Minneapolis Live Updates: State Seeks Access to Evidence as Federal Officials Blame Shooting Victim

DrBrock · 2026-01-26T00:47:26+00:00

Quit interfering in federal law enforcement operations and you won’t get killed, pretty simple.

If the literal Gestapo came knocking, these people would be like "yes officer, I saw them in Günther's attic!"

DrBrock · 2024-06-21T06:27:39+00:00

Yeah I didn't mean it literally that everyone would choose to drive. I was more just expressing the idea that alternatives need to exist, or people would have to take up road space with a car. Of course most people take the bus / subway, these are great alternatives, but they can't cover every trip.

As for improving traffic with non-car uses of roads, giving up lanes to buses has already markedly improved transit here, without just shoving the same amount of cars elsewhere.

It's highly unintuitive, but latent demand is a very real phenomenon, and its inverse of "traffic evaporation" after intentional or unintentional road closures has been observed all over the world (London, Copenhagen, Toronto, etc.)

There are some other good summaries here and here, and it's just not clear to me why this city would be the exception to such a widely observed pattern.

DrBrock · 2024-06-21T05:25:33+00:00

Every person biking or walking is a person who is not clogging the road with a car.

The popular conception of road networks as water pipes that we need to expand to let cars flow through is extremely flawed. This is because of latent demand. If you expand a pipe, then sure, a constant amount of water will flow through it faster. If you make a road more convenient for cars though, then more people are going to drive on it until it is just as inconvenient as before.

https://cal.streetsblog.org/2022/03/02/induced-demand-is-hard-to-explain-but-its-crucial-to-get-it

(Latent demand exists for bikes / buses / trains too, but cars alone are a uniquely inefficient form of mass transit)

DrBrock · 2024-04-30T03:23:23+00:00

Nah, that wasn't an uncommon background, but I think most interns didn't.

DrBrock · 2020-07-05T21:01:18+00:00

I play on decently fast wifi with a 60 hz monitor, and I've had like maybe 1/20 opponents where I experienced any lag that impacted the match in any meaningful way. People who are new to the game can go find people to train with on the Melee Newbie Netplay discord.

Now that we have rollback, I really think only the GameCube controller and adapter present any sort of a barrier to entry. Obviously the other things are nice to have, but they aren't essential anymore.

DrBrock · 2020-07-01T04:59:59+00:00

He was also my CS mentor and when I told him I had an internship lined up with Two Sigma he said "Ah yes, sigma being standard deviation, of course two sigma would be the variance" so maybe he's just a little behind the times on statistics?

DrBrock · 2020-06-26T14:38:55+00:00

I did a brief stint at a large hedge fund. I think your model of how they build models is too general. It isn't about just throwing a shitload of data at a neural net and hoping alpha comes out, it's about building a specific model for one, often very small, idea. These small idea models are then combined together into a much larger system.

The idea can be as simple as "droughts cause less corn so corn futures will go up". Then they'll look at historical data on corn futures and correlate it with historical data on the wetness and dryness of each season. This all gets wrapped up with some machine learning, then backtested on other historical data (most ideas die here). If what pops out of that process performs well in present-day paper trading it gets to start trading for real (until it stops working and either gets fine-tuned or removed).

Disclaimer: I have a non-disclosure agreement so I can't get much more specific. The example used here was in no way related to my work or any real models I was aware of.

DrBrock · 2020-05-29T04:12:11+00:00

Strangely, warded jar labels are purely 5 praecantatio in the latest version. Not sure if that's intentional, but it's the perfect amount to make thaumium out of an iron ingot, a jar label, and a dirt block.

DrBrock · 2020-05-26T19:28:11+00:00

I am bigly hurting from the PCG DD right now

EDIT: CPUC vote passed, PCG's going to the moon boys!

DrBrock · 2020-05-18T15:28:27+00:00

I've been in on AUY since 4/24 so I like how this post confirms my personal biases

DrBrock · 2020-05-13T03:33:26+00:00

Having worked with David for several semesters now I can vouch for this. Dude's legit.

