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onhn

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The Photos app gets worse with every single update

reddit.com
30 points·by onhn·5 years ago·6 comments

I fought Apple in court after it billed me for a ‘free’ app

thetimes.co.uk
2 points·by onhn·5 years ago·0 comments

Man offers Newport council £50m if it helps find bitcoins in landfill

theguardian.com
2 points·by onhn·6 years ago·0 comments

Quantum computers may be heading underground to shield from cosmic rays

physicsworld.com
3 points·by onhn·6 years ago·0 comments

comments

onhn
·5 years ago·discuss
Unless I misread it, if a project is deemed to have an "FBA" then the project leader is an "FN", in the author's opinion. And yes, some such projects have been explicitly called out.
onhn
·5 years ago·discuss
>Really Bad Acronyms, or FBAs, are spawned by FNPLs (Nerdy Project Leaders) when naming new systems

Nothing like personal attacks to get your point across. Well done author.
onhn
·5 years ago·discuss
The standard and most effective form of curation in science is the reference list at the end of a paper.

But usually you just read everything that is relevant to your research interests from the daily arxiv posting.
onhn
·5 years ago·discuss
"You can upload your research and publish it on the open web. Members of the community will be able to vote on your research to raise its visibility."

Oh dear.
onhn
·5 years ago·discuss
Are you sure it was peer reviewed at all? It looks like a conference proceedings.
onhn
·5 years ago·discuss
I think the article misses the point of what physics is. It is not a collection of "sparse" models and principles, rather, it is a scientific discipline from which such models have emerged.

You will notice the article conflates the two things: physics and the known laws of physics (e.g. first para in section 1.2). Simplicity of the latter does not imply simplicity of the former, but the article assumes that it does in order to tackle/state the question as posed: "Why is AI hard and physics simple?".
onhn
·5 years ago·discuss
The author is talking about how a given physics model appears simple when they are presented with it, e.g. a particular quantum field theory. This is the kind of limited perspective about research that an undergraduate physicist may develop simply by solving the hand crafted problems that are presented to them.

However, the true difficulty in physics is arriving at that model in the first place. Decades of work offered up against experiment, the associated conceptual leaps in understanding required to get to e.g. a quantum field theory which succesfully predicts things are nothing short of a monumental achievement. To say that physics is simple is ludicrous.
onhn
·5 years ago·discuss
"The counterfactuals that matter to science and physics, and that have so far been neglected, are facts about what could or could not be made to happen to physical systems; about what is possible or impossible."

On the contrary, if I had to describe theoretical physics in a nutshell, I would say it is entirely about what is impossible. Pick any physical law or theorem. I cannot exceed the speed of light. I cannot globally decrease entropy. I cannot measure a force between two static electric charges in vacuum that deviates from the Coulomb force law.
onhn
·5 years ago·discuss
Note that if f(x) = x^2 then the second derivative f''(x) = 2, so it looks like you're off by a factor of 2 (as well as the accuracy issue).
onhn
·5 years ago·discuss
Knowledge of complex numbers are required to solve quadratics too (when the discriminant is negative).
onhn
·5 years ago·discuss
If you liked Primer, the film "Timecrimes" does an excellent job at the physical consistency of time travel.
onhn
·5 years ago·discuss
It is interesting that they chose to use a first person shooter as an example screenshot since gameplay would be broken by visual changes in occlusion.
onhn
·6 years ago·discuss
I think we need more clever people making more predictions (and especially from people quoted in the article like Gross, Witten, Rattazzi etc), and fewer blog articles like this designed to discourage them.

The last time a huge, costly, dedicated collider was built, it was in service of the Higgs prediction, and that worked out quite nicely.
onhn
·6 years ago·discuss
IANAL but I expect not. I would imagine the rental company would then just bill or sue the driver for the loss and inconvenience (or otherwise claim it on insurance).
onhn
·6 years ago·discuss
On a similar note, I would like to think a rental car company would suffer consequences if a drunk person waddled up to the rental desk and they were handed a set of keys.
onhn
·6 years ago·discuss
> astronomers use supernovae to measure distances, which is important for cosmologists to study, for instance, the expansion of the universe and dark energy.

AFAIK supernovae datasets are usually obtained as a survey, resulting in a statistical sample which can be used to compute cosmological observables. Here it seems that there is a new sample bias introduced by the neural network classifier. Can this bias be accurately quantified?
onhn
·6 years ago·discuss
I think this would be great, yes.

The store has no reason to hide the markup if its fair, reflecting the convenience they added.
onhn
·6 years ago·discuss
I think only in the same way that 'soccer' is not a good name for football, as a reference to domestic violence
onhn
·6 years ago·discuss
In that case, hypothetically what about a separate app that only sells game currency, like vbucks?
onhn
·6 years ago·discuss
There is a fundamental reason not to publish scientific code.

If someone is trying to reproduce someone else's results, the data and methods are the only ingredients they need. If you add code into this mix, all you do is introduce new sources of bias.

(Ideally the results would be blinded too.)