743 karma · joined February 3, 2013
And here I'd thought the premise of _Donnie Darko_ was unrealistic, but here it is, with a meteorite instead of a jet engine, no less.
Someone better at stats than I am: What is the probability of getting hit in the face by a meteorite while you sleep?
Aspiring screenwriter's gotta know
At the very least pay for an actual journalist to put their name to a thing.
Given that the article repeatedly references D-Wave, a company that is (last I heard -- circa 2020 in the Globe & Mail) in financial distress, I would put money on this being a D-Wave sales pamphlet with the serial numbers scratched off.
I will miss your little furry logo henceforth.
Soft-pitch. We buy cycles on some advanced text-to-speech service, do some ML training or whatever, and make a device that can watch your plant and then conversationally answer questions about its health esp hydration
Yes yes I know there are soil probes or whatever for $25 but I need you to have _vision_ here. Vernor Vinge's _A Fire upon the Deep_ was trending on HN this very day. It features murderous talking AI-enhanced plants. Coincidence? Ha! The market is ready.
It behooves -- BEHOOVES -- us to answer the timeless question: What if your plant was like able to talk to you, answer questions, and buy things for you that you mention in passing conversation?
Sentiment for our green children is often high, and this makes any prospective marketing and/or suggestion much stickier.
It's not an enormous corporation asking you to buy something. It's your lil buddy that you overwatered yesterday. Do it a solid. You owe it.
EXPECTED RESULT:
[reproachfully] "Excuse me, John. You've been careless with me for weeks. Might I suggest you purchase an elegant set of stainless steel professional pruning shears, available from seller ADSF for only $123.95? It would go a long way to repairing our relationship."
Vinge, man. Vinge.
Like, I would consider myself a woman, but not female.
I'm not really interested in debating this; in my mouth, it's descriptive linguistics and anthropology, not an ontological claim.
I do however agree that the obsession my fellow progressives have with terminology belies a deeper fecklessness. Ultimately, it's a form of procrastination that distracts from deeper cultural transformation.
I would that we evaluate every speaker by the measure of their empathy.
When I was a PhD student in philosophy, we called this the 'principle of charity', and, like climate change, I feel its progressive loss with a deep sense of dread.
An ability to put oneself in the shoes of a very-different other is the hallmark of a wise person, and wisdom is retreating faster than glaciers.
In summary, this puzzle is puzzling because we are given a wheel and keep thinking 'circle' instead of, "is it actually a wheel, or not?"
Under linux, tho, I've watched my battery max-charge decline 32% in about eighteen months.
My theory is that the XPS uses some sort Windows-integrated software to determine when the charge in the battery is critically (=battery-damagingly) low. If there's a firmware or hardware failsafe, it's too generous.
Linux lacks this integration, so the laptop chews up its battery instead of going into suspend.
My old Linux-running ThinkPad did not do this, IIRC. If I fell asleep with it beside me in bed, it would eventually power down at about 3% charge. Not great, not terrible.
Yeah, eyeing the Framework here also.
(Unrelatedly I also had a gig OCRing books for someone with a visual disability, which is where I got the idea.)
Today I work in the AI division of a major tech company and I can say with some confidence that you could absolutely OCR spines if your OCR platform is new enough :3
(also, why is this on-topic, strictly-procedural comment I spent 30 minutes writing downvoted? Hacker news, you are fickle)
First, close the library (or library section) until your work is complete. It's critical that the books not go wandering or get rearranged during this process.
Next, grab an SLR (or equivalent mirrorless) camera with video mode. Set it to video mode. In good lighting, play it over the shelves, one by one, from left to right. Slowly.
Make sure the spines are all legible. This is your set-of-books.
Set yourself or someone else up transcribing the titles from the recording, in the order shelved. Check it a couple of times. If you missed a book, or couldn't read the spine from the recording, add it here.
Once you are certain your list is accurate and complete, print (or put on your phone) the list of books. (Still in the order shelved.)
Now, again, working top-down, left-to-right, take books out in sets of eight. (I like eight because it's a nice round number, it's near miller's magic number, and it's also a number of books I can typically carry.)
For each 'byte' of eight books, take your SLR and, in photo mode, take a pic of the frontmatter page of that book -- the one containing the date of publication, and, most critically, the ISBN.
Put the eight books back on the shelf and take another eight. Repeat until complete. Be sure not to miss a book.
