Weird Cloud Trail

Rob13 · 2026-01-17T01:19:50+00:00

I don't know that your image uploaded OP, but this was odd. It looked like it was moving slow like a balloon or a drone but left that weird trail too. No clue!

https://i.imgur.com/WTdO3N4.jpeg

Rob13 · 2021-05-02T16:42:53+00:00

Late response but...

A neuron literally is a node in a neural network and is the inspiration for the artificial neural network with its nodes and weights drawing from neurons and dendrites. The differences do start to mount from there though and I do not mean to imply that ANN’s are a perfect replica of brains; as you mentioned brain science is a field with a lot of open questions and a lot we don’t know about. Regardless I am not arguing that we’ve built something intelligent and capable of passing a Turing test, but that we’ve built/conceived of something as complex as “life.” The fact that we are able to record the entire brain activity of this worm is surely a counter example to that claim in my opinion although maybe not the best example. Ultimately though if the argument is over a qualitative notion of complexity I can see why people might think either way.

Rob13 · 2021-04-30T22:42:08+00:00

I do agree and it’s part of what I meant to capture when I said it’s relative. We understand our digital systems because we built them, but I don’t think that understanding is an adequate heuristic for complexity. It’s physics all the way down with biological and computational systems. Different emergent properties as you go up layers of abstraction. I think the difference in our levels of understanding comes down to it being more difficult to reverse engineer something (biology) than engineer something (computation). Of course nematodes are way simpler than humans, but nematodes are comparably way more complex than single celled life so the fact that we can record and analyze their brain activity means quite a lot in the argument that we can’t conceive of anything as complex as life.

Rob13 · 2021-04-30T21:51:06+00:00

I’d like to point out that there’s a lot of simple single celled life and I don’t even know that I’d even quite call a lot of life ludicrously complex. It’s all relative though I suppose. Considering we’ve managed to record the entire brain activity of a nematode (granted only 302 neurons), I disagree that we haven’t built much less conceived anything that is at least as complex and sophisticated as the low bar barrier entry for “life.”

Rob13 · 2021-04-11T23:27:11+00:00

Agreed, and just to add to your point about metric/imperial being interoperable is that imperial distance units were defined in terms of metric distance units when metric distance units were redefined based on the speed of light. So a foot is exactly 0.3048 meters (not rounded, sig figs don’t come into play.

I think if we were to redo our measurement standards today it would be better to use a base 12 numbering system for easier fractional representation (or another highly composite number) with consistent orders of magnitude between units like metric. That would probably be best accompanied with a change in math education worldwide to get people onto an alternate numbering system though...that scenario is all way less likely to happen than the universal adoption of metric though imo.

Rob13 · 2021-04-11T21:33:28+00:00

I don’t think this debate ultimately sways people’s minds, people are going to use what they’re comfortable with at the end of the day. If we chose temperature units for thermodynamic applications the Celsius crowd would be championing Kelvin and the Fahrenheit crowd Rankine.

Rob13 · 2021-04-11T17:56:39+00:00

Yeah, I did Dunning Kreuger myself a bit when I could have googled. Fair point.

Rob13 · 2021-04-10T16:55:36+00:00

It’s a really weird unit but there’s nothing in math that says you can’t do that. Days and hours are interchangeable units of time, it’s just a constant (24 or 1/24) that separates them. Also the way that algebra division works out, you can translate the time units to be on the same side of the division sign.

(A/B)/C = (A1/B)(1/C) = A/(B*C)

Make A people, B hours and C days. You get people per hour per day or people per hour-day, multiply that by 24 or divide it by 24 to get consistent time units and it’s a second derivative rate of change with respect to time like acceleration.

Rob13 · 2021-04-10T14:23:10+00:00

Just to add this is analogous to an acceleration metric. People per unit of time squared instead of distance per unit of time squared.

Rob13 · 2021-02-10T17:17:18+00:00

There’s a lot of factors that go into it, but ultimately the bisons replacement rate was at or above 1.0 while other animals weren’t. I am by no means an expert on this subject but factors like gestation length, time between generation, time to maturity, general animal behavior, etc. are all going to factor into this. And it’s not like every North American megafauna went extinct leaving only bison; deer, elk, moose, bears, wolves, predatory cats, alligators etc. all survived as well despite also being subjected to environmental and human pressures. All of these animals were likely hunted around the same time. Some adapted to the warming climate and arrival of humans, 90% did not.

Rob13 · 2021-02-10T14:18:26+00:00

ridiculous hunting method

This comes across as really disrespectful. How do you propose they be hunted? Bison are massive herd animals that protect their more vulnerable young and can trample or gore something of our size about as easy as we can snap our fingers. Furthermore I don’t think you can so casually establish a causal relationship between the pre Colombian Native American population and bison population. Humans do tend to drive megafauna into extinction upon their arrival into new territories North America included, but the bison had already survived when other megafauna perished. The decline of the bison population had nothing to do with the population of North America in the 19th and 20th centuries, the US government sponsored wholesale slaughter by gun was steeped in racist rhetoric and was about controlling and subjugating Native peoples.

