fasa99

I was recently in Amsterdam (you know, the place where they said "welp we'll never fully outlaw prostitution & drugs so let's allow but regulate") and appreciated a series of very public urinals. Which I assume follows the same logic "people are going to pee on the street no matter what, let's give them a place to help control it" - I quite like the idea that acknowledging certain human traits are essentially a force of nature, so why not redirect that firehose towards a more tasteful target than impossibly try to stop it.

See - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pee_curl

My thought is they have 50-200 systems programmers where it's like "Hey George, I know you like to contribute to linux, have at it, we just need you to put a little pinhole here here and here" Then they have 5-20 security gurus / hackers who are like "Thanks George, I made this binary blob you need to insert, here's how you do it"

So the systems developer job is to build a reputation over years as we see, the security guy's job is to handle the equation group heavily encrypted/obfuscated exploits.

This would explain a mix of code quality / professionalism - multiple people, multiple roles. Of course the former "systems programmer" role need not be a full time employee. They good have motivated a white hat developer to change hats, either financially or through an offer they can't refuse.

People always sell Sear, but myself, I'm a fan of presearch.com I have no affiliation with them whatsoever or financial interest. I have no interest in their crypto based business model. In fact I think their lack of google or bing style search result filtering is entirely due to lack of funding and/or prioritizing other things more important to success, not due to taking a stand on free speech or anything like this. And that's perhaps how it was in the early days of the internet, when maslow's hierarchy of corporate needs focused on trying to make the thing work versus public relations goodfeels and presenting only rightspeech.

Anyway, if I'm looking for some topic I believe google would be known to filter heavily, or something esoteric, I take a look at presearch to get a second opinion. I'd also love to see archive.org do something similar, archive.org has an amazing collection of data, poorly indexed and poorly searchable.

On top of this, most times when I am renting, is via an airport. Airports are everywhere, but not everywhere. They're 1-6 hours from whereever you're going. And if your destination is say 4 hours from the airport, necessarily one is going to be worrying about charging as such. That alone slaughters the business model.

I enthusiastically agree with this. Try having your car/vehicle stolen, the offending party caught and pled guilty, ordered by a judge to pay back the damage they have done ... and do nothing (despite making, technically, massive untaxed sales on untaxed drug income) (the hustle and bustle of big city life!) still waiting, philadelphia

As a level 12 necromancer, I myself am a fan of necrobiotics: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/advs.202201174

Spiders move not through direct-muscle limb manipulation as we do, but something more akin to hydraulic pressure moving a joint. Thus they become self-building hydraulic soft actuators with a very simple i/o interface(psi in the necrospider)

You'd want three LLMs, one to create the bugs, one to report it, one to fix it. I joke of course but on the other hand this is potentially a worthwhile architecture from a self-training perspective - a bug-creating LLM means your training set size is as big as you want it +/- GAN features.

This particular submarine may offer some reprieve from the april fool's joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotland-class_submarine

Which innovately uses the very classic stirling engine, an engine which operates on the sole basis of heat differences, no internal combustion. As I understand it these can be more silent than nucular submarines, which require pumps and such to avoid nucular meltdown, but I am no expert on the intricacies of submarine detection

>In contrast, rents are a more reliable indicator of a shortage, no speculation there. Take a look at the Bay Area. One major distortion: property tax is fixed at the time of purchase. So all these people who bought a house in 1980 are paying yearly taxes at the 1980 rate. This compels people to hang onto the property at all costs, what a lucrative rental cash cow. Of course this also means tax revenue via property tax is skewed heavily to be paid for by new buyers. Imagine paying property tax on a 2 million dollar house, valued at 80K.

This creates (a relative) oversupply in rental houses in the area due to people who intend to hang onto their homes forever. Naturally the area is very strong in NIMBYs seeking to retain home value, plus the political environment, is people who love the environment, so they will shed no tears if no houses are built in order to protect and preserve the pristine natural empty fields of the region.

That's all to say the home buyer/seller dynamics in a region indirectly influence rental prices - vis a vis whether the person deciding to "not live in this house" chooses to simply sell the home or to rent it. This creates a little mini- supply/demand factor interacting with rental prices.