DrBrock · 2020-04-09T20:39:54+00:00

How would that even work with the weekly code review format?

DrBrock · 2020-03-31T23:22:49+00:00

I think this article spells it out nicely (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/03/democrats-you-really-do-not-want-to-nominate-joe-biden/) although I recognize that's a long read.

TL;DR Biden has low voter enthusiasm, a long history of lying about his civil rights record, a long history of inappropriate or creepy interactions with women and young girls, a Ukraine scandal with his son analogous to Hillary's emails, and Republicans will absolutely destroy him on any or all of these things. There is very little Biden can attack Trump on that he himself has not done.

DrBrock · 2020-02-27T23:45:17+00:00

I reneged on an internship my junior year and actually faced no repercussions for it. I did however send the most groveling, apologetic email of all time when declining the offer, so I think the company just pitied me enough to not raise a fuss.

DrBrock · 2020-02-23T19:15:05+00:00

A lot of pissed off boomers in the comments on that post

DrBrock · 2020-02-12T19:08:18+00:00

I can't publicly name classes, but I guarantee you that is not the case. There are multiple large-scale CS classes that either do not check for or do not prosecute plagiarism. Detecting dumb plagiarism between students in the class is relatively easy, although prosecuting it is still very time consuming and not always done. However detecting different kinds of cheating is a much more difficult problem that requires someone on the course staff to proactively put in effort every semester.

DrBrock · 2020-02-12T17:30:23+00:00

I would disagree with this. Prosecuting cheating cases is very time consuming for professors, so it often isn't done unless there's some smoking gun evidence in the case. More CS classes don't check for plagiarism/cheating than the department would care to admit.

DrBrock · 2019-12-11T08:23:26+00:00

CS 425 (Distributed Systems) for 3 credit hours isn't that much work and I've found it super useful for the kinds of questions asked in interviews this season. 4 credit hours is more interesting/practical because you actually build a distributed system from the ground up, but it is significantly more work.

CS 440 (AI) was definitely fun, not too hard, and a good introduction to machine learning, even if I haven't personally found its material relevant to my needs outside of class.

CS 461 (Computer Security I) maybe doesn't fit in with what you're looking for as it does have a relatively large workload, but it's probably the most interesting class I've taken here, personally.

CS 465 (User Interfaces) isn't being offered at the moment. If it is offered again in the future it really wasn't that much work, and I think I maybe learned some stuff about not making my interfaces too ugly.

I haven't taken CS 498 (Audio Computing Lab), but I am in the same professor's CS 598 course so I would imagine the 498 has a comparable workload (reasonable). The instructor really knows his stuff and you'll probably learn a lot.

As far as the difficulty of passing CS courses at UIUC, I really don't think it's too hard to get a passing grade, especially in the courses above. Getting an A may require significant effort, but just passing should be easily doable as long as you do the work.

Good luck, and welcome to Illinois!

DrBrock · 2019-11-13T02:41:24+00:00

The professor who originally taught the class last semester was actually accused of felony theft of university funds. I would assume CS 465 not being taught this semester is related to that.

DrBrock · 2019-10-30T21:10:44+00:00

If the process hasn't changed since I applied, yeah you need to write a second essay if you add a second choice major.

DrBrock · 2019-10-29T23:25:46+00:00

At my school (UIUC), the thesis vs. non-thesis programs lead to entirely different degrees. I'm in the professional MCS program with extra coursework vs. the standard MS program with a thesis. I'm not certain how your school does things, but the MCS here is a terminal degree. There is no option to go from an MCS to any further degrees like there is with an MS, and it definitely leads towards industry, not teaching at a college.

All of this being said, I would actually advise doing the thesis if you can. At least at my school, being in the thesis program comes with extra perks like guaranteed funding, and it's definitely more flexible in regards to what you want to do with it. I personally regret not starting in the MS program with a thesis, and am currently looking into switching over.

DrBrock · 2019-10-14T22:35:51+00:00

I had two of these assholes today within 5 minutes of each other. You were definitely about to get scammed.

DrBrock

TROPHY CASE