koningrobot

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3 months agodiscuss

The Buyr app is made for this, though not sure it covers clothing and toys yet.

9 months agodiscuss

It goes further back than that. In 2014, Li Yao et al (https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0585) drew an equivalence between autoregressive (next token prediction, roughly) generative models and generative stochastic networks (denoising autoencoders, the predecessor to difussion models). They argued that the parallel sampling style correctly approximates sequential sampling.

In my own work circa 2016 I used this approach in Counterpoint by Convolution (https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.07227), where we in turn argued that despite being an approximation, it leads to better results. Sadly being dressed up as an application paper, we weren't able to draw enough attention to get those sweet diffusion citations.

Pretty sure it goes further back than that still.

2 years agodiscuss

> how much livestock is grown and slaughtered specifically for leather

Yes and, I would hope that the majority of leather comes from cattle that are grown and slaughtered for meat. In that case, the amount of cattle put through the meat grinder is a function of both the demand for meat and the demand for leather, but it would be unlikely to be sensitive to both at the same time. I suspect, given that meat has so much turnover whereas leather lasts a long time, that we are meat-bound rather than hide-bound.

3 years agodiscuss

I think you're not aware of all the available evidence. The lab leak theory does not implicate China so much as it implicates particular people in the US who intentionally moved the research to China to evade the US' ban on gain-of-function research. These same people then got to be the experts with the authority to craft the official narrative on the subject.

The most important pieces of evidence (imho) are

  - No evidence for zoonotic origin has been uncovered, *and it's not for lack of trying*.
  - Peter Daszak applied for funding with DARPA to take a bat coronavirus and insert the furin cleavage site; his proposal was rejected.
  - The cover-up started with the "proximal origins" paper: a *peer-reviewed* paper in a *respectable journal* establishing zoonotic origin with certainty in the public eye. The Fauci emails show that the authors were far from certain, and several were leaning the other way.

US Right to Know does good journalism on this and other subjects: https://usrtk.org/category/covid-19-origins

3 years agodiscuss

And yet "debunked" it shall be, by taking the weakest argument and showing it is wrong with such condescension that good citizens will be afraid to believe any of it.

3 years agodiscuss

I think the point is that 0.5 is 1/2, and the 5 digit only appears because of our base 10 presentation of numbers.

3 years agodiscuss

Have you seen the author list of DeepSpeech2? https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02595

3 years agodiscuss

The one thing that I most wish Python had is Common Lisp's restartable conditions. They're like exceptions but they don't break your whole process if you don't handle them in the code. If you forgot to define a variable, you'll have the option to define it and resume computation. If you forgot to provide a value, you'll be able to provide one now and resume computation. As it is, Python just dies if something unforeseen happens, which feels like a missed opportunity given that Python is a dynamic language (for which it pays a price).

I work in ML, and launching a job on a cluster just to have it fail an hour later on a typo got old ten years ago. Being able to resume after silly mistakes would easily reduce debugging time by an order of magnitude, just because I need to run the job only once and not ten times.

4 years agodiscuss

They meant algebraic in the sense of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_operation.

4 years agodiscuss

I notice it mentions Ctrl-a and Ctrl-x which "increment or decrement any number after the cursor on the same line". I hate these shortcuts because several times I've accidentally pressed them (e.g. on some level thinking I'm in Spacemacs or in readline) and introduced a hard-to-find bug into my code without knowing it.

4 years agodiscuss

More like 10x. Black is truly a terrible thing.

4 years agodiscuss

It definitely works, JAX only sees the unrolled loop:

  x = 0
  x += y
  x += y
  x += y
  x += y
  x += y
  return x

The reason you might need `jax.lax.fori_loop` or some such is if you have a long loop with a complex body. Replicating a complex body many times means you end up with a huge computation graph and slow compilation.

4 years agodiscuss

Ah yes, deny people the right to die because we could make their lives better in principle. Assisted suicide is the messenger that tells us that we are otherwise failing these people. Without it, we would still fail them, but at least it wouldn't bother us so much.

4 years agodiscuss

Did you mean to write dμ(x) instead of μ(dx)? As a non-measure-literate person, I can understand dμ(x) as the d of density μ(x) evaluated at x. But μ(dx) has μ evaluated at the infinitesimal dx which is very different. Is μ(dx) the correct notation?

4 years agodiscuss

You made a statement about "keto diets" in the plural, and "for control of obesity" in general. An anecdote would be you relating which of this plurality of keto diets you tried and what results you found with each of them. "Keto diets [...] are effective" is a conclusion one may or may not take away from such anecdotes, but it is not itself an anecdote.

4 years agodiscuss

> Just an anecdote: keto diets for control of obesity are so effective it feels like a hack.

I'm genuinely fascinated that you prefaced this clearly-not-an-anecdote with "just an anecdote". If it had been an anecdote, it would have been fine without the preface. Instead it's a sweeping claim that at best requires several anecdotes to support it.

4 years agodiscuss

I don't think the author is talking about utilitarianism at all. They're talking about compressing their moral intuitions. They already believed it's bad to kill grandma, therefore "utilitarianism" must be beaten into shape to reach the same conclusion.

The fundamental unit of (classical) utilitarianism is good/bad sensations, not right/wrong actions. If you start by taking rightness/wrongness of actions as fundamental, you are very much not doing utilitarianism.

The grandma/surgeon examples do seem to suggest that killing grandma is good or dividing up the patient is good according to utilitarianism. That may or may not be right, depending on context -- who are the people involved, what do they bring to the table, what relationships do they have with each other and with people not mentioned in the story? You can fill out these details in ways that would lead "common sense morality" to the abhorrent conclusions also, or bite their own bullet and claim "the means justify the ends" somehow.

4 years agodiscuss

> The argument being that it was better for someone who would only projected to make it to 50 years to die early than it would be if someone who was projected to make it to 75 years died early.

That's not what it says at all. It says that being exposed to a carcinogen isn't bad if you aren't going to live long enough to suffer the consequences. Plenty of things wrong with the memo but this little observation isn't it.

4 years agodiscuss

According to https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/Trends/ the rate is still going down. Literally the first place I looked and their graph goes to 2018.

4 years agodiscuss

Yes, I've worked with this exact algorithm before, and others like it, and it should be much worse. Better than finite diffs or reinforce, but way worse than backprop's exact gradients, to the point of being unusable. Moreover the variance of the estimate grows with the number of parameters, so it gets worse still on bigger problems.