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type_enthusiaston X-COM

I played this game though probably 100 times and never realized that repeatedly firing weapons is what improves a soldier's accuracy. So thanks for that. I mean, it makes perfect sense when you think about it, as long as you assume there is no other training that these soldiers go through behind the scenes. Which... Yeah.

type_enthusiaston They're deleting my channel, but they don't know why? [video]

Also note that the musical composition is itself a copyrighted work, not just the recording. So that is a better case against #3, but still doesn't change #4 (unless the songwriter are themselves offering a competing educational mechanism for learning the song... which could be the case, who knows!)

type_enthusiaston They're deleting my channel, but they don't know why? [video]

No, because reading the book aloud for free on YouTube would obviate the need for people to purchase the book (or otherwise acquire a purchased copy of it). In this case, learning how to play a song on guitar doesn't obviate the need to hear the original artist's recording of it.

It's an argument over the doctrine of fair use, which has four parts:

1. What's the purpose of the use? Is it for educational purposes, or commercial purposes? (These aren't mutually exclusive, which is a confounder)

2. What's claimed to be copyrighted/creative in the original work? Is the creativity in question merely the phrasing of facts, or are there aspects of the original author's own creativity (for music, this one is probably irrelevant; it's obviously a largely creative endeavor, though I guess there probably exist certain hypothetical pieces of music for which it's harder to say)

3. How much of the work has been used? This is tricky; he probably teaches how to play entire songs, but the guitar part of any given song is a small piece of the overall work (and he probably uses very little, if any, of the copyrighted recording)

4. What's the impact on the value of the original work? In this case it's clear that there is essentially no negative impact – if anything, if you're learning to play a song, you're more likely to purchase or otherwise consume the original recording. This is also usually the most important factor in deciding fair use (from what I understand; I am not a legal professional, I just remember this from a paper I wrote in college for some course or other).

(edit: formatting)

type_enthusiaston X-COM

Gotta be honest, I installed the game tonight under DOSBox thinking I would give thirty-something, seasoned engineer me another crack at decoding the file format. But then, those UFOs kept landing and I mean, somebody had to do something about it. And then all of a sudden my kids were like "daddy where are you" and the file format (and UFOs) once again had to wait for another day...

type_enthusiaston X-COM

Well sure, when you put it that way it sounds simple! I was 12 or so, and I spent a few nights trying to figure out the "plain data file" before shrugging and going back to playing X-Com.

type_enthusiaston X-COM

It was also interesting from a design perspective; the various parts of the game were all separate executables and I never did figure out how they all interacted (though clearly some people did, as evidenced by the excellent XComUtil which has proved difficult to track down lately!)

type_enthusiaston X-COM

I grew up here :P

This was such a passtime for me that 20 years later I remember the randomly-generated names of some individual soldiers who came through for me and turned a battle around when there seemed to be no hope.

Siegfried Krause, I applaud your sniper abilities to this day.

type_enthusiaston The Unexpected Elegance of Irrigation Systems from Above

Something that might be cool, if impractical: devise a system of end-to-end linked pivot sprinklers in a Fourier series that draws something interesting in vegetation when seen from above!

type_enthusiaston Graphical Linear Algebra

> Even Bartosz said that Adjoints aren't that interesting in Haskell because every functor is an endofunctor.

Every functor (in the standard library) is an endofunctor, but is also a functor to a specific flavor of full subcategory in Hask. It might be useful to support other flavors of subcategory, and I think there's some ongoing work on this in the SubHask module.

type_enthusiaston Quick-Thinking Cop Captures Runaway Peacock

No, I've had one of these cold melonfarmers run at me with pure malevolence in its eyes, right here in California. I ran the hell away. Reminded me too much of Jurassic Park.

type_enthusiaston The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic

    Oh, give a little space to me
    away from me.
    Please try not to sneeze in my eyes, corona.
    Sanitizer isn't free
    uh woe is me
    couldn't get an N-95, corona.
    Kids are home from school
    and they're bugging me
    stores are out of food, that's no good
    there's none left for me
    so I say:
    "Why, why, why, why why" Ow!

type_enthusiaston Hacking my arm prosthesis to output CV so that it plugs into my synth [video]

Yeah, that's the joke.

type_enthusiaston Hacking my arm prosthesis to output CV so that it plugs into my synth [video]

It's happening! I'd say we're no more than five years away from a computer interface that integrates with your existing fingers.

type_enthusiaston NeRF: Representing scenes as neural radiance fields for view synthesis

They're modeling a scene mathematically as a "radiance field" - a function that takes a view position and direction as inputs and returns the light color that hits that position from the direction it's facing. They use some input images to train a neural network, in order to find an optimal radiance field function which explains the input images. Once they have that function, they can construct images from new angles by evaluating the function over the (position, direction) inputs needed by the pixels in the new image.

type_enthusiaston Where are all the animated SVGs?

