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etrk

152 karma · joined December 24, 2019

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etrk··on John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code
It's very interesting, especially if you grew up playing id games, and it's also an easy read. Go for it!
etrk··on GM self-driving tech unit Cruise laying off about 8% of staff
Regardless of road quality, weather conditions are unpredictable.

When the rain or snow or haboob kicks in, I guess your car will pull over to the side of the road and you'll need to drive manually until conditions improve. We'll need to keep the steering wheel around for the foreseeable future.

etrk··on April Is Canceled
Yeah, unless Leibnitz was busy making some tacos.
etrk··on April Is Canceled
In an alternate reality, Newton did five pull-ups instead of inventing calculus.
etrk··on Coyotes are being seen on the empty streets of San Francisco
Coyote sightings were a regular occurrence on my NextDoor feed long before the quarantine.
etrk··on Signal processing is key to embedded machine learning
"if its 1 dimensional then its signal processing"

This is clearly not the case, since image signal processing, 2D Fourier transforms, etc. are alive and well.

etrk··on 800Gb of possible Census Bureau data (tax records,etc) leaked. Check your data
It's asking for my email to check if my census data has been leaked? Email isn't even shown as a field in the leaked records. Is this site just harvesting emails?
etrk··on 'Sushi parasites' have increased 283-fold in past 40 years
It's a recommendation by the FDA in the US, not an enforced regulation.
etrk··on Signal processing is key to embedded machine learning
Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, if you're not dealing with approximately bandlimited and sampled signals, then this wouldn't apply. The article is about embedded devices processing sensor data (microphones, motion/light sensors, accelerometers, etc.), and in those cases the signal of interest will often be bandlimited.
etrk··on Signal processing is key to embedded machine learning
> That is, signal processing had Nyquist's rates. And typically knows there is an underlying signal. Does ml have either?

What does this question mean? Every band-limited signal has a Nyquist rate. Most signals of interest are well-contained within some finite bandwidth (e.g., human voice). Sampling above this rate will get you very little.

If you're building an ML model to process a certain class of sampled signal and you know, for example, 99% of the signal energy falls within a certain frequency range, that should guide your choice of sample rate. If you're sampling at too high a rate, your input layers may have far more parameters than are needed or useful.

Whether or not a given ML input actually contains a signal of interest doesn't seem relevant to how you sample and preprocess the signal.

etrk··on 99% of those who died from virus had other illness, Italy says
What is a "typical person"? As the article states, most of these people are 70+ years old.

It would be interesting to know the prevalence of these illnesses among the cohort of 70+ year old Italians, but that would require more searching/translating than I care to do now. But feel free have at it.

etrk··on 99% of those who died from virus had other illness, Italy says
See Table 1 in the original study: https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Report-C...

  Ipertensione arteriosa (high blood pressure) 76.1%
  Diabete mellito (diabetes) 35.5%
  Cardiopatia ischemica (heart disease) 33%
  Fibrillazione atriale (atrial fibrillation) 24.5%
  Cancro attivo negli ultimi 5 anni (cancer in past 5 years) 20.3%
  Insufficienza renale cronica (renal failure) 18%
  BPCO (COPD) 13.2%
  Ictus (stroke) 9.6%
  Demenza (dementia) 6.8%
  Epatopatia cronica (chronic liver disease) 3.1%
Note that the most of the people in this study were 70+ years old, and I have no idea what the typical prevalence of these diseases is among 70+ year old Italians.
etrk··on 50% – 75% of cases of Covid-19 are asymptomatic
If you're working for a company where it's seen as "heroic" or "passionate" to come to work sick, you're in a toxic environment.

