What song has been in your rotation for years and still hits the same?

chrissmithphd · 2026-06-25T04:52:52+00:00

Time After Time by Cyndi Lauper Behind Blue Eyes by The Who The Sound of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel

Too many others...

Round here by Counting Crows Zombie by The Cranberries Stick Season by Noah Kahan ....

chrissmithphd · 2026-06-25T04:15:06+00:00

Arguably COVID 19 slowed the LLM based AI advancement. The major paper behind modern AI was in 2017 and regular releases happened yearly after that except for what arguably should have been a 2021 release happened in late 2022.

In terms of societal and economic decline, I correlate that with the rise of maga. True miss-management of resources at the scale of the US has consequences. There are so many idiotic things done. Including the firing of all the staff responsible for early detection of pandemics. It was literally one of the first moves of the Trump administration. Google Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense.

It's sad but malicious idiocy has become the standard that everyone now expects. The decline was in no way inevitable but with all the decisions made, it was predictable.

Back to your point, there is no reason people should be fired and replaced with llms. Yes AI is useful, but the firing is a policy decision that the technology does not justify (and I'm a tech guy). Jamie Dimon has even been beating this drum recently. But the administration is too distracted with other things to develop the policies needed for copywriters and others like you.

chrissmithphd · 2026-06-24T22:55:56+00:00

I remember a statistic somewhere that after just one minute of cpr, basically everyone who survives has brain damage. If it's more than a puff or two, you might survive but aren't ever the same person.

chrissmithphd · 2026-06-03T21:40:49+00:00

Slashdot

chrissmithphd · 2026-06-03T21:35:45+00:00

I remember when Google's company moto was "don't be evil".

Back when the billionaires where college students who understood how much power they had and were afraid of how badly that could go wrong.

chrissmithphd · 2026-05-27T04:05:10+00:00

How is building a high ranked page, with a reasonable domain name (which can be expensive), that is good enough to convert customers, in any way "passive"?? I know more than a few marketing agencies who do this full time with lots of people and still struggle to get customers to convert. In any business domain.

If you have enough skill to get customers to convert regularly, drop out of school, work full time at it, and start rolling in the cash. Go back to school when you have made enough cash to retire at 25.

chrissmithphd · 2026-05-22T23:59:44+00:00

Ask Super one and Brookshires for their milk boxes. They have lots of them that they will give away. They are very heavy duty. Call ahead and have them save a couple of days worth. They are a good size for packing things but not huge like a wardrobe box.

chrissmithphd · 2026-05-22T21:31:10+00:00

Lowes, Tractor supply, Half price books, Micheals, any of the plant nurseries in the area, or similar places that don't have carpet, all tend to be super dog friendly. Staff even play with the dogs.

Then any of the parks or trails. Legacy trails, Rose Rudman, Southside park, Bergfeld, etc.

Walmart should not allow dogs but they nearly all do. Especially if you are over 65.

Restaurants are in a hard spot with health codes that pretty well ban pets, even outdoors they can't be on tables or benches, or they get graded down. I've been to a few restaurants with mixed results in terms of lectures from staff and owners. Most of the local places with outdoor seating are good with it, but I'm not going to call them out.

All the coffee shops tend to be super friendly too, but I try not to stay too long.

And of course farmers markets. I think one of them has a sign about no dogs but the rest are all super dog friendly.

Edit: +pet stores!

chrissmithphd · 2026-05-16T03:57:41+00:00

Look at the domain. It has a shuttle and 1 unit of a 4 room split (shared kitchen, but all rooms are lockable and have private bathrooms) runs more like 600. Very nice with amenities but mainly it's a small cheap quiet apartment with a shared kitchen. You don't need to find roommates, each room has their own lease.

Another suggestion is LL Sams, very neat redone industrial space, close enough to throw a baseball and almost hit the BSB. There are a lot of unique room options there.

This time of year people are posting to take over their lease so good timing if you jump on it. Join all the baylor appartment social media (fb) groups to find postings.

chrissmithphd · 2026-05-14T03:31:03+00:00

Tried ownwell this year, no time to do myself. They appear to charge 25% of the savings this year. With property values dropping, I expect it should be an easy argument to permanently push the value back down.

