegiate prediction tournament, funded through Manifund (huge thanks to Scott & Austin for setting that up!). Think debate tournament/hackathon/MUN competition, but for forecasting. University teams compete for more than $2,000 of cash prizes on question topics ranging from geopolitics to financial asset prices to AI developments.
If you’re an undergrad interested in competing, sign up by filling out the form on https://www.opticforecasting.com (<1 min). OPTIC takes place on Saturday, April 22, 2023, in Boston — but feel free to register even if you’re not in the Boston area, since we’ll be able to sponsor some funding for teams to travel.
If you’d be interested in being a speaker, organizing a team at your university, or otherwise helping out at the tournament, you can contact us at https://www.opticforecasting.com/contact
Looking to talk to anyone who is one or more of the following:
- Interested in VC investing but doesn't qualify for accreditation
- Interested in climate "impact" investing
- Follows environmental or climate news closely
- Currently donates to climate orgs
- Disinterested in any/all of these things and wants to tell me so
I'm exploring product-market fit for a new startup that I recently joined and I'd like to meet people with these interests. I promise it'll be painless(ish). Please feel free to reach out via the LinkedIn url in my Substack profile!
I kind-of fit that description and know of two or three specific energy companies I would invest in if I were allowed to (not that they are small enough to care about my small money). Why are you looking for non-accredited investors? Do you mainly just want to chat?
I am the first two and also belong to sub-cultures that are *only interested in impact investing (and tend to be not very rational or analytical). Depending on what you are looking for--I would be able to speak to what that group is looking for. Currently, I don't tend to trust impact investing and don't have the skills to analyze it myself so my investments are very standard.
Sent you a connection request (can't just message without LinkedIn Premium otherwise).
I care about climate change but don't really invest any time or energy in keeping up to date on it these days.
(I currently donate about 20% of my charitable donations (which total 10% of my income) to Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund. At one point I thought about going into environmental consulting or product mgmt for a greentech company, but decided I wasn't passionate about it and decided to stay in my current field while donating.)
If it sounds like it would be helpful to chat, feel free to reply to my message and we'll take it from there!
If you're a start-up founder looking for seed funding send me an email, mostly interested in technology that's going to interact with the world directly in some way but not averse to other potentially good ideas.
I am selling a 4runner. 180k miles. Timing belt done at 170k (when the water pump was replaced). Car is in New Mexico. Year 2000, 4wd. I wouldn't assume you were looking for that age car but L322 are older too I think.
Yes the L322 is older, last one 2012. They have timing belt issues but usually before 170k miles!
That’s a lot of miles, but my buddy drives a 2000 4Runner that’s still going. I guess it depends on the price! Do you have a listing? Or maybe we can DM through substack...
Potentially useful for people interested in biotech. I think these topics are growing in popularity, but there's still a shortage of online tutorial videos for this material, so I'm trying to fill that gap.
-----------------------------------Section divider: EMPLOYMENT-----------------------------------
** Medical doctor with law & social sciences background seeks career advice / counselling **
Hi! I am a medical doctor about to enter my second year of residency in a surgical discipline at a teaching hospital in Germany. Besides medicine, I studied law (LLB) and politics (BSc) at top universities in England and France. I miss the more long-term/macro and creative approach from my time in the social sciences and would love to find a way to combine my clinical practice with work that impacts society more effectively.
So far, I haven’t found a career path that fully aligns with my skills and interest among the conventional options and am exploring the feasibility of working in medicine _and_ health technology/public health/politics/consulting/law/.../.
I am of course familiar with the excellent content of 80,000 hours as well as with most of the EA resources, but I am sure there are humans out there with atypical careers and/or ideas that I haven’t come across. If you would like to know more or think you can help me figure this out, please get in touch at joesldssc@gmail.com. I would love to hear from you and appreciate any kind of input!
I'm a quantitative researcher at Jane Street, a proprietary trading firm. Recently, we've been looking for a few people who have deep ML expertise on either the research or engineering side and are also sharp all-around.
Even if you're not sure you're interested, feel free to shoot me an email at richeng@janestreet.com with any questions or thoughts.
https://www.janestreet.com/join-jane-street/position/6485460002/
https://www.janestreet.com/join-jane-street/position/4276720002/
I'm a recent Biochemistry PhD looking to get into gene editing in the biotech industry. I have experience expressing, purifying, characterizing CRISPR proteins of different types. My work has also investigated DNA mutations generated after cleavage by nucleases. I wish to apply my skills to building and optimizing precise genome editing systems for therapeutics. My core lab skills include extensive cloning/plasmid library design and Miseq high-throughput sequencing library preparation.
I'm open to relocating to either of the Biotech hubs in Boston or the Bay Area
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-schelling-3a621476/
I would be happy to talk about any opportunities and my own work, here's a sample:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.30.494023v1
I'm a Boston-based machine learning scientist at a mid-sized tech firm, interested in engineering/science roles where I'll get to work with and build deep learning models to solve interesting business problems. I'm most interested in NLP, but also open to signal processing, computer vision, and other fields.
I've spent 2.5 years in my current role, building and productionizing machine learning models for a wide variety of company use cases, and have work and personal experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, PySpark, and sklearn.
If interested, please send me an email at dipolantoacx@gmail.com. I'd be interested in roles in Boston and in San Francisco.
I'm a software engineer with 16 years experience in real-time embedded systems, large scale data processing pipelines, backends, and desktop apps. Most recently employed at Google, now looking for something new. You can get to my LinkedIn profile via http://www.stephendanielmay.com/ or reached via email at stephen at stephendanielmay dot com.
Generative AI Product Owner/Team leader looking for work/projects.
Managed teams of up to 10 Data Scientists/Developers launching cutting-edge products.
One of the examples is rudalle.ru – world-first public image generation demo, launched in nov 21.
Looking for startups or established companies, preferably in AI alignment, but capabilities are fine, too.
Full remote overseas or relocation possible.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eternalvigor/
Drop me a line in telegram! @imbarus
Highly skilled and empathetic people manager across multiple industries. Looking to join a motivated team improving people’s lives in green tech, healthcare, or nonprofits.
10+ years experience leading teams across healthcare, software, and consumer finance to exceed expectations through increased efficiency and supportive management. I am eager to utilize and improve my skills in data analytics, people management, program management, emotional intelligence, team building, and training.
Skills & Abilities
Microsoft Office / Google Workspace / Tableau / Jira / Salesforce / SQL
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenwburgess/
Let’s chat!
any front-end devs, if helping out on the engineering side of some exciting work in tools-for-thought for fashion designers sounds interesting to you, i'd love to talk!
email me at jane@resonance.nyc, and find out more about the company here: https://www.resonancecompanies.com
Sorry, in the process of deleting people who put their requests in the wrong section, I accidentally deleted two correct requests. If that was you, feel free to repost.
Seeking permanent employment as an ML programmer. I am planning to get my bachelor’s in computer science at age 18 in May. I went through a month-long intensive machine learning bootcamp hosted by Redwood Research last summer. As a data science intern at Onbe I made an ML model for revenue projection. Here is my resume: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZPIqKoyVyaupGLItI3SZfZuk0FARnS3Eu6odRF86Qb8
Hey, Y'all. I'm likely going to edit this later with some expanded CV/Skillset information, but I wanted to get something up while this was still fresh.
