Hani Mustafa

Fake numbers again that happened to be completely exactly in line

@EGHaug Haha. Wait till you see the tiny shelf for physics/chemistry in the largest public library in Bjørvika 🤡

Stikker man innom norges største bok-butikker finner man hele vegger fulle av krimbøker, mens vitenskap nå er redusert til ett par rader med populærvitenskap. Samfunnet blir det de leser 😎 Bok butikker gjenspeiler samfunnet, det går feil vei ??

@simocristea Tobias Hürter in "Too Big for a Single Mind" talks about a law of conservation of genius, where the brilliant theoretical physicists are often terrible at experimental physics, and vice versa. I think there is something along these lines in every field

During my PhD, I worked in a purely dry-lab (100% math & modeling-view of biology type of lab), where I met excellent theoretical people who advanced computational biology substantially, and who had minimal interest in the wet lab. It's not even about being at the cutting edge of wet lab, it's just about carving out time of the day to understand wet-lab details (which they just didn't feel like doing). I then moved on to applying all this theoretical stuff in the real world, and was at first surprised to see how, in excellent clinical and medical wet-labs, some people simply didn't care about the theoretical properties (or lack thereof) of methods they were applying as a necessary step in their workflows (e.g. UMAP/PCA). They are instead laser focused on experimental details and biological question. In practical terms, these people are oftentimes the ones who move the needle on challenging medical issues (this is slowly changing now, as more and more ML/AI/comp bio is finding its way into practical clinical application). Then you have the very few people who are genuinely interested in understanding and internalizing these two very different disciplines. I think this is great and very fulfilling, understanding end-to-end how a biological system works and why and how we need to employ methodology to make sense of the data the system outputs. But it's not a must for excellence, and a healthy set-up optimally positioned for innovation will bring people with different levels of such expertise together. There will always be experts excited to go super deep into something or, complementary, experts excited to take a step back and see the whole picture, while (at least initially) having to sacrifice some of the depth.

Besides your 8 MB calculation is incorrect because it is based on the protein coding regions. It has been understood for a while that much of the step improvements in evolution happens in the regulatory non coding space. It is as if you are comparing two binaries by looking only at the .data 🤷‍♂️

To make the argument clearer, the folding is not entirely determined by the sequence. So not every stretch of a DNA sequence will fold the same way. It is governed by another orthogonal system of histones that you are not accounting for. This system keeps state that is inherited next to the actual DNA, and is the reason why 2 eggs can never merge to form a viable cell, they are not folded correctly

Surprising how difficult it is for some to grasp very basic notions of information theory. Arguments like "8MB is actually more information than 8MB" seem to me like arguments that demonstrate the possibility of perpetual motion.

@nntaleb Old saying, لكلٍّ من اسمه نصيب

There was a debate whether names help predict professions, Dennis becoming a dentist. It is silly for Ackman to make claims so easily testable: the effect, if it exists (it doesn't), would be < 1 in 2700 persons. Note: I am the exception that confirms the rule: Taleb= scholar.

@LindorffLarsen underrated my man

Taylor series

@nntaleb A sort of human PCA

To see if a book is real, ask 10 people of different backgrounds & professions to summarize it. If the summaries are similar, the book will not survive as it can be shortened to a journal article. The more the summaries diverge, the higher the dimensionality of the book.

@fredsters_s If you had already done the work of doing self service, why not just keep the freemium but restrict it just enough so that it serves as a free demo environment but is unusable otherwise? That phone call is a barrier for most engineering types unless your company is well known

We turned off our self-serve signups and replaced our freemium plan with a $200 per month floor and it has generated... a reaction. A thread with some thoughts on why we did this and what the impact has been so far to our business

@ClarkeMicah @MailOnline Ah, even the great Peter Hitchens can be so clearly hypocritical.

'mol.im/a/12672795 via @MailOnline 'When someone urges you to see an evil deed in context, he is generally making excuses for it. What would you think if someone said that Myra Hindley's and Ian Brady's crimes 'did not happen in a vacuum'? I would think I was in the presence of an apologist for evil.'

@POTUS My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

I have come to Israel with a simple message: You are not alone. As long as the United States stands – and we will stand forever – you will not be alone.

@ID_AA_Carmack I enjoyed this one amazon.com/Road-Somewhere…

Book challenge I appreciate that there are many people who roll their eyes at my optimistic-libertarian-technological-triumphalist take on things, yet still interact civilly. I have had several meaningful conversations here, but the bandwidth is limited. If you are one of those people, suggest a book for me to read that you think will challenge my worldview. I will read it with an open mind and make some posts reacting to it. In return you will do the same for @johanknorberg ‘s The Capitalist Manifesto. Volunteer yourself and a book here. I will pick a few and run a poll tomorrow.

All of the plenary talks were amazing at Bridges this year! @mathgrrl gave the last one, and during the talk she gave everyone a 3D printed copy of this knot, which has the surprising property there does not exist a plane that is tangent to the knot in three places. So it rolls!

@nntaleb @LieraMarco Another factor: historically, the cost and inconvenience of traveling rate limited immigration, and probably selected for the type of ppl who could immigrate. Though I imagine exceptions exist (eg Germanic tribes to Rome?)

@LieraMarco You are missing a looooooot, Marco. Why don't you use arguments from when the Steppe Yamnana came to Europe during the Bronze age?

What intellectuals don't get about MIGRATION is the ethical notion of SYMMETRY: OPEN BORDERS work if and only if the number of pple who want to go from EU/US to Africa/LatinAmer equals Africans/Latin Amer who want to move to EU/US Silver Rule in #SkinInTheGame Gabish?

@luciascarlet How about this one? Iykyk

I still wonder what the actual fuck the thought process behind this thing was

@GeorgeWHerbert @NikMilanovic @peternixey @rjonesy It is. Off camera it’s a beautiful Norwegian hotel juvet.com

@NikMilanovic @peternixey @rjonesy Looks like it to me.

I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again. Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge. A canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way. StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day. It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. Or vice-versa. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views. But since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen; at least for me. Which will be bad for StackOverflow. But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans. What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on? When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. GPT4 will have answered them in private. So while GPT4 was trained on all of the questions asked before 2021 what will GPT6 train on? This raises a more profound question. If this pattern replicates elsewhere & the direction of our collective knowledge alters from outward to humanity to inward into the machine then we are dependent on it in a way that supercedes all of our prior machine-dependencies. Whether or not it "wants" to take over, the change in the nature of where information goes will mean that it takes over by default. Like a fast-growing Covid variant, AI will become the dominant source of knowledge simply by virtue of growth. If we take the example of StackOverflow, that pool of human knowledge that used to belong to us - may be reduced down to a mere weighting inside the transformer. Or, perhaps even more alarmingly, if we trust that the current GPT doesn't learn from its inputs, it may be lost altogether. Because if it doesn't remember what we talk about & we don't share it then where does the knowledge even go? We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. But at least we control it. We can extract it, duplicate it, go & store it in a vault in the Arctic (as Github has done). So what happens next? I don't know, I only have questions. None of which you'll find on StackOverflow. (I write on AI from a technical and product perspective. If you find that interesting then please do follow me for more)

@nntaleb Or just as potent, when their enemies change their mind

People don't change their opinions when supplied with a potent argument. They change their minds when their friends change their minds.

This video of a red-tailed hawk seemingly suspended in the air earned Bill Bryant the win for the Audubon Society 2021 Award in the video category [source: buff.ly/3igxQz0]. The hawk's head is perfectly still while its body stabilizes around it

@lordx64 Nitpick: This guy is not a journalist. He’s a political leader, an ex-presidential candidate who spent years in jail