Viewing profile — academia_hack

Reading the definitions here it looks like France is basically banning 15 year olds from using interactive websites. Platforms like Steam, Xbox Live, Minecraft, the New York Times …

It's inordinately difficult and expensive to start an LLC or SA in some EU countries. It's even difficult and expensive to _stop_ an LLC and dissolve it. Huge amount of risk and co…

++ Anecdotally, I find you can tell if someone worked at a big AI provider or a small AI startup by proposing an AI project like this: " First we'll train a custom trillion paramet…

I hear this a lot (that children learn languages faster, or the corollary from various app ads that the best way to learn a language is to do so like a baby does), but is it actual…

Everyone remotely competent in AI in the federal government that I know has quit in disgust over the past 6 months. I know zero talented AI people who are looking to take a cut in …

At least to me, loyalty _is_ the benefit. I can't conscience working for someone I hate or someone who I don't feel like I want to help succeed. I've definitely quit jobs before ju…

Do you think there is a role for the federal government to employ engineers for any purpose? 18F was a general purpose engineering group that built software for many agencies inste…

Check out: https://trafficcamarchive.com/ for an example.

The data collection isn't even quiet. There's an entire cottage industry of companies that scrape these traffic cam feeds, store everything for x numbers of months in low-cost clou…

True that! I use probably 15 days of "unlimited" leave and still manage to feel guilty about it. The frustrating thing for people in fed jobs is that if you hit your 13 days that's…

USDS is great! I know people who have made a huge impact there and if I personally were to go into government from tech it's where I'd look. They are situated at the White House wh…

In terms of benefits, here's an anecdotal comparison with a senior engineer (5-10 years experience) at a mid-level start up I worked at. * Federal Pay (GS-12): $100,000 * Startup P…

Counterintuitively, scaling government down goes hand in hand with increasing the attractiveness of the civil service. Right now if a government agency wants to do something like m…

Totally. I think comp is a necessary but not sufficient precondition for fixing government technology. The actual solutions (good authentication and least privilege systems, robust…

Until the US federal government pays civilian tech talent competitively, this is always going to be an issue. Your typical hands-on-keyboard blue team engineer in federal governmen…

I've noticed a trend in AI policy (e.g. the EU AI act or the USA's AI executive order) to include references to quantities of Floating -Point operations to differentiate between AI…

I've giving "Accept - Minor Revisions" to every paper I've peer reviewed since getting my PhD other than two that were outright plagiarism. Figure it's important to the morale of g…

Dan's fantastic. Been interviewed by him in the past and was super impressed by his interest in understanding technical nuance and communicating the story accurately to a lay audie…

They don't even copy and paste the text! At least in my experience, once done with peer-review I spend a few hours wrestling with the "print ready" LaTeX template provided by the p…

Honestly they were just there in the Wikipedia text I copied. I've seen them in more modern texts to help with pronunciations and translation (if I recall correctly some words have…

Exactly this! It gets even cooler in this example too because the meter for "Odi et amo" elided to "Od'et amo" directly parallels the scansion for "excrucior" (long syllable, short…

I'm really sad at how much Latin I've managed to lose since my school days. It's really an incredible language and this stack exchange post shows some of that versatility. Because …

It's a pity the state of the art here is still so dire for basic use cases. Things like managing group access to files in directories, or giving people field-level permissions to s…

As an atheist, I've been thinking a lot about this in the context of the factors that made me atheist in a way that would've been not just repugnant, but downright unimaginable, to…