Agree with your first point. For the second point, I felt like I had to add some artifice because otherwise the morally correct choice in almost all situations would seem to obviously be "ask humanity and let it choose for itself"! Which is correct, but not very interesting.

(In any case, I'm not actually that interested in these particular moral puzzles, I have other purposes in asking...)

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Hey, thanks for pointing this out! I quite like the bracket notation for indicating axes that operations should be applied "to" vs. "over".

One question I have—is it possible for me as a user to define my own function and then apply it with einx-type notation?

Thanks, the one problem with that is that you have to use dumpy.wrap if you ever create a function that uses loops and then you want to call it inside another loop. But I don't see any way around that.

Well, Einstein summation is good, but it only does multiplication and sums. (Or, more generally, some scalar operation and some scalar reduction.) I want a notation that works for ANY type of operation, including non-scalar ones, and that's what DumPy does. So I'd argue it moves further than Einstein summation.

At one point, I actually had some (LLM-generated) boxes where you could click to switch between the different implementations for the same problem. But in the end I didn't like how it looked, so I switched to simple expandy-boxes. Design is hard...

There's no magical significance to the assert x.ndim==1 check. I think I just wanted to demonstrate that the softmax code was "simple" and didn't have to think about high dimensions. I think I'll just remove that, thanks.

Yeah, I totally agree with this point! DNA is definitely not sufficient to build an organism. Originally, I thought there was definitely a large (albeit hard to quantify) amount of information embodied in the cells. Though there's been some debate on that point about how large that really is. For example, if I provided a single photograph of an adult human and—I don't know—gave the typical fraction of different atoms in a human body, would a sufficiently intelligent alien race reverse engineer how to make a zygote?

In any case, my (annoying) answer to this challenge is to retreat: I don't technically have to solve this problem because I'm not trying to estimate the amount of information in a cell, just the information in DNA.

The response I find really amusing is that lots of people respond with, basically, "But if you don't do this then it's harder to make money on twitter."

(OK... If doing plagiarism makes it easier to make money, then it's not plagiarism?)

That first study appears to be non-blinded, so I tend to discount it. I wasn't aware of that second review. I'll take a look. At a glance, most of the studies seem to be included in the 2020 review I did cite previously and I don't seem to see much claim that it helps for stress--in fact, the opposite. It looks like the claim is that it helps with sleep and/or ADHD.

That said, as far as I know, theanine is very likely to be completely safe. And I think it's totally possible given all the evidence that it does have a small effect on stress/anxiety and maybe some other things. So I don't think there's really any reason not to take it. I'm just 95% convinced that the people who claim it's lifechanging for stress/anxiety are delusional.

All fair points!

1. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure of the difference between stress and anxiety and jitters. For me they're closely related, and I guess I tried to measure some combination of them.

2. True, more isn't always more. But more does tend to be more, and this is one of the suggestions people made from the first experiment.

3. I agree. However, I see this in the context of the first post—the scientific literature has tested theanine and found basically nothing! I was originally convinced that the internet was onto something, but now I tend to think the boring scientific literature had it right all along.

Is this really the opposite? Reading that post, I find very little to disagree with.