jsinai

West Coast - Seattle to Portland.

If we had that in certain locations in the U.S., it would be absolutely amazing. You just show up a half hour before your train (gotta get there earlier in certain huge stations) and basically walk on.

Security theatre in the US means you don’t just walk on the train. You sit in a waiting room with no ambition for capacity and get escorted to the platform by friendly security guards. Quite an experience if you’re not from the US and used to the way trains normally run in the rest of the world.

I have a problem where Voice Isolation partially cancels out my voice, especially when background noise is pronounced, and actually makes calling a worse experience for both parties. Whenever I'm on a call outside, with my AirPod Pro's, the person on the other end complains that Voice Isolation cancels out every other word. When I experiment between keeping Voice Isolation on or off, almost everyone I've tried this with prefers it off. It turns out filling in missing words takes more energy than understanding my voice with background noise.

I wish Voice Isolation could be pre-trained on our voices, similar to how Face ID pre-trains on your face. That way, the phone's software can know to recognize your voice and not cancel those out.

fyi GP’s post is sarcasm. In UK “rail replacement bus” means the train route is cancelled and there’s a replacement bus instead.

Bus networks can work over small high density areas. Johannesburg has been building a bus network with exclusive lanes for years, but it’s designed to work in conjunction with its part complete metro. Cambridge, UK, has limited “busways” which connect the local villages. However, over large distances, I fail to see how buses can be more efficient. A single train can move hundreds of people over hundreds of kilometres, at much higher speeds than a bus, and with very little pollution.

As an aside, I really wish the VSCode team did more to integrate iPython REPL more seamlessly into VSCode as that is one of the big blockers for me to using VSCode for anything Python related.

VS recently made big changes to notebooks support [1], and they are now fully integrated into VS with their own Notebooks API. I've been following the changes for the past year on VS Code Insiders and the latest integration is really impressive from a UI and developer point of view. What's more is VS Code lets you easily use notebooks with any language (not just Python). I've had a really good experience so far using Julia kernels.

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/11/08/custom-notebo...

This is great news to see. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in Milan. It is one of my favourite cities, although the pollution is noticeable. Something else I’m hoping this plan will improve is noise pollution. Thanks to the ubiquitous Milan is one of the noisiest cities I’ve been in.

One thing I’m curious to know is how the cobble stones will be handled. Some of those circular routes have cobbled sections. They remain for historical reasons, however the vibrations to a cyclist would be jarring.

Am EV over a fuel burning car is huge improvement, however EV’s alone are not a sustainable solution to our transport needs. There needs to be mass transit and wider adoption of cycling/walking in more towns and cities. EV’s are still burning fuel if they’re not charged using 100% renewable energy, which clearly we are not at yet, and at the end of the day they’re _still_ an inefficient means of transporting people over any distance.

To reduce transportation emissions worldwide, there needs to be greater emphasis on alternative modes of transports to cars, electric or not.

- Long distances should be covered by train/bus.

- Medium distances by metro/bus/tram/whatever works in a given city’s geography and layout.

- short distances by cycling/walking.

- an EV when you need the flexibility of a car.

In the meantime, places like MIT, moderna, NASA etc are reaping the benefits.

Can you elaborate more? MIT is well known but would interesting to know how Moderna and NASA are using Flux?

Take a walk through Hyde Park or Green Park round about now and you’ll smell intense, sweet aromas signifying spring turning into summer: sweet chestnuts, lime trees and hawthorns.

I use Firefox Focus on mobile which lets you reset your entire browser and cookie history with one click. It also has some built-in tracking protection and content blocking.

While it doesn’t solve the issue of add-ons, it has enough of a privacy focus to make me feel better about reducing my footprint on the mobile.

It’s a pity that development is not as active as it used to be, but looks like Firefox are still supporting the project: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/focus-ios

It’s just gym equipment that’s designed to be durable outdoors. Kind of like jungle gyms but for adults. I’ve seen it in Cape Town, Milan, London, Auckland and always they are busy.

Part of the issue is that the harms of gender bias (and other types of bias) should not need to be made explicit, but part of the research canon. Should a security researcher outline the harms of an attacker obtaining user credentials, or is our imagination sufficient because the harms are well known to us? And if you were looking for more in depth studies, then there is a ton of published research, maybe not all of it on arxiv or in machine learning journals.

Exactly. When I was a beginner I made off-by-1 errors (in Python mind you) all the time. Now that I iterate directly through arrays or use map-reduce patterns I rarely have to handle the index itself.

But she didn’t show how this is harming anyone in a concrete way.

To roll with the example “man” ~ “doctor”, “woman” ~ “nurse”, the harm is having a giant and widely used search engine reinforce baseless gender biases, ie that there is no underlying reason why women should be nurses and men doctors. What is the harm you may ask? The harm may be subtle, eg being surprised when you find out your next doctor is a woman or your next is a man. It could suppress career choices and aspirations, and it could even be financial, eg reinforcing systemic pay gaps.

More likely production systems will be written in C++ than Python.

