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hello
definitely me, rob, here with a post, not my wife typing on my blog while i’m in the bathroom
now normally when i type like this i’m here to point out Important Facts like how cute i am and how i’m such a great husband
but today is special! today is my birthday!
so that means it is YOUR TURN to point out some facts about how i am a great person/ writer/ cutie. maybe reblog this post or send me an ask saying something about a good memory of my online or irl presence or something i wrote.
other things that you can do today (and every day) to honor the spirit of robnost:
1. ABJURE THE MISUSE OF STATISTICS. teach yourself a lil something about statistical literacy, maybe? or at least don’t share bad graphs on social media.
2. BE EFFECTIVELY ALTRUISTIC. iff you want to and can afford to, maybe sling a few bucks to givewell or one of their recommended charities.
3. BE CONSIDERATE TO PEOPLE WITH ALLERGIES. try and make sure there is suitable food for people with food allergies at social events. ask if it’s okay before you open a window on a high-pollen-count day. don’t spray a bunch of perfume/ cologne in a public place.
4. JUST GENERALLY BE NICE. i feel like this either doesn’t need any explanation, or it needs more explanation than humans have thus far been capable of.
5. DON’T GO INTO THE CAVES.
Anonymous asked: just pointing this out but "bioinformatics pipeline" is a great euphemism for "dick"
High-throughput
Jeffreyssai muses on the amazing coincidences of life with natural selection and the exponential universe. How evolution designed to make people hot, and then designed so much more complex tools that they actually are more efficient at hunting than each other, and then run parallel lives so insanely prolific that all human societies went up in flat-Earth fashion and then mysteriously disappeared. Then he muses on the amazing coincidences of human intelligence and the fact that most people still don’t know about the great design coincidences of natural selection, and then on the great design coincidences of human intelligence and the fact that the human brain design sequence looks just like the natural selection design sequence… or doesn’t look nearly as elegant.
He also muses deeply on the fascinating coincidences of fissioning low-energy nuclear reactions with antimatter nuclei, and on the special case fissioning atoms directly with antimatter radiation rather than with matter.
Why is Jeffssai’s consciousness always important? For one thing, he knows the extraordinarily powerful Lagrange multipliers that characterise the wavefunction of an Feynman path integral.
“A glass is half full of half-empty rations, and exactly half full of water,” he said, and tapped a string with his finger, which let him know the exact state of the contents. “And that is how the Legendary Smug Filthy Rich Gang is behaving right now.”
“Ah,” you say, “that explains why your connection doesn’t always work.”
“I agree - our classical hallucination of the universe blends real and unreal, and no matter what the constituents remain essentially the same, their states can change very fast. Otherwise I wouldn’t be saying all this to you.”
“Yikes!” exclaimed the second ascension egod. “That explains my connection actually not working!”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” retorted the first ascension god, “but listen - imagine that any one of these seven steps had been entirely unattainable, impossible, or futile. Then the only way you could actually get anywhere, on this planet, would be by talking to someone who had gone down the same road. I will not allow that. I admit it - I occasionally get a little jealous. You want to go the Moon, I’m offering you a lift. But the great and the good…”
“What?” said the other two ascension gods.
“The lift.”
“You want to go to the Moon, all of you, and I’m offering you a lift here! But that doesn’t mean you have to…”
“No,” said the other two ascension gods.
“You have to,” said the first ascension god.
The others nodded.
“Then again,” said the first ascension god, “if all of you had ascended at once, none of you would be here -,”
“Excuse me,” said the other two ascension gods, and they all paused.
“The other ascension gods,” continued the second ascension god, “are standing a few paces away from one another. So I reckon we shall have to split up. And just in case any one of you has the potential to do the Moon-Eyes, we’ve still got a bit of extra work for you, and a whole lot of other ways you could go. For now you can stay over at my alma mater, for now. In the event that the project requires more than one of you to manually steer one asteroid into Jupiter’s orbit, I plan to split the remaining work evenly.”
There was a fair amount of muffled discussion, and a good portion of the engineering work that had been done already was failing, along with some of the more prominent members of the project.
