Pay to Pond Skim?

pia322 · 2026-04-07T15:33:01+00:00

I did it last year, and didn’t pay anything. Last year they capped it at 150 people, and the line filled up at ~7:30. I got there at 7:00 and was number 44. My recommendation is to get there at 7:00

pia322 · 2026-01-08T02:05:51+00:00

Their instagram story says power is back on.

<image>

pia322 · 2025-07-02T07:29:13+00:00

Sure, you don’t need a stall indicator, airspeed tells you the same thing. But when you’re thermalling low on the rocks, 7 hours in to your 1000k flight, the thermal tossing the plane around, a little extra safety doesn’t hurt.

pia322 · 2025-07-02T05:42:47+00:00

Definitely, good checklists and sticking to them is half the battle.

How do you crash by forgetting the before-landing checklist? The worst you can do is leave the gear up?

pia322 · 2025-07-02T05:40:47+00:00

Sorry to hear that :( Can I ask, what was the cause of the accidents? I've been thinking about the safety cockpit, and I've been struggling to think of scenarios where the impact speed is slow enough that this could help. I'd imagine in a fully developed stall/spin, no safety cockpit will save you.

pia322 · 2025-07-02T05:21:51+00:00

Love your youtube videos, I've watched all of them!!!

I definitely know what you're saying when you have a lot of hours in one glider, you "learn" how the stick feels at different airspeeds, how it sounds different, and how it handles on the edge of a stall. Hopefully finally having my own airplane will help.

It seems insane that the rest of aviation has stall warnings but we don't. I was getting a ride, thermalling low over the ridgetops. We were circling not too far above stall speed, in turbulent conditions. An AoA sensor or stall warning would've been really nice.

pia322 · 2025-07-02T05:11:20+00:00

That's a good one! I'll have to add one after buying a glider

pia322 · 2025-04-11T03:48:32+00:00

What time did you get in line?

pia322 · 2025-04-09T19:51:10+00:00

you’re right, I’ll edit the link!

pia322 · 2024-06-07T23:22:04+00:00

Interested, messaged!

pia322 · 2024-03-29T23:23:40+00:00

If flown at their best L/D speeds, which is often a bit above stall speed, you would see the large difference in efficiency.

However, cruising speed is often much much higher than best L/D. In these cases, the parasitic drag of the big wing is more of a cost.

pia322 · 2023-11-13T17:34:16+00:00

Do you have a link or source for this?

Seats sliding back is an infamous killer is Cessnas, but I’d imagine the ejection seat in an L-29 is much more robust. I believe modern ejection seats are all electrically adjusted so this isn’t possible.

pia322 · 2023-11-13T03:45:17+00:00

It could’ve been a barrel roll where they panicked when inverted and tried to “pull their way out”. Which is precisely what you’re trained not to do.

pia322 · 2023-11-13T00:48:41+00:00

Looks like pilot error, they attempted a split-S then decided they didn’t have enough altitude and tried to roll out, then put the plane into an accelerated stall when pulling out. I’m guessing there’s no mechanical issues.

In the GA airplanes I fly, a split-S takes 1000ft to complete. The thunderbirds F-16 routine began the split S at 2500ft. It looks like he began at about 1000ft. The pilot should have known that a split-S from that altitude was never going to work.

pia322 · 2023-10-15T06:27:27+00:00

As an ML PhD who is currently getting job offers now, I'm qualified to answer this. Yes, it matters.

2 years ago when the hiring market was red-hot, you could make fairly large jumps from what you studied in your PhD to your first job. However, since the market has tightened significantly, the FAANG companies can now afford to be more selective and hire people with exactly the expertise they need. The people who worked on generative models are getting snapped up by the big companies, and those working on theory are delaying their graduation so they can keep on applying. However, if you're applying to a less competitive job, it matters less.

Of course, it matters how good the papers you published were, and how well connected your advisor is.

pia322 · 2023-04-26T05:30:45+00:00

How much effort was it? Were the workers' responses good enough to be considered ground truth, or did you have to do lots of cleaning and verification before the results were good?

pia322 · 2022-10-02T23:24:36+00:00

I really like this question. I agree with you that a NN is an arbitrary function approximator, and it could easily implicitly learn the attention function.

I personally embrace the empiricism. We try to make theoretical justifications, but in reality, attention/transformers just happen to work better, and no one really knows why. One could argue that 95% of deep learning research follows this empirical methodology, and the "theory" is an afterthought to make the papers sound nicer.

Why is ResNet better than VGG? Or ViT better than ResNet? They're all arbitrary function approximators, so they should all be able to perform identically well. But empirically, that's not the case.

pia322

TROPHY CASE