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.
It should also be required reading for anyone who builds any tech that touches language. A software engineer who is capable of wading through mathematical notation they don't quite understand in ML papers should be able to do the same with IPA.
There's numerous ways to achieve the task of a "computer mouse", with the design I described yesterday being quite outdated.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!
@alcinnz typical touch interface inputs are still extremely noisy, even after signal processing in the hardware and OS driver. See https://github.com/google/ink-stroke-modeler for an example of a software-based solution to smoothed, low-latency drawing with a stylus.
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!"
@johncarlosbaez@dduque on the bright side, a deeper understanding of mathematics has helped me with "understanding life," in at least some small ways, in that it has equipped me to look for structures and patterns which I might not otherwise recognize, or in situations where I might otherwise use the wrong models/metaphors.
But the map is not the territory, and we can't blindly apply metaphors rooted in mathematics without acknowledging their assumptions and blind spots.
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
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.
@mekkaokereke@taatm it may depend on which country you're talking about, though. I heard a bit of a fuss from Mexican interns in recent years about pay disparities.
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 ... dump it into Octave? (Because if there's one thing that's better than hacking together a numerical solution on a platform you know well, it's paging through HTML-ized info pages for a language you might never use again.)
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?
@emilymbender It's probably Baader-Meinhof, but I've heard "zero-shot" thrown around very casually lately (as though it's a given that out-of-class data will be handled appropriately). Has it come to mean "we are going to throw an LLM at it and claim it does a good job"?
@tess 100% agreement about git not being the right thing to hand to people who are new to source control.
When I was a TA, the professor wanted students to turn in assignments with a "real" tool. I opted for SVN over git.
Students still did silly things when committing to the course repository, but I wasn't about to tell them to pick up a tool whose handles consisted almost entirely of sharp edges. The course was "make Roombas play soccer," not "how to lose your source code like the pros."
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
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
@mekkaokereke@justinmwhitaker as a point of reference, @SDF has provided services on the Internet longer than the Web has been around and uses this membership model extensively.
@Green_Footballs I've idly wondered if you could quantify the time and energy lost over the years from drawing rounded corners and drop shadows everywhere just because Apple did it or something.