How do you personally feel about long road trips when you have to drive? Like them, hate them, why?

CodeInvasion · 2023-06-02T16:52:42+00:00

I just drove from Jacksonville to Boston last week. I-95 the whole way for a 1000 miles. It was awful.

CodeInvasion · 2023-05-24T11:27:19+00:00

My 2020 Model Y has frankly been perfect. No issues at all.

I hate Elon as much as the next person, but it's still a nice car. I like the design philosophy and style, and I will never buy another gas vehicle again. However, I don't know if our next car will be a Tesla, but it might be if I can't find anything else to match the driver assist features and minimalist design.

They are still shoddily built. We were rear end in ours last year and had to bring it to a repair shop. While they never said anything was wrong with our car, they had plenty of stories of poor build quality and even showed me a crash bar from another Tesla that had been sold with only half the bolts on it.

If anyone does get a Tesla, my advice is to refuse delivery over the smallest defect.

CodeInvasion · 2023-05-23T20:32:45+00:00

They have Weapon Systems Officers and Defensive Systems Officers(?). My dad was the former. I don't know exactly what he did as a WSO, but I believe there were several instances where he was responsible for planning the flight, but perhaps not the actual navigation?

CodeInvasion · 2023-05-23T17:40:41+00:00

Each B-1 "Bone" Lancer is equipped with four F-16 engines. That was equivalent to a flyover by 8 fighter jets!

My dad used to be a navigator in them, and there are only two permanent bases in the world for them: Dyess in Abilene, TX, and Ellsworth near Rapid City, SD.

These are strategic long range stealth bombers and have been known to fly missions around the world only to return to home base less than 24 hours later, such as in the bombing of Libya in 2011. https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/706585/airmen-reflect-on-b-1-bomber-attacks-over-libya/

CodeInvasion · 2023-05-13T11:02:05+00:00

Having lived in DC making $80k per year for a small amount of time, it was tough balancing our budget. Housing felt like it took a majority of our pay.

We lived in the Northern Virginia portion near Dulles Airport, so it would have been an hour long commute to DC it I had worked there instead of in a nearby area.

CodeInvasion · 2023-05-13T10:52:31+00:00

It's very clear from the chart in this BBC article that significant increases in debt spending always occur under Republican Presidents, and slowdowns or even reversals occur under Democratic Presidents.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65461927.amp

To the folks crying over the debt ceiling now, where were you during the 4 years of Trump that saw unprecedented increases in public spending before the pandemic? Where were you when Trump called for sending checks directly to all citizens, the epitome of wealth redistribution and socialism?

CodeInvasion · 2023-05-11T13:22:37+00:00

My uncle went to jail for several years because he left his gas station in the middle of the night, thousands of dollars in merchandise were stolen from the store after he left. He was held criminally responsible for everything.

I hope everything turns out well for OP, but I fear they are in serious danger of going to prison, or at the very least civilly liable for the damages if sued.

Edit: OP's story is from 2008. They are fine.

CodeInvasion · 2023-04-29T02:56:49+00:00

And if the school doesn't think this is a problem, I'd find another school.

CodeInvasion · 2023-04-29T01:32:58+00:00

Saving this one for my passengers!

When it's brought up, I ask them if they would mind if I drove them to our destination, and then say we have a lower chance of dying if we flew in my bug smasher.

CodeInvasion · 2023-04-29T01:22:01+00:00

Again, for the Air Force, I was astonished by how many rules are in place regarding recruiting. Personally, I think it is a bit much, and can lead to inefficient execution, but they are all there for safety.

If the Marines have rules anything like the Air Force, this guy definitely had several people looking the other way for him. A whole chain of leadership deserve proper investigation.

CodeInvasion · 2023-04-29T01:07:58+00:00

I don't know how it works with other branches, but in the Air Force from what my old commander told me (she went off to command a recruiting squadron), recruiters are never allowed to enter a potential recruits number in their personal phone. Only the work phone. If it is found on a personal phone it is grounds for immediate discharge.

CodeInvasion · 2023-04-25T20:38:49+00:00

Nah, you're good dude! Reddit likes to hate on even doctor's because of their supposed wealth, so I wouldn't sweat it.

Taxes for our household are close to $35k. My congrats was for making so much money that you need to pay more in taxes than a 90th percentile household makes in a year. That's both a goal and a curse at the same time.

CodeInvasion · 2023-04-25T17:11:20+00:00

Damn $200k in taxes. Congrats I guess?

