JeremyHerrman

Same here! Spherical harmonics finally explained why the 3d orbital has the donut shape. Why isn't this taught in high school?!

What an excellent summary of the CAD kernel landscape.

Favorite quote from this:

"The only popular open-source b-rep kernel is OpenCascade, which is the Pontiac Aztek of b-rep kernels: It is ugly, barebones, and it might break down on you, but it is drivable and you can get one for free."

SO true!

In the comments Steve addresses this:

"The DB-19 isn’t really a B shell and probably shouldn’t be called “DB” anything if you’re being precise about naming. Apple called it DB-19 in their documentation, though, and the name stuck."

Have you tested PaliGemma's OCR abilities? The article says it does well:

"In average accuracy, we saw 85.84%, beating all other OCR models except for Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus."

From TFA, PaliGemma is competitive to GPT-4o and even beats it in terms of speed and OCR accuracy. It also can do object detection (bounding boxes) and segmentation which GPT-4V/o and Claude 3 Opus can't do at all.

Not to mention it's built to be fine tuned and commercially permissive!

This informative take deserves to be higher up the comment chain!

Why can't we resolve this with synthetic data? Just take the original statements and ask another LLM to flip around the relation, then train on both. I tried this with GPT-4 and it seems to understand the task [0]:

Me:

For each of the following relational statements, flip the relation around and generate a new statement or question answer pair.

Input: Bluey's father is Bandit

Output: Bandit's daughter is Bluey

Input: Neil Armstrong was the first person to step on the Moon.

Output: Who was the first person to step on the Moon? Neil Armstrong.

Now for the real statements:

- Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to travel to space

- Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son? Tom Cruise

ChatGPT:

Here are the flipped relational statements:

Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to travel to space

Output: Who was the first woman to travel to space? Valentina Tereshkova.

Who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son? Tom Cruise

Output: Tom Cruise's mother is Mary Lee Pfeiffer.

[0]: https://chat.openai.com/share/33eb3ee4-2094-4748-b01e-0967af...

great insight!

One other thing to note: although auras move and change over time, unless they appear in the center of your vision (fovea), you won't be able to directly "look" at one.

Here's how I usually describe what a migraine aura looks like:

It's just like the after-image you see after glancing directly at a bright light (like a light bulb's filament) then looking away or closing your eyes. Now imaging that after-image with a colorful scintillation along the edges, sometimes wrapping around a blind spot in your vision (not necessarily a black spot).

The cilia of a lobed comb jelly are close to what I'm talking about (video: https://youtu.be/LPu1juezWeg)

Auras are beautiful little harbingers of debilitation.

One of the APIs powering the Pinball Map is the excellent Open Pinball Database (opdb.org).

OPDB came about because an older site IPDB doesn’t have an API (and doesn’t want to have an API) in order for various pinball software to communicate with each other. I'm in some pinball leagues with the developer, Andreas Haugstrup, who also makes matchplay.events, pintips.net, and other sites that serve the pinball community.

Requisite link to SNL's 1988 skit "All Drug Olympics"

https://youtu.be/jAdG-iTilWU

Came here to also praise the 2400c. I finally restored mine to working condition just last week after finding a donor screen from a parts machine.

Excellent build quality thanks to IBM Japan who thankfully incorporated the inverted T arrow keys, a first for an Apple notebook, which still persists to today's MacBooks. The 2400c excellent build quality also doesn't suffer from poor hinges like the PowerBook 500/5300/1400c models.

The processor is on a daughterboard allowing the 2400c to be upgraded to a G3, and the modding scene out of Japan has brought a ton of interesting upgrades like translucent cases and keyboards.

The main problems the 2400c suffers from are leaky PRAM batteries and other issues causing the dreaded Green Light of Death (GLoD), where the machine won't boot without hardware replacements like a new processor card.

This reminds me of a scene from the Simpsons [1]:

Homer: Hmm. I wonder why he's so eager to go to the garage?

Moe: The "garage"? Hey fellas, the "garage"! Well, ooh la di da, Mr. French Man.

Homer: Well what do you call it?

Moe: A car hole!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5t9w98afJo

Nice, I’ll check it out!

Hey freezy! I'm amazed at what you've been able to build with VPE and appreciate the consistent push to bring Visual Pinball into a modern era. Seriously great job with untangling that legacy codebase and keeping the good bits (physics, existing tables), and replacing everything else.