I completely agree, there's no reason any engine can't have VVT. I believe that famous northern european supercar guy, I think "Keurig" or something like this is is name - he took an old beater car 4 cylinder engine and superpowered it with some pneumatic / AI controlled valves - I think it's called "FreeValve" or something like this.

As for two strokes being "less efficient", efficiency is in the eye of the beholder. We see on the recent key bridge collapse lore that indeed these mammoth cargo ships run two stroke engines, in this case, two stroke turbodiesels which formerly were the mainstay engine of american trucking. The humble weed eater or chainsaw also tends to use two-stroke - why? because they're far more efficient, almost twice as efficient, in power-per-pound of engine i.e. in applications where lightweight is needed. An added benefit is mechanical simplicity. The double-power notion follows from the name, these engines give power every two strokes versus every four strokes. Two strokes are also really interesting in that exhaust manifold geometry interacts with the engine stroke with pressure waves, look at any two-stroke dirtbike and some will have these goofy-appearing exhaust manifolds for this reason. Granted the major challenge of two-strokes is dirty/pollution and being oil-burning by their nature.

For cancer and forces of nature, there is anger, there is a sense of unfairness, but we ask "why" and the instinctive answer is there - force of nature. To the robber metaphor, for example I've had cars try to run me off the road on my bicycle, so I approach the driver and it becomes immediately clear this is an insane person with major problems, and I think "oh, force of nature, this person is completely insane" - similar how "not guilty by way of insanity" is a real thing. Again we get an answer "why" - because this person is insane.

For me the deep insult that causes anger is if this is intentional, this is a person, they willfully did this of sound mind. Perhaps why a Madoff might make someone angry, but not SBF. In my view, SBF was a step or two removed from a big "too big too fail" 2008 bank that offered an interest rate to account holders by making investments with some risk. It seems to me SBF was operating along similar lines, 8% interest rate if I recall, but his intent wasn't to steal so much as illegally hide risk and hope for the best - and in his case, he was small enough to fail.

Farmers can generally be tree friendly in certain circumstances - if a road with some traffic passes through or by the farm, isolate it with tree wall (many suburban houses do this) - trees near major erosion sources / streams Putting trees on the "edge" of productive farmland, versus down the middle of some field, is much less problematic for the farmer. Generally a farmer is more than happy to reduce erosion, if not for environmental reasons than for keeping their soil where it is

to me the most exciting thing is that if is training that is speed up on the order of 100x-1000x, a large cluster may be well suited to gradient-descend hyperparameter tuning parameters by LLM training again and again at scale -- this is the first foot in a door towards an AI that iteratively may improve itself

>So we need some better argument for why it sometimes seems to work under the conditions it does. And that's arguably more about getting the physics right than it is about math.

Douglas adams solved it though, he understands why this flawed physics seems to work -- 6x9 = 42

"- just how unpopular would it be to abandon Baltimore?? "

I mean I'm from the Baltimore area and.. well.. I mean some of us would consider that town somewhat abandoned already, think Detroit. It has some pretty rough parts. With the main triggering event being 60s/70s loss of steel industry (Bethlehem Steel). Of all the big east coast cities (Boston, DC, NYC, Philly, Baltimore) I would say Baltimore is the most abandoned already.

Also note in New Orleans, Daddy Longlegs is a nice man who can remove bad juju from a customer for a fee using that dark Tom Cruise witchcraft.

Here's the thing.

If you come in with low-mid trust and say "Expectations are 9-5, 5 days a week, in office" that's what you'll get.

If you come in with high-trust and say "four day workweek, flexible hours, remote" you may well get 5-6 days a week most weeks and 7 days a week in crunch times, still with high morale.

People are fearful of the latter approach because if the wrong people are hired, it can absolutely be abused. The flipside is that the former approach will seem stifling to the right people.

It's fine, there's a roadmap for it - "the 1000 quark" node should last as a good 10, 15 years until we get to "1 quark" Then we move onto the "10,000 planck length node". That should easily get us to the end of Moore's law.

