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franch

89 karma · joined April 9, 2013

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franch··on Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse
I suggest this one: https://eclipsemap.xyz
franch··on Italian Competition Authority Fines Apple $115M for Abusing Dominant Position
The relevant comparison is fines vs. actual budget, not fines vs. some cherry-picked industry segment. EU general government spending (across 27 nations) in 2023 was around €8.4 trillion. €3.8B in fines is 0.045% of that, again, completely immaterial.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1379290/government-expen...

franch··on Italian Competition Authority Fines Apple $115M for Abusing Dominant Position
Italy's unconsolidated budget for 2025 is projected to be around 700 billion euros in revenue and 900 billion in expenditures:

https://www.rgs.mef.gov.it/VERSIONE-I/attivita_istituzionali...

So yeah, whoever talks about these fines as a strategy for fixing the budget knows nothing about the actual budget of a G7 state, these fines are completely immaterial to Italian fiscal policy.

For perspective, that's roughly equivalent to someone with a €50,000 annual income finding €7 on the street and someone claiming they're doing it "to survive."

franch··on Google's Liquid Cooling
It has been done. See how the leonardo supercomputer is cooled. Closed circuit water that is passively cooled completely outside the building: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mckX_R0GeRY
franch··on Why is choral music harder to appreciate?
In our Alpine region there is a long tradition of male choruses singing folk songs about mountain life and tales through rich harmonizations of pieces. An example from coro SAT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQZyZggh3SQ
franch··on Auto manufacturer family tree: Who owns what?
They keep all the marquees because they sell better in the various European national markets, but many models are now the same platform with some small aesthetic changes. For example the new electric citroen berlingo / fiat doblo / opel combo are the same car:

https://www.citroen.it/modelli/berlingo/elettrico.html

https://www.fiat.it/e-doblo/e-doblo

https://www.opel.it/veicoli/gamma-combo/combo-e-life/panoram...

franch··on Auto manufacturer family tree: Who owns what?
The reason for being a Dutch company is purely for a taxation advantage, and it goes back to the fact that FIAT/FCA moved its headquarters to the Netherlands under Marchionne's leadership. Other italian companies (Mediaset owned by Berlusconi Family) did this too recently: ( https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2021/09/18/mediaset-la-sede... )
franch··on Auto manufacturer family tree: Who owns what?
The original mother company of Fiat/FCA (Exor, controlled by the Agnelli family) now merged in Stellantis, also own stakes in Ferrari, CNH Industrial (New Holland Tractors, Case and other industrial and farming equipements), Iveco and a bunch of other brands. Quite a concentration of companies.
franch··on Sentry.io outage
I'm using it for a small project and it works fine. Self hosting is documented here: https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/

Upgrading is a little bit tricky: in my (limited) experience the upgrading procedure for the self-hosted version sometimes fails and requires to take the application offline to perform the upgrade (but it is very possible that I may be doing something wrong).

It is really an invaluable tool.

franch··on How to design a house to last 1000 years
Not all stone houses are castles or luxury residences. My family's house (northern Italy in the Alps) is at least 600 years old (there is a painting on the outside that has been dated to around 1420) but it is a working-class home. The interior has been repurposed many times over the centuries, but it is still there and inhabited.

edit: spelling

franch··on Using Machine Learning to “Nowcast” Precipitation in High Resolution
Also, physics-based models (Numerical weather predictions NWP) assimilate much more data than just the last few radars scan. The assimilation phase takes a couple of hours, but when the physics kicks in, the NWP models win hands down.
franch··on Using Machine Learning to “Nowcast” Precipitation in High Resolution
I chime in on this because I'm working on deep learning for precipitation nowcasting using radar for my Ph.D. I was very excited when google released the press statement at NeurIPS about their work in this area. Unfortunately, after reading the paper, I have to say that their approach is fairly basic. Basically they threshold the precipitation in 4 thresholds (no rain, light, medium, heavy) and then use a U-Net like architecture, treating it as a classification problem. I think that the works of Shi et al are much more interesting in this regard:

https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5955-convolutional-lstm-network...

http://papers.nips.cc/paper/7145-deep-learning-for-precipita...

What I think is that Google wanted to use a lighter model that can be applied to the whole continental US. I expect them to integrate this in google assistant, like: "hey google, tell me when it's going to rain"

franch··on EU votes to create gigantic biometrics database
> So, no, it wasn't rejected by "the population" (a term that it was always be inaccurate[1]). It was rejected by a minority. And the treaty being one that requires unanimous approval, failed because of that.

Uhm sorry no. Read the links. It was rejected by the majority of the voters both in France and the Netherlands.

What happened afterwards in France was to change it slightly and make it pass by parliamentary vote instead.

About the accuracy of the term "the population", I simply mean it "by the local rules for a nation wide referendum".

franch··on EU votes to create gigantic biometrics database
> The aim is to have a federal union in Europe. In a way, going straight to monetary union is to 'force' further political union because they know full well that it requires it in order to work.

Sorry, but I disagree. There is no consensus whatsoever in the EU about a federal Union. There is not even consensus on a budgetary union (as in shared debt, not just having a shared currency) because it will reflect badly on states that currently have stronger economies in the EU: https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-lithuania/merkel-say...

Actually, to be fair, every time there was a popular referendum even the EU Constitution has been rejected by the population (it only passed later by the parliament): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_French_European_Constitut... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Dutch_European_Constituti...

franch··on Just 10% of U.S. plastic gets recycled. A new kind of plastic could change that
As a European temporarily living in the US I am truly shocked by the amount of plastic used in packaging here. Moreover, the number of plastic bags that it's used in supermarkets is also shocking. Where I come from (Italy) we banned plastic bags 2 years ago in favour of compostable bags with no problems. Instead of creating a different kind of plastic, I think that we should really enforce at least a global ban on light plastic bags.

EDIT: spelling

franch··on Qualcomm and Apple agree to drop all litigation
It's not just an anecdata: http://cellularinsights.com/iphone7/

This story has been going on for years. Apple wanted to find a second supplier for the modems. They asked Intel but they underdelivered constantly.

Edit: spelling

franch··on Intel Exiting 5G Modems
No coincidence at all:

(2017) https://semiaccurate.com/2017/11/06/qualcomm-opens-apple-leg...

(2019) https://semiaccurate.com/2019/04/16/qualcomm-just-beat-apple...

franch··on Qualcomm and Apple agree to drop all litigation
Charlie from semiaccurate has been following the story for a while:

(2017) https://semiaccurate.com/2017/11/06/qualcomm-opens-apple-leg...

(2019) https://semiaccurate.com/2019/04/16/qualcomm-just-beat-apple...

That's also the reason why Intel is quitting 5G modems

franch··on Italy bans unvaccinated children from school
As an Italian I don't want that article changed for ANY reason. The possibility to exploit any conditionality in art.34 both as an excuse to avoid mandatory education and for privatization of the public school system is really too high. Public schooling must remain free and mandatory without any exemption or special case.
franch··on The New 30-Something
If make it less so means reducing personal freedom to the point of regulating how much time a grandmother can take care of it's grandchildren, I really strongly disagree with that vision.
franch··on Introduction to Convolutional Neural Nets
Also, a very nice tutorial for Keras: https://github.com/leriomaggio/deep-learning-keras-euroscipy...
franch··on Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car
This kind of tech has been around for about a year... http://semiaccurate.com/2014/06/30/pretec-takes-step-flash-c...
franch··on Documenting your PostgreSQL database
I use DBSchema for ER diagrams, works well. http://www.dbschema.com/screenshots.html