Experts' nebulous decision making can often be modelled with simple decision trees and even decision chains (linked lists). Even when the expert thinks their decision making is more complex, a simple decision tree better models the expert's decision than the rules proposed by the experts themselves.
I've long dismissed decision trees because they seem so ham-fisted compared to regression and distance-based clustering techniques but decision trees are undoubtedly very effective.
See more in chapter seven of the Oxford Handbook of Expertise. It's fascinating!
I once saw a visualization that basically partitioned decisions on a 2D plane.
From that perspective, decision trees might just be a fancy word for kD-Trees partitioning the possibility space and attaching an action to the volumes.
Given that assumption, the nebulous decision making could stem from expert's decisions being more nuanced in the granularity of the surface separating 2 distinct actions. It might be a rough technique, but nonetheless it should be able to lead to some pretty good approximations.
... if they are privileged enough to be able to take time away from family and jobs.
The current crop of LLMs are subsidised enough to make this learning less expensive for those with little of both time and money. That's what's meant by democratised.
One of the issues with Iraq was that Rumsfeld didn't want to acknowledge that it takes more personnel post-toppling (to rebuild infrastructure and institutions) than during invasion. It seems like the current government could be prone to make the same mistake.
I recommend anyone interested in this to read Cobra II. It's an excellent book.
I don't know anything about laboratory uses of agar, but I do use it in cooking. Something that baffles me is that so many recipes (at least in northern Europe) use gelatin when agar works just as well or better. Agar is cheaper, easier to handle, comes in more compact packaging, lasts longer, sets faster, is reversible, fits more food preferences, etc. Why this obsession with gelatin? What am I missing?
The article contains one possible clue: gelatin melts at body temperature. This implies dishes made with gelatin melt in the mouth like chocolate does, but I can't recall experiencing that (at least not to the extent of chocolate) when eating gelatin-based stuff. (And many gels, at least in my opinion, have a better mouthfeel when more solid than liquid.)
Gelatine melts at a lower temperature and has a much better mouthfeel for most of these traditional recipes. It is creamy and adds body to a stock or sauce. Agar is brittle and requires a higher temperature to set. Agar would be a good choice for something where you want it to stay in a particular shape, but it is much more of a one-trick pony when it comes to cooking. Each can act as a poor man's version of the other, but neither really hits the same features as the other.
Agar is great for a gel, especially one you want to stand up to a bit of heat and remain stable at room temp, and I would always reach for it instead of gelatine when doing most desserts or pastry work. OTOH I would only use it in a sauce if I needed to accommodate a vegan guest.
> I would only use it in a sauce if I needed to accommodate a vegan guest.
As an alternative, I've found methylcellulose to be pretty good for thickening my vegan homemade sauces (mainly tried it because I use it for other stuff, like fakemeat homemade protein sources). That's for homemade mayo or the like; for sauces in stews and similar, flour does the job - though US cooks seem obsessed by cornstarch instead for that use case.
They are ‘obsessed’ with cornstarch instead of flour because cornstarch is almost pure starch and doesn’t add a flavor the way that flour does. It shares that property with methylcellulose.
> Why this obsession with gelatin? What am I missing?
Probably just tradition. It's pretty easy to "accidentally" make gelatin when making a broth, and intentionally making it only requires heat and bones, which are essentially pure waste. Whereas agar is a product that you have to buy in a store, and wasn't even available in the West until somewhat recently.
Of course, everybody just buys gelatin in the stores these days, and agar is almost as easy to find, but old recipes tend to be handed down for generations.
If you’ve had soups and broth made with lots of bones, and you want to recreate that same mouth feel and experience without using loads of bones, then you can achieve that by using gelatin, because gelatin is exactly what the first dish had that yours is missing. It’s literally the missing ingredient if you’re not cooking with the bones.
Also, they simply aren’t perfect replacements for each other. Agar and gelatin are certainly similar in many ways, but the are not the same.
I was unaware (until I read the article) that it was used in cooking.
There is a family story that I had been fed a good deal of agar as a baby since my parents were poor but my father was at a state university and the agar was able to walk out the door with him from lab classes (and I think he worked as a lab assistant/technician to pay for school).
> can't recall experiencing that (at least not to the extent of chocolate) when eating gelatin-based stuff.
The traditional jelly around the outside meat of British pork pie would frankly be weird texture (and probably horrible) if it was made from agar. It really has got to be made from pork bones to be authentic. It does melt in the mouth, when the pie is properly made - sadly rare these days.
I realised I never shared this with HN! My first proper Pico-8 project was a minimalistic arrival air controller game, where instead of vectoring planes you assign them to routes.
Early versions of the game were extremely challenging and lasted only a few minutes, but play testers thought a more chill experience would fit the game better, so while the game does ramp up its difficulty, most people should have no problem going for at least half an hour.
Thanks for accommodating for unregistered play. This was fun!
It took me a surprisingly long time to break out of the tetris gravity mindset and start attaching pieces to the bottom of existing blobs, rather than on the lowest possible position on the board!
I agree. Including the unit in the name is a form of Hungarian notation; useful when the language doesn't support defining custom types, but looks a little silly otherwise.
Depends on what variant of Hungarian you're talking about.
There's Systems Hungarian as used in the Windows header files or Apps Hungarian as used in the Apps division at Microsoft. For Apps Hungarian, see the following URL for a reference - https://idleloop.com/hungarian/
For Apps Hungarian, the variable incorporates the type as well as the intent of the variable - in the Apps Hungarian link from above, these are called qualifiers.
so for the grandparent example, rewritten in C, would be something like:
For Apps Hungarian, one would know that the ibHdrContent and cb fields are the same type 'b'. ib represents an index/offset in bytes - HdrContent is just descriptive, while cb is a count of bytes. The pfnParent field is a pointer to a fn-type with name Parent.
One wouldn't mix an ib with a pfn since the base types don't match (b != fn). But you could mix ibHdrContent and cb since the base types match and presumably in this small struct, they refer to index/offset and count for the FileNode. You'd have only one cb for the FileNode but possibly one or more ibXXXX-related fields if you needed to keep track of that many indices/offsets.
I've long dismissed decision trees because they seem so ham-fisted compared to regression and distance-based clustering techniques but decision trees are undoubtedly very effective.
See more in chapter seven of the Oxford Handbook of Expertise. It's fascinating!
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