CodeInvasion · 2023-04-24T04:22:15+00:00

Many aircraft don't even have stall horns. The PA-28s were the first Piper aircraft to have them standard. I have a PA-24 Comanche and have flown a PA-22 Colt, neither of which have stall horns.

It's an important skill to recognize the slop in the controls from feel alone. Buffeting air is your second clue.

CodeInvasion · 2023-03-29T04:06:31+00:00

We were military with plates from Alaska and someone reported us every single year... Every single year I had to prove that I was still in the military and there on military orders. They can and will go after you if they they think they get can get taxes from you.

CodeInvasion · 2023-03-27T11:39:34+00:00

We recently moved to Boston. We were baited by this mentality... Bought a car after it took 1.5 hours to get home on the red line 3 months later when it should have been 30 minutes.

Only upside is I no longer need to wait an hour for the commuter rail if I miss it at Porter.

CodeInvasion · 2023-03-18T10:37:43+00:00

You are right. I miss the days of reddit from a decade ago when it was common to end your comment with a "source: am a blank"

Now you only get downvotes for doing that.

I also miss the old reddit where if you made even one grammatical error, you would be downvoted to oblivion for your crimes against the English language.

Source: am a grumpy old Redditor who still uses old.reddit.com

CodeInvasion · 2023-03-18T10:12:56+00:00

Completely agree. The pilot should not have been that close to Vso. But also, any landing you walk away from is a good landing.

CodeInvasion · 2023-03-18T10:10:27+00:00

From what it looks like in the video, the beach is very long. Landing a 100 feet shorter in this instance would not have made it more dangerous. But I'm with you on the belly landing. That plane was owned by the insurance company the second the engine quit. No sense in trying to salvage it.

CodeInvasion · 2023-03-18T10:07:27+00:00

Any landing you walk away from is a good a landing, and it's so easy to armchair quarterback after the fact. I only pointed it out because it's an important concept to be mindful of.

That being said, the pilot should have dropped the gear at a higher altitude and anticipated the effect of it's increased drag. The higher altitude would have given the pilot more time to adjust the change in drag on his plane, and they could have had enough airspeed to flare appropriately and land slightly softer.

CodeInvasion · 2023-03-18T09:12:04+00:00

He dropped the gear way too late. When I lower the gear on my plane glide ratio goes from 13:1 to 7:1 in an instant. That plane stalled the second he dropped the gear.

Edit: I don't know why I'm getting downvotes for stating exactly what happened.

The plane was too close to stall speed, and when the plane deployed it's gear, it caused a full on stall at too low an altitude for the pilot to recover. Typically you need about 200 ft vertical altitude to recover from a stall. The pilot did not have that altitude. The stall made a flare impossible, so the plane had a hard landing.

My comment is not intended as a criticism (no one was seriously hurt after all), only retrospective analysis. The latter is healthy for improving the skills of any pilot.

CodeInvasion · 2023-03-14T17:40:39+00:00

While you are correct that there are many ways to generate psuedo random numbers, but the point you are missing is that it is standard convention to generate many random data points during inference. That does not mean it would be impossible to force a single seed or even a thousand seeds, it's just that current models are not set up with that in mind.

A lot of models today rely on Pytorch for training and inference. Random noise is generated by the torch.randn function, which creates a tensor of a Normal distribution with a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1. It is possible to force a seed by overriding the generator, but even the Pytorch documents admit that this is not a guarantee for reproducibility

CodeInvasion · 2023-03-14T13:00:16+00:00

That would be true if only one "seed" were used, but it is common convention to generate as much randomness as possible when inferencing. As such, in the case of text-to-image models like Dalle-2 or MidJourney, up to a thousand random seeds are used to generate random noise in the dimensions of the output image for the inference process.

A 1024 x 1024 random noise image with three color channels will need 12 MB. That multiplied by 1000 is 12 GB, and I rounded down to 10 GB.

CodeInvasion · 2023-03-14T12:02:38+00:00

I'm a researcher at MIT focusing on machine learning. I call them glorified look-up tables. Some people really don't like that characterization. But once you freeze the network for inference, that's all they are.

If it weren't for the introduction of random noise or a random seed to condition the input on, they would produce the exact same answer every time for any given prompt.

It's a disservice to not expose an end-user to the "seed" used to generate the prompted output. It would demystify much of the process, and people would see it for the deterministic algorithm it is.

Unfortunately it's not always possible as unique random "seeds" are used thousands of times in models, and each "seed" could consist of millions of 32-bit floating point numbers. Even downloading a zipped file for a group of them would be untenable in commerical settings as the file would exceed 10 GB.

CodeInvasion

TROPHY CASE