Tomminn

15 ms·

61.
by Tomminn 6y ago
As someone who is addicted to nicotine gum, I think this is a genius policy. Nicotine is an intensely habit forming drug. You smoke for the nicotine, whether you realize it or not. Take it out, and you've lost the primary reason you sm
62.
by Tomminn 6y ago
Quora has become.. weird for me. I used to love the site, but now 80% of the answers that come up in my feed feel creepy as fuck. It's a shame because it used to be of such high average quality. I'm sure it's a classic case o
63.
by Tomminn 6y ago
Almost every single of the tens of thousand papers by the hundreds of tenured academics in the field of protein folding are made obsolete by 10 google engineers. This is what it's like when someone really moves the needle. And academic
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by Tomminn 6y ago
The exterior product also exists in a different vector space to its factors.
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by Tomminn 6y ago
The type signature of the outer product is not correct. We are mapping two functions to a function in the same domain. Convolution is neither a valid example of an inner product or an outer product. No basic geometric operation on vectors h
66.
by Tomminn 6y ago
The parents point is that when you do the primary school multiplication algorithm, you are actually performing a discrete convolution.
67.
by Tomminn 6y ago
I don't think you can really call it a generalized dot product, because it doesn't map to a scalar. The inner product is the well accepted definition of a generalized dot product, and convolution does not follow the axioms that an
68.
by Tomminn 6y ago
This example is great, hope you don't mind if I spell it out how your impulse weight f(d) and impulse response functions g(d) are functions over d (each associated with 10^d): f(0) = 1 g(0) = 3 f*g(0) = 3 f(1) = 0
69.
by Tomminn 6y ago
Okay. This is decent. I do like the idea of "fancy multiplications" because I do think you should understand convolution as well as you understand multiplication. But I still feel like this kinda obscures and confuses the origin o
70.
by Tomminn 6y ago
The key point is that if you lower the replication rate-- the number of people each person with the virus goes on to infect-- below 1, the number of active cases exponentially decays to zero. The business-as-usual replication rate of covid
71.
by Tomminn 6y ago
This is a very good point. The sine function obviously doesn't have a technical inverse on any interval where it has two values. The notation does make me forget this sometimes. Of course, the situation is different from many other fun
72.
by Tomminn 6y ago
The sin^n x notation is bad. I don't blame the undergrads there. So we learn the following fact: sin^{-1} x = y => x = sin y Being enthusiastic new algebra students, we presume know this must
73.
by Tomminn 6y ago
This is absurd. The return on investment for a bug like this must be extraordinarily high. The OP can fix it themselves by changing a string in the developer console. A permanent new revenue stream from an entire country for the price of 1&
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by Tomminn 6y ago
This essay is weakened significantly by one glaring clanger. If this person had equal levels of talent and yet wasn’t from the place they are, they would never make the foolish statement: “exposure to prestige can't make you successful
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by Tomminn 6y ago
Since hydrogen is very low density you'd pay through the nose in terms of an increase in drag and a decrease of max wind tolerance.
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by Tomminn 6y ago
I think there will be a large market for plane-like drones with very malleable wings for exactly the reason you state. The cost (in terms of both price and structural integrity) of gratuitously dynamic wings (think turning the whole wing 45
77.
by Tomminn 6y ago
This is interesting from the perspective of showing a particular ideological blindness very, very clearly. He claims that Obama to Trump voters are motivated by racism and cannot see any problem with the idea that a racist would vote for
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by Tomminn 6y ago
If I am expected to make a better prediction of the election outcome by averaging your last 10 predictions than by taking your current prediction, then your current prediction is suboptimal. This is Taleb's point, and it is solid as a
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by Tomminn 6y ago
Taleb's criticism was that the chance it rains four months from now shouldn't reliably vary about a mean (say from 30% to 70% to 30% to 70% etc) in the four months leading up to that day. Because if it does, I can make risk-free
80.
by Tomminn 6y ago
Ahh, that's even worse for Nate Silver then, if the "polls-plus" and the "polls only" predictions were not assuming the election happened today (which it seems like they weren't, even in 2016 [1]), then Taleb&#
81.
by Tomminn 6y ago
"if the election were to happen today, what is the probability of each candidate winning?" This was a correct characterization of Nate Silver's model at the time Nassim Taleb made his critique. Since then, Silver has change
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by Tomminn 6y ago
So long as you accept that if it's expected that only 1 in 10 people repair their airpods, this only helps if making them repairable results in less than a 10% increase in materials used, while not increasing failure rate at all. I can
83.
by Tomminn 6y ago
They're tiny, they're valuable, and they last a decent while. Of all the places to point fingers at waste problems, this is a strange one.
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by Tomminn 6y ago
Rationalism is hydrofluoric acid. It silently creeps inside you and hollows out essential parts of you when you thought it was just a tool helpful for dissolving some external problem. You start with a problem, and instead of solving the pr
85.
by Tomminn 6y ago
Agree, it definitely is representative. There is the odd project that is so computationally intense that it needs to be written near optimally, but most scientific computing is a quick-and-dirty calculation run inefficiently on a giant clus
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by Tomminn 6y ago
No, just because something changes doesn't mean it can be used to send information. You need changes you can control . The thing about the change of "colour" in this analogy is you don't know in which direction it chan
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by Tomminn 6y ago
Roughly speaking: if you can see your marble through a purple filter, the one in Australia will turn out to be perfectly green.
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by Tomminn 6y ago
I can never decide whether to recycle or just throw plastic in the trash. If I throw it in the trash, I know it's at least going to go to a well-managed landfill and has a negligible chance of ending up in a river somewhere overseas, a
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by Tomminn 6y ago
For sure. It's a small fraction of the population whose first instinct to prove themselves right is to do which also has the possibility of also proving themselves wrong.
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by Tomminn 6y ago
It's weirdly great that you had enough misplaced conviction to motivate you to write a simulation which ended up proving you wrong. It's actually an interesting, possibly general story, that kind of makes me think. Perhaps for cer

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