Viewing profile — smath

This is a common source of confusion. The knitting / pottery making is not rewarding because its made by hands or is not knowledge work, but because it is done in the direct servic…

In a way it’s the same phenomenon as TV channels with fixed programming replaced by cable and the streaming video. Newspaper vs curated feeds. There is an exploit vs explore tradeo…

Is it possible to acquire lower frequency components with a camera too? This also reminded me of MRI where low frequency is acquired first in a space called k-space

My conclusion is that this in not the end of creativity but an increasing premium on creativity that is certified to be human made. It’s like how if I cook something from scratch t…

Very cool! While this is a different type of inverse problem, it reminds me of a radiolab story [0] about a device to help blind people “see” using electrical impulses on a metal s…

Very fond memories of Mir Publishers' science and math books growing up in India in the 80s and 90s. I think English translations were freely available in India. My grandfather wou…

Are they trying to infer characters/words from brain waves? I would have thought the brain is thinking in concepts rather than actual words

GA’s optimize only combinatorial problems though — where you have discrete set of choices (~genes) for each variable, and therefore do not have a gradient

Mind blown, I had no idea about this, thx for sharing

I believe that is correct. Part of the problem is that similar words in different languages are actually not quite identical. “Not having emotions” is not quite the essence of stoi…

Tangential tidbit about etymology of the word Zen: Zen is a Japanese word that comes from the Chinese “Chan”, which in turn comes from the Sanskrit word “Dhyana”, which roughly tra…

Right, value != price. Now, is this a bug or a feature? Discuss (serious question)

I'm looking for some data -- if anyone has it -- on the fraction of companies that are led (CEO) by a technical person, over the years/decades. I have the (anecdotal) impression th…

This reminded me of my 11 yr old who, when I give her math problems to solve, is too focused on “getting the right answer”. I’ve told her plainly, I don’t care if you get the right…

Here is a solution to this problem I think: make an LLM. Summarize everything. If there is fluff then it should get dropped? Basically we only care about the relevant information c…

I for one am happy to see an engineer at the helm.

Loved the writeup. I'll just drop a note here to say that these spherical harmonics are also used in creating specialized neural network layers that are useful for modeling 3D obje…

My 2c is that it is not 'joy' or 'happiness' that kids bring to parents universally (although they might bring those things for some parents), but 'meaning'. Meaning is harder to d…

Shameless plug: More than a decade ago, I wrote a paper [1] on how the random perturbations in the wireless channel between an ambient RF transmitter (FM radio, TV) to the two devi…

As a kid I loved casio digital watches (metal band, digital display). But as a grown up I found I like analog watches better -- my brain is quicker at interpreting the visual image…

Very very cool. I have this condition - I got it randomly ("idiopathic" as opposed to age-related) when I was 22. At the time it wreaked havoc on my mental health.

A benevolent monarchy maybe - like some places in the east (maybe).or maybe UBI? Some way to not have to worry about basic health and needs What places have this today? I see an an…

Slightly tangential: this is a wonderful and deep project, that requires a lot of personal time. Lately I've been wondering what social/economic/govt conditions allow for this type…

came here to see if anyone had read Rodney's recent essay - and to ask how does this announcement by Figure square with Rodney's essay. The essay was long so I cant claim I read it…

“How the immune system works”, Lauren Sompayrac