r_klancer (u/r_klancer)

r_klancer commented on Datasets for Reconstructing Visual Perception from Brain Data github.com/seelikat/neuro... · Posted by u/katsee

aspenmartin · 11 days ago

in both cases: physics decides what's possible

r_klancer · 11 days ago

Well, well, then I have a paper for you (2014); https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscie...

You might be interested in author #7. Some guy named Dario something.

r_klancer commented on Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit lesswrong.com/posts/4mvph... · Posted by u/paulpauper

r_klancer · a year ago

Gemini (2.5 Pro):

"Yes, Paul Newman was widely known for being a heavy drinker, particularly of beer. He himself acknowledged his significant alcohol consumption."

The answer I got (https://gemini.google.com/share/9e327dc4be03) includes references such as https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-reviews-movies-paul... and https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-playing-field/20... although they are redacted from the public-sharing link.

r_klancer · a year ago

Though a local model I'm running (gemma-3-27b-it; https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/gemma-3-27b-it-GGU...) just told me various correct sounding bits about his history with alcohol (correctly citing his alma mater and first wife), but threw in:

"Sobriety & AA: Newman got sober in 1964 and remained so for the rest of his life."

Which doesn't check out. And it includes plausible but completely hallucinated URLs (as well as a valid biography.com URL that completely omits information about alcohol.)

r_klancer commented on Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit lesswrong.com/posts/4mvph... · Posted by u/paulpauper

aerhardt · a year ago

My mom told me yesterday that Paul Newman had massive problems with alcohol. I was somewhat skeptical, so this morning I asked ChatGPT a very simple question:

"Is Paul Newman known for having had problems with alcohol?"

All of the models up to o3-mini-high told me he had no known problems. Here's o3-mini-high's response:

"Paul Newman is not widely known for having had problems with alcohol. While he portrayed characters who sometimes dealt with personal struggles on screen, his personal life and public image were more focused on his celebrated acting career, philanthropic work, and passion for auto racing rather than any issues with alcohol. There is no substantial or widely reported evidence in reputable biographies or interviews that indicates he struggled with alcohol abuse."

There is plenty of evidence online that he struggled a lot with alcohol, including testimony from his long-time wife Joanne Woodward.

I sent my mom the ChatGPT reply and in five minutes she found an authoritative source to back her argument [1].

I use ChatGPT for many tasks every day, but I couldn't fathom that it would get so wrong something so simple.

Lesson(s) learned... Including not doubting my mother's movie trivia knowledge.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/who-paul-newma...

r_klancer · a year ago

Gemini (2.5 Pro):

"Yes, Paul Newman was widely known for being a heavy drinker, particularly of beer. He himself acknowledged his significant alcohol consumption."

The answer I got (https://gemini.google.com/share/9e327dc4be03) includes references such as https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-reviews-movies-paul... and https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-playing-field/20... although they are redacted from the public-sharing link.

r_klancer commented on Our interfaces have lost their senses wattenberger.com/thoughts... · Posted by u/me_smith

SoftTalker · a year ago

> AI chat is too devoid of friction.

You want an AI that argues with you?

r_klancer · a year ago

Actually that would be kind of awesome.

r_klancer commented on Ask HN: Do your eyes bug you even though your prescription is "correct"? · Posted by u/jbornhorst

_JamesA_ · a year ago

What is a higher end optician and how do you find one?

r_klancer · a year ago

Can't speak for GP, but in my case it was an academic optometry center. Life changing. See my longer toplevel reply.

r_klancer commented on Ask HN: Do your eyes bug you even though your prescription is "correct"? · Posted by u/jbornhorst

r_klancer · a year ago

I will say this: if you're not happy with your current prescription, there are ways to get a more intense workup and better outcomes by going to an academic optometry center. In my case, I went to the New England College of Optometry and got prescribed a special type of contact lenses ("scleral" lenses) which have been a major quality of life enhancement.

They're expensive, there was a learning curve for getting them on correctly, and it took several followup appointments to get the correct fit from the manufacturer, but I can wear the lenses almost all day and they give me clear, sharp, 20/20 vision.

Also, when I'm wearing them I need reading glasses to read up close--my uncorrected vision actually compensates for my slight age related nearsightedness. But my vision is so much better I don't mind at all!

The back story is that I had lifelong astigmatism and 2 eyes with different powers (one more farsighted than the other one) which led to some mild amblyopia (lazy eye) that I've had since childhood. My vision wasn't "that bad" so I got by without using my glasses for a long time. But when I tried using my several year old prescription glasses I found that presbyopia (that age related inability to focus on anything up close) made the glasses almost useless for reading.

