187 posts
Latest Posts by serialport0 - Page 4
it does suggest that "friendship" is a rare and serendipitous thing
why should anyone be friends with anyone else? what do they get out of it?
maybe everyone else has, like, peripheral ports and protocols that make it click
A list of pleasant things: lists, autumn, winter, walks, computers, libgen, z-lib, coffee, birds, space, music, podcasts, robots, anime.
Flame Skimmer (Libellula saturata), Libellulidae, Chambers Bay, Pierce Co., WA, USA
photograph by Steve Russell
Just a moment. I have to scatter some of my thoughts across the internet.
Acne is all like, "Hey, you don't have any meetings? That's cool. Well, I'm going to take a leave of absence until you need to have a bunch of face-to-face interactions. See you around!"
Uh... is it possible to post code snippets on tumblr? There's an enable syntax button, and yet ... the post formatter eats pre and code tags?
Today I learned raw image files are sometimes incorrectly described as "digital negatives". Like transparency film and unlike negative film, raw image pixels contain positive exposure measurements. The raw datasets are more like undeveloped film: a raw image can be developed by software in a non-destructive manner to reach a complete image that resolves every pixel in an RGB color space.
Stop excluding me from your secret clubs.
That's a nice solution you've got there. It would be a shame if it wasn't the root cause of the problem.
The trilemma of fast, good, and cheap: you may attain two of these properties, but probably not all three. If it is fast and good, it probably won't be cheap. If it is good and cheap, it probably won't be fast. If it is cheap and fast, it probably won't be good.
Bonus: The concept of "cheap" is context-dependent and may not necessarily pertain to a thing's monetary cost.
There are three versions of yourself: the version of you that you see, the version of you that others see, and you as you really are.
People in their thirties remember the olden days, when it was just you, your Windows 95/98/me desktop with floppy disks, and Nokia 5110 versus the universe.
One of the most boring forms of discourse is when two opposing sides are like, "They're hypocrites!" "No, they're the hypocrite!"
Some slides we made in class this week. Histology's been treating me well.
When I see mosses, I think about how they function similarly to sensors or organic bioindicators. For example, you can potentially determine when an environment is contending with pollution merely by looking at moss from a distance. But moss can also be collected and thoroughly examined in a laboratory.
Cladonia sp. / Begerlav sp.
people should learn more history so that when it comes time to make comparisons it’s not Everything Is Transatlantic Slavery Or The Holocaust
"If we keep on optimizing the proxy objective, even after our goal stops improving, something more worrying happens. The goal often starts getting worse, even as our proxy objective continues to improve. Not just a little bit worse either — often the goal will diverge towards infinity. This is an extremely general phenomenon in machine learning. It mostly doesn't matter what our goal and proxy are, or what model architecture we use. If we are very efficient at optimizing a proxy, then we make the thing it is a proxy for grow worse."
Too much efficiency makes everything worse: overfitting and the strong version of Goodhart's law
I think 90% of conspiracy theorists would be a lot happier if they just bit the bullet and got into creative writing
The origins of modern genetics. From Mendel's principles of heredity, by W. Bateson.
(cont.) These F₂ plants were again allowed to fertilise themselves and the offspring of each plant was separately sown. It was then found that the offspring, F₃, of the recessives consisted entirely of recessives. Further generations bred from these recessives again produced recessives only, and therefore the recessives which appeared in F₂ are seen to be pure to the recessive character, namely, in the case we are considering, to dwarfness. But the tall F₂ dominants when tested by a study of their offspring (F₃), instead of being all alike (as the dwarfs or recessives were), proved to be of two kinds, viz. (a) Plants which gave a mixed F₃ consisting of both talls and dwarfs, the proportion showing again an average of three talls to one dwarf. (b) Plants which gave talls only and are thus pure to tallness. The ratio of the impure (a) plants to the pure (b) plants was as 2 to 1. The whole F₂ generation therefore, formed by self-fertilisation of the original hybrid consists of three kinds of plants: 25% pure dominants, 50% impure dominants, 25% pure recessives. Or three dominants : one recessive.
Purple-backed Thornbill (Ramphomicron microrhynchum), male, family Trochilidae, order Apodiformes, Colombia
photograph by Cristian Valencia
OK. But the real question here is this: why, oh, why are you so cynical?
Joining a guild focused on a particular skill makes you strong at that skill, in the same way that standing in a garage turns you into a car or attending church makes you a virtuous person.
Is there a better way to pass the time than collecting fun facts about various fields of science? I don't think so.
Internet likes from distant friends or total strangers hold more weight than those from close friends and family, who are biased and feel obligated to like you.
It has just occurred to me that data hoarding is the 21st century version of bibliomania.
Mosquitoes exist. Yet so do things that are metaphorically mosquito-like. I'm not really a fan of this at all.
The concept of heaven banning is possibly one of the most hilarious forms of punishment. Users are unaware, isolated from the main network, and subjected purely to positive feedback loops, creating a sense of perpetual false validation.
It's always annoying when a work of fiction presents a "revelation" that you didn't even realize was supposed to not be known. In Jennifer Government, there's a bit where this guy is infiltrating the villainous organization having copied the identity of a member of that organization. He meets a guy whose name is the same as his cover name, and a bit later he suddenly discovers that this is the person he's disguised as! In one Ghost in the Shell episode, they're looking through the pictures taken by a murder victim -- in a world where cybernetic implants are common, and which are clearly taken from his eyes rather than a camera -- and then much much later one of these crack professional detectives realizes that there's no camera and this is the key clue he needs to blow open the case. Even if I might buy someone from our time missing that, this guy lives in a world where such things are commonplace! How does he not realize this?
Quick! Download those animes from the Internet Archive before a copyright claim takes them down.