moregrist

6 ms·

1.
by moregrist 5d ago
There are a lot of companies and academic institutions working on genomics. Most don’t do self promotion at the scale that Google does. And most aren’t on the HN radar.
2.
by moregrist 5d ago
It’s a very common experience that people in the physics-adjacent sciences have. It’s so common that there’s an xkcd about it: https://xkcd.com/793/
3.
by moregrist 7d ago
My job hasn’t completely changed. It’s changed, but fundamentally I solve problems. Sometimes LLMs help me do that now. The job market sucks, but there are so many confounding factors: pandemic over hiring, the loss of ZIRP, an economy that
4.
by moregrist 8d ago
> one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence). I was with you up to “usually by coincidence”. There’s a long and sordid history in areas of chemistry and areas of biology of holding up a competing paper in re
5.
by moregrist 21d ago
There’s a reason that many CEOs have a stint in sales. In a stable, profitable company, you need sales to keep the business solvent. And understanding the sales pipeline is pretty essential to effectively running a business. Where this brea
6.
by moregrist 21d ago
> we've had Superhuman Intelligence for at least hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the form of corporations and institutions. It’s true that collective groups of humans can accomplish tremendous things, but I hesitate to use “
7.
by moregrist 26d ago
> And by the mid 80's the moats were already very deep. You raise some good points, but I don’t think the idea of moats from the 80s really holds up. None of the obvious moats in the mid-80s are still dominant players. In the mid-80
8.
by moregrist 29d ago
What you’re saying is that they should be charging $2000 or more per month then. Perhaps that’s true, but it’s a price tag that’s a lot harder to swallow for many orgs than $200/mo, and would require some hard justification for how you
9.
by moregrist 29d ago
Funny how one of the arguments against Medicare in the 60s was that providers wouldn’t accept it. Turns out when you have the choice of accepting lower payment per patient for Medicare or having a lot fewer patients, you choose the lower pa
10.
by moregrist 1mo ago
> Sorry, nobody does stochastic simulations where the number of uniform random numbers obtained per second is any sort of bottleneck. If you've spent considerable time on stochastic simulation, you already know this. Actually, I spe
11.
by moregrist 1mo ago
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make, exactly, but a use case for better non-CS generators has always been stochastic simulation, especially simulation/sampling approaches that are bound by the number and quality of uniform va
12.
by moregrist 1mo ago
> I'll push back against this, despite it being so popular. I dislike the arbitrary "innovation tokens" It’s a cute way of saying that you can only do 2-3 new things. The post is written for an engineer at a startup as a r
13.
by moregrist 1mo ago
You don’t learn Big-O in Calculus because it requires CS algorithmic concepts. But the core question of “how does this behave as N -> \infty?” is asymptotic behavior (ie: limits) which were developed for calculus and are very much part o
14.
by moregrist 1mo ago
Nice analogy. I loved graphing calculators until I learned tools like Mathematica and Matlab. Still waiting for the Mathematica version of LLMs. Agents / loop engineering / whatever is hot with the AI Twitter kids still isn’t it.
15.
by moregrist 2mo ago
> The line has to be drawn somewhere to prevent garbage from making its way into open standards. Given that the term is explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual of Style, I suspect that this is much more of unicode trying to capture ex
16.
by moregrist 2mo ago
> Personally I don’t see any point to typing that sort of thing out As other people have commented, it's partly a relic of an era where things were typeset by hand. Some journals may also require this in their style guide; I don&#x
17.
by moregrist 2mo ago
Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid. You’ve clearly never had to deal with a lot of references. Author lists can cluster. If you’re reading, it can get tedious if the last 5+ references are to the sa
18.
by moregrist 2mo ago
Preferring badly handled-drawn art to AI slop does not mean “use better AI slop.”
19.
by moregrist 2mo ago
You wouldn’t need five tables. Each trit takes up two bits when unpacked into 0,1,2 values. You can do a full unpacking-via-lookup with a uint16[256] and then do bit shifting and masking to extract the individual trits, but using an extra b
20.
by moregrist 2mo ago
I think it’s pretty wishful thinking to believe that the Iran war was some complex N-dimensional chess to make Chinese oil costs higher. Even if the current President was known for his strategic global thinking and ability to keep quiet abo
21.
by moregrist 3mo ago
Pretty much. For all the current US administration has complained about the opposition being “socialist,” they’ve certainly gone all-in on the state partially owning private companies. Almost like cries of “socialism” have become a dog whis
22.
by moregrist 3mo ago
> My point is not that hard to understand. Have you done any serious graphics programming? Even at the OpenGL 1.x level? What you’re saying just doesn’t make sense. Just because you’re rotating and translating things in 3-space doesn’t n
23.
by moregrist 3mo ago
PCA is an orthogonal transformation of the covariance matrix, so like all orthogonal transformations, it’s _literally a rotation_ in N-dimensional space. SVD is more complex but ultimately it’s just another useful decomposition of a matrix.
24.
by moregrist 3mo ago
> It has always been overpriced and had huge margins. This is the engineer’s take on things. I am entirely sympathetic to it. I also think it missed a lot of what management values in consulting. At its best, you can offload a lot of th
25.
by moregrist 3mo ago
> They hire juniors because they have junior level tasks that need completed. I have never worked at a place where this was true. Either senior devs would pound through the tasks, or we’d cut them as unimportant. The only reason we ever
26.
by moregrist 3mo ago
Claiming “50-100 years” is a misleading and hand-waving way of saying “futuristic.” It tries to get you to imagine that advances in the last 50-100 years will project linearly into advances in the next 50-100 years. This is not generally th
27.
by moregrist 3mo ago
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, Founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, in 1977
28.
by moregrist 3mo ago
> I don't suppose you have experience with how badly small non-profits are fucked by every tech consultancy they ever work with? Definitely with you here. > Getting nonprofits into AI that feels even marginally more self-serve Um
29.
by moregrist 3mo ago
Regardless of how you think about LLMs (I do find them useful), there’s something really odd to think that you can select for “proven experience” in a young technology where current experience appears to have little to do with experience 15
30.
by moregrist 3mo ago
I love that we’re already talking about “proven experience” for a technology that’s essentially 15 months old, arguably only broke into the mainstream 3-6 months ago, has an unclear RoI for many companies, and seems to be changing quickly i

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