> Most of their tech is stolen or trickles down from innovation elsewhere

Overheard at a battery conference: western battery suppliers are actually copying (or in your words, stealing) the Chinese electrolyte formulas and other designs.

Great artists steal, the US and Europe play the same game.

Wilkie Way Research | Infrastructure Engineer | Remote (US Only) + Peninsula

We're a small (<5 person) quantitative prop trading shop looking for a midcareer engineer to take ownership of core infrastructure. We place a premium on work life balance and offer profit sharing.

Stack is mostly Python (Django, scientific stack, celery) + Rust.

More details at https://www.wilkiewayresearch.com/careers.

Email me (CTO): jin@wilkiewayresearch.com

It took me a while but I think I've got it -- sports betting? (or horses, etc)

Pretty good guess but not quite. Email me if you want to chat more!

> It vastly increased the number of end users (20M+) using apps built on our SDK. This gave us significant leverage with Google. They are super supportive of the SDK and give us early access to several builds to ensure the SDK doesn’t break when they make updates to Gmail.

One of my favorite essays on "vs effective altruism" - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/effective-altruism-as-...

I jot down my notes in a google doc and paste links that I want to save.

If I really like an idea, I'll use these notes to write out a larger form memo that touches on GTM, product strategies, tech stacks, competition, etc.

At the risk of defending a faceless megacorporation, I'm curious what injuries per package look like at Amazon vs "Industry Average".

According to the article, productivity expectations per worker doubled with robotics, and Amazon has about double the injury rate per worker, so my super rough back of the envelope calculation says they should fare similarly on that metric.

If the industry alternative takes twice as many workers to do the same job, ultimately leading to approximately the same number of injured workers, has Amazon really created a safety crisis?

Yes, they have. It doesn’t matter if an employee is twice as efficient if their injury rate is twice as high. If you are going to work and have twice the risk of injury, that’s a very bad thing. This is about injuries per employee, not injuries per item picked.

Theoretically, a system could be designed where all safety standards were ignored and productivity was n times more per employee, with lower injuries per item picked, but would result in astronomical injury rates. If you were an Amazon employee, would you want to go to work where there was a 1/10 chance per day you’d be injured? A 10x more efficient warehouse employee isn’t making 10x more money, so they are seeing increased risk for no personal gain.

Have you heard of this thing called quantum computing?

Are quantum computers even relevant to AGI? I'm under the impression that the belief that human brains are quantum computers is considered fringe in both computer science and particularly neuroscience, despite having a handful of high profile proponents (notably Penrose.)

People have a common tendency to connect one thing they don't understand with another they also don't understand.

"If only AI were powered by quantum computers, then AGI would emerge."

Will never replace general computers.

It's more of a hardware to run specific types of algorithms.

The thing that nobody can tell if it works or not? What about it?

The article did say that the motivation for doing so was because AWS credits were running out .. why prematurely optimize a free resource? :)

I built some coronavirus simulations to explore the impacts of our actions in a virtual environment - let me know what you think!

Goals of this project are to spread high quality information around and use some basic monte carlo / bayesian ideas to show the impact of individual actions on the individual.

You may also be interested in https://coronavirus.simrnd.com/shopping_solo/, an earlier simulation that explores the impact of sending out 1 person to shop vs 2 per household.

The simulation engine is written in Rust at https://github.com/jinpan/covid-simulations, which is compiled to WASM to run on the browser.

Semi-related: I'm working on agent-based simulations for coronavirus, exploring our individual actions affect outcomes.

In the first simulation, I take a look at single/dual shopper households and explore how choice affects viral spread on a societal level, and then on am individual household level.

You can check them out at https://coronavirus.simrnd.com/shopping_solo/

You're making me want to make a simulation to explore how different behaviors among the populace of a geographic area can influence the spread of infection. It'd be cool to be able to set policies in a region as a behavioral control, and to simulate processes like hearsay and news reading as a mechanism for the spread of accurate and inaccurate information. You could have mechanics like testing materials, ppe availability, laboratory capacity, patient turnaround, symptom severity, et. al. control the effectiveness of different policies and other processes.

Yeah that would be incredibly useful for testing policy in a simulated environment before releasing into the wild :)

One of the hardest challenges is "How do we choose realistic parameters for how the virus spreads? Infection duration? Mortality?"

But if we can incorporate the latest research and Monte Carlo simulate with ranges for the above parameters and find policies that are robust against those parameters, I think it would be an enormously powerful policy tool. Additionally, I think it could bring transparency into the decision process, something the public lacks.

If you want to contribute to the effort I started, the simulation code is open source at https://github.com/jinpan/covid-simulations. The engine is in Rust, which is then compiled to wasm.