scottlocklin

That's taking entirely the worst interpretation of what I said. I assume Thomas is sensitive about his appearance, took the worst interpretation possible and flagged all my posts. Which seems at least as shitty as noticing.

It's not like I'm making fun of the lady for having a big nose. She's simply completely ignorant in life experience, and even possible life experience to do justice to the source material.

I think it's also a damn shame my comments are seen as "toxic." I realize America is collapsing into a foment of witch hunts, statue topplings and city burnings, but if you really consider my writing on HN to be .... even "spicy" -the end can't be far off. God help you all.

Best of luck to both of you, Happy New Year, and apologies for rustling your jimmies.

Also "I've tortured the meaning of this to make Ray look like less of an idiot." I'm pretty sure gunshot detectors, which arguably date from WW-1, don't qualify as "Public and private spaces are routinely monitored by machine intelligence to prevent interpersonal violence.”

I'd rather write python than matlab any day (I made this choice, literally in '98): it's a statement about reading. Matlab is closer to a a math notation and python is a clunky programming language. I'd never in a million years write new code in Matlab, but I prefer it for didactics.

Inflationary pressures and pent up demand no doubt. Also, you can just look at the chart and see it's basically already there.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/iron-ore

It's a regression as far as code readability goes for fairly straightforward reasons: almost everything in Matlab is a matrix. Matrices are not first class citizens in Python, and it matters. I use Python a hell of a lot more than Matlab, but for examining how an algorithm works (say, for implementing in another language or modifying it to do tricks), Matlab wins. Go look at these PRML collections in Python and Matlab and see if you disagree:

https://github.com/ctgk/PRML

https://github.com/PRML/PRMLT

Looking around at all the enormously fat people, I suspect it's more likely to be thyroid and biome problems than cancer.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6915086/

https://www.gmoscience.org/glyphosate-and-roundup-disrupt-th...

I'm happy to pay more for, say, beans which aren't soaked in glyphosate. It's really bonkers how Monsanto has succeeded in putting this shit everywhere.

People noticed:

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/october-2020-talc-lawsu...

I never understood why one might use talc over, say, chalk or corn starch.

Because even a reasonable set of first steps towards creating artificial mechanical life forms made out of arbitrary atoms do not exist and probably never will. Drexler wrote a stupid science fiction book. Good marketing for chemists for a while I guess. Remember the congressional hearings back in 2005 on how nanotech was going to be 15% of US GDP by 2015? I do!

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-109hhrg21950/html/C...

I didn't downvote, but maybe because it is an insipid and disgusting question?

FWIIW in high altitude aviation where digestive gas could cause debilitating pain or even life threatening injury, the solution is to eat food that doesn't make you fart; usually steak and eggs. I'm sure the astronaut nutritionist types have this issue under control. People forget how many zillions of dollars went into the early space program to figure stuff like this out.

I usually like Collision articles, and agree with the title, but this is a terrible measure for physics.

Horgan's book is a better resource for this sort of thing[0]. Obviously there are many problems with the sociology and incentive systems for physics departments; affirmative action, papers with 1000 "coauthors," infrastructure fees for grants involving giving a grad student a pencil, political witch hunts, difficulties in family formation, herding behavior in subjects, byzantine political games, overcrowded winner take all credit. Frankly you'd have to be kind of a combination masochist moron to want to do it these days outside of the rare person whose career is assured post PhD; masochistic morons probably don't make good scientists.

But nobody talks about the fact that an awful lot of "physics" these days is unfalsifiable piffle. Phenomenology, network theory, cosmology, noodle theory, "quantum computing," black hole physics, neural net fiddlers, nanotechnologists, cosmologists, numskulls babbling about "muh multiverse" and "muh simulation hypothesis" -the world let alone the average physics department has entirely too many of these. Nobody in the physics department can make fun of these cranks for entirely political reasons. And at this point the lunatics outnumber the actual scientists, who, you know, can make predictions that can be checked, rather than generating piffle suited for press releases and late night bong sessions.

[0] https://www.wired.com/1996/06/the-end-of-science/

https://web.archive.org/web/20201004020641/https://blogs.sci...

there is a good chance that bugs like this one will be eventually be used to illegally spy on domestic dissidents and whistleblowers.

These things and considerably smaller were fielded 10 years ago by the US; you could bid on SBIR contracts to remedy some of their defects.

Of course the capital costs of this are absurd (that's basically what you're saying here), but if it results in tomatoes and strawberries which don't taste like paste, it's worth it to me. Dutch greenhouse farms are considerably more realistic [0], but who knows, this may have some niches in extremely urban areas.

[0] https://tour-pronl.com/en/mice-tourism/tours-for-professiona...

I charge by the hour, so my "free time" is billable too. Focuses the mind knowing whatever you're doing when you're not working is billable hours (hence no vidya). I still mostly make my own food, coffee and wash my own clothes. Hell Paul Krugman washes his own clothes in his sink, while he's travelling, and I'm pretty sure he bills more than I do (I actually do use laundry service when I travel for work).

Anyway, maybe that's why I don't see a lot of those things on the list as desirable; if I have to spend two hours managing the graphic designer to make a chart/plot/figure, I may as well fiddle around in xfig or whatever to get it done myself.

And all it costs is my time, which is free.

Well my time is definitely not free; people pay lots of money for access to it.

The problem with "muh welcome to upper middle class prosperity" lists like this is it doesn't account for the management time and mental load involved in something like "Hire a researcher or expert consultant." For that matter "Cleaning services" or "Hire a graphic designer to turn your appalling sketches into ..." require significant cognitive overhead and time to hire and manage unless you or your spouse or close friends are already doing such things for your day job. If you're already doing such things for your day job you probably already thought of these things.

