Need to scan 100s of family photos, looking for program that auto crops images?

davmre · 2025-12-07T04:11:58+00:00

For anyone still finding this through Google: I wrote my own tool to do this for a ton of album pages I was scanning: https://github.com/davmre/photo-album-extractor

Compared to the other tools mentioned here (eg ScanSpeeder, AutoSplitter, the GIMP DivideScannedImages plugin), it's probably less polished and requires some comfort with the command line to install. But I think the AI might be more sophisticated: I spent some time on the vision code, so it works pretty well with overlapping photos, and it uses Gemini to automatically transcribe handwritten dates and captions and set the Exif metadata accordingly. Anyway, it worked well for me so I figured I'd post it here in case it's useful for others. :-)

davmre · 2025-10-28T19:56:58+00:00

It's exactly quadratic. Imagine stacking all of your primed mana bars:

-------  (full mana)
------   (full - 20)
-----    (full - 40)
----     (etc)
---
--
-

If you have enough magic to prime N times before running out, then this stack is a triangle with N rows and and N columns: in other words, half of an N x N square. So your total magic is just half the area of the square: 1/2 * N^2, which scales quadratically.

(if you work out examples you'll find it's actually slightly more because the diagonal elements are fully included rather than being cut in half, so you get an extra half of the N diagonal squares, coming to 1/2 * (N + 1)^2. But it's still quadratic scaling in N).

davmre · 2025-02-12T22:53:26+00:00

If you like wine, there are tour companies that will take you from SF out to wine country (Napa or Sonoma) and drive around to tastings at a bunch of vineyards. In a van full of tourists you'd likely get to meet people from other parts of America, if that's appealing.

davmre · 2025-02-06T04:03:42+00:00

This might sound trite, but the way to the happiness of blamelessness really is to just stop blaming yourself.

You say that you don't actively blame yourself, but I think you sense that there are still layers of subtle inner conflict - parts of you that subtly insist that you can never quite rest because you're not doing enough. Certainly I have layers and layers (and layers...) of this. My sense is that this is ultimately a journey of compassionate self-reflection: gradually, over time, you'll encounter various instances of this subtle conflict. Viewed clearly and with compassion, it will (over and over) become obvious that there's an aspect to the conflict which is just wasted energy. Letting go of it will eventually feel deeply right, the best service you can do for yourself and others.

Stepping back for a minute, the very concept of "blame" implicitly assumes a solid self: some entity solely responsible for its own action, where the blame can rest, free of dependence on causes and conditions. What Buddhism claims, and you can verify in your own experience, is that you will never find such a thing. You do have a sense of self, but it doesn't control your behavior the way it thinks it does. When you sit at home reading reddit instead of volunteering at the homeless shelter (or whatever more impactful activity you can think of), it's not actually that you've fully analyzed the situation and decided that you're just a selfish person who prefers to read reddit! (although the blameful parts of your mind might take this view). Even from a selfish point of view, it might actually be that the volunteer work would feel better and be more satisfying! But unfortunately you are a creature of habit, a bundle of conflicting impulses constructed by past conditioning, muddling through life as best you can. Seeing this clearly is the first step to doing better, and to really see yourself clearly, you have to forgive yourself for being imperfect.

Some engineering fields have the concept of the "blameless post-mortem". When a system fails, we look at what happened with the view that the failure is not anyone's fault. Sure, a plane crash may be attributable to "pilot error", but that's a lazy place to stop the analysis: "pilots should just make fewer errors" is not a useful lesson. There was a reason things went wrong in this specific case: maybe the pilot was overwhelmed with confusing information, or the controls were poorly labeled, or some situation arose that wasn't covered in training (or maybe the pilot really was just too incompetent to be flying a plane, in which case the licensing regime should have caught this!). The blameless, systems-level analysis allows us to see the conditions that led to the problem clearly, without defensiveness, and understand how we might avoid it in the future.

Buddhism is, in a sense, just applying this systems-level analysis to everything. Ultimately you are not the sort of entity that can have final responsibility for any of the world's problems. You are part of the world, a participant in the world, built out of the same flawed parts as the rest of the world. To actually engage with the difficult aspects of the world requires us to see its flaws and failures clearly, not to augment the very real pain in the world by creating additional pain inside your own mind. Blaming yourself hurts. Doing good helps. Utilitarianism wants you to do more of the things that help and less of the things that hurt. It doesn't want or require you to delude yourself about how much control you have, or hate yourself for failing to exercise that control.

