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meow_cat

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I tested literally all alternatives to Lightroom, including even other commercial Windows only software, just because I want to get off the subscription. I tested two specific functions I use and need, and zero of all other programs do them well. It's frustrating.

Is there an established way to take into account that people rate different types of restaurants on very different scales? "5 stars great burgers and cheap beer" vs "the avocado soufflé on the 6th course was such a letdown, no creativity at all, ruined my evening, 3 stars". I've seen particularly harsh reviews on fine dining restaurants that speak more about the entitlement of the customer than on the quality of the place.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but what is the idea behind quantizing and tokenizing time series? We tokenize text because text isn't numbers. In the case of time series, we're... turning numbers into less precise numbers? The benefit of scaling and centering is trivial and i guess all timeseries ML does it, but I don't see why we need a token after that.

Psytrance Guide 3 years ago

I really wonder if this is 1) Nostalgia.Obviously, the first tracks you heard were your introduction to the genre, so they will have emotional value. 2) First-mover advantage, for the lack of a better word. Obviously you perceive every new track t_i in the context of t_{0..i-1} that you already know. Maybe track t_443, which sounds cheap and commercial now, would have sounded innovative if you heard it as t_33? 3) Genre saturation. How many truly new tracks can be done in psytrance (or any other specific genre) while still being psytrance, before every track sounds like one that was done before? I don't envy the poor souls trying to express individuality in established, specialized genres.

I also wonder whether we could use deep learning to learn representations unbiased by our own history with the genres, and analyze this in a more unbiased way. But I'm also sure you can make the model say whatever you want if you bend the data the right way :)

I don't get the point the author is trying to make:

* The article starts off by arguing that Gantt charts are for factories not for information work; therefore, software providing "bygone ways" of project management (such as Gantt charts) is bad.

* Then it criticizes that software that masters multiple project management methodologies is also bad because SaaS companies are trying to make money by adding features.

* Then, we find that the issue is that project management software is a simplistic UI in front of a relational database. They don't work because project management is not a problem that can be put into databases.

* Then the problem is that the smartphone generation will never understand relational databases because they are used to smooth UIs, and the problem is that there is no undo button.

* Next, the problem is that we aren't all thinking like managers, so PM methodologies... don't apply at all to us?

* However the supporting example instead says that the problem is that we aren't all thinking like developers, and developers dogfooding their PM software is not necessarily a great selling point for everyone else (this is a take I find somewhat convincing).

* Finally, the issue is poor planning, and no software will ever solve it.

Maybe I am not commenting on the "most charitable reading" of this article, but it leaves me confused. The author is echoing a broadly-felt frustration with the world of PM tools. They further various criticisms of PM tools, but it feels like they struggle to find what their own criticism actually is.

During my masters thesis in a chemistry lab, I got a side task to look at a data analysis script and make it run faster. It was a "C/C++" code (i.e. procedural C-style code using C++ stdlib for convenience) that read a file line by line and then fed it to a slow processing function, then aggregated the results. It took over a day to run.

Without even looking at the processing function, which I considered some sciency science, I set up pthreads and mutexes on the result array and such to reap almost perfectly linear scaling. So far, so good.

Then I ran a profiler to see what was actually taking so long.

... Uh, why are you spending all this time copying strings back and forth?

Turns out they passed all strings by value. Sprinkling in a few const & here and there got a 1000-fold speedup or such. I felt pretty stupid for my multithreading antics after that.

Yay, my research field on Hackernews!

Great achievement. The title is of course misleading: The Orbitrap itself (the part that "fits in your hand") was hardly miniaturized, it's about the same size as a regular one [0]. The achievement is to miniaturize "mass, volume and" (IMO especially!) "power requirements" of the box around it (which, even miniaturized, does not fit in your hand). This runs at 41W and weighs 8kg. A commercial instrument runs at a total of ~2kW and weighs >100kg.

(Though in space they have the convenient advantage that no extra vacuum system is needed, which makes up a lot of space and energy consumption of these instruments here on Earth. The atmosphere on Europa is conveniently just about the "natural" operating conditions of an Orbitrap, which is required for its high accuracy.)

[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbitrap_Mass_Analyz...

[dead] 4 years ago

There have been a few new developments in "open-source Retool alternatives" recently. I tried out Openblocks, Illa Builder, Tooljet, Budibase, and Appsmith, with a toy project to test the suitability for a frontend for scientific software.