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mometsi

780 karma · joined January 16, 2019

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mometsi··on Can a Corporation “Own” a Color?
A property tax on trademarks isn't a wacky idea, any more than other assets like spectrum or land. Importantly, it should be a second-price auction; the tax is the rent you pay for withholding the trademark from the next-best coalition of potential users. If you are the only one who could reasonably make use of some asset, there's no reason for the tax system to penalize your getting the most out of it.
mometsi··on Mastercard and visa are the de facto regulators of porn
A fly with human characteristics doubly so
mometsi··on AI Wrote and Performed a Jerry Seinfeld Routine [video]
I'm looking forward to an always-on pirate livestream of Crow T. Robot, George Carlin, and Strong Bad reacting to current events in real time.
mometsi··on AI Wrote and Performed a Jerry Seinfeld Routine [video]
Make it a GAN with AI hecklers
mometsi··on Alien intelligence and the concept of technology
I'm willing to recognize Gnome Chompsky as a valid alternative spelling.
mometsi··on The Celera 500L passenger plane gets hydrogen powertrain
They've optimized for cabin volume and all their claims are weirdly crafted to take advantage of that design choice.

For passengers who expect a flight with 4 first class-type seats, their competition isn't a minivan with wings like the beechcraft bonanza, it's a learjet with half the seats removed.

mometsi··on Town Seized Building, Offered to Return It If Owners Bought Two Cars for Police
The "defendant" arg is passed by value and can't be null.

The hack they came up with is to just disable type checking and pass in whatever object they have available.

TFA describes the inevitable runtime errors

mometsi··on ESO event on groundbreaking results from Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration
In its place comes cosmic trypophobia
mometsi··on Listerine Mouthwash Royalties
One morning, as Gregor Samsa experienced the pesticidal effects of a sweetener used in his mouthwash, he discovered that he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.
mometsi··on NYC allows citizens to report idling vehicles in exchange for a cut of the fines
'Just' dislocating the pollution away from a dense city block at street level, where people live and work, to a power plant where emissions have less human impact and can be addressed more effectively, sounds great.

Trash collection just dislocates rotting food scraps and garbage from city streets to a landfill. I think it's an acceptable arrangement!

mometsi··on Heavy Wears the Crown and the Kohinoor
It's a bit weird to call Nader Shah, the ruler of Persia, 'a Persian brigand'. Not that brutal autocrats deserve more respect, but it was a massive military campaign and not some colorful local incident that got out of hand when a foreign highwayman somehow wound up with the diamonds.

It's like saying Ethiopia lost control of its infrastructure due to a raid by Benito Mussolini, an Italian bandit.

mometsi··on I Spent Hundreds of Hours Working in VR
If you live in a polluted dystopian hive, alienated from those around you, tuning it all out by strapping a facebook appliance to your head sounds maladaptive even in the immediate short term.
mometsi··on GPS

  I know not by what tools Web 3.0 content will be found, but Web 4.0 will be searched using hn comment breadcrumbs.
mometsi··on Microsoft to Acquire Activision Blizzard
Already happened. Insiders know that snagging PriitK was the real motivation behind the Skype acquisition...
mometsi··on Analyzing the public hostnames of Tailscale users
*Hostnames belonging to the emperor*: corp

*Trained hostnames*: pihole, homeassistant

*Fabulous hostnames*: mewtwo, mew, bronzong

*Innumerable hostnames*: otx82wn9xnzcygap6bsc

mometsi··on TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS

  And he is a foole, a sotte, and a geke also,
  Which choseth a place vnto the same to go,
  And where diuers wayes lead thither directly
  He choseth the worst and most of ieopardie
https://www.otago.ac.nz/english-linguistics/tudor/BarcEclogu...
mometsi··on Training computer vision models on random noise instead of real images
Generate a scribble. For a positive example, take two random crops of the scribble. For a negative example, take crops of two different scribbles. Ask the network if they both came from the same scribble.

The meat of the paper is that the scribbles can be remarkably shitty and still get you decent pretraining.

