flaviojuvenal's comments

On: Brazilian Amazon lost 18 trees per second in 2021

[flaviojuvenal]

Note this is probably a false dilemma. According to Brazilian federal police, the recent deforestation surge is caused by illegal logging, not agriculture or cattle raising. Source in Portuguese: https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/nacional/pf-grilagem-e-madeira-...

Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation.

[ratww → flaviojuvenal]

That's a very important post.

> Brazil had no trouble to grow in 90s and 2000s while reducing Amazon deforestation.

Thanks for putting it into words in a way I couldn't.

[spywaregorilla → ratww]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra...

I'm not sure its accurate though. The marginal rate of forest coverage loss seems to have dropped substantially since 2008.

[ratww → spywaregorilla]

Fine, that's even better then: it continuous decreased from around 2004-2014, when the country was really really growing fast and fine af, to the point it was able to totally ignore the 2008 financial crisis. Amazeballs.

By the way the president from the first of those years is running in the next election. There's still hope.

[vitorbaptistaa → flaviojuvenal]

Ilegal logging is the first step. Take down the valuable trees, burn the remaining, and finally start raising cattle.

On: Similarity Learning lacks a framework. So we built one

[flaviojuvenal]

Not a full featured framework, but pytorch-metric-learning has data loaders, lossess, etc. to facilitate similarity learning: https://github.com/KevinMusgrave/pytorch-metric-learning

Disclaimer: I've made some contributions to it.

[dimitry12 → flaviojuvenal]

Seconding this. PML is high quality, active, and well documented.

[generall → dimitry12]

PML is a great collection of implementations, but not the best framework. Also you can use PML with Quaterion: https://github.com/qdrant/quaterion/blob/master/examples/tra...

On: Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade

[flaviojuvenal]

Plenty of discussion about that on contemporary philosophy. You should just search a bit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion

[iancmceachern → flaviojuvenal]

This all seems to support abortion in most cases. Am I misinterpreting?

[flaviojuvenal → iancmceachern]

Sorry, thought you're asking about pro-life positions.

On: Symbian Source Code

[flaviojuvenal]

Besides the awful UI, it missed several key third-party apps that Android and iOS had. Also the GMail integration was pretty bad.

On: Brazillian businessman built a giant perpetual engine

[flaviojuvenal]

More pictures of this bizarre thing here: https://www.hypeness.com.br/2014/01/empresa-brasileira-desen...

On: Ask HN: Good Python projects to read for modern Python?

[flaviojuvenal]

The EDX platform is open-source, it's a complex Django project: https://github.com/edx/edx-platform

On: Uncomfortable Truths in Software Engineering

[flaviojuvenal]

Yes, survivorship bias too.

On: An underrated idea: the priority view

[flaviojuvenal]

And lack of knowledge about Prospect Theory.

[Ensorceled → flaviojuvenal]

How does prospect theory apply to the scenario as proposed?

[flaviojuvenal → Ensorceled]

The article states: "you might consider a small amount of happiness for someone who is depressed to have more moral value than a larger amount of happiness for someone who is already fairly happy". For me this looks like the prospect theory curve: the depressed friend is at a loss, so you assign greater value to their happiness gains, regardless of the real utility.

On: Study reveals new details on what happened in the first microsecond of Big Bang

[flaviojuvenal]

Check Conformal Cyclic Cosmology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology

On: Human-monkey chimera embryos created in lab

[flaviojuvenal]

Exactly, even a broken clock is right twice a day.