I've had a couple co-workers who perhaps see themselves as heroic for coming to work sick, but everyone else resents them and wishes they would just stay home.

etrk··on Why Walking Meetings Work
Real geniuses walk and drink their coffee at the same time.
etrk··on Landmark computer science proof cascades through physics and math
> "a problem that could not be solved"

The solution is counter-intuitive, but the problem can be solved with some elementary probability theory.

etrk··on Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
I interviewed at some AI companies a year or two back. They all had teams of people dedicated to support each client: to clean their data, train their models, integrate the domain-specific requirements, customize UIs, etc. They sold themselves as the next AI-powered mega-unicorns, but they were more like boutique consultancies with no obvious path to scale up.
etrk··on Studio Ghibli suddenly makes 38 albums of anime music available for streaming
> releasing practically their entire catalogue of movies on Netflix

Except in the US, Canada, and Japan.

etrk··on MIT 6.S191: Introduction to Deep Learning
Citations tend to be a better indicator of impact. There are some interesting analysis here [1]. MIT has the most citations, and they've also published the most papers by far. If considering citations per paper, MIT falls in the middle of the pack. Toronto is an outlier with a very high number of citations per paper.

NeurIPs is a big conference covering lots of topics, though. All of this says relatively little about MIT's true impact on deep learning in the last eight years.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/academic/ar...

etrk··on Not everyone has an internal monologue
I’d heard that this is, to some extent, impossible, because everybody subvocalizes when they read. Wikipedia supports this, but I guess the goal is to minimize subvocalization rather than to eliminate it completely?

“Micro-muscle tests suggest that full and permanent elimination of subvocalizing is impossible.”

I know this is true for me. If I press the tongue to the roof of my mouth while reading, I can’t stop the muscles from moving very slightly as I read.

etrk··on Not everyone has an internal monologue
I remember asking my French teacher if she ever “thought” in French, and she had no idea what I meant. She apparently had no internal monologue.

I assumed there was something with me for “thinking” in words. I tried to train myself to think more abstractly, and maybe it worked to some extent, but I’m not sure this was for the better.

etrk··on Pantone 448 C
I wouldn't want to eat ice cream three times a day, but that doesn't mean it tastes bad.

What do you think will sell better this Valentine's day: bouquets of magenta colored flowers or Pantone 448 C colored flowers?

etrk··on Pharmaceutical Executive Sentenced To 66 Months In Prison In Opioid Trial
> "Perhaps inarguably"

Two words you rarely see together.

etrk··on Pantone 448 C
> Dark brown is not the ugliest color, the ugliest color is magenta.

That's just, like, your opinion. Beauty is subjective and the only way to declare something the ugliest, in some general sense, would be to get the subjective opinions of many people. This is presumably what was done in the market research for Pantone 448 C.

Also, magenta stands out. That is a likely reason why it was chosen as a transparency placeholder, rather than just being "ugly."

etrk··on Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'
We have over 800 military bases in ~70 countries around the world.
etrk··on A 60 GHz phased array for $10
This isn't new technology. SiBeam came out of Berkeley Wireless Research Center in the mid-2000s. They had mmWave phased arrays from the start (60 GHz is pretty much useless without a phased array, or a large dish antenna if you're outdoors), but in 15 years, they never managed to find a compelling consumer use case.

I think at that point, the burden is on the company to prove its value.

etrk··on Around the World in Rare and Beautiful Apples
It now says:

Supposedly, seeds were carried by Alan Bean on Apollo 12 (no citation provided).

Do you have a citation for this?

etrk··on Leaving Pittsburgh because of industrial air pollution
Reminds me of when I was younger, and I crunched census data to locate the city with the highest percentage of single women.

Turned out to be a random suburb with a female prison.

etrk··on 13.3" full color ePaper display
Does he only read comic books? Black and white screen is ideal for most of the world's books.
etrk··on AirPods revenue does not exceed Spotify, Twitter, Snapchat, and Shopify revenue
As a counter-point, I'm running on 3 years and still get a few hours out of mine. The gamechanger for AirPods was the convenience of the charging case.

I'm just surprised I've never run them through the wash.

etrk··on Writing 1/3 in binary (2014) [video]
If this kid pursues a career in tech, he's going to crush his whiteboard interviews.
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