I feel like there needs to be a "Gordon Moore" of marketing let's say Mordon Gore's law, that says for every X% decrease in actual size there is a 2^X% claimed by marketing.

I can't wait for the day when marketing nanometer figures blow right past atomic size and we're measuring feature sizes in quarks. By the time feature sizes DO actually get close to atomic size from an engineering perspective, marketing will be damn near the planck length.

I think it's the right chain of thought. You could either have 0/1 and then have additional nodes with negative activation functions, or -1/1

-1/1 is appealing to me (0 = -1) because bit hackery could be used instead of the multiplication function, presumably on integral or fixed-point representations. The goal would be to eliminate any "if/then" like "if 0 do this if 1 do that" to avoid the need for branch prediction - there are bit-hackery ways to bypass this. That would lend itself well to all existing processors, ASICs, FPGAs, GPUs, etc.

Well I think it's an interesting idea, and to add to that, the "-1" values would correspond to an inhibitory neuron!

What neurons can do though is integrate over time, so your output can be one spike, or 3 spikes very quick, same for your input, and maybe 10 quick spikes in a row is a more powerful signal than a lone spike. We know this intuitively, though, via vision, we don't see in mac-classic style black/white images, we see shades of brightness and color, indicating that at least our optic nerve is sending what amounts to an analog signal (even if encoded as binary spikes - is the spike timing not analog?)

This is not to mention all the biochemical signaling that happens, and the multitude of local neurotransmitters and global physiological/hormonal factors at play. And all that weird stuff like glial cells and astrocytes is there in the mix too.

So LSL2 came out in 1988, Linux in 1991, so definitely NOT a reference to Linux. However both the game and Linux are a reference to Unix (Bell Labs, released in 1970s). The LSL2 developers clearly knew about Unix. And the play on word "Eunuchs / Unix" is a reversal of the pun of the original Unix i.e. the authors of Unix were themselves making a pun on the word "Eunuchs". Here, what Unix was "castrating" was an even earlier (1960s?) operating system called Multics developed by Ken Thompson, who got frustrated by all the bloat and complexity, so sought to castrate down the complexity by writing the now famous Unix, whose paradigm spread far and wide and was re-implemented in Linux.

gamma ray burst is a fun one (though unlikely thankfully!) -- a similar one that gets me excited is "false vacuum collapse" whereby the "energy" of the fabric of space itself is at a local but not global minimum. So in some unspecified conditions it drops to a lower/lowest minima and a destructive wavefront expands through the universe at the speed of light. Since the universe is so large, maybe one is already expanding right now, you'd never know (since speed of light). The upside is you'd never know it happened since death would take nanoseconds. Last I read about it, we don't know whether it's a local minima "false vacuum" versus global minimum.

The Carrington event was about 7 days, so one could assume this would affect EVERY country.

So the hypothetical nation state here would need a ready-to-go plan ready to roll out at any time, and the plan must assume the native country also has all electronics knocked out along with the adversarial country. Such an all-out attack by itself would turn the world against this aggressor, moreso since it exploited the event and was premeditated. I think it's unlikely, it would be a crazy thing to do.

Now, who do I think might want to pull off something like this? A terrorist group could have a plan spooled up just waiting for this event. That, and I would expect some opportunists to appear as well.

big name in the JHU CS community (small as that is relative to all else)!

Also of note, at JHU, an "intersession course" is a kind of mini-semester taking place late december-early january (hence intersession, between fall and spring). you may take one or take a break as you please. if you take the course, usually they are cute and interesting as we see here, and count for 1 credit.

I used to work with a guy like that in 1997, during the bubble, Higgins was his name. He'd claim you could fit every movie ever onto a CD-ROM, at least one day in the future it would be possible. Higgins was weird. I can still recall old Higgins getting out every morning and nailing a fresh load of tadpoles to that old board of his. Then he'd spin it round and round, like a wheel of fortune, and no matter where it stopped he'd yell out, "Tadpoles! Tadpoles is a winner!" We all thought he was crazy but then we had some growing up to do.