Ask me about:

  • Science (biology, computation, statistics)
  • Gaming (rhythm, rogue-like/lite, other generic 1-player games)
  • Autism & related (I have diagnosis)
  • Bad takes on philosophy
  • Bad takes on US political systems & more US stuff

I’m not knowledgeable about most other things

  • 47 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: September 15th, 2024

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  • I don’t think this is good advice by any means, but I dropped my previous car at a car dealership for $500. They only were able to give me $500 because 1) it was an ex-police car and they apparently couldn’t sell it under normal circumstances, and 2) the car was pretty beaten up and probably have to be scrapped for parts.

    This information is 2-3 years old so maybe things have changed… but back then I believe car dealerships would be willing to take a car for at least $500, since they can probably make a profit by auctioning the car or scrapping it for parts that way. So if I really just want to get rid of something, it’s not a bad option. However, most second-hand cars are worth way more than that, especially if I’m willing to put in a bit of effort, so… take this information as you will. I agree with the other comments that a used car can go for much higher if I’m willing to try.




  • The thing that annoys me is… even if they genuinely want to save money (and that’s a big if), this is barely even “saving” much money. NIH has historically been a very good return on investment for the US government despite running on a shoestring budget, and that is probably not even accounting for the various downstream applications (like all the pharma industry) that relies on NIH-funded research.

    Part of the issue with indirect costs are due to the NIH never getting much of a budget raise and the ballooning bureaucracy… Yes, there are people wanting change for the better, but the current administration decided to wake up to violence by dealing with this in the worst way possible











  • Conventional AI/ML: I… don’t think so, unless they are models specially designed for playing games (with extreme examples being the likes of AlphaZero for chess/shogi/go). Actually I guess you could say that whatever DeepMind was doing was technically training/improving their models using video games? Case in point, their innovation on AlphaZero led to AlphaFold (which literally got a Nobel Prize) and the recent weather prediction tool

    Generative AI: The field seems to have a major existential crisis due to running out of high-quality training data. So maybe there would be a way to use games to augment training data? I’m not an expert in Generative AI/LLM training so I’m not sure of the details

    AGI: I’m certain an AGI model can be improved using video games but I don’t think researchers even remotely have a concept of how to build an AGI model yet




  • Technically my primary computer activities are gaming, but these days I game exclusively on the Steam Deck or the tablet (for mobile games)…

    My most speced-out computer was actually purchased for work related reasons. I wanted a decent GPU because I thought I’d be working in deep learning. Well current job doesn’t require training models and I was required to use a dedicated work laptop so… This high-spec one I mainly use for just about everything else other than gaming














  • Currently live in a condo, I think every unit in the building came with one

    The biggest advantage I could find is that they are insanely convenient for making French press coffee! French presses are otherwise a pain to clean (since there’s no filter to aggegate the grounds), but having an in-sink disposal means I can just flush the coffee grounds directly into the sink. Besides this though I’m pretty indifferent to them


  • So this is a bit counter to the news article’s point, and apologies for linking to Reddit… but there has been a fairly hot post on the subreddit r/USCIS. A practicing immigration attorney was sharing some thoughts on how feasible the promises are https://www.reddit.com/r/USCIS/comments/1glflxy/so_what_now_an_immigration_attorney_perspective/. Some quotes:

    IMO, no-- the economy makes way too much money from DACA folks. I do believe that they will dangle it like a carrot to appease right-wing voters. Major corporations employ DACAmented folks. The SSN from work permits have allowed more tax revenue to come in. Too much is at stake. Legally, the legal arguments at the courts surrounding DACA involve constitutional rights, which themselves aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. It’s honestly just a topic that is often talked about, but hardly understood by many.

    I want to put this into perspective. There are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US. Currently, DHS has about 92,000 officers, and ICE has about 21,000 officers. It is asinine to try to achieve this.

    Let’s say it actually does begin and people are getting rounded up. Guess what? Not all undocumented folks are just undocumented-- many have TPS, pending asylum applications, pending T/U Visas, and work permits (see my point regarding #1). Unless a migrant has an expedited removal (not likely), DHS/ICE still needs to process each deportee, assign them A#s, and follow basic procedures. If they don’t? That’s a very easy way to reverse a deportation order. It’s the equivalent of convicting someone of murder using a confession made under a very obvious 4/5th amendment violation. Slam dunk case.

    Oh, and you know who has to handle all of these deportation cases? Federal DHS attorneys. They’re already overworked, and they tend to exercise discretion. If no discretion, the overworked ones tend to gloss over cases and provide weak arguments. Only major attention is paid to serious crimes. You’d be surprised the amount of times DHS attorneys have gotten my clients’ names wrong or made procedurally embarrassing typos.

    … assuming the administration still follows basic social contracts, that is. If the Trump administration actually uses the military to forcefully enforce mass deportations, then I feel the US is going to be fucked on so many different more levels… and there would be way more to worry than just the deportations









  • Had a fairly important work deadline that was supposed to be end of this month. Unfortunately, I didn’t read institutional policies carefully enough, and institutional fuckery mandates that they receive all the documents one week prior. So my actual deadline is like next Monday

    So yeah, I’ll be working this entire weekend… at least the good news is I can probably get two free days off by the end of this month (which I wanted to do anyway)