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projectorlochsa

101 karma · joined February 24, 2017

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projectorlochsa··on Gary Taubes responds to the AHA presidential advisory on dietary fats
An average US citizen eats about 3500kcal daily. Half of those calories are from fatty animal foods, half are from refined sugar.

Why is everyone demonizing fatty foods, or sugar, when that 3500 number is screaming at us from afar?!

US citizens eat way to much and move way too little. The side effect is diabetes T2, heart attacks and all sorts of issues.

US citizens also do not know how to eat, their capitalism has failed them, the whole food business is subsidized insanely. So they are "forced" to buy highly caloric foods that kills them (because that food is cheap), and foods with high nutrient to calories ratio are too expensive. Sodie pops and milk cheaper than water, meat cheaper than vegetables, insane.

projectorlochsa··on The Mammoth Pirates
> Capitalism can't dictate morals.

I do agree with that.

> Killing pigs and killing elephants is in a similar category. But it's kind of about context.

Yeah, the context being that elephants are glorified by the press, while reporting on mistreatment of pigs (or any farm practices) in the USA is considered a criminal act. [0]

That's the look-the-other-way market agent from up there. The context is also that mentioned mutated set of values.

I don't think the comparison is anywhere close to ISIS.

> Idk what the temple Grandin thing is about.

Well, no one knew you could manage a milk farm with two people, so saying that elephants can't be domesticated is a bit of a stretch.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag

projectorlochsa··on The Mammoth Pirates
> It's not worth the effort.

That's for capitalism to decide (and those look-the-other-way market agents).

> It's also pink. Hit me up next time you get confused.

Difference being ethical one, not physical. Giving same moral consideration (no matter how great or small the consideration is) to elephants and pigs would be ethically consistent, yet it's quite clear that consideration isn't equal, due to some flawed/mutated value system of appeals to tradition, popularity and futility.

> Lol, I'm passingly familiar with her work. After the revolution, she's going to gulags. Idk why you bring her up tho.

A good example of how breeding docile, non-aggressive creatures can result in some seriously mind-blowing complacent, plant-like behavior (we see it in the human gulags too, though, and it's documented quite thoroughly in the history of USSR, docile humans at its finest form).

projectorlochsa··on The Calibre Content Server
Nope. Works slow with 0 books, although I do have about 700, which still is by Big-Oh standards, at least it should be, small.
projectorlochsa··on The Mammoth Pirates
Just like we domesticated cattle, we could do the same with practically all animals.

I mean, cows, pigs, chickens (dogs and cats) are the most docile creatures on earth. How would we enslave, rape, raise, slaughter them if they were angry and combatant and weren't submissive?

Breeding does wonders.

Check out any wild cattle and you'll see how easily, fearlessly they stomp their predators to death.

As for ethical problems, I see no difference between an elephant and a pig. Both are one of the smartest animals on earth. Yet, bacon! :D Given that first world countries enjoy their 99% factory farmed abominations of animal flesh, I'd say ethics was decided as a non-problem by look-the-other-way anthropocentric market agents.

edit: checkout Temple Grandin work with cattle. you can have a farm with hundreds of milk cows and have 2 people working on it (part time vet that's making all the cows pregnant and managing their calves, and one full time employee). her methods made industrial milk farms manage themselves. cows practically go to the milking robot alone, never stopping, never panicking. when I saw this being done with my own eyes, no wonder family farms can't compete without huge subsidies.

projectorlochsa··on The Calibre Content Server
Calibre is unfortunately a big mess of spaghetti code. I had a problem with speeds when a book is being added. Couldn't get myself out of the soup to fix it.
projectorlochsa··on Pharmacies take a $10B hit as Amazon lands Whole Foods deal
Yeah, and I'm a true believer in bad science.
projectorlochsa··on Pharmacies take a $10B hit as Amazon lands Whole Foods deal
One can find homeopathic remedies in Whole Foods. Maybe that's a pharmacy?
projectorlochsa··on Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls (2016)
It all evolves slowly but steadily.

Given an animal that can produce sounds, if sounds are meaningful enough it can be a big advantage. Given more animals that produce sounds, the ones that can transmit more information will survive.

It's weird to think that there's nothing between complex (human) and simple (sheep) when it was the result of a gradual evolution. Big jumps are rare.

projectorlochsa··on Bugs You'll Probably Only Have in Rust
unsafe with features sounds like monad transformers in haskell.

if implemented it would probably outperform haskell (given that monad transformers in haskell have runtime overhead, unfortunately).

projectorlochsa··on U.S. Pays Farmers Billions to Save Soil, But It's Blowing Away
Yeah, but here it's not really about food, here it's about huge stockpiles of cheese, or about draining the water from the dry areas for cattle.

That's not food, that's luxury. Subsidies aren't necessary if you are seeking luxury, it's a waste.

projectorlochsa··on U.S. Pays Farmers Billions to Save Soil, But It's Blowing Away
EU agriculture has extremely large dependence on soy from Argentina and Brazil. [1]

It's on a good path as in, it acknowledges the issue and is working through regulations to remove the dependence or drastically reduce the dependence.

[1]: http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/agriculture/soy/so...

projectorlochsa··on U.S. Pays Farmers Billions to Save Soil, But It's Blowing Away
Too much subsidies in farming business. No true capitalism. When I see how much of EU money goes to farmers, it's ridiculous. It funds the destruction of rainforests all around the world, ecosystems, oceans etc.

Yes, the food wouldn't be as cheap, but at least there would be a huge incentive for people to find cheaper ways (maybe finally someone will make an effort to improve hydro/aeroponics).

