I wouldn’t say unnecessary; most available comment systems are either a Discuss-style firehose of tracking scripts, or a pain to maintain when self-hosted.
Then how come Github shows you the photocopying page, sometimes for quite a while? It takes long enough to convince me it does more than set a pointer.
> Very early on we figured out that actually forking people’s repositories was
not sustainable. For instance, there are almost 11,000 forks of Rails
hosted on GitHub: if each one of them were its own copy of the repository, that
would imply an incredible amount of redundant disk space, requiring several
times more fileservers than the ones we have in our infrastructure.
I don't know, but since GitHub allows you to show commits from any fork with a URL referencing another fork, GitHub seems to use a common object store for all forks.
Maybe setting up the separate issue tracker and Pull Requests takes some time?
I have an Ender 3 (one of the cheapest available consumer 3D printers) and have had success using Inkscape to generate gcode for it. For anyone interested, Processing/p5.js are great tools for programmatically generating .svgs for plotting. It’s great fun! Thinking about making some wall art soon.
I also have a MUJI notebook on my desk that I use to sketch out ideas before coding them :)
The posted solution seems to work even when the objects have zero area, and are just points in space. If you just surrounded the target with 16 points, there would either be gaps or the points would be infinitesimally close to the target and would occupy the same space.
So that means that any possible laser coming out of the shooter's position eventually passes through one of these 16 specific infinitesimally small points _before_ ever hitting the target? And that is always possible for any position of shooter and target? That's bonkers, wow.
Fans who really want to see their favorite artist/sports teams get extorted, and the money goes to scalpers instead of the artists and venues which are actually providing value. Scalpers provide no value to society.
Planet Money has done an excellent episode on this - https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/25/195641030/epis.... While I broadly agree with this, I would say that scalpers can actually provide a service of exchanging money for time and convenience. For example, you may have a free or cheap concert that sells out extremely quickly, but with scalpers, those with lots of money can always get a ticket. Much of the economy is built on the similar concept of arbitrage, where someone buys something cheaply and sells it for a markup to those who lack the ability or knowledge to get it from the seller's source.
That said, scalpers in particular seem to cause a whole lot more harm than good in general. As the above podcast addresses, it's a very difficult problem to solve systemically if you are intentionally undervaluing your goods.
> For example, you may have a free or cheap concert that sells out extremely quickly, but with scalpers, those with lots of money can always get a ticket.
But how do you square that with scalpers causing the tickets to sell out so quickly? I mean, they're the ones creating their own market. They're not really providing a service if they're the ones creating the annoying need for the service in the first place.
A while ago I trained StyleGAN2 to generate artificial overhead imagery on a dataset of aerial imagery of Italy which I compiled. It was a fun project and the results are kind of neat, so I thought I'd share the process.
This is also my first time writing a blog post and posting it publicly, which was arguably harder than training the actual network. I'd love some feedback on writing style and content!
This looks really cool and I’m sure the tech can be used to do all kinds of interesting things, but I’m struggling to think of an actual use case for the product. From the marketing and price it seems to be directed towards consumers—is there anything this can do for me that a backpack can’t do? Still want one, anyway.
> is there anything this can do for me that a backpack can’t do?
I agree it’s early enough that the tangible uses for this type of tech are still a bit blurry to us. But I also think this is a bit like saying “is there anything a car can do for me that my legs can’t do?”
It depends on what criteria you evaluate it on. Yes you can move from A to B on your own steam, of course. But automation is incremental. These things aren’t a significant obvious benefit, until they are.
Scalability is one thing. Comparing writing notes in my iPad to writing them on paper, at first glance doesn’t look much different, apart from that the iPad can effectively store a lifetime worth of notes, easily searchable, shareable, linkable etc. Its scalability potential (for this use case) is almost infinite.
When evaluating these sorts of things it’s worth bearing in mind the “leverage” that the tech might give us, that we didn’t have before. This scalability/leverage benefit is often not immediately obvious until you look a little bit below the surface.
This robot dog might start off by carrying your water bottle but later it might be able to also carry a foldable chair, a waking stick, food and water, and a communications device, suddenly meaning that someone with limited mobility can actually go out for a walk on their own and have everything they might need carried alongside them as a mobile support system. That person just gained a little bit of extra freedom. At the enhancement end of the spectrum, an athlete could use this “support robot” to extend the possible range of their training runs.
I do wonder about the near term use cases for this sort of tech (at this price point) for people with disabilities of various kinds.
Often leading edge tech starts out in the realm of compensating for disabilities for a smaller audience before progressing to being looked upon as an “enhancement” for a wider audience (because it becomes affordable enough and useful enough to start to appeal to people who don’t need to compensate for any particular issue but see it as a net convenience worth paying for).
I'm seriously handicapped and have a dog phobia thanks to ugly events in early childhood. My handicap makes having actual animals in my home a bad idea anyway for cleanliness reasons.
While $2700 is way out of my price range -- handicapped people tend to have tight budgets -- I can absolutely see a tremendous market for companion animals for people allergic to animals, with a dog phobia etc.
Especially if they could add some fetching capabilities, this could be enormously useful to many people. Our population is aging and unlike other populations with physical limitations, people whose limitations are primarily age related sometimes have money. Sometimes lots of money in fact.
Companion animals are not pets. They are working animals.
Battery life has a tendency to change over time. For someone largely housebound, it wouldn't much matter. They could be on a tether plugged into a wall even and still do good things for many people.
I meant it’s not fit for a companion. It wouldn’t have agency, “keep you company” in any sense or understand your needs like animals can be trained to do. It’s a sharp, computerized tool.
I don't know a better term for what I am thinking of. I don't think it has to be able to serve that specific function in order to be useful to someone with significant limitations.
I can see where the miscommunication comes from, but I think my point stands. For handicapped people, a mechanical dog that can carry, fetch items for them, help them get up, light their way, etc is potentially very useful.
I thought a dead simple military application would be sentries. Have them patrolling around FOBs, return and charge when they need to, fresh ones go out. Unarmed of course.
The grandparent said autonomous armed robots that are currently in use (which excludes under development).
As far as we know, the answer to that question is zero, unless you might count a missile as an autonomous flying robot (but even that still has to be launched by human).
I like Black Mirror. Like an extension of the argument that "guns don't shoot people, people shoot people", Black Mirror displays the equation, XYZcoolTech+people = horrifying.
Apply that here and you can bet that "florida robot dog does stupid thing" will be a headline in the future.
Cool project, although it seems to think the word “male” has moderate female bias... word embeddings can be fussy.
I would think you could just compare cosine similarities between the entered word and words like male/female or man/woman (not sure if this is what you’re doing).
Why shouldn't the word "male" have moderate female bias? It depends on the contexts in which it appears across the corpus.
As a biological sex, I can think of numerous ways it will co-occur with "feminine" words - the first few sentences of the Wikipedia entry for "Male" being a good example:
"A male gamete can fuse with a larger female gamete, or ovum, in the process of fertilization. A male cannot reproduce sexually without access to at least one ovum from a female, but some organisms can reproduce both sexually and asexually."
This demo shows gender bias, which as a concept is deep-rooted in most if not all natural languages. Consequently, it may be more accurate to say the word "male" is tips the scale towards "feminine" or "womanly" rather than "masculine" or "manly".
Ugh that's embarrassing. It seems like it works for most words, but has a few obnoxious outliers like "male" that I can't figure out why they score as female. It might just be a quirk of the dataset or something :/
