TooKool4This

> Australia, New Zealand, and Canada are quasi-police states [1] and will probably mandate vaccination+boosters soon.

Regardless of whatever metric you use to define “freedom” all of those countries rank higher than the US pre-Covid for “freedom”[1][2][3]. If your argument is that those countries are fundamentally “less-free” post-Covid due to public health measures, I don’t see the data to support that. To imply that all those countries will shift from the principles that drive them pre-Covid to a police-state post-Covid is very unlikely given the prior right?

As someone who’s lived in one of those countries and the US, I can say that the tendency of the US to argue over every small issue, even if it is overwhelmingly common sense and beneficial, takes away a lot of focus on the big issues that the country needs to solve.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

[2] https://rsf.org/en/ranking_table

[3] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...

That’s actually very interesting!

I just got done reading the Three-Body problem which is translated from Chinese and there was a very strong escapist narrative which felt very strange for a westerner reading it.

This actually adds a lot of context as I felt the book didn’t live up to the reviews but I felt all along that it was down to cultural differences and the translation to English.

> Many people talk about vim lately, probably the most I've seen and I'm still not sure why.

Extrapolating from personal experience, I think this might be down to Covid WFH where more people have had to ssh into remote machines and may need to edit files so might choose to use vim as it’s easily available. And vim is something that I find is better learned progressively where you pick up 1 or 2 tricks every week or something so those people might have been able to pick it up over the last year or so and are now evangelizing it.

I wonder if this will encourage a renaissance in China of LAN play, more P2P protocols for online gaming, and informal game servers run by people you know (rather than the game publisher).

Sounds like it could be kinda fun (nostalgia for me)

> Remember when the previous administration suggested looking into the Lab Leak theory and was laughed at?

Remember when the head of the previous administration thought injecting disinfectants or UV light was a possible solution to Covid?

The problem with trust and credibility is that once it’s lost, it’s very hard to gain back. Even if the broken clock is right twice a day, it’s still broken.

I see this point often brought up to detract from green energy sources. But I fail to see how it would be possible to transition to any new green technology without relying on the existing energy infrastructure for manufacturing. This attitude reminds of of the saying "perfection is the enemy of the good" and would get us no closer to a green energy future if everyone held this opinion.

Put another way, what is the alternative you are proposing for the energy source to manufacture the first wind turbine (at cost and can scale)? You might be able to manufacture a couple of wind turbines with some horses and man power but it will never be cost competitive with fossil fuels unfortunately.

Very interesting article, would definitely like to read the paper when I get the time.

Something I would like to understand is how these old systems scaled the reference measurements to order of magnitude larger/smaller weights to measure. Up until recently (before the SI redefinition of weight to physical constants) this was an issue even with the modern definition of the kg where for measuring larger and larger weights we essentially have to resort to larger reference weights. And in doing so the manufacturing complexity grows significantly if you want to hold the same uncertainty (as a %). And of course, this applies when measuring masses significantly smaller than the reference 1kg prototype.

> I would also enjoy a maximize button that does maximize the window and not create a virtual space with the application in full-screen.

This was the biggest thing that annoyed me when switching from Windows. I’ve been using SizeUp for 5 years now without any problem and it’s great, especially when using a 4K screen (quarter screen window tiles).

https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

I am not sure its a problem of our species (most species seek to expand their footprint in the world) but considering we have the cognition to understand our impact on the world, it seems imperative that we minimize our impact to some extent.

But after all that, with the right perspective, what you describe can almost be seen as describing a fundamental law of nature (entropy). An ordered system will naturally trend towards disorder given no external input and its much easier to have an unordered system than an ordered system.

Transferring songs and playlist is actually very easy (unless you are listening to very niche stuff). Songshift (no affiliation) worked very well for my needs and moved most of my playlists and songs over. Not sure about discover weekly though

Aside from the language features, some of the libraries in Julia make it really useful for statistical computing. One really cool library I am trying to use more and more in Julia is the Measurements library [1]. With the multiple dispatch system in Julia its super easy to integrate into most problems and can let you estimate error bounds on values programs produce. Super important for scientific applications.

I am hoping in the future that I can mix this in with some auto-diff problems to get uncertainty bounds on estimation problems with minimal fiddling with covariance matrices. Right now the performance is the only problem in integrating the library into pretty much any problem :(

[1] https://github.com/JuliaPhysics/Measurements.jl

If I understand correctly, the audiophile review is claiming to recommend a network switch based on the difference of a few pico seconds of jitter!? Surely that is outside the range of human perceptibly right?

The main issue here is mixing up a statistically significant effect and that effect being significant. With a very high powered experiment you can detect very small effects but that doesn’t mean they have a significant effect on the outcome.

