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Ask HN: What have you been curious about?

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Re: Ask HN: What have you been curious about?

#11

Post by david927 »

adityaathalye wrote: post #4
david927 wrote: post #2

Each second Sunday of the month, I post an "Ask HN: What are you working on?" thread. I can add this to that, since the idea is the same. What do you think?

Oh, that will be neat! I am a frequent reader of, and (very) infrequent contributor to that Ask HN :) Thanks for keeping it going. It always surfaces cool projects. Speaking for myself, I have far many more active topics I'm curious about, than I can possibly do anything about. Curiosity just because is fulfilling in its own way. No expectations of course. If you later decide this angle will add noise and/or too many…

It was always supposed to be part of the question -- not just what cool projects you might be working on but also ideas that you might be thinking about. It fits nicely! Consider it done.

Re: Ask HN: What have you been curious about?

#12

Post by gysakai »

I hadn't sat down to watch a concert on TV in a long time. It was Mozart and Vivaldi, performed in the courtyard of the Louvre. For a while, I kept wondering, "Where is the conductor?"

Then I noticed that one of the violinists was leading the other musicians while playing, through eye contact, body movement, and the music itself. Only after looking him up later did I learn that it was Julien Chauvin's ensemble, and that this was simply how they performed.

I ended up watching Julien Chauvin and his ensemble for a full hour. It went by in no time.

Re: Ask HN: What have you been curious about?

#13

Post by a_tartaruga »

kwakubiney wrote: post #10
a_tartaruga wrote: post #8

The recent major geopolitical shifts and their intersection with energy commodity markets. The book Virtual Barrels by Ilia Bouchouev. The details and mechanics of financial option pricing.

>The recent major geopolitical shifts and their intersection with energy commodity markets. Any specific resources you're using?

There are a lot of different twitter accounts that are fun to follow. @Lvision_trading on twitter is doing particularly great work counting ships. Danny Citrinowicz analysis on Iran and Carnegie Connects media for how the foreign policy establishment thinks. Sparta "trade with conviction" podcast for more detailed market things. Commodity Context podcast / news letter is not bad. A lot of refreshing Al Jazeera.

Re: Ask HN: What have you been curious about?

#14

Post by jfil »

The great Egyptian desert. Those raised "lines" across the wadis - what is their function? The remote border stations near the Egypt-Libya-Sudan border: what is life like for the soldiers stationed there? What are all those trucks nearby on the Sudanese side of the border? Smugglers?

On the Eastern side of the Nile, what are all those small areas of bulldozing near the gold mines? "Artisanal" mining? Is that profitable?

What have you been curious about, adityaathalye?

Re: Ask HN: What have you been curious about?

#15

Post by adityaathalye »

jfil wrote: post #14

The great Egyptian desert. Those raised "lines" across the wadis - what is their function? The remote border stations near the Egypt-Libya-Sudan border: what is life like for the soldiers stationed there? What are all those trucks nearby on the Sudanese side of the border? Smugglers? On the Eastern side of the Nile, what are all those small areas of bulldozing near the gold mines? "Artisanal" mining? Is that profitab…

Ooh, are you using satellite views to explore? When google earth first came out, I was hooked on making the globe go round and round and zooming into strange and wonderful places. Incredible.

As for yours truly; I'm trying to do "ten year projects" as part of my "second life" (the first is before 40, the second is after).

Allen Center / Levin labs / TAME / Bioelectric networks as the software plane of morphology

https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10346 and other work from that fecund lab is ever-fascinating. I have been following their work for five or six years. Much of that informed a giant essay I wrote prompted by an essay contest on Consciousness: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/consciousness-lives-in-a-ded...

How to write a Hard SciFi novel that does not have magic technology genius, and certainly not magic ET showing up to save the day?

A spec fic author friend is on my case about it, because he said "why the hell haven't you written your novel yet?" and I foolishly said "yeah why not? okay let me do it", and now I'm stuck in an honour pact. Write or die trying.

How the hell does the weather even work (metrology)?

This is because of my current work project, helping an applied sciences team run weather forecasting models, like WRF (pronounced "Worf", which I absolutely love :D). My day-to-day is packer and FreeBSD and shell scripts, but I have to also understand enough about the domain to be somewhat dangerous.

And also... why the hell isn't everybody using FreeBSD for server workloads?

Re: Ask HN: What have you been curious about?

#16

Post by adityaathalye »

david927 wrote: post #11
adityaathalye wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that will be neat! I am a frequent reader of, and (very) infrequent contributor to that Ask HN :) Thanks for keeping it going. It always surfaces cool projects. Speaking for myself, I have far many more active topics I'm curious about, than I can possibly do anything about. Curiosity just because is fulfilling in its own way. No expectations of course. If you later decide this angle will add noise and/or too many…

It was always supposed to be part of the question -- not just what cool projects you might be working on but also ideas that you might be thinking about. It fits nicely! Consider it done.

You made my day, david :)

Re: Ask HN: What have you been curious about?

#17

Post by adityaathalye »

devmando wrote: post #5
cmcollier wrote: post #3

I'm curious to know what proportion of the training data at frontier model shops is composed of their scanned book text vs the internet.

this is a good question, and I wonder if its even open to the public. My limited knowledge knows that Anthropic settled a lawsuit of I believe ~1.3billion for scanned textbooks if I'm not mistaken.

One would hope that a "public benefit corporation", such as OpenAI, would be transparent about the stuff that is being ingested by sausage factory. The literal legal entity is about benefiting the public after all.

Since the leadership is obviously not going to say anything factually true or psychologically honest, I wonder if anyone has tried invoking some aspect of corporate or constitutional law, given their legal status (as nonprofit that controls a PBC) to force such disclosures.

Re: Ask HN: What have you been curious about?

#18

Post by mikewarot »

I'm hoping that I live long enough to read about and understand the new physics that's been hidden from us since before I was born.

I strongly suspect it's for very practical reasons, like making it trivial to generate extreme forces that were previously the exclusive domain of nation states.

Imagine if every random hacker had plans for a TARDIS that could be built from common items.

Re: Ask HN: What have you been curious about?

#19

Post by adityaathalye »

a_tartaruga wrote: post #9
ex-aws-dude wrote: post #6

I randomly read an old book by John von Neumann I found in a thrift shop called “The Computer and The Brain” It’s only like 70 pages and it’s basically just him comparing how computers and neurons work and speculating on some stuff. The general takeaway seemed to be that the brain looks digital at first glance (binary activation of neurons) but is actually a lot more complicated and more like a mix of analog/digital.…

That book is just so cool.

Both of you, thanks for the referral and the endorsement. The PDF is easily available for free download from several public sources.

Of course, Springer won't let you download it unless you spring some cash.

nb. Don't feed the beast, I'm just citing it here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-70911-1_...

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