telchar

I mean, springs would do that. Maybe a latch with slightly delayed release mechanism would work better to time the energy release for optimal running. But unless you want to violate conservation of energy (like flubber presumably does) then springs would get you there.

That's a nice summary of the problem and a solution I think I can agree with. One quibble is I think your notes could maybe fit into a DAG, but (as I think you meant) not a tree. In practice I don't think there's an easy way to do that - it would mean lots of sym or maybe hard linking and I don't know enough about filesystems to know if that's feasible.

But the one area that curation carries a big advantage over search is in browsing. You can do maybe some things with topic modeling and recommendations to allow a kind of browsing, but with searching it's really hard to know whether you have thoroughly covered a part of the space via searching, while with hierarchical curation that is easy. Filling in that last part with a good solution would make searching a no brainer over curation I think, but IMO I don't think most search solutions try to handle that right now.

You’re not seeing how the delta variant would have spread in a fully unvaccinated population. Notice how the original variant and the more infectious alpha variant failed to thrive post-vaccine. There was some competition effect from delta but it isn’t as if one variant directly suppresses another. Delta would have ravaged the country without vaccination reducing its rate of spread.

Such a loss. If you want to know what a hive mind really is (it’s not how pop culture portrays it), read The Ants. Fascinating book.

There are a number of textbooks available, if you were interested in serious self-study. I don’t know of specific names off-hand. A dictionary would be important as well to have as a reference.

You could start with a beginning textbook to get basic grammar and vocabulary, then eventually move up to advanced grammar and then actual ancient texts. These would probably be transcribed to a familiar font with hints to help through things like common abbreviations.

There are some conventions to learn before being able to read actual artifacts - when you’re paying to have stone carved by the letter, abbreviations are going to be frequent.

That seems to me to be a big mistake. People talk a lot about affordable housing but as far as I can tell they aren't talking about housing that would be affordable to build. People seem to only want to talk about subsidized housing in luxury developments, at least in the discussions I'm party to.

Of course only a few of these units get built in any development, after much wrangling from the city, and then the city and the developers pat themselves on the back while the lack of housing is hardly budged and the affordable housing advocates are unappeased. I think SRO-style housing is the only realistic way to make affordable housing widely enough available that people well below the median income for an area can be guaranteed housing.

Also, if you use the Firefox search bar only the first 20 chars are sent to google, so longer calculations are truncated before they're calculated and wrong answers come back with no warning. Not a Google problem per se but a risk of using Google to calculate still.

I don't think there's a need to be confused here. Parent liked it when the tool empowered them, but most people don't like when tools give others power - potentially power over them. The difference in like/hate is in how the tool is deployed.

If the only use of facial recognition on Facebook were to track how one's own image is used I don't think many people would be upset. But allowing someone else to find every image one appears in is a different and scarier thing.

Can you expand on how those repositories are written and how you use them for unit testing?

You're right, it's a fine line. I think it falls on the engineering side of the line because the hypothetical and the consequences in the Martian are pretty mundane when you remove the setting and price tags. Imagine the same story but about a character abandoned at McMurdo Station in the present day. It would be a largely similar story with largely similar consequences. I think you might agree that it wouldn't be sci-fi.

The world isn't really any different for the hypothetical of Watney getting stranded on mars. It's just an event that happens. A hypothetical like -what if Mars were already inhabited by aliens or -what if we could launch items to space for less than $.10/kg using X technology would be more on the sci-fi side of hypotheticals to me. The latter because it would open up the question of how the world would develop differently, even though it's just a simple question of technology.

Edit: I should make it clear I loved The Martian, I'm just making the argument it could be called not sci-fi.

Admittedly calling the Martian not sci-fi is a bit of a hot take, but I’ll defend it. To me sci-fi is speculative fiction. That is, take a counter factual or hypothetical and run with it, explore the consequences of the idea.

The Martian supposes we send some human missions to Mars like we probably will in a decade or two, and lays out the steps a crewman takes to survive being left behind. There’s not really an idea there to explore other than what might be done in an engineering planning meeting.

I might call it eng-fi instead of sci-fi.

I don’t see how anyone could call Banks hard sci-fi.

(Possible spoilers?)

The culture is so extremely powerful that they’re scarcely less magical than the dimension-bending aliens in TBP, which I agree are pretty fantastical, though I’m happy to accept them in exchange for a vastly ambitious plot.

Banks is alright, certainly creative, but I wouldn’t call his work hard sci-fi. Player of Games maybe more so than the others I read, if you ignore the Mind Ships. My issue with his books is that I feel the plots tend to meander and he seems a bit over enthusiastic with the gore.

Can I ask what you like about Egan’s work? I’m not familiar.

