tetrazine · HackerTrans

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Because they believe they will turn a profit on the investment (in expectation). Next question

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Yeah, that makes sense. Given your account, it sounds like the 2D paradigm of the bibi-symbols (which I'm following) is fundamentally bad for interpretability with dyslexia, because it results in a lot of symmetries.

Even when considering the population of people without dyslexia, I can't think of examples of vernacular human alphabets that have many pairs of distinct symbols that are identical under some symmetry. So maybe symmetry is an alphabet design antipattern.

tetrazine

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I agree. I also think that the alphabet leans too far in the direction of making the symbols distinct, and not enough in the direction of making them transparently interpret-able as binary - which is the unique aspect of a special binary notation like this and should be emphasized.

I sketched some alternatives here:

https://i.imgur.com/7MZs4ji.png

tetrazine

3 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

This is an aside. But I twigged on a caption for one of the figures: “Every computational problem takes longer to solve as its input grows larger, but not all problems grow harder at the same rate.”

It’s obvious from CS201 that this phrase is generally true and I have no pedantic objection to its inclusion in the article. However, I’m curious if this is strictly true or if we can find a (nontrivial) counterexample. Are there any algorithms that run faster as input grows? My first intuition is some kind of probabilistic question solved to a given correctness bound.

Edit: it is trivial to construct an algorithm with this property. My precise question is whether any meaningful problems have optimal algorithms with this property.

tetrazine

5 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

> Scientifically, this MUST be superior to simply replacing the cork (or screw cap in Australia).

Why must this be the case? This is a genuine question, not a pure objection.

Consider two oxygen levels, o_1 and o_2, where o_2 << o_1 due to vacuum removal. Consider a set of chemical reactions that occur between wine and the surrounding environment. Of oxygen, glass, trace chemicals, cosmic rays, astological auras, etc. Let ℜ be the set of chemical reations that affect phenomenological quality (flavour) (presumably negatively, as a just-opened bottle of wine is at the peak of quality and can only degrade).

Why must it be the case that o_2 is the limiting factor for all, or even some, of the elements of ℜ? What if another quantity (surface area, pressure, etc) limits the pace or extent of the reaction, and just as much degradation occurs with partial vacuuming (o_2) as without (o_1)?

Perhaps you or someone else is a wine chemist, professional or amateur, and can enlighten me. Until that point, there are more things in heaven and Earth, dear dhsysusbsjsi, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

tetrazine

6 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

There’s probably nothing to this, but when I try to screenshot the pdf (https://ia802805.us.archive.org/7/items/comp3321/comp3321.pd...) on iOS Safari, my phone locks up for a moment with a black screen and spinner and then I have to unlock the phone. Doesn’t happen on other PDFs on archive.org or after I’ve saved it to iBooks. Can anyone replicate? Is this perhaps the result of some byzantine configuration state in the PDF spec that Apple has chosen to implement or that their implementation is choking on?

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Sorry... what? In fashionable places these are some of the most common high-end shoes I see people wearing. They're not very hard to buy or artificially scarce, just expensive, so they're not really a target for sneakerheads in the traditional sense of the word. They mostly care about specific colorways or variants that come in small quantities, or shoes that have just been released with constrained supply.

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

On the topic of hair synthesis... a particularly mind-blowing legal complaint alleges a startup CEO that has published and shown at Siggraph repeatedly of fabricating large elements of their tech. It was brought by a core research scientist working on hair (who brought the complaint) who also alleges that he was fired without warning when he revealed this fabrication (after consistent warnings that he would do so if changes were not made at the company), and that the CEO and others assaulted him while attempting to keep him from removing personal data from his laptop. Other gems: the research scientist alleges that they withheld months of pay, that the CEO doesn't even have a work visa valid for his work as CEO, and that the CEO used his position as a professor to copy results from papers under review and integrate them into their product. If they don't settle this will be a very interesting lawsuit.

https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/07/19/sadeghi_pinscreen_complain...

And take a look at that, the founder in question is the last author on this paper. And another member of Pinscreen is the first. I'm going to have fun replicating this one.

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Well. Videos are orders of magnitude larger than many other common web content formats. And there are probably several codecs available on a CDN. It's reasonable to call that expensive and still claim that cloud computing is cheap overall. It is amazing to store gigs of photos for cents per month on AWS.

But I would guess bandwidth dwarfs storage costs here, so it does seem odd.

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Hmmm. Inclined to agree if you replace the company in this argument with a person.

Very disinclined in actuality, since this is a company providing a service to people who have handed over custody of their personal data (It sounds like very high-value data! Cooking videos aren't easy to make!) under the assumption that they will get something out of the deal, i.e., the videos would be hosted and they would be warned if they were going to be deleted (or at least apologized to if they were deleted by accident and not lied to).

