> Your profile reads like a 'Hacker News Bingo' card: NASA, PhD, Python, 'Ask HN' about cheating, and a strong opinion on Reddit's community. The only thing missing is a post about your custom ergonomic keyboard made from recycled space shuttle parts.
I end up asking the same question when experimenting with tools like Cursor. When it can one-shot a small feature, it works like magic. When it struggles, and the context gets poisoned and I have to roll back commits and retry part of the way through something, it hits a point where it was probably easier for me to just write it. Or maybe template it and have it finish it. Or vice versa. I guess the point being that best practices have yet to truly be established, but totally hands-off uses have not worked well for me so far.
Why commit halfway through implementing something with Cursor? Can you not wait until it’s created a feature or task that has been validated and tests written for it?
Why wait until everything is finalized before committing? Git is distributed/local, so while one philosophy is to interact with it as little as possible, the other one is to commit early and commit often, and easily be able to rollback to a previous (working) state, with the caveat that you clean-up history before firing off a PR.
Well, same statement applies. Rolling back commits is also O(1) and just as easy. And if you branch to start with it's not even a "rollback" through the commit history, it's just a branch switch. Feel like OP has never used git before or something.
Another reason why the idea of AI agents for science hasn't made much sense to me. Research is an extremely collaborative set of activities. How good would a researcher be who is very good at literature review, but never actually talks to anyone, goes to any conferences, etc?
You and I have matching stories, unfortunately. I've made a point of sending my sons to public school for this reason. Now, of course this also means that I shopped for a district that aligned with my expectations. But would never want a repeat of my own experience.
I think being accountable for your work to a person who isn't in your family is actually an important thing to learn.
It also turns out, parents aren't really qualified to be teachers just because they believe that they are.
I mean, to some extent, the non-aeronatics part also has some of this. SpaceX picked up propulsive landing and friction stir welding expertise from NASA, to name just two things. (This is not to imply there is anything underhanded about this.)
I think the way to make this work would be to ease transition of technical experts to/from private industry, carrying the know how in their heads.
Isn't gradient descent basically PID over parameters?
And tricks like momentum basically a low-pass filter integrated in the PID loop? It's quite weird how not that many concepts from analog electronics domain have gotten carried over to ML.
I'm finding it difficult to find objective assessments of the impact of what has happened in East Palestine. It seems like there are interests in dismissing the impacts entirely, but there are others that seems to want to overstate the impacts significantly. Does anyone else feel this way?
I think part of the problem is that a really thorough investigation from the NTSB (https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20230214.as...) will by definition not be quick. We'll definitely get answers, but it will take time. As a result, we have an information gap which is quickly filled with tons of speculation.
I think it's fair to be concerned until we know that the impact was somehow limited. Toxic fumes and spills are incredibly dangerous. Not just deadly in the short term, they can cause severe long-term health problems. It's not like the spillage/smoke just simply disappears, so it's good to be concerned about them until there's proof the impact is minor.
Other than introducing FUD about the cleanup costs, why would you believe there is overstatement on the impact of the disaster? What metric has you doubting the impact statement? What are your qualifications to make this assessment?
I'm thinking about what I've read on social media (twitter, reddit, etc) about the event. The posts getting the most engagement/traction are convinced this is larger than Chernobyl. However, relevant authorities do not seem to agree with this.
But I have no environmental sciences credentials to speak of.
> I'm thinking about what I've read on social media (twitter, reddit, etc) about the event.
Social media is social media. It requires critical thinking skills to navigate what you can trust versus what you cannot. I would have put this point in your GP, though. The GP otherwise reads like it has an agenda.
> relevant authorities do not seem to agree with this.
They're (probably) a more reliable source than social media, so I'd have to refer to the relevant authorities.
Social media (likely) isn't out there gathering soil samples, air quality metrics, and water quality metrics in a uniform or scientific method that would qualify 'social media' to make a judgement call about the impact of the disaster.
I think the overt issue is that both state and fed gov completely bungled their response. Their absurd, stubborn silence, even after the issue has been lighting up social media for a week, gives the impression they know it's deadly but don't care -- whether or not that's the truth.
That is the "conspiracy" non-conspiracy minded people like myself agree they bungled their response but that just confirms my long held position that the government is completely incompetent and we look to them for guidance, or solutions to a given problem at our own peril.
As the famous axiom goes... "Government: If you think you have problems now, wait until you see our solutions."
Their bungling of the response is completely predictable, extending a long long history of bungled responses to emergencies. Of course the predicable reaction to this bungling is not to simply acknowledge the reality of government incompetence, no.. it will be as it always is a mix of not enough money, not enough power, and capitalism / lack of regulation that will be to blame. Government agencies are always pure as the driven snow, and with out fault
Government is always measured by their intentions, never their results.
Eh, the problem here is you're taking 'government' as a single entity, but it's not at all.
If it were up to the singular 'government' there would have been better brakes on the trains and the company would have been following the law on transporting the chemicals. All the issues at hand were well known about for years.
The problem here is very little government but instead for profit corporations going "How can I squeeze more blood out of this penny" and look for ways to get out of the regulations that prevent disasters in the first place.
Really no one does a 'great' job of dealing with disasters, hence why they are disasters. The best regulations/forms of government prevent the damned disaster based on the inevitable outcome of human greed in the first place.
Right on schedule here we have exactly that I predicted. Government is good, they just did not have enough power to stop the evil capitalism... because the evil capitalism forced other parts of the government to stip the good parts of the government of power...
Responses like that should be laughable but far too many people believe that narrative. Never mind that rail is one of the most heavily regulated industries, and even if more regulation was passed the next disaster will be again "well there is still not enough regulation" because again government is measured by intention not results
There is never "enough" regulation, there is never "enough" power transferred to government, and it could never ever be that government failed in their duty to enforce existing regulations, or failed to use their existing power. No it is always evil capitalism corrupting the pure government preventing the noble public servants from protecting us all...
Never mind that the regulation that everyone talks about (the brake system) has been shown that even if that regulation was in place it would not have applied to this train at all
Never mind that we do not even know what the cause of the derailment was at this point.
It has to be that norfolk southern tried to "squeeze more blood out of this penny" as evil capitalist, and the good pure government could have stopped it if they were just given more power, more money, or more regulation....
Same story over and over again through out time, Authoritarian Statists have no other tale to tell
"Chronic libertarian eaten by bears after no other libertarian neighbors want to pool together for trash service. His last words were 'at least the communists didn't get me'."
Someone would think this is larger than Chernobyl if they were critically uninformed on just how big and stupid Chernobyl was. Burning the contents of the train cars will destroy a lot of the dangerous chemical compounds you originally had. A vast amount of the danger by weight is gone. The biggest issue is determining the dioxin output.
With a nuclear fire that is not the case. When things go out of control you make even more radioactive stuff, and you can't even clean up the mess in the first place without dying and killing all of the equipment that is working on it. It is just an unimaginable disaster that most of us can't fully comprehend.
It's being pretty actively done by politicians on one side. I've seen lots trying to somehow blame Biden for it for example even though it's completely irrelevant.
