denimboy's comments

denimboy | 1 year ago | on: Think your dog can understand words? This scientist says you might be right

I knew a dog that had a decent vocabulary. He would visibly react to words like CAR, WALK, or PARK. He also understood PARTY and MEAT and would wag his tail for PART and lick his chops to MEAT. One time we were going to a BBQ so I explained to him we were taking the CAR to a MEAT PARTY and he got super excites, wagging his tail and going to the door all while frothing at the mouth. Anecdotal but it certainly looked like he could synthesize concepts and imagine what was going to happen in the near future.

I've done a few other experiments with my foreign speaking friends and it appeared to me that dogs understand the language their owners speak primarily.

denimboy | 1 year ago | on: Advanced Python Development Workflow in Emacs

This guide explores how to evolve Emacs into a robust Python IDE. Whether you’re writing simple scripts or managing large-scale projects, you’ll find a setup that aligns with your engineering needs and reflects the power of Emacs customization.

denimboy | 2 years ago | on: The Complete Guide to All the Taquerias of Redwood City, v2.0 (2008)

I ate at El grullense no 1 on middlefield almost every day in 1995. 5 dollars for 5 tacos at the time. No salsa bar but they put enough of the delicious ranchero salsa and pickled jalapeño for a perfect plate.

I think the ones on el Camino actually came a couple years later. One tiny one in front of Safeway and another down south a bit. I think this is the one he ranks as number one.

I really recommend trying anyone of these places if you can. Really the simple ranchero style is delicious and unlike other Mexican food you’ve had. Sorry not a lot of vegetables but you can skip the soda and get an agua Fresca or carrot juice to make up for it.

denimboy | 3 years ago | on: DuckDuckGo adds CHatpGPT powered DuckAssist

Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has a new optional artificial intelligence feature called DuckAssist. Users of DuckDuckGo's browser apps or extensions can access a beta version of the feature now, for free.

denimboy | 4 years ago | on: A few things to know before stealing my 914

> Smell is the thing that gets me a lot of the time with classic cars too.

I had a 1972 Triumph Bonneville which had a "tickler" button on each carb instead of a choke. That meant to start it up you would press each tickler button until a bit of gas shot out invariably on your hand but also the engine and the sometimes hot exhaust. Only after this ritual was performed could you jump on the kickstart (no electric start). So you end up smelling like gas.

Q: Why to the British drink warm beer? A: Because Lucas makes electrics.

denimboy | 4 years ago | on: A few things to know before stealing my 914

914 had a type 4 engine which it shared with the type 2 VW bus. However the transmission was completely different from the bus. The 914 had 5 speeds and the bus only had 4.

A lot of the article is about "you'll never find 2nd" which is in large part to the weird shifting pattern. Reverse is where first usually is, first is where second usually is and the rest are in a kind of off by one pattern from there. This was actually considered a feature since supposedly it allows the driver to make the shift from first to second faster.

The vagueness of the stick is very true and something every 914 owner can relate to. Those first couple weeks you spend some time hunting for the right slot. I went from first to fifth many times before a muscle memory was developed and I didn't have to think about it.

denimboy | 4 years ago | on: StarSpace: General neural model for efficient learning of entity embeddings

StarSpace

StarSpace is a general-purpose neural model for efficient learning of entity embeddings for solving a wide variety of problems:

    Learning word, sentence or document level embeddings.
    Information retrieval: ranking of sets of entities/documents or objects, e.g. ranking web documents.
    Text classification, or any other labeling task.
    Metric/similarity learning, e.g. learning sentence or document similarity.
    Content-based or Collaborative filtering-based Recommendation, e.g. recommending music or videos.
    Embedding graphs, e.g. multi-relational graphs such as Freebase.
    Image classification, ranking or retrieval (e.g. by using existing ResNet features).
In the general case, it learns to represent objects of different types into a common vectorial embedding space, hence the star ('*', wildcard) and space in the name, and in that space compares them against each other. It learns to rank a set of entities/documents or objects given a query entity/document or object, which is not necessarily the same type as the items in the set.

denimboy | 5 years ago | on: Eigen Grandito – Principal Components Analysis of the Taco Bell Menu

OP calculates the Eigen Grandito, which is named after the Onion article, "Taco Bell's Five Ingredients Combined In Totally New Way", which, in more mathematical terms, asserts that Taco Bell's dishes are all linear combinations of the same ingredients.

Actual code is here

   http://www.limerent.com/projects/2020_11_EigenGrandito/
but discussion is surprisingly interesting.

denimboy | 5 years ago | on: How Hatred Came to Dominate American Politics

Would ranked choice voting cut into the two party system if people felt better about voting for what they believe in instead of the less wrong candidate from one of the two leading parties?
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