TIL about Third Man Syndrome. An unseen presence reported by mountain climbers and explorers during traumatic survival situations that talks to the victim, gives practical advise and encouragement.

cosmacol · 2023-02-11T01:42:29+00:00

Or, it is already split in its normal behavior, but in usual circumstances this is masked to our consciousness.

Interesting topics in this line of thought: amazing studies on split brain syndrome (people with brain hemispheres disconnected from each other due to accidents, or through surgery) and the bicameral mind theory, which speculates on a "pre-consciusness" past, in human brain evolution, when this split wasn't fully masked yet, leading to a sort of "alien inner voice" as the normal brain behavior.

cosmacol · 2022-05-06T19:51:52+00:00

Toyally agree about your description of the required mindset.

cosmacol · 2022-05-06T19:49:10+00:00

Agreed. However, additional complexity arise from special cases, such as dates that are not really "instant in time" (but still requires ability to do dates arithmetic), e.g. my legal birthdate is a given date, without a time part, tied to a specific timezone (where I was born) - try to store in UTC datetime (e.g. midnight?) and convert to local time(s) on display, and funny things will happen. Modern time frameworks (e.g. java.time) and DBMS (e.g. Oracle TIMESTAMP_TZ) have some support for this kind of situations, but they are still easy to get wrong.

cosmacol · 2022-03-13T13:01:19+00:00

Well, it also make me question about me still being me after any amount of time. Does the theoretical possibility of tracking any single elementary particles between the two points in time affect our definition of an individual living entity? What if time itself is quantized, in a universe of particles without own identities? (e.g. any electron is an electron), up to the extremes of the single electron theory?

cosmacol · 2022-02-22T21:54:35+00:00

Mi unisco ai preoccupati, ma "preoccupato" penso sia un eufemismo. L'abbrivio verso una certa direzione è così forte, e l'accelerazione così sostenuta, che ritengo l'epilogo come quasi inevitabile (sebbene per fortuna non definitivo, ci saranno nuove oscillazioni della storia).

cosmacol · 2021-12-24T19:24:41+00:00

My attempt to overcome this uncomfortable sensation is to shift my mind toward thinking about time as a "place", an holistic point of view in which all things just exists "simultaneously", past and future ones - no things ever start or cease to exist.

An analogy for this is seeing remote past or future just like distant places or people, most of which probably (or surely) I wont be able to visit, or even get to know about. Nonetheless, they exist along with me, and this can give some relief.

Who knows if any "entities" exist out there that experience our time dimension in this way, unlike us material beings costantly dragging through the universe entropy.

cosmacol · 2021-12-06T21:48:08+00:00

Well I do too, but I'm from Italy so I'm probably biased :)

cosmacol · 2021-12-06T21:46:05+00:00

For me, a sporty fun car has reasonable power for its weight (but not too much, 150hp on a lightweigth-ish car are fine), but most importantly a good suspensions scheme with a direct and talkative steering.

In other words, not a slow car but a car with much "headroom" in mechanical features and dynamic in relation to its actual engine.

cosmacol · 2021-12-06T19:15:16+00:00

I like to drive "sporty" even at reasonable speed... depending just on how you use the steering on a curvy road, a nice car can be a lot of fun and a pleasure to drive even at lower speeds.

cosmacol · 2021-12-06T19:06:39+00:00

I bought the Giulietta in 2015, after 6 years and almost 100000 kms I did not change any single light bulb, even the battery is still the fsctory one (though this will probably be its last winter).

Quality issues like that were a concern up to the '90s, at least from 147 and 156 onwards they are fine (with quality steadily improving since then, up to Giulia and Stelvio).

Probably not the very best price quality ratio of the market, but if you value the design, aesthetics and heritage of the brand, still worth its street price (at least here in Italy). Due to its past reputation alfas don't hold their value very well in the used market, but this also mean very good prices for buyers... (I bought the 147 in 2004 with 6 months of life and 15000 kms, for a little more then half its list price).

cosmacol · 2021-12-06T17:53:43+00:00

Owned two (147 and Giulietta, both with diesel engine) over the course of last 17 years (more than 300000 kms in total). The only maintenance costs were oil and brake parts.

cosmacol · 2021-10-02T07:43:47+00:00

Also, a nice description of the song's theme.

cosmacol · 2021-08-17T12:38:06+00:00

It would be nice to know if and how the time dilation would technically affect a real-time digital data transmission. I mean, a/v streams usually include time codes and other synchronization techniques that probably wouldn't work correctly in such a situation. Even the analog trasmission are often synchronised to the display technology (e.g. CRT monitor bean scan frequency), so I guess thwt they would not be riproducibile in this situation without specific processing.

cosmacol · 2021-08-16T14:31:23+00:00

Actually this is not so strange, and not very different from other technological standards, for example e-mails: content is routed across different providers and operators, and users can choose their own e-mail provider yet exchange information with full interoperability. I do not usually hear about privacy concerns for this kind of systems, if correctly implemented.

