iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

aL @alxin.me · 29/07/2026

"You're the people from the sea" I'm fairly sure that this is mostly metaphorical. I keep seeing literal interpretations like "the Trojan war veterans and Ithacans are responsible for pillaging the Mediterranean" which seems kinda media illiterate as a take (The Odyssey 2026)

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aL @alxin.me · 07/09/2025

Me, a utilitarian: making it morally necessary to give me all the pizza at the function by willing myself to be way happier than anyone else if I receive pizza and way sadder if I don't

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aL @alxin.me · 28/07/2025

StatsSky professors and teachers, what problems do students find intuitively difficult to grasp? I.e., problems or concepts that are mathematically well-defined but often stump students because the answers "feel wrong".

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aL @alxin.me · 07/01/2025

It took me 4 hours to update my personal site. Updated the CV, removed some pages I didn't like so much, etc. Unfortunately, a bug chunk of time was my insistence on testing changes in a local Jekyll server and the subsequent debugging

awqx.github.io

Alison (Al/aL) W. Xin

Alison (Al/aL) W. Xin’s site

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aL @alxin.me · 22/12/2024

I am a tireless messenger pigeon delivering memes between group chats of people who will never know each other (while taking credit of discovery by omission)

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aL @alxin.me · 22/12/2024

NIH Biowulf and HPC team my fate is in your hands > pushes 10000 swarm jobs

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aL @alxin.me · 21/12/2024

bro we're gonna have the singularity before sillk song

Screenshot from the Steam Yearly Review page of my most played game, reading "Hollow Knight. We get it, we want to play Silk Song too. 41% of Total Playtime. 142 Sessions played. 10 Day Streak." Background is cover art of Hollow Knight."

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aL @alxin.me · 02/12/2024

Note to past me: make more effort to fit causal inference into coursework. It keeps coming up during work presentations and I'm always thinking, "man, I wish I could actually contribute to discussion 😔".

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aL @alxin.me · 30/11/2024

"Cope" and "cringe" are very expressive and insightful terms, but they are unfortunately overused/misused due to pattern-matching to "effective dunks that seem to be smart"

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aL @alxin.me · 24/11/2024

Why does United make these sharp enough to cut skin

Photo of the blue sanitizing wipe provided by United Airlines

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aL @alxin.me · 24/11/2024

Protecting my peace is blocking everyone in this thread that missed the joke

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aL @alxin.me · 17/11/2024

My hack for copy-editing my writing is to do it multiple times with different levels of sleep. By the time I cross the 5 hour mark and slamming back acetaminophen, I'm basically modeling a completely different person.

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aL @alxin.me · 16/11/2024

Accidentally nerd-sniped myself during a workshop by thinking about how to prove what size chessboards allow for a non-cyclic knight's walk. I didn't even finish the proof so I guess I know what I'll be doing this weekend

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aL @alxin.me · 14/11/2024

When I have some weird generalized inflammation going on, it seems like it tends to show up in old scars getting raised and shiny. Is it like balloon and the weak points are inflating faster?

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aL @alxin.me · 30/10/2024

Sad: Omnivore died and I need to find another read-it-later/content aggregator app. Confusing: The team got acquired by ElevenLabs, some AI voice generation company. Annoying: 2 wks before all data gets deleted and the export keeps failing.

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Reposted by aL

Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 24/10/2024

We're hiring a postdoc! Our lab is interested in understanding how visual perception and mental imagery relate to each other, both in the mind and the brain. We're looking for someone with fMRI experience to work on this topic. Please apply! subjectivity.sites.northeastern.edu/research/arc...

subjectivity.sites.northeastern.edu

The Subjectivity Lab

Interdisciplinary lab in Northeastern's Psychology Department researching visual perception, mental imagery, consciousness and metacognition.

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aL @alxin.me · 17/10/2024

Thank you high school me, for absolutely cooking by moving notetaking to Obsidian from OneNote. Thank you Obsidian, for being the best.

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aL @alxin.me · 16/10/2024

Pushing a fine-tuning run to the CPUs instead of the GPUs, just to feel a rush

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aL @alxin.me · 24/09/2024

Bookmarking for myself because this would be a good journal club presentation when the story is more complete (e.g., precise reasoning for retraction is given).

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aL @alxin.me · 23/09/2024

I see potential for this graph as a niche meme in LLM mis/use discussion 📈📈📈

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aL @alxin.me · 11/09/2024

My partner is teaching me a bit of Croatian! Lots of consonants, though it seems that pulling from English + Chinese + Shanghainese mostly covers the set

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aL @alxin.me · 09/09/2024

Gasoline can dissolve tough adhesive that won't come off with water or ethanol.

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aL @alxin.me · 07/09/2024

Kierkegaard sorta cooked on Fear and Trembling

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aL @alxin.me · 17/08/2024

Time for my quarterly replay of Hollow Knight

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aL @alxin.me · 10/08/2024

"Bad food poisoning is rare" I think, instantly subsumed into the subset of the population where bad food poisoning is common

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aL @alxin.me · 08/08/2024

I can't stop reading the terrible haystack of IG comments because of needles like these.

"Once went to a dentist with teeth marks on his forehead".

