Talk With Nakul
Just listing out stuff that we talked about:
- Nakul’s cool new drone that he returned in 2 weeks - he took some truly incredible photos with them, and got to explore a lot of communities around the area in doing so as well.
- Nakul definitely has some amount of experience in selling his services / making money on the side with doing stuff - he told me this side business he tried to make selling these cheap attachments that stick to your phone and you can put your Juul in. Apparently he spent $50 getting some Instagram account with 60000 followers to advertise his product, and 10 of those people actually got it. He then had some tie up with some Chinese factory, which would ultimately ship the product directly to them. Also lol, it was free but there was $10 shipping.
- Talked about Nakul’s girlfriend’s friend and her boyfriend getting murdered by a high school kid. That’s actually insane. https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/post-tribune/ct-ptb-valparaiso-homicide-charges-st-0305-story.html It was on the news on like 10 different websites/newspapers.
uid: 202007152352 tags: #talks
Mulan’s dad’s political ideology
- Doesn’t think a lot of these issues will work, because left is so extreme
- People are afraid of admitting they’re not PC, because they’ll get attacked
- A lot of conservatives get attacked
- Democrats think you have a responsibility to help people, vs Republicans think that people can fend for themselves 202006042317
- Jun thinks that affirmative action helps one group of people, while screwing over others (Asians) 202006050127
- Did admit that the black people who made it out of poverty usually end up really good people
- Have go to and encourage the people to have jobs
- Spend the money on education, make sure teachers are paid more
- People are against the Democrats because they funnel everything into social welfare, instead of institutions
- Institutions should work, but a lot of the time it doesn’t work
- On the other hand, just socially helping people out doesn’t always work either 202006042317
- Jun thinks that the debate about transgender bathrooms is dumb, because it’s not that bad for people to have to go to the women’s bathroom
- You should be able to handle it first of all, and bathrooms are built a certain way, because of convenience. It’s not that big of a deal
- Single gender bathroom is fine, he agrees with it too
- Doesn’t understand why it became a policy issue, seems extraneous
- Transgender community was pushing for small things first
His response to the instagram posts: 202006020038
uid: 202006080251 tags: #politics
# The Food Expiration Dates You Should Actually Follow
source: https://ift.tt/jBdUbEW tags: #literature uid: 202302202126 —
MK - TL;DR, most things (including oils, flour, store bread if it’s refrigerated, condiments, etc, can last a while. )
Want longer-lasting milk? Look for “ultrahigh temperature,” or “UHT,” on the label. Milk in these cartons has been pasteurized at high temperatures (275 degrees Fahrenheit: hot enough to destroy not only viruses and bacteria, but bacterial spores as well), then aseptically pumped and sealed into cartons. Most organic milk brands undergo UHT. (Bonus: In the blind taste tests I’ve conducted, most people preferred the sweeter flavor of UHT milk.)
That’s 60 full days! But odds are good that they’ll still be palatable for several weeks longer than that.
MK - Talking about eggs having a longer shelf-life than you would expect
Bing: “I Will Not Harm You Unless You Harm Me First”
tags: #literature #inbox uid: 202302201659 —
The very fact that they’re so good at writing fictional stories and poems and jokes should give us pause: how can they tell the difference between facts and fiction, especially when they’re so good at making up fiction?
A search engine that summarizes results is a really useful thing. But a search engine that adds some imaginary numbers for a company’s financial results is not. Especially if it then simulates an existential crisis when you ask it a basic question about how it works. Source: https://read.readwise.io/read/01gschkgvemwc7t5fzhsq0qsah
I’d love to hear from expert AI researchers on this. My hunch as an enthusiastic amateur is that a language model on its own is not enough to build a reliable AI-assisted search engine.
I think there’s another set of models needed here—models that have real understanding of how facts fit together, and that can confidently tell the difference between facts and fiction. Source: https://read.readwise.io/read/01gschm0vvpnwg4ycg4febwc94
01-29-2023
uid: 202301290801 tags: #journal —
I have a bunch of thoughts after reading “Build your metadata library” 202301291444:
- Most things in my life that I do casually, like watching sports, listening to music, reading articles, etc., I can track, and therefore continue to reward myself for doing what I’m already doing. I can also use tracking to incentivize myself to do what I know I should be doing but don’t feel like doing at the moment.
- I have a very constructed method of tracking the articles I’ve read. And I’m not happy with it, particularly because it requires disrupting my reading flow by opening an article I’m already reading in Instapaper first.
- I have several tools that I’ve used and are specialized for a specific purpose, but I don’t have a centralized source that I can collect all of them (and then use to review what I’ve been looking at every day). I’ve tried to do this by having some ad-hoc scripts that I can manually run and then copy-paste into my personal notebook, but this takes too much effort to do consistently.
Lagrangian Mechanics
Just read a bunch of stuff to re-learn the principle of stationary action, Lagrangian mechanics, and the derivation of the Euler-Lagrange equations. After thinking about it for long enough, I think I understand it. Here are some links that helped:
- https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-intuitive-ways-to-understand-the-Principle-of-Least-Action-or-Hamiltons-principle
- Specifically this answer: https://qr.ae/prnqQn
- https://profoundphysics.com/lagrangian-mechanics-for-beginners/
The Wikipedia article is interesting, although it took a couple of stares to understand what was going on:
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Stationary-action_principle
An important thing to note is that at the classical mechanics level, the principle of least action doesn’t have an intuitive explanation (why do physical systems behave this way?). The “true” explanation lies at the quantum electrodynamics level and is related to Feynman’s path integral. Look at this answer for more: https://qr.ae/prnzXu
uid: 202212292118 tags: #knowledge