Of course, capitalism is greedy, not globally optimal, so it is necessary that certain restrictions are made by law. Complex issue I guess, EU is on a good path IMO.

projectorlochsa··on “Let her speak please”
Which cultures?

There are social constructs but I would not deny biology. Effect of testosterone and estrogen on behavior has been studied extensively and it is quite clear from that why men and women behave the way they do.

Is women avoiding STEM a social construct? It most definitely is. Is women having lower salaries a social construct? In some cases yes, in some cases it is quite clear that they are not as risk taking as men, and are much more agreeable (they will not risk by asking a higher salary during a job interview).

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/04/08/reddit-ceo-ellen...

A nice example of how biology created an inequality.

projectorlochsa··on “Let her speak please”
It's biology.

Women are less aggressive and assertive by nature.

Testosterone and stupidity (much more prevalent in male population) does wonders when it comes to being aggressive, assertive and risk seeking.

projectorlochsa··on Reducers, transducers and core.async in Clojure
you can remove the extra parentheses after sum.
projectorlochsa··on The far-reaching effects of air conditioning
It sounds very weird. If the space is closed, the AC makes the air dryer, so sweating should be minimal on these low temperatures (dampness is hell).

Are you sitting next to a window that is blasting its rays over your body?

Is the building badly designed?

Are you protected by a layer of fat cells?

Sweating at 24-26C without sunlight blasting at you is very anomalous.

Lowering the AC to 20C or below is such an insanely wasteful thing to do it ought to be forbidden. The biggest CO2 footprint is us, the first world, heating and cooling.

projectorlochsa··on The far-reaching effects of air conditioning
24-25 Celsius on lowest fan settings should be cold enough for practically everyone.
projectorlochsa··on JSC loves ES6
Firefox on Sierra is extremely slow. Not just javascript but everything else. Can't understand how it differs so much compared to being run on Ubuntu.
projectorlochsa··on Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit 2.0
They use http://halide-lang.org/ for some convolutions. Very interesting.
projectorlochsa··on Show HN: 100K sentences mined from Wikipedia to help non-native English learners
There's a very good book for Latin that uses that trick.

Goes from zero to extremely complex Latin. Whole book is in Latin, no translations.

https://www.amazon.com/Lingua-Latina-Illustrata-Pars-Familia...

The only requirement is knowledge of orthographic alphabet and how each sound is produced. Latin, fortunately, has very simple sounds compared to English or Swedish.

It took me about 2 years to go through both parts and I was amazed at how easy the journey was. Could speak and write Latin fluently without issues.

projectorlochsa··on Accused of underpaying women, Google says it's too expensive to get wage data
Women are just less aggressive when negotiating and are more agreeable than men. It's statistics and it's obviously biological.

Women also feel satisfied with compensation at one moment and have no desire to increase their working hours/responsibilities for a meager (if any) improvement in their quality of life (that would appear with higher salary). Men on the other hand, seem to have more of those crazy individuals that waste enormous hours and overachieve despite the meager improvement in quality of life, if we ignore the bragging rights it gives them. Also statistics, and obviously biology.

Not to mention the fact that accomplished women most often have older and more accomplished men as partners, which also removes an incentive for them to make more money.

It is also the case that women do accept part-time work positions (which makes them earn less) more than men.

Is it the patriarchy? Is it Google?

I'm pretty sure it's just the way it is.

projectorlochsa··on Why Did a Chinese Peroxide Company Pay $1B for a Talking Cat?
Samo Login, which means Just Login (as in "just do it"). Quite amusing name :D It was deliberate, obviously.
projectorlochsa··on How we built Tagger News: machine learning on a tight schedule
How does fasttext compare to vowpal wabbit?
projectorlochsa··on Making a Neural Synthesizer Instrument
How does the performance of algorithms hold? I'm seeing all these old reports of how it's computationally difficult, yet can't find any performance reviews on new hardware. Not mentioning FPGAs or whatever else.
projectorlochsa··on Making a Neural Synthesizer Instrument
Thank you for the comments, couldn't find any newer papers in the subject that advanced the methods.

Yes, it was VL1.

projectorlochsa··on Making a Neural Synthesizer Instrument
They should try to incorporate ideas of sound generation from samples which were established long ago, patented and then the area completely forgotten. Patents have since then expired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karplus%E2%80%93Strong_string_...

This algorithm works wonderfully for guitars (there are improvements to it too). There was a synth 20 decades ago, if not more, I believe, that mimicked all of the wind instruments extremely well (you had a pipe through which you could blow and a keyboard to choose the sounds).

Unfortunately the whole area seems to be abandoned due to patents on algorithms.

Looks wonderful that WaveNets are producing something so well, although the sound still needs improvement.

projectorlochsa··on Your tl;dr by an ai: a deep reinforced model for abstractive summarization
Well, BLEU is non-differentiable and not decomposable over sequence of translation decisions. Yet I wouldn't call methods reinforcement learning because loss is tricky.

But yeah, I guess there's more to it than meets the eye.

projectorlochsa··on Your tl;dr by an ai: a deep reinforced model for abstractive summarization
I don't think reinforcement learning is equivalent over optimizing joint loss.

I mean, their model executes X steps and then they calculate the loss using supervised data, use that loss to learn.

The same is being done with machine translation models when they optimize over BLEU. It's still supervised learning because to calculate the loss you need reference data.

projectorlochsa··on Space-Efficient Construction of Compressed Indexes in Deterministic Linear Time
most speed gain tricks in ripgrep have nothing to do with string algorithms. you can save a lot of time by parallelizing your filesystem walks or by using some system call tricks for reading files as quickly as possible.
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