thaw13579 (u/thaw13579)

thaw13579 commented on Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say washingtonpost.com/nation... · Posted by u/anigbrowl

musicale · 5 days ago

Graduate student violence is more common that it should be. For example, you hear about suicides every year.

I can't help but suspect that sometimes it may be related to graduate school itself, which can be stressful and unforgiving, with minimal support, and where supervisors often hold both academic power over their students' futures and financial power over their livelihoods. (And switching supervisors, even at the same institution, typically requires restarting research from scratch.) It can't be good when, after a lifetime of top-tier success, you are facing failure for the first time, with no preparation for handling it and no obvious path forward.

thaw13579 · 5 days ago

Sadly so, students often associate their self-worth with research and academic achievement, so if things go south, for whatever reason, they are in crisis.

thaw13579 commented on Oliver Sacks put himself into his case studies – what was the cost? newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/barry-cotter

Ambolia · 13 days ago

Steven Pinker on this article:

>https://x.com/sapinker/status/1999297395478106310

>"Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity."

thaw13579 · 7 days ago

Curious why this comment is being flagged if anyone minds explaining.

thaw13579 commented on We Induced Smells With Ultrasound writetobrain.com/olfactor... · Posted by u/exr0n

glenstein · a month ago

Chiming in as a reply to your comment since I had a similar feeling. There's no... institution!? No university or other institution listed. They list author names, which is something. But no institution, no paper, no heritage of research concepts. No citations outside of a few NIH ones not especially specific to their particular experiment. No real meaningful discussion of mechanisms. The domain itself doesn't have anything other than this page. Granted, whatever, there's no rules in this world, do what you want. But so far there's precious little in the traditional signals we typically rely on to distinguish this from misinformation.

This reminds me a bit of the escherian staircase video from 10+ years that went viral. A bunch of college students walking down the stairs, acting amazed when they found themselves back at the top. It was great acting and video editing, but it was fake and all part of, if I recall correctly, an art project.

I don't want to dismiss it outright either, seems cool as hell. But it's remarkable to me that all it takes is a blogpost to get this amount of uncritical acceptance of a demonstration.

thaw13579 · a month ago

I agree there are some red flags here to me. One is the priority claim "As far as we know, no one seems to have done this kind of stimulation before - even in animals." The other is the definitive conclusion based on weak experimental design and documentation, "Can ultrasound make you smell things that aren’t there? Turns out, yes!"

These are big scientific claims, but the work is clearly too premature to make those conclusions, and it lacks the connection to prior work and peer review needed for making priority claims. It's really great hacker-tinkering work though, and it could turn into solid science if they take more care with it.

If this effect is real and truly novel, my cynical expectation is that someone already established in focused ultrasound will read this, apply a more rigorous approach, and get the recognition that they are hoping for through more establish channels.

thaw13579 commented on We Induced Smells With Ultrasound writetobrain.com/olfactor... · Posted by u/exr0n

glenstein · a month ago

Chiming in as a reply to your comment since I had a similar feeling. There's no... institution!? No university or other institution listed. They list author names, which is something. But no institution, no paper, no heritage of research concepts. No citations outside of a few NIH ones not especially specific to their particular experiment. No real meaningful discussion of mechanisms. The domain itself doesn't have anything other than this page. Granted, whatever, there's no rules in this world, do what you want. But so far there's precious little in the traditional signals we typically rely on to distinguish this from misinformation.

This reminds me a bit of the escherian staircase video from 10+ years that went viral. A bunch of college students walking down the stairs, acting amazed when they found themselves back at the top. It was great acting and video editing, but it was fake and all part of, if I recall correctly, an art project.

