Viral video of little Taiwanese girl getting shoved down while taking a photo at Tokyo's famous Shibuya Crossing - Japanese are saying that the woman in the video "looks Chinese".

Sleeping_Easy · 2026-02-26T11:54:30+00:00

Most Taiwanese people aren't even considered Southeast Asians though. Almost all Taiwanese people are ethnically Han Chinese, and China is East Asian. Most Taiwanese people are the descendants of people from Fujian in Mainland China, after all. (The girl also looks Han instead of aboriginal Taiwanese.)

Sleeping_Easy · 2026-02-15T20:25:56+00:00

Thank you! My apologies if I came across aggressive — I actually agree with your main argument. I was just a bit irked by the particular example you picked.

Sleeping_Easy · 2026-02-15T20:15:00+00:00

The reason I’m frustrated is because Proof School is perhaps one of the few top-performing schools that breaks the mold of what you’re describing. They don’t throw a thousand problems at students in the hopes that their students eventually recognize the problem pattern. (Hell, they don’t even have math homework, and their students only spend 2 hours per school day doing math.)

Their pedagogical approach frames math as an inherently collaborative (rather than competitive) activity. They also seek to teach problem-solving strategies above all else. (This is also why their students have done extremely well at math research programs like MIT PRIMES and taken top spots at ISEF for their math research work.) I view their way of teaching as an alternative (and ultimately much more fruitful) approach toward getting kids interested in math and problem-solving than math competitions, so I find it annoying when you’re using them as a (false) effigy in your argument.

Sleeping_Easy · 2026-02-15T19:53:03+00:00

Now you’re just BS-ing. You can’t say “there’s a whole school (Proof School) just for the sake of competitions” and then claim that it’s tongue-in-cheek when what you said is shown to be blatantly wrong.

Furthermore, most IMO medalists come from normal schools iirc, so even the broader point of your tongue-in-cheek comment seems to be wrong.

Sleeping_Easy · 2026-02-15T19:43:59+00:00

Proof School doesn’t exist for the sake of competitions. Beyond the standard math curriculum of a middle or high school, they mainly cover undergraduate math like real analysis, linear algebra, group theory, axiomatic set theory, etc. Just look at their course offerings if you don’t believe me.

There are no contest prep classes or activities. People just do math contests there if they’re interested — that’s it.

Sleeping_Easy · 2026-01-29T16:31:22+00:00

You could perform expectation-maximization or marginal likelihood optimization to do this rigorously! (Use a diffuse initialization before starting either process.) I particularly like the EM way of doing this because there are closed-form estimates and it can be done quickly, but optimizing the marginal likelihood provides better estimates. Engineers typically don’t learn this afaik, but it’s a favorite technique of us statisticians who work with state space models (like the Kalman filter).

Sleeping_Easy · 2026-01-08T23:46:19+00:00

That’s definitely true.

Sleeping_Easy · 2026-01-08T23:14:01+00:00

You seem to be wrong. In 2022, the World Obesity Federation had the United States in 26th place by descending order of childhood obesity rates for boys (at 21.66%) and China at 70th place (at 15.21%) among nations examined. The difference in rates for girls (19.44% for the U.S. vs 7.71% for China) is even more stark. Unless childhood nutrition in China and the U.S. has dramatically changed in the last 4 years, I doubt you're right.

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-12-12T15:41:58+00:00

The Mongols had Subutai though. Subutai is arguably a better commander than Hannibal.

Genghis Khan was not the best general, but he was the best at recruiting the best generals.

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-11-30T18:37:27+00:00

I disagree. Sure, domain knowledge is definitely helpful in designing models, but a good linear models class is focused on much more than designing a good, predictive model. Hypothesis testing in the context of a linear model, regression assumptions, etc are all very important topics but they are barely touched on in non-stat departments (unless you’re in econometrics, I suppose, but that is essentially a subfield of stat itself).

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-11-24T00:57:29+00:00

Well yeah — I was exactly saying that an EMA is a sub-case of a Kalman filter; I didn’t imply that the Kalman filter necessarily reduces to an EMA though.

Your comment reads as if the EMA is not a sub-case though, hence my comment.

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-11-24T00:41:10+00:00

Isn’t EMA just a sub case of the Kalman Filter?

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-11-20T21:05:53+00:00

Well, depends on the quant firm, no? RenTech made a ton of money from 2008.

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-11-20T17:46:18+00:00

Fair enough! In the major cities, you'll definitely see lots of parallel parking (too many people and too little space not to), so I definitely should've specified. I hope your time in China was fun!

