InspiredIdiot's comments

InspiredIdiot | 1 year ago | on: Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website

The decision was completely partisan 5-4 with 5 Republican appointees voting in the majority, 4 Democrats in the minority. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2008/08-205

Obama appointed 1 of the 4 Democrats who voted in the minority, his only appointee up to that point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_Supreme_Court_can...

So he literally did all he could, subject to the constitution, to prevent this ruling. The logic of mentioning Citizen's United here is like people complaining that abortion rights were taken away during Biden's term. In other words, there is no logic other than a crude misdirect.

InspiredIdiot | 2 years ago | on: Detroit wants to be the first big American city to tax land value

> Higher density cities require more outside inputs brought in from outside the city.

Surely, it can't possibly be that simple. Sometimes that's true, sometimes it is not. If I want fiber to my house in the country I might be paying $30k to get that line all the way to my one house whether I want 100MB/sec or 10GB/sec. In the city it might be shared with hundreds and only need to run a few yards. Same for sewage. Same for police and fire.

InspiredIdiot | 2 years ago | on: SpaceX punched a hole in the ionosphere

Once anything collides with anything in orbit it has a slightly different trajectory. Any movement up or down will make its orbit more ellipsoidal than the original orbit. Also the atmosphere moves up and down in response to solar wind and therefore varies in both time and space. Atmospheric drag is apparently still a factor up to 600km https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/impacts/satellite-drag

Debris in a crowded orbit will eventually collide, no matter how synchronized it all was initially.

InspiredIdiot | 2 years ago | on: Do high interest rates fix high inflation?

Peak inflation was last June at 9.1% CPI. It is now 4% https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2023/06/13/cpi-...

Also, unlike quarterly profits of a business inflation is calculated relative to the same month in the previous year, so that adds up to a year of lag instead of only a quarter of lag for quarterly profits.

So the range of quarterly profits between approximately Q2 2021 and Q2 2022 would be the best time range to compare with the June 2022 inflation. Lo and behold, peak inflation coincides with the highest quarterly profits ever recorded. [Edit: Well, not highest "ever recorded" but rather highest recorded in the 70 years of data from the chart you provided.]

That doesn't prove causation but it is completely consistent with GP's contention.

InspiredIdiot | 2 years ago | on: NaturalSpeech 2: Zero-shot speech and singing synthesizers

I think parent is saying that the model does not require any paired samples of the voice to be synthesized and corresponding text. So based on my understanding:

one shot - given the text "run faster" along with Alan Greenspan's voice pronouncing that phrase, the model can produce Alan Greenspan's voice saying any other phrase

zero shot - given only Alan Greenspan's voice pronouncing "run faster" but no text version of what was said, the model can produce Alan Greenspan's voice saying any other phrase

InspiredIdiot | 3 years ago | on: Salesforce is shuttering Slack’s remote work research group Future Forum

You're lucky if they want either the product _or_ the vision. Quite often they simply want the team or the void left by the market position the acquisition used to have. Of those two, the acquirer wanting the team is better but if they want nothing but the team odds are the team has little reason to stay other than golden handcuffs.

InspiredIdiot | 3 years ago | on: Incompetent but Nice

Because interest rates are now nonzero so they couldn't get their startup funded without a string of successes to point to?

InspiredIdiot | 3 years ago | on: Incompetent but Nice

I wouldn't consider the original wording unacceptable but I would suggest leaning more towards the phrasing foobazgt used a few replies back. Specifically, claiming that X broke Y is likely not fact-based. The facts in such a situation are often: a certain test started breaking in a certain build and the build reports that only one commit is different than the previous build. I would suggest stating that fact instead of inferring that the commit was the reason the build broke. I've seen plenty of instances where it turned out that wasn't the problem. The build infrastructure itself was changed. The reported set of commits versus the previous build was inaccurate. The test was flaky. A third party dependency that the build system didn't insulate itself from was updated. The list goes on.