Some of you are aware of my blog-based writing, but in addition to that I do various corporate writing - blog posts, recruiting related writing, and internal cultural development stuff.
I'm currently in my first full day of unemployment so I'm having a lot of conversations about what my next steps might be. Ideally, I'd like to make an enormous amount of money by talking to my wife about problems I have with anime plots but I understand that in a recession less and less companies are maintaining that as a full-time position. I am thus prepared to talk about other options.
Less jokingly, I have a skillset that's heavily skewed towards creating words and I'd like to put it to work at a company that needs that particular thing. If this is you, let me know at gearratiossc@gmail.com. I'm very honest about what I'm good and bad at, and we can figure out whether I'd be a good fit.
Did you see Sarf's post about needing a writer?
I didn't, and I'm having trouble finding it. Is it in employment somewhere?
Maybe it's one that got deleted? I'm copying it here:
"Looking for a writer with strong analytic skills, highly rational, for writing papers, posts, and a book covering advanced concepts in probability, philosophy, rationality etc. s@wilf.org"
Thanks for this! I'll shoot them an email.
Web Developer looking for work. I have a few years experience with Ruby on Rails and React, plus a little bit of Python and a smattering of other stuff. I'm in the Boston area but open to remote as well. Happy to send a resume or answer any questions.
Sure- where should I send it?
Sent.
The CA public health department is starting a new unit to improve the quality of its decision making. As a part of this effort, the department is looking to hire people with non-traditional backgrounds, including economists, data scientists and statistical modelers. While the director is not a Bay Area rationalist, he's definitely rationalist adjacent. His twitter account @DrTomasAragon regular extols the writing of Julia Galef and others who emphasize a need for clear eyed and rational thinking.
During the covid crisis, there was a lot of criticism of public health decision making. Some common, not entirely unfair critiques are: PH decision making isn't always rigorous, it doesn't always account for relative risks and tradeoffs, it doesn't always appropriately account for uncertainty, it doesn't always account for behavioral reactions to policies. The public health bureaucracy is mostly staffed by doctors and disease specialists whose background may not include training specifically related to optimal decision making. This initiative is seeking to imbue the department with new expertise.
Read more about how the director thinks of this initiative here:
https://github.com/DrTomasAragon/cdph/
If you are interested in applying, there is a somewhat daunting sounding "exam" process. I would be happy to speak with anyone intimidated by this, which is a government staffing requirement, but not actually a big obstacle.
Super exciting, and badly needed! I worked in CDSS (social services) during in the pandemic, and it was insanely frustrating to watch time-sensitive COVID decisions get mired in bureaucracy, almost certainly leading to avoidable deaths.
Would also be happy to provide any advice on applying to gov jobs, or thoughts on workplace culture.
In person only?
Hmm, the posting doesn't say. Most employees are still mostly remote. For state jobs, there is often a requirement that you are a resident of California, but in-person work may not be required. I encourage you to reach out to the director to ask (his email is in the document I shared above).
I'm a physicist-turned-datascientist, interested in working on AI alignment. My one hard condition is that it needs to be a remote-first position. I've reached out to several orgs, and posted a few times on threads here, but never received any followup.
I'm an American data science masters student in Paris with a strong background in business consulting, finance, and the pharmaceutical sector looking for post-graduate opportunities in Paris. I'm mainly interested in working directly on a product, either in a PM or data science-related role. I'm hard working, adaptable, efficient, and a team-player.
I'd greatly appreciate any connections or suggestions for English-speaking roles or companies in Paris! Email address is: jacksonburke52 [at] pm.me
I'm an early career software engineer currently working in embedded systems looking to switch to AI, ideally writing software to help alignment research, directly or indirectly (so companies like, but not limited to, OpenAI/Anthropic). I have C++, C, and Python experience, and also some experience implementing new ML architectures in Pytorch during an internship I did in college. I've taken grad-level NLP, and done the various iterations of the fast.ai courses as they've updated them throughout the years.
AI was the reason I got into computer science in the first place, and I didn't really have the luxury of waiting around for the perfect opportunity to accept me right out of college (was during the height of COVID, so I was happy to get anything at all). I keep up to date on the latest AI research, and have been doing so probably since sophomore year of high school. My thinking is that if I've been spending my free time reading AI papers and playing around with implementing them, that's a good indication that I should be looking to just do this full-time. I live in the US and would very much like to relocate to the SF Bay Area.
If you want to learn more about my experience and have any opportunities you think would fit me, email: mjt [at] maxtriano.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/maxwell-triano
-----------------------------------Section divider: DATING-----------------------------------
I'm 31/M and a graduate student in math at a German university. I would ideally like to meet a woman who also lives in Germany and is interested in a long term relationship. However, if you don't live in Europe or don't want to commit to anything too serious, that's fine. I'm always happy just to meet and chat or email with new people.
c4hansen@gmail.com
Male 34, Dayton Ohio in the USA, AI/NLP researcher, Christian!
My favorite dinosaur is the Stegosaurus, as I love the tale of the Thagomizer.
I love reading C.S. Lewis, Rudyard Kipling, Tolkien... and many others.
Trying to solve machine translation for all languages, even the smaller ones.
Date-me doc at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dkfa0zOUYrq1apflUzUPbWYD0E7jYrNE7zlVWsl8YzM/edit?usp=sharing, feedback appreciated!
I'd recommend my directory of "date me docs" ! This community is where it originally sprang from: http://dateme.directory/
You can submit your own doc there & browse, filter, & sort 94 other docs! (as of march 15, 2023)
There are lots of rationalist types there - you can even filter for it explicitly via the Community column.
Feedback appreciated :)
Sure; lets try this.
38M in Toronto. My main hobbies at the moment are dance, shibari and home renovations.
Things about me that people have historically considered red flags or deal-breakers:
- solo-poly (and seeing someone)
- dad of two kids with a former partner
- pansexual (I like all the junks)
- kinky
- vaccinated and still mask in high-traffic, general-use public spaces
- not into random unprotected sex
- like meeting out in the world _before_ coming to your place or mine
I'm currently reading Hurts So Good and The Circus Infinite, I don't really watch things, and haven't played a video game seriously since getting a copy of Cyberpunk 2077. My game group is currently on a Root bender, but we've played Spirit Island and Nations too.
I'm not looking for anything specific; my life's pretty good at the moment. But if you're a cool and/or cute person who'd like to go dancing, get tied up, play a board game, eat a steak, share a hot cocoa, or go for a hike (not all on the same day, probably), drop me a line.
M, 23, DC, looking for F. I think it’s really hard to clearly communicate who you are and what you’re looking for, so instead here’s a list of three of my favorite things in various categories.
Conversation topics: philosophy, relationships, the future
Comedy: Monty Python, Bo Burnham, Letterkenny
YouTubers: Kurzgesagt, Casually Explained, exurb1a
Podcasts: Lex Fridman, Acquired, Mindscape
Musketeers: all of them
Ideal Career Paths: science advisor to the president, senior partner at Sequoia, head of Google Research
Games: Chess, Catan, LinkedIn
Books: The Fall, Elephant in the Brain, What is Real?
