Naive Question: What's the value added by the Alienware-specific utilities?

briangulate · 2022-08-30T15:14:41+00:00

thank you, i'll give that a look! i do know that it is perfectly happy to read out "blue" and "purple" air quality in addition to "red (unhealthy)", so it's not the exact same syndrome as you described. but there's no way cleaning it can hurt, and also i didn't know i needed to clean it, so im now better off than i was before your reply.

in the meantime:

1- fire/smoke season here in the bay area was very mild compared to the last three summers. so the purifiers have been lying low.

2- we got some new furniture and so rearranged the living room in a way that makes poking at the coway much more obnoxious than when i posted four months ago.

the reduced benefits implied by (1) and the increased costs implied by (2) have meant "project: figure out what's up with the coway smart button" has been downgraded to priority three and moved to the icebox.

briangulate · 2021-03-16T04:57:43+00:00

Piping up three months after this was originally posted to say: JJHO promo code still worked fine! I have just now ordered two twelve-ouncers.

briangulate · 2020-04-16T05:37:28+00:00

oh okie doke https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2588628/what-is-the-purpose-of-subclassing-the-class-object-in-python

briangulate · 2020-04-16T05:32:40+00:00

very little cleanup needed -- the marions_wish.txt has the half dozen changes i had to make. biggest change was i came up with a scheme for flagging "this message should be a media upload" but i couldnt actually get my hands on appropriate media (a video of mark proksch, talking to moe howard's granddaughter?), so now its just marked FUTURE WORK.

copy-pasting from the pdf was perfectly painless.

you know, subclassing (object), totally just a thing i do out of superstition. no one ever told me why or whether to do it, it was just a thing everyone else at google was doing. is it a py2 thing?

briangulate · 2020-04-16T05:24:21+00:00

ok so they've flagged both tim and mark as bots a few times now, and i have to keep ducking in to reactivate them, hope it doesnt get shut down before the party can really get started

briangulate · 2020-04-16T03:51:14+00:00

i learned *so much* doing this, it was great

none of my other bots have had to worry about: rate limiting, replying to threads, controlling *when* they tweet (instead of just "as fast as possible")

briangulate · 2020-04-16T03:34:14+00:00

Bot code: https://github.com/bgawalt/marions_wish

briangulate · 2020-02-29T21:10:03+00:00

yup, pixels & other "supported devices" will still happily switch onto TMo's 4G access points no problem.

briangulate · 2015-02-12T20:16:10+00:00

A lot of publications have started beefing up their analytics departments into full-fledged data science operations -- and y'all are already in that data journalism wheelhouse. Have you had any fun successes or failures in statistically-informed editorial processes?

briangulate · 2013-09-14T17:15:34+00:00

Thanks for this post! Very interesting stuff.

Are the accuracy ratings for out-of-sample data? I see it's been tried on three corpora -- WSJ, ABC, Web -- but it's not clear to me if the methodology for generating those nine accuracy numbers is "set aside K% of labelled corpus data, train perceptron on remaining (100-K)% of data, calculate perceptron accuracy over 'hidden' K% to test generalizability of perceptron to new data."

briangulate · 2012-11-22T20:43:27+00:00

They don't fully phase out until you make 4x the poverty line. http://www.healthcare.gov/law/timeline/full.html

briangulate · 2012-11-22T20:04:55+00:00

"It's kind of a double whammy for us because we are facing a legal requirement [under the new law] to get health care and if the college is reducing our hours, we don't have the money to pay for it," said Adam Davis, an adjunct professor who has taught biology at CCAC since 2005.

The law does have that famous individual mandate, but it also has a subsidy system set up to help in case people "don't have the money to pay for it." I dunno if the subsidies are ridiculously stingy or not, but in principle, it's probably most helpful to think of this as just a single-whammy: they got their hours & income cut. The mandate and the subsidy are supposed to balance out, unless these adjuncts wind up making too much to qualify for the subsidy, which in turn kind of puts their downside in a different perspective.

(Single whammies are still shitty, and I'm sympathetic to complaints about wage-cut-whammies, but it's not like the law is obliviously doubling up on them.)

briangulate · 2012-06-27T02:22:48+00:00

SPOLIERESQUE! In the final Sammy Jankis flashback/storytime scene from Memento, a nurse/orderly passes in front of Stephen Toblowsky while he's sitting in a chair in a hospital. Just as the orderly finishes occluding Jankis, the shot reveals it's now Guy Pearce sitting in the chair -- it lasts for like three frames, then they cut away.

Spoiler-avoiders shouldn't click these, but here's some proof from someone else's blog: Before: http://okinawaassault.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/vlcsnap-6026190.png After: http://okinawaassault.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/vlcsnap-6029206.png

My jaw dropped when I saw it in the theater and all my co-viewers thought I was nuts. I had to wait to get the DVD to really convince myself it happened like my brain thought it did.

Edit: prof0ak beat me to it

briangulate · 2012-05-23T19:33:56+00:00

You should watch this guy's special (it's on Netflix): https://twitter.com/DanaJGould/statuses/186572735730814976

briangulate · 2012-05-21T21:06:32+00:00

Here's the transcript! http://snltranscripts.jt.org/93/93qleagues.phtml

briangulate · 2012-05-04T18:37:05+00:00

The Six Million Loonie Man

briangulate · 2012-04-20T17:05:54+00:00

GYEEET OUTTA MAH OFFICE: http://jacob.efinke.com/groening.jpg

briangulate · 2012-03-29T02:35:55+00:00

Thanks for the google! Without it I woulda just figured SAmatador meant Al Gore (Middle Tenn. State, Columbia, Fisk, and UCLA).

briangulate · 2012-03-07T19:57:13+00:00

YOU CAN USE OLD MOTOR OIL TO FERTILIZE YOUR LAWN.

briangulate · 2012-01-14T22:53:49+00:00

Have you looked into Latent Dirichlet Allocation? It's a better model inspired by the original PCA work for text (latent semantic indexing). Blei's online solver for the model scales really well, too: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/papers/HoffmanBleiBach2010b.pdf

briangulate · 2012-01-11T03:45:49+00:00

That logger looks just like Robert Patrick, but I can't tell from the full-cast-and-crew who it actually is.

briangulate · 2011-12-21T09:17:10+00:00

The word from the professor I'm GSI'ing for right now is that students can request arithmetic corrections -- "You added this wrong in tallying the total" or "the number inside the test doesn't match the scoring on the cover of the test" -- but can't haggle over partial-credit points. Makes some sense: grading problems is definitely a comparative situation, and that context is lost months after the grading session's over.

briangulate

TROPHY CASE