Page 2 has the figure. Getting people to not smoke has been the most effective treatment in our lifetime.

Public health is a really big deal, and RFK et al are a disaster for the nation.

Julia is phenomenally great for solo/small projects, but as soon as you have complex dependencies that _you_ can't update - all the overloading makes it an absolute nightmare to debug.

But for anything with a userbase of more than ~15 people, C/C++ are widely preferred.

For teaching linear algebra, MATLAB is unironically the best choice - as the language was originally designed for that exact purpose. The problem is that outside of a numerical methods class, MATLAB is a profound step backwards.

But first: we need to take step-zero and introduce a type "r64": a "f64" that is not nan/inf.

Rust has its uint-thats-not-zero - why not the same for floating point numbers??

Plan B is wait until 2028, when it goes off patent. I think I can keep my job til then. I've learned from the HR folks that they just signed another 3 yr contract with the insurance company, so I'm not forseeing any major changes to coverage. This drug is super pricey, as it was originally targeted towards people with acute cancers, but now the largest market is the chronic disease patients, but they never lowered the price.

I suspect the insurer/PBM are making a small fortune off of my care. They are also being sued by the pharmaceutical industry for using a "co-pay maximizer" which caps (patients) out-of-pocket co-pays, and goes after the pharmaceutical companies' "charities" which help patients purchase their products, which the insurer then takes a cut from.

And the weight gain isn't fluid, it's definitely body fat. I think the weight gain is from the "baseline" treatment being a mutagenic chemotherapy, and the likely fact that my (previously) enlarged spleen was impinging on my stomach limiting my appetite, and the lived fact that it massively slows your metabolism, as I'm always a bit cold.

The big problem is that it's a chronic blood cancer, so the pills have a list price of $180k/yr. Who knows if my insurance will cough up for a second big-money prescription/

I think its from a CS education which treats the "naturals" as fundamental, vs an engineering background where the "reals" are fundamental, and matrix math _essential_ and people live on one side of this fence.

https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/planet4589.bsky.social/post...

They may be _meant_ to last a lot longer, but as you launch a larger constellation, you end up finding more and more edge cases which your original design missed. Even if it's a generous 10yr lifespan - 10% depreciation is pretty brutal, especially if your customers are expecting a certain coverage quality, as then you need more redundant satellites in orbit.

Excluding depreciation makes sense when you are dealing with assets with an unknown highly variable lifespan - e.g. software - some of which lasts decades without being touched, others of which experiences breaking changes on a monthly basis. Similarly, excluding interest on debt makes sense if you're borrowing heavily to feed your sales funnel, but otherwise making very real profits on your sales.

However - none of these are true for some of these "new-wave" startups, which are trying to justify an (internet-based marketing) hype cycle to juice their valuations via the "dumb money".

And at a depreciation rate of 15-20%, that "D" term starts to get pretty expensive, pretty darn quick.

He is answering what a computation engine will do, but not what a "wise" person would do, which is the _the_ test of AI.

The goal of wisdom (and good teaching) is to first correct the faulty assumptions of the questioner that leads them to ask a bad question, and then once they ask a good question, then and _only_ then, provide the answer to the question.