Viewing profile — medvezhenok

Not necessarily. House occupancy laws also have a role here - some of the living arrangements that ended up in higher density in the past are illegal today, forcing population decl…

You can get AppleCare+ in the U.S. for $149/year which is just as good (or better) than any warranty.

Yup, especially data backups (although I wouldn't store critical backups like this, only nice-to-have ones). One minor note is that parquet file sizes / compressed sizes can be sen…

Yup. And an extra benefit that you can treat any file like a table, so you can also do something like UPDATE my_table SET x = file1.x, y = file2.y FROM 'first_file.csv' file1 LEFT …

Claude code can write exploratory queries for you to give you a quick rundown on the shape of the data set, frequencies, missing values, etc etc (without having to load it into a m…

Basically like a locally hosted Snowflake - it only shines if you have enough data to analyze (100 MB - 100 GB is probably the sweet-spot range - less than that and the benefits ar…

DuckDB has been probably my most used tool in 2026 - if you're comfortable with SQL it's incredible at quickly prototyping and slicing / dicing data. I do a lot of experiments with…

Soviet Union had childlessness tax, but you were exempt if you could prove infertility

What exactly would that evidence look like, for you? It definitely increases some types of productivity (Opus one-shot a visualization that would have likely taken me at least a da…

Short answer: there is none. You can't get frontier-level performance from any open source model, much less one that would work on an M3 Pro. If you had more like 200GB ram you mig…

I'm curious about book recommendations on this (as someone raising kids in the US but originally from Russia)

Yeah, I wonder if you plotted crime rate vs time spent outside or something like that (car accident rates are usually reported as an average of an accident / # of miles, since how …

The core premise (benchmarks are broken), might be correct, but the poverty benchmark he uses is a bad example. The OPM and SPM (supplemental poverty measure, developed in 2009-201…

The core premise (benchmarks are broken), might be correct, but the poverty benchmark he uses is a bad example. The OPM and SPM (supplemental poverty measure, developed in 2009-201…

The strongest argument is probably that for someone subsisting on the minimal wage, the CPI is not a good representation of their consumption basket (whereas it might be for someon…

The increasing levels of abstraction work only as long as the abstractions are deterministic (with some limited exceptions - i.e. branch prediction/preloading at CPU level, etc). Y…

Human societies? No. Subcultures? Some are at least trying to (i.e. rationalists), though imperfectly and with side-effects.

Sure, but LLMs tend to be better at navigating around documentation (or source code when no documentation exists). In agentic mode, they can get me to the right part of the documen…

Indeed. But the unintended consequence (perhaps) of LLMs making things easier to use is that more people will use them - basically Jevons paradox. I would expect that this will cau…

I think this was true before AlphaZero; now, I'm not sure there's any benefit to having a human + engine versus just an engine alone. From my understanding the AlphaZero based engi…

I think they said M4 Ultra Studio is not going to happen, have to wait for M5 Ultra...

Race and culture are not the same thing and it’s a big pet peeve of mine that Americans always link the two. A Slav that was born and grew up in China would be Caucasian but cultur…

Right. I would say the most apt analogy is from poker. In Poker, luck plays an integral role in the outcome of any specific game or match, but skill does show up when collected ove…

As someone with diagnosed ADHD, and prescribed something similar: It's not that they make you superhuman - I don't think I'm any "smarter" on them. It's just that without them, my …

Whether its genetic or environmental doesn't matter here. Existence of a correlation is enough reason to break down any analyses by demographic data to have a clearer picture of wh…