Compared to alternatives:

imagenet: exhaustively annotated, disk-space-consuming, nonfreeforcommercialuse real world photos - huge and has licensing issues

rotnet: take random images, rotate them and ask the network whether they're right side up or not - easy, but still takes up disk space

3d renders: render realistic 3d scenes on the fly and use those as input - nvidia has enough of my money already, thx

fractaldb: generate fractal images and pretrain by predicting the fractal's parameters. - why bother with fractals if you don't need them

mometsi··on Artificial Intelligence in the Cockpit
In any case, he manufactured some critically flawed aviation equipment, which resulted in a fatality.
mometsi··on Scripting languages of the future
A sophisticated AI-powered UI maps your voice commands to an execution graph composed of assorted php functions, single-purpose node packages, and sandboxed excel worksheet cells. Generations of engineers have devoted themselves to rewriting it all in one of several incompatible versions of hyperrust.
mometsi··on How WhatsApp enables multi-device capability
Would it have been in bad taste to say it during Hindenburg's administration? Your personal data may be more durable than benign government.
mometsi··on FAA Releases Data Showing Trends in Dangerous Laser Strikes
It's also ridiculously difficult to blind someone with a laser from far away.

Assuming a ~$200 fan-cooled 5w engraving laser with an excellent collimating lens focused at infinity, 1mrad divergence, the irradiance would fall off within 500m to a level below any permanent harm (let alone permanent damage in less than a second). This is by the FAA's very conservative standard of 2.5mW/cm^2, which is about 1/50th of the irradiance of direct sunlight. Within 500m, you'd need to be able to aim the beam very precisely to maintain the narrow cone of light to within 1mrad of the victim's pupil. Your hands are too shaky, you'd need something like a motorized telescope mount with active tracking.

The risks pilots bear when assholes shine bright lights at their windshield are distraction, glare and temporary 'flashblindness', where your rods and cones lose their low-light adaptation as they adjust to the briefly intense brightness level, and gradually recover over 10s of seconds. These are real risks, but it's not 30km lightsaber beams frying pilots' retinas for $3.99.

mometsi··on Launch HN: Hotswap (YC S21) – Easily migrate customers away from competitors
"There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
mometsi··on Gail.com
I love the domain squatting complaint--

> vii) it is unlikely that the Respondent was unaware of the Complainant’s trademark considering the fame and tradition of the trademark GAIL;

Can the respondent really be so ignorant of overseas manufacturers of extruded architectural ceramics, which were available in the respondent's home country as recently as 1990?

mometsi··on On Geofoam
Sounds like some sort of reverse psychology trick by Halliburton.

"Oh, I certainly hope no terrorists come, and pump oil directly under our facilities!"

"Yes, that would truly be a devastating blow!"

"We can only hope that no hostile actors from oil-rich nations learn about our critical vulnerability to this clever, effective tactic!"

mometsi··on Great Bitter Lake Association, the Sort-of-Micronation Formed in the Suez Canal
Forget land. I can't wait to set up my Aztec-style reed float in Bitterlakeistan for Drowning Man 2021.
mometsi··on Functorio
Oh it's a python app. I read `virtual factory constructor generator` and assumed it would be Java.
mometsi··on Obfuscated Tiny C Compiler
And around a week ago, his text compressor topped the enwik9 (Hutter Prize) benchmark. Not prize-eligible though-- that would require a single core, non-GPU build to run in <100h. His nncp 2.1 benchmark took 140h to run on a GTX 3090.

https://bellard.org/nncp/

http://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html

mometsi··on Build Your Own Text Editor
A related project is Lite, a graphical text editor that's a bit further along the frontier of useful features vs code simplicity.

It includes lua 5.2 and SDL. On top of that, it's a few c files to handle input and rendering, and a set of neatly written lua modules for the logic.

Repo and author write-up:

https://github.com/rxi/lite

https://rxi.github.io/lite_an_implementation_overview.html

mometsi··on Who’s behind the “reopen” domain surge?
Looks like they used the bootstrap.js blog example as a template-- compare with https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.4/examples/blog/

I see tracking via facebook, linkedin, quantcast, matomo, and locallabs.com, and user monitoring via newrelic js-agent.

mometsi··on The Ramanujan Machine: Using algorithms to discover new mathematics
Why on earth did they not call it the Ramanutron??
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