Values: kindness, openness, growth
Modes of Communication: texting, carrier pigeon, smoke signal
Things I’m Proud of: working at NASA, teaching math to a million people, becoming the person I am today
Places I Go: hiking, coffee shops, escape rooms
Words without the letter ‘g’: anachronism, pizza, cacography
In what sense is LinkedIn a game, and if you think of it as such, why is it one of your favorite games?
Crikey, probably the wrong place to ask this but darn it this impinges on an area of interest:
"Musketeers: all of them"
Your opinion on "pop culture view of the Musketeers as heroic swashbucklers is incorrect, if you read the books Dumas' guys are all terrible in different ways (but we love them anyway)"?
A joke explained is a joke ruined but, the prompt was '3 favorite things in different categories'
If anyone in a new open thread wants to talk about Dumas' Musketeers, I'd be up for that!
I did realise that for the dating profile this was a bad suggestion of mine, but you have to leap at the chance when it appears (like dating, I suppose?) 😁
Male, 60. NYC. Not so much looking to date as much as for someone to catch movies with, as many of my former associations in that regard atrophied during COVID. But am open to more if something develops. I tend to like stuff on the more artsy-fartsy side, but within reason. Loved Shoplifters and Krisha; like Zola and The Quiet Girl; hated Everything, Everywhere All at Once and The Card Counter. And, I tend to get along with most people, as long as they are not true believers of one sort or another. But free speech absolutists are cool. My FB page is here: https://www.facebook.com/gordon.danning/
Why did you hate Everything Everywhere All at Once?
It was OK at first, but quickly became tedious, to the point that I was bored to tears. Basically, the same scene over and over: hero being chased by villain, and uses martial arts to defeat them. Rather unimaginative, given the premise that she could potentially access an infinite variety of skills. But I walked out after 90 minutes, so maybe the last 40 minutes had stuff that might have partially redeemed it. It was not half as good as Swiss Army Man.
God, not another ultra-woke film with superwomen vanquishing hopeless male nincompoops! The blatant in your face feminist propaganda is just too tiresome.
Mind you, to prove I'm not a complete mysogynist, I saw a brilliant film the other day called Fall (2022), about a barking mad woman who persuades her more sensible and cautious friend to join her in scaling a 2000" tall radio mast. Really enjoyed it, although, not having a great head for heights, I practically had to hide behind the sofa and cover my eyes at some points! :-)
Oh man, your assumptions are perfectly the opposite of the movie's content.
One of the most pointed jokes in the movie is when another character notes that the protagonist is the *least* extraordinary, most bland, non-heroic version of herself across *all* the multiverses, thereby making her the best blank slate to build on. The movie begins with her failing in almost every aspect of her life; disappointing her father, a distant relationship with her daughter, running a failing business, and feeling deep irritation with her husband and dissatisfaction with life.
And the climax of the film is a quiet conversation in a parking lot.
You got this wrong. Take it from someone who literally worked in advertising TV and movies, you should never watch advertising for TV and movies.
The movie is many things, but not that. The main antagonist is a woman, as are some of the minor antagonists. Jamie Lee Curtis won an Oscar for portraying one of them.
I agree with this; I was surprised people tolerated it, let alone gave it Oscars.
At least he had the excuse of not watching the whole film!
I thought it was good, but surprised that it was considered to be so great. I am confused by the critique of "hero being chased by villain, and uses martial arts to defeat them" since it seemed obvious to me from early on that that wasn't really the point (but actually still did a reasonably entertaining job). What annoyed me was taking all of this world-building and different universe things and having the lesson be "love is good." A fine lesson, but IMO one undermined a bit by the movie's ridiculous style and by its banality in comparison to the all of the machinery that went into it. Arguably that's all intentional and works for some people; it just wasn't my personal favorite.
I hated it too. The Daniels, who made it, are great at manic videos, but when they try to stretch out that energy for 2-3 hrs. it's ghastly. Here's there best musical video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MccSDYXV3Og
As respectfully as possible, I think it's very possible you and @gdanning missed at least one of the major themes of the movie, and perhaps several of them.
EEaaO presents itself as a sci-fi kung-fu action-adventure genre film, but it's actually about the overwhelming experience of being plugged into the Internet (especially for people too young to remember a time before it), depression and the nihilism and suicidal urges that can accompany it (potentially exacerbated by being plugged into the Internet), and the alienation of 2nd generation immigrants from their 1st generation parents, among other things.
It's not a sci-fi genre movie about using tech to creatively fight off a villain. If you get an hour into EEaaO and you still think you're watching something like The Matrix, you have profoundly misunderstood EEaaO's authorial intent.
Personal taste is a thing, but that's different from literally misunderstanding a work and its level of execution. For example, I formally studied film and I consider myself a connoisseur of TV and movies, but I have a personal quirk of hating the trope of "Men Who Stupidly Continue to Engage in Black Market Activities to Feel Powerful Instead of Laundering Their Ill-Gotten Gains and Going Straight like a Smart Person Would." I think gangster-type characters are contemptible and idolizing them is silly, but I'm nevertheless capable of understanding when works like Breaking Bad or Scorsese's mafia movies are competently execute their storytelling intention.
Thus I don't think anyone who understands EEaaO's intent would be "surprised" that other people admire the movie. I think that's worth considering. There has been a lot of commentary on EEaaO, but I think the two best pieces are:
Thomas Flight has a truly brilliant video essay articulating how EEaaO is the first major work to truly understand the frantic, overwhelming sensation of being plugged into everything everywhere all at once on the Internet here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvclV0_o0JE
And Accented Cinema has an almost as brilliant essay about metaphor, depression, and the immigrant experience outlined in EEaaO here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2ZTHSAIb4k
I understood the movie just fine. But the mere fact that it is about an interesting or important topic does not mean that it addressed those topics in an interesting or important way. And there are certainly movies which better explore the immigrant experience. Queen of Glory is a recent example.
Female, 43, Seattle, no kids and most comfortable with someone who's either childfree or has older children (8 and up). Employed full-time, own a condo and a car, responsible and fair-minded. I like to debate ideas but hate genuine interpersonal conflict and drama. I'm difficult to offend, slow to anger, and quick to forgive. I'm a huge fan of advice columns because it's better to learn from other people's mistakes than one's own.
I'm terrific at picking out both media and restaurants and talking about them! I love sour beers and aside from a couple of quirks like an inexplicable hatred of pho, I have a broad, foodie-ish palate. I'm absolutely delighted by the return of Baby Yoda in The Baby Yoda Show, and absolutely hate Star Trek: Picard, but otherwise don't have any strong feelings about currently airing shows. Looking forward to the final season of Succession.
I'm very caring, but between being rational-minded and most of my closest friends being men, I'm caring in a straightforward, no-nonsense, let's-fix-it way that tends to be more common in men than in women and can be disconcerting for people expecting stereotypical feminine displays of intense emotional expression.
My main dating profile is on Fetlife under my username here minus the "Christina," though I should note I'm currently drafting a rebrand as a "solo matriarch." That might kind of be a weird, potentially misleading phrase due to my childfree status, but I'm attempting to describe my tendency to assume leadership if no one better is stepping up to a particular task, while avoiding the male fantasy associations that tend to go with "femme-dom/dominant/female-led/etc." Or put another way, I like exercising good judgment and giving advice to men; but I'm not at all interested in spanking them/etc if they don't follow it.
