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akjetma

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Waymo in Portland 3 months ago

Really horrifying lack of empathy in your thinking. Also, what a stupid, shortsighted plan.

there are some artists with very strong, recognizable styles. if you provide one of these artists' name in your prompt and get a result back that employs their strong, recognizable style, i think that demonstrates that the network has a latent representation of the artists work stored inside of it.

Half-Life: Alyx 7 years ago

it's funny, VR doesn't give me motion sickness but browser parallax stuff does. i don't think i've ever seen a good implementation of this and i've seen tons of attempts. highjacking scroll just never feels good.

i wonder if there's a constant average reading speed (in terms of bits per second) across written languages. chinese is obviously more dense per symbol than english, but is each character processed more slowly as a result, preserving constant data rate across languages? also interesting to consider how much harder real time, verbal translation would be if data rates differed.

Scientists started with written texts from 17 languages, including English, Italian, Japanese, and Vietnamese. They calculated the information density of each language in bits—the same unit that describes how quickly your cellphone, laptop, or computer modem transmits information. They found that Japanese, which has only 643 syllables, had an information density of about 5 bits per syllable, whereas English, with its 6949 syllables, had a density of just over 7 bits per syllable. Vietnamese, with its complex system of six tones (each of which can further differentiate a syllable), topped the charts at 8 bits per syllable.

how can you encode 643 syllables using 5 bits? same for 6949 syllabes/7 bits?

media molecule's Dreams has the most impressive user interface i've ever used. it uses 2d panels laid out in 3d space but the panels can be anchored and resized in screen space, object space or world space and it's extremely intuitive. i highly recommend people interested in ux/ui check it out

Don't mean to nitpick, just wasn't able to parse this:

Each of the 2-8 main CPU cores can run independently, shutting on or off as necessary, and has its own private cache (bigger than most computers’ RAM up to even recently) ...

Aren't CPU caches necessarily much smaller than RAM?

Additionally, I think the public is now realizing how powerful the friend/follow metadata graph is. It's pretty easy/robust to infer traits about people for whom you don't have explicit information. Alan, Betty, and Charlotte filled out the quiz and all live in Florida; Dave has mutual friendships with Alan, Betty, and Charlotte; Dave probably lives in Florida. You can do this recursively and don't need to have concrete information about the majority of members in a graph in order to make pretty strong probablistic inferences about the traits of a large graph.

If the algorithm is directing people to more 'extreme' content for a given topic, does that imply it has some latent notion of what is less extreme? In order to draw a vector from one point away from the center, it'd need to have some concept of where the origin is.

The internet is inherently social, we don't need to reify that aspect in explicit sites for 'social networking'. It's a weird cargo-culty skeumorphism of a natural thing. I think we need maybe point-to-point and broadcast comm standards but not social networking sites that try to trap you and own you

it's not 'lack of vision and political will' that stymies government initiatives--that's some TED talk bs. and i shudder to think that we're necessarily dependent on the benevolence and 'vision' of large companies to drive society forward.

The CTO at my company recently decreed PR reviews to be the number one priority during the day. Seems to have helped make clear the importance of reviewing things. I think when it's explicitly and clearly mandated from a superior, it makes it easier to justify the cost of the context switch and I also think it's a good idea at an organizational level to prioritize this.

'We're in a Bubble' 10 years ago

I wonder if the frequency of "We're not in a bubble" articles tracks its counterpart over time.

GitHub down 10 years ago

It's an issue for people at large to have this shared point of failure, but not for any particular individual.