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dwiel

819 karma · joined October 14, 2009

Terran Robotics - CEO

zdwiel at gmail

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dwiel··on Zotero: Free, easy-to-use tool to collect, organize, cite, and share research
In addition to the other responses to this question, they also got rid of their browser plugins that let you quickly add arxiv pages/pdfs/etc in one click with automatic metadata detection. Worked from any browser on Android and desktop. I've yet to find anything like it.
dwiel··on FBI's ability to legally access secure messaging app content and metadata [pdf]
Parallel Construction makes this a technicality/nuisance, not a show stopper.
dwiel··on Experts from a world that no longer exists
Haha, I read that too fast thanks
dwiel··on Experts from a world that no longer exists
I follow ZeroHedge, but this statistic isn't very helpful without knowing the number of false positives or incorrect timing.
dwiel··on U.S. house prices are rising exponentially faster than income
I agree, and I've loved the European cities I've visited, but this is an article about US housing prices and the parent was talking about "existing cities" and how they "are the most resource efficient we have", which is plain wrong. I am all for making them more resource efficient by making them more like cities in other parts of the world.
dwiel··on U.S. house prices are rising exponentially faster than income
Cities are resource efficient and low environmental impact only if you count the tight core/downtown and exclude all of the suburbs and sprawl surrounding nearly every big city in the US. Everyone driving an hour to get to everywhere is not resource efficient or low environmental impact.

Small cities/large towns are actually more efficient on average in the US since everyone is a 10-15 minute drive of everything.

Rural areas can be very inefficient.

dwiel··on Southwest new CEO denies walk-off rumors, defends pilots amid schedule meltdown
There should be a name for the fallacy of expecting people to "vote" with their dollars on every single issue all of the time.

It's like the opposite mistake that communists make. They expect a single centralized decision maker to balance all considerations to set a price, which is inevitably ineffective.

This vote with your dollar argument expects every individual to balance all considerations to set their own personal price. There is an assumption of information symmetry and unlimited ability to analyze on the part of the individuals behind the vote with your feet argument that is just not remotely true.

dwiel··on RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
Why assume that more output doesn't come with more input? It doesn't seem presumable to me one way or the other.
dwiel··on Greenland suspends oil exploration because of climate change
Wouldn't Russia rather Norway stop pumping oil so the EU buys more energy from Russia? What is in it for Russia? I don't really know much about this, genuinely curious.
dwiel··on Ray: A Distributed Framework for Emerging AI Applications
Just to add on in here, it may be fixed now but the most recent time I tried to use ray on my on-prem cluster, it was quite difficult as everything assumed I was in one of the clouds or on a single local laptop. I had used ray pre 1.0 release maybe 3 years ago and it was trivial to setup this use case back then.

I dont remember the specifics right now, but my problem may have been related to having a local kubernetes cluster that wasn't a cloud. I'd be happy to dig through details in my notes if its worthwhile feedback, just reach out.

dwiel··on Voice Assistant for VSCode
The author of talon doesnt support homebrew installation. Other people try to add it, but it doesn't work to install that way. Have you tried the installer on the website?
dwiel··on Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
As a parent of a 6 year old and 8 year old, I'm thankful for this cutoff. Many studies define child as <= 18 or < 20, and I'm not sure how relevant they are for our particular situation.
dwiel··on Cycling is more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities
Do you have any data for this? Last I checked, about a year ago, there was a recent news article referencing a couple year old paper referencing a couple year old industry release referencing an older paper. It turned out a critical assumption was way out of date.

Definitely interested to see new data on this if you have it.

dwiel··on Compensation as a Reflection of Values
Do you then get paid the same hourly rate, but just fewer hours? I like this idea, but I also know that there is an upfront cost of staying in the loop that is about the same no matter if you end up contributing 1 hour per week or 80. So maybe 32 hour people get slightly less per hour than 40, all else equal? Curious how people already doing this handle this.
dwiel··on One Year Alone in Forest of Sweden Building a Log Cabin
I've found that places exempt from building codes are much more common than places exempt from health code. Be sure to read up on local plumbing, waste water, septic, etc. code. They will often dictate things like how big the septic system needs to be, how big pipes need to be etc. Generally good rules to follow if you want such a system. If you want a legal outhouse or composting toilet and/or grey water setup, there are very few places in the US which allow it so be sure to read up first.
dwiel··on March Update: Status Report
So this didn't used to be a problem but now it's a problem that only someone with deep pockets and vision can take on? What happened? Genuinely curious.
dwiel··on Why inflation is not a threat
That is true and means current prices may not be much higher, but it makes homeownership much more risky. If interest rates ever go back up, the price would go down and you could wind up owning a house where your principal is much higher than it's current value. This is ok if you don't want to move. If you ever want to move though, even to a house with an equal price, you may end up owing the bank a lot of money.
dwiel··on Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution
A bit off topic, but what I've wanted forever and never found is a spreadsheet that deals in units natively. So if one cell is in Newtons and I divide it by a cell that is in m/s^2 I want the resulting cell to be in grams. Units should propagate through the sheet automatically. Unit prefixes can either be automatic (km, m, mm, um, etc) or fixed as you would with a format setting.

Google calculator is the closest thing I've seen to this, but it isnt in spreadsheet form.