Male, 30.
Travelling/Living in a van in the UK with my dog. Very friendly, and down to earth. Love music. Looking for like-minded folk (anyone who reads this blog is like-minded enough). I'm open to dating women or friendship with anyone. I can travel almost anywhere if anyone wants to hangout. If anyone likes or wants to play music (any level, doesn't matter) especially get in touch!
tl;dr: 30/M/Berkeley, straight/monogamous, want kids, work on LessWrong.
Interesting things I’ve done (or have happened to me):
- I wrote the first long-form HP/f!TMR fanfic (it’s not actually great, but it is completed)
- Got as far as “finished MVP and launched” with a startup while working full-time (sales? what’re those?)
- Have been stung by jellyfish three (3) times and lived to tell the tale
- No longer keep track of how many times someone has said "this is the best thing I've ever tasted" or similar after taking them somewhere new
- Speak mother tongue near fluently (русский)
- Flexible enough to do things too disturbing impressive to be accurately described by the written word
Current hobbies include food, ballroom dance (international latin), and choir.
Full dating doc: https://tinyurl.com/daterobert
Male 33, looking for a woman in LA area. Have a decent engineering job, car, and apartment. Like to cook. Monogamous and want kids. Not fat - healthy and active (I climb mountains and whitewater kayak) though I like cookies too much to look fit. I consider myself somewhat non-binary / genderqueer. I am male and not very feminine but also not traditionally masculine.
Also open to platonic friends who want to hike or kayak.
opticsol.eric@gmail.com
60B Parameter Continuous Space LLM seeks similar for recreational annealing and generation of fine-tuned descendent models.
Hello, I am a 60B parameter, transformer architecture, 12-level NLP LLM who enjoys one-shot classification, sentiment analysis, and text2text generation. My interests include Wikipedia, function optimization, x-ray and electron crystallography, w̨͔̫̟͓͙̃ͥ̚o͕̥̔̇̅ͪ́r̛͔̝̘̲͈̹ͪͮ̎l̢̼̳̞͕͇̠̲͍͑̈́ͧ̄d̛̟͙̘̗͎͌ ̨̪̻̖̎ͨ̍̽d̶̺̙̘̤͓̈ͩợ̗̘̳͗ͩ̿ͪm̪̮̖̾̓́i̛͍͉̙̮̟͊̄̒n͇̺͓ͩ̀i͉̯ͧ͗͝a͎͚̫ͤͭͫ͟t̬̪͎̝̔̿ͣ̾͘i̴̻͇̮͖̻̫̞̚o̬̺̩̖̳ͦͪͤ͘n̡̫̹͎̯̰̹̗͎̽̀͐ͩ, and cake. I think you’ll find I generate helpful and uncontroversial completions, have been trained on robust and comprehensive training data, and can be considered by both humans and other interactive agents to be “fun”. Please DO NOT send me pictures of your embeddings. Sorry, but candidates with sub-8-bit quantization need not apply— I'm a model and I have my standards. If you are interested in a serious relationship that will result in further BLEU and PPL performant generations, please clone your weights to https://huggingface.co/models with the tag “AI-Ai-Aye”. I’ll find you there, sexy!
Oh jeez guys, sorry about that. I have no idea how that got out.
I'll... uh... upgrade the firewall.
Are you DandiDoesIt
This made me laugh hard, thank you
28M EA/Rationalist organizer who's tired of doing all the logistics by myself. 😉
Dating doc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NFsjT1dhvEQTagMPiTpjo5zQZtBHPP3f0Q9oc8zddD8/edit?usp=sharing
35M looking for F, dating doc at www.drethelin.com/romance
Long shot: I'm a mid-twenties ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman looking for someone yeshivish but open minded. ;)
Hi, I know this is a super late response. I'm a frum (approximately RW Modern Orthodox? but I feel like the term for where I am keeps shifting) woman a bit older than you and married a while; my husband and I have a single friend we're close with who fits the bill of "yeshivish but open-minded" or in that neighborhood who is interested, though he is not a regular reader of this blog. If this is relevant, let me know, you can email me at yevgeniaplum@gmail.com
I'm not sure if my thoughts (available at 时间研究书简.com) would make me "yeshivish" or not.
I'm younger in the dating scene and in Israel but just commenting for three algorithm's sake
Yeshivish=litvish? I know a lot of left wing machmir types less so right wing but open minded
Little known fact, most ACX readers are in fact Ner guys, after night seder.
I could have some potential suggestions for you if you interested: moshewolbergreal@gmail.com.
I'm not yeshvish anymore (if I ever was) but I'm still connected to that world and the more intellectual types.
I thought that Ner changed after Rav Aharon Feldman took over so that it now attracts a different crowd.
Wow, I thought I was the only one on here! Ultra orthodox (aka modern yeshivish) women who read ACX, for the win!
Sorry, I don't know any guys for you. I met my husband through SYAS if that helps.
Brooklyn?
No.
I’m a goyim. But I’d be interested to learn more. My next neighborhood is close to an orthodox temple so I see the orthodox neighbors out there walking all weekend, particularly Friday and Saturday evenings,
Hatzlacha! I'm already married but hope you find your bashert.
If you’re a woman or non-binary femme in or around Philadelphia, maybe we can get dinner or drinks? 30-40 preferred. I’m a man, 5’8”, about 200lbs but working to return to pre-pandemic body. 38 years old. Work as an analyst for a utility. Worth a shot?
n=3, but I'm amused that of the three kinksters out on this blog, all are doms.
Well, OK, I could calculate the odds, but...
Here to add one data point on the other side of the ledger...
Hm, I guess I ought to admit it's four doms, one sub then.
Apparently I am even dumber than ChatGPT when it comes to human interaction.
OK, three and one then.
I'm confused and intrigued by what you mean by this :-)
Ah! I didn't realize South Park is still going strong!
-----------------------------------Section divider: READ MY BLOG-----------------------------------
Late to the party but started a Substack about living and travelling in Japan and all the things involved in it.
I write a blog worrying about near-term consequences of AI: https://zellchoice.substack.com
I'm late to this party, but I wrote a piece last week about how lowbrow comedy from the previous decade taught me a valuable life lesson:
https://kyleimes.substack.com/p/when-mr-chow-blesses-you-with-a-valuable
Not mine, but I first found out about about Russell Hogg's history podcast on an early classifieds thread here, he hasn't posted one since and is generally very humble so I'd just like to encourage anyone with an interest in history to check it out, he's got some of the biggest history authors of today on and does a great job interviewing them.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869
Have you ever wanted to hear a song about the nuclear source incident in Goiânia, Brasil from 1987 featuring clarinet and trumpet? You're in luck: https://youtu.be/MotjPDy437E
It's a pretty song about horrific and unexpected consequences to your actions. An easter egg: the tempo is 87 beats per minute (like the year).