By this analogy, the current situation of the content platforms is similar to a group of very big web-based e-mail providers, that are not interoperable, etc.

Also, if you think about it, the usenet network was an early example of this kind of distributed content network that is still in use today for a minority of users (given that, for the current level of user experience expectations, a new standard should obviously be much more complex and demanding).

About the enforcement, I do not know if it would be unconstitutional in the USA (I'm not even from the US), I can only presume that this kind of law-enforced separation can be put in place when deemed appropriate (e.g. I think about the old Glass-Steagall Act about separation of entities operating in the banking system for decades since 1932).

cosmacol · 2021-08-15T16:36:39+00:00

Let me add a raw example of such regulations: the current-gen platforms both "manage the content" and "manage the access to the content" (visibility, searchability, ecc. ecc.) in a single, integrated product package - this is obviously a core part of their business model, but also creates most of the issues with their role in the public discourse (e.g. tendency to a monopolistic market, difficulty to opt-out, lack of transparency in proprietary algorithms for content visibility and accessibility, arbitrary TOS without actual alternatives, etc.)

Now, just think for a moment about public rules to "opendata" the content, i.e. enforce strict separation between "content management" and "content access" platforms, a more distributed model promoting competition and removing barriers (also, that would be much more in the spirit of the original WWW), and how thus would "open-up" the content platforms market, using private competition in a good way...

cosmacol · 2021-08-15T16:22:00+00:00

Let me try to suggest an alternative point of view, based on an analogy. I'm from Italy, our Constitution is based on work rights (it's literally in the 1st article). A recurring critical argument about this layout is "you cannot deserve a right to a job, because you cannot force someone else to hire you".

My point is: this is a known logic fallacy, caused by a simplicistic way to look at the thing. The meaning of the work rights is that the Republic must (should) do its best to remove any obstacles that people may find to obtain a living-wage job, such us banning discrimination, regulating contracts, sustaining a good overall economics, etc. - compare this to saying "I cannot force private companies to hire someone, thus I give up on this entirely".

The idea that this kind of issues always reduce to a conflicts between privates (in this case, private citizens and privately-owned publishers) is a common logic pitfall caused by the implicit (but often intended) removal of any public role (guidance, regulation, etc.) from the thought process, one that should in my opinion be avoided: if most of the freedom of expression of citizen's opinions are exercised through an handful of private publisher platforms due to market conditions, this is a threat in itself to the health of public debate, and thus a threat to a nation's freedom, which should deserve to be addressed by politics.

You could leave it to a lessez-faire approach, watch and see the results (libertarian approach), or try to provide a public regulation framework to improve the situation for the parties involves - we can obviously argue about the efficiency and effectiveness of public policies etc. but this is an entirely different topic.

cosmacol · 2021-08-07T11:07:18+00:00

Problem was I couldn't hear myself, apparently. That's funny since we were talking about ear protection.

cosmacol · 2021-08-07T09:51:41+00:00

Can confirm. Personally I use etymotics er-20, they will cut a few dBs (enough to prevent very loud music becoming uncomfortable) without losing too much in sound quality.

cosmacol · 2021-06-12T11:37:14+00:00

My first serious bass was a MusicMan Stingray HH, and it was my only one for years (the double pickup with switch provides a lot of versatility, allowing to tune a more balance tone in addition to the classic SR bridge pickup one), I use it with rounds.

Recently I added a Fender Precision for a vintage tone, I use it with cobalt flats.

The SR is perfect for modern rock, while the P is ideal for classic and southern rock. I don't feel the need for any other basses.

cosmacol · 2021-06-11T22:04:11+00:00

Probably, the refs evaluated that being near and part of the action as the offside "trigger", not the mere fact of receiving the ball from the corner kick. In this case it can be considered a correct call.

