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jicks

273 karma · joined March 2, 2016

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jicks··on The Electric Car Atop Europe’s Sales Charts Isn’t a Tesla or VW
It seems to not be true anymore. I checked last week to rent a car in France for the holidays, and all the cheapest options for small urban cars were EV (mostly Zoe).

Note that I only checked for big renting companies (Sixt, Enterprise, ...). I was very surprised!

jicks··on Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15
I edited my comment to follow the guidelines.
jicks··on Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15
My guess is no, because while they may take 30%+ of the screen initially, they don't represent 30%+ of the full page (see [0] for more details).

[0] https://www.betterads.org/mobile-ad-density-higher-than-30/

jicks··on Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15
According to the article, the ads deemed "overly annoying or intrusive" are defined by "the standards established by the Coalition for Better Ads, of which it is a member". Since it's not Google actually deciding this, how is that anti-competitive?

BTW, the Coalition for Better Ads has many members [0], including Facebook and other big ads providers.

I'm personally not convinced this will solve the issue, but I believe it's a least a step in the right direction.

[0] https://www.betterads.org/members/

jicks··on Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15
It's usually around 20€/month for that kind of plan in France (with unlimited calls and SMS).
jicks··on Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15
The criteria is not discretionary. They'll block ads that don't follow the guidelines defined by the Coalition for Better Ads [0] (Google is a member, but there is a lot of other members, like Facebook, ...). So yes, they'll block a site which has non-conforming Google ads.

[0] : https://www.betterads.org/

jicks··on Google will turn on native ad-blocking in Chrome on February 15
No, they'll only block ads that don't follow the guidelines defined by the Coalition for Better Ads [0] (Google is a member, but there is a lot of other members, like Facebook, ...). Note that this may include ads provided by Google.

[0] : https://www.betterads.org/

jicks··on Debugging an evil Go runtime bug
Apparently, because it's shorter [0].

[0]: See https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/11/10/348

jicks··on Population-based training of neural networks
It is actually very different:

- AutoML is used to automate the design of the ML model.

- Population-based trained is used to automate the choice of the hyperparameters (e.g. the rate of learning).

If you wanted to use both, you'd first use AutoML to find a good design for your problem, and then you'd use PBT when training your network.

jicks··on Bottery – A conversational agent prototyping platform
Except it's the other way around. Their repo is 6 months older than yours.
jicks··on Every Major Advertising Group Is Blasting Apple for Blocking Cookies in Safari
If I remember correctly, the idea is to block ads that don't conform to the standards set by the Coalition for Better Ads [0]. Google is (as you can expect) a member of this coalition (just like Facebook and many other companies [1]).

[0]: https://www.betterads.org/standards/ [1]: https://www.betterads.org/members/

jicks··on New t-shirt sewing robot can make as many shirts per hour as 17 factory workers
Less transportation required, which should be cheaper and better for the environment.
jicks··on The US has forgotten how to do infrastructure
It doesn't fit.

Railway systems in Japan and France (taken as example in the article) are high quality and last long as well. Yet construction railway is way less expensive there.

jicks··on Amazon Polly – Lifelike Text-To-Speech
I agree, it doesn't sound "lifelike" at all to me. Compared to WaveNet[1] it's day and night.

[1] https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio...

jicks··on Spawkfish: Neural network chess
A very interesting project.

One remark: although I'm admittedly a poor chess player, I managed easily to get a draw by threefold repetition even though Spawkfish could have avoided that easily (and still destroy me). Am I correct to assume Spawkfish don't take past moves into accounts?