It all comes down to glutamate and gaba again. It's been really interesting to see how fundamental these two molecules are as I have learned more about medical biology/neurology. They are implicated in so many medical and psychiatric conditions, yet you tend to hear much more about the monoamine transmitters (serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, etc). But they are also hard to target for therapeutic purposes because gabaergics (barbituates, alcohol, z-drugs, etc) are often dangerously addictive; gaba just feels good... until the bill comes due. Maybe someday we will find a way to upregulate gaba activity in the body/brain without the inevitable crash. Hopefully we will, at least for the sake of people that suffer from over/under-excitatatory diseases.
Readit Newsmagicnubs commented on How the Brain Balances Excitation and Inhibition quantamagazine.org/how-th... · Posted by u/FromTheArchives
magicnubs commented on Remember: Kurt Vonnegut Was 47 joanwestenberg.com/p/reme... · Posted by u/herbertl
It may be true that youth confers certain physical and mental benefits, but I feel it's generally under-appreciated what a massive amount of value older people can still easily bring to society around them.
I grew up as a young 20-ish programmer in a FOSS community that had multiple people in their 60s and 70s act e.g. as module maintainers and similar, and you can be productive and matter and contribute to greater things for far longer than most people seem to assume.
The bottom line is perhaps more that "finding ways to apply yourself" and doing the right things is challenging at any age.
Agreed. The child prodigy is overvalued in popular perception. It is a subject of fascination precisely because it is uncommon. Most really great work is done by people with plenty of experience; it's just not that interesting when an experienced person does good work.
That’s interesting. I’ve been told every time (so far) to keep a “neutral face”. I smiled once and the guy let out a heavy sigh and made me take the photo again (Redwood City, CA DMV).
Same. I've been explicitly told "Neutral Face. Don't smile." for my passport and driver's licenses in NC, FL and CA (Redwood City too).
magicnubs commented on In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant nytimes.com/2025/05/19/op... · Posted by u/Traces
I wonder what everyone else thinks about this claim made by the article:
> The enduring strength of a state-dominated Chinese system that can pivot, change policy and redirect resources at will in service of long-term national strength is now undeniable, regardless of whether free-market advocates like it.
The writer claims that a command economy gives them an advantage over a free market economy. Top-down production targets and price controls didn't really work for the Soviet Union, but maybe the more immediately-available and granular data available nowadays makes it feasible? The US already has a way to encourage production through various methods (e.g. subsidies). It seems to me the real difference is not the economic system, but that the Chinese government is less beholden to existing interests (that aren't the CCP). The US seems to often be unable or unwilling to accept the temporary pain of a big change, even if it would be better off in the long-term.
magicnubs commented on In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant nytimes.com/2025/05/19/op... · Posted by u/Traces
There do seem to be parallels to America's rise to the dominant global power. In particular, they have so much of the global manufacturing infrastructure, like the US did after WW2 destroyed much of Europe's, and I don't see a way for the US to compete with China's cheap labor and agglomeration economies. And they are generating more and more of the research in high-value sectors, kind of like the US scooping up all of the physicists during the war.
There are other roadblocks that the US didn't have to be sure, their very top-heavy population pyramid and they have less arable land (which probably doesn't matter so much except in wartime or as a national security concern). It still feel like the only things that might derail the current trends are internal social unrest or a major war.
magicnubs commented on Vectorized and performance-portable Quicksort opensource.googleblog.com... · Posted by u/slackerIII
I am always amazed at the algorithms re-implemented using SIMD. One of my favorites is the Striped Smith-Waterman approach used for sequence alignment. Does anyone have any good resources on learning to use SIMD? I've found it heard to make the "plunge".
The lectures and assignments for Oregon State's CS475 (Parallel Programming) are all available online. [0] There are lectures [1] and a project [2] about SIMD. I really enjoyed the entire course as a survey of parallel and high-performance computing. The full course covers multi-processing, multi-threading, caching, SIMD, GPUs (CUDA and OpenCL) and MPI. The projects are in C/C++ (along with OpenMP, CUDA and OpenCL). FYI, I think the last two projects use some large research GPU bank that you have to have special access to use, so you'd be out of luck on implementing the projects for those.
[0] https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~mjb/cs575/ [1] https://media.oregonstate.edu/media/t/1_7wju0jtq [2] https://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~mjb/cs575/Projects/proj04....
magicnubs commented on Gergely Orosz: Meta rescinding E3 and E4 offers twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/... · Posted by u/0xedb
I'm reading elsewhere that this may not be true?
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6928529...
magicnubs commented on Review of the Mustang Mach E electrek.co/2021/02/05/th... · Posted by u/cs702
My question is what on earth will they call their sport coupe now? The Ford Super Mustang? The Ford Mustang Falcon? The Ford Mustang Mustang???
Thunder-cougar-falcon-bird?
> The drums of the 24 m analog calculators are of course not 24 m long.
I was disappointed
The health of the market is not a function of the total number of jobs alone, it's a function of the number of jobs and the number of people to fill them.
The number of total jobs going up year after year meant that there were increasing numbers of candidates, new people entering the field. If the job growth stops, then there still we be candidates coming in. There will also be the new hires from the last decade moving into increasingly senior roles, and there won't be space for them (unless you devalue the meaning of "senior" even more).
So the year over year change matters a lot. If it plateaus, or even declines slightly, it's more than enough to make a terrible market.