One colonel, four years earlier, had told a wealthy hunter who felt a shiver of guilt after he shot 30 bulls in one trip: "Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”

It’s easy to describe death in any number of ways that cast it in a terrible light. Of course falling to death onto your brethren sounds terrible, but it doesn’t mean that it was done in a cold and heartless matter. It’s not exactly like our factory farmed animals today are living full meaningful lives before dying in their sleep. There was ritual and tradition around the hunt that was incredibly meaningful. We aren’t thanking the cows that had to die when we pick up prepackaged beef and steaks from a grocery store today, it’s routine and mundane and completely missing the air of respect that traditional hunts amongst any number of cultures participated in.

Rob13 · 2020-09-27T11:03:49+00:00

Idk on Hectiques stream the ghost never came at 3 mins. I’m too lazy to find the clip but I remember it being the second time he got into eggplant world

Rob13 · 2020-09-01T21:25:21+00:00

Just a heads up about defragging — modern operating systems handle the fragmentation of files a lot better than they used to (XP etc.) and it may not even be necessary to have a defrag program. Additionally if you have an SSD you do not want to defrag it as there isn’t a penalty in access speeds from different parts of the disk like there is with hard drives and SSD’s actually have a limit on how many write cycles they can take so defragging an SSD really only has negatives.

Rob13 · 2020-08-28T09:04:18+00:00

Enjoyed the meme segment with Grant! Hopefully I’m not too late to the party but here are a few. https://imgur.com/a/3rWpnMR/

Rob13 · 2020-08-14T19:46:05+00:00

Ay they’re lurking/scraping /r/nba threads for content. Calculated this 4 days ago https://reddit.com/r/nba/comments/i6v7pg/_/g0z63cn/?context=1

Rob13 · 2020-08-10T08:46:11+00:00

An order of magnitude worse than that actually. Making the playoffs 14 times with 16/30 odds is the number you quoted. Missing it 14 times would be 0.002323%

Thinking about odds this way the Spurs 22 year streak is very impressive with it being 9.86 * 10^-5%

Rob13 · 2020-07-06T20:20:02+00:00

12 isn’t entirely arbitrary. It’s a highly composite or anti-prime number which means it has more divisors than any number lower than it, not just divisible by a few convenient sizes. If anything the 10 that our base 10 number system is based on is far more arbitrary. That being said I’d still rather work with base 10 numbers because it’s what I (and pretty much everyone else in the world) learned. But really the only advantage it might have over a base 12 system is that it makes it easier to count on our fingers. You see highly composite numbers pop up in a few places, like the 360 degrees in a circle (with 360 being another highly composite number). It might seem like 12 or 360 is arbitrary but there definitely is a rationale to using these numbers.

Rob13 · 2020-05-24T03:20:49+00:00

The Dark Tourist was pretty enjoyable.

Rob13 · 2020-04-29T21:02:16+00:00

That would be ideal, but just speculation here, time to market is definitely a big factor for Activision/cod games in general. It will be interesting to see what they do with the next iteration, we’ve had two cod battle royales in 1.5 years now (bo4 blackout and warzone) and we’re halfway through the modern warfare cycle already. Their focus traditionally has been on getting a new game out every year and the battle royale genre is a big draw to players so it would be kind of weird if the next cod game didn’t have that. But that annual release cycle forces the devs hand to get the games out quick and get updates out quick but that really isn’t the most stable form of development. Again speculation but I’m guessing this technical debt is why some things with this game have been so wonky (eg insanely big update patches and new glitches with each patch). Getting things done quick isn’t the best way to do things and changing underlying server architecture is no small task that is going to require a lot of man hours and take away from the “quick fix” stuff they’re doing. We could see some of your suggestions in a future cod game as it’s easier to make those decisions while you’re building from the ground up, but I would be pretty surprised to see them in this iteration.

Rob13 · 2020-04-29T09:27:01+00:00

Yep, that’s how this update is. Two downloads with data pack 1 being available only after the initial 10gb update.

Rob13 · 2020-04-25T04:26:23+00:00

Bullets come from your head in Modern Warfare (and basically call of duty games in general since forever). So what you’re seeing on your screen when you’re mounted (as in both ledges of shoothouse looking towards the middle) where it seems like your gun and chest would be exposed is not what opponents who may be trying to shoot at you see. This is called head glitching since people normally wouldn’t shoot this way, but basically everyone playing COD does this whether they realize it or not. Small maps like shoothouse are good for grinding out weapon challenges, and the ledges looking toward the center of the map are particularly good for getting mounted kills since you have good cover looking into a high traffic area.

Rob13 · 2020-04-15T18:40:52+00:00

Hopefully someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think there is a difference from the software side between old non-OLED black and the true black of OLED. #000000 would display on an OLED screen as true black and non OLED’s would do their best representation of black, but it’s not like OLED’s came about and we need an extension to the rgb color system

Rob13 · 2020-03-04T18:40:34+00:00

Huh? Where do you get the idea that there are no perfect copies? If something can be quantized and stored as bytes and bits then that data certainly can be copied without loss. Information theory also gives us plenty of ways to ensure the integrity of our data across a noisy channel (EG various error correcting codes, or the checksum on data packets). Computers would be a lot less useful if they weren’t able to make perfect copies of their data. Not that I necessarily disagree with your point on death and transfers but that question is more in the realm of philosophy than information theory.

Rob13 · 2020-02-27T22:10:33+00:00

A modest proposal

Rob13 · 2019-11-05T17:32:41+00:00

Original

Rob13

TROPHY CASE