You can also use VS Code notebooks and Julia support in VS Code keeps getting better. As a newcomer to Julia I am super impressed with the experience. No getting around loading the Plots package but producing a high quality plot and getting the data there is a much more enjoyable experience than pandas + numpy + Matplotlib + whatever tensor framework you’ve sworn to.

Is it just me but the way things are currently stacked, human insight is still the best line of defence? The OP and other anecdotes in the comments are examples why we’re not quite at “AI vs AI” yet

Statistics is a science as well. Unfortunately it’s overloaded in business terms and can mean anything from “knows means and regressions” to “has a copy of _Meyn and Tweedie_ on their shelf”.

The other thing I'd emphasize here is dealing with "state". Data is effectively state.

It gets even more complicated. It’s not just the current state that matters, but also the history (sometimes the entire history) up to that state.

If only ‘race’ was such an innocuous attribute, and couldn’t be used to discriminate against or harm others, like ‘nike shoes’. Unfortunately history and present day experiences say otherwise. And I’m not talking about the shoes.

This is why a standard API is needed, like Open Banking in the UK. When I use a third party app, the access request is redirected to my bank app and authorisation is granted there. At this point it is explicit what data the third party will require. Once authorised, I’m redirected back to the third party’s app. At no point have I given my credentials. This must be renewed every 90 days. Furthermore I can view what apps have access to my account and can revoke this access at any time.

PS Yes I know people like Ben Thompson [1] and even the US Treasury (mentioned in the same link) advocated for a private solution like Plaid (and nearly by extension Visa), but seriously this seems like something that needs to be government regulated to prevent incentives for selling user data.

[1] https://stratechery.com/2020/visa-plaid-networks-and-jobs/

On the other hand, Plaid’s behaviour means that your data is not yours either, but is up for grabs by a 3rd party for which you may not have given consent to. Plaid is no Robin Hood (the story not the app) here.

It works in the UK where open banking is regulated by the FCA:

https://www.openbanking.org.uk/customers/what-is-open-bankin...

IANAL but in South Africa the Constitution and Bill of Rights specifically outline limitations and how rights interact.

So for example, it is explicit that freedom of expression cannot limit another’s freedom to practice their religion [2].

Furthermore it has been determined that freedom of religion is not absolute [3], for example that religious objections cannot prevent a women from seeking an abortion, or for a same-sex couple to marry. And indeed these two examples are protected by law.

So yes you can say that “your right to religion should not limit my right to free speech”, but there is no conflict of interest or ambiguity in terms of how these two rights interact. In South Africa the line is drawn in the sand already. While this may seem like a hardline (pun not intended), it’s important to understand South Africa’s dark history with selective rights and freedoms, and that the one of the lessons learnt is the explicit outline of rights and their limitations in the Constitution. South Africa is a young democracy and these limitations are a feature of fairly recent history.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_South_Africa

[2] https://www.gov.za/documents/constitution/chapter-2-bill-rig...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_religion_in_South...

In South Africa we’re taught from a young age that while everyone has a “right to x”, codified in the Bill of Rights, each right comes with a “responsibility”.

My “right to free speech” should not limit your “right to religion” or your “right to political association”, and in this case “your right to safety”.

While South Africa has a lot of improvement to do, the understanding that rights need to be self-limiting in order to remain sustainable is a very good starting point in a constitutional democracy.

meta, what if it was just GPT-3 commenting and there was just leakage from the ML community

I've never been to Boston but the description you give sounds a lot like London to me. Within the M25 (inner ring), London is mostly 2-3 story terraced houses with a few apartment buildings (don't think they go bigger than 8 stories) and taller social housing buildings. It's mostly dense but also plenty of green space and each neighbourhood feels mostly like a village within a city: ie a local high street, parks, schools, halls, religious centres etc within 15-30min walking distance. Of course it's not perfect and pre-pandemic the Tube was insane, but I'll take it over living in a car-reliant suburb any day.

Would say London is a very good example of this as well, provided you're within the M25 (still a massive area though)

Non white patients are inherently fewer than white patients

Look at global population statistics. While there are no official global figures for ethnicity, we can make some simple inferences based on continental distribution [1]:

North America + Europe combined (17.19%) is barely as much as Africa (17.2%), and this is ignoring the fact that a good part of the North American population is non-white. There is nothing "inherent" about there being less non-white patients. The issue is inbalanced access to health care and screening programmes, but that is not inherent.

This is without even mentioning that Asia accounts for almost 60% of the global population.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_world#2020...

Fundamentally, it seems to me like there just aren't as many lung cancer screening scans out there for non-white patients as there are for white patients.

Just to qualify, you mean for the USA alone? It seems to me that part of the challenge is recognizing that the research needs to take place beyond just Western countries, or acknowledging it where such research is already occurring. Understandably many people would not be so comfortable with Google accessing patient data from around the world, so the next challenge is how diverse and global data can be protected so that important medical research can take place without any compromise of privacy.

The challenge is hard but surely not impossible, as this was the approach taken by the AstraZeneca-Oxford (and others) which conducted part of its covid vaccine trials in South Africa to test efficacy on non-white populations.