natvert

Says the clawdbot

oh, and the output videos that are generated are 5sec clips at 554x960px. this is on a single A6000

I've ran hunyuanvideoai from their GitHub and it seems to generate realistic videos. It is a bit slow (30-60min per video clip) and requires ~50GB VRAM. I wonder how the quality compares though?

anyone done a comparison with the open-source hunyuanvideoai.com?

Firearm related X is the wrong thing to measure. Obviously if guns are truly banned, there will be no gun crime. There will still however be knife crime, fist crime, car crime, etc.

The thing we want to measure is if we can (as a country) live our lives in peace. Better measures of this might be all crime, violent crime, life-span related measures, or even mental health and drug abuse.

Banning one specific thing does not change human nature. We need to take a holistic view to address many issues underlying violent crime, firearm related or not.

Ebay is terrible.

I once sold a nice (and expensive) smartphone on ebay. The buyer complained that it did not arrive as described. The phone was fine, but whatever, I thought ebay would just refund the payment and have the buyer return the phone, right? Nope, ebay refunded the buyer and let them keep my phone! No recourse... nothing. Ebay let the buyer steal my phone!

Wait. Is this fact or conjecture?

Oh and read the first comment

Party in the CIA https://youtu.be/C-CG5w4YwOI

Same here

I agree with your assessment, however I don't think the response is more surveillance. If recent data breeches have taught us anything it is that data aggregation (necessary for surveillance) is just another source of Chinese intelligence.

The solution to this (and other problems of social engineering) is to educate the general (democratic) population, so they are aware of and resilient against such attacks. I don't think it's possible to stop everyone from using a given service, but if every user understands the real tradeoffs, then we have a chance. If individuals (and more importantly voters) cannot think and reason for themself, given the facts of a given subject, democracy has no future.

In general though, I think people are smart. They make decisions and tradeoffs with the information they have. The problem here is that they don't understand the real risks. More than the loss of privacy and security, the real problem here is that a hostile nation state seeks to influence the thoughts of free citizens of other (democratic) countries. This is how wars are won and lost -- in the hearts and minds of the people. If everyone who used TikTok saw the situation in a similar light, I doubt it would have the adoption it currently has.

The point is that scientific discussion and debate was shut down by some of the most powerful scientists in the country. The disaster is not COVID and it is not the source of COVID. The problem is the lack of free discussion and inquiry.

This is bad. This is bad for COVID and bad for scientific integrity as a whole.

There needs to be a public response by scientists decrying the bad behavior here. It's the least we can do to try to slow the general public's loss of faith in experts.

This is not true. The case fatality rates are very similar. https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/25/E666

Even if the rates were very different, the any difference claimed to be caused by specific measures would not necessarily be causal as implied by brimnes. For example, what are risk factors for COVID? Here are some data on obesity: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db56.htm#:~:tex.... What about weather differences? The list goes on.

This is a fantastic interview.

Lex is a great interviewer, always focused on the other human being he is talking to and assuming the best in them. Lex's humility and unselfish love of others shines though.

Jay is a fantastic resource on COVID. He is a pragmatists who believes and communicates the truth as he understands it. An example from the episode is when Jay reflects on his family helping him run the Santa Clara seroprevalence study. He is in real fear for his family members, because he doesn't understand how dangerous the virus is and for which demographics. Once he better understands the virus, he proposes a very reasonable approach to living with this endemic disease.

Also news: 'operating systems' developed by consumer-exploiting tech giants fuel an epidemic of ransomware.

On a serious note though, the 2nd amendment protects the American right to own and carry a gun. We should be teaching gun safety like drivers ed, not blaming violence on the tool. Just like an OS, this tool can be used for nefarious purposes or the protection of basic human rights.

Here is a far better article, by one of the founding members, than the editorialized article (and title) above: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-11-08/niall-...

Conveniently, I just saw: https://twitter.com/bryanrbeal/status/1437551640559620098

Same analysis error. How many beds are there total in a given hospital is the right question.

Looks like _all_ community hospitals in the US have about 100,000 beds (including all types of ICU beds, even pediatric for example) https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals

Spread this out to cover the entire number of community hospitals ~5000, and that means if 5 families of 4 people get sick in any community, the hospital will be "overrun"

This is a great example of how misleading relative change can be. Double of 1 is 2. Double of 27 is 54.

Stats like this should be presented in absolute numbers and given in context with comparable historical norms, e.g. deaths by other or all causes.

What I really want to know is how the likelihood of death by covid is related to likelihood of death by say, for example, car.

The people who are for forcing everyone else to take the vaccine don't understand how strongly people's beliefs (including their own) are held. What if the anti-vaxers we're forcing everyone to not get the vaccine or be fired?

Requirements such as the vaccine mandate will not have the intended effect, but perhaps even the opposite. Want more people to quit their jobs? Requiring everyone to put something in their bodies they don't want there is a great way to do it!

For those interested in depth imaging, Stereolab's RGB stereo camera is good for situations where ambient IR is an issue or reflection is an issue, such as looking through a window. In other cases the Azure Kinect is fantastic.

If we can give internet to everyone in Cuba using our tax dollars, why don't we use our tax dollars to pay for internet for everyone in the US as well?

This is a problem with learning the appropriate context. In the case of a yellow traffic light, there should be a traffic light fixture and two other (unlit) lights. Without this context, it becomes apparent the yellow pixels in a circular shape (representation to the network) are not a traffic light at all.

Tesla’s vision/ml systems are amazing. I would love to learn more about how unit testing for this type of error is done. Without some intermediate semantic representation, I don't see how these large, multi-head, end-to-end systems can isolate and regression? System tests are maybe possible, but it's unclear how well a system test would generalize to related, but unseen cases.

It's not my plan, nor am I advocating for it. I just think it's a potential in the logical progression of events.

To your point though, what if a few or even all Fortune n companies formed countries (or one country together). Who would the sanctions really hurt/benefit? I doubt it would hurt the corporate nation states as much as the others.

When the benefits of creating a new country outweigh the costs (to shareholders), does it fall within the fiduciary duty of corporate leaders to form a new country?

This could present an opportunity! Similar to what used to be a traveling TV repairman. Tubes were before my time, but I imagine a person who used to replace tubes in the TV.

Instead of fixing smart TVs, this "repairman" would go around with a hot air rework station and unsolder wifi chips from working smart TVs.

If I had a TV I would unsolder the wifi chip. Maybe even easier -- just cut the antenna traces on the PCB.

haha, this is great! i was thinking about making something similar to skip youtube ads on my ipad!

I shudder to think how much that latter cost the US taxpayer.

:O

This is huge. Not as a security device, but if this were the normal permission model on all iPhones (e.g. owners of devices get root on the devices they own... like a normal general purpose computing device) I could ditch my android and my mac and use an iPhone for everything.

I'm not saying this will ever happen, but in my mind this paints a bright picture of what the iPhone could be.

It's also a bit sobering as I'm quite concerned Apple is actually pushing the other direction in their shift from Intel to ARM.