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bigbillheck

1,619 karma · joined February 22, 2021

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bigbillheck··on NPR suspends veteran editor as it grapples with his public criticism
I've got no love for NPR, but as a result of the comments here I've had to do some self-reflection, and keep coming back to that saying about a table with ten people and that story about the bartender who kicked a dude out.

@dang please ban this account.

bigbillheck··on Loading a trillion rows of weather data into TimescaleDB
Huh, I wonder if climatologists might have based their analyses on more than just this single time series. No way of knowing.
bigbillheck··on Creating sexually explicit deepfake images to be made offence in UK
>"whatever done by consenting adults in the privacy of their own home is cool".

For example, cooking meth.

bigbillheck··on To make a fortune, target bored young men who want to make a fortune
You've never donated to your local npr/pbs station?
bigbillheck··on Ramanujan's lost notebook
He's been dead for 104 years, where's the piracy?
bigbillheck··on Ramanujan's lost notebook
Do they not teach the concept of linear time anymore?
bigbillheck··on Ramanujan's lost notebook
> If published someone like Terrence Tao could write formal proofs for them like he and his team did some improvements for the work by Yitang Zhang.

From the second paragraph:

> George Andrews and Bruce C. Berndt (2005, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2018) have published several books in which they give proofs for Ramanujan's formulas included in the notebook

bigbillheck··on A shrub in Nepal supplies the raw material for the bank notes used in Japan
> There are too many high-level botanical terms here, I can't understand anything.

That's easily fixable, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTsAFpSXj7Y

bigbillheck··on Star explosion to appear in sky in once-in-a-lifetime event
I'm not really sure there's a singular "now" that encompasses both here and there.
bigbillheck··on Rejuvenating the blood cell population
> ...vertebrate...Before machine-mediated transportation— trains, planes, boats and cars—individuals were likely to be exposed to the majority of pathogens in their local geography by the time of reproductive age

This hypothesis would be testable by looking at migrating animals, such as gray whales or arctic terns.

bigbillheck··on Washington's Lottery forced to pull site after creating AI porn of lotto user
Are you of an age to remember a certain variety of picture in National Geographic? Assuming those ladies knew they were being photographed and were ok with it being published, where does that land in your flowchart?
bigbillheck··on Washington's Lottery forced to pull site after creating AI porn of lotto user
I think if you thought the post was worth making in the first place it's a matter of personal integrity to keep it up even in the face of pushback, downvotes, or flagging.
bigbillheck··on Washington's Lottery forced to pull site after creating AI porn of lotto user
Not all consensual photographs of ladies with their tits out are porn of any kind.
bigbillheck··on Washington's Lottery forced to pull site after creating AI porn of lotto user
> Gotta love how women's breasts are simultaneously "softcore porn" and "women's rights", all depending on the type of news/propaganda utilized.

Very strange. It's almost as if the settings in which humans operate require "nuance" and "complexity" and "context" to understand and can't be navigated with a flowchart.

bigbillheck··on The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk (2023)
> cheap enough to not care about

You can get a ten pack of 16gb drives for $25, which after inflation is in the ballpark of what I remember floppies costing 30 years ago.

bigbillheck··on Bradford pear trees banned in few states – More are looking to eradicate them
@dang get over here and do something about this.
bigbillheck··on Bradford pear trees banned in few states – More are looking to eradicate them
Sure is! https://www.apsnet.org/edcenter/disandpath/fungalbasidio/pdl...

> The white pine blister rust pathogen is a typical heteroecious, macrocyclic rust that produces five distinct spore stages on two different hosts to complete its life cycle. The pycnial stage consists of pycniospores, or spermatia, which are haploid spores that fertilize compatible receptive hyphae. The two sexes are not distinguishable and are simply designated plus and minus. This is the stage where genetic recombination can occur that may lead to development of races of the rust. However, the nuclear cycle (i.e., dikaryogamy, diploidization, meiosis) of the blister rust fungus has not been fully determined, but is assumed to be the same as for other better known rust fungi such as Puccinia graminis. The aecial stage develops in host tissue occupied by pycnia the previous season (Figure 6). The fungus is perennial in the pine host and aeciospores are produced annually as long as the host tissues remain alive. Aeciospores are disseminated by wind over long distances, and Ribes spp. as far as 480 km (300 miles) from the nearest known white pines have been infected.

bigbillheck··on Bradford pear trees banned in few states – More are looking to eradicate them
It's a host for white pine blister rust.
bigbillheck··on You won't find a technical co-founder
> they deliberately didn't patent it

If you'll check the historical record you'll find, for example, patents US2524035A (Bardeen&Brattain, Three-electrode circuit element utilizing semiconductive materials, oldest priority 1948-02-26) and US2569347A (Shockley, Circuit element utilizing semiconductive material, oldest priority 1948-06-26).