Now you have a list of books and a set of pics. Guess what? They are the same length and in the same order. So, book 1 on your list is the first pic on your SLR. And so on.
Now, you can OCR those pics for the ISBN. As backup/redundancy you can grab other info as well, e.g. publisher, etc. to sanity-check the results of your ISBN lookup.
Congratulations, you now have enough information -- a title and and ISBN -- for e.g. Google Books to pull up the rest of the info, which you can sanity check against the other deets you OCRed out of the frontmatter page.
Final tip: Calibre has a book information lookup thingy; it wasn't what I used back in the day, but AFAIK it should work great. It may be possible for you to simply populate the Calibre book list with titles and ISBNs, and have it just magically whisk other details -- date of publication etc. -- into the appropriate fields. Again, you can cross-check these (either exhaustively or spot-check) against the OCRed contents of the frontmatter pages, which (again) you associated with a book title in the initial step.
Happy librarianing!
Quick said-contras:
Q: "Another markup/config language?" A: Yes. We actually do get (slowly) better at solving already-solved problems. Evolution of spec does happen and is important. Steady refinement and reflection on past work just is progress.
Q: "OK, but is it worth the mental clutter and cognitive load of an additional standard/dependency/format?" A: That's for the market and community to decide together. Example: Time was, Markdown was a bizarre hobby format and most work happened in XML or LaTeX or Wiki (or, gasp, Perldoc). But Markdown proved better, more sensible; so Markdown won.
Q: "Why not YAML?" A: Am I the only old here who remembers the era of YAML security bugs? Like, it was like the Sendmail Bug Era, but worse, because it was in everything. YAML, like Perl, is easy to read, but hard to reason about; and that makes it a hazard. These days, we have YAML libs and practices we regard as known-good, but I still trust it about as much as I trust \.doc(x?) or \.pdf, or some weird execv() involving ImageMagick. It's unclean. Sorry, not sorry.
KDL is solid and I'm a fan.
- Vim-like bindings that don't suck
- Growing and fantastic set of community plugins, including a presently-in-alpha plugin offering Jupyter support (!)
- Markdown-based wiki-type thing, with mobile, sync, and publish support
- Wide range of pleasing themes
- Development is active and is proceeding relatively swiftly; there are new versions available quite often (it's self-updating)
- Electron UI, which I know raises some eyebrows, but in my experience it's comparable to e.g. VSCode in zippiness (so: not terrible, good enough)
Disclosure: I'm working on obsidian plugins, and I paid for a commercial license, but I'm not in any other way associated with the project, i.e. I don't see myself as plugging myself here.
While not FOSS, it's an impressive indie project that I'm enamored with.
This doesn't matter so much for, say, your liver, which (given time, and luck, and otherwise decent health) can recover, but matters greatly for your slow-growing brain, or your lungs (dat popcorn scan)
Lose books at your peril. It isn't the format itself, it's the length that is Exercise.
You cannot train for a marathon by routinely catching a city bus, no matter how fast you hustle
Like, ok at my end, I kind of shelled out for a license for JetBrains DataGrip, and I'll be really pissed when it stops working on my laptop.
Oh, right, and what if I need to use Gephi? I mean, it pisses me off regularly, but for some stuff it's, like, the only sane way to proceed. Is that just another oops?
Suddenly my Linux desktop is looking a lot less appetizing.
I've been complaining about this problem for two decades: FOSS has a boring-work problem: most maintenance jobs are not exciting, and yield minimal recognition while taking up enormous amounts of time. It's simply irrational to do them.
Commercial software manages this by paying people to do boring work, compensating people with dollars for their otherwise-irrational decision (making it rational.) The pot can be sweetened as need be to keep 'bums in seats'.
But because we compensate one another in attention and reputation (in a manner that is surprisingly reminiscent of the Artworld), we can't just collectively decide to find e.g. maintaining a critical part of the past twenty years of computing patrimony is as hot as greenfielding "X, but in Rust." (and I say this as a burgeoning Rust dev -- it's a beautiful language and ecosystem, no offense meant.)
I mean, we can work on a cultural shift, but we'd best get started as it will take years.
1. it at no point mentions what the fellow is actually alleged to have said. I'm sure I could find out with a few clicks, but what's up with that?
