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aL

@alxin.me
140 followers 291 following 258 posts

Postbac at NIMH Machine Learning, comms assistant at CCDD. Previously TA at Harvard Stats.

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aL @alxin.me · 29/07/2026
Agamemnon wanted the Trojan War to break Troy's control of the trade routes, so there's something to be said about imperialist ambition destroying the honor system and diplomacy, or abundance breeding greed, etc. But my gripe is the reading that the Achaeans are literally the sea people.
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aL @alxin.me · 29/07/2026
The context of the conversation is that the Trojan horse shattered trust in Zeus's law. The Achaeans pillaged, but they also broke the norm of honor in warfare. There were other examples of Zeus's law being unstable (Circe's island, the suitors) indicating "societal decline"
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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
So far, I've got St Petersburg's paradox Gambler's fallacy vs regression to the mean X vs Y and Y vs X having the same slope in lr (equivariant) Zero probability in continuous random variables
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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 · 09/04/2025
Though I'm surprised nobody's really put together a take on US-China trade war. But I'm also unclear what radicalizing means in this context haha
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aL @alxin.me · 09/04/2025
To me, it seems EAF/LW writers lag behind the most recent current events unless they already have a preset take. Considering most of the tariffs were walked back today, I wouldn't be surprised if stuff is now stuck in drafts for 90 days until the pause expires
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aL @alxin.me · 21/03/2025
Quote dunking = using the quote repost for snide remarks against the original poster.
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aL @alxin.me · 17/03/2025
Unfortunately, the closest label we got is trans rat murder cult 😔
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aL @alxin.me · 28/01/2025
Truly bizarre to see the term "neo-Marxist" on a government document
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aL @alxin.me · 28/01/2025
Thanks for the link! Still a bit of a headscratcher though because it's pretty unclear how they go from their buzzwords to their totals. I was curious about studies that control for confounders, for instance, which aren't in the examples but would likely contain some mix of "DEI" terms
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aL @alxin.me · 07/01/2025
Wrote it down for funsies
awqx.github.io
Local testing of GitHub Pages on MacOS
I can’t believe this took me so long to debug.
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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 · 07/01/2025
Thanks! My bad for not thinking to check Dec 2024. Yeah, I figured, considering "corr" and "causal" didn't bring up anything useful in these articles haha
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aL @alxin.me · 07/01/2025
Coffee and pure juice is vegan and good, apparently
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aL @alxin.me · 07/01/2025
It might be me, but it seems every news article about this doesn't link the original study. The closest thing I could find is this (based on Google Scholar results for "uk biobank milk depression" from 2025) which has its own incredibly detailed infographic to speculate over
sciencedirect.com
Ages-specific beverage consumption and its association with depression and anxiety disorders: A prospective cohort study in 188,355 participants
Diet habit is associated with mental health which has been suggested to be an independent risk factor. Nevertheless, evidence concerning the associati…
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aL @alxin.me · 06/01/2025
The article even points out "idiosyncratic weaknesses" like hallucination, brittleness, letter counting, and tic-tac-toe. But (my reading is) betting on these known weaknesses shouldn't underpin regulatory strategy. E.g., we can't assume logic puzzles can be the new CAPTCHA
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aL @alxin.me · 06/01/2025
This claim is disputable, but valid concerns about OOB performance, generalizability, multimodality, etc. aren't super relevant for this piece's purpose. It's mostly a rhetorical transition to saying "assuming AI can't equals won't is risky and baseless thinking in regulation".
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aL @alxin.me · 01/01/2025
I may be misremembering this, but back when Harvard was scouting for Presidents (pre-Claudine Gay), the search committee took recommendations from students. There was some whispers to get a group push for Avi Loeb, in no small part because it would be really funny.
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aL @alxin.me · 30/12/2024
(Should have linked this first, whoops)
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aL @alxin.me · 30/12/2024
FOMO from NYU faculty is referring to a "Reply All-pocalypse" where it seems that an email somehow hit a mass mailing list that looped in all the faculty into a gigantic email chain.
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aL @alxin.me · 30/12/2024