> How 'bout the amplifiers on the optical fibers?

patents.google.com reports 65279 hits for "optical fiber amplifier"

> Uh, the laser?

The original invention of the laser led to patent disputes and lawsuits that weren't settled until 1987.

> RSA encryption

US4405829A (Rivest, Shamier, Alderman, Cryptographic communications system and method, filed 1977 awarded 1983)

> And the FFT (fast Fourier transform)?

There's an entire category for this, G06F17/142, with 11186 entries: https://patents.google.com/?q=G06F17%2f142

bigbillheck··on What we know about the xz Utils backdoor that almost infected the world
> Can’t the OS / environment provide a “features_available”

That wouldn't be consistent with the "unix philosophy".

bigbillheck··on Not so fast, Mr. Fourier
> What if you apply the fourier transform twice?

You're back in the time domain except reversed in time.

bigbillheck··on Dr. Katalin Karikó (2021)
> same way we look at Polio today

You mean "still present and due to the nature of the vaccines requiring eternal vigilance"?

bigbillheck··on Dr. Katalin Karikó (2021)
> Is AI gen or real?

Why would you say such a thing.

bigbillheck··on How to graduate your PhD when you have no hope
> The consensus? He has tons of "red flags" for basically being "billy the beta" who won't excite the women who would come into contact with him. Hardly anyone is surprised that he can't get dates. Quoting one of the top comments: "his persona reads to be like a human representation of mashed potatoes with no seasoning, bland. "

There's a couple people in that thread who used the term "beta" but I wouldn't call it the consensus. There's some calling him "boring", but there's also a bunch of ladies saying "maybe if I were single", and a bunch more saying "wanting kids is a dealbreaker".

And in any case things seem to have worked out for him: "This profile was published in August 2022; I'm no longer single, but wanted to leave it up since it was an important document for me." (https://colah.github.io/personal/dating/)

> The reality is that being a SWE or related is a massive net negative to your "SMV". We software people trade our game for our money. It's sad but it is what it is. I blame the widespread normalization of "nerds" being bullied by "jocks" in TV from the 1980s on. The cultural damage this has done is unreal.

I don't think this is true at all.

> Seriously - the most unrealistic thing about the movie "wargames" is the idea that a kid who looked like that doing a bunch of command line shit would have a girl who looked like that interested in him (and his computer!).

Matthew Broderick ended up marrying Sarah Jessica Parker.

bigbillheck··on X (Twitter) Is Funding Lawsuit Against Block (Square): Chloe Happe vs. Block
For the record, the only actual tweet in the document is Happe saying "Looking fear in the eyes today as I'm using the ADA gender neutral restroom in the office and a r~~~ t~~~ in a wheelchair knocks on the door."
bigbillheck··on A muon collider could revolutionize particle physics, if it can be built
That's all true, but they wouldn't spend the money on those kinds of things, they'd just buy more fighter jets.
bigbillheck··on Topologists tackle the trouble with poll placement
It's hard to solve social problems (intentional voter disenfranchisement) with technological solutions.
bigbillheck··on Nobody Wants to Buy the Future: Why Science Fiction Literature Is Vanishing
> Science Fiction is plagued with all the same problems facing comic books and tabletop gaming: the entire publishing industry only cares about representation and winning industry accolades for said representation and it isn't resonating with fans so sales are cratering. The industries are focused on people who aren't already customers and they aren't attracting them as customers either.

How does this square with, for example, the Dragon Awards? These kicked off after the initial 'sad puppy' Hugo drama, and many of the early winners were from that group, but in the last couple years once they've become more widely known outside that demographic they're looking a little more like the other big popular-vote award.

bigbillheck··on Nobody Wants to Buy the Future: Why Science Fiction Literature Is Vanishing
> because they represented a counter-reformation to the "new wave" which made Smith look cool again (great!)=

Tor didn't start until 1980, by which time the new wave was long dead. (Also which "Smith" do you mean? E.E.'Doc'? L.Neil? Cordwainer? Clark Ashton?)

bigbillheck··on Advances in semiconductors are feeding the AI boom
Two credited authors.
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