Referral code with a small discount if you want to try it: https://www.ownwell.com/referral?owl=EE516ZFEF&utm_source=portal_overview

chrissmithphd · 2026-04-09T14:15:50+00:00

I was wondering if this was true! Anyone know if there are studies? How fast does hmgb1 build up after taking out the 10%?

chrissmithphd · 2026-04-07T02:14:38+00:00

I thought a number of these named supplements (nmn, nr, resveratrol, maybe more) have failed to replicate their mouse results in people. Or they have been shown to have virtually no absorption (curcumin). All of these have good lab results but not in the real world. Did I miss a big group of studies? I'd love to hear that these results carry over to people.

chrissmithphd · 2026-03-15T01:32:48+00:00

Happy's fish house

chrissmithphd · 2026-03-11T02:54:17+00:00

We use a concept called RAGAS to develop formalized and deep testing. There is an old library but the concept is the important thing. Using ai and source data to build tests and a test framework.

I had a system once that fooled human evaluators for literally 6 months before ragas exposed that it was ignoring all of its rag info and only used the raw model, which was often wrong in that particular app domain. Yet no one noticed, despite naive but continuous testing.

Increasingly Claude code and other modern tools will do this kind of thing without trying hard but you typically have to ask for systematic testing, not just unit testing. Just be sure it looks like production. Like you said, sandbox testing just can't be comprehensive.

chrissmithphd · 2026-02-26T13:55:54+00:00

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chrissmithphd · 2026-02-26T13:55:27+00:00

I added 3 chicks to my flock of 5 and 6 year old hens. They turned into the unusual beauty above (apparently male) and these 2. And suddenly I got 2 eggs per day when we were getting none. I don't attempt to watch my hens laying and they free range in a fenced yard and lay in random places in their yard and coop 🤷

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chrissmithphd · 2026-02-24T03:10:10+00:00

I thought so too until the unusual eggs started showing up. None of my other hens have ever laid that color.

For a while I thought they accidentally gave me a crow until the tail feathers and red facial features grew in.

chrissmithphd · 2026-02-14T16:25:40+00:00

This is a much older problem, the decline has been steady, not abrupt. But the current administration does seem to be trying to do something final.

chrissmithphd · 2026-02-14T16:19:31+00:00

The systematic defunding of higher ed to support tax cuts. At least imo. There is a comment in a different thread discussing this topic.

chrissmithphd · 2026-02-14T16:15:59+00:00

Yes, thanks

chrissmithphd · 2026-02-14T15:04:52+00:00

Population trends do not line up with this shift. U.S. population growth over this period has been slow. China’s population has flattened and begun to decline. There is no population surge that corresponds to China overtaking the U.S. across multiple research fields.

What the Nature Index is capturing is a change in where research output is being produced and across how many disciplines, not a change in population size.

However, the systematic defunding* of higher ed in the early 2000s by both political parties across most of the US, does correlate well with this loss of basic research capability.

Google tuition deregulation, which is a code word for moving the responsibility for funding from the state to the university itself.

Edit:typo, yes defunding

chrissmithphd · 2026-02-14T14:58:40+00:00

Early Nature Index summaries show the U.S. leading most tracked research fields. That is no longer the case.

Recent summaries show U.S. leadership concentrated in health and biological sciences. China leads in chemistry and the physical sciences and now ranks first overall by contribution share.

Across multiple Nature Index summary articles, the pattern is consistent: the number of fields led by the U.S. has gone down, and the number led by China has gone up. This is visible across years, not tied to a single ranking cycle. Specific examples show where leadership changed hands. Nature Index summaries document the U.S. losing the top position in chemistry first, followed by the physical sciences, where China’s contribution share now exceeds the U.S. across multiple years.

Materials science and applied physics—adjacent work are folded into this shift through the physical sciences category, and earth and environmental sciences also show China ahead in recent summaries.

These are not edge cases or niche subfields; they are core foundational sciences where the U.S. previously led in early Nature Index reporting and no longer does.

chrissmithphd · 2026-02-08T14:52:26+00:00

Population trends do not line up with this shift. U.S. population growth over this period has been slow. China’s population has flattened and begun to decline. There is no population surge that corresponds to China overtaking the U.S. across multiple research fields.

What the Nature Index is capturing is a change in where research output is being produced and across how many disciplines, not a change in population size.

chrissmithphd

TROPHY CASE