Anyone know of a system that provides this functionality?

dwiel··on Ancient Babylonian Algorithms: The Earliest Programs
Definitely extending the usefulness of the analogy, but when I am riding my bike a lot and then take a break for repairs and walk more instead, I quickly get sore. Even after walking distances that I dont normally get sore from if I am bike free for a while and walking more regularly.
dwiel··on Gradient Free Optimizers: A collection of modern optimization methods in Python
Another option in some cases is to just map the space to something else. Like in this case, x and y are unconstrained and are what the optimizer sees, a = x and b = (1 - a) - abs(y).

Not always easy to do, but can work in some cases if the optimizer cant deal with it natively.

dwiel··on We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the 1990s
Actually in many suburban and exurban places, more chemicals are used in lawns than in farms. On farms they have to watch their costs since they have very tight margins. A person spraying their yard every so often may get 2x or 3x what they need, just to be "safe" and then go ahead and spray any left overs until it is all gone, because why not. Same goes with fertilizer.

This isn't to say that farms don't have this problem, they definitely do.

dwiel··on We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the 1990s
I occasionally use iNaturalist to help identify plants and fungus while out on hikes. The community there has a ton of specialists and it is extremely common to get messages like this on observations that are months old. Here is one I got this morning about a random mushroom I took a picture of in the woods of Indiana:

Russula sanguinea was described from a European mushroom and therefore probably isn't here in North America at all. The name has been applied to many red Russula in N. A. adding to the confusion. Out west where it may be sorted it is being called Russula rhodocephala which itself is a lookalike for Russula americana but under different trees according to Danny Miller here [1]. Mushroomexpert's Kuo and Mycoquebec say that a lookalike under oaks in the east is Russula tenuiceps or R. sanguinaria under conifers/pines, but it is probably a group of species, and also not the same as the European one in the case of R. sanguinaria. We are trying to downvote these identifications for this reason. Hopefully, any people interested in identifying mushrooms will pitch in and help to vote any Russula that is being called Russula sanguinea in the eastern US back to genus level anyway, but we are concerned with a few other species too. Read fungee's journal post here [2]. Check out the master list here [3]. Another thing that is daunting for Russula ID, there are well over a hundred known red Russula in the east, many are not named yet, and, if they are, the name is not in use.

[1] http://www.alpental.com/psms/ddd/Russula/index.htm

[2] https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/fungee/46596-new-ai-comp...

[3] https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/computer-vision-clean-up-wik...

dwiel··on What Inception Net Doesn't See
Interesting, maybe I'm just in my own filter bubble, but I never see that suggestion. After sampling roughly 15 articles found searching for things like "how to use inception net", etc I didnt find a single article suggesting you take a pre trained model based on image net and use it without modification on a completely different dataset. I am genuinely curious, do you have any examples of this?

Also, it may seem minor, but as someone who has been working professionally with neural networks since 2013 or so, there is a huge difference between saying "what inception net doesn't see" and "what inception net trained on image net doesn't see". I may grant that the author is simplifying for an inexperienced audience, but if that were the case, they should at least point out how such problems can be avoided, and have been avoided for at least 5 or 6 years now, if not longer.

dwiel··on What Inception Net Doesn't See
This analysis is quite the strawman. It's a bit like taking a demo SQL table and basic select queries off an intro to SQL tutorial and claiming SQL sucks because the queries are inefficient and the tables can only store books and author names but not any other kind of data because that's what the example was. There is a lot more to SQL than what gets introduced in the intro to SQL tutorial and there is a lot more to computer vision nets than grabbing the network trained on a benchmark dataset and shoving completely different data at it.
dwiel··on A Streamlit component for real-time video processing web apps, streamlit-webrtc
Since a year or so ago, I use streamlit in almost every situation I previously used jupyter and enjoy working with versioning, a real ide, etc.

I dont see how this project breaks from that though. It looks pretty useful for quickly visualizing information common in computer vision. What "does not see your way"?

dwiel··on Sci-Hub Is Now on the ‘Uncensorable Web’
This is a case where I find Vitalik's distinction between different kinds of decentralization useful. [1] Roquerre is talking about political or logical decentralization whereas you are talking about architectural decentralization.

[1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...

dwiel··on No, Cellebrite Cannot “Break Signal Encryption”
I needed to get into my office so I asked my boss for a key. She gave me an entire key ring of keys. After trying dozens of keys against my office door I finally found the key that worked.
dwiel··on Tillis Releases Text of Bipartisan Legislation to Fight Illegal Streaming
I wish more politicians would realize that this kind of nonsense will happen no matter how they vote or what they say and move on to voting and acting in a way that fits their values and what they represent.
dwiel··on Hypercore protocol: a distributed (P2P) append-only log
Does the new cli allow multiwriting yet? I'd like multiple computers to be able to modify the dataset.

Similarly, it seems the protocol supports keeping around all versions of the hyperdrive, but it looks like that isnt made available via the cli. Is this correct?

dwiel··on Hypercore protocol: a distributed (P2P) append-only log
I dont know syncthing so cant comment on that. My setup is very simple. `dat share` running on my laptop and `dat <hash>` on all of my servers. The servers are running inside docker/k8s in a daemonset so every server in the cluster has a recent version of the files. Some benefits of this over say a shared NFS mount hosted in the cluster:

- I can use my local editor online or offline in the same config

- my editor doesnt hang as it saves over a network connection

- live reload apps running on the servers will pickup the changes immediately. inotify doesnt work on nfs mounted drives.

One main disadvantage in some cases is it doesnt currently support multi-writer. the servers mounting the dat are read only. I'm pretty sure this is changing in newer versions, but I'm not sure on roadmap.

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