> I lost a dog at 3 and a half years almost to the day to a congenital defect, that we didn’t know about until he was already very sick. I’m a guy who will cross a street to meet someone’s dog. For over a year afterward I would cross the street to avoid walking past the same breed and color of dog. The way people avoid pitbulls.
> And that was just a dog.
Depending on the person and/or situation, losing a dog can rival the pain of any other loss. Especially if the bond between person and dog is reinforced through daily activities.
I guess what I'm saying here is loss is loss. Some losses may be painful longer than others, for sure, but the pain of losing a being you love is universal.
A friend of mine described the pain of this type of loss thusly;
Think of the pain like a ball bouncing around in a box,
with a button at center-bottom which activates pain every
time it is touched by the ball.
At first, the ball is almost the same size as the box
and hits the button constantly.
Over time, the ball shrinks but the size of the box
and the button remain the same. All that changes is
how often the button is hit.
Into my heart, an air that kills, from yon far country blows. What are those blue remembered hills? What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content. I see it shining plain. Those happy highways, where I went, and cannot go again.
I'm reading an excellent book right now called Cells, Embryos and Evolution, in which one topic is the exploratory nature of certain biological processes. One of the processes described is the dynamic instability of microtubule growth.
Microtubules randomly grow and shrink from an anchor in the cell until they hit something that stabilizes them. Through their random growth they explore the cell, which means that processes depending on microtubules are robust against changes in size and shape of both the containing cell and the target object that needs the microtubules. The author explains that we still don't know how microtubules are stabilized, which I thought was fascinating.
Except that the book was written twenty years ago, and now we DO know how they are stabilized. It turns out that the author was the person who discovered microtubule instability, and since then we have not only figured out what stabilizes them, but have developed numerous cancer drugs based on those molecules: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9932/#_A1831_
“The time has come for you to seek the Path. Your soul has set you face to face before the clear light ... and now you are about to experience it in its Reality, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky, and the naked, spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum, without circumference or center... At this moment, know yourself and abide in that state.”
May everyone be happy.
May everyone be free of disease.
May auspiciousness be seen everywhere.
May suffering belong to no-one.
Peace.
Jai guru dev
__________
.
RIP David Lynch, 20 January 1946 - 16 January 2025
I'm incredibly saddened by his passing away, even if it was expected given the recent decline of his health.
I'm not going to touch on his films, which are all special and definitely worth watching, but if anyone who didn't know him wants a primer on his complex, sometimes surreal, but I think ultimately endearing personality, then this is a nice introduction:
I literally just finished The Return two days ago, because the Blank Check Podcast, a very long form podcast about filmographies that I love, is covering Lynch.
The fact that The Return exists at all is amazing. The fact that it is not what you expected or wanted is really compelling. I absolutely loved it, even if I honestly have no idea what much of it means. Lynch's ability to use pacing -- lingering on a scene -- to cause unease is really something special.
They unpack each novel paragraph by paragraph and sometimes line by line. After reading the novels 5x through I found a whole new realm of depth and enjoyment. O’Brian is a truly masterful writer and his learning and erudition are simply astounding sometimes.
As for the audiobooks, Patrick Tull cannot hold a candle to Simon Vance’s sublime narration. Sadly blackstone audio isn’t making them available right now unless you can find them on your local library’s app.
Strongly recommend this. I enjoyed "Master & Commander" (and read the first three books in the series, which are really one continuous story) before finding "A Sea of Words" and was astounded, on a re-read, at how much I didn't understand about sailing terminology, life onboard, the navy, etc.
But it's also a book that rewards knowledge of French, Latin, the history of science, music, geography... really an astounding book.
1. The model size was small enough to process the corpus fast-ish using the limited resources I have. They also support MRL and binary embeddings which help would be helpful in case I need to downsize on the VM size.
2. Close to 500ms. See [^1].
3. This [^2] was the reason I went with milvus. I also assumed that more stars would result in a bigger community and hence faster bug discovery and fixes. And better feature support.
4. Yes, I automated the weekly pull here [^3]. Since I am constrained on resources available, I used HuggingFace Spaces to do the automation for me :)
Although, the space keeps sleeping and to avoid that, I am planning keep calling the same space using api/gradio_client. Let's see how that goes.
| which is more recent, more people might want
Absolutely agree. I am planning to add a 'Recency' sorting option for the same. It should balance between similarity and the date published.
| also you might want more result density - so perhaps a UI option to collapse the abstracts and display more in the first glance.
Oh, I will surely look into it. Thank you so much for a detailed response. :D
Hey, I'm not OP, but I'm working on what seems to be the exact problem you mentioned. We (https://fixpoint.co/) search and monitor web data about companies. We are indexing patents and academic papers right now, plus we can scrape and monitor just about any website (some social media sites not supported).
We have users with very similar use cases to yours. Want to email me? dylan@fixpoint.co. I'm one of the founders :)
Unusual use case but I write literature reviews for French R&D tax cut system, and we specifically need to: focus on most recent papers, stay on topic for a very specific problematic a company has, potentially include grey literature (tech blog articles from renowned corp), be as exhaustive as possible when it comes to freely accessible papers (we are more ok with missing paid papers unless they are really popular).
A "dedicated product workflow" could be about taking business use cases like that into account.
This is a real business problem, the Google Scholar lock up is annoying and I would pay for something better than what exists.
- Pocket for bookmarking.
- Onenote for longer form less structured note taking on copied/linked base material or needing exposition (somewhat reluctantly). Occasionally Word.
- Anything/Jetbrains : Markdown for short form or dev docsor with intuitively clear sub-structure or heirarchy. (Pseudo)Code and comments for simple codable ideas, python-like.
- Scapple for mind-mapping high level concepts, collections of related ideas or things, associations rather than hierarchies
If people are interested it was featured hear on HN a day or two ago but Obsidian released an extension called Obsidian Clipper that can save webpages in markdown format.
https://github.com/obsidianmd/obsidian-clipper
The new Gemini Experimental models are the best general purpose models out right now. I have been comparing with o1 Pro and I prefer Gemini Experimental 1206 due to its context, speed, and accuracy. Google came out with a lot of new stuff last week if you havent been following. They seem to have the best models across the board, including image and video.
Omnimodal and code/writing output still has a ways to go for Gemini - I have been following and their benchmarks are not impressive compared to the competition, let alone my anecdotal experience in using Claude for coding, GPT for spec-writing, and Gemini for... Occasional cautious optimism to see if it can replace either.
Chill. I say that as a reasonably accomplished scientist.
Yes, work hard. But there’s a difference between working hard on the right thing and doing it just because it makes you feel good.
You’re much less likely to find the right thing if you’re in a spiral of working on things you know will be a waste of time. You can pull as many 16 hour shifts at a gas station as you want to, but people only do that because they’re broke, not because they might find it fulfilling.
I recommend reading http://www.paulgraham.com/greatwork.html in its entirety. You strike me as the type of person it was aimed at. And believe it or not, one of the most important takeaways is that you have to allow yourself to play, just a little, in order to Rome the kind of work that makes you happy.
If you like Nick Lane's writing, I also recommend David Dreamer's Assembling Life. It gets a good deal more technical (chemical?), and has more depth about possible ways that membranes were "invented".
Paul Falkowski's Life's Engines is also quite good.
> And that was just a dog.
Depending on the person and/or situation, losing a dog can rival the pain of any other loss. Especially if the bond between person and dog is reinforced through daily activities.
I guess what I'm saying here is loss is loss. Some losses may be painful longer than others, for sure, but the pain of losing a being you love is universal.
A friend of mine described the pain of this type of loss thusly;
HTH