Used this same trick (but with SMIL) for an automotive client back ca. 2004. They wanted their electrical systems' documentation diagrams to be in SVG, with signals being animated in a similar fashion. At the time the only viewer that supported it was Adobe's ActiveX plugin! (Not claiming credit for the trick; AFAIR I found it on a web forum somewhere... wish I remember who invented it)

type_enthusiaston As SpaceX Launches Starlink, Scientists See Threat to ‘Astronomy Itself’

Could a tiny space telescope be added to each satellite, constantly sending telemetry down to earth via starlink? Maybe in concert that would be enough interferometric data to be a net gain for astronomy?

(I know nothing about it, just spitballing)

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

The notebooks are just .ipynb files (Jupyter's format, though apparently it doesn't like our notebooks very much...). So you can certainly store them in git. We don't have integration yet, but it's on our roadmap.

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

A couple of years ago I would have totally agreed with this, and I had several abortive attempts to do something like that before starting Polynote. The problem is, it turns out that a notebook really needs to be able to display a bunch of really heterogeneous rich output. There's only one pre-baked way to support that, and it's HTML. So you can either embed HTML in your UI, or embed your UI in HTML. At least on the JVM (and at least for me), it turned out to be easier to do the latter than the former.

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

I don't want to over-promise anything given that I still have some reading to do about Graal's inner workings. But even given the interpreter side, there's also some plumbing to do (e.g. Monaco integration) that we haven't thought out yet. It's still in its infancy, and we'll need some help to be able to add stuff like this.

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

If you mutate an object itself, we can't really track that. There's no magic going on; you can break the state if you use mutable objects. It's less of an issue in Scala where immutable data structures are the norm, but I can imagine it would be disappointing in Python.

Currently it takes a shallow copy of the state output by each cell, meaning every value is going to be a primitive value or a reference. If it's a reference to mutable state, you're kind of on your own with respect to keeping reproducibility. I felt like this was a good compromise between strictly enforced reproducibility and practicality; if it turns out to be confusing we could consider deep copying the state, or having an option to do that (I could imagine it being pretty bad for efficiency in a lot of ML use cases, though).

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

I did the upside-down lambda with the right-side-up lambda because I thought it had a neat yin-yang look to it. Probably should have thought about how it would read to someone who reads Greek :picardfacepalm:

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

There are lots of cool developments in IDE notebook support - IntelliJ just dropped a plug-in for it as well. To be honest I'd be thrilled if an IDE solution could fill all the gaps that Polynote's targeting (our work would be done!) so I'm looking forward to seeing what develops.

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

Yep, we will be adding a plug-in to support Graal languages (little bit of learning to do on Graal first). We didn't want to make the project depend on Graal, though, because it's a pretty small segment of users (and we're not using it on our team at this point).

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

It does! Monaco is one of the many awesome open source libraries that made Polynote possible. We'll be discussing that at Scale by the Bay; check out our talk if you're going!

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

And there are lots of teams at Netflix that are investing in Jupyter as well! Plenty of room for both options.

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

To be clear, we're not out to supplant Jupyter. Anybody who's happy with their Jupyter setup will likely find little value in Polynote. But it has plugged some gaps we've had in our Scala ML research team at Netflix, so we thought others might see some value as well.

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

Thanks for the kind feedback. It's a young project to be honest, but I'm pretty proud of what we've done with only two contributors so far. With community participation I think we could support many more languages pretty quickly!

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

You're more than welcome to pronounce it that way! :)

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

See, we tried that, and to me it just looked like "ponynote". So far everyone who's mentioned "polylote" has been a current or former physicist, so maybe there's an interesting correlation there...

type_enthusiaston Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook

The logo was hastily designed by an amateur (me). I figured most people would figure it out, pedantic people would complain, and we'd all have a good time :)

We've had some better options contributed in the past couple of weeks, but as long as we're going to change it I didn't want to rush that. So we stuck with my questionable typographic treatment for the blog post.

(Edit: autocorrect typo)