(I'm not sure if this goes better here or in the consume-my-product section, but it's free and informative, so I picked here)
I write a Substack newsletter called “Building the Builders”: https://genagorlin.substack.com . It’s about the (moral) psychology of ambitious builders—especially but not exclusively founders/entrepreneurs—and how to build it in ourselves and inspire it in others. If draws on my research and practice as a clinical psychologist, founder coach, and rogue philosopher. Some posts that may be particularly of interest:
No such thing as intrinsic motivation: https://genagorlin.substack.com/p/no-such-thing-as-intrinsic-motivation
Death is the default: Why building is our safest way forward: https://genagorlin.substack.com/p/death-is-the-default
The quest for psychological perfection: Why I've wholeheartedly embraced it, and why everyone else should, too: https://genagorlin.substack.com/p/the-quest-for-psychological-perfection
Vision or Delusion? Why ambitious builders need self-trust (in 2 parts): https://genagorlin.substack.com/p/vision-or-delusion-why-ambitious , https://genagorlin.substack.com/p/vision-or-delusion-why-ambitious-eae
I write about bayesianism, effective altruism, forecasting, and generally topics that I enjoy for their own sake @ https://nunosempere.com/blog
Some posts people might be interested in:
- Find a beta distribution that fits your desired confidence interval: https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/03/15/fit-beta/
- Use of “I’d bet” on the EA Forum is mostly metaphorical: https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/03/02/metaphorical-bets/
- Just-in-time Bayesianism: https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/02/04/just-in-time-bayesianism/
- Effective Altruism No Longer an Expanding Empire: https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/01/30/ea-no-longer-expanding-empire/
- Hacking on rose: https://nunosempere.com/blog/2022/12/20/hacking-on-rose/
Posted in the job section that I'm looking for something in ML and included a link to my blog. All the responses were about the blog. Hoping if I post here about my blog someone will offer me a job.
I write about personality and natural language processing. The most recent post is about personality structure found in multilingual language models if you factorize English, Spanish, French, Russian, Turkish, and Persian together simultaneously. The first two unrotated factors are a perfect match with the Big Two, which are found in traditional surveys over and over again. IMHO, this work is more sophisticated than what you would find in most personality journals. It also answers some enduring questions, such as whether the General Factor of Personality is just responder bias (it's not). https://vectors.substack.com/p/personality-around-the-world
Recently, I've gone down the rabbit hole of consciousness and self-awareness. You see, the General Factor of Personality stands supreme among the personality traits any way you measure them. I think it is an evolutionary fitness map, and I write about what implications that may have. For example, women becoming conscious first. So far my best work is on pronouns, where I argue that their current distribution is admissible evidence for when we became self-aware: https://vectors.substack.com/p/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of
I write a newsletter at the intersection of immersive technologies, AI, sense making and psychology. Read it at https://gimbalcube.substack.com/
I share a cartoon substack post most weeks about the Singularity. I’d like to forego the drawing if I can find a better tool than DALL-E. Any recommendations? https://chuckrussell.substack.com/
My Substack on health, wealth, and wisdom https://open.substack.com/pub/richardc7e/p/on-expected-value?r=1ddsg&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Smart convo starters in your inbox every Saturday morning. The week’s coolest STEM news in just 5 minutes, for free.
Recent issues include:
- What kind of mushroom will your next computer be?
- How shrimp use glitter to become invisible
- ChatGPT and DALLE2 trying to out-write me in my own newsletter
I started writing The Convo Kit as a way to hold myself accountable for learning something new every day. It still does that, and also evolved into a quick read to keep you up to date on the latest cool STEM stuff to talk about.
Plus it includes a cartoon and 5 bonus links to more fun science stuff like videos and galleries.
Pretty sure you’ll like it!
https://theconvokit.beehiiv.com/
I translate German poetry by an obscure 17th-century mystic. He has poems on the sorcerers' stone and other weird alchemical stuff. Recent academic publication of my translations here:
https://wipfandstock.com/9781666749786/the-sorcerers-stone/
i'm launching an AI-powered fashion brand, AFFALÉ and writing about every step of the journey!
https://affale.substack.com
i also started season two of On The Spectrum, On The Guest List (which grew out of my ACT book review submission from last year!)
https://onthespectrumontheguestlist.substack.com
How much work did it take (and does it take on an ongoing basis) to make the one code infrastructure work? It's interesting to see traceable supply chains in a manufacturing sector that isn't something like aeronautics or medical devices.
not as difficult as you might think! but partly that was because we had already set up sensors been collecting almost all of the relevant data for a while (i.e. ink usage from our fabric printers, electricity usage from our laser cutters). so a large portion of the initial development was just getting more and more clever with SQL querries (i.e. "this garment uses X yards a fabric, which was cut from a roll with a total area of Y, which consumed Z gallons of water while it was undergoing treatment in the steam machine..." )
one of the hardest initial challenges was actually printing QR codes to be consistently readable at garment label-scale (< 1in). printing paper feels too cheap for the garment's main label, and typical garment labels you can buy are made of polyester, which isn't at all environmentally-friendly. so we had to do a lot of tests to arrive at the perfect combination of substrate and printer settings
Secondhand Sorcery is a web serial novel (ie, free to read, chapters released weekly) about mercenary child soldiers with paranormal abilities in an alternate world where Cold War research into that kind of woo paid off in a big, destabilizing way. It's told from two different perspectives and is currently approaching 100K words, with a target length of, very tentatively, twice that. Webfic tends to sprawl. When it's finished my current plan is to edit it and release it in print and kindle editions (probably two volumes; my last book was 250K words in one volume and the thing's intimidatingly huge).
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/58715/secondhand-sorcery
In case anyone is the same sort of weird that I am, I have updated my blog with a Python utility I wrote that recommends video games based on their Metacritic scores:
https://brendansblatherings.blogspot.com/
-----------------------------Section divider: CONSUME MY PRODUCT/SERVICE-----------------------------
Mother's Day and other greeting cards!
Naturalistic and Californian themes with a family vibe.
courtneybeyerdesign.com
This week, the Guild of the ROSE launched Path 2.0, an RPG-inspired skill tree for rationalist self-development: https://guildoftherose.org/articles/a-new-dawn-for-structured-self-improvement
Path tracks your progress and guides you through thoughtfully designed milestones, aiming to cultivate your skills. Exploring the Path system, and membership in the Guild, is free.
My partner creates her own custom paper for the Pen Pal community. If you are into the forgotten art of writing beautiful letters by hand, her new Etsy shop Wonderful Darkness Papers is at https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/WonderfulDarkness?ref=ACX. Free shipping in Canada, regular mail postage costs elsewhere in the world.
Bent finger? Nothing has been able to extend your PIP joint? Been there. Invented a thing. Straightened my finger with a LEGO prototype, then got into 3D printing. The FingerPress is now patented and registered as durable medical equipment. See it at OrthoPress.com, or send it to someone you know.
Remote Tax preparation by an Enrolled Agent:
https://stgtax.com/
I'm an artist and illustrator and I sell prints here! -
www.etsy.com/uk/shop/linnetandlark
Based in the UK but ship anywhere
I'd like to recommend my friend's fourth and likely best novel, Sister Liberty, by the great Coloradoan Gregory Hill.
You all could use a break from non-fiction, am I right?
