wxnx

8 ms·

31.
by wxnx 5y ago
Interestingly, Poe is not alone as a famous writer of fiction who became fascinated by a particular branch of zoology. About a century later, Vladimir Nabokov was obsessed with butterflies, with one of his hypotheses (then thought of as lar
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by wxnx 5y ago
I think the usual argument is more along the lines of: Google's greed prevents them from putting the proper controls in place to prevent these sorts of abuses of the system, because those controls would cost too much. Not so much that
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by wxnx 5y ago
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by human biodiversity. As for the others on your list, non-alt-right people (cf. non-alt-right sites) might be more inclined to discuss (cf. host discussions about) these "facts" if their p
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by wxnx 6y ago
Quite right, poor choice of phrase on my part. My point was that there are people who are e.g. legitimately surprised when their high-speed data connection drops and it prevents them from using Google Maps on their smartphone. To them, it&#
35.
by wxnx 6y ago
> My first reaction was “7% sounds low”, but again, that’s probably biased by my own experiences. That was my reaction as well, particularly based on how the question was asked - it was very specifically about the Internet, not mentionin
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by wxnx 6y ago
A significant portion of the US is illiterate [1]. One might assume that being illiterate affects internet usage. Not quite as romantic as neo-Luddism, or even making a conscious choice not to expose oneself to potentially problematic patte
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by wxnx 6y ago
> I have nothing against supporting GPUs (although I think their use is overrated and most people would do fine with CPUs), but Python really needs a general purpose, high performance autodiff. As someone who works with machine learning
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by wxnx 6y ago
> By that I mean not that expressing the meaning of a word is forbidden, not the idea, but the utterance itself. If, like me, you tend to assume that cultures become more progressive and tolerant over time, this is an interesting very st
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by wxnx 6y ago
> If Ehrlichman did say that (as you pointed out, even that is disputed) it's quite absurd. The prohibition of drugs started decades before the Vietnam War or the Civil Rights movement, and it was an international effort, in respons
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by wxnx 6y ago
Well, you've successfully constructed a hell of a strawman! My comment was to express my support for the following statement: > I'd say more generally, it's about control and having something police / government can h
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by wxnx 6y ago
This, in my opinion, is closest to the truth - not to discount the issues of race that have historically propagated downward through the system and continue to affect people today. From John Ehrlichman, a Nixon associate: > You want to k
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by wxnx 6y ago
Well, it's a fundamental technique in statistical genetics, so the paper doesn't explain it in depth. MR uses the technique of instrumental variables. [1] looks like a good explanation. The basic idea is to identify a variable Z (
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by wxnx 6y ago
> Yeah, this would make sense if you ignored all dietary and solar variations in Vitamin D productions No, actually, MR specifically accounts for these variations. However, one idea (one that would need a lot of evidence in my opinion, b
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by wxnx 6y ago
Good question! A popular motif (and perhaps the most illustrative example) is to restrict the instrument to be genotype variants within a specific gene, and use its protein product (for example, its serum concentration) as the exposure [1].
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by wxnx 6y ago
Mendelian randomization (MR; for the interested layman - the term for instrumental variables techniques when the instrument is genotype) is a well-founded research paradigm with several known potential flaws which I discussed in more depth
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by wxnx 6y ago
Horizontal pleiotropy is always a concern when analyzing MR studies, and I agree that this one does disappointingly little to preempt this criticism. I also agree with your point that causal loops aren't a concern here - vitamin D defi
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by wxnx 6y ago
The IRS, in terms of of maximizing their tax collection, would almost certainly be better off using that money on (admittedly expensive) enforcement action against those who use traditional tax avoidance techniques. As you say, money talks.
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by wxnx 6y ago
That may or may not be true, but I feel it's worth mentioning that often those individuals need some level of security clearance. See listings on job boards for janitorial staff/etc. that require security clearance (often at priva
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by wxnx 6y ago
No, not necessarily. The objective functions used to train neural networks are generally non-convex (the nets themselves being non-convex as well), but are traditionally trained using stochastic gradient descent (and its variants).
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by wxnx 6y ago
In the context of this paper, you can think of the "gradient descent step" as optimizing the parameters of the kernel (i.e. the parameters that generate the kernel space). There are no explicitly optimality guarantees beyond those
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by wxnx 6y ago
Antisense drugs are the same biological material, but have a very different mechanism of effect. Specifically, mRNA vaccines require an immune response to be effective. The mRNA (vaccine) encodes a viral protein, and the host (human) immune