I also appreciate how you interact with the community. Every time I see a new post from someone announcing a new project to replace VP, you're there to gently point out all of the details they haven't encountered yet and why VPE is solving them a certain way already. Nice!

I do think there's a big need for vpx-js to make visual pinball more shareable in a browser, even if Unity offers a webgl export. Hopefully I can help with that soon!

Hey Randy! Love your work on Archer and wish Stern could have kept that theme instead of Iron Maiden. I was able to play Archer at some festival (maybe Pin-a-go-go?) and could tell it was something special right away.

Tell your brother to stop being so good at pinball :-) I guess it's okay though since he keeps on popping out amazing designs, especially with Jurassic Park.

I've been building my own pinball machine from scratch on and off for the last several years. What I love about pinball design is that it combines so many disciplines: woodworking, metalworking, CAD, electronics, low level & high level software, game design, storytelling, blinking lights, and competitive fast action play.

I've got some old photos of my build progress here: https://jherrman.com/gravity-pinball-public-build-log

FWIW, he mass blocks people who have _never_ interacted with him on twitter. If you happen to like a tweet from an account that he doesn't like, you're blocked!

I get that people need to protect their feeds for their mental health, but I'd expect a public figure to have thicker skin and not default to hitting the scorched-earth-mega-auto-block button so often.

Agreed. Fine-tuning GPT-3 is often called out as expensive and sometimes unnecessary given K-shot & embeddings. I'm glad they shared their success story even if it's not ground-breaking.

This was my main thought as well, right after "Ah, so CleanMyMac X really is malware - I knew it!"

so cool, thanks for making this! Love that you have escape velocity!

Apple laptops had an amazing run from 2000-2015, starting with the Titanium PowerBook G4 and ending with the retina MacBook Pro (pre-touchbar).

FYI MagSafe was introduced with the first intel MacBook Pros in 2006 (although they had a nearly identical case as the PowerBook G4), so unfortunately no PowerPC notebooks had it.

Did Solidworks actually move away from Parasolid? I had thought that only some 3DEXPERIENCE cloud products were using CGM, but Solidworks on the desktop was still based on Parasolid.

I'm a big fan of Rectangle Pro. I just got a new MacBook and it only felt like it was really "my machine" after installing karabiner + rectangle. Thanks for making it!

Unfortunately the nearby headphone notifications are not generated by an app, so you can't use the normal notification banner settings. The only way I've found to disable them is to go to Bluetooth preferences (while the headphones are connected), click options next to the headphones, and change the "Connect to This Mac" dropdown from "Automatically" to "When Last Connected to This Mac".

I'm not satisfied with this solution since I enjoy the automatic switching between devices, but I'm driven crazy by the notifications that pop up on my mac literally as I'm listening to music with those headphones on my iPhone. C'mon Apple - this is all within your ecosystem!

I've had my Synology DS918+ for about a year, and overall I've been happy with it except for one huge mess with encrypted folders completely wrecking my Dropbox for a few weeks. Here's what happened:

I wanted to have a backup of my Dropbox on my NAS, so I used Synology's CloudSync service to back up to an encrypted folder. Unfortunately Synology's encryption actually encrypts each file individually, which Dropbox happily syncs to all of the computers that use that Dropbox, making all of those files unusable!

In the end, I had to write a script that detected which files were encrypted (files start with `__CLOUDSYNC_ENC__`), then use a WINDOWS ONLY decryption utility provided by Synology to decrypt and finally get back to a clean state. Then I wrote another script to move the decrypted files back into the proper path in Dropbox while correcting the newly decrypted files with the original metadata (creation date) from the encrypted bad files. What a pain!!

I'm still not sure of a good way to achieve my original goal of backing up Dropbox while still protecting my data with encryption. Let me know if anyone has a solution!

Nice - great advice in there. Aside from capturing disabled ships I didn't really use escorts to trade cargo, but your freighter strategy can really rack up the credits!

Me too! I cut my teeth on ResEdit and discovered weapons I never saw in the game. Total thrill!

Back in the 90s I played countless hours of the Escape Velocity series. I still drop into a Mac OS 9 emulator every now and then to get a healthy dose of nostalgia.

I'm happy the EV torch is still going in the 2020s with Endless Sky!