I really think the simple hearing test is best but should incorporate common tools of measurement science such as repeated tests and multiple, varied listeners. Audio “quality” is very subjective and can come down to preferences driven by culture, age, experiences, etc. Some sort of consensus rating over all reviewers should be done.

Edit: also the rule of 3s! Never measure twice, always 1 or 3 times, is particularly relevant to this article :)

> Unlikely things happen all the time. If he lost money, this article wouldn’t exist.

Exactly! The person you replied to did the right calculation but completely threw away the context. The argument here is akin to p-hacking where all the investors in the world are the experiments and this article merely picked the one that got lucky.

Different scenario but similar argument, I roll a large set of dice, 5x rolls each die. If the set is large enough, one of the dice is likely to land all 6s. While that is unlikely, that doesn’t automatically mean the diced are unfair. It’s not just enough to reject the null hypothesis but you also need to prove the new hypothesis. Not to mention having a solid working theorem for why the alternate hypothesis is correct.

That’s pretty cool! I’m going along in the same vein. I know my median guess was taken first so I can’t actually win but I just wanted to see how close I could get out of curiosity.

I am surprised the median was an accurate estimator in your case but I suppose it makes sense if you are not close to the bound of zero (I.e. it start approximating a normal distribution)

Yep looks like there are but are in the higher range of the distribution (>300). Updated the post with some interesting plots.

I would really like to use a z-score metric to remove the outliers and fit a gamma distribution, but unfortunately its a busy Monday!

I tried applying the wisdom of crowds idea instead :D https://twitter.com/SmittyW62858649/status/13589265825139957...

Not sure if taking a median is the best idea. I figure a gamma distribution might work better!

I think trying to fit a single solution to the entire range of schooling is a bad idea.

In the earlier years of your life, a big part of schooling is “learning how to learn” whether implicitly or explicitly. By the time you get to university you have a good set of skills in terms of taking notes, referencing literature, practicing problems such that more time is spent learning the material rather than developing those meta-learning skills. I think that might explain the difference between your experience and your colleagues’.

I haven’t thought too much about the pre-k to grade school level, but at the university level it seems like universities are making an incredibly lackluster attempt at remote learning. They seem to have just taken the lecture aspect of university, thrown it into a zoom meeting, and called it a day. For the tuition that students are paying in the US (10-50k per year) there is so much room to provide value in alternative ways. I understand a large portion of those fees go towards paying faculty salaries but surely without having to run facilities they can invest that money in providing more value in remote learning. Things such as VR lectures/labs, improving the social aspect of remote university, more smaller group learning with more remote TAs, etc. There is so much opportunity here but there seems to be very low effort on the university side, probably due to massive sunk costs on the in-person learning side.

I believe there would be minimal practical impact in any case.

In the case of anisotropy of the physical constants, it would have to be so small that to date independent labs around the world haven’t detected a difference outside of the measurement uncertainty.

In terms Of time variance a similar logic can apply. I would also add that variation of the physical constants over the span of a few decades is not very likely in the grand scheme of the universe.

It’s the same reason that nothing in your life materially changed when we switched the definition of the kilogram last year, unless you are a metrologist ;). The variations being discussed here have to fundamentally be below our current measurement uncertainties and our current measurement uncertainties are very very small.

One interesting thing to consider is the Paradox of Tolerance[1]. In the case of our society, allowing the norms to be consistently pushed can lead to the rise of intolerance.

Not to mention that the decisions to ban Trump certainly wasn’t taken overnight and he was given a very long leash.

Regardless I’m sure the motives here are not philosophical but mostly profit motivated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Well said. The ability to better realize primary standards and disseminate that to secondary metrology labs from national standards is so critical.

It’s the same reason I think the work done in changing the SI definition to physical constants is so critical. In a decade or so all secondary labs should have capabilities to measure directly to the definition of a unit without needing to do comparison measurements to national standards. To me it seems like the metrology equivalent of “open sourcing SI units”

Specific to my knowledge base, timing is critical to applications in inertial sensors (IMUs that guide missiles, AR/VR, smartphone apps, and so much more). To that end, here is interesting work that DARPA is doing in developing inertial sensors that can navigate without GPS for significant amounts of time. Critical to that is accurate chip level atomic clocks.

https://www.darpa.mil/program/micro-technology-for-positioni...

Other uses as other posters mentioned is in traceability of measurements. Improving the means of measurement of the primary standard has downstream impact to secondary standards in metrology labs which ultimately (through transfer standards) would result in better calibrations of production systems.

