O_nlogn

Joined 11 years ago

Karma

Submissions

Member since

Mar 5

Recent submissions

I agree completely. I am baffled by the support that this and other "rails to trails" initiatives get around the world. At a time when we are trying to decarbonize, we should be investing in modernizing and upgrading the existing railway infrastructure, not scrapping it for recreation. This is a vanity project. California has enough hiking trails. It has too many cars and not enough public transport.

A similar project is underway in Ireland [0], where they decommissioned a large number of former passenger lines in the 1970s, and are now spending millions of euros converting them to "greenways". To give one example, the Youghal to Midleton "greenway" replaced a former commuter rail line connecting commuter towns to Cork City. Every day, thousands of people drive between those towns, resulting in traffic jams and unnecessary CO2 emissions. Re-opening the train line would be a no brainer, they have more commuters today than ever before. Instead, residents now have the option of cycling or walking along a desolate trail through a bog.

[0] https://www.corkcoco.ie/en/resident/greenways/midleton-to-yo...

Comment · 3 years ago

> I’d hate to see another South Africa scenario, xenophobia wise

For the uniformed, South Africa has a growing nativist political vigilante movement which violently targets foreign people and businesses called Operation Dudula [1] (Zulu for "push out/forcefully expel"). They attribute South Africa's social and economic problems to other migrant Africans, rather than the mismanagement and corruption of the ANC.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-66808346

Comment · 3 years ago

chat GPT has the same behaviour, no? I've had it send most or all of a response before the censor system triggers it to be redacted.

Comment · 3 years ago

In the UK at least Apple has a subscription-based iPhone upgrade program [1] to get a new iPhone every year. Makes sense as they want recurring revenue, but it does seem wasteful to promote that type of consumer behavior.

[1] https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program

Comment · 3 years ago

As someone born after the Cold War, that film opened my eyes to the fear of nuclear winter in a way I didn't grasp learning history. Fantastic piece of cinema, highly recommended.

Comment · 3 years ago

Canonical sent me a 30 question "written interview" which asked all sorts of personal and irrelevant questions as the first step in their interview process. I ghosted them.

Comment · 3 years ago

Disclaimer: I voted to remain, but this is a great example of misleading/fear mongering by the remain campaign. They very vocally claimed that all the "good bits" of the EU cooperation would be permanently ended by leaving the Union. As evidenced by this news and others, that is untrue. There is clearly room for close cooperation in many areas without surrendering sovereign control over your nation.

Comment · 3 years ago

I've never done standup but am a big fan and want to try at some point. I'm glad you mentioned your experience, this thread made me think of the show "Kill Tony" (a podcast where randomly selected comedians do 60 seconds). The quality of comedians ranges from terrible to excellent, but I feel watching those terrible performances has taught me more about the art form than I could have learned only watching headliners who've perfected the craft. The line between weirding everyone out and making them laugh is a fine one, and it helps to see many examples of people failing to fall on the right side.

Comment · 3 years ago

I think gp's referring to this meme [1] embedded in the article. I believe a charitable interpretation would be that it's satirising the various entities who have voiced opinions against large scale deep learning (from skeptics and theorists, to social activist types that want to slow or stop DL's march). No need to take it too seriously.

[1] https://horace.io/img/perf_intro/gpus_go_brrr.webp

Comment · 5 years ago

Neither, they found that 6.2% of the programs that SILO generated performed better on their benchmarks (based on a sum of the expected and actual execution latency of the assembly on some test data) than the gcc -O3 baseline (i.e. 93.8% of the programs SILO generated did not perform better, or were not correct). AFAIK they don't state how much better the super optimized programs were.

Comment · 8 years ago

Improbable [0] is building (and has open-sourced) Keanu, "a general purpose probabilistic programming library built in Java", where Bayesian networks are represented as DAGs. It's feature list includes Probabilistic Programming Operators and Distributions, Auto-differentiation, Inference, Maximum a posteriori, Metropolis Hastings, Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, Sequential Monte Carlo (Particle Filtering), and Support for Kotlin. [1]

[0] https://improbable.io/

[1] https://github.com/improbable-research/keanu

Comment · 8 years ago

This is a really cool application of this technology, great work! Do you have any blog posts explaining the types of models you're using or open source repos that one could contribute to?

(Asking as a ML/Software Engineer who's pleasantly surprised and yearning to contribute to something like this!)

Comment · 8 years ago

Please consider including links to local crisis helplines e.g. [1] and [2]. Doubtless some people in the midst of a crisis will discover this resource, and it is really important that they are aware there is immediate help available. [3]

[1] https://www.samaritans.org/

[2] https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/

[3] https://www.nuj.org.uk/news/mental-health-and-suicide-report...

Comment · 8 years ago

Congratulations! That is one of life's greatest milestones -- and yet we don't have a common term for it.

I'm my parents' last child and am soon to graduate Grad school and enter 'the working world'. I can definitely feel their relief in knowing decades of parental sacrifices and obligations have paid off and finally come to an end.

Savour that pride and relief -- you've earned it.