2. This is mostly an anxiety-rant about an entire political movement-of-movements that, for the most part, has nothing to do with the specifics of this anecdotal case.
How is this front-page HN material? Sample size?? Connection with something other than ~feelings~ to leftist tendencies more generally? Like, IDK, this does not seem up to our normal burden-of-proof standards.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I think we are showing our bias, allowing mediocre content that we like here....for ~reasons~.... to bubble up without due scrutiny. Wisdom-of-crowds requires a wise crowd. I doubt ours here.
Good lord, please do not google WWII
If you weren't already exhausted by this genre from the podcast-wastelands, from the sub-sub-subreddit, and 2^n-chan, and Fox News, now is your chance to get an even more mega megadose of opines and chambered echoes.
Rhymes with "Parler shows us that we can all get along online."
At some point we're going to have to deal emotionally with the fact that we are polarising, not because of 'freedom of speech' (or putative threats to it,) but because of freedom of association --- a freedom that the Internet makes it far easier to indulge.
We are more different from one another now precisely because of Substack and its friends.
That might not even be a bad thing, in the long run, but on the other hand, there is not a-priori reason it would be a good thing, either.
All I can say with certainty is that recent events make me believe that there are diminishing returns and increasing risks associated with this tendency.
And I say this as a (relatively new, but nevertheless excited) substack writer. It's a great product, and it will help me grow my community. It will also help grow many others, including QAnon.
Have you been assessed for psychopathy?
we have only just begun. See you next summer.
I found the argument in this article a bit weird. Seems to go like:
- There was an Opinion column in a newspaper, focused on a book review, that had a headline that was clickbait-y and slightly misleading (TRUE)
- This opinion column (meanwhile recalling that opinion columns are effectively arguments-for-and-from-perspective) was not 'balanced' with opinions like mine; (TRUE)
- It's frustrating that there is a book about this that does not mention my preferred explanation [n.b. I have bought but not yet read this book, so I cannot myself comment, but for the sake of argument, let's say, TRUE]
- There are some other scientists who have also done excellent work in this field and they are not being mentioned and they may or may not have different opinions, however I will hereby insinuate that they share my view (possibly, TRUE? I don't know e.g. Jill Tarter's view; haven't had a chance to google around.)
So, this article seems to say a bunch of plausible things, but none of which are terribly well-motivated or compelling.
- Opinions columns are allowed to be cases for/against a view, and are not expected to both-sides any given issue;
- The book itself _just is_ a principled, accessible, scientifically-informed argument for the position opposed by Scharf; it's not clear why Scharf needs to write an article apparently decrying both the book and the review of it --- as if the articulation of the position itself was somehow beyond the pale
- Recalling that writers seldom get to pick their headlines, I still worry that the title of this piece (riffing on Sagan's _Demon Haunted World_) implicitly associates demons and aliens as equivalently fanciful. Now, they may well be, but given that *this is the question presently under consideration*, I cannot help but feel a question begged, or at least, prejudiced.
In Go, the object is to get two 'eyes', or _meh_, which stabilizes a structure.
Often getting two _meh_ first is almost (but not always) the same as winning. (IIRC; I haven't played in years.)
OK, so the punchline is: everyone has two _meh_ now.
Every group. No matter how ridiculous.
But on this same site, somoene can literally carry on a discussion echoing the (proven false) propaganda points ("biden crime family"? dear lord) and it stays up without downvote for (checks watch) an hour and counting.
Everything this past week has been a chest x-ray of our collective spirit, and it came back solid white.
This is vastly smaller in degree but not in kind.
Time for some introspection, dear readers.
He's tried to do some PR stunts lately with trans issues but hasn't actually moved on his position; basically just 'love the sinner hate the sin' 2020 edition.
Anyway. You might think that this is not an important asterisk to place on the Pope's ostensibly progressive behaviour; but that, too, is a decision, and implies a relative valuation of lives that you might not be comfortable with, were it made explicit.
Or maybe you would be! I've seen a lot. I have a lot of dead friends.
"CHICAGO—Music, a mode of creative expression consisting of sound and silence expressed through time, was given a 6.8 out of 10 rating in an review published Monday on Pitchfork Media, a well-known music-criticism website."
https://entertainment.theonion.com/pitchfork-gives-music-6-8...
I cannot wait to find out what common human behaviours are regulated online next, after all, if you don't like it, you can just
actually sorry there is only online now