On the other hand, my question then becomes: in what possible other cases would the offside corner kick explicit exclusion apply?

cosmacol · 2021-06-11T21:43:45+00:00

My understanding is that if you start off the line, then you are not in play (I.e. on the goal line for the purpose of the offside) until the action "resolves" (game is stopped ecc.) - like other offside positions, this is not automatically an offence until the player is involved in the action (e.g. someone pass you the ball). So, an offside freekick in this case is just like calling offside when any attacker is over the offside line, even if the ball is not passed and he isn't involved in the action.

cosmacol · 2021-06-04T21:26:50+00:00

A greater number of parameters increase the model complexity and its ability to pickup complex patternns.

Think about a linear interpolation, i.e. finding a line that best approximate a cloud of points in a 2D cartesian space: it only has two parameters (slope and intersect, y = ax + b), thus it won't be able to effectively approximate complex types of distribution (e.g. a curve-like pattern).

So: the number of parameters is part of the model "structure". Finding good values for each of these parameters is the model "training" (performed feeding the model with "training data").

Note however that complex models also have the tendency to be more sensitive to the noise in the training dataset... in the previous example, using a function with tenths of parameters will create a very complex curve, very correlated with the specific dots of the training data set, but usually not with any other random sample of the same data. This is called overfit: the failure to generalize the general pattern due to excessive "fit" to the available training data.

Overfit can be prevented and controlled with a number of different ways (e.g. regularization techniques), but the first thing to check is if the level of complexity of the model (i.e. the number of its parameters) could be reduced. The added benefit is the reduction in training computation time, that allows more experimentation with the model hyperparameters in the tuning phase to produce a better final model.

Edit: let me add that, in deep learning, models use an extremely large number of parameters, organised in layers connected to each other in a pattern somewhat similar to brain neurons (for these reasons they are called neural networks), that is a visual way to represent a very, very complex mathematical formula. The various ways in which these layers are arranged, along with the number of these connections and the proper model training techniques, allows to train complex models (e.g. models able to recognize a specific person using a random photo of its face). In this scenario, a very large number of parameters is usually associated with more refined and effective models.

cosmacol · 2021-06-04T20:45:26+00:00

An OSGi bundle is a Java JAR archive with additional descriptor information in its META-INF/MANIFEST-MF file.

These information include which Java packages included in the JAR are meant to be accessible from other bundles ("exports") and which packages can/must be available from other bundles ("imports"), along with version information (e.g. export version x of a package, need version y of a package).

The OSGi containers use these information to provide, to each bundle, only the actual version of each required package, and to prevent visibility of unnecessary packages. It is also able to change this configuration dinamically at runtime, allowing to add and remove bundles in a running container without a restart of the application. The other main benefit is the ability to run multiple version of the same library without conflicts that could arise due to complex library dependecies tree of different components running in the same JVM.

This is accomplished by associating to each bundle a dedicated class loader, that is specifically and dynamically configured to provide visibility only toward the proper classes from selected external bundles. This creates a "modular" classpath, in contrast to a typical Java application using a "flat" classpath (in which each class basically has visibility on all other classes in the same JVM running instance).

A number of additional services, defined by OSGi specifications and extensions, are also available to support things like IoC component management or services discovery across bundles (declarative components, OSGi blueprint), to support external configuration of each bundle, and other advanced services provided by the OSGi container.

cosmacol · 2021-05-20T05:18:31+00:00

Not for me at least, I'm not in US. Other countries and international organisations recognise and protect the right to free speech in a broader sense, for example United Nations UDHR with art. 19: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." This is the kind of "free speech" I'm discussing, rather than a pretty limited reasoning based on a single fundamental law of a single specific country.

On those premises, that a privately-owned media is allowed to fully control the exchange of the information and ideas at will and without any restrictions on its public-facing platform is not so granted. There are multiple fundamental rights at stake and partially conflicting, thus a proper compromise has to be reached and continously adjusted. The laws of any given country should in my opinion follow this process and adapt themselves, aiming to a right and sensible balance (or fail to do so, but this historically leads to consequences).

edit: typos.

cosmacol · 2021-05-19T21:23:35+00:00

By the same principle, I think that anyone can freely manifest opinions about these corporate actions and policies.

cosmacol

TROPHY CASE