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xVedun

169 karma · joined August 2, 2017

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xVedun··on 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History
Check out Demons of Unrest, which covers the few months before the American civil war. It covers the stories of Lincoln, other union leaders and Confederate leaders and their understanding and misunderstandings about what the other side thought.

It's remarkable about what assumptions people can make without talking to people from other places.

xVedun··on I asked Claude for 37,500 random names, and it can't stop saying Marcus
Maybe the only way to be sure is to have it generate (not stable diffuse) an image with the value in there.
xVedun··on The Naming of America (2023)
There doesn't seem to be a ton of information easily accessible about America Vespucci, but this [1] except from the Washington Democratic Review for February 1839 notes the following:

> The object for which she had specially come to America, was to obtain, if possible, a grant of land from the Congress of the United States, as a means of honourable and independent support and the failure of her application, as well as the grounds on which it was deemed necessary to decline compliance with the request, are fully and fairly stated in the following Report made to the Senate of the United States, by Mr. Walker, of Mississippi.

Where a report names that she seems to be worth of the name, but fails to mention any actual land grant, which I would assume is a nice way to say no.

> She feels that the name she bears is a prouder title than any that earthly monarchs can bestow; She asking us for a small corner of American soil, where she may pass the remainder of her days in this land of her adoption. She comes here as an exile, separated for ever from her family and friends; a stranger, without a country and without a home; expelled from her native Italy, for the avowal maintenance of opinions favourable to free institutions, and an ardent desire for the establishment of her country's freedom. That she indeed is worthy of the name of America —that her heart is indeed imbued with American principles, and fervent love for human liberty, is proved in her case, by toils, and perils, and sacrifices, worthy Of the proudest days of antiquity, when the Roman and the Spartan matrons were ever ready to surrender life in their country's service.

[1] http://portraits.allenbrowne.info/Vespucci/Buckingham/

xVedun··on Elon Musk posts deepfake of Kamala Harris that violates X policy
Ouioo up ok I Justin i
xVedun··on An interactive exploration of Boston's subway system (2014)
Wow that's super interesting. I'm glad that the MBTA is publishing more detailed stats so we can get super interesting visualisations like that. I'd be curious to see how the charts update as Boston fixes its recent delays.
xVedun··on Caffeine and theanine exert opposite effects on attention (2017)
Possibly something like this: Caffeine and theanine have opposed effect on attention when stressed (2017)

Based on the definition of emotional arousal, stress isn't 100% accurate, but perhaps better than aroused.

[1] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/emotional+arousal

xVedun··on Is Consciousness Everywhere?
I would be curious to see how the author would respond to this fairly detailed criticism of his book: [1] One excerpt from this amazon review goes "If you are impressed by statistics, blips on fMRI screens, taking correlations as proof of causality and meta-analysis as equal to replication, then you might like this book. If you are interested in what wild speculations parapsychologists are coming up with these days, then this is the book for you. If you are looking for evidence that psi is explained by quantum physics, you'll be disappointed."

[1] https://www.amazon.com/review/R2VIDRICPX3ROL/ref=cm_cr_srp_d...

xVedun··on Show HN: Open-source quadruped robot with robotic arm
This looks very cool! I wonder how close it is to the method that Boston Dynamics uses to control the their version. Did they simply train a machine learning algorithm for way longer than a hobbyist can or is there a ton of manual tweaking?
xVedun··on Searching for 'VK' shows only a single result on DuckduckGo. Why?
I found that going to the last page showed a more realistic number for results. This would only be shown on that "last page" of results though. However, it does seem strange that there are only 447 results for a google search of "apple"[0] down from a whopping 4,070,000,000 results shown before that page. And that is with show omitted results. Seems like max result limiting for the 0.1% of users that want to look past page 10 of search results

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=apple&start=440&sa=N&filter=...

xVedun··on What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project
If the work and stress is spread out over two or three years. It's likely that the time spent could easily be outweighed by many other jobs/projects,
xVedun··on Snapchat Detection on iOS (2019)
Interesting that even apple apps with the strictest sandboxing by default still has over ten different methods of determining if a jailbreak exists. Now maybe these methods are only useful when a phone is jailbroken, but it seems that this just seems like another way of collecting information.
xVedun··on Why Does DARPA Work?
It seems that this would be a much better way of funding research in a general sense, since that seems to be the general process of their problem solving. The only thing is that to apply this to other fields, the barrier for getting people that are equally motivated and intelligent about analyzing if the research is 'going' somewhere is high
xVedun··on Dark Basin: Uncovering a Hack-for-Hire Operation
If this is what a single company can accomplish with a moderate amount of funding. It makes me worried about what a military force could accomplish given 100x resources.
xVedun··on The Supermicro H11DSi Motherboard Mini-Review: The Sole Dual EPYC Solution
So I was looking at the H12DSU-iN(https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/H12DSU-iN) which would seem to be another option. But it looks like the article implies that this would only be available to buy through getting an entire server with it. Although it looks like it could be possible that they sell it if you ask. The server they are going to release is here: https://www.supermicro.com/en/Aplus/system/1U/1024/AS-1024US...
xVedun··on BrachioGraph – a cheap, simple pen plotter
Pi Zero ($5): https://www.adafruit.com/product/2885 4 Servos ($9): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q6JGWNV/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_...

Shipping might go over $14 though.

xVedun··on The complicated ethics of Tesla’s Autopilot
Hopefully it takes less than ~50 years which the airline industry took to get to that point. Seems that this would need to become a popular opinion before becoming reality.
xVedun··on Build a do-it-yourself home air purifier for about $25
MERV info: http://www.mechreps.com/PDF/Merv_Rating_Chart.pdf
xVedun··on The Reason We Haven’t Directly Detected Dark Matter
I'm guessing that "guessing in the dark" is the way experiments for particles in the standard model have been done for a while now. I would assume that a single success would set off a chain reaction as the author said.
xVedun··on North American vs. Japanese zoning
Maybe some residents benefit from gentrification, but it seems that gentrification actually speeds up housing prices.

Sources: https://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/real-estat...

xVedun··on One Artist Has a Monopoly on the World’s Blackest Black Pigment
That article seems to forget to mention that in retaliation the original creator has made a "Black 2.0". You can find the full story here: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/new-photos-vantablack-9061...