Newtra

Honestly, I don’t think that there’s room for a competitor until a whole new paradigm is found. PyTorch’s community is the biggest and still growing. With their recent focus on compilation, not only are TF and Jax losing any chance at having an advantage, but the barrier to entry for new competitors is becoming much higher. Compilation takes a LOT of development time to implement, and it’s hard to ignore 50-200% performance boosts.

Community size tends to ultimately drive open source software adoption. You can see the same with the web frameworks - in the end, most people didn’t learn React because it was the best available library, they learned it because the massive community had published so many tutorials and driven so many job adverts that it was a no-brainer to choose it over Angular, Vue, etc. Only the paradigm-shift libraries like Svelte and Htmx have had a chance at chipping away at React’s dominance.

The easiest way to get the basics is to search for articles, online courses, and youtube videos about the specific modules you’re interested in. Papers are written for people who are already deep in the field. You’ll get there, but they’re not the most efficient way to get up to speed. I have no experience with textbooks.

It helps to think of PyTorch as just a fancy math library. It has some well-documented frameworky structure (nn.Module) and a few differentiation engines, but all the deep learning-specific classes/functions (Conv2d, BatchNorm1d, ReLU, etc.) are just optimized math under the hood.

You can see the math by looking for projects that reimplement everything in numpy, e.g. picoGPT or ConvNet in NumPy.

If you can’t get your head around the tensor operations, I suggest searching for “explainers”. Basically for every impactful module there will be a bunch of “(module) Explained” articles or videos out there, e.g. Grouped Convolution, What are Residual Connections. There are also ones for entire models, e.g. The Illustrated Transformer. Once you start googling specific modules’ explainers, you’ll find people who have made mountains of them - I suggest going through their guides and learning everything that seems relevant to what you’re working on.

If you’re not getting an explanation of something, just google and find another one. People have done an incredible job of making this information freely accessible in many different formats. I basically learned my way from webdev to an AI career with a couple years of casually watching YouTube videos.

Since it’s a natural hormone the body already has ways to get rid of it. It has a half-life of less than an hour. The lethal dose is so high we haven’t been able to intentionally kill animals with it: “Melatonin is not fatal even at a dose of 800 mg/kg in animal studies”.

The big risk of ongoing high doses is becoming so dependent on it that you wake up as soon as it wears off (e.g. after only 4 hours of sleep). At this level you basically can’t sleep without it and have to slowly wean yourself off to get back to normality.

I think the big difference between people benefiting at small doses (~0.3mg) and large doses (2+mg) is that the 0.3mg group use it for sleep quality through the night, whereas the 3+mg people just need the sudden shock to get to sleep in the first place.

The drawback with big doses is that your brain becomes less sensitive so your naturally-produced melatonin might not be enough to keep you asleep for the whole night after the pill wears off. It has a very short half-life in the body (under 1 hour), so there’s no way for a single dose before sleeping to last 8 hours. We naturally produce only 0.06-0.08mg per night, so it’s easy to see how supplementing melatonin could desensitize someone and cause them to wake up after just 4-6 hours of sleep.

I have ADHD and am in the large-dose category and use 2-3mg of melatonin to help me fall asleep. Without it, I can’t sleep reliably because my brain often won’t shut up. Sleep reliably is so much more important to me than sleep quality.

Using it only 5 nights a week, I’m not significantly dependent. I can still sleep without melatonin, just less reliably. I’ve tried 0.3mg, but it felt the same as taking nothing.

For me, 10mg would be excessive and probably harmful in a desensitizing way. The most I’ve taken is 6mg, but it only helped in 2 out of 6 times. The other 4 times my brain just wouldn’t stop. If doubling my usual dose didn’t help, I don’t think doubling it again would be any different.

There are however studies with higher doses, e.g. this one about kids with ADHD that says:

two-third of the patients responded to relatively medium doses (2.5–6 mg/d), whereas doses above 6 mg added further benefit only in a small percentage of children.

so I guess it’s different for everyone.

Yes! Scientific trials have shown that for most people, 0.3mg of melatonin gives better quality of sleep than 3mg.

I’ve seen pills as high as 10mg on the shelf and have to wonder wtf they’re for. If you take too much your body becomes less sensitive to it and you become dependent on supplementation. 10mg is definitely too much.

That was directly in response to:

those are helpful altho the name of the game is also brightness

Every night I lie in bed, lights off, using my phone for about 20 minutes while waiting for the melatonin to kick in and my brain to calm down. In a dark room I have to keep my phone on quite high brightness (about 1/3rd of maximum).

Lamps aren’t an option at that stage as usually my husband is in the room also trying to sleep. I also find that “warm” light still has too much blue

Yes. They’re very effective at making me sleepy, but have 2 big drawbacks: they’re uncomfortable to wear in bed with your head on a pillow, and complete monochromaticity seems to ruin any enjoyment you get from using your phone. If I get bored it’s much harder to get to sleep because my brain starts fixating on stuff and making me anxious. Yay ADHD.

