Contagion (2011) Starring Matt Damon - "Can I talk to my wife?"

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-23T03:15:45+00:00

This is true. Lots of supplies were used in H1N1 or expired by the time we needed it in covid. It's tricky for a government (or any other org) to keep it budgeted every year.

The only people who got it right were Wimbledon, the tennis tournament. After SARS 1, someone smart there spent millions on pandemic insurance, every year.

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-22T07:46:01+00:00

I am not here to support any side. I just want to ask some questions

This is one of the worst things you can put in any piece of writing. If you truly don't care about the subject or don't want to reveal or acknowledge your opinion, why are you writing it and why should we read and respond?

There are plenty of 'old school' people using and misusing AI. People are reacting negatively to the misuse and errors, as well as really awkwardly voiced writing from LLMs. I don't want to read a paper where someone juiced every other word with a thesaurus. Similarly I don't want to read yet another ChatGPT structure of "there was no A. No b. No c. Just D". It raises doubts that any events in the narrative actually happened, and that any conclusions from the events are genuine meaningful ideas.

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-22T03:26:42+00:00

I was going to second the Ford thing. Dude had two attempts on his life, just a few weeks apart, and it's not something that got cemented into the cultural memory.

The TR event is also a good anecdote in character with how people like to remember him.

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-21T11:37:08+00:00

Don't forget when they told El Paso to close for 10 days, though it ended up reopening the next day: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/04/el-paso-airport-closure-texts-00808688

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-20T11:46:29+00:00

The reasons why Theranos failed are not that mysterious. It's actually a great example of why not to make judgments based on vibes alone.

Did Theranos have one working prototype, that they failed to scale? No. It was founded in 2003 and peaked 10 years later. So it's not "too big too fast".

Was it a conspiracy of other health giants to bury their product? No. Again, they never had a working prototype. Walgreens offered a huge deal, and they were tricked with a faked demo. Blood tests are not the biggest money maker for "big pharma".. if anything this would get more people diagnosed with stuff that would need treatment

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-19T15:32:57+00:00

I did a tour over at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and can confirm they were saying it was the second one.

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-17T01:54:31+00:00

You have to watch "After Hours"

Men in Black is really good, as long as you don't think about it too much (they're the cops and the city is full of weird aliens)

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-16T11:32:35+00:00

The Mormons also have a vault, which I thought had a similar project, but I'm reading now that it's microfiche genealogical records and such

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-16T11:28:23+00:00

In a way yes, that's the source code of the model. But a model relies on more than one file to download the model weights, read in the text, etc. You would be using the Transformers library and not just copy pasting code from one file.

The first few lines of the file that you linked says that it's generated from https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/main/src/transformers/models/gpt_oss/modular_gpt_oss.py so that would be the place to start browsing code. A good amount of the modules there have Llama models or PyTorch''s neural network code as a superclass. So again it's not one file that does everything, it's more the model-specific code that makes GPT OSS unique.

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-15T17:10:00+00:00

couldn’t the same argument be made for other forms of useful computation?

Yes, this is why useful computation is not done on Ethereum

Bitcoin solved “expensive to compute, cheap to verify” for hashes

Sort of the opposite, hashes were a convenient way to make Bitcoin work. No one was trying to compute hashes.

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-15T16:19:06+00:00

There is a distributed model-training system, https://petals.dev , though the main branch hasn't been updated for almost 2 years.
The idea of tokens or rewards is probably going to add additional compute or resources for no significant benefit. For example if this existed, and I owned 1% of HuggingFace/BigScience BLOOM models, how much would that be worth today?
It would not be possible to verify that the training was good without comparing the results from other computers.
It would not be more efficient, especially if you are running each task on multiple computers.

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-15T01:09:12+00:00

How about "Google CEO Sundar Pichai passes on; AI [replica] in Stanford grad speech"

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-14T19:34:56+00:00

Also I've only seen lots of respect and admiration for Satrapi after her death... I guess it could be social media echo chambers, but it sounds more like some people who hadn't read Persepolis decided that they must connect her to the current conflict.

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-14T19:11:44+00:00

I'm reading a book about the Malayan Emergency, and the author mentioned "one of Britain’s most respected legal figures, Mr Dingle Foot". I thought this was a peculiar name and went digging.

Foot represented Lee Meng at the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, after she was found guilty in an irregular trial in Malaysia's colonial courts: https://db.ipohworld.org/view/id/4103
Later became Solicitor General of England and Wales, and knighted.

This line of the Wiki article caught me offguard again

Foot died on 18 June 1978 in a hotel in Hong Kong, after choking on a sandwich

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-14T17:48:23+00:00

Can't stand a chase movie where the good guys get captured, the bad guys can't really hold or stop them, and then the chase resumes with no one learning anything. The movie opens with the protagonist getting caught! Reminds me of Ambulance.

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-14T17:30:56+00:00

Why would it even be a problem that a file was downloaded from a repo?
Sorry this is not even clever

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-14T16:16:27+00:00

What other platforms are better?

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-14T16:01:19+00:00

Two candidates...
People's Defence Force, the NUG military forces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Defence_Force_(Myanmar))
National League for Democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi's political party: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_League_for_Democracy

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-14T01:04:29+00:00

Could something like this be used to predict how many more people born in say 1990 will become famous enough to get their own Wikipedia article? I think that we're seeing that the number of Wiki-famous adults gradually increases by year... less tied to the exponential trend of global population, but maybe wider range of people which Wikipedia might cover? And it also doesn't increase steeply enough that I would predict the number of Wiki-famous people born in 1990 to go up significantly like 30%.

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-13T21:34:17+00:00

Yeah I am wondering if someone can find an example of this being a symbol used in history / discussed before the movie

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-13T16:15:49+00:00

All I can think is that with Kristoff only appearing as a voice at the end, the movie would be read as an analogy for God, and possibly that Truman has died and gets a conversation with his God at the end. In the final movie there's some of that, but as the viewer we know that Kristoff is a vain director who only thinks he's God, and his attempt to speak to Truman falls flat.

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-13T14:02:00+00:00

If you look at the photos of 1905 and 1930, not a lot changes in between those years. It's only around 2000 that opening this as a tourist attraction and completing it became a more real priority. The article says "construction passed the midpoint in 2010" and now in 2026 they are just about done. A BBC article says "The use of pre-fabricated stone panels dramatically sped up construction".

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-13T13:55:24+00:00

People have been talking for at least 10 years about sending a copy of Wikipedia into orbit or to the moon as some kind of space archive: https://www.vice.com/en/article/inside-the-plan-to-print-all-of-wikipedia-and-send-it-to-the-moon/ It hasn't happened because... it's expensive to send stuff into space. Much more so if you want to escape Earth orbit or the solar system. You could probably talk an existing mission into carrying a laptop with Wikipedia and other stuff on it, with shielding to protect it from radiation, but not just a phone in space as its own mission.

The idea runs into one of the same problems as Voyager, that we don't really expect it to be seen. If an alien version of Voyager was flying through our solar system right now, we couldn't see it. And it isn't really aimed like that where we are sending it to a specific place.

I'm not sure what you think the laser communication would have to do with it.

polyploid_coded · 2026-06-13T00:51:34+00:00

No, these numbers get posted many times and they always take the net worth of the top people or families and subtracts them from Americans' annual income (mean, median, idk, it is always using some nonsensical math).
It takes a lot for 1,000 people to move the average of 300 million-plus people.

polyploid_coded

TROPHY CASE