trurl

weilawei, 2 months ago to random

@ned 😳

Wow. Question: in Canada, are bicycles required to broadly adhere to the same laws as motor vehicles, or do they get totally separate treatment?

(I ask, because that's illegal here in the US to be in the road at a light and cross when it goes red.)

mekkaokereke, 3 months ago to random

Rest in Power Shafiqah Hudson.
https://www.netrootsnation.org/profile/shafiqah-hudson/

Shafiqah, known online as SassyCrass, was a brilliant teacher, writer, and Black feminist that we owe so much to.

We talk a lot about how online disinfo campaigns from Gamergate to the Alt-right to Moscow's Internet Research Agency, target the Black community. But the Black community doesn't fall for it. "Famous security researchers" often pretend that they first found these disinfo networks, but they didn't.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/black-feminists-alt-right-twitter-gamergate.html

alcinnz, 4 months ago to random

There's numerous ways to achieve the task of a "computer mouse", with the design I described yesterday being quite outdated. So what are the common designs today?

Most mice (or wireless "hamsters", lol!) shine a laser light askew at a surface to reveal any roughness it might have. An image sensor rapidly compares the last 2 frames to determine how far the previous has to be shifted to match the next.

Involves a lot of very clever arithmetic, & a "digital signal processor" to run it on!

1/5?

johncarlosbaez, 6 months ago to random

No. Succeeding in love is not easy, and there's no formula for it.

Here's the essence of this bad take:

"Since life is itself simply a game in disguise, having a few mathematical tricks up your sleeve can also give you an edge in the game of life."

Life is not simply a game in disguise. There are no fixed rules, apart from possibly the laws of physics. More importantly, there's no fixed definition of what counts as "winning". In fact the whole concept of "winning" doesn't apply, except in very limited realms.

I'm reminded of an anecdote I heard from the statistician Persi Diaconis. I'll probably get the details wrong, but it goes something like this:

Persi Diaconis was friends with an economist who had just gotten two job offers, one on the east coast of the US and one on the west coast. The economist was having a lot of trouble deciding which offer to take: each had its pros and cons. So Diaconis said "Hey, why not use the mathematics you're always talking about? Compute the expected utility in each case, and pick the offer that maximizes it!"

And the economist said "Come on, Persi! This is SERIOUS!"

.....

The article is here:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/05/how-maths-can-help-you-win-at-everything

and I thank @pigworker for pointing it out.

foone, 6 months ago to random

It'd be unlikely to have much use outside the one specific situation I find myself in, but it'd be interesting to have a variant on a one-click hoster that works by setting up a temporary one-off SFTP account. Like, you sign up to provide a file named X, and you can securely upload a thing and it gets stored in a server, which won't let you download X back.
Someone else creates an account to download the same-named file, and it gives them a similar temporary SFTP account

mekkaokereke, 7 months ago to random

Yesterday I spoke to an MIT sophomore hoping to get an interview for a Google internship. The student has already done one summer internship at another company, enters programming competitions, and has coursework in machine learning, distributed systems, and neuroscience. So far they have submitted over 40 internship applications.🤯

From all their applications, they've only gotten two OAs (online assessments), and no interviews.

It is so much harder for kids today than when we were young.

kierkegaank, 7 months ago to random

The wheel of time (pilot)… oh god, i’m holding tolkien responsible… and whatever soap opera and dungeons and dragons clone that taught the creators of this how to write dialogue and visualize a scene

foone, 8 months ago to random

hmm. I may solve a minor calculus problem by instead using multithreaded python very slowly

emilymbender, 9 months ago to random

When multiple scientists independently come up with the same or similar ideas, we call it convergent discovery. What do we call it when multiple scientists come up with the same or similar bullshit?

