Viewing profile — maxander

It’s not that dumb- if a human gets exposed to space the water in their exposed tissues will boil off, leading to evaporative cooling. In a vacuum, evaporative cooling can get you …

This is the basic concept of my favorite computer game back in the 90s (!): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creatures_(video_game_series...

The interesting thing about this blog post isn’t the point it makes (which was endlessly made about cafes in all blue-state U.S. cities in the 00s) but that it’s an Iranian writing…

Sadly, I think the modern alternative for ncurses-based interfaces is javascript.

Yeah I was unclear there - I meant the other use of the & operator, 'foo & bar' where bar starts after foo completes. AFAIK, if you ran foo by itself, there's no way to make bar au…

My primary project the past couple weeks has been applying the AI interpretability technique from Anthropic's famous paper this past summer (you know, the Golden Gate Claude one) t…

Location: Boston, MA Remote: Yes Willing to Relocate: Unlikely Technologies: Python, R, Javascript, AWS, GCS, Azure, SQL, pandas, numpy, scipy, Tensorflow, Keras, [Py]Torch, SQL, N…

SEEKING WORK | Boston, MA | Remote or on-site I am Max Alexander, experienced data scientist and bioinformatics engineer, available for short- or long-term contracts. My background…

I don’t know whether this is a provocative or tedious thing to say, but the quintessential ‘enlightenmentware’ to have come out of the past several years is ChatGPT. Name anything …

The avenue towards making this a viable, routine cure for HIV is by performing a “transplant” of the patient’s own immune stem cells that have been genetically modified to carry th…

I’d recommend mynoise.net ; most of the sounds are for-pay but white noise and a few others are free, and it includes an equalizer (and some presets for pink noise and etc.) An app…

It’s not news to anyone that NATO could win a (conventional) war with Russia. The important result is that any sizable chunk of military force in Russia itself stands a good chance…

SEEKING WORK | Boston, MA or remote Open to freelance/consulting work in bioinformatics. 8 years of experience in various areas of bioinformatics and computational biology, with pa…

Is this true? Flat rectangles pack more efficiently than tubes. With mattresses, afaik, the big difference was vacuum-packing reducing overall volume, not shape.

It’s definitely not too old for anything, if you want to do it. Source: I transferred from local college to better college at 20 myself. There will be plenty of 20-year-olds where …

I recommend Matt Levine’s blog Money Stuff [0] for analysis of just how bizarre Musk’s twitter saga is relative to usual day-to-day corporate acquisitions. I also recommend his twi…

Respectfully, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and it’s entirely reasonable to publish what you have now. If later you make further improvements, you can simply publish again.…

A bit of black electrical tape, carefully applied, is pretty discreet on a typical black casing

There’s no sign that you’ll be able to turn it off in the car ahead of you, though.

Energy consumption would be limited by supply and energy dissipation, and energy dissipation (roughly speaking) depends on surface area and thermal conductivity. So, yes, for all d…

Indeed, Dyson spheres would need to release some amount of waste heat, due to the laws of thermodynamics. If there were too many of them that heat would be visible (at least to inf…

It’s a nice idea; perhaps something along the lines of a mix between Kerbal Space Program, SimCity, and Satisfactory. There’s a big problem for making this a practical step towards…

If you want to not be behind a screen, what you’re looking for might not be mechanical engineering at all. The guys/girls on the floor of a shop full of CNC machines and 3d printer…

I don’t know, but there’s always a relevant XKCD, even for XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1159/ :)