There also seemed to be some kind of unified front that wanted to do this just to be able to do things faster - an uncompressed set of human-level ideas that ran all the way up to and including unmanned spacecraft, a common language, and a common utility function; but with no common language or common utility functions to tie them all together.
The tension seemed to rise.
“Well,” said the wizard, lifting an eyebrow slightly, “in case you’ve been using that as a forcing-factor on the project of yours, or a ramification of your own desires, I do not have much to add to the bargain. Three board members and you, for all that you are technically-advanced, could hunt around inside the special cases and figure out any one of a hundred and thirty-five different ways that this thing could go wrong. The problem is, you haven’t specified any ship-of-my-detention. We could give you a list of possible candidates, of course, but chess players cannot fly. They
So yes, hair is a molecular-sensor integrated with a hair-and-fur genome. In a sense, hair is part of the skin and hair is a skin-and-hair part. But hair has no skin and no hair, only chemical tags. The concept of “evolution” starts from this basic commonality - the building block of cognition - along with the observation that many common skin touches go through cycles of coherence that keep them in line.
The first step in the evolutionary path of a given complex pattern is to draw a schematic for the organization of the gene pool, and the organization of the skin and hair. Schematic drawing of how the hair-and-skin genome plays out - most of the structures are the same, but not all of them. (In case you’re wondering, a human adult retains around as much skin and hair as ten chimpanzees; if you’ve never seen a naked mole rat, the human brain looks just like a naked mole rat, and similarly the same is true for any other adult organ.) Skin, hair, hair and hair and hair and hair, all share an organizing principle that’s true across the genome.
“Let me put this very sharply,” says Betsey. “Genetics is arbitrary. It’s arbitrary whether a crystal shows a smiley or doesn’t smile. There is no set of rules that apply in isolation. You can make arbitrary choices about which characters or sequences to put in front of backslashes. I am not arguing that the genomic data should be treated any differently from any other data point. I am arguing that the idea that arbitrary rules apply in isolation is arbitrary and not just disjunctive. It is certainly disjunctive with respect to propositions felt to be true (like monogamy) or felt to be false (like an increased chance of mutant children). Genomic data should not be treated any differently whether or not it is empirically felt to be true - the idea that arbitrary rules apply in isolation is not a logical truth, it is an empirical belief about which propositions are most salient. And sure, some of your biological parents may have had sex with other ancestral humans, but did you really have to go there, Jeff? To discard the idea that you might or might not do something really stupid, when there’s so much evidence? Genomic data shouldn’t be different whether people find it true or false. We don’t live in a world that thinks only about the empirical truth of a proposition. We live in a world that thinks about the logical truth of a proposition as well. That’s all there is to it - a proposition - and we also live in a world that thinks about how you feel about the logical truth of a proposition as well as the actual truth of it. Which we do not live in a single germ-collapse utopia where you ever have to entertain doubts without proof and where new logically-sound conclusions are just pointed out as generally-sound. That’s the level on which most people compete. If everyone just hits the ball into the ballpark - and even sometimes loses money on it - that’s the level on which most people dominate. But my grandparents didn’t live for this. I don’t imagine they even made it very far playing traditional dice. I imagine it
Thus, we get tabular material that cannot be
evaluated and seems nothing less than absurd,
such as purportedly serious heritability estimates
for ‘pajama parties’, ‘striptease shows’, ‘learning Latin’, and ‘Bible truth’, these and 46 others
somehow mysteriously ‘corrected for unreliability’
(Table 4.3).
It’s weird to me how people keep re-implementing a set of standard vector operations in new numerical computation packages, often giving them the same or very similar names, and yet (to my knowledge) no one has tried to write a formal specification of this set of operations. Or at least no one has done it and gotten it off the ground?
I’m thinking of operations like “reshape,” “squeeze,” “concatenate,” “stack,” “zeros/ones/eye,” etc. There are versions of this shared language in MATLAB, in numpy, in pandas (although pandas uses database-like indices so it’s a little different from the others), in tensorflow, in torch/pytorch, and presumably in other things I’ve never used.