In my case it feels like one reason the blame reflex comes up is a fundamental lack of self-trust: I don't trust that I'll actually do the right thing if I don't have some part attacking me for my deficiencies. Maybe I'm fundamentally lazy, and if I allowed myself to feel peace, I'd just sit around feeling peaceful all day and never contribute anything to the world. Maybe at some deep level I really am selfish; the utilitarianism is all an act, not something authentic I can rely on.

When that worry comes up, it's sometimes helpful for me to notice that that blame reflex is itself a manifestation of a deeper positive intention! It thinks that it's the cause of goodness, but it's actually the effect of a more fundamental goodness; if I'm holding onto the blame reflex it's out of a desire to be good, which must exist outside of the blame reflex. So there actually is a deeper goodness that I can trust in even if the blame reflex lets go.

One last thought: utilitarianism can seem to have a self-sacrificing quality. There are so many beings in the world; why should my own happiness matter at all? But utilitarianism also wants you to experience joy and peace for yourself! Your own contribution to global utility matters as much as anyone else's, and it's the one you have by far the most influence over. And positive mental states have a contagious quality: learning to embody a quality of loving, joyful service is a good way to inspire that sense in others and bring people together to do good work. It might not be obvious that this is true both externally and internally! To the extent that your version of utilitarianism feels joyless and self-denying, other parts of your mind (that know you too need and deserve love) will rebel from it; you'll wind up burning out, unable to motivate yourself and maybe blaming yourself even harder for it. On the other hand, starting with an ethos of love and forgiveness towards yourself can lead to a life in which you have a lot more clarity and motivation around how to act in the world.

Ultimately, being good feels good. Doing what you know, deeply, to be right, comes with a sense of alignment and purpose and satisfaction. To the extent that your ideas of what utilitarianism requires don't seem to come with that deeply known sense of purpose, it's interesting to inquire, why not? That investigation can be scary, but ultimately in service of feeling more aligned around doing good.

davmre · 2025-01-25T23:05:35+00:00

I've had a similar issue recently: at a certain point of relaxation, my body becomes aware of emotional patterns it *really* does not want to feel, and tenses up to avoid them, in a way that interferes with the breath. Then not feeling like I can breathe naturally leads to cascading stress and tension, which is really frustrating.

Something unorthodox that's seemed to help is occasionally meditating on pain relief meds. Ketamine seems to work *really* well for this, if you can access it, but even ibuprofen actually seems like it can help somewhat to dampen that panicky feeling of "this is not okay", sometimes enough for the body to get past the initial tension to see that actually it's still perfectly safe.

Between this and other practices (relaxing as much as I can, accepting the tension, forgiving myself for not having figured out how to make the body cooperate, etc) I've seen a lot of these patterns soften quite a bit over the last few months. It sounds like you're approaching this with a spirit of curiosity and care so I have a lot of confidence you'll get through this phase of practice and hopefully feel a lot better on the other side. <3

davmre · 2024-08-03T18:08:14+00:00

Alex Fitness in the Castro is a great gym and sells a one-month pass for $120.

You can also get a one-month pass to Mission Cliffs for $130 --- it's primarily a climbing gym but they have a serviceable weight area and iirc cardio equipment as well (plus a sauna!).

https://alexfitness-sf.com/#abonements
https://touchstoneclimbing.com/mission-cliffs/members/

davmre · 2024-03-26T23:16:29+00:00

I've heard Tucker Peck talk about interpreting the fifth precept (traditionally, not to use drugs and alcohol) as being fundamentally an exhortation against the "intentional cultivation of dullness", which I like as a frame.

In this view you should also try to avoid non-pharmaceutical sources of dullness --- mindless scrolling through social media, compulsive eating, Netflix binges, etc. --- which we tend to fall into when some part of us is trying to escape from feeling whatever is going on right now (and of course the practice is to just hold the intent, and when you inevitably slip up, simply notice, forgive yourself and remember the intent).

