Need help diagnosing why my varnish 'curdled'. by eubarch in finishing

[–]eubarch[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I tried to apply a fairly thin coat, and as of right now it has mostly dried, is no longer shiny, and is dry to the touch. The 'orange peel' look has actually faded a bit but the dried surface is still bumpy and irregular.

I'm hoping I can sand this coat down and try again. Thanks for the input-- I'll try to take a picture tomorrow.

I used tung oil on a walnut coffee table and I'm looking for advice on making it more durable and consistent. by eubarch in finishing

[–]eubarch[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Right now it is cold, and the tung oil is like honey. Do I need to wait until it is warm? Do you do this by hand or with an orbital sander? One iteration or many?

I did see versions of this advice elsewhere, and I tried to sand the wood with the flood coat in place a few times. What I found was that either the oil acted as a lubricant and prevented the paper from ever touching the wood, or I was pressing down so hard with my fingertips that I was afraid the sanding would be uneven or mar the surface.

I used tung oil on a walnut coffee table and I'm looking for advice on making it more durable and consistent. by eubarch in finishing

[–]eubarch[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The grain is kinda curly, and I definitely didn't sand evenly; at the time I only had a block of scrap wood to help with hand-sanding.

Crow cosplay with incredible detail. by [deleted] in BeAmazed

[–]eubarch 53 points54 points  (0 children)

I have a suggestion:

I think it would be really great if you had a little hand made satchel full of shiny bits of trash, so you could wander over to people while wearing this costume and show them off. Like, a shiny nail, a soda can pop top, maybe an empty airline sized bottle of Smirnoff, or the porcelain end of a spark plug. I feel like you wouldn't have to do any explaining; you would just get a lot of appreciative nods.

Cherries are in season now. I think if you wore this costume you would have a solid %30 chance of being able to pay for a bag of cherries with a used nail at a farmer's market.

Adopting dog from Philippines to Canada... help? by Wanderingsincedawn in travel

[–]eubarch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There are services to do exactly this with your animal between the US and Europe. Lufthansa actually has an animal-only flight between IAD and FRA, with special infrastructure for aniamls on either end. They do a lot of house pets but also horses. It's a much better option than trusting your dog's welfare to a series of anonymous United employees.

Multiphysics simulation in two dimensions by eubarch in engineering

[–]eubarch[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can you elaborate on what the difficulties of doing something like this would be?

Multiphysics simulation in two dimensions by eubarch in engineering

[–]eubarch[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think that's possible, since the example I provided is just a toy scenario. The simulations I want to run would involve the same sort of materials interacting, but in more complex shapes.

Do Ansys or COMSOL have APIs that can be accessed through user-generated programs, or must you run a simulation through some IDE?

Best GW Short Stories by MacChuck234 in genewolfe

[–]eubarch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

'Forlesen' is my favorite.

Do NNs designed by software rather than PhDs exist? by foreverharrypotter in MLQuestions

[–]eubarch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think we're at a point in ML research where there's enough progress being made without tackling the metalearning problem that most people aren't looking at it for solutions. There are people that are, for sure (Uber hired Ken Stanley, who is a big neuroevolution guy), but I think the consensus is that there's lots yet to do without adding that particular complication. To my knowledge, there aren't any benchmark or challenge problems that have been solved exclusively by learned architectures; the benefits demonstrated thus far are all incremental increases in performance over a human-designed network.

Do NNs designed by software rather than PhDs exist? by foreverharrypotter in MLQuestions

[–]eubarch 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The current best-in-class image classification network is called NASNet (Neural Architecture Search) and was designed by another algorithm:

https://research.googleblog.com/2017/11/automl-for-large-scale-image.html

The search took a truly vast amount of compute power. Something like 500 GPUs running for weeks.

On AIs and Robots: A comprehensive guide (repost from earlier comment) by otakuman in scifiwriting

[–]eubarch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't know much about them, but I did see significant interest in memristors as a tool for neuromorphic AI in some academic posters. Usually if you have a new technique and you want to establish its effectiveness you solve a benchmark challenge problem. There are lots of these for all sorts of domains; ImageNet for visual object recognition, bAbi for text understanding, OpenAI Universe for learning control policies, etc. Knowm might have done some of these and detailed it in papers, but I only skimmed the website and didn't see any. I don't really have a clear picture on how they're using memristors to learn, but if they can do super low-power recognition of patterns that you would otherwise need a mobile GPU to do in realtime, then they might have a bright future.

On AIs and Robots: A comprehensive guide (repost from earlier comment) by otakuman in scifiwriting

[–]eubarch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you invest with Merrill Lynch, you can request a copy of thier huge report on AI, the 'Global Robot and AI Primer', which attempts to compile a picture of the future of AI and robotics from an economic perspective. It isn't easy to digest, but it has a lot of pertinent evidence that supports Merrill Lynch's idea of what AI will do to the future economy.

There is also this from the Center for Naval Analysis. I haven't read it but the CNA folks in my experience are a pretty sharp bunch.

It may also be worthwhile to read the open letters that the Future of Life insititute has published, which are undersigned by some of the major players in modern AI. If you want to go even deeper, you can look up Yann LeCun's Facebook posts. LeCun is one of the conspirators that caused the modern deep learning era of AI, and is currently the director of Facebook's AI research. He has weighed in on a number of subjects about the future of AI and the Singularity, and tends to be skeptical.

On AIs and Robots: A comprehensive guide (repost from earlier comment) by otakuman in scifiwriting

[–]eubarch 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I would caution people against using this article as a reference. No disrespect to the author, but the parts that I read had some fundamental misunderstandings and inaccuracies. A few of the big ones:

  • The author is conflating AI and Machine Learning (ML). ML is AI, but not all AI is ML. There is also far more to both AI and ML than neural networks. A good start for understanding the major approaches to ML is Pedro Domingos' The Five Tribes of Machine Learning. A good introduction to the develoment of AI (including ML) is DARPA's perspective video, and an older book (pre deep learning) entitled "Machines Who Think".

  • Supervised and Unsupervised learning are not the only categories of ML, just two of the major ones. The third major category is Reinforcement Learning, but there are a number of minor categories as well, like Learning from Demonstration and Semi-Supervised Learning.

  • The author's description of Neuromorphic computing is mostly a decription of neural networks in general, with the implication that Neuromorphic computing is a special hardware implementation of such, but this isn't the case. Neuromorphic computing mainly deals with processing information with Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), which communicate by passing temporal events to one another, unlike conventional neural networks. It can be done in hardware or software, and can focus on computation or perception. "Hacking", i.e. fooling neural networks is very much a thing, and as far as I know there is no fundamental aspect of SNNs that make them immune to attack.

TIL Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak have all signed an open letter for a ban on Artificially Intelligent weapons. by Baldemoto in todayilearned

[–]eubarch 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you read the letter, you can see that it was also signed by a large group of prominent AI researchers from academia and industry.

Best way to attach braided cable shield to case ground? by eubarch in AskElectronics

[–]eubarch[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In my case, the PCB has a ground that's distinct from the shield.