"I love this shirt because you can use it for every situation no matter the gender you're" (you're is written as the contraction of "you are")

"This is y I don't like oceans 😂 I like my toes Id rather not have 7 instead of 8 like I don't wanna be a freak 😭"

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aL @alxin.me · 29/07/2024

LDL CHOLESTEROL (to the tune of Hot to Go's chorus)

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aL @alxin.me · 28/07/2024

Berkson's paradox: trait Y is negatively correlated with trait X if you undersample subjects with low values in X and Y

en.wikipedia.org

Berkson's paradox - Wikipedia

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aL @alxin.me · 28/07/2024

Model collapse: a problem, but likely not going to meaningfully slow genAI dev b/c: a) This paper introduces a formalism, but collapse was known as a risk before then and can be addressed in data processing. b) It doesn't seem to generalize to inputs from other model's outputs #ML #AI

nature.com

AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data - Nature

 Analysis shows that indiscriminately training generative artificial intelligence on real and generated content, usually done by scraping data from the Internet, can lead to a collapse in th...

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aL @alxin.me · 27/07/2024

China's airport security is way more attentive than my experience with the TSA, but mostly around lithium ion battery safety

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aL @alxin.me · 27/07/2024

Wake up, new Linear Algebra Done Right dropped (PDF is free to download). #math

linear.axler.net

Linear Algebra Done Right

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aL @alxin.me · 25/07/2024

It's nice that as of now, Bluesky is small enough that it passes through the Great Firewall by default. Too bad most of the click through links on interesting posts still don't work

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aL @alxin.me · 21/07/2024

@bsky.app Thumbs up for setting up alt text to load before images, very helpful for low speed networks. Tentative request that any future adjustments to the allt text feature don't break this order, e.g. future auto-alt text is loaded with the same order

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aL @alxin.me · 13/07/2024

The two-stage fun of math/stats paradoxes is first understanding the counterintuitive result and then understanding why the wrong answer is intuitive

en.wikipedia.org

St. Petersburg paradox - Wikipedia

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aL @alxin.me · 08/05/2024

Maybe the real diss tracks were the abandoned children we made along the way

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aL @alxin.me · 07/05/2024

Used to use Pocket Premium (lol) but recently switched to omnivore.app and it's great! Has Obsidian integration and everything. Turns out an app that's slightly better than texting links to yourself is not that hard to make really good and useful

omnivore.app

Omnivore

Omnivore is the free, open source, read-it-later app for serious readers.

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aL @alxin.me · 02/04/2024

Approximately every two years I experience a night where I'm so itchy I can't sleep. This seems independent of geography or season, so I assume the mechanism is like rogue waves, where the histamine coincidentally overlaps to create maximum generalized itchiness.

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aL @alxin.me · 02/04/2024

This was a terrible plan because I kept using boba as motivation to do other, higher priority things

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aL @alxin.me · 17/01/2024

EpiSky - CCDD's preparing for their annual infectious disease epi seminar series. Mostly hybrid, with some only-remote talks. Register at hsph.me/idepi24 I run CCDD's Twxttxr acct, but we haven't officially spread to bsky yet. First talk on Feb 2.

ccdd.hsph.harvard.edu

ID Epi Spring Seminar Series 2024

Each spring, the CCDD hosts a seminar series featuring experts presenting the latest research in infectious disease epidemiology and modeling. The ID Epi Seminar Series aims to bring in speakers fr…

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aL @alxin.me · 02/01/2024

The current plan is: - Reset my current pages into a new Obsidian vault - Migrate existing subscribers to Buttondown - Disconnect the custom URL and reconnect it to GitHub - Make an explanatory Substack post - Delete Substack If I get boba, I can probably do this in 1-2 days

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aL @alxin.me · 02/01/2024

For my ongoing zombie collection

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aL @alxin.me · 01/01/2024

Big ugh field for me migrating from Substack to GitHub pages because I just configured the custom URL and the default themes are not great. I also don't have any paying subscribers, but I suppose it's the principle. I'll do it as a New Year's gift to myself I guess?

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aL @alxin.me · 08/12/2023

Statsky birthday problem enthusiasts this one's for you

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aL @alxin.me · 08/12/2023

Why is this fruit/vegetable tingly or spicy when it shouldn't be? - New allergy or cross reactivity with pollen - Tannins (esp. in persimmons) - Protease (bromelain in pineapple, papain in papaya) From personal experience

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aL @alxin.me · 03/12/2023

I already tried to condense this paper, but I'm thinking of another rewrite. Main point: the framing of autism spectrum disorder as a communication disorder is challenged by 1) masking, and 2) better rapport/info efficiency in only-ASD and only-non-ASD groups than mixed groups.

alxove.com

Pragmatics in autistic communication

Observed pragmatic differences in autism may be framework variation rather than deficiencies

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aL @alxin.me · 03/12/2023

oh I forgot there's an #ML feed for stuff like this

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aL @alxin.me · 30/11/2023

My friend keeps saying "DALL-E solved art" and I am trying to convey that quickly putting a bespoke rendered graphic on every PowerPoint slide is not the same "problem" as soothing a fundamental human drive toward creativity and expression.

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