Some of them are pretty insane: people who need a maid to chuck their clothes into the washer and dryer, then put them away: if it takes you longer than 15 minutes a week to do this ... I have to wonder at your wardrobe. I mean, I understand some people deeply resent performing such menial tasks, or maybe they have large families, but it's not that big a job compared to feeding yourself and getting some exercise.

For myself, hiring experts to assist with my day to day life has been a fairly mixed bag, and my education, hobbies and lifestyle is such that DiY is usually the win.

Yeah, I didn't miss their clever little double entendre, nor did I miss they portrayed Shannon as a doddering old fool. This was not a docudrama; it was a desecration.

Are you actually defending the thing, or do you just take offence at "Calculus apple-noggin sperdo?"

Because I paid for the book, paid with hours of my life reading it, and am hopping mad that it is total garbage which wasted my time and money with a puerile, long winded stack of drivel.

I'll eventually take the time to write about it in detail; you can figure out some of the details on why the movie was trash by googling my name.

Sadly Soni's book is reads like a precocious high school student's summer book report, and he and his coauthor (who doesn't seem any more qualified than Soni is to write such a thing) manage to misunderstand a bunch of obvious things about Shannon's work and life.

The wiki entry on Shannon's life is more interesting, readable and accurate and wasn't written by soul sick former management consultants.

That movie is a travesty and the people who made it should be punished.

Soni's book is also pulpy trash which reads like a precocious high school student's book report, and manages to make Shannon ... possibly the least boring human of the 20th century .... boring. Gleik's book is reasonable.

I haven't studied it carefully, but it sure looks like 90% of the performance improvement is using a big cache, which is a totally obvious thing to do. Also the big x86 guys have more or less been asleep at the wheel for almost a decade.

My go to example: my 2011 x220 sandybridge stinkpad is faster than my 2017 kaby lake mbp. 2005 machines (I dunno, Lakeport?) aren't even in the same ballpark as modern machines. Had that pace continued up to current year, the M1 chip would be a stinker. As it is, AMD is close and could smoke M1 in next generation 5nm chips, restoring order to the universe.

The jury is still out on that one.

You didn't read the papers. Anyway, the literature is chock full of "sleeping pills associated with early death." Whether the pills are causing it, or because people with deadly sleep apneas pop a lot of pills is really pretty irrelevant: take home is the pills ain't helping you, so you better get serious about fixing things.

Yet another "eat the cockroach protein, peasant" message from our lizard overlords. Thanks for sharing guys.

Futurists were the most punk rock artistic movement before punk rock happened in the 70s. They even invented Industrial noise before Throbbing Gristle with Russolo's "Art of Noises" and orchestra of noise makers. The interesting thing about them is while they enjoyed shocking people and beating up their artistic rivals, they weren't nihilists like punks were: they were punk rock for technological progress rather than sticking bolts through their noses in defiance of de-industrialization.

"Pasta is a cruel and brutalizing food that makes you lazy and sentimental."

Cantos, Bros Karamazov, Gibbon, Junger, Norwich .... I get suggestions for crummy business self help books, a biography of Elton John, something about crazy ladies talking to their crazy therapists, and something on vegetarianism I had already read and found laughably insane and ill researched. I'll stick with my literary bubble.

The engineer wouldn't have been able to waste the week feeling fancy fiddling with GPUs in that case.

Funny I have friends "on both sides of this issue" so I went out and did the common sense thing of adding up the CDC deaths, subtracting the baseline average deaths and noticing that the difference between 2020 and previous years is pretty much exactly the number of deaths the CDC attributes to Covid. You don't need to be an expert to do that.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#S2

No, while B3 is a common ingredient in such things: it was really nicotine.

Everyone went to HS in my parents day; you can look up the graduation rate in the US; it was lower than it is now ~70%.

Reading Anglo Saxon is "useful" if you wish to understand the english language, and appreciate the high literature available in Old English. Sort of like reading Shakespeare or Camoes is useful in appreciating what the human race has done and what can be done with older versions of the language. If you're a cretinous boob, I guess learning handwriting, grammar and so on are also entirely optional. We can just teach kids how to thumb twiddle their phones, take birth control and twerk their asses.

You should try using R; the real world performance is actually better than Julia in every way that matters. Yes, Julia has a better data frame object; that's why we use data.tables().

Also Wes probably got the idea for row indeces from R.

It's an open secret in the military that psychedelic use is fairly widespread. Unlike cocaine and weed, you can't really test for it. Kind of sad to see something like this published by the Marines though; basically content free "muh microdosing." I mean, does this even mean anything?

"Microdoses cause cortical functions to be more fluid, leading researchers to believe that psychedelics may help certain brain areas work in increas- ingly flexible and expansive ways."

If ever there was a meme elixir designed to punch holes in your pre-frontal cortex, microdosing is it. There's basically zero evidence such substances enhance anything. In my experience, and in my observations of others, it makes you feel like you're enhancing your noggin, but real world performance definitely, sometimes dramatically suffers.

Modafinil and amphetamines probably enhance performance on grinding tasks. Nature, concentration and lack of sleep definitely enhance performance on creative tasks. Caffeine works too, and nicotine and the racetams for keeping the cobwebs out and the acetylcholine high. Microdoses, yeah, nerd "muh microdoses" articles ain't gonna cut it for me: I've seen the effects and will stick with coffee and snus. Hell, simply looking at scientific or technological output pre and post civilizational psychedelic use: you can see it hasn't had any obvious benefit. People did more amazing things back when day drinking was common.