I think this is well-written and satisfying, I spent many years in postgrad stats departments but never managed to find anything this approachable on category theory.

A professional scientist I know (tenured, professor) recruited me to set up a backtesting framework for a predictive finance model. When the results were not as they expected (this person does not work in finance and never has), they asked to see the code, then told me that claude had found a problem with the way some of the calculations were done (there was actually no problem), supplied the claude comments, and told me to change the code to match what they thought was correct. I did it anyway. Had they had more expertise in the domain (finance), they likely would have been able to leverage claude as a tool rather than inadvertently pursuing a very stupid mistake. Domain experts tend to doubt their ability to excel in other domains which is amplified by LLMs.

I work with a bunch of PHD's and have been since before ai coding.

Their code is aways terrible, and they constantly think it's good.

The exercise is always the same: explain the math to me, like I'm 5, then we profile it and see what is faster.

Oddly Claude Code, integrated into their IDE's has made this situation happen much less.

I never want to work in a place again where the fun way to start the Monday meeting is a "math problem".

PS: Don't even get me started on their SQL.

My first job out of university was at IBM wrangling a prototype some research PHDs had written into a shipping product, and.. yeah, this tracks.

This sounds rather similar to the form of scientific fraud where you first create a conclusion, then invent/manipulate the data until it supports your conclusion.

The comments section on the author's book 'How to not be wrong' is one of the best things I have read in ages. I am so glad the author left it public. Imagine releasing a book called 'How to not be wrong' and you have like 200 people telling you that you are wrong. Posting in the comments section of your minimal personal blog.

Hi, nice work, its pretty simple and easy to use. I've often found new artists from one-off song collaborations eg Devonte Hynes from Solange's single Losing You. No connection between them is indicated from my minimal use of the site. But that's from the data feed (MusicBrainz) from what I gather, and adding such functionality may increase complexity. Would love to get a quick playlist from all the nodes in a neighbourhood so I could listen quickly. Keen to see where it goes.

Hi there! Thank you :D I just looked up both Devonte Hynes and Solange and put them on the same graph. They indeed seem to be disconnected, but I also couldn't find the single you mentioned at all, so yeah, it's probably just absent from the DB. If you ever find the time and motivation to add it to MusicBrainz, it will show up in time on my copy, though :) I haven't yet, but plan on scheduling replication weekly or so, so that the graph can evolve along with the data. Thanks again and be sure to send any feedback you might have in the future my way!

EDIT: Oh, and I definitely want to make playlists a part of it, haven't figured out the best way yet. The dream would be to use something like Bandcamp and actively encourage people to give money directly to the artists, but it might not be the most straight-forward way to do it. Stay tuned though, playlists will be there in the future

I did a job for some neuroscientists years ago and we found a very strong correlation between microplastics exposure and elevated acetylcholine in a very young sample. They all thought there should be no effect or the effect should be inverted because of oxidative stress. We never resolved the phenomenon though. From what I understand, Acetylcholine elevation in the lipidome is either neuroprotective or neutral. Is there any reason why microplastics exposure would tend to increase acetylcholine?

Depends on the microplastics, but many act as endocrine disruptors that "mimic" estrogen, tricking the body into over-activating ERa and upregulates the PEMT gene and the higher acetylcholine. It could also be that the microplastics can physically bind to or chemically inhibit acetylcholinesterase and that is the reason for the higher acetylcholine. Depending on the cause this is only a short term good thing, but could be downregulating genes.