s_m_t

You know, morons.

Like the American Association of Poison Control Centers

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...

Or maybe you are applying an unreasonably high burden of proof here

Your common oscilloscope is common ground referenced. You attach to your test circuits ground with the typically black alligator clips coming off the probe and then read voltage at a point with the test lead. A decent differential probe like you might be thinking of usually costs about as much as a decent hobbyist oscilloscope.

OTOH there are more people than ever earnestly doing all those things. If we take the barrier to entry for publishing being as low as it is as a factor in you and many other professionals having written top quality technical books then I for one am thankful for this process you speak of.

Doritos are bad because poor people can afford them. Making your diet mostly organic greens is good because you need lots of money to afford them and you will be underweight and incapable of performing peasant style manual labor.

The cognitive dissonance here is striking. A growing man needs a shit ton of calories to grow to their full potential. You might as well fill your caloric needs with "junk" food otherwise you will need to spend an inordinate amount of time preparing and eating "natural" food at a higher cost for the exact same effect.

Because the idea of class interest being split along easy to understand lines like billionaires versus everyone else or rich people versus poor people is a fallacy. In the real world your economic interest relies more on exactly how you make your money, in what industry, in what region, what your assets are, etc, etc. A teacher in California might have close economic interests with billionaire group X and a truck driver in Wyoming might have close economic interests in line with billionaire group Y.

Everything else is just propaganda to try and give a compelling narrative to these unintuitive groups. Because what we are actually talking about is essentially a classification problem in highly multi-dimensional space there really isn't a coherent narrative. The only way the propaganda narratives make sense to you is if you have shut down your critical thinking skills. Being confused means you aren't a brainwashed partisan.

And? Mind-body dualism as Descartes imagined has been practically disproven on almost every front.

That doesn't seem too bad to me. It isn't trivial to prove the earth is flat. 10th percentile IQ seems to be around the functional illiteracy threshold. The military won't take them because as much as they have tried they can't seem to get that 10th percentile trained in just about anything. If such a person looks out into the distance, sees that things look flat and not like a sphere, and then watches some video with half-baked reasoning telling them they are right then I'm not sure how you could realistically convince them otherwise.

Let's do a thought experiment. Floating in an otherwise completely empty region of space is a bomb. It explodes. For quite some time after the explosion entropy will be decreasing in that region. I really don't see the mystery here.

It is actually very easy to correctly assert certain statements outside of your domain as long as the domain you are butting in on is obviously fraudulent, pseudoscientific, full of charlatans, practitioners don't have any skin in the game, is almost entirely funded by political money (and wouldn't be funded otherwise), or is heavily based on some sort of mysticism, and I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list. Turns out that is a lot of domains of human activity.

You don't have to touch it or eat it ;)

Use a fume hood or extractor and really learn how to solder properly. It sounds like you are either running your iron too hot and/or you are trying to melt your solder on the iron and pass it to the joint. The pros use a TON of flux because it practically solves the oxidization issue and helps a lot with spreading the heat to where you want it to go. Half of your temperature issues can be solved by either preheating your boards or spot heating with a hot air rework tool.

Piracy is very cool. It allows people left out on the price-consumption curve to enjoy what everyone else is enjoying. Usually children, students, and people living in third world countries with low incomes or bad exchange rates. I pirated tons of software when I was younger, you probably couldn't price software cheap enough that I would (or could) actually buy it. Now it simply isn't worth my time to pirate.

I still pirate roms and games that aren't sold though :)

You don't actually act or behave in accordance with that "belief". You would be incapable of perceiving anything, taking any action, or making this post.

I don't get it are operating systems and computers supposed to ship without web browsers? You could argue literally any feature is put into a product to 'bundle and dump' to kill competitors. Why is a web browser something that should be a paid product with a so called competitive market to begin with?

Windows also comes with USB drivers but hypothetically I could drive down to Best Buy and choose from a number of different USB drivers I would have to pay for separately (I guess I should pick up a web browser too apparently). This would be preferable why?

The civil service is legally protected from the influence of democracy and the legislature has by and large ceded the real implementation of law to the civil servants themselves.

And yet my motorcycle has gone 80,000 miles without ever needing any maintenance except for a new chain and new sets of tires. Well, I've had to replace the headlight and levers and shift peg because I've crashed it off-road multiple times but that's not the motorcycles fault. I bought it for $1000 used.

It can be a very long wave. If you have a coastal area that is mostly at or very close to sea level then that entire area could now be 3m underwater which is very bad.

Also, even under normal conditions the type of wave you would see at the beach with a height of 3m is insanely powerful. I think the highest I have body surfed in was maybe 2-2.5m and if you get caught in the break of the wave you are literally powerless and get dragged under water and spun around for quite some distance. It is a bizarre experience and doesn't really match the basic intuition of how powerful it should be.

