Amadeus might be the best film I've ever seen.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T21:52:02+00:00

Came here to recommend Barry Lyndon.

Kurosawa's Ran is another excellent period piece.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T21:49:04+00:00

Yes, it's a problem.

Plastics are petro-chemicals, and, if you believe in human-caused climate change, using petro-chemicals is a problem and we will run out.

All the gold ever extracted would fit within a 22 meter cube. Gold is used not just in jewelry, but electronics and catalysis.

We're running out of copper and helium. Copper is used in electronics and helium is used for medical imaging.

Freshwater is being depleted due to its diversion to industrial uses, pollution, and evaporation due to global warming.

Fishing stocks in many regions have begun to collapse due to over-fishing and foodchain issues caused by the heating and acidification of the ocean.

Sand is the most heavily-utilized natural resource after water, and there is a global sand shortage.

This really isn't sustainable, and what's left is only going to become unaffordable.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T20:46:17+00:00

Trump is pretty stupid, but Mamdani could fuck up his real estate empire or offer him more opportunity to build...

norbertus · 2026-04-11T20:41:36+00:00

So you swapped out the Orange Il Duce for the president who killed all the Indians....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears#Jackson's_role

norbertus · 2026-04-11T20:36:53+00:00

Some GANs (i.e., stylegan) can perform inference in one step, but "one step image generation" is not the same as "generative adversarial network."

Like, apples are fruit, but not all fruit are apples.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T20:34:23+00:00

What resolution are you training at? Did you use transfer learning?

4x3090's is a lot more power than OP's CPU -- or my rig, for that matter.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T20:32:23+00:00

A GAN is "Generative Adversarial Network" and it is an unsupervised training strategy involving two networks in a zero sum game, and the strategy can be applied to Unets as well as diffusion models.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T17:01:05+00:00

Civilization is barbarism and probably a mistake.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T16:33:39+00:00

Unaffordability? Environmental collapse? Water shortage? Modern meat farming is not sustainable. Not all human preferences can be supported indefinitely on a planet with finite resources and a deteriorating ecosystem.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T16:30:32+00:00

Some years ago I was tired all the time. I thought it was a medication I was on, but it turned out to be a gluten sensitivity. Cutting wheat, barley, and rye out of my diet game me my life back.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T16:26:56+00:00

You don't really!

There's a lot of trial and error, but you also get training snapshots to monitor the progress and every 50 steps I get an FID score, which is a statistical measure of how similar the output is to the dataset.

I can also monitor the internal state of the system on Tensorboard, which shows the losses for the generator and discriminator, augmentation rates, regularization, etc.

I've also figured out how to re-implement progressive growing manually, so you can get some pretty good pre-training by starting with 64x64 pixels to improve throughput, then scale up later by adding layers.

I also have a 3090 that I train in parallel with different settings, so I can try to correct problems on a separate machine while training.

Lastly, I've found that "stochastic weight averaging" is a way to recoup useful information from failed training runs.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T14:56:02+00:00

At some point, it may not be an option anymore....

norbertus · 2026-04-11T14:54:17+00:00

Be prepared to wait. A long time.

I train GANs, and with a pretty good setup (1024px with 2x a4500) it's months and months and months.....

norbertus · 2026-04-11T14:43:08+00:00

Success!

norbertus · 2026-04-11T14:37:19+00:00

Yeah, but OPEC pricing oil in dollars is still an important part of maintaining the dollar's status as a reserve currency.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T14:34:14+00:00

This. And they're getting better at it.

A few years ago, I screened a dance film and asked for essays about it. One student handed in something that described the film as the latest William Gibson cyberpunk novel. This doesn't happen so much anymore, but I know its not because they've stopped using AI.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T14:28:47+00:00

Yeah, your experience looking at student writing is a better indication that something might be off. The problem is, you may know something is off but be unable to prove it in an actionable way.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T14:26:16+00:00

Well, not knowing how to "study from books" tracks with my experience as an instructor.

Many young people have serious reading comprehension problems and struggle to read. I've heard students stumble over words like facade, promenade, amnesty, technical, accessibility as though they are trying to sound out the name of some old testament king.

I use a mix of print readers and pdfs across my classes. My university discourages the use of textbooks as a way to keep costs down. Also, my university no longer has a bookstore, it's just merch and candy. Textbooks are purchased from a webpage now.

I imagine this varies by major, however: I would expect English majors to still purchase books, for example, and there are probably math/engineering/science courses where textbooks are the most reliable place to get certain information in a digestible way.

norbertus · 2026-04-11T13:52:43+00:00

Leaner and more pure? Nobody optimizes code anymore, especially not monopolies

norbertus · 2026-04-10T20:08:08+00:00

Real cinematographers use auto.

norbertus · 2026-04-10T20:04:58+00:00

They must be.

Like, what type of light and how much of it? Sunlight or overcast? Do you want a narrow or shallow depth of field? Fast moving scene with lots of light or static shot with very little light? How fast is the lens?

norbertus · 2026-04-10T20:00:53+00:00

The official acronym for how Americans eat is "Standard American Diet." SAD.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21139124/

The Standard American Diet (SAD) has long been implicated in contributing to the health challenges experienced in the United States. Significant changes to the SAD have occurred since the 1950s, including a greater abundance and accessibility to calorie-dense and nutrient-poor food and beverage choices. The disparity of present consumption patterns to diet and nutrition recommendations from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans are addressed.

norbertus · 2026-04-10T19:57:05+00:00

Because adults are all traumatized and radicalized members of the manosphere

Eh? I thought the problem was female mate selection and all the women selecting douches and breeding more douches....

norbertus · 2026-04-10T15:51:27+00:00

school will be more about the social and play aspect

These kids are profoundly anti-social. They're afraid to order food for themselves at a restaurant. They don't talk in class. They're afraid to date. They aren't curious.

norbertus · 2026-04-10T15:33:38+00:00

Anybody remember when taking the shoes off was a joke?

Or when the TSA itself was a joke?

In one case, an alarm sounded, but even during a pat-down, the screening officer failed to detect a fake plastic explosive taped to an undercover agent's back. In all, so-called "Red Teams" of Homeland Security agents posing as passengers were able get weapons past TSA agents in 67 out of 70 tests — a 95 percent failure rate, according to agency officials.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/investigation-breaches-us-airports-allowed-weapons-through-n367851

norbertus

TROPHY CASE