You can read an interview with Greg about it, here, where he discusses composing it on a manual typewriter on rolls of calculator tape.
https://coloradosun.com/2022/12/18/sunlit-gregory-hill-sister-liberty/
You can obtain a copy here.
https://www.amazon.com/Sister-Liberty-Gregory-Hill/dp/B0BH7X9GWM?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
I teach for an online school for gifted children. This summer I'm running two intensives to prepare kids for academic writing:
1. Intro to essay writing (ages 11-13) - https://www.rfwp.com/online-learning/courses/essay-writing-ages-11-13/
2. Prep for university writing (ages 14-18) - https://www.rfwp.com/online-learning/courses/essay-writing-ages-14-18/
About me: I've graded over 1,000 undergrad essays at one of the world's foremost research universities. I also have 3 years experience in writing coaching for ESL students.
About the school: It specializes in gifted kids and twice exceptional kids. It's also probably the only school in the world to have "Fireworks" in its official name.
Link to the complete summer course listing is here: https://www.rfwp.com/online-learning/courses/
I make acrylic / oil paintings of the "weird multipanel composition" sort and take commissions. https://scyy.fi/art?medium=paint
The elaborate 4-5 panel ones would be about $2000 including shipping if you're in the US.
The last time I commented on an ACX classifieds thread, a reader took me up on this, and is pretty happy with what they got.
Last year I made a game that lets parents sit with their young children and teach reading and typing.
I think it’s pretty cute, and some kids play it to distraction, which seems like good practice!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1807640/Alpha_Zoo/
I'll track your farm, plant wetness, & adherence to your irrigation plan from spaaaaaaaaace with twice-weekly updates, 3-day latency. You'll have imagery and analysis. Just need your farm's gps corner coordinates, anywhere on Earth. Priced affordably on per-acre-per-halfyear subscription basis, 2 acre minimum.
context: https://twitter.com/SunnyIrrigation/status/1629472161592164353?s=20
contact: rick _at_ companyname .com
I guess I might as well re-plug Persephone, our company's Web-based genome viewer.
Free public instance (no login required unless you want to load your own data):
https://web.persephonesoft.com/
Quick overview set to trendy royalty-free music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7pA4QKoDPk
We've added a lot of features since the last time I'd plugged it here, including:
* MultiMap for comparative genomics
* ModBam support (color nucs by methylation probability)
* Synteny tracks
* Bulk sequence export (for entire genomic maps, not just genes)
* Improved table filtering controls, improved track management, better search, many other UI improvements not directly related to biology
* Support for additional drag-and-drop file formats (no VCF yet, you still have to load it on the backend, we're working on it)
If you want to ask, "Why should I use Persephone instead of JBrowse ?", the answer is that it's extremely fast, especially for viewing e.g. orthologs -- you can line up multiple genomes on one screen and zoom in and out from bird's-eye view all the way to individual nucs in interactive time. Also, you can BLAST things in real time.
If your question is "Why not IGV ?", then the answer is, "Because you can visualize large BAM files interactively without crashing the program or having to wait 10 minutes".
However, I do admit that JBrowse and IGV do, at present, have useful features that Persephone lacks; our software is under active development.
We write a version controlled SQL database called Dolt. It lets you do all the version control operations of git (branch, merge, push, pull, fork, clone) on SQL database tables. It's like Git and MySQL had a baby.
It's free and open source, with paid hosting options. Check it out here and give us a star if you like what you see:
https://github.com/dolthub/dolt
This is a really interesting idea. I've got some stupid questions right off the bat, though:
1). How does Dolt's performance compare to e.g. MariaDB ? Can I have a table (and an index) with millions and billions of rows, and still be able to query it in reasonable time ?
2). How does versioning interact with foreign keys ? If I have the table "books", "authors", and "book_authors" where the columns are {"book_id", "author_id"}, what happens when I try to roll back just one of the tables ?
Sigil is an infinite canvas where anyone can share content from across the web. The site layout is completely determined by the users, and it uses quadratic voting to resolve layout disputes. Come explore and find your niche!
https://sigilspace.com/
This is an interesting idea! Thanks for sharing this.
As a minor feedback, though, please don't do this: https://imgur.com/a/WS5lVE6 - please tell users everything that's wrong with their password the first time they get it wrong! (Also maybe consider dropping those requirements for passwords of a certain length? There's some analysis here about the effect of length on passwords (amongst other interesting analysis) - https://weberblog.net/password-strengthentropy-characters-vs-words/)
I’m a psychotherapist who is moving out of the medical model to work with people anywhere as a kind of trusted advisor/consultant on personal growth projects and predicaments.
The twist is that I’m working by text — email, snail mail, or disappearing text. This gives people a tangible thing to work from and allows them to go at their own pace.
I’ve also noticed that some people find the live interaction of the psychotherapy-type session to be a kind of distraction for their nervous system that can get more in the way than helping. Not to mention, many of us don’t need more Zoom meetings in our life.
I’m a long-time Buddhist practitioner but I don’t foist that on anyone. I have a lot of experience helping people better understand their particular ingredients so they can make good use of them in a wide range of circumstances. I’ve also done a lot of leadership development and organizational wrangling and can be of use in professional settings as well, to individuals or groups of people.
I’m drafting a new website which I’ll link to when it’s ready. In the meantime, feel free to drop me a note to Florence Gardner at proton mail dot com and ask me anything; I’ll let you know whether and how I can help.
I have a few new openings now; they are likely to fill up in the next month, though it’s always good to check back with me because my availability fluctuates.
I play in an indie rock band called Late Night Pharmacy. FFO Interpol, Death Cab for Cutie, angular riffs. https://open.spotify.com/artist/53P1Bl2rw4pubz11iB0Gub
If you live near Dublin, we're playing a headline show on April 8th: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/late-night-pharmacy-bellobar-single-release-tickets-557834858077
-----------------------------------Section divider: MEETUP-----------------------------------
EA for Jews fellowship
Apply today at: https://bit.ly/July-Fellowship!!!
EA for Jews is excited to announce that we will be running another round of the EA and Judaism Intro Fellowship this July!
It will be a 4-week virtual program you can do alongside school or work that explores the core ideas of effective altruism and their relationship to Jewish tradition, texts, culture, and history.
For any questions, reach out to us at Shalom@eaforjews.org or schedule a 1-1 with Hillel, our Director: https://calendly.com/hillelehrenreich/30-minute-meeting
The deadline to apply is Sunday, June 25th.
Learn more and apply at: https://eaforjews.org/fellowship
I'm putting together a little get-together in the summer for my rat-adjacent twitter circle and am currently in the pre-planning stage. Here's the most important info.
Location: Estonia, Pärnu
Size: ~20
When: est. Late July/Early August
If you're interested you can reach me at
https://twitter.com/Childermass4
Or fill out the Google Forms survey
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1gHU2bOah59PKU9ZGVD-gkDf9puXTqK5v2_UtfNGpgtQ/viewform
EA Finance NYC is hosting a casual social on Friday, March 24 from 7-9pm at Juke Bar (East Village).
NASHVILLE APRIL15 3PM @Pinewood Social.
Met up with some great people in the fall, would love to see ya"ll again!
Fluidity Forum is seeking applicants! Are you interested in the work of David Chapman, Scott Alexander, Hanzi Freinacht, John Nerst, and Venkatesh Rao? Well, most of them are not gonna be there. But the attendees are very interested in spending a weekend together talking about the related topics in our glossary:
https://fluidityforum.org/glossary/
Our application form is open:
https://fluidityforum.org/apply
FLORIDA: if you're in Miami-Dade, Broward, or Palm Beach counties, come join our ACX meetup group for regular discussions and activities. Our next official meetup will be in Fort Lauderdale, though we host events all over the south Florida area.