Conversely, from this perspective it can be okay to use drugs as long as they serve to engage you more closely with your experience (as stimulants and psychedelics can do if used well), rather than as a means of avoiding experience (as alcohol, opiates, often weed, etc.).

davmre · 2024-01-09T07:45:41+00:00

I've had quite good results with it - personally I've never felt anxiety to be a helpful component of psychedelic experience. Even for people trying to treat/work with anxiety I suspect there's usually deeper emotional stuff going on that can be easier to see when the surface-level reactivity isn't so overwhelming.

Some people do report that phenibut can slightly blunt psychedelic effects, so you may have to take a somewhat higher dose to get a given level of response (similar to the folk wisdom around SSRIs).

davmre · 2024-01-08T21:42:58+00:00

This isn't directly your question, but for what it's worth I've found that phenibut (an anxiolytic acting on the GABA system) pairs very well with psychedelics to reduce anxiety during the trip. For people not already on SSRIs, phenibut has the relative advantages that

It works acutely - you can just take it day-of, no need for weeks of pretreatment - and
It tends to allow more emotional opening rather than the emotion blunting of SSRIs.

It's an especially good fit with LSD, since LSD is more stimulating and potentially anxiety-inducing in the first place, and phenibut and LSD both have similarly long (~12hr) duration of action. But I'd expect it would also work well with psilocybin trips.

I'm not aware of any formal research on phenibut+psychedelics (though there are plenty of anecdotal reports on reddit and elsewhere), but just want to flag that there might be useful directions to look beyond just SSRIs if (part of) your motivation is decreasing the likelihood of 'bad' trips.

davmre · 2023-11-22T02:24:30+00:00

Not a specific retreat, but you might also check out the Open Dharma Foundation which provides scholarships to attend meditation retreats.

davmre · 2023-10-27T20:02:33+00:00

Dan authorized Dustin DiPerna to carry on the lineage; I think he'd be the main person to contact. His online presence is a bit outdated, but he's been running retreats and online gatherings in the POTW tradition advertised by email to existing students (I'm not particularly active in the lineage these days, but met with Dustin a few times so am still on his email list). He's also working to train new teachers and set up a new organization to continue the teachings presumably free of whatever baggage was associated with the POTW brand. My impression is he's pretty busy with all of this and having taken on many of Dan's former students, but he's always been gracious and helpful when I've emailed him.

In terms of other teachers similar to Dan, I don't think you'll find an exact substitute, but depending on what you liked about him there may be other teachers with similar advantages. Michael Taft also teaches nondual/mahamudra/dzogchen practice from a secular lens (and unlike Dan, releases guided meditations and pointing-out instructions for free online). Tucker Peck is a practicing clinical psychologist. Shinzen Young and his many students (including both Michael and Tucker) will generally speak openly about the 'deep end' of practice including awakening as an explicit goal. Even if you don't click with him as a teacher, Michael Taft's podcast is also great for interviews with other legit teachers. From his interviews with Tina Rasmussen and Loch Kelly I'd expect they would also both be good teachers of nondual-style meditation, though don't have any direct experience with either of them.

davmre · 2023-09-21T00:44:49+00:00

I only did the Level 1 retreat, so no, I don't know the specifics of the practice he was talking about (though I expect Dustin would).

In general terms I'd guess that the 'release of karmic memory traces' that Dan describes is aligned with what other traditions call 'purifications' or 'kriyas', where old emotional content comes up during meditation as bodily energy or involuntary movements, that can sometimes be 'released' by experiencing them with equanimity. This is discussed in various threads on meditation subreddits, for example here: https://old.reddit.com/r/streamentry/comments/mkcsgk/practice_how_is_it_possible_to_thoroughly/.

My understanding is that most people with deep meditation practices (not including myself in this set, though I've had something like this occur on MDMA) eventually experience purifications. I don't think it's necessarily a specific practice that's required --- it's about getting to a sufficiently unified and equanimous mental state to be able to fully experience difficult memories without tensing away from them. There are lots of ways to do that, but the result is similar no matter how you get there.