>>> If you can’t think of a reason that positively improves the world for us all, and all that you’ve got is “we should hold them up as an example for others to avoid”, this post already does so and without doxxing them.

Hmm, how about "we should hold them up as an example for users to avoid".

Doxxing doesn't exist for corporations, it only exists for individual people. The proper term of art here is whistleblowing or journalism. And the reason the author avoided mentioning the company name is probably to cover someone's ass who signed an NDA.

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I think you're right about this for many people but not all.

Intel stepping up the lane counts in HEDT is definitely a good reactionary move but won't affect the budget-constrained scenarios I discussed until a few years from now because you can just buy a couple generations back. I might be wrong but I believe many X299 chips before gen 9 had 16-24 lanes?

I also don't think your point about price difference insignificance is universally applicable because buying extra GPUs over time is quite common and having an extensible box with 1-2 GPUs at the start is potentially a good move. As for the PCIe switches on the X399 chipset IMO this depends on the assertion that 16x is X% better than 8x. This depends on use case and analysis of the penalty you get at 8x vary but many people would take a 10-15% penalty down the road @ 4 cards (really 5-7.5% because it only affects 2/4 cards) to save money now.

I built a box with Intel because I had the capital, and most people at an industry job probably should, but if you read forum and mailing list threads many people are faced with this economic decision and are going TR - I see quite a few academics doing this. Math libraries are a good thesis topic :)

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

One important niche where Intel is ripe to lose their lead is deep learning workstations. The issue at hand: they don't put high enough PCIe lane counts on all but the highest end desktop processors. It's unclear if these processors will address that (I can't find lane counts on a quick google search).

Let's say you want to run 4 GPUs off your CPU for a powerful workstation or small server (e.g. for a research group). There's debate over whether you need to run cards in x8 or x16 mode for most deep learning applications, so let's say 8x as a conservative choice. That means you need 32 lanes (or 16 for just two cards). But your drive and other peripherals might take some lanes too. So 40 looks like a safer number. Easy enough to find that on a motherboard...

Most of the mid-high range Intel desktop CPUs only have 16 lanes total. Base model Threadripper (1900x) which is price-competitive with those has 64. You can go to Xeon but that (AFAIK) can be problematic in several ways for midrange or mixed use workstations (no integrated graphics, less mobo selection for the needed features).

I think this is pretty important. If enough researchers go to Ryzen then math libraries will get written there and the lead that libs like MKL provide could be nullified[0]. This will filter into the server market, where CPU is used even in deep learning production deployments (e.g. for inference servers). And having lower end processors is important because there are lots of independent researchers doing important work in the field who don't have huge budgets, as well as academics who can't get budget and might be spending out of pocket on their workstation.

[0] I'll admit I don't know enough about the math hardware in Ryzen vs Intel to say if this is possible.

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

This is true. Lots of other mentions of Germany in this thread with good points. The downsides to Germany that Americans and Canadians (and to a lesser extent British) might perceive:

- Constant store closures. Almost all Sundays and numerous holidays, almost all stores, including groceries, are closed. Don't forget to get milk or you have to trek to the central train station.

- Very bad international food. Even in major German cities, the food (outside of German, Middle Eastern, and some European cuisine) is simply not on par with places like the Bay Area or London.

- Less outwardness as a social norm. I am sure there will be debate over this. But I think many will agree it is hard to make friends with non-expats even when there is no or little language barrier, compared to many North American social contexts.

- Lots of bureaucracy and dependency trees of ID and permits, even for simple things like getting a train pass. As a reference, it costs 1500-2000 EUR to get a driver's license in Germany (including mandatory training classes), much higher than in the US or Canada. Also, there is a refugee crisis choking the German immigration system and it may take much longer than normal to get immigration-related matters sorted out.

- More public smoking, including on patios and inside bars and clubs. If you are sensitive to cigarette smoke don't plan to go to any nightclubs.

- Serious environmental policies, which would be admirable if it weren't for the Autobahn and all the coal that Germany burns. Have fun drying your sheets and towels on clotheslines in the middle of winter and don't expect AC during the summer.

Some of this is generic to Europe, much of it less true in Berlin than elsewhere, and there are lots of positives to Germany that have been mentioned in this thread. Good luck!

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

In the art world, Banksy is seen largely as trite and is known to attract new and dumb money. If you've seen his film "Exit Through The Gift Shop", Mr. Brainwash, the aspiring artist he portrays, is quite similar to how anyone who knows or cares a little about art sees Banksy himself.