Yet each one of the dialects has its quirks. The same operation (concatenate arrays along an existing dimension) is called “concatenate” in numpy, “concat” in pandas and tensorflow, and “cat” in torch/pytorch and in MATLAB. In MATLAB the call signature puts the axis before the arrays, while for all the others it comes after the arrays. (Everyone agrees about what “stack” should be called, for some reason, although it’s just concatenation along a new dimension instead of an existing one.) Meanwhile, the thing called “reshape” in numpy, MATLAB, and tensorflow is called “view” in torch. Things represented as f(A, B) in the other dialects are often A.f(B) in pandas, but not always. And so on!
The process of “learning” one of these software packages, once you know any of the others, is largely about learning the arbitrary differences in the dialect. Stack Overflow questions about pytorch frequently take the form “is there a torch equivalent of tf.whatever?”, and IIRC the tensorflow questions tend to be like “is there a tensorflow equivalent of np.whatever?” (And there are probably older ones about numpy equivalents for MATLAB stuff.)
It all feels a bit silly and wasteful, and seems distinctively more chaotic than the situation with SQL, possibly (or possibly not) because SQL at least has a standard. There are differences between the major SQL dialects, but there’s at least an intuitive core that people feel they can expect, and people would get mad if you told them you supported “SQL queries” but it turned out you had renamed JOIN to, like, JOINIFICATE or MASHUP or JO or something. (New Relic’s query language is basically like this – it has SELECT and WHERE, but renames GROUP BY to FACET – but they know not to call it “SQL.”)
I was thinking about linking to that in my post, actually – as evidence that people like to propose universal standards, indeed more than is strictly reasonable, which is why I am surprised to see no such attempts in this case.
(There are a lot of versions of this language, but none that even aspires to universality. The closest thing I’m aware of is Keras’ “backend API,” but that’s just a new dialect for encoding calls to one of several other dialects, not a standard with a specification you can write down.)
It’s weird to me how people keep re-implementing a set of standard vector operations in new numerical computation packages, often giving them the same or very similar names, and yet (to my knowledge) no one has tried to write a formal specification of this set of operations. Or at least no one has done it and gotten it off the ground?
I’m thinking of operations like “reshape,” “squeeze,” “concatenate,” “stack,” “zeros/ones/eye,” etc. There are versions of this shared language in MATLAB, in numpy, in pandas (although pandas uses database-like indices so it’s a little different from the others), in tensorflow, in torch/pytorch, and presumably in other things I’ve never used.
Yet each one of the dialects has its quirks. The same operation (concatenate arrays along an existing dimension) is called “concatenate” in numpy, “concat” in pandas and tensorflow, and “cat” in torch/pytorch and in MATLAB. In MATLAB the call signature puts the axis before the arrays, while for all the others it comes after the arrays. (Everyone agrees about what “stack” should be called, for some reason, although it’s just concatenation along a new dimension instead of an existing one.) Meanwhile, the thing called “reshape” in numpy, MATLAB, and tensorflow is called “view” in torch. Things represented as f(A, B) in the other dialects are often A.f(B) in pandas, but not always. And so on!
The process of “learning” one of these software packages, once you know any of the others, is largely about learning the arbitrary differences in the dialect. Stack Overflow questions about pytorch frequently take the form “is there a torch equivalent of tf.whatever?”, and IIRC the tensorflow questions tend to be like “is there a tensorflow equivalent of np.whatever?” (And there are probably older ones about numpy equivalents for MATLAB stuff.)
It all feels a bit silly and wasteful, and seems distinctively more chaotic than the situation with SQL, possibly (or possibly not) because SQL at least has a standard. There are differences between the major SQL dialects, but there’s at least an intuitive core that people feel they can expect, and people would get mad if you told them you supported “SQL queries” but it turned out you had renamed JOIN to, like, JOINIFICATE or MASHUP or JO or something. (New Relic’s query language is basically like this – it has SELECT and WHERE, but renames GROUP BY to FACET – but they know not to call it “SQL.”)
hey this post is definitely me
i am so cute and good
i distract my wife from sadness with nicolas cage
i get genuinely moved by scenes in the movie con air because i am a big fucking softie
i am too good for this world, too pure