MITSardine

6 ms·

1.
by MITSardine 2mo ago
It's just labor law, these are countries where job security is considered very important. As a result, a lot hinges on having an indefinite duration contract. The same rule exists in France and you'll have a hard time getting a lo
2.
by MITSardine 2mo ago
You presumably spent 15 or so years in school to learn things of which many only have very indirect applications, and at most a small minority directly applied to your career. Should we similarly get rid of mandatory education? Most of it i
3.
by MITSardine 2mo ago
From the article, it sounds more like these funds are the research budget (what you pay other people with). This is quite attractive, students are typically < 200k / PhD, so you can fund quite a few theses with this right off the ba
4.
by MITSardine 4mo ago
Stuff just gets done, I guess? Projects move faster, people onboard faster with less intervention, etc. The speedup seems noticeable enough that it doesn’t need precise measuring.
5.
by MITSardine 4mo ago
As a disclaimer I haven't read the article, nor do I know much about simulating instruments in particular, but I just wanted to point out that accurately simulating the physics of a musical instrument is most likely still a very diffic
6.
by MITSardine 4mo ago
Great article, thanks for sharing. I didn't know (but should have assumed) AI-generated podcasts existed. That's depressing. I imagined if mankind had the ideal machine, that could automate anything, we would get rid of dull offic
7.
by MITSardine 5mo ago
To take this further, don't LLMs justify lowering the "barrier to attention"; i.e., if it only takes Claude's and not the hacker's eyeballs on the software, won't people find vulnerabilities in custom software
8.
by MITSardine 5mo ago
What are these languages? I'm curious because C++ is the standard in my community so it's all I ever hear about (and Rust from the adventurous few).
9.
by MITSardine 5mo ago
In French, there's a saying: "la nuit porte conseil". Roughly translates to "the night advises", and it means it might be better to sleep on it. I recall my father (also a mathematician, incidentally) often repeatin
10.
by MITSardine 5mo ago
Not an attorney so I don’t know the details but it is definitely possible to leave the US several months in a row on a J1. When I did it (also as postdoc), it was an involved process that escalated to the (vice?)president’s office to get pe
11.
by MITSardine 6mo ago
If your country is Italy that might be the case, but groceries are at most 30% more expensive than France, and some are nearly the same price (vegetables). Meat and fish do cost an arm and a leg (100% tax on border crossing). Meanwhile, med
12.
by MITSardine 6mo ago
But 1% is on the total held, not on the capital gains, right? If that's the case, it affects earnings quite a bit. Say your investments beat inflation by 3 percentage points, you're effectively down to 2 percentage points after ta
13.
by MITSardine 6mo ago
You'd have to break this down into "archetypes" because like 90% of what you pay for is specific: - retirement - healthcare: negligible expense for most young people (for instance, about 80% goes to the 65+ in France) - unemp
14.
by MITSardine 6mo ago
This is something I could almost never be bothered to do before, but I can now very lazily set up large parameter sweeps and visualization scripts to really probe things. There's a danger of "analysis paralysis" but I've
15.
by MITSardine 6mo ago
On the other hand, if it can detract PhD factory foremen from hiring students for the sake of publishing, and let them focus on advising fewer students better, I can't say I see the harm in that.
16.
by MITSardine 6mo ago
On the contrary, my experience of US academia has been that (graduate) students are very much students, who take a lot of classes, are graded seriously with the possibility of failing, are mentored rigorously (the author even says "the
17.
by MITSardine 6mo ago
In the classic division, "teaching" consists in giving undergraduate classes, and "research" consists in the whole spectrum between working all on your own and managing a PhD factory (3+ students a year). So this article
18.
by MITSardine 6mo ago
It's an interesting paradox: the more we made computing accessible, the less we got out of it. When a PC was expected to boot to an OS and not much else, we had all the freedom - by necessity - to tinker and learn. Hardware was barely
19.
by MITSardine 6mo ago
The build quality and usability on mac laptops is something else, I've yet to see even 2k€+ laptops that people typically get for their jobs that aren't a pain to use without a mouse and monitor. Whereas I'm sitting here in f
20.
by MITSardine 6mo ago
In an organization, the number of sequential steps doesn't really scale with number of participants, does it? Rather with dependent steps of the tackled process; say, devise building permit request, await approval, purchase materials,
21.
by MITSardine 6mo ago
I'm probably missing most of your point, but wouldn't the fact that we have inverse problems being applied in real-world situations somewhat contradict your qualms? In those cases too, we have to deal with noisy real-world informa
22.
by MITSardine 6mo ago
> You could in principle create a simulation with the same mathematical properties as the physical world but no one has ever done that. I'm not sure if we even know how. What do you mean by that? Simulating physics is a rich field,
23.
by MITSardine 6mo ago
As I recall, a lot goes into DF's world generation, including erosion simulation and the like to achieve a realistic result. That game is the embodiment of over-engineering, after all.
24.
by MITSardine 7mo ago
That's pretty impressive! However this workflow could have trouble dealing with the types of meshes coming out of those 3D generative algorithms. Geometries are arbitrary (not simple geometric shapes) so you'll have to fit with NU
25.
by MITSardine 7mo ago
Some of the defects are attributable to the critical: > AI models generate meshes using "isosurface extraction" or similar volume-to-mesh techniques This creates the "lumpiness", the inability to capture sharp or fla
26.
by MITSardine 7mo ago
Yes, what's preventing the LLM from running myCommand > /tmp/out_someHash.txt ; tail out_someHash.txt and then greping or tailing around /tmp/out_someHash.txt on failure?
27.
by MITSardine 7mo ago
I'm only discovering Literate Programming today, but you seem very familiar so I might as well ask: what is the fundamental difference with abundant comments? Is it the linearity of it? I mean documentation type comments at the top of
28.
by MITSardine 7mo ago
With LLMs this fast, you could imagine using them as any old function in programs.
29.
by MITSardine 7mo ago
The Portuguese sometimes describe themselves as the "povo de brandos costumes" (people of mild customs).
30.
by MITSardine 7mo ago
To be fair, a lot of science doesn't follow the scientific method. I've yet to see an applied mathematician (to speak only of what I know) come up with a hypothesis, it's usually rather: here's how people solve this prob

More ›