Finally, an interesting thought I have is that in the future this could be an interesting way to figure out your absolute position on Earth. At a conference one of the NIST Boulder folks mentioned that the frequency of clocks in the development pipeline was so precise/stable that it could pick up time dilation effects from moving the clock from a desk to the floor! An instrument like that combined with accurate gravimetery data could be used to map the earth, find concentrations of natural resources, or possibly act as a standalone positioning system.

It’s a chicken and egg problem though. I don’t know if we will know all the uses for it until we build it, so instead of saying “why build it?” I think it makes sense to go and just build it :)

I don't see how with that arrangement they could guarantee the app is also not collecting and uploading data in addition to the data saved on Microsoft's servers. It would come down to trying to prove a negative which is not really possible outside of trivial cases.

The only way to make that arrangement work would be to give Microsoft access to the source and ability/responsibility to review the source/releases. Not exactly a great Setup for either party.

After working in a particularly magnetics heavy project at work an analogue that I found works better is picturing the flux lines as “fluidic” and emulating common fluid behavior. For example, having a ferromagnetic material within a magnetic field is like having a funnel in a fluid stream. Taking this analogue along with an intuitive understanding of Maxwell’s equations really gives you an intuitive understanding of magnetics for applied sciences (ie DivB = 0 means that in any bounded region the number of field lines entering = number of field lines leaving).

Of course all of this is only good up to the point you start looking at magnetics at the material science level. Then you really need to internalize it is a quantum mechanics effect and commit to learning the hard science behind it.

Veritasium has a good video on the “levels of explanation” of magnetic fields and you really need to decide how deep you want to go.

Definitely! I had an opportunity to visit their physical measurement labs and get a tour of their facilities as part of my job and the amount of detail poured into every single aspect of the measurement system for primary standards was amazing.

Seeing the kibble balance that is now the primary standard for mass measurement was particularly great!

And the work going into putting primary standards into the hands of thousands of people through the Nist-On-A-Chip project is absolutely amazing.

https://www.nist.gov/pml/productsservices/nist-chip-portal

There are 3rd party replacements for USB-C MagSafe connectors if you do ever need to upgrade. Don't know if they get the sweet spot for retention force that the old MagSafe connector did but I have seen some co-workers use it without issue.

1: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=usb-c+magsafe&crid=20NMLJRE2HMRI&...

Wow that was awesome and super easy. Thanks for the tip, didn't know iOS Safari had an API for content blocking, I will need to explore that more.

Any solutions for mobile (iOS)? This problem is really painful on mobile devices where (in Safari) the popup takes up half the screen after the url+nav bars takes up a quarter leaving you with 25% of the screen to look at the actual content (with autoplaying ad videos every few paragraphs if you are lucky!) until you dismiss the popup.

Argh, makes me angry just thinking about it. The web is becoming increasingly painful to use through a UI browser.

Interesting tool but couldn’t discern the interface from the README.

On a side note, does anyone have any recommendations for C++ plotting libraries that integrate nicely with Eigen matrices/vectors? Even better if it is usable through lldb when breakpoints are set. I’m trying to recreate my workflow in matlab where you can set a breakpoint at some point in the code and visualize through different plots the variables when writing an algorithm. I find this makes matlab very nice for prototyping and the lack of this workflow becomes a real pain point when we go to convert our matlab implementation to a more performant C++ implementation.

I agree with you and I’ve made the same observation but I don’t think it’s due to some misplaced sense of superiority.

I think it’s simply because it has been a while since disease and pestilence was a worry for the average Western country so the average citizen (and therefore the leaders) are complacent in a sort of “It can’t happen here” way. There have been outbreaks such as the AIDS epidemic or swine flu but nothing as impactful, infectious, and at the scale of COVID.

Whereas Asian countries have grappled with issues of SARS, Malaria, AIDS, Polio, and many more in the not so distant past and have learned the importance of taking public health seriously. The experience of the outcome of mismanaging a response to a previous epidemic is still “fresh” so to say in many of these countries. I think a good example of this is how South Korea dealt with SARS and evolved their response to COVID based on the learnings from that.

Lastly I wonder if the prevalence of more communal societies in Asian cultures make a difference. I can imagine it could make the problem worse but it could also be beneficial in the sense of providing strong societal pressures to quarantine/hand wash/social distance/etc.

Edit: And of course the misguided leaders in particular Western countries are not helping. Maybe the US this particular time is just a statistical outlier due to some mismanagement and there is nothing more to read into further than that?

Not sure what you mean by pancake.

But I feel its mostly rotational motion that is perceptible in VR demos rather than translational motion. I suspect that's because a small rotational motion results in a large shift in perspective for objects in the world that are some distance away from the camera while small translational movements don't really result in a significant perspective shift.

Would be interested in seeing what research into human head motion while sitting/standing/walking/etc. shows though.