Unfortunately I have to keep my brightness quite high. My eyes can’t focus well in the dark.

I do. I also messed with the iOS accessibility settings to color shift even more. It helps so much.

I even went to monochrome red at one point and it felt like me cellphone was actively putting me too sleep. Unfortunately monochrome also kills a lot of the enjoyment of using a phone. I was getting sleepier, but felt so bored I just wanted to find something too do to fill the dopamine void.

Melatonin

I can’t do sleep hygiene. My cell phone is the first and last thing I see every day. I stare at screens all day for work and for leisure. With moderate melatonin use I can somehow maintain regular and restful sleep.

No side effects if you use it responsibly (e.g. 5 days on, 2 days off, stick with low doses). Very safe. Can improve sleep even if you’re already sleeping well. I don’t know why more people aren’t on it.

Oh awesome, I hadn’t started looking out for Brandon. Thanks for the recommendation

David Cronenberg, especially his stuff in the 90s and 80s. He has made so many movies that just got stuck in my brain. Everything’s weird, but memorable-weird. eXistenZ was my favorite movie for years.

In two languages I’m learning, German and Chinese, I’ve found it to suffer from “translationese”. It’s grammatically correct, but the sentence structure and word choice feel like the answer was first written in English then translated.

No single sentence is wrong, but overall it sounds unnatural and has none of the “flavor” of the language. That also makes it bad for learning - it avoids a lot of sentence patterns you’ll see/hear in day to day life.

Thanks! That’s a well-written paper. I don’t know why I keep falling for science journalism’s simplified explanations.

I’ve so-far only skimmed it, but to answer my question they find light dark matter to be the simplest case (I didn’t see a specific range, but they used 250keV as an example), but they also considered a scenario where “dark-zillas” (mass >> 10^10 GeV) are plausible. At least that still narrows the search space a bit 😅

Sadly archive.li seems to be in a broken CAPTCHA loop, so I can’t see the full article. However, I’m struggling to imagine a fundamental universe-spanning interaction that triggers weeks after the big bang, given that the universe has already expanded/cooled enough by 20 minutes to stop fusing nuclei. If there is evidence for a Dark Matter big bang for weeks after the Matter big bang, surely this must have some extreme implications about the possible mass range of DM particles?

One thing nobody seems to be talking about: Just like String Theory, the more new phenomena are needed to make the Dark Matter model work, the further we stray from the edge of Occam’s Razor. While all the research into detecting hypothetical particles has been fun to follow, I can’t help but feel we’re just a few equations away from discovering that the universe is actually pretty MONDane.

Keto-ade can be great for taking the edge off keto flu. It’s basically a home-made concentrated sports drink - artificial sweetener, potassium & magnesium salts and a lot of water. All the fluid & electrolytes help your kidneys filter out the metabolized fat that would otherwise linger in your bloodstream.

Some minor/hard-to-notice health-related things can dramatically reduce alcohol tolerance and/or give “hangovers” shortly after starting a session.

For me, inflammation is a big cause. I have (barely noticeable) cat allergies, and (obvious but hard to avoid) food intolerances & gut issues. If I don’t stay on top of avoiding triggers, my alcohol tolerance goes from multiple G&Ts giving a nice buzz, to 1-2 sips of G&T giving dizziness and headaches. Electrolyte imbalance can also cause it. I’ve found I have to add magnesium and potassium salt to my diet, or else I generally feel tired more, and my alcohol tolerance plummets. Once you start controlling these factors, you’ll start getting clear feedback from your body when you have too much or too little salt, in the form of water and food tasting different and general feelings of tension or tiredness.

My advice: try antihistamines, easily-digestible meals, and/or sports drinks for a few days before you drink. If those help your tolerance, you probably have some health stuff going on - figure it out and you’ll probably find a way to generally feel better.

As someone with untreated ADHD, I absolutely don’t feel I’m the highest level of control in my brain. I can make all the plans and decisions I want, but I can only gently steer what I ultimately end up doing and paying attention to. My “executive function” wields ultimate power and not only can overrule me, but also prevent me from having the thoughts I want to have.

Another indicator that I’m not the only consciousness in here: anxiety-inducing events like deadlines and exams can give me physiological symptoms even when I’ve forgotten about them. I’ll just be sitting there wondering “why is my stomach upset at me?” and only later realize it’s from stress for an upcoming test I hadn’t paid attention to.

Though my lizard brain demands me to be around other people, most of the things that bring me genuine life satisfaction are just easier to do solo. When I’m at purely social events I also get this sense of dread that I could be making better use of my time.

The voice in my head is making contradictory demands, so I’ve learned to not feel bad for circumventing it. I have my own goals in life, instincts be damned.

I find that listening to people casually talking is usually enough to satisfy the lizard brain, so I listen to a lot of stuff in the background: YouTube video essays, Twitch Just Chatting streamers, etc. When it gets particularly demanding I’ll try engaging with the people, but usually I just let my subconscious listen while I’m focusing on more important stuff.