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Galen

@samgalen

PhD student @ UVa's Biocomplexity Institute, where I mostly do things relating to simulation of diseases and synthetic data.

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19.09.2023
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Latest posts by Galen @samgalen

Deciding to shovel out the car yesterday looking better in retrospect - you’d need a jackhammer to get it out today

26.01.2026 16:04 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Honestly it probably strengthens Disneys case since it sets the groundwork that a) generation of content containing their IP is something that can be subject to a deal and b) how much that use is valued at.

11.12.2025 18:54 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

It’s sports injury September everyone, so remember to get hurt in a not-life-altering-but-definitely-inconvenient way through your own hubris

17.09.2025 13:24 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

We’re going to get Grimes back on the boat

06.08.2025 03:22 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Strava activity saying that I’m a local legend on Poison Ivy alley

Strava activity saying that I’m a local legend on Poison Ivy alley

Hm

31.07.2025 02:19 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

mostly the person is me

04.07.2025 17:06 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Neither my job is to punish the person using the computer for their hubris

04.07.2025 17:06 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

This is a great piece that reflects lessons I’ve also had to learn the hard way (though maybe not as bad as the author)

That said I’m not sure a 1:1 analogy to non-publication bias is entirely appropriate in the AI setting

19.05.2025 14:05 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
License Plate Reader Company Flock Is Building a Massive People Lookup Tool, Leak Shows Flock, which has license plate readers (LPRs) all around the country, wants police to be able to β€œjump from LPR to person,” according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media.

This seems like something Charlottesville folks should be concerned about - is Charlottesville PD participating in the record linkage program?

18.05.2025 12:22 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Street art with a sort of femme demon character in a drainage culvert

Street art with a sort of femme demon character in a drainage culvert

Grafitti with the same femme demon character also in a culvert

Grafitti with the same femme demon character also in a culvert

Eye grafitti with text on a concrete wall

Eye grafitti with text on a concrete wall

A kind of cat character graffiti with caption one day at a time

A kind of cat character graffiti with caption one day at a time

Charlottesville culvert grafitti

04.05.2025 22:07 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Nathan Fielder is a pilot?

Apparently Nathan Fielder got a pilots license and type rating on the 737?

22.04.2025 01:14 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

They can’t actually have done the thing they said they did in the Rehearsal S2? Surely the flight purchases would have been flagged

21.04.2025 22:12 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

As someone who’s been coding in Python since version 2.7, it is kind of crazy to see how it’s slowly turned into Java

29.01.2025 01:54 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

They call it going Gwern-mode

13.01.2025 18:28 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The example provided is kind of wild though- I had no idea that online cooking advice could be read that way. Perhaps this has to do with loci of anxiety. For me cooking has very little anxiety associated with it. Where this shows up for me would be online productivity advice

10.01.2025 18:07 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Crisis of Confidence Avoidance Machines, Part 2

This was interesting- very much agree with the thesis. I focused on programming in college because it more clearly provided me with feedback about when I was doing something wrong (as opposed to math, where if you don’t know you’ve made an error it won’t necessarily become obvious)

10.01.2025 18:03 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Surgeon General Calls for Cancer Warnings on Alcohol (Gift Article) Dr. Vivek Murthy’s report cites studies linking alcoholic beverages to at least seven malignancies, including breast cancer. But to add warning labels, Congress would have to act.

This does seem to be an example of statistical significance not necessarily corresponding to real world significance? The increase seems to be about 1/100 over baseline with moderate drinking

03.01.2025 16:00 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

You know what today is giving? It’s giving Tuesday

03.12.2024 13:19 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
Are Overemployed β€˜Ghost Engineers’ Making Six Figures to Do Nothing? "We have data on the performance of >50k engineers from 100s of companies. ~9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing: Ghost Engineers.”

Not mentioned in the article is that the last author on the arXiv paper the meaurement tool is based off of is the same guy who wrote the AI gaydar paper like 7 years ago

www.404media.co/are-overempl...

27.11.2024 18:43 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I have a very strong memory of a time in 2018 when my phone broke the night before flying back to Chicago. Taking the crowded early morning blue line into Lincoln Park. It was fall, so cold. In some ways a very heightened experience

25.11.2024 21:01 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

There’s nothing quite so psychically destabilizing as a piece of equipment on which you rely daily breaking.

It can be kind of nice in that it reminds you of how much these objects mediate your experience, though in practice I’m stressed and can’t think about anything else until it’s fixed

25.11.2024 20:54 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Start your week off right by having to do emergency OS reinstall and restore from backups on Sunday night

25.11.2024 03:52 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

I’ve gotten the sense that for people most prone to concern about seed oils, they actually might be doing this?

Mostly this comes from reading from what I now would recognize as a right-wing adjacent money blog in 2014 where one of the money saving tips was to drink oil instead of bringing snacks

24.11.2024 04:16 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

An ad campaign that probably would have killed in mid-2010s San Francisco is a series of billboards saying β€œDependency Hell is Real”

18.11.2024 19:56 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Seems to be that the next thing in the self-optimization community is regularly donating blood to clear out the toxins

12.11.2024 23:23 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
A train with two CSX locomotives passing through an elevated rain track by a creek

A train with two CSX locomotives passing through an elevated rain track by a creek

Call me O. Winston the way I’m hitting these links

12.11.2024 14:31 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

It’s interesting (to me at least) that even though it’s pretty common to use AI/ML as a way of prioritizing items for further investigation, there’s no super popular formalization that really reflects that

12.11.2024 01:05 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
β€˜Stop This’: What Tired Texans Wrote to the FCC We got the complaints about a pre-dawn 'Blue Alert' that pissed off a lot of Texans.

I spent about 3 months in Texas this summer and got more amber alerts than in the past 3 years in Virginia so this article rings true.

07.11.2024 15:36 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
An orange bumper sticker showing a man digging and putting dirt into a scanner. The text says Archive is a living memory it’s a location

An orange bumper sticker showing a man digging and putting dirt into a scanner. The text says Archive is a living memory it’s a location

First laptop sticker courtesy of Boot Boyz Biz

11.03.2024 02:32 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

The two times I slept through class/missed an exam in college were both the Mondays immediately after DST

10.03.2024 14:35 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0