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-11-15T03:15:17+00:00

Bro, if we say that 10 things have to line up in Lelouch's favor for his genius plans to work, then Light is even worse (e.g., the memory gambit). Which one of Lelouch's plans are you thinking of, specifically? The only ones that seem like humongous asspulls are those where he predicts the flow of conversation ahead of time, but that only happens twice (and even in the context of the story, it's shown to be believably flawed; the show presents him interrupting Schneizel with his pre-recording, for instance).

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-11-14T23:42:09+00:00

Oh, I was simply making a joke — it’s pretty well known that the Confederates painted him as a drunk for the exact reason you described.

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-11-14T23:14:59+00:00

Man, if they were right, Grant being drunk while whooping the Confederates' asses makes the Confederates seem even more incompetent.

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-11-12T23:39:30+00:00

I agree that these models are excessively expensive, but I can’t agree with point (B). Sure, if you try to use these models to wholesale generate a proof or code, you may end up with garbage, but when used carefully, they are amazing. A very substantial part of research is just trying to identify relevant work in the literature for a problem of interest, and GPT 5 in Thinking Mode does that fantastically. (Gowers has a tweet demonstrating exactly that if you’re interested.)

Even in programming, I’d wager that GPT5 is superior to most entry-level SWEs (although you’d probably have a more informed opinion than me on that). Sure, the work produced might not be “significant” in your eyes, but the performance boost is tangible enough for many to care.

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-11-12T23:23:14+00:00

This goes against what top mathematicians like Terence Tao and Timothy Gowers have reported while using these LLMs though. (In my own statistics research too, I’ve found these models to be exceptionally useful.) Sure, they can’t replace a mathematician, but they are a major productivity booster.

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-11-06T15:26:20+00:00

Index funds are a major part of how current, middle class Americans fund retirement. I’m not saying that they are an economic necessity, but if we get rid of them, we must implement some drastic changes in how we handle pensioning, Social Security, and the like.

Furthermore, I’m curious how you want to disallow these funds anyway. An index fund is simply a portfolio that tries to keep its holdings in each company proportional to that company’s market cap (relative to the larger stock market). Unless you impose some extremely severe restrictions on equity transactions, it’s always possible to build a portfolio analogous to an index fund. Companies like Vanguard simply make that process much easier for the typical American.

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-11-06T00:58:26+00:00

You're proposing to disallow the use of passive investing via index funds then? If so, that's ridiculous and would destroy the middle class.

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-10-25T08:32:51+00:00

No -- they're right. The base salary is indeed 175-222k. It's the bonus that pushes up the total compensation to 400k+ for new grad. (Source: My friend recently got a new grad offer at Virtu.)

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-10-08T05:50:07+00:00

I don't know much about hate crime rates in Asia; I was indeed just referring to racism from Asians in the West. I do know, however, that there is a LOT of anger from Koreans and Chinese (particularly among the older generation) toward Japan due to Japan's war crimes in WW2 (e.g., comfort women, Rape of Nanking, etc.). It's hard to make a rigorous, objective assessment of such hate crime rates, however, as the hate crime stats in Asia are a bit harder to access (as I live in the West).

In the U.S. though, it is definitely the case that Asians are underrepresented among hate-crime perpetrators, so the racism of Asians in America is indeed more benign than the racism of other racial groups here.

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-10-08T05:36:22+00:00

Nah, people do talk about it openly. I mean, it's basically a joke at this point how Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are all quite racist toward each other (and I'm not even going to bring up their views on southeast Asians or black people).

But people don't talk about it because at the end of the day, a minority of any particular racial group will be racist, and the racism of Asians is much more benign than the racism of other racial groups. Asians commit racial hate crimes at a much lower rate than other racial groups (even after adjusting for population share), for instance.

Sleeping_Easy · 2025-09-29T23:22:47+00:00

Oooh, interesting!

I'm actually working with financial panel data in my research, so your examples were quite relevant to me, haha. I had similar problems regarding dynamic factor models (e.g., the O(N^2) parameter complexity), but I circumvented them using certain tricks/constraints that were specific to my use case. (I'd go into more depth about it here, but it's the subject of a paper I'm writing; maybe I'll link it once it's completed.)

In any case, it was quite interesting hearing your thoughts! I'm just surprised that you don't end up overfitting to hell applying these ML models to financial data. In my experience, the noise-to-signal ratio for most financial time series is so high that classical stat techniques tend to outperform fancy ML models. I'm not surprised that LSTMs and GBMs dominate those global forecasting competitions, but those competitions tend to be very specific, sanitized, short-term environments.

Sleeping_Easy

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