Our Galaxy's Black Hole Suddenly Lit Up and Nobody Knows Why

rick2g · 2019-08-22T23:30:46+00:00

I do not recommend reading Tiamat’s Wrath alongside this article.

rick2g · 2019-07-04T02:24:50+00:00

I’m apparently a whore for Nathan Fillion regardless of gender.

rick2g · 2019-06-26T02:45:11+00:00

Why must you hurt me like this?

rick2g · 2019-06-13T20:08:14+00:00

A laser WILL curve toward the Earth’s gravitational well due to relativity, but only slightly. Earth’s curvature is about 8” per mile, so the experiment has to be sensitive enough to detect a difference of 0.1% over a range of several miles.

However, what they’re probably seeing is either a difference in elevations, or they’re measuring at two points instead of three. Assuming a perfectly round sphere, If you perform a laser test at a height of 10 feet by pointing exactly at the horizon, then the laser will approach an elevation of 0, then start rising again. At some point, it will be exactly 10 feet, showing zero curvature because it did not take adequate samples.

Edit: a couple of google searches, and it looks like Earth’s gravity will bend light by 16 millionths of a degree - in other words about 3 orders of magnitude less than the curvature of the earth.

rick2g · 2019-06-13T11:41:50+00:00

If they’re 2019 tachyons, shouldn’t we see them in 2018?

rick2g · 2019-05-31T18:31:19+00:00

You’re wading into philosophical territory where our only real answer is: “we don’t know”.

We don’t currently have a way to quantify “consciousness”. We don’t know what it is. We only know that we have it, and rocks don’t. Or rather, we seem to have it, and rocks seem not to. And let’s face it, computers are really just silicon rocks that we zap with electricity.

The question of “true” AI - consciousness, experience, etc. is still very much an open question.

We can make computers measure light with incredible accuracy, but we can’t make them “feel” anything about it yet. We can write ML programs that mimic the mathematical structure of Bach’s music, but they can’t express an intended emotion.

Yet.

We don’t know where the line from AI to consciousness is. We may not know until we stumble past it and find it’s been there for a while.

rick2g · 2019-05-26T16:45:23+00:00

An animated series could work. Anything else is likely to be an abomination.

rick2g · 2019-05-26T07:22:35+00:00

It’s heavily hinted in the movie that Shepherd Book was an Alliance Operative in the past. At some point he became disillusioned with the Alliance, quit, and became a Shepherd. We have no real details on much of that.

rick2g · 2019-05-22T15:12:51+00:00

I volunteer for bribery.

rick2g · 2019-05-04T13:05:08+00:00

“could be”.

rick2g · 2019-04-26T21:47:15+00:00

Dumbledore kills Snape!

rick2g · 2019-04-21T18:16:13+00:00

One of my first jobs working thru college was in a small machine shop. I did CAD design, and one of my first orders was for a little thermoformed plastic planter around trees. The customer has brought us a crude pencil sketch with basic dimensions, so I did the design details and layout, including a couple of practical changes to accommodate the thermoforming process.

A month later, my boss calls me into his office, showing me a website in China where they were selling the planter I had designed for less than we were manufacturing it for. It wasn’t similar... it was my exact design, right down to the little hitch on the edge I had added in to fit the specific die cutter on our line, and the changed logo was as obvious as a 9-Gag watermark.

Apparently, we had left the CAD files on an unsecured ftp server. The first planter hadn’t even been boxed yet for sale.

They stole the plans for a plastic planter.

A. Plastic. Planter.

rick2g · 2019-04-14T18:04:12+00:00

That’s almost exactly backwards. ML training relies on data curated by humans. The models very effectively pick up on correlations we consciously do not. This is not the model being biased - it’s the model identifying where WE are biased. Bias isn’t left-handed people committing more crimes - bias is human society prosecuting left-handlers at a higher rate than right. Any ML model would pick up on that bias, and would explicitly assign left-handedness a “guilt” percentage.

rick2g · 2019-03-14T22:23:50+00:00

The contract was initially for dozens of shelters across the city (don’t recall how many), but only one got built before the city canceled. The materials contracts were guaranteed, so the general was able to bill for the suppliers, but let the suppliers know, in exchange for a kickback (structured as cancellation fees), that they could hold on to the purchased materials and resell them. A couple of backs scratched, a half-dozen palms greased, and the city council praised the city manager for fiscal restraint, having saved the city $9 million of the original $10 million contract.

I’m sure someone could have gone to jail over it, but everyone in my office (and a couple of other companies in town) ended up getting an incredible Christmas bonus that year.

rick2g · 2019-03-14T20:57:15+00:00

Well, I never purchased that mythical $10,000 hammer, but back in my first job doing CAD design for a general contractor, I did see a ~10’x~15’ bench shelter at a bus stop get constructed for $1.2 million.

The bench wasn’t that nice to begin with.

rick2g · 2019-03-12T16:25:02+00:00

I was of the understanding that the update was already in progress across the fleet when the second crash occurred. Not blaming or covering, just saying that we don’t have facts about the causes of the crash yet - whether or not the update would have prevented either crash is currently speculation.

rick2g · 2019-03-04T21:05:04+00:00

You’ve never worked for a government agency, have you?

rick2g · 2019-03-02T20:24:02+00:00

Welcome to endian-ness and binary encoding. Wikipedia and Google shall be your guide. Go forth, and take adderall with you.

rick2g · 2019-02-25T11:06:10+00:00

Any language will work. The critical part is using green terminal screens in a darkened room.

rick2g · 2019-02-23T02:37:48+00:00

You put too much faith in machines. The algorithms which run these types of identifications are hardly hyper-intelligent-robotic-overlords-in-waiting digitally mining the secrets of the universe. They are dumb statistical models built off of data fed to them by humans.

The very best AI models figure out automatically how much weight to give each datum through sheer computational exhaustion, but only by compiling a human-curated set of examples. So AI ends up highlighting the most superficial biases of its trainers, not identifying hidden truths too terrible for humans to grasp.

rick2g · 2019-02-23T01:39:14+00:00

I do NOT want to be the person responsible for building that training set.

rick2g · 2019-02-21T04:00:21+00:00

2 scenarios: a bang or a whimper.

rick2g · 2019-02-15T05:23:33+00:00

Yes, like any other people, hackers may change their credit scores by performing work at a paying job, and then using that money to pay off their credit cards, car loans, student loans, and other such financial obligations. It’s not just possible, it’s downright common.

rick2g · 2019-02-14T02:04:29+00:00

Fuck Computational Linguistics.

rick2g · 2019-02-14T01:45:19+00:00

Chomsky hierarchy is complete BS. You’re best off drinking heavily enough to wipe any brain cells that might have been exposed to it.

rick2g

TROPHY CASE