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boxerab

111 karma · joined February 6, 2011

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boxerab··on How has mathematics gotten so abstract?
The French Bourbaki school certainly had a large influence on increasing abstraction in math, with their rallying cry "Down With Triangles". The more fundamental reason is that generalizing a problem works; it distills the essence and allows machinery from other branches of math to help solve it.

"A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies."

-- Stefan Banach

boxerab··on Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers
"Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better"
boxerab··on Homeowner baffled after washing machine uses 3.6GB of internet data a day (2024)
I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that. This rinse cycle is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
boxerab··on YouTube says it'll bring back creators banned for Covid and election content
leftism is truly an inversion of reality - current govt is not outsourcing censorship to do end run around 1A, Biden admin did.
boxerab··on YouTube says it'll bring back creators banned for Covid and election content
tl;dr The Biden Administration has been caught using the government to force Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to censor its political enemies.
boxerab··on YouTube says it'll bring back creators banned for Covid and election content
Yes! This MUST be why the VAERS adverse event tracker went through the roof right after the rollout began, and why excess death remains sky high in many countries to this day - because a product that didn't stop you from catching or spreading the virus was one of the only things preventing deaths. Couldn't have been our, you know, immune system or anything like that, or that the average age at death was 80 along with several co-morbidities.
boxerab··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
Here's why we should be wary of the "wonder drug" being touted by GAVI:

RFK Jr.: "Gardasil is probably the single worst mass vaccine that we've ever seen. This vaccine targets millions of preteens and teens for whom the risk of dying from cervical cancer is zero. Nobody in their right mind would ever take this vaccine if they actually read the clinical literature."

"Death rates in the Gardasil trials were 37 times the death rates for cervical cancer. Children who take that vaccine, the Gardasil vaccine, are 37 times more likely to die from the vaccine than they are to die from cervical cancer. The problem with Gardasil, like most vaccines, is it was never tested against a true placebo, an inert placebo."

"And the CDC and HHS say, if you don't test it against a true placebo, it's not science. You have no way of gauging whether the injuries you're seeing from the product are being caused by that product, or whether they're just bad, sad coincidences. The entity that is actually performing the study is, and paying for the study, is Merck."

"Merck got to decide which injuries were being caused by Gardasil and which were just bad coincidences. And because it had that power, it just wrote them all off as bad coincidences."

"You can do that when there's no placebo, because the injuries they were seeing in the control group, where the girls were getting aluminum neurotoxins, were identical to the injuries they were getting in the Gardasil group."

"So they said, well, we don't have to report any of these as vaccine injuries. They were able to license something that is insanely dangerous."

boxerab··on Britain jumps into bed with Palantir in £1.5B defense pact
"jumps into bed" - gotta love that totally unbiased reporting at The Register.
boxerab··on ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair
I am heartbroken to see the way Jimmy Kimmel has been treated. I believe he is, in his heart of hearts, a good and decent fellow, devoid of malice and hate.

Just kidding! He's a humorless scold who thought he could lie about Kirk's murder with impunity : it was viewer disgust and an advertiser revolt that drove the decision at ABC. It's FAFO time, Jimbo.

boxerab··on Nvidia buys $5B in Intel
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
boxerab··on Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza
From John Spencer, a retired United States Army officer, researcher of urban warfare, and author.

> The U.N. Genocide Report Against Israel Is an Assault on Critical Thinking

https://freebeacon.com/israel/the-u-n-genocide-report-agains...

boxerab··on Meta Ray-Ban Display
I continue to be amazed by people rushing to give away even more of their personal data to a large corporation, especially one with Meta's privacy-challenged history.
boxerab··on Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
Time to switch to Mattermost.
boxerab··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
I think you missed the point. Granted the disease is dangerous, but what if the cure is worse ? If we don't know this is true, we ought to assume the risk outweighs the benefits until PROVEN otherwise- that is the precautionary principle. As an analogy take Vioxx, a headache remedy that caused thousands of heart attacks. Merck the manufacturer started an advertising campaign for the drug AFTER the learned it was killing people - they were ultimately fined 4.5 billion.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp048286