Screencap of arXiv abstract: Exploring the Use of Large Language Models for Reference-Free Text Quality Evaluation: A Preliminary Empirical Study Yi Chen, Rui Wang, Haiyun Jiang, Shuming Shi, Ruifeng Xu Evaluating the quality of generated text is a challenging task in natural language processing. This difficulty arises from the inherent complexity and diversity of text. Recently, OpenAI's ChatGPT, a powerful large language model (LLM), has garnered significant attention due to its impressive performance in various tasks. Therefore, we present this report to investigate the effectiveness of LLMs, especially ChatGPT, and explore ways to optimize their use in assessing text quality. We compared three kinds of reference-free evaluation methods based on ChatGPT or similar LLMs. The experimental results prove that ChatGPT is capable to evaluate text quality effectively from various perspectives without reference and demonstrates superior performance than most existing automatic metrics. In particular, the Explicit Score, which utilizes ChatGPT to generate a numeric score measuring text quality, is the most effective and reliable method among the three exploited approaches. However, directly comparing the quality of two texts using ChatGPT may lead to suboptimal results. We hope this report will provide valuable insights into selecting appropriate methods for evaluating text quality with LLMs such as ChatGPT.
Screencap of arXiv abstract: ChatGPT Outperforms Crowd-Workers for Text-Annotation Tasks Fabrizio Gilardi, Meysam Alizadeh, Maël Kubli Many NLP applications require manual data annotations for a variety of tasks, notably to train classifiers or evaluate the performance of unsupervised models. Depending on the size and degree of complexity, the tasks may be conducted by crowd-workers on platforms such as MTurk as well as trained annotators, such as research assistants. Using a sample of 2,382 tweets, we demonstrate that ChatGPT outperforms crowd-workers for several annotation tasks, including relevance, stance, topics, and frames detection. Specifically, the zero-shot accuracy of ChatGPT exceeds that of crowd-workers for four out of five tasks, while ChatGPT's intercoder agreement exceeds that of both crowd-workers and trained annotators for all tasks. Moreover, the per-annotation cost of ChatGPT is less than $0.003 -- about twenty times cheaper than MTurk. These results show the potential of large language models to drastically increase the efficiency of text classification.

tess, 9 months ago to random

I posted a rant in someone else's mentions which I regret and then deleted but I need to vent.

I use git every day. I'm very comfortable with git.

Also: git is fucking terrible, and I suspect it's the reason a lot of people get scared away from writing software.

jessica, 9 months ago to random

Tag yourself I’m the lone sixteenth note ending a measure

foone, 9 months ago to random

wow the autodesk fusion 360 API docs are interesting. it seems like they're trying to see how much documentation they can write without possibly being useful

trurl, 10 months ago to emacs

Looking around a little bit to see if I can find a replacement for shared shopping lists in Google Keep.

Anyone in the #Emacs #orgmode community ever try to share org files over WebDAV between #Orgzly and #Beorg? I'm already serving SVN-revisioned org files via WebDAV with Orgzly, which works pretty well for me, but I have family members on iOS.

trurl, 10 months ago to random

Malapropism on a work mailing list today brought me a new phrase: programming language echo system.

I shall use this to mean hype that boosts a programming language. For example:

While the tooling around Java may have been weak when it was introduced in 1995, its patrons were wise to invest in a strong language echo system.

mekkaokereke, 10 months ago to random

🤯 This year in social media is wild. The latest chapter is no exception. Fascinating data and anecdotes.

Data:

• Over 430K Fediverse accounts created in the past week. And it's accelerating.

https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/110576430285028932

Anecdotes:
Major communities may be moving soon.

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/59559/Removed-as-moderator-of-r-Celebrities-after-14-years

Here's the Fediverse version of "celebrities" with exactly 1 subscriber so far... the person who claimed to be the former moderator of the celebrities sub-reddit.
https://kbin.social/m/celebrities

Green_Footballs, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago) to random

Web pages are full of rectangles, often with borders.

Which border style do you prefer?

fribbledom, 11 months ago to random

Everything is shit until you try to improve it yourself.

gregeganSF, 11 months ago to random

Tesla announces that “phantom stops” are due to the car’s sensors detecting dark matter vehicles and pedestrians. “Instead of complaining, just give us the Nobel Prize!”

https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/25/23737972/tesla-whistleblower-leak-fsd-complaints-self-driving