Hard sci-fi is No Real Scotsman: The Genre. The hardest sci-fi is just called fiction, because there is no room in hard sci-fi for speculation about science. At best you could call it fiction where technology figures heavily, like The Martian, which while great is hardly sci-fi at all in my opinion.

Any testable scientific theory is generally either so esoteric as to be impossible to work into a story in a significant way or so likely to be false that it gets labeled soft sci-fi. Theories that can’t be tested are just metaphysics or magic. So the more Fi, the less Sci.

Criticizing something for not being hard sci-fi is easy, but I would say largely meaningless unless the piece plays so loose with the science that it could have achieved the same effect with harder science, but I certainly don’t think you could say that of TBP.

I don't see why the training data would need to be provided. The model would, and that's derived from the training data, but the training data itself shouldn't need to be provided. It is hard to explain a model with any degree of complexity with or without training data, so it might not be easy, but that's just the nature of complex models.

Epic would tell you that they have been very successful in predicting sepsis too. But it's hard to train a model that generalizes to data from other sources (the problem described in the article). How does BH's model work outside Johns Hopkins? That's the real test.

The point is that an image of consequence, if real, would have a signed raw copy available which people could check to verify that there was in fact a real image that showed what a given edited image purported to show. If an image is being circulated but no one as been able to verify that a signed version exists, that image remains untrustworthy. This wouldn't stop people from editing images for aesthetic value.

That's a factoid that has been going around, but lost some information as you stated it. Large container ships produce tremendous amounts of NOx and SOx pollution compared to passenger cars, true, but CO2 is a different story. Still a lot probably but not anywhere near as much as 50MM cars per ship. Unfortunately I think some hear that factoid and take away from it that cars don't actually contribute to climate change that much, which is not true.

Credibility matters. Denying the big problem exists in spite of an overwhelming consensus results in being distrusted and ridiculed when (perhaps rightly) playing up a small problem over the big problem in a particular space.

Likewise no one cares to listen to people who refuse to get vaccinated or do anything at all to reduce spread of a disease when those same people want to talk about whether the disease made a trip through a lab on it's way to the general population.

Since this comment got some attention, my source for this was [0] Ranney, Wayne. “How Rivers Carve Canyons.” Carving Grand Canyon - Evidence, Theories, and Mystery, 2nd ed., Grand Canyon Association, 2012.

Not to take away from your point, but from what I have read, the Grand Canyon was most likely not formed by little drops of water, but instead by occasional torrents of water. There is ~70 feet of boulders and detritus at the bottom of the Colorado River. Only a flood powerful enough to get all that material moving at once will erode the bottom of the river bed and carve the canyon deeper. The slopes and walls probably erode more continually though.

And in geological time, an every-10,000-year event may as well be like every day to us.

You've piqued my interest. Do you mind sharing a few of the things you have observed and/or learned in this process?

That link is both very damning and very succinctly informative of the problem.

The taxable amount would be the loan amount, not the value of the property. The loan is trivial to value. If the property later sells for less than the loan amount then it would be a capital loss that could be carried forward from there.

This sort of wealth tax probably would be targeted at amounts over a $5-50M threshold so it would never hit the primary residence of anyone except billionaires, who could surely pay cash.

Here's one for you: https://innovation.cms.gov/innovation-models/bundled-payment...

I suspect this rather obvious flaw (from the article: not taking deletion into account when calculating trends) is due to it being easier to create a data pipeline that is purely additive at the scale they're operating at. Not having to consider deletions and updates simplifies development. This is too much of a vulnerability not to fix, though. It amazes me Twitter somehow manages to remain relevant with how broken it is in various ways.

The Joint Commission (healthcare field) seems to do this. There is at least some churn in metrics for each triennial inspection of healthcare facilities and operations. Aside from reducing gaming, it's a good way to make sure BI teams always have work to do.

That's an interesting example to choose, because almonds have a small amount of cyanide naturally. I think that highlights that quantity matters

Cycles can't as a general rule keep up with cars, unlike motorcycles. There's no integrating them with auto traffic whether or not you force them into the same roadway.

Part of good separate path design is planning the intersections to prevent the sort of crashes you're describing. I've seen some designs that make sense - it's rather interesting actually what nuances go into safe intersection design. I don't have any links available offhand though.

This argument - which I see often - ignores that land doesn’t have to be used for growing crops or grazing. Leaving some land wild allows biodiversity which has quite literally unquantifiable benefits now and far into the future. Using less land in total let’s us leave more land wild, and/or to put solar panels on it, or put it to other uses that may be beneficial.

Further, some of that land which is unsuitable for growing crops used to be - and was degraded by growing crops or grazing. Further degrading and depleting it doesn’t do us any favors.