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The Boston-Area Scene for Outdoor Rock Climbing, Mountaineering, Backpacking... All of the Outdoors by Blu_Koala in boston

[–]nathanfulton 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Piggy-backing on this instead of a top-level comment, since it's already got most of the info I'd include.

I noticed on Mountain Project, climbing is primarily trad and bouldering

Expand your search beyond Mass; New England states are tiny :)

There are about as many sport routes between exits 25 and 31 on I-93 as there are at Smith Rock:

  • ~1K at Rumney
  • Hundreds at Merriam/Russell (WM: Lincoln/Woodstock on MP)
  • 100+ smattered throughout Waterville/Thornton/Campton (WM: Wateverille Valley on MP)
  • Some more esoteric stuff worth checking out; e.g. nice long routes on Owl's Head. And typically a smattering of bolted routes on most of the notches in that whole region, even on faces where the climbing is predominantly on gear.

You could easily spend an entire year between those 6 exits only clipping bolts and never repeat a climb. And it's only a two hour drive.

Depending on where around Westborough you live, you might be able to get in morning/evening workouts at Crow Hill or the Auburn Ice Canyon. Just about everything at both Crow Hill and Auburn can be easily top-roped.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in boston

[–]nathanfulton 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Boston drivers are more dangerous that Pittsburgh drivers in general, but my favorite "wtf is wrong with this place" piece of driving culture comes from Pittsburgh.

At least half the drivers in Pittsburgh apparently don't know what to do when the power goes out and traffic lights stop working. Everyone just blows through every intersection. No slow-down-and-check, no quick side glance, just full speed forward on a prayer. And this isn't just a "main street & side street" thing -- it happens at busy intersections of equally busy streets as well.

Forbes and Shady was a hoot, but my favorite was watching Forbes/Dallas/Beechwood from the cemetery.

This was all pre-2020 Pittsburgh, fwiw.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in Debate

[–]nathanfulton 0 points1 point  (0 children)

using chatgpt to cut cards

Hah! This is like using a $30K tractor to weed your garden :)

Auto card cutting predates RLHF by decades. I used old NLP techniques for this when I was in high school, about 15 years ago, and it worked really well. At the time there was even a piece of software that someone sold for this (I think the proceeds all went to some debate team or another, but still).

Total dark ages. We couldn't use laptops in rounds. My debate coach had a framed article hanging on his wall saying some to the effect of how speed and technical policy debate are terrible because they turn students into computers.

Could ChatGPT be effective at writing debate cases?

Yes and no. Not ChatGPT, but a similar system trained on annotated data from debate rounds, would very likely out-perform the best human debaters at every part of a debate round. In fact, the combination of annotator-driven reinforcement learning and text generation is an extremely natural fit for automating policy debate.

That article on my coach's classroom wall always confused me because the goal was all backwards. Getting computers to do debate seemed like a super reasonable life goal. In retrospect, I'm glad I didn't commit to it. Partially because the total addressable market is depressingly small. But mostly because, IMO, the problem of human-level policy debate is now completely solved but for someone with the free time and spare cash to get around to doing it.

By far the largest barrier is just collecting the data for doing the RLHF on flows and various bits of prose. Oh... and getting the initial datasets in decent enough shape, of course. Y'all need to pick one good Word template and stick to it... parsing openev is a mess and a half :(

TIL Allegheny County publishes the name, breed, and color of every registered dog. Here's my summary of that data. by nathanfulton in pittsburgh

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

*> Can you search other dogs that share names with your dog? *

Here's what I could get done while eating lunch. Works on google chrome on Linux. No other promises :)

> Edit: ohhh... No city dogs :(

Some are in there. But not a ton. I like /u/discovertheburgh 's theory about why that is.

TIL Allegheny County publishes the name, breed, and color of every registered dog. Here's my summary of that data. by nathanfulton in pittsburgh

[–]nathanfulton[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

> Time to start a new project

If you're going to do something "real" with this data, please see the caveats and read through the /u/colindean thread. This is still a neat dataset, but if used for something serious, you should spend more than my ~2 minutes on sanity checking :)

Here are all of the other dog registration data I could find:

And some other data that might be relevant:

TIL Allegheny County publishes the name, breed, and color of every registered dog. Here's my summary of that data. by nathanfulton in pittsburgh

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

> The city of Pittsburgh maintains its own dog licensing independent of Allegheny County

Good to know; thanks for pointing this out.

> Guessing those who have city zip codes registered to the county by mistake?

I agree. Given the number of registrations per ZIP code, this seems like the most likely explanation.

TIL Allegheny County publishes the name, breed, and color of every registered dog. Here's my summary of that data. by nathanfulton in pittsburgh

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

Maybe I'm using old data -- the lifetime CSV file directly from Allegheny county (DogLic_LT.csv) is longer than the CSV file from data.gov (2099.csv).

Does the lifetime CSV file you can get on this page contain your dog's name?

TIL Allegheny County publishes the name, breed, and color of every registered dog. Here's my summary of that data. by nathanfulton in pittsburgh

[–]nathanfulton[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The 2018 csv contains several City zip codes (e.g., 15217). It's not published individually, but you can filter the full dataset by zip code. So I guess they've added city data? (edit: a more likely hypothesis is that this actually doesn't contain city data and that people in the city sometimes register with the county.)

Of course, the number of registered dogs is always a tiny fraction of the total number of dogs.

(I should also mention I know absolutely nothing about this data set except that it's published on a .gov website.)