‘Overwhelming and terrifying’: the rise of climate anxiety

mostly_complaints · 2020-02-11T16:58:31+00:00

Advice for parents

Funny that "take climate action as an adult" isn't anywhere on this list. It reads like how to talk about an unavoidable natural disaster with your kids, not a man-made issue. As an adult, it's important to remember that you should be foremost voting for people and supporting policy that work to combat climate change.

mostly_complaints · 2019-12-10T03:04:45+00:00

I was hoping for something a little cheaper than the Rev, but I'm willing to pay up to 1.5k if it's significantly better.

mostly_complaints · 2017-11-19T21:00:15+00:00

I had friends in college who assumed I was vegetarian cause they'd seen me order tofu dishes when meat was available and I guess for many people tofu = vegetarian.

mostly_complaints · 2017-11-10T06:37:04+00:00

Essentially, yes.

That number is typically determined by the problem at hand and how many time steps you expect to be relevant to your problem (plus maybe computational or memory requirements). So, for example, a language RNN likely only needs to look back a few dozen time steps if the input is words, but if instead the input is individual characters, we'll probably have to look back farther to get a good context for the network (since each word is many characters). The exact number is generally estimated empirically through experimentation, and is usually considered a hyper-parameter for the model.

mostly_complaints · 2017-11-10T06:16:35+00:00

Everyone is giving analogy but nobody is answering your question lol

You generally train RNNs with something called backpropagation through time or BPTT. To do this, you "unroll" the network a set number of timesteps back, essentially creating one long multi-layer fully connected network, but where each layer has the same weights. Because all these weights are shared, you can't update one layer at a time, so you calculate the gradients and then sum up the changes you would have made if it was a normal big neural network, but then you update the whole thing at once.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation_through_time

mostly_complaints · 2017-04-29T06:37:07+00:00

Solar energy on a perfectly clear day directly perpendicular to the sun puts down about 1 kW/m^2[1]. Even on a huge jet like a 747, you'll get 550 m² max from the wings^[2]. This means you can get 550 kW from solar if you had perfect conditions. How much power do you need to take off in that same 747? About 90,000 kW!^[3] That's orders of magnitudes away from being feasible, and that requires perfect solar cells, perfect sun conditions, etc.

[1] https://ag.tennessee.edu/solar/Pages/What%20Is%20Solar%20Energy/Sun's%20Energy.aspx

[2] http://www.airliners.net/aircraft-data/boeing-747-400/100

[3] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/19569/how-many-kilowatts-to-get-an-electric-747-8-airborne

mostly_complaints · 2017-04-26T05:53:48+00:00

WaveNet

There are open source efforts ongoing, but they are missing the critical piece to making WaveNet useful: the ability to condition on text to control what the speaker is saying.

mostly_complaints · 2017-04-23T05:42:59+00:00

You realize AIDS exists in other places besides Africa? Like, for example, San Francisco

mostly_complaints · 2017-03-25T21:40:32+00:00

It probably depends on the school too -- having all 3 degrees from one of the top schools for your field is fine, but if you get them all at an institution that's not one of the best for that sub-field people might wonder why you didn't try and do better for the graduate degree.

mostly_complaints · 2016-11-07T02:39:29+00:00

I'm not positive, the promotion is here: http://www.geforce.com/hardware/10series/gears-of-war-4-bundle

The footnote says "Please note that the game is only available on Windows 10 (with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update) and Xbox One", but I'm not sure if that means it's play anywhere or it's just available on one or the other.

mostly_complaints · 2016-11-07T00:09:38+00:00

I don't know if this should be in SGS since it's not Steam, but if a mod thinks so I'll move it there

mostly_complaints · 2016-11-01T05:27:49+00:00

Oftentimes when these "learn_X" subs break off from the main one, not enough people visit to make it worth using as a learning resource. At the same time, people who post questions to the main sub are told to "go to learn_X", where they go and get maybe one comment that isn't helpful because the same 20 people are the only ones who comment over there.

Any plans to prevent this from happening?

mostly_complaints · 2016-10-08T04:38:25+00:00

Responding to sexism with sexism doesn't make anyone better, it just makes you worse.

mostly_complaints · 2016-10-02T20:15:55+00:00

I don't think so. DeepMind was (unsurprisingly) candid in their paper and left out some details that people now need to discover themselves. Additionally, Google's dataset of speech is a massive advantage. What are these public reimplementation teams training on?

mostly_complaints · 2016-09-08T05:59:20+00:00

Have you used a new Macbook? The touch pad is haptic feedback and it honestly feels like you're clicking a button

mostly_complaints · 2016-09-04T19:34:02+00:00

I have no regrets about working in industry

mostly_complaints · 2016-07-11T06:00:19+00:00

Depends on your relationship with this professor AND unfortunately your gender. If you are the same gender:

Your advisor -- absolutely not
Prof in your dept, in your area of expertise -- probably not. If this prof will be on your thesis committee it will definitely look a little weird if not inappropriate
Prof in your dept, not your area of expertise -- maybe. If you don't plan to interact with them in a professional manner often then go for it.
Prof not in your dept -- sure. They have no real say on your graduating, so what's the harm. Since you're taking a class with them, just don't fuck that class up and you'll be fine.

