Viewing profile — iskander

Lots of practical but low impact suggestions in this thread. I think the only real answers involve large scale decoupling from the rapidly changing social norms. Can you cobble tog…

I think unpopular to mention here but John Ioannidis did a really weird turn in his career and published some atrociously non-rigorous Covid research that falls squarely in the cro…

>we don't try to attack the actual cause It's cars and large houses peripherally connected to amenities by car-only infrastructure. People love this lifestyle and will fight you ve…

What is Invidious? An alternative front-end to Google-hosted video content?

#1 on ASPCA's list of common toxicoses in cats: https://www.aspcapro.org/sites/default/files/zl-vetm0606_339... Study of 286 cat/permethrin cases in London: https://journals.sagepu…

Related: Verifiable Delay Function https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00145-020-09364-x

Only clue in the source:

I love the simple but elegant formatting of this blog. cgadski: what did you use to make it?

Exceptions so far are Novo Nordisk and CostCo. Not sure if there are many others at scale.

Not that anyone is offering $192B but I also suspect existing doctors and the AMA might actively oppose this. Debt-free MDs would probably create downward pressure on salaries.

My dog seems to know least the names of 6 family members, 4 friends, and names of ~6-7 other dogs (in that she can go to those individuals on command). She also knows: cat, dog, co…

Moved to the US as a kid (by way of Estonia and then Italy), went to a year of Russian language "transitional" school here. So don't have any insight on the Ukrainian school experi…

I was born in Kiev and spoke Russian at home. Can barely understand Ukrainian unless it's spoken slowly by a native Russian speaker. I can get the gist of what Zelensky is saying i…

I expected the core of the algorithm to be a parallel prefix scan though (isn't that the point of Mamba?): for i in range(l): x = deltaA[:, :, i] \* x + deltaB_u[:, :, i] y = einsu…

Keras started out great but grew clumsily, making custom use-cases cumbersome and error prone and also became inextricably linked with TensorFlow (which was a big headache compared…

Like, huge tangible improvements. You can do general purpose programming in all kinds of DSLs and Rust libraries that compiles down to big-but-practical arithmetic circuits and the…

Can you still!? It's so incredibly traceable these days and every iteration of Silk Road gets busted, no?

Merkle trees, yes! That was just an example of a technique that can be well hidden vs in the user's face. Newer techniques like Verkle trees, SNARKs, STARKs, &c are.... well, new.

I think the initial impractical prototypes for the core techniques were in the literature for a while but there's really no comparison between eg interactive ZK protocols and the s…

It would be a shame if this keeps happening, like: (2013) Bitcoin and its clones failed at all their stated purposes, (2017) the ICO craze left nothing of value, (2021) the DeFi/NF…

I think you'll see people picking those techniques and using them in a hidden-from-the-user way (like how git and BlueSky use Merkle trees)

I gave the "industry" a pretty thorough deep dive; I learned Solidity, wrote a bunch of smart contracts, tried a lot of DeFi, and listened to ~100 episodes of the Zero Knowledge po…

Scott's political ontology seems intrinsically limited to white middle class. It doesn't really make sense in poorer parts of America and really falls apart once you start trying t…

...what happens in the next 50 years?