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solinent

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a fool, a skeptic, a human

take heart, not profits

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Location: Canada

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes (Canadian citizen)

Technologies: C++/C#/Java/Haskell/Python/JS/OpenGL/Vue/Flask/Qt/Houdini

I have a mathematics degree from Waterloo, where I was employed through their co-op program for two years as a 3D graphics developer for SideFX's Houdini, working on the 3D viewport. I then moved into augmented virtual reality (as we called it), researching developing mapping systems for a company which sold to Facebook, Sulon technologies. After that I worked for Teledyne Optech, the leading Lidar company, developing their mapping suite software. At the present I am working on building a startup developing an analytics suite software using NLP for M&A law firms. Ideally I would find some part-time remote work (30 hours is still okay) so I can continue with my business, but I am willing to cut my losses given the right opportunity. Thanks!

Résumé/CV: https://asaldanha.com/resume.html

Email: a2saldan@uwaterloo.ca

Isolation by itself can come in many different forms, I'd say. I don't think that all of these metal diagnoses due to isolation really apply to everyone or every situation very well. It's important to consider that some people historically lived very isolated and also some people lived in the middle of civilization, and some did both.

It's really more about signal-to-noise ratio I'd say, if there are often loud noises then your brain will have to attend to them, if there is constantly a fan noise, for example, then your brain will actually focus since there is no signal--but I've definitely found it's best to get rid of both in almost all domains.

It seems to me the investment community has accepted bitcoin at this point, with major institutional investors finally buying in now--1 billion from microstrategy, for example--so expect to see it go up more. I think it will keep going up until it gets regulated, I'm sure they'll continue to find ways to "increase liquidity" despite Bitcoin.

Definitely--lots of old assets are used for testing, I've seen them personally. It's standard practice to keep around old models, scenes, textures, etc.

They render them at a very high resolution, so perhaps the person I heard the rumors from was talking about reducing the resolution to something less than 10k by 10k (or more sometimes, I've been out of the film industry for 8 years).

I shouldn't really say more.

I should have said gut--I've been calling my gut my stomach for too long and have had difficulty stopping that habit.

However, I don't think we really know where satiety comes from yet, that's why we have all of this research on the topic still. There are a few different theories, but I wouldn't call them proven.

It may not be a sensation related to some measure of the volume of matter in your gut. I think it's also related to gut microfauna such as lactobacilla, and appetite is definitely related to the brain as well through the gut, so it probably gets pretty complicated and possibly is very individualized. I'm no expert, but I do read a lot about these topics.

I'm a jazz musician--it's interesting stuff, there is a whole area of research dedicated to this type of work.

Jazz chord progressions are pretty simple ultimately when expressed in compressed form, but tend to have actual semantics behind them be pretty communicative so I doubt this will cover absolutely everything except the popular works.

You can generate something very close using a formal grammar but you get stuck in the same position as the logicians in Chomsky's time. I've had some really great thoughts about ML approaches, however, with some sort of seq-to-seq approach.

I have no clue, I'm not an expert. I just don't see any discussion on this topic and it concerns me. Historically, I don't see any vaccine which was effective against such a virulent virus, unless it had a much higher rate of immunity. I'd gamble on 5% odds if the reward was high enough, so 95% immunity sounds good but it's only half as strong 97.5% immunity, for example.

I do know that the immunity may only be temporary--1 out of 20 cases of the most virulent strains may then have a larger substrate to mutate within, but I'm not sure if you can get many strains at once, for example. I do know that the flu mutates each year, and I guess I'm basing this whole "increased selection pressure could cause more mutations" on that fact. When there is less available space for the virus to propagate, it's only chance of survival is to be able to infect those who are already immune.

In my opinion, we have an immune system crisis here--we need to focus on eating better and exercising more: we have to fight this virus with every tool we've got, but if we wait a few more months it's possible that we'll get a stronger vaccine. I suspect that's why it ended sooner in certain places--I doubt any measure we can take have had any real effect due to the virulence of COVID--it's in the air and on surfaces and lives there for days, and is transmitted by asymptomatic carriers--so your uber eats driver driving in their car with the AC will infect your food etc.

I'm a bit of both, so I guess I take the radical approach--straight from mathematics to C++/ASM/FPGA/ASIC. Ultimately programming languages are just an alternate notative system for mathematics--formal language theory actually formalizes and generalizes this, it's what us Computer Scientist's specialize in generally.

Since the computer is just a glorified calculator with memory (sorry Apple), we can fit the whole thing into a formal mathematical framework.

It gives you a new perspective, but for some it can be traumatizing. I think it's a much better treatment than any drug out there, though, so maybe it has a potential to be integrated into our culture.

Environment seems to be the biggest factor in any successful treatment--drugs, psychedelics, or nothing at all--environment reigns supreme.

There's a certain mathematical elegance to APL, I think. When the language is terse enough it helps you visualize and work with the language as a tool of thought--Matlab attempts to map actual mathematics to ASCII which is not that successful for me at least, since it meets a middle ground where it's too difficult for me to think quickly purely in Matlab and it's too high level for it to be useful as a practical language.

Engineers love it for prototyping, though, so maybe I just haven't worked with Matlab enough.

While privacy is definitely my main concern here, it's not just privacy that's the issue here--I believe people should be compensated for the work that they offer society and if Google is using a captcha to create driverless cars then it's obviously antithetical to this premise.

I always try to miss some of the obvious items or make mistakes and I (almost) always get through. There's only one service that uses a Google captcha that I continue to use, so it's not really a huge issue for me anyways, and I have decided to stop using it!

It's not too difficult to host your own captcha, I don't see why this can't be an open-source effort.[1]

[1] https://github.com/dchest/captcha

It's possible that the technical discussion about online signature checking was subsumed by the political discussion--the two are interrelated and if we don't get into these discussions here I don't really see another place for them to happen.

It's easy to shrug it off as simply a technical issue, and it's very convenient for the PR department as well.