The docket shows us that pharmaceutical companies are serial felons who have paid some of the largest fines in history for lying about their products. It is prudent to be skeptical until proven otherwise.

boxerab··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
facts don't care about your feelings, can you answer the question ?
boxerab··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
very few people are against vaccines per se, they are just against *unsafe* vaccines. "anti-vax" is a term used to dismiss dissident without having to deal with their arguments i.e an ad hominem. As an analogy, if I object to high levels of mercury in fish, am I anti-fish? or anti-poisonous-fish ?
boxerab··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
And yet, this is a valid concern for any new drug - does it have a net positive benefit ? And can you guess why DTP was replaced by DTaP in the developed world, while people like Gates and orgs like GAVI are still promoting it in the third world ?
boxerab··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
> Sure. This one hasn’t.

That is exactly why we need to apply the precautionary principle for new drugs like this one.

> That said, I frankly think people should be free to vaccinate as they please

Never said they shouldn't be. Just need to be skeptical of organizations like GAVI and their PR, as they have a huge conflict of interest in promoting and profiting from these drugs.

boxerab··on Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out
Doesn't answer the question. Other vaccines, for example DTP, have been shown to cause higher long term mortality rate over those who didn't get it.

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/3/e000707

boxerab··on QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
Yes, that's one missing piece. Excellent software but there is a steep learning curve, and it has its own format that you need to convert back and forth from.
boxerab··on QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
nice. If you aren't already familiar, you might be interested in this platform for Dutch geospatial data: https://github.com/PDOK . They use mapserver on the cloud at massive scale, and all of their infra is open.
boxerab··on QGIS is a free, open-source, cross platform geographical information system
QGIS is fantastic - it's the only OSS viewer I know of that can consistently and efficiently display multi-GB TIFF images without crashing. It has been a long journey - 20 years to capture ~8% of the geospatial market. ESRI still rules the enterprise, with 40-50% of the market share. More generally, there are so many excellent open source geospatial projects like Geoserver, GDAL, Geonode, Map GL Libre, kepler.gl, Martin, Mapserver, .... but they still have not managed to disrupt ESRI. I think because they are still too fragmented, and still mostly stuck on the desktop, while everything is moving to the cloud.
boxerab··on How to Think About GPUs
"How to Think About NVIDIA GPUS" is a better title
boxerab··on Faster, easier 2D vector rendering [video]
Excellent presentation - I like that the design bakes in rendering efficiency from the get go.
boxerab··on Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre
As an article in The Nation noted, ‘When asked in 1996 what values he retained from his Marxist days, MacIntyre answered, “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post.”’
boxerab··on Full upstream support coming for MediaTek's IoT Edge AI Genio platforms
Full upstream support coming for MediaTek's IoT Edge AI Genio platforms
boxerab··on Is JPEG 2000 a preservation risk? (2013)
It certainly was a risk in 2013, when the open source libraries were slow and riddled with bugs. Today, there are two stable, well maintained and fast open source libraries available:

https://github.com/uclouvain/openjpeg and https://github.com/GrokImageCompression/grok

JPEG 2000 is a niche codec, but in the niches that it occupies it is the gold standard, even after 20 years:

1. digital cinema (part of the digital cinema standard) and broadcast 2. medical imaging 3. satellite imagery

For memory institutions, it still vies with Tiff as the top preservation codec.

boxerab··on Peter the Great’s Beard Tax
read Gulag Archipelago, then get back to me.
boxerab··on Peter the Great’s Beard Tax
Not just perception - there was a very real conflict in the 19th century between traditional Russian values and western ideas such as nihilism and socialism. Dostoevsky was such an idealist in his youth, then turning his back on those movements after being imprisoned in hard labor camp. In his book Demons, he very much groks the dangers of these western ideas, which led to the disastrous 70 year reign of the Bolsheviks
boxerab··on The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
Nit pick: I think they mean "every day", not "everyday" which is a synonym for commonplace. See this person pushing back against inane Coca Cola slogan :

Treat The English Language Well. Everyday. http://www.happyrobot.net/words/thewayiseeit.asp?r=3385

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