Allowing for the possibility that we are wrong isn't professional only because it is nice. It is also professional because it is honest and it helps focus the whole team on the facts so that we don't spend our time investigating the wrong thing.

InspiredIdiot | 3 years ago | on: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

Also, he quite likely _does_ die in space. Which figuratively but very directly represents not leaving anything for the swim back. There is room to square the main message of the movie about transcending limits with Gore Vidal's line (something like) "No one exceeds his potential... It would simply mean we had failed to accurately assess it in the first place." Maybe he makes it back, maybe he doesn't, but he goes, does what he sets out to do with no consideration of whether he will be able to return and then tries to return. It's exactly equivalent to people who say they would go to Mars even without knowing whether it is a one-way trip at the outset.

InspiredIdiot | 3 years ago | on: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

I'm glad you relate to it because it is amazing but if there is one criticism I could level, it is that the only female character seems like she is ~drugged~ for most of the movie. Uma Thurman is a good actress so I have to assume it was the direction/script.

Edit. Sorry, I was getting hyperbolic. There just isn't much development of her character so it is hard to see what the relationship between her and Ethan Hawke's character is even based on.

InspiredIdiot | 3 years ago | on: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

In my imagined ending he _does_ die in space, but after accomplishing something great and as a result the obstacles he overcame to get there become known and contribute to the very slow process of realigning society.

InspiredIdiot | 3 years ago | on: Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

There is a certain probability he will have the heart condition. That actually happened. There is a separate, dependent probability that given he has the heart condition he will die very young. That, at the point of the movie, hasn't yet come to pass. I don't see the problem.

InspiredIdiot | 3 years ago | on: What happened with the substation attack in North Carolina?

If the attacker's ultimate goal is ideological but their proximate goal is chaos and they think they have a large enough group of similarly motivated people the purpose could be quite simply to show that it can be done. Do it, don't get caught, and wait for the copycats. It doesn't even matter if their ultimate goals and the original attacker's align.

InspiredIdiot | 3 years ago | on: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

I have become what I hate most. Someone who didn't read the article. I've heard too many instances of the term being misapplied and jumped to a conclusion based on the discussion.

If you use Bing webmaster tools (a logged-in account for the use of the domain owner/content creator) and you can see indications that Bing indexed the content and no indications that errors preventing it from being eligible to show then it is certainly at least closer to a shadow ban than I originally thought.

Still, any reference to a "feed" entirely misses the point unless Bing is the one also serving that feed. I can't see any evidence that Bing displays a feed to the poster.

InspiredIdiot | 3 years ago | on: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

I think a good test of whether this application of the term makes any sense is: Could any search engine ban ever not be a shadow ban? We already have a term: ban. Let's just use that one and stop conflating things and being unnecessary imprecise and incendiary. It helps certain parties' (edit plural possessive) agenda but does not help us clearly communicate.

InspiredIdiot | 3 years ago | on: I'm shadow banned by DuckDuckGo and Bing

Nope. Still wrong. I understand there is some way it feels like that from your perspective but DDG and Bing don't own your feed. So they are hiding nothing from you. They are 100% ~up-front~ (edit) consistent about not choosing to show your site (ban it) and the fact that they don't control your feed doesn't make it any more accurate to apply the word "shadow" to their ban.

InspiredIdiot | 3 years ago | on: Deepmind’s AlphaCode conquers coding, performing as well as humans

The concern is that the reasons people _want_ to make art are not the same as the reasons people choose to make art their profession. Specifically, they want to make art for the sort of reasons you mention. And most of those people have to choose to make commercial art if they want to have a decent living while also having the time to make some sort of art.

It is glossing over so much of the important detail to say "[AI] actually frees more people..." We live in a capitalist system. It frees the holders of capital. Anyone reasonably likely to profit from AI is likely to already be immensely privileged, given the costs of training and attendant centralization and barriers to entry. If they wanted to make horseshoes they would already FIRE and forget it.

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