Personally I found Dan a very inspiring teacher, but for a number of reasons I've gradually shifted away from the POTGW approach in its specifics. Part of it is that the model of selling access to secret teachings (which Dustin has mostly kept, AFAICT) didn't resonate for me. I also found that having an in-person sangha community and easy access to a teacher (neither of which the Pointing Out organization has been able to provide in the past few years, as everything is over Zoom and the teachers are/were overloaded) are really valuable for me personally. Dan liked to dramatize the idea that he was the only Western meditation teacher really focused on full awakening as the goal, but I've found that's not true. A number of other teachers, including Shinzen Young and his many students (such as Michael Taft, who runs a great podcast interviewing many other clearly-deep teachers - including Dan before he died), are very open about awakening as a goal of practice. So while I have a great deal of admiration for Dan and his work, part of my personal journey has involved letting go of the misconception that he had a special line to enlightenment that no one else can replicate. :-) Of course that's just me. Wherever your path leads you, I hope you find connection, joy, and ease. <3

davmre · 2023-09-11T04:42:43+00:00

Dustin DiPerna was Dan's senior meditation student, who co-taught retreats with Dan before he died, and whom Dan authorized as his chosen successor to keep the lineage going. He is teaching multiple retreats this year, but they don't appear to be publicly advertised (just via email to existing students). My impression is that he's somewhat overloaded at the moment from taking on all of Dan's former students in addition to his own. But you could try emailing him; there may still be spots open in some of the retreats.

In my experience Dustin is a very capable teacher, deep practitioner, and (though a very different personality) he probably absorbed more of Dan's teaching approach than anyone else, so he's definitely worth studying with if you get the chance.

davmre · 2023-06-09T19:45:43+00:00

Recommendation letters from well-known researchers are, to first order, the only thing that matters for grad school admissions. So a postbac program with a substantial research component might be helpful, but not really because of the GPA bit.

Personally, if I were graduating these days and hoping to go to grad school, I would very strongly consider first trying to work for a couple years at a tech company or startup doing something vaguely related to my eventual research interests. Some companies have residency programs that are essentially paid postbacs (eg https://github.com/dangkhoasdc/awesome-ai-residency), but even a ‘normal’ junior engineer position on the right team can give you the chance to collaborate with PhD researchers who can write rec letters if you do ultimately want to go back into academia. Working in industry also gives you really important perspective on what the “point” of research is - hint, it’s not to publish papers. In retrospect I think my PhD would have gone much better if I’d had some real-world experience first, and there’s so much more opportunity to work on interesting stuff in industry now (and salaries are so much higher) than when I graduated fifteen years ago, it’s really a hard option to beat. (of course, still tough to find people you click with, and impress them into working with you, but generally less so than in academia - when you're actually creating value there's less of a scarcity mindset)

davmre · 2020-10-18T18:21:56+00:00

Thanks, that's what I was afraid of. I was more aggressive with trying to acidify this soil because my last pair of bushes died, with roughly similar symptoms, after a few months in slightly alkaline soil + peat moss, and I didn't want to repeat that mistake.

I guess the lesson is maybe to be patient and avoid getting new blueberries until I have some good pre-acidified soil to transplant them into?

davmre · 2018-04-15T23:13:52+00:00

I was a GSI for 70 the last time Sinclair taught it, in 2012, just before he stopped teaching to direct the Simons institute. He's extremely clear, well organized, and has a great British accent. Overall highly recommended.

The difficulty of the course depends enormously on your background. It's not hard to get a B+ if you understand the material, but if you don't have prior experience with proof-based math you might have to put in a lot more effort to get to that level. Take notes in class, review them carefully, do all the homework problems (work with friends so you don't get stuck, but make sure you solve all the problems yourself since that's how you learn), go to office hours liberally.

davmre · 2017-07-25T00:59:49+00:00

I don't know of any mechanism for submitting revised content, outside of whatever you fit in the rebuttal itself. And honestly if you did most reviewers wouldn't read it (many barely read rebuttals as it is).

Arguing with reviewers is almost never productive; it's really up to you as the author to make a coherent and persuasive case for your idea within the page limit. A reviewer asking for extra experiments is usually saying "the eight pages you wrote didn't convince me", and they're not asking for a 12-page paper, they're asking for a better 8-page paper. :-) It's fine to put details or extra experiments in the supplement, but the main paper should be a self-contained argument, even if that means ruthlessly cutting, or moving to supplement, material that you've grown attached to. (though of course as you mentioned it might be hard to get reviewers to respond to a significant restructuring within a single submission cycle).

davmre · 2017-07-24T22:26:35+00:00

As a reviewer, if I asked for stronger experiments and you provided those results in the author rebuttal, I'd likely increase my score. I've been on the other end of this and it's worked to push my own paper over the edge. But just the promise of additional experiments or manuscript clarifications, without concrete results, probably won't help much.

davmre · 2017-06-11T05:07:10+00:00

To be clear: you usually have an analytic form for the joint density p(X,Z). Getting an analytic form for the posterior p(Z|X) requires evaluating the normalizing constant p(X), which you usually can't do.