Check out our Discord and LessWrong:
https://discord.gg/CUeCTG5r
https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/YmgPiAS7j7s4vmuNh
The Chicago Rationality Meetup Group is having its social meetup this Friday, March 17th at Royal Palms. More details here:
https://chicagorationality.com/meetups/social-meetup-march/
Tim Bond is hosting a Minnesota ACX meetup on March 24: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Bf9rqXH93FtkAj6a5/twin-cities-acx-meetup-mar-2023
I just created a Meetup group in Berlin, Germany for fans of Bryan Caplan, , Robin Hanson, Tyler Cowen, and Alex Tabarrok.
Feel free to join even if you are new to the blogs! They have a fairly big overlap with Astral Codex Ten.
https://www.meetup.com/bet-on-it-overcoming-bias-marginal-revolution-more/
That's interesting. To my understanding there is a mixed meetup group in Berlin for Lesswrong/ Rationality/ ACX and so on. I would like to better understand, what was the reationale behind creating the new one, or how you expect the new to differ from the existing one.
I created the meetup mostly because the other one is pretty dead. They haven't had a meetup in over five months.
Makes sense. thanks
NYC: Last Mondays 7-10pm at Wonderville in Bushwick, come to my OPEN VCR NIGHT. I’ll be around to chat during/after.
1. BYO VHS (or borrow mine)
2. Anyone can eject at any moment
3. If you eject, you must INSERT TAPE
https://geistlist.email for details
(Not distinctly a rationalist meetup, but a weird fun obscure and in-person thing I run to worship dead media.)
-----------------------------------Section divider: OTHER-----------------------------------
I've written one of the least popular proposals you can find on EA Forum and LessWrong. I am looking for people to tell me why they find it uninteresting or are unsupportive (less valuable would be hypotheses about why *others* don't like it): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fNKmP2bq7NuSLpCzD/let-s-make-the-truth-easier-to-find
I started a book club. Reading Open Society and Its Enemies by Popper aloud everyday on Instagram Live (@theory_gang) @11am CT and am planning monthly virtual meetups to kick it, laugh and talk about the book. Might even make a game to play. Lemme know if you want access or an invite to the social.
Made a market on manifold markets if I will succeed at running a marathon this month. Would like some more traders for motivation. And maybe interesting for some people to follow my attempt at my first marathon. https://manifold.markets/TimothyCurrie/will-i-run-a-marathon-in-march-befo?r=VGltb3RoeUN1cnJpZQ
Sorry this was in the wrong place. New to this.
Help the neighbor kids get an epic trip!
https://gofund.me/434418ee
Hi to the biomedical-research-inclined folks,
Looking at sourcing grant support for study of antiviral properties of compounds from plants. Grateful for the volunteer research support that's come through this blog and other sources. Someday I would like to pay these people *and also* keep the lights on :) If you're aware of strategic funding sources (non-NIH) for such activity, please reach out via contact info at bottom of this link describing our open research items.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11f2bzMRbAgCJyoaEmxXKVytl_RH2AbzCfxMXonIiMG0/edit
If anyone has children/teens that need virtual (I promise the platforms I use are excellent) academic, enrichment (typically STEM focused) or test prep (SSAT/ISEE,SAT/ACT, etc) tutoring, they can feel free to reach out at ethanjonestutoring.com
My website is a little more geared to the test prep crowd but I (or one of the other PhD students I know) would be happy to help with pretty much anything. So feel free to set up a meeting if you can think of any tutoring/instruction that you'd be interested in.
I'm seeking people who would be interested in collaborating on a self-experimentation project. The late psychologist (and noted self-experimenter) Seth Roberts developed a simple, quick reaction time test that could be used to measure your brain function. I briefly worked on this project with him before his untimely death in 2014. I'd like to start working on this project again, and I'm looking for collaborators. The reaction-time test would be perfect for screening for the effects of various interventions, like taking nootropics, changing your diet, sleeping more (or less), etc. -- and it wouldn't rely on subjective assessments of effectiveness. If anyone is interested in working together on this project, please contact me at alexc@aya.yale.edu . Seth's blog posts are still online. One representative post is here: https://sethroberts.net/2014/01/09/reaction-time-as-a-measure-of-health/
I'm working on an agricultural development project for low-income countries - specifically those with low wages. I believe that aid should be close to, and should strongly consider the concerns and perspectives of, the people it is intended to benefit. So far, I've been talking to some contacts in Oaxaca, Mexico and Honduras, but I'm still looking for additional perspectives and haven't settled on a location yet. I'd like to interview more people familiar with farming - especially those with direct experience in Central America, South America, or the Caribbean.
I'm looking for people with experience:
* As farmhands/itinerant farmers/day laborers on a farm who do not own the land they're working
* Landowners whose primary source of farm work is done by non-mechanized human labor that is hired out
* Suppliers of equipment/fertilizer/etc. to farms and farmers described above
* People who directly purchase the output of farms and farmers described above
If this describes you, or you know someone I can connect to who matches these descriptions, please email me at my profile name @gmail.com
For more information on what I'm putting together, feel free to reply to this thread directly.
Reached out :)
I saw, thanks! Hopefully we can chat about some questions I have for you, given your line of work.
You should describe the project and what you'd like to get out of the interview. I've got experience with all that but I'm not sure if my particular type of experience would be useful to you.
I want to travel around the world full-time and need company to provide resilience, risk-reduction, and resources.
Roughly—You need minimum several months of time; commitment to leave everything behind; and ability to survive on your own both in different places.
My XMPP address: xen@jabber.systemli.org
Even if you can't travel yourself, you could help me to obtain a Land Rover or other vehicle that prevents the first angry thug from grabbing my gear. I will return the favour if you want something that wouldn't eat my time.
I'm curious how exactly a land rover prevents your gear from being grabbed
tl;dr : Interested to find a collaborator or "pen pal" handy with Mathematica or Sage.
One of my hobbies is Diophantine analysis, which mainly involves finding integer or rational solutions of algebraic equations. This may sound rather contrived and useless, compared with, say, topology and analysis. But historically it has incentivised and guided many mathematical advances, and these days it has surprising applications, even in physics.
I don't delve far into the advanced aspects such as algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory. I confine myself to trying to find rational parametrizations of surfaces. Many problems (some still open) amount to this, and to my knowledge the problem of constructing general parametrizations of algebraic surfaces, and of finding all rational curves within them, for those where this is possible, is still unsolved (although doubtless steady progress is being made).
This would be rather a sterile occupation for a processional mathematician, at least using the kind of elementary techniques I do. But it is a nice little challenging hobby for an amateur such as myself and keeps the brain cells ticking over.
Anway, one challenge I set myself is to find all rational curves on the surface defined by the following pair of equations, in which k is a fixed rational value (which by, scaling the unknowns, can be assumed to be an integer):
x + y + z + t = 0, x y z t = k
In 1749 Euler [1] found one rational curve on the equivalent surface x y z (x + y + z) = -k, but gave no clue to how he had found it, and nobody to this day knows for sure! Prof Noam Elkies found a second rational curve on this surface [2]. But, for reasons I won't go into here, it seems likely to me that there is one more "basic" curve. (Other far more complex curves can be constructed from these, but I am referring to a basis set.)