It isn't just "big money" saying this - ask any cool (poor) artists or curators if they like Banksy and you'll be laughed out of the room. He's the Nickelback of contemporary art. It's not because of his message - lots of other artists make biting, hilarious attacks on global capitalism and consumer culture, if that's what you're into.

Also, as others in this thread have pointed out, practices like this shredding don't actually devalue the piece, and may in fact increase it's value. The shredding is an empty gesture signifying the rejection of a culture that the piece is very much a part of. If a piece is just an investment vehicle, what effect does humiliating the owner of the piece have on the piece's function as an investment vehicle, if it does not lower the value? They (allegedly) own the art only for it's value, so how does this strike back at them?

If you want to look getting money out of art, you might start by looking at the early performance art tradition and what it achieved in terms of decommodification. Pay special attention to the amount of lying and inconsistent storytelling. Ask yourself whether "Exit Through The Gift Shop" (grossed 3MM in USA box office and set Banksy on the track to these $1mm sales) achieves any of the same decommodification.

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Sorry, but you have to do the work. There's no real point to having every paper revisit the key points of the field that everyone working already knows. The introduction section, when well written, provides starting points for research if you're not completely up to speed.

While cross-domain sharing of insights and knowledge is commendable and important, I'm not sure why it would make sense for review to be outsourced to non-experts in the field, as you describe (even if the paper was "readable" the domain experts would presumably be the most able to evaluate a paper). Maybe one or two reviewers on a panel of many, but otherwise it makes very little sense. All of these suggestions essentially serve to slow down the research process and have benefits for a very small portion of the potential audience.

I think what is more valuable to opening academic research up is greater open education material, besides the traditional models of bachelor->masters->phd->postgrad, and more aggressively written textbooks that work on the cutting edge of the field (with appropriate disclaimers).

Oh, and big disclaimer: tons of papers are badly written. That doesn't affect any of these points.

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

This is absolutely wrong, as many passengers do not make it to a flight, without being bumped. This rate is very high and makes overbooking valuable. The difference in cost includes both the relatively low bumping rate and the relatively high missed/cancelled flight rate. Many routes make very little revenue per flight (not per passenger) after overhead - at times in the hundreds of dollars, if I recall correctly - and would be completely unviable without overbooking.

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Someone's never managed a supply chain before

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Hospitals have needs that hotels don't from the ground up. They have different architecture, interior design, and HVAC needs, they have different real estate needs, they need to be robust to natural disasters, they maintain services like ambulances and a vast records and bookkeeping system. Sanitation requirements are much higher, there's no reason to assume costs there scale linearly - think about night shifts. Hospital workers usually are more unionized than hotel workers (should a hotel room be <$100 a night?). I believe nurses do a lot of work that lower trained/skilled/paid workers would do in a hotel.

Then you can start throwing in the inflated costs due to the American insurance system, the higher liability hospitals have compared to hotels, and other factors. I'm sure people more familiar with the medical profession could add even more exacerbating factors that I don't know about. All of this isn't to say that the hospital or healthcare system isn't inefficient, but simply that hospitals and hotels are apples and oranges.

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Very interesting answer from Suzanne Sadedin. Very odd that "Arush Kakkar, Founder, CorsecoTech", who appears to neither be a physician, nor a medical science expert, nor a woman, is the highest displayed answer for me, with a strained analogy relating women's bodies to software, which is based on Suzanne's answer. I don't know if this is because of user voting, his score, or the Quora algorithm. I wonder if the mysteries of this ranking system are what lies behind the Quora login wall.

tetrazine

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

This is actually a subject dealt with widely in the humanities. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction is a good start, for instance. It does seem odd for art to be valued by the market, but there are clear ways to construct standard valuation (based on utility, etc) around it.

  some computer and printer somewhere can easily reproduce the piece if I ever need it again [...] well-defined manufacturing cost

This is not as straightforward as some might think! Some people agree with you. Some don't. "Fake" is a spectrum as well. Is it a reproduction of an original work, or an original work falsely attributed to a particular artist? In the second case, if the quality is high and scholarship has emerged around that work, is it "less valuable" to own after it is revealed as fake (for one individual, not at market prices) or is it in a sense more interesting? Is it perpetrated to be real or simply a print? Even if it's an authentic creation of the artist, was the work been authorized outside of their canon in a less official way? What about photographs, and later editions of them (by either the artist themselves, their estate or family, a dealer, etc)? Check out Richard Prince and his "decertifications" of paintings.

Startups offering blockchain solutions to this landscape, of course, are emerging. But they face the same problem everyone does in that market: how can physical assets, and their movements, be indisputably registered to a blockchain?

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