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sn41 commented on FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't   npr.org/2024/06/26/g-s1-6... · Posted by u/isaacfrond
Molitor5901 · a year ago
This seems like splitting hairs on the part of the FDA.

FDA officials acknowledged Tuesday that statements that a product “may contain” certain allergens “could be considered truthful and not misleading.” Bimbo officials have until July 8 to identify steps taken to remedy the issue — or to explain why the labeling doesn't violate FDA standards.

So a baker.. who adds (insert allergy ingredient here), in minute quantity so they can legally say it contains it, is still in the wrong because that product does not normally contain said ingredient?

What is a baker to do? I think it is wholly unreasonable to say a baker cannot say on the product that the product may contain traces of an ingredient, when they cannot 100% say it does not. This just seems like splitting hairs and unnecessarily penalizing the baker.

We should want a food maker to list all possible allergens that could be present, not just are present in the foods.

sn41 · a year ago
I agree. If I am allergic to sesame, then I would also rather play it safe, rather than try a risk.

By the way, Molitor 5901 is the phone number used by the Jackal to know if he could move, in "The Day of the Jackal", if I remember right.

sn41 commented on The case for criminalizing scientific misconduct   chris-said.io/2024/06/17/... · Posted by u/elektor
sn41 · a year ago
With my modest experience as an expert witness in courts, I am against this. It is very difficult to make judges understand, for example, how science works - one can only be so sure, and we go ahead with that, for example, in medicine, as well as cryptography. Judges have a hard time appreciating this nuance.

I agree that something stricter should be done, but it should not be about bringing the legal system into play. I see a fundamental issue with bringing science to trial courts, where rhetoric, appeals to emotions, and other different priorities are paramount, not technicalities about overenthusiastic interpretations, data fudging, p-hacking, empirical anomalies and wilful data manipulation.

Science works by different norms of truth (I would call this statistical) than the judicial system does (beyond reasonable doubt/preponderance of evidence). I believe an international peer scientific committee ostracising a person from publication for X number of years, or forever, might be a better measure than a criminal trial and punishment in open court.

sn41 commented on Detecting hallucinations in large language models using semantic entropy   nature.com/articles/s4158... · Posted by u/Tomte
3abiton · a year ago
I skimmed through the paper, but don't LLMs most of the time guess, sometimes these guesses contains noise that might be on point or not. I wonder if "confabulation" had a more formal definition.
sn41 · a year ago
There seems to be an article on confabulations - seems to be a concept from neuroscience. From the abstract of the article:

"Confabulations are inaccurate or false narratives purporting to convey information about world or self. It is the received view that they are uttered by subjects intent on ‘covering up’ for a putative memory deficit."

It seems that there is a clear memory deficit about the incident, so the subject "makes stuff up", knowingly or unknowingly.

--

cited from:

German E. Berrios, "Confabulations: A Conceptual History", Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, Volume 7, 1998 - Issue 3

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1076/jhin.7.3.225.185...

DOI: 10.1076/jhin.7.3.225.1855

sn41 commented on Show HN: I made a puzzle game that gently introduces my favorite math mysteries   rahulilango.com/coloring/... · Posted by u/MCSP
sn41 · a year ago
Just a quick note: Rahul Ilango is a phenomenal theoretical CS researcher who has made great progress towards understanding the "Minimum Circuit Size Problem" [MCSP], long believed to be, but not yet proven, NP hard. Needless to add, "the username checks out".
sn41 commented on Boeing CEO admits company has retaliated against whistleblowers   independent.co.uk/news/wo... · Posted by u/breadwinner
Tao3300 · a year ago
It's the same all over. Never speak up. Especially not internally. If you have to, find a regulatory agency that has the legal clout to protect you from retaliation, or go to the press anonymously. Know the names of the people who retaliate against you, and don't try to get them fired: it's better to know exactly where your enemies are going to be than having them vaguely at large.
sn41 · a year ago
Assuming that you trust that the regulatory agency does not have leakers back to the respective companies. When there's a revolving door between regulatory agencies and companies, it gets tricky.
sn41 commented on Indian startup 3D prints rocket engine in 72 hours   spectrum.ieee.org/3d-prin... · Posted by u/pseudolus
fallingknife · a year ago
> America's immigration system gets more and more rickety

It's completely insane that we allow mass migration of people with no money and no skills and make it incredibly difficult for the most valuable immigrants to get in.

sn41 · a year ago
It's quite understandable, imho. Immigration is being allowed precisely for cheap labor, especially when citizens are not prepared to go through the extra hardship - for example, I remember reading that the fatalities when the bridge fell in Baltimore around 1 am, were all immigrants, all on duty at that hour.

For specialized labor, there is always a question of possible espionage and back-channel tech transfer. This is not so much perhaps for India as opposed to other technological rivals, but it may be one of the considerations in the immigration policy being counterintuitive.

sn41 commented on Quit Being a Cynic at Work. It's Holding You Back   wsj.com/lifestyle/workpla... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross
sn41 · a year ago
The title sounded condescending. But the overall theme seems to be that we must not lose trust in others since it may be better for us professionally. I think it is also better for us psychologically.
sn41 commented on An intuitive guide to Maxwell's equations (2020)   photonlines.substack.com/... · Posted by u/gballan
sn41 · a year ago
Just curious: Sussman and Wisdom have written a book called "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics" following the classic SICP Scheme book. Has anyone attempted a similar approach for electromagnetics?
sn41 commented on Monads are like burritos (2009)   blog.plover.com/prog/burr... · Posted by u/ipnon
frabjoused · a year ago
Is something that is so inherently hard to explain while giving it justice truly practical or even worth it? If you are in a room with 10 devs, how many will have a deep understanding of monads? And if it is expected to be only a few, is it really constructive to have it in the codebase? Or is it just going to trip people up and be misapplied.
sn41 · a year ago
I don't think you need to understand a concept deeply to use it. The "do..." syntax in Haskell is something that comes naturally to many programmers. It is introduced only at the end of a Haskell course since it uses monads, but many iterative-style programmers switch to that syntax exclusively afterwards. And it actually takes a while to construct the desugared monad syntax.

For a common example of this phenomenon- I took a look into the innards of printf to see how printf("%f",...) and printf("%g",...) works. I am still clueless how it actually works. Does not prevent even beginners from using these.

==

Also for what it is worth, I think the most useful analogy of monads is "monads are pipes with types", even though it does not give a full understanding of bind.

sn41 commented on All the remedial classes in one place   professorconfess.blogspot... · Posted by u/Plasmoid
parpfish · a year ago
a long-time peeve of mine is that people who frequently talk about the value of a 'well rounded (liberal arts) education' almost always have an implicit exclusion of math.

they think it's great to have some basic knowledge in a wide variety of subjects -- history, literature, music, etc. But when it comes to math, they'll just shrug and gleefully say "i'm not really a math person!"

sn41 · a year ago
I think this is from the traditional "Trivium" - grammar, logic, rhetoric - which was considered to be a well-rounded education (presumably for scions of wealthy families).

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

In contrast, "Quadrivium" - arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy - was a follow-up.

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

These constituted the "seven arts". But it was perfectly fine just to be educated in the trivia, if math wasn't your cup of tea.

See the "Yes Minister" clip where Sir Humphrey vehemently denies being so low-standard as to be educated in the sciences - he was good enough to study the classics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckgt4VWIsf4

(edited for better grammar, logic and rhetoric.)

u/sn41

KarmaCake day3973September 3, 2013View Original