I don't want to dismiss it outright either, seems cool as hell. But it's remarkable to me that all it takes is a blogpost to get this amount of uncritical acceptance of a demonstration.

thaw13579 · a month ago

I wonder where they got their equipment and research space. A charitable explanation is that they purchased it out of their own pockets, but otherwise, they really should acknowledge their support if it's from a university, federal grant, foundation award, etc. In my opinion as someone with domain experience, they don't show any novel solutions to accomplish this, it's mostly just that they have the time and resources to experiment try out, so it's especially important to acknowledge who enabled it.

thaw13579 commented on Claude Is Down status.claude.com/inciden... · Posted by u/agrocrag

iAMkenough · 2 months ago

If they're running 120B on a M5 (32GB max of memory today), I'd like to know how.

thaw13579 · 2 months ago

Probably an M4 which has up to 128GB currently

thaw13579 commented on Who benefits from the MAHA anti-science push? apnews.com/article/maha-s... · Posted by u/voxadam

_blk · 2 months ago

Questioning your own beliefs isn't a requirement to science. Just sayin'

You question mine, and I'll question yours completes the cycle but if you don't let me question yours because you already did that, where's the science in that?

thaw13579 · 2 months ago

An experiment is essentially a way to question ones own beliefs by probing how well they align with reality. There are some theoretical scientists, who don't experiment, but I think they also benefit from counterfactual reasoning to do their work.

thaw13579 commented on Who benefits from the MAHA anti-science push? apnews.com/article/maha-s... · Posted by u/voxadam

xhkkffbf · 2 months ago

I think it's wrong to think of MAHA as "anti-science" because science is all about questioning. Something as important as medicine should be questioned and questioned again and again. Simply dismissing them out-of-hand with such a term is more anti-science than what they're doing.

Now having said that, it's perfectly fair to criticize some of their assumptions and methods. The article, for instance, talks about raw milk. Pasteurization seems like a smart idea to me, but to assert that anyone who drinks raw milk is "anti science" is wrong. They're just approaching science differently.

thaw13579 · 2 months ago

Questioning is great, but to generate scientific knowledge, we need a few more steps, roughly speaking:

1. Ask a question 2. Form a hypothesis 3. Experiment to test it 4. Analyze results 5. Draw conclusions 6. Repeat

The MAHA folks essentially disregard this as a valid process for gathering knowledge. They occasionally talk about experiments and studies, but they are selectively chosen to support their conclusions in a posthoc way, ignoring both evidence to the contrary and basic methodological issues. When people describe them as "anti-science," I believe this is the kind of thing they have in mind.

thaw13579 commented on Sequoia COO quit over Shaun Maguire's comments about Mamdani ft.com/content/8e6de299-3... · Posted by u/amrrs

einszwei · 2 months ago

Looked at Shaun Maguire's twitter page and I find it appalling. Maybe I was naive about people in tech being more tolerant (as they both work with and build for diverse people).

thaw13579 · 2 months ago

That was previously the case from my perspective as well, but it seems to be rapidly changing.

thaw13579 commented on Who benefits from the MAHA anti-science push? apnews.com/article/maha-s... · Posted by u/voxadam

vvpan · 2 months ago

Hacker News is a little hard in these times. That it has kept politics unrelated to tech out is a great achievement, but as scientific method is being equated to flat-earth thinking by elected leaders talking about what's new in Rust seems off.

thaw13579 · 2 months ago

It's especially hard given that big tech companies and their leaders are working closely with government and explicitly supporting certain political missions, there are few truly apolitical corners of tech now.

thaw13579 commented on iPad Pro with M5 chip apple.com/newsroom/2025/1... · Posted by u/chasingbrains

apparent · 2 months ago

Yep, I have the original 11" iPad Pro from 2018. It still works flawlessly and would be perfect for this use case. Someone who needs a device for school should buy a used iPad like this, not a new one that would be overpowered for the task and would cost double. Even with the edu discount, it's over $1k with the keyboard case. Why not just buy an MBA at that point?

thaw13579 · 2 months ago

Two reasons for are the cellular connection and smaller form factor. Would love to have a MBA with those