All this tells me is that people report a wide range of levels of ability pertaining to some skill. You could find similar ranges of abilities in any skill but that doesn't necessarily mean there is anything fundamentally different about the people in that spectrum of ability except insofar as developing that skill has changed them. There could of course be a fundamental difference but I haven't seen anything to convince me of that.

This is a complicated topic. To me the ability to hold a coherent (not necessarily still for reasons I won't elaborate on fully to keep this message somewhat short but essentially there is a large kinesthetic component that I suspect a very large percentage of people, myself included, rely on to visualize) 'image' in the minds eye is the measure of hyperphantasia. But 'image' is the wrong word because the 'image' we see in our mind is probably more of a rational reconstruction in our mind spurred by some sort of impression that first formed the memory that the image is reconstructed from. Aristotle wrote about this and more in "On Memory and Reminiscence", I am not correctly conveying the idea.

If you could accurately form an image of a realistic face in your mind then barring some sort of motor issue you would I argue by definition be able to draw it on paper by using the image in your mind as a reference (obviously the technical skill of using a pencil to dutifully create lines which entirely match what is attempted might be lacking and it might be a poor picture in a technical sense but I think it would still be recognizable as a realistic face). The difficulty in drawing a realistic face is that you don't actually know what one looks like, or, more accurately, you have the ability to recognize what a realistic face in general should look like (perhaps due to some inbuilt neural circuitry) but you don't have the ability to recall it in all of its detail. Because you can't recall it you can't form that image in your mind. Anyone who can't draw a realistic face doesn't actually know what a realistic face actually looks like, they can only recognize it. I don't think this would be a controversial view among talented artists for instance because many well regarded treatises on the subject of drawing essentially put forward this idea.

I guess what I am trying to say is that your ability to visualize a face is probably not much better or worse than your ability to visualize any other object of similar complexity except that you would be much better at recognizing that the face you visualize isn't very accurate. If you weren't able to recognize that it wasn't accurate you wouldn't have critiqued it and if you did you wouldn't have remembered the critique anyways.

To close by detracting from everything I have just written: You can also draw a very convincing face by memorizing a complex set of rules that doesn't rely at all on visualizing anything so who is to say that isn't the thing that happens when someone draws a realistic face which puts this whole business of visualization into some doubt

Sounds to me like you are more trained in one style of thought than another. That doesn't seem so strange to me. Personally I'm not very good with accents or music but I also don't have very much background at all with those things. On the other hand I consciously trained my skills in visualization from a young age.

I'm still not entirely convinced the spectrum between aphantasia and hyperphantasia truly exists as distinct existential phenomena. I suppose I would self report as someone with hyperphantasia and I strongly suspect I would score highly on the objective correlates but if I really drill down into my mental imagery they seem to be very illusory (even compared to the other things floating around in my mind) and it is very difficult to say definitively that I am really experiencing those images in a fundamentally different way from someone with aphantasia. The objective correlates mentioned in the article to me aren't very convincing and it seems that they could simply point to another confounding factor that changes the way people self report their internal experiences.

Of course on the other hand I can't think of any way to build a stronger case for or against so I'm excited for more research into the subject

I see, so the idea is that enough of the quantization errors are sort of averaged out across the dimensions of the vector space to still be useful?

Thanks, I was thinking that zero, negative zero, inf, negative inf, and the NaN's were included like in IEEE 754

How can 4 bits possibly be enough? Are intermediate calculations done at a higher width and then converted down back to FP4?

I think there is something to the nature of your addition example that is counter to your point. Addition being an "abstraction" doesn't make it destroy information it's just an algebraic property of addition. If you instead took multiplication of prime numbers as your "abstraction", no less abstract than addition, then every product would have a unique factorization in the primes. Whether either of these operations makes sense for your problem and thus whether their limitations apply doesn't have anything to do with what "abstraction" you choose. They are either isomorphic to some aspect of your problem or they aren't.

Yes, the in-depth domain specific 1150 page book is going to be more useful for building an engine than the introductory 340 page book on design patterns with a gamedev flavor.

A nice hack for building a small keyboard/macro pad that is 80% of the way there is to buy one of those cherry mx key testers, a microcontroller dev board of your choice, and a small lipo. All together it might cost you something like $40 depending on how many keys your key tester has and you should only need a soldering iron and some wire to put it together.

The trick is that you don't actually have to do all the tasks you write down. It is still nice to have a record of what you've planned so if you ever decide to jump back on any task you have a history of what you have done and any context associated with it on hand.

A lot of my todos are something like "I found this article interesting but I don't have the current skills to really understand everything in it" or "I want to add this feature to X but I think I will wait until the new version comes out because it will be easier then" or "I want to remember this when I finally decide to do Y".