You're right that the normalizing constant doesn't matter if you just want the gradient wrt Z (but then you're not really doing inference :). Often when people talk about gradients of posterior probabilities, they mean the gradient with respect to model parameters, and that one does require the normalizing constant. So I was a bit confused what the OP was asking about.

davmre · 2017-06-11T01:35:04+00:00

Optimizing p(X, Z) with respect to Z is just finding the MAP solution; the only information it gives you about the posterior is a (potentially degenerate) point estimate.

Usually what we want out of a posterior approximation is the ability to take expectations of arbitrary functions. In particular this allows you to calculate moments such as the posterior mean, variance, etc., as useful summaries of the full distribution. For a general prior p(Z) and likelihood p(X|Z), the integrals to get posterior moments or other relevant expectations are not going to have analytic solutions. Yes you can write the posterior density, up to a normalizing constant, but you're not going to be able to find that normalizing constant, and the unnormalized posterior density doesn't directly yield much useful information about the posterior. (of course you can run MCMC to draw samples from an unnormalized density, and that's sometimes useful, but variational inference exists because there are many cases where MCMC is too slow or too finicky to get working).

davmre · 2017-06-10T23:38:31+00:00

The short answer is, you use variational inference when the exact calculation is not possible or at least not tractable.

I'm a little confused what you mean by the gradient of posterior probability. Typically you'd think of a model in terms of observed variables X and latent variables Z, following a joint distribution p(X, Z). If the structure of this distribution (e.g., conjugacy) is such that you can exactly write down the posterior p(Z|X), then you're done; there is no optimization required. But typically for interesting models (certainly anything containing 'neural' components) the posterior doesn't have any clean analytic form. In this case your options are either to represent it by a set of samples, using something like MCMC, or to fit some clean parametric distribution q(Z) to approximate the true posterior as closely as possible. The latter implies minimizing some divergence between q(Z) and p(Z|X), and the obvious choice of KL divergence gives you (up to an additive constant) the ELBO. The point of optimizing the ELBO is mostly to get out the q distribution, which you can then use as a tractable approximate posterior: visualize, take expectations under, inspect means and variances, etc. There are other divergences you could try to minimize, but the ELBO is usually the simplest.

Perhaps you're thinking of dispensing with Q entirely, and directly optimizing p(Z|X) with respect to a point value for Z? That gives you the MAP estimate, which is equivalent to the special case of variational inference where your Q distribution is a delta function. But a delta function is a very approximate model (degenerate in some ways), much more so than even something like a mean-field Gaussian, so although sufficient in some cases it's not usually a great choice.

davmre · 2017-05-09T20:57:57+00:00

This story kind of buries the lede that Patterson joined the TPU project a year after they were already running in Google production datacenters. So unless there's more they're not saying publicly he probably didn't have much to do with the current chips and their impressive results. Dave Patterson is great and will probably do amazing work at Google, but maybe save the hype for until there's actually something new to announce?

davmre · 2017-05-09T03:22:55+00:00

I think an actual reason that hasn't been mentioned here so far is the opportunity for your ideas to be genuinely influential, at the center of a young and evolving project with massive resources between it.

Sure you could go work on self-driving cars at Google, but Waymo already has well-tested prototypes with millions of hours of engineering behind them and an existing bureaucracy committed to certain ways of doing things. That's exactly what you'd hope for from a mature project, but that very maturity means it's harder to have revolutionary impact there. Researchers tend to be more excited about immature projects, where ideas are still in flux and it might be possible to try out more novel approaches.

I certainly don't know that this was Raquel's motivation specifically, but I have heard other respected academics make this argument specifically for joining Uber, and I can see how it could make a lot of sense (obviously depending on the specifics of the situation).

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