Would a crow be close enough?
youtu.be
Loki, our American Crow, painting.
YouTube video by Schlitz Audubon Nature Center
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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
Shoutout to voiceless wanderers in a beautiful and unsettling world gotta be one of my favorite genders fr fr
Top 3 games by playtime. Number 1: Hollow Knight. 41% Play Time, 142 Sessions Played. 2: Animal Well: 11% Play Time, 33 Sessions Played. 3: Rain World: 8% Play Time, 32 Sessions Played.
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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 · 16/12/2024
The original post is rage bait based on a bad machine translation of Chinese. An alternative reading is that the CEO had no idea what the GotY standards were (in a lighthearted "I'm new to this" way) and the acceptance speech was a team pep talk.
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aL @alxin.me · 15/12/2024
I see the reasoning here to make a concise, direct essay. However, I also appreciate the links and discussion in this thread, as the observation that demand-side and supply-side need to work together is not common (probably because the former is usually morally opposed to animal farming).
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aL @alxin.me · 15/12/2024
They also perch on top of the 24-hour library and swoop down on the dazed students (not frequently, but it happens)
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aL @alxin.me · 14/12/2024
Typewolf has a good archive of well-designed reference sites for font/color combos. These are often bespoke sites whose template can't be purchased directly, but having a visual reference might be helpful for fine-tuning the final look.
typewolf.com
Site of the Day · Typewolf
An archive of all the sites featured on Typewolf as site of the day.
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aL @alxin.me · 14/12/2024
Are those finger tattoos shark teeth? Very on brand
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aL @alxin.me · 10/12/2024
Blocks go both ways. You can test this on any random account, and when you refresh their feed, their posts will all be hidden. Blocks don't remove your replies or quotes, but you won't be able to see what you're replying to or quoting.
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aL @alxin.me · 07/12/2024
This and the "yuck fale" merch are staples of the November Harvard fit
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aL @alxin.me · 05/12/2024
However, I think Bang always intended the discovery to be relevant to healthcare, considering he was chair of Pathology at Johns Hopkins. Might not count as basic basic
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aL @alxin.me · 05/12/2024
Frederik Bang notices horseshoe crabs live in dirty water. He takes their blood, mixes it with bacterial toxins, and finds out it clots sometimes. After several years, he gets Jack Levin to figure out what to do with it. This becomes the LAL test for bacterial contamination (e.g. in IVs or meds).
hub.jhu.edu
Blue bloods
For each COVID-19 vaccine shot in the arm, we have the horseshoe crab, and the collaboration between a Johns Hopkins immunologist and hematologist, to thank
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aL @alxin.me · 04/12/2024
At least it has a decent vowel in the middle, unlike the despicable twelfths
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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 · 02/12/2024
Kurzgesagt is doing pretty well, though often for a younger or more offline demographic
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aL @alxin.me · 30/11/2024
In Chinese they call age-related frozen shoulder 五十肩 (wu shi jian), literally translated as 50 shoulder
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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 · 25/11/2024
I like going to ASOS then searching for "oversized". This usually means the collar isn't too low proportional to the length of the shirt. If you are okay with graphic tees, there are often steep discounts.
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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 · 24/11/2024
The people crave headlines that include the modeled fat loss distribution, expressed as a scaled and translated Gamma
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aL @alxin.me · 23/11/2024
Thank you for your generous pre mortem donation to science
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aL @alxin.me · 23/11/2024
Screenshot from Hollow Knight where the player challenges the sun (the Radiance)
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aL @alxin.me · 23/11/2024
Try the feed "Only Posts" and "Popular with Friends". Though, to be fair, I'm not really a power user and don't need to sift through a high volume of content, so I'm not confident this will help depending on what your follow list looks like.
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aL @alxin.me · 21/11/2024
She dropped the cat out the window so the firefighters would catch the cat
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aL @alxin.me · 20/11/2024
I hope Providence will one day smile upon me and provide a prophetic vision of what post elicited this quote skeey
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