Elise Cutts

I realize this is obvious to everyone who isn't in a weird job where you work alone in a room at a laptop but you know, for my fellow laptop gremlins out there: find a mentor

It is so unbelievably helpful just to be able to talk to a person with more experience doing the thing you do

The big math changes to small math 🧪

Weird, I imagine they must charge an arm and a leg. I was able to get the economist via the Vienna library, but only through the PressReader app which is usable but really awkward.

Also the public library systems in the Boston metro are great and you should be able to access magazines for free through them, if I remember right.

If you get the MIT tech review for free while at MIT, I can recommend it!

Also I have to respect their commitment to a sassy, pun-heavy editorial voice. There aren't too many magazines I can recognize just by the tone of the article.

I've gone back and forth between having and not having an economist subscription so many times... it's pricey, but it is really kind of the best at what it does in a way that's hard to replace. Esp. how they get across why things happening halfway around the world matter everywhere.

What are your favorite media outlets to read right now?

Emails spawning more emails is so real

I do feel like I'm getting an uptick in spam emails that aren't the usual scams asking me to send money somewhere or buy something or click on a fishy link — just random shit like this. And I have to wonder why...

Screenshot of an email. Subject: TRADE - TRADE - TRADE From: HISTORIAN ECONOMIST (email address given), to: blanked out. Content: Economic

OpenClaw is that you?

I did that too, and I'm surprised how effective it was. Also set up a minimalist first page with just text links to the apps I actually want to use (notes, maps, whatsapp, etc.)

monkey brain likes colors I guess

The things I'm most conflicted about is whether to keep:

1) emails

and

2) a web browser

Both can come in really handy esp. when traveling. But I guess I could just delete the apps so if I really want them I have to consciously re-install?

Any tips for dumbing your iphone?

I know I can't amputate this thing entirely but I want it to stop distracting me and just be a tool.

I cannot wait to see that interview, they better not back out!

Also, office hours are the way you actually get to know professors and TAs. Those relationships are professional connections that lead to opportunities like internships and research projects!

So there are real reasons to go to office hours even if you could get a perfect answer from Claude.

We were able to mostly (not perfectly, ok, but perfection isn't a realistic goal) ban kids from drinking without selling all their biometric data to vampiric silicon valley weirdos and call me naive but I think we can do that for phones, too.

I sometimes wonder if it'd be better, if we decide we need to ban kids from the internet up to a certain age, to do this for hardware and not web access.

Like, what if we made it illegal to physically hand a kid an unlocked non-"kidproof" smartphone the same way it is to hand a kid a beer?

It's a tactic that works, unfortunately.

I had a conversation literally today at lunch about this very topic and until I mentioned the privacy thing and the fact that Big Tech actually *wants* age id laws etc. some people were all for it.

Also the germanosphere loves its homeopathy and alternative medicine and "wellness" like nothing else. There's a hike near my place that has signs marking the "positive energy points" along the route.

literally came here to say that Austria loves hating vaccines but you beat me to it

(This is not to discourage relevant tips about upcoming papers, love those)

Have any other journalists been getting more emails from scientists and PR folks with paper/press release pitches lately, or is it just me?

I'm wondering if this has to do with people letting AI agents loose on the internet, or if I am crossing some unseen career threshold into email hell

Translation: this is a post about adjacency matrices

Translation translation: this is a post about how networks are actually tables of numbers and why this is useful actually

Networks are math squares disguised as drawings This is why neural networks are linear algebra under the hood

This week's post is just me enjoying the dreaded math squares that made me cry a lot in high school.

By math squares, I mean matrices. And the reason I'm enjoying them now is 1) I don't have to actually calculate anything about them (yay) and 2) networks are cool, and networks are math squares. 🧪

(not to say there aren't men whose life dream is to be a doting stay-at-home dad or, more realistically, to have kids and then reduce work to part-time to be fully present for them, I know several, but I doubt they're driving most of this pattern)

Most children are also really excited about getting puppies. More excited than their parents. Hm. I wonder why.

I feel like literally every young man I know wants kids, and literally every young woman I know is making spreadsheets and crunching numbers and creeping in parenting subreddits and panic attacking about whether she's going to be able to have kids without sacrificing literally everything else

Me wondering how this is news