viscousviolin

If someone has an old GPU laying around, say a GTX 1080 with 8 GB of memory, would that be enough to get a (small?) local model running?

The software that won the competition seems to map the configuration space of an origami crease pattern using techniques from statistical mechanics - pretty snazzy!

More technical details here: https://isef.net/project/phys021-mcmc-sampling-of-origami-an...

Does it usually get taught in the undergrad maths curriculum?

Seems like Katex from the scripts getting loaded. I love the design too, kinda medieval-chic.

Today I learned there's a CSS property for styling the first letter of a paragraph, neat. (https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/i/initial-letter/)

--edit: The font used for those initials is called Goudy Initialen: https://www.dafont.com/goudy-initialen.font

Thank you!

Is there a notification channel you can subscribe to / look at if you want to stay up to date on compromised PyPI packages?

That's a great find. My personal favourite so far from Dust is "Laboratory Conditions": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N25e4Ss34Q

That's a lovely bit of automation.

I've never read up on the republic of Venice, but after quickly scanning the Wikipedia article on its election procedure... that is a strangely large number of voting rounds and lotteries.

Agreed, I'm not sure if it can be made to work either. I have an inkling of a thought that instead of an egalitarian society being required for lottocracy to work, an egalitarian society can be created using lottocracy. But it's just a thought. Hopefully that book holds something close to an answer, but I'll see :)

It's a potentially big problem for sure. It reminds me of stories I've heard about the public education system in some of the Scandinavian countries. From what I remember off the top of my head, Finland has a system where private educational facilities do not exist. Meaning that, if rich or otherwise elite people want their kids to receive a good education, they need to support the public education facilities their own kid attends. I quite like this idea that everyone is nudged towards helping everyone else, even if they mostly care about their own family and friends.

Similarly in a lottocracy you'd want everyone to be a capable leader when their name is picked from the hat. As the professor I listened to put it, lottocracy makes you think what a democracy really values. Is it about everyone's voice being heard, or is there another goal we should care about more? Not an easy question to answer.

I heard about lottocracy/sortition for the first time not long ago and I quite like the idea. The last time was when I heard a professor talk about it, and I was recommended reading the book "Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections" by Guerrero [0].

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217981747-lottocracy

Lecture recordings available here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs6rMe3K87LHu03WWh9rE... And the interactive tutorial server can be found here: https://adam.math.hhu.de/#/g/alexkontorovich/realanalysisgam...

Something I'd love to see is a Europe-hosted mirror of software repositories like pypi, juliahub, and the like. It feels pretty essential to have these be available no matter what, but I haven't found any such mirrors.

It's amazing to hear it's visible in such a big city. I don't have a good intuition for all the metrics that describe how strong this storm was/is, but when put like this it hits home.

Nice to hear earth weather apps also work great in space haha. I'll keep that in mind when I set up my own notifications. Hopefully I have time to look into it before the next storm hits.

Could you see it from the inner city or only closer to the edges?

The first time I heard of it was in this Matt Parker video where he helped do this with a school-sized group of kids [0]. An "AI player" made of matchboxes, run by schoolkids, is a fantastically fun idea.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9c-_neaxeU

Thanks! I'll go give it a look.

Sounds like a fun topic to dig into. Do you have any papers or books you'd recommend?

3blue1brown has a great series of videos on the central limit theorem, and it makes me wish there were something similar covering the generalised form in a similar format. I have a textbook on my reading list that covers it, unfortunately I'm I can't seem to find it or the title right now. (edit: it's "The Fundamentals of Heavy Tails" by Nair, Wierman, and Zwart from 2022)

Do you have any good sources for the physics angle?

I'm no security researcher, but this hits close to home for me personally.

Version control is fantastic, and you can get quite creative with it too. Git scraping for example (https://simonwillison.net/2021/Dec/7/git-history/). But as nice as Git is, people who are not trained to be a software developer or computer scientist often don't have a lot of exposure to it, and when they do it's a relatively big step to learn to use it. In my mechanical engineering studies we had to do quite a bit of programming, but none of my group mates ever wanted to use version control, not even on bigger projects. The Jacquard notebook and other Ink&Switch projects are aimed at people with non-software backgrounds, which is quite nice to see :)

I had the same thought - researchers who are used to having their workflows in VS Code, for example, could be missing out on a lot of tools that they are used to. I'm their description they talk about how they want to meet researchers where they're at, "building bridges" to existing workflows and software. So I'm hopeful that they will consider integrating with popular programming and data analysis set-ups. The project seems to be just getting started so it'll be interesting to see where this goes :)

Yeah it feels like having a very focused editor with a polished workflow could help OSM get more people to contribute, although it would be very nice to maybe have an advanced mode I imagine. Places get new neighbourhoods all the time so it would be great to be able to rigourously modify maps from the same place you contribute from otherwise, although maybe a desktop experience would be much better for this.

I've noticed StreetComplete focuses on details to fill in an already existing street layout, which makes it feel like there are clearly separated stages to the mapping process. First get the basic layout down, then fill in more details like zoning and buildings, and then more details. I like the idea of that so far.

I installed it last night and their flow seems very simple, yeah. Does it allow you to, for example, add missing streets or paths that aren't marked as missing? Because it sounds like it only lets you contribute to things that are already marked as "needs more data"

Thanks for all your input! How long does it usually take you to complete a single update? I'm curious about helping out with the effort in my neighbourhood.

Is git-based syncing something that's built into Obsidian? I'd imagine it's awkward setting up git management on a smartphone outside of Obsidian?

*Inkscape not Inkspace

That's one of the examples he goes into in his talk, at a high level anyway. I'd love to find a write-up of someone who has done the detailed calculations of how likely alignments and shape occurrences are.

Another thing that would be interesting is to look at the effect of non-uniformly distributed birthdays. For example, the day that's nine months after valentine's day or christmas might (?) have a slightly higher number of births than an average day. Then you could look at what kind of an effect this would have on the probability of a common birthday as a function of group size.