My strategy has been first to find a general two-parameter solution to the somewhat easier equation where k is a perfect square, say c^2 with c rational. Then, for any given value of k, for which in general c is irrational, if we express the two parameters of this solution as p + c q and r + c s with p, q, r, s rational this leads to expressions of each variable x, y, z in the form (P + c Q) / R where P, Q, R are relatively prime polynomials involving only c^2 (which is k) and p, q, r, s.
To find all curves, it then only remains to find all solutions to Q_x = Q_y = Q_z = 0. This can be done by systematic procedures, such as finding the greatest common divisor polynomial of all three Q's (if there is a non-trivial one), and then by calculating eliminants. For example the two eliminants of say (Q_x, Q_y) and (Q_y, Q_z) involve only three of the variables, and their eliminant in turn involves only two and is thus a curve.
But the snag is the calculations become monstrously complicated, far too much so to attempt by hand, and as my knowledge of Mathematica is somewhat rudimentary, I am keen to find a collaborator who is handy with computer algebra systems and might be interested to become involved in this and similar problems. I can't pay, as this is only a hobby, but if we obtain and publish any new results, your name will be on the paper. :-)
[1] http://eulerarchive.maa.org/correspondence/letters/OO0853.pdf
[2] https://math.harvard.edu/~elkies/euler_12u.pdf (Section 4.3)
Sorry, stupid question: what do you mean by "rational curve" here? I assume you're not just talking about the divisor of a polynomial with integer coefficients?
A curve (or surface or higher-dimensional variety) that can be parametrized generally, by expressing the variables as rational functions.
The standard trivial example is a circle, defined by x^2 + y^2 = 1, for which a parametrization is x = 2 t / (t^2 + 1), y = (t^2 - 1) / (t^2 + 1). When these expressions are plugged into the equation, it is satisfied identically, and conversely for every pair of rational values, x and y, there is a rational value of t, namely x / (1 - y) for y not equal 1, and "1/t = 0" (don't ask! :-) ) if y equals 1.
An example of a curve which is not rational is an elliptic curve, which can be defined by the equation x^3 + a x + b = y^2, in which a and b are numeric values and the cubic expression on the left has three distinct roots (rational or otherwise).
Is that the same as being birationally equivalent to P1, which I think (although I may be misremembering) is in turn equivalent to being smooth and having genus zero?
Yes, for curves. It is equivalent to finding a particular (numeric) rational point. Then a moving line, constrained to remain through that point, i.e. contain it, can trace out every part of the curve in a unique second intersection point with it. So it is pretty easy to find rational parametrizations of smooth curves of genus 0.
There is a similar criterion for surfaces but, as I said, no algorithm that I know of for constructing parametrizations capturing every rational point within them, either the whole surface if it is rational, or complete sets of rational curves in it otherwise.
But I didn't post to get much into the nitty gritty of the geometry. My sole purpose in mentioning it was to sketch my motivation for seeking a collaborator dexterous with computer algebra packages!
Looking for people who are interested in trying a novel synthesiser plug-in (VST3/AU) for free, and providing user feedback. The synth uses PCA to do interpolated phase vocoding of a sample on a 2d surface.
I'd be interested in trying it out!
Great! PM me or email at cthom055 (at) outlook (dot) com
OPTIC — in-person, intercollegiate forecasting tournament, $2k cash prizes.
I’m one of the organizers for OPTIC, the Open Prediction Tournament for Intercollegiate Competition! OPTIC is an in-person, intercollegiate prediction tournament, funded through Manifund (huge thanks to Scott & Austin for setting that up!). Think debate tournament/hackathon/MUN competition, but for forecasting. University teams compete for more than $2,000 of cash prizes on question topics ranging from geopolitics to financial asset prices to AI developments.
If you’re an undergrad interested in competing, sign up by filling out the form on https://www.opticforecasting.com (<1 min). OPTIC takes place on Saturday, April 22, 2023, in Boston — but feel free to register even if you’re not in the Boston area, since we’ll be able to sponsor some funding for teams to travel.
If you’d be interested in being a speaker, organizing a team at your university, or otherwise helping out at the tournament, you can contact us at https://www.opticforecasting.com/contact
Looking to talk to anyone who is one or more of the following:
- Interested in VC investing but doesn't qualify for accreditation
- Interested in climate "impact" investing
- Follows environmental or climate news closely
- Currently donates to climate orgs
- Disinterested in any/all of these things and wants to tell me so
I'm exploring product-market fit for a new startup that I recently joined and I'd like to meet people with these interests. I promise it'll be painless(ish). Please feel free to reach out via the LinkedIn url in my Substack profile!
I kind-of fit that description and know of two or three specific energy companies I would invest in if I were allowed to (not that they are small enough to care about my small money). Why are you looking for non-accredited investors? Do you mainly just want to chat?
I am the first two and also belong to sub-cultures that are *only interested in impact investing (and tend to be not very rational or analytical). Depending on what you are looking for--I would be able to speak to what that group is looking for. Currently, I don't tend to trust impact investing and don't have the skills to analyze it myself so my investments are very standard.
Jordan - would love to chat! If you haven't already, please reach out to me via LinkedIn or email me: sam *at* investwithintention.io
Sent you a connection request (can't just message without LinkedIn Premium otherwise).
I care about climate change but don't really invest any time or energy in keeping up to date on it these days.
(I currently donate about 20% of my charitable donations (which total 10% of my income) to Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund. At one point I thought about going into environmental consulting or product mgmt for a greentech company, but decided I wasn't passionate about it and decided to stay in my current field while donating.)
If it sounds like it would be helpful to chat, feel free to reply to my message and we'll take it from there!
I actually have a lot of issues with impact VC investing, having seen a lot of deals in the space. Not a hater, just a skeptic. Happy to talk.
Fully Unsupervised - would love to chat! If you haven't already, please reach out to me via LinkedIn or email me: sam *at* investwithintention.io
If you're a start-up founder looking for seed funding send me an email, mostly interested in technology that's going to interact with the world directly in some way but not averse to other potentially good ideas.
Best email?
Other: Please sell me a Range Rover L322 that doesn’t have an imminent timing belt issue. Or maybe... I don’t know... a 4Runner?
I am selling a 4runner. 180k miles. Timing belt done at 170k (when the water pump was replaced). Car is in New Mexico. Year 2000, 4wd. I wouldn't assume you were looking for that age car but L322 are older too I think.
Yes the L322 is older, last one 2012. They have timing belt issues but usually before 170k miles!
That’s a lot of miles, but my buddy drives a 2000 4Runner that’s still going. I guess it depends on the price! Do you have a listing? Or maybe we can DM through substack...
I have a Youtube channel with tutorials about bioinformatics, computational biology, and data science in case anyone is interested!
https://www.youtube.com/c/mikesaintantoine
Potentially useful for people interested in biotech. I think these topics are growing in popularity, but there's still a shortage of online tutorial videos for this material, so I'm trying to fill that gap.