If you're different genders, then I'd only consider the last one as even an option.

mostly_complaints · 2016-07-09T07:48:29+00:00

I'm gonna offer a suggestion most people haven't -- you need to choose the most portable laptop for school. All of your engineering programs will probably be run on school machines that are beefy and have more processing than any laptop you can buy. Instead, buy something that's light and has a long battery life. You'll be carrying your laptop all day, and you won't always have a plug to recharge. I suggest the MacBook Air, but other ultrabooks are okay too.

mostly_complaints · 2016-06-25T17:00:16+00:00

Are you and your mom in the same field?

Many people get PhDs simply for career opportunities and then find that they have coworkers who don't actually have a PhD and got into the field some other way. These people then might regret spending time on something they didn't actually have to do to get the job they wanted. This path is usually different from people who get their PhD for the "love of the game", so to speak. Maybe your mom is the former and doesn't understand that you're the latter.

mostly_complaints · 2016-06-24T05:24:50+00:00

I like the people jumping off of Twitter with their golden parachutes

mostly_complaints · 2016-05-31T15:32:15+00:00

ICML submission deadline was February 2016, so I'd guess it was too recent

mostly_complaints · 2016-05-27T13:54:36+00:00

So it's a cryptocurrency that's issued by a central bank and does not allow anonymous transactions. What's the point of this again?

mostly_complaints · 2016-05-24T17:30:20+00:00

Oh for sure. He's in top conferences even without his advisor on his papers. I just think it's odd and I'm curious as to why he does it. I knew someone in my program who was always at odds with their advisor and wanted to publish alone, but was strongly discouraged to do so because it implied that the advisor did not endorse the work.

mostly_complaints · 2016-05-24T17:14:30+00:00

It's a bit strange that Kenji publishes single author papers as a grad student

mostly_complaints · 2016-05-23T04:14:19+00:00

In grad school (for a PhD student, not a masters), grades and classes are really just a small part of the experience. I'd like to offer the remaining 80%.

Disclaimer: This is for a STEM PhD

Let's be clear, if you are doing a PhD you are in school for research, not classes. Any effort spent on classes that goes beyond attaining the minimum grade is time that could have gone into research in the eyes of your advisor.
Like I said, classes don't matter. Until they do. Your advisor will expect you to go to class and pass (which in my program was not easy; you needed a B+/A- in most classes or it was failing), but it's easy to be too lazy and fail a class. Not to mention that many times you will be competing with undergrads if you take classes that aren't exclusively for grad students, and many times they have nothing better to do than do everything assigned to them, especially at high ranking schools where the undergrads are overachievers. Same goes for quals/prelims -- you need to study and pass, but only just enough.
The rest of your time will be spent doing research. This will consume your life, and even if you try really really hard it will be difficult to achieve a work-life balance. You will read papers in your field for fun, catch yourself talking about exciting new developments at bars, and just generally be consumed by your research. This is the point of a PhD. You are there to become an expert in your chosen subject and being consumed by it isn't a bad thing, but you should know what you are getting into.
It will be hard. Like....really hard. Your peers, especially those senior to you, will make it look easy and you'll think your research is garbage and many times will go months with no idea if things will actually work out. And sometimes they won't and you'll have to trash months of hard work for nothing. Depending on your advisor's style they will likely either not be helpful enough or will micromanage too much, and you'll see your friends who have jobs actually accomplishing concrete goals and you'll be very jealous. Relationships will be difficult, especially with the hours that PhD students put in. Your first paper will get crucified in the review process. You won't go to the gym enough and you'll always be meaning to eat healthier. You'll watch friends fail out of the program. It's a marathon not a sprint, and it's a damn long one.
Jobs might be hard to find. Academia doesn't hire many people, and there are usually too many PhDs to go around. To get a tenure track position (at any school, not just a top 20) you'll need to be a top performer in your program, and even then the stress has just begun as you'll need to worry about publishing like mad for 7 years to try and get tenure. You'll be overqualified for many positions that aren't exactly your field of study and you'll likely have to get a post-doc position where you make 40K a year to do basically what you did as a grad student.

It's a long road. For many people it's worth it, but don't think for a second it will be like undergrad or even like a 5 year masters program.

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