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Placeholder. I followed through on a travel insurance claim and actually managed to get to the end. Received a check in the mail . This is for medical expenses from a story I wrote about earlier 1 . I have paid for travel insurance many times and only once prior to this case, did I really need it. In 2015, I got conjunctivitis on travel abroad and found myself picking up the eye drops for this in an airport pharmacy in Frankfurt. The drops were only about maybe 11€ so I did not file a claim. That would have been silly. The policy costs $100 typically. ...

Saw a bee on my roof this morning which I hadn’t seen before. It was a cold morning. The bee was still and sitting. Some shifting of weight with the wind. I took a photo of this bee. But there is a bee whose photo I could not ever take before, because ever since I started coming to this rooftop every day for a year, during the warmer days there would almot always be another bee a kind of yellow jacket bee, that would always aggressively say hello right up to your face, so there was never really a time I would attempt or even think of taking its photo as it tries to hover in front of my face. ...

I got a laugh, showing this silly 😛 before and after to a family member recently. But this expensive silliness is just an example of an otherwise very versatile technique. I remember still for most of the brief lifetime of ChatGPT that this kind of image manipulation using a prompt, with autoencoder latent space manipulation was not possible. The only models available for most of ChatGPT history were like DALL-E text to image word2vec types, trained by using a dataset of text and image pairs. ...

At my work, our team meets daily to discuss our goings on but I think the part I think everyone gets the most utility from is the affectionately named parking lot, where we talk through issues that are blocking people in their efforts and the team does ad hoc resolution sessions. I still recall when a colleague had introduced this practice to our team a while back, as a modification to the typical standup. I think her idea was from the fact that during the de rigueur stand up three question updates, people would get caught up in discussions and it felt quite rushed. But by deferring these to the end, the feeling of the rush went away because everyone had a chance to say their piece. ...

Of course, when Apple Notes added math, I thought and still think it’s really clever. But noticing just now a good reason to check the math haha 😅 I was checking some walking pace analysis because for some reason haha, my Strava doesnt consider walking a work out so it doesnt give you pace popped into Apple Notes, 12:18 minutes /0.56mi ‎ = 32.143 minutes/mi 45:10 minutes / 2.21mi ‎ = 4.525 minutes/mi I just am starting to get into walking I guess so I dont know the numbers but haha the above two felt way too different. 🤔. ...

About a year ago, 2024-08-22, I was reading Leopold Aschenbrenner’s post1 on AGI and I had jotted down a musing about a scaling law observations, but I forgot to write about it. I found my note today. So I get that it is possible to look at charts comparing compute and performance and many conclude scaling laws mean AGI is inevitable. I like Yann Lecun’s perspective here that if transformer models are giant lookup tables, then making them bigger will make them appear more impressive, but this is not sustainable. ...

This year, and last, Ive been glad Databricks changed one simple thing that has nothing to do with fancy ML algorithms or distributed computing optimization, and thats the ability to interact with workspace files on the python level. Prior to Databricks 11.3 , the workspace could only contain notebooks and folders but no plain files. If you used python to do import os os.getcwd() you would see /databricks/driver and you could just use this cluster file system to copy files from outside blob systems for python file processing like say to read some csv into pandas and convert that to a spark dataframe but there was no notion of interacting with the actual file system where your notebooks lived (aka the workspace). ...

I was recently trying to understand why the asking cost on an insurance claim for a set of hand and wrist xrays, was quite high. The provider put this on two associated bills , and the amounts looked quite steep also per my look at https://www.fairhealthconsumer.org/ , according to the lookup for the two Current Procedural Terminology or CPT codes, on the invoices. One cool thing though is, that recently I looked at the provider’s page here, ...

Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You from maybe over 10 years now, conveyed that Steve Jobs was using hindsight in recommending you to follow your passion. Don’t be a firefighter, astronaut or ballerina. Just do what let’s you put food on the table. Cal’s later work is on doing reducing distractions and slowing down to meet your aims; less is more. Did Cal end up asking you to focus after all? ...

DRAFT… Recently I went on a trip, to Kraków, where during the trip I got to try out the medical system and got to compare this with an experience in the U.S. too. In Kraków, I went on a traditional raft during the trip and prior to that, in the U.S. I was attempting to understand some long standing pain in my wrists. One of the things to do in the Polish countryside is to raft with the local Gorals1 who live in the forest areas, near the Poland/ Slovak border. Involved in herding and forestry, but at one point they got into rafting and a tourist attraction they organize is to go on a large raft made out of six canoes tied together by ropes. The joke is that you have to hold them tightly with your adductors in case the ropes give way. The trip is a lot of fun because the flisak (or raftsman) keeps you engaged with jokes about names of mountains and about friendly rivalries with the bordering Slovakia, of which is separated by the River Dunajec. ...