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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 25th, 2024

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  • You can’t use phone calls or texting when your family lives in the other side of the globe. Many parents are not tech savvy for them to be able to use something else if you aren’t there to set it up. Lot’s of them got into Facebook, and their friends are there, and we need to be there for them to reach us. It’s the network effect.

    Also for many parents, internet = Facebook. They don’t even use emails, or any other services for that matter, maybe news websites that are bookmarked in their browser years ago by their children.


  • The risk of LLMs aren’t on what it might do. It is not smart enough to find ways to harm us. The risk seems from what stupid people will let it do.

    If you put bunch of nuclear buttons in front of a child/monkey/dog whatever, then it can destroy the world. That seems to be what’s LLM problem is heading towards. People are using it to do things that it can’t, and trusting it because AI has been hyped so much throughout our past.








  • As others have mentioned they already do that to a degree they can with the uncertainty of forcast. It’s called Forcast Informed Reservoir Operation (FIRO).

    Important thing is that the forecast is uncertain farther you go in future, and smaller the area you’re looking at. So the policies will have to take that into account, you can’t simply empty your reservoir because if your forcast is wrong and you don’t get enough rain, then you don’t have the precious water anymore for dry season. But if you’re wrong on the other side you get flood issue.

    Satellite data and a lot of ground sensors are in place that help us better forcast the future storms along with improved computation and technology, but nothing is sure, and it might get worse with current situation. We already have problems because of previous funding cuts causing us to lose so many sensors.

    Also a fun fact, we’ve had dams for so long that we don’t know the natural flows for so many rivers so we can’t calibrate our models well. Basically we built dams long before we started measuring the rivers. I’ve been meaning to publish this, but it’s just stuck in a draft for almost a year now :(



  • I do have a career, I am a specialist of (kinda) GIS and data analysis related to hydrology. I’m currently on the path to complete my PhD within the next year. I have been really successful at pitching my programming ideas on non-programming domain. Solve problems for clients, make applications/algorithms that can outperform what they had before. It does sometimes make me feel like I’m a bit too wide on my skillsets related to others in my field, but at least in my immediate circles, I am still as good in the core aspects of my field. But there are so many people that are better specialist than me if I search around.

    But now, due to the current climate, and situation in the USA, I have been thinking I might have to move to another country before I finish PhD, and I might not be able to find a job in another country immediately, so I’m thinking of finding some small gigs I could do for some side income.