ryandamm

That said, it's limited due to the training set, iirc. So we still use PSNR regularly — it's an easily-understood metric with widely-understood limitations, which is in practice not too bad. Devil you know, etc.

On a personal level I’m very excited about AI getting good at math, but I’m a consumer of math, not a creator. My job gets easier as AI gets better on this front, so I can’t fully empathize with mathematicians who feel threatened or are worried about the sanctity of the discipline.

There are weird relics of the underfunded past, but you can’t blame the educational failures on lack of budget.

Part of it is declining enrollment, part of it is Baumol’s cost disease (a living wage is pretty high here! Teachers get paid well on a national scale and very poorly on a local scale).

But yeah… education is simply not well-run in California. I find that pretty indisputable.

Briefly, a Stanford-affiliated "researcher" named Jo Boaler produced two deeply underpowered studies claiming to show that putting all students in the same grade-level math course led to better outcomes for everyone — even the kids that would've normally been tracked into advanced math. But she only tested results on grade-level math — of course the would-be advanced kids did better on "grade level" math if they've taken it recently. The loss is the advanced math they didn't take.

Here's an article: https://stanfordreview.org/jo-boaler-and-the-woke-math-death...

I fought with my son's middle school administration about this precise issue. It is the stated policy of CA's state level education department to de-emphasize advanced math and tracking, in favor of these deeply suspect ideas. I'm pretty progressive in general, but this is braindead stupid, alarming, and self-defeating. (If you care about equity, you NEED to have options in the public school for the underprivileged gifted kids! the rich kids have lots of options and will be fine.)

It's deeply depressing, but education has long been a weak spot for California; since Prop 13 in the 1970s, California has been 49th or 50th in per-pupil funding for public education (excluding college, I think). But to compound that with this wrongheaded, moronic, politically suspect and quantitatively incorrect policy is... infuriating.

The magic of Gaussian splats is their ability to render photorealistic outputs without material properties, explicit ray tracing, etc. They do this by synthesizing complex light transfer in the scene via these fuzzy blobs overlapping — but they need to be able to change color and transparency with view angle to recreate much of that light transport. Hence, relatively heavyweight data.

There are many approaches to reducing the data volume, and they get increasingly complex when you add a time component. Not even worth listing publications here because it's changing so quickly, just plan to look at the SIGGRAPH pre-prints in a couple of months. Exciting times!

His take on this, crypto, all things Elon Musk, and the current 'predictions market' are funny and insightful.

In practice the price paid for the company being acquired is usually a bit higher than the market value (so the shareholders take the deal), and the market usually punishes the acquirer a bit and the resulting entity’s stock will fall a bit. (This is most definitely not investing advice.)

The one I was most familiar with was the Discovery “acquisition” of Warner Brothers. Though apparently that’s a little complicated because AT&T was divesting itself of Warner.

Not really something I’d want to try out in practice, seems like a fire in a nuclear reactor under the ocean, where the source of the fire explodes on contact with water, is a less-than-ideal situation.

Not a bad metaphor for the times, though.

Methanol poisoning stories in the news almost exclusively result from people trying to sell denatured or industrial alcohol. The biggest risk in home distilling is fire.

This affects brightness and contrast: For emissive displays, you can have emissive values that are several to many orders of magnitude brighter than the 'black point', and more importantly, the primaries are defined by the display, not by ambient illumination.

Part of the magic of HDR displays is manipulating local masking (a human perceptual quirk) to drive bright regions on a display much brighter than the darker regions, so you can achieve even higher contrast ratios than the base technology could achieve (LED back-illuminated LCD panels, for many consumer TVs). Basically, a bright pixel will cause other nearby pixels to be brighter, because you can't see the dark details near a bright region anyway — but other regions could be darker, where you can perceive more detail in the blacks. This is achieved by illuminating sections of the display at significantly higher or lower levels, based on what your eyes/brain can actually perceive. That leads to significantly higher contrast ratios.

(As a heuristic: photographers generally say you can only get ~5 stops of contrast out of a print. (That is, bright areas are 2^5 times brighter than the darkest regions.) Modern HDR displays can do 2^10 or better. YMMV.)

But this also affects color... much of the complexity in getting printers to match derives from the interaction between the imperfect gamut caused by differing primaries, as filtered through human perception (and/or perceptual models). But you can't control the ambient illumination, so you're at the mercy of whatever the spectrum of your illumination is, plus whatever adaptation the viewer has. This feels fundamentally impossible to do "correctly" under all circumstances.

Which is to say, the original sin of color theory is the dimensional collapse from a continuous spectrum to a 3-dimensional, discretized representation. It's a miracle we can see color at all...!

I've read elsewhere that photosynthesis is partially limited by dealing with free radicals, and at peak light flux, many plants would be damaged by the monoatomic oxygen species that light-capturing complexes would create. Hence pigments that reflect some green light.

Article:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-are-plants-green-to-reduc...

This is a decently-well documented observation. (I hesitate to call it a "phenomenon" as that would imply an actual casual mechanism.)

Am I the only person who proofreads emails anymore?

(Though I used to use the em dash with spaces on either side — like this — and only recently converted to the more common, tighter spacing—like this. I might go back to my old ways since it's different from how AI uses them, like some sort of weird shibboleth.)