Even though I'm a dev who looks at screens all day, I didn't think I minded, but I noticed in recent years that my appetite for reading books had disappeared was partly due to noticeable eye strain, but also due to generalized eye fatigue that I wasn't really acknowledging. I also had to sit up front in meeting rooms to follow along with anything projected on the screen, which was annoying.

A colleague mentioned the book Fixing My Gaze (https://www.google.com/books/edition/Fixing_My_Gaze/Ul16tPVk...) and I bought it. It's partly a personal narrative by a neuroscientist who was stereoblind and taught herself to develop stereo vision in middle age (she was profiled by Oliver Sacks at one point). But it's also a history of research optometry, which focuses on refractive vision correction and visual processing (as distinct from eye diseases) and which I barely even knew was a thing. Which led me to NECO and my big quality of life improvement!

r_klancer commented on The Drug Industry Is Having Its Own DeepSeek Moment wsj.com/health/pharma/the... · Posted by u/birriel

inverted_flag · a year ago

> For one, many top scientists trained in the U.S. have returned to China over the past decade, fueling the emergence of biotech hubs around Shanghai.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Talents_Plan

It's depressing that we were never able to stop China's parasitizing of our tech industry and expertise.

r_klancer · a year ago

Should be fixed soon! We decided at 6pm on Friday to reduce biomedical research centers' budgets by billions of dollars ($4B in Massachusetts alone), effective Monday. So in the future China will have to train its own scientists.

Sadly, no "/s"

r_klancer commented on I got a heat pump and my energy bill went up heatpumped.org/p/i-got-a-... · Posted by u/ssuds

rayiner · a year ago

I don’t know where this person is, but electricity is wildly expensive in many places. On a cold day, a good heat pump might give you say a COP of 2. So with 5 kW, you get out 10 kW of heat, or 35,000 BTU/hour. In say MA, at $0.25 per kWh retail, that’s $1.25/hour. In Boston, natural gas costs $1.5/therm, which is 100,000 BTUs. With a 96% efficient condensing boiler, you’re looking at $0.55/hour for the same 35,000 BTU/hour output, or less than half the price.

To be comparable to natural gas, you need electricity to be about $0.10 per kWh retail. That’s basically the PNW, the mountain west, and parts of the Deep South.

r_klancer · a year ago

After I installed a high-COP, cold-climate heat pump in my Boston area house in 2020, I figured the wintertime running cost was about half again the cost of gas heat. However, the cost was about the same as that of running the somewhat ancient oil furnace the house came with.

Electricity prices in MA are high and are controlled by the marginal cost of gas to run generators, even though we have a significant fraction of renewable, hydro, and nuclear generation. Gas prices are also high because we're at the far end of the east coast natural gas pipeline network.

It's interesting to think about the whole chain -- burning gas in a high efficiency condensing furnace at home approaches 100% efficiency of conversion from chemical to heat energy.

Whereas utility generators that convert heat to electricity are upper bounded by the second law to ~60% efficiency, and then you have transmission losses on top of that. But you win roughly all that lossage back because your heat pump can pump ~3 units of outdoor heat energy into your house for every ~1 unit of electrical energy it consumes.

Add transmission costs and unfortunately heat pumps are more expensive here for now. But CO2 wise of course it still wins because of that renewal and nuclear share I talked about

More importantly, I can also install solar and start getting some energy "for free" (obviously, much more so in the summer than in the winter). And over time of course our renewable share will go up.

r_klancer commented on Groundwater Movement (Interactive) has.concord.org/groundwat... · Posted by u/jdwg

r_klancer · a year ago

You can gain a lot of intuition for system behavior via particle models like this and their many, many other interactives.

I also recommend looking at their library of learning resources that put these interactives into context: https://learn.concord.org/collections

r_klancer commented on Groundwater Movement (Interactive) has.concord.org/groundwat... · Posted by u/jdwg

zkiihne · a year ago

Cool interactive, also +1 for being from my hometown

r_klancer · a year ago

I worked there until 10 years ago and it was quite rewarding. (In fact this interactive uses some of the "lab" framework code I worked on.)

The founder was inspired by Concord (Massachusetts)'s history of progressive educational experimentation, going back to the transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau).

They're based in Concord but they also have a Bay Area office, after merging with the nonprofit org that built CODAP (https://codap.concord.org/)