21–30 of 633 posts
I'm on a (currently very experimental) project where we're trying to answer natural-language queries using data from an arbitrary database (given hypotheses on the schema). The natural-language plaintext is fed into a language model that annotates it. That output is converted into an intermediate representation based on relational algebra, which we manipulate and finally compile to SQL. It's probably not scientifical…
Academic and Scientific publishing. It's the primary source material of human knowledge. It should be completely open and accessible to everyone with no barriers to access the literature or to add to the literature. The structure it currently takes - academic journals - made perfect sense in the 1600s when that structure was developed, and it continued to work reasonably well for distributing academic results up into…
One of my hobbies is tax optimisation and finding and exploiting tax loopholes. I’m a contractor, I work through my company. It’s way more tax efficient than being perm. But, it could be even more efficient. So, I did some research. Turn out, where I am, a business can have multiple business codes. Activities the company is registered as performing. Now, I was and still am a software development company. But I also a…
> Why artistic productions? Well, because it’s the most liberal business code for expenses. > As a software company, I can expense travel for some things, the most useful for me being conferences. But that means I need to buy the conference ticket even if I’m not interested and can only expense accommodations for the duration of the conference. That’s good but a bit restrictive. > Now, as a artistic production compan…
There seems to be a false idea that only the USA has tax loop holes. I assure you. It’s not the case. And tax heavens are also way easier to use as a EU citizen because there’s no global income declaration required.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes me sad that all these spun cycles could have been put to use doing something productive if only the tax code were simplified and the IRS automatically pre-filled our taxes, as is done in other, saner countries.
Oh hey look its the "America backwards" trope again. How tiring. Sure. The IRS could change things. But you're also able to do a lot more in America that they can't track. Other countries (e.g. Sweden, etc) are far "simpler", and homogeneous. For example, the depth at which one can trade various instruments, produce companies, etc is far far greater in America than almost anywhere else. This necessitates a somewhat (…
Concerning taxes though, I'll have to (quasi) side with you. 1040EZ is as easy as it gets. One could of course argue that in that case, in which the IRS has the numbers already, why do you have to be forced to do your taxes at all (think Germany).
I’m working on the expert elicitation of priors. We’re making web UIs to better capture human judgement, especially for forecasting. I work at a data driven company, sometimes I think a bit too data driven. I want to capture more intuition for our systems in a rigorous way. It’s incredibly interesting and very niche. There are a handful of academic papers out there. I think it will be a big deal in the next 10 years.
What is an expert elicitation of priors? Sounds like something the FBI would do when interrogating an old timey train robber or something.
“Expert” is that you’re asking people who should know what they’re talking about, not random laypeople.
“Elicitation” is that there’s a whole process to it. You don’t just ask “What are the odds this movie will do $100 million in domestic box office in its first month?”. You ask lots of smaller questions and use visuals to build up an answer.
I also like how “expert elicitation” sounds like we should be doing a good job eliciting!
A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly gene synthesis by 10x. For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less tha…
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” —Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park).
A little while ago, a patent for high throughput DNA synthesis using silicon chips went off-patent, so I have been learning analog IC chip design to build an open source high-throughput DNA synthesis chip. If it works, and I sold them at cost, it would reduce the cost of oligo pool synthesis by ~100x and possibly gene synthesis by 10x. For about 8-9 years now my goal has been to build a cell from scratch for less tha…