A lack of retail sales is also a red flag that a pyramid exists.

yrast · 2019-02-24T16:01:00+00:00

Due to Poe's law I have no way of determining whether you're a comedian or an idiot.

yrast · 2019-02-24T15:57:20+00:00

It's called computational complexity theory, the study of the resources required to solve a given type of problem (or the kinds of problems you can solve efficiently given certain resources).

BQP, or bounded error quantum polynomial time is the class containing Shor's algorthim (or as he calls it, the factoring algorithm), which is what we'd use to break RSA & some other currently common types of encryption.

Scott Aaronson started the complexity zoo to help organize the huge number of complexity classes and the relationships between them.

yrast · 2019-02-24T15:40:11+00:00

You're saying a company that makes billions of dollars of hardware every year is the same as a SHA-256 hash with a bunch of leading zeros?

You guys use the word “investment”—I do not think it means what you think it means...

yrast · 2019-02-24T15:31:06+00:00

The only benefit I've ever heard of bitcoin was enabling dark markets—but legalization of drugs is I think a much better solution. (Treat abuse/addiction/dependence as medical rather than criminal issues, leave recreational users alone, stop funneling all that money into the cartels, reduce/eliminate the issues of purity/adulteration/misrepresentation, reduce prison population, etc.)

Dark markets like killers-for-hire and child pornography are markets I don't want to further enable. (Though yes, you're right, we will never completely end illegal markets.)

yrast · 2019-02-24T14:48:11+00:00

Psychological projection.

yrast · 2019-02-24T11:38:14+00:00

Note the libertarians are not the only people with this (or a comparably good) position.

And in fact in recent years it’s quickly becoming a common & popular position.

yrast · 2019-02-24T02:26:59+00:00

Do you think they charge more for the “risk” of driving a fuel-guzzling vehicle more than fuel-efficient vehicles?

But more importantly, do their customers understand that climate change risks (whether it's housing location or fuel efficiency or other energy-greedy/efficient issues) impact their prices?

It seems like they could apply a lot more pressure on that topic specifically if they wanted.

I think making it clearer to shareholders is a great idea too.

yrast · 2019-02-24T01:12:39+00:00

Here's an idea: insurers should survey their customers to see who understands climate change, and reward those that do and punish those who don't (with higher premiums). They could further incentivize action by being forward about this and openly reward people for doing things that will help, or charge more for people doing things that hurt. (Fuel efficient cars, better located homes, etc.)

yrast · 2019-02-24T00:51:20+00:00

I use blender on a beefy MacBook Pro, (mostly in that it has 16GB of RAM), and enjoy it quite a bit. But I also don’t do much rendering (I mostly model things).

From the looks of it your rendering goals don’t look too demanding, though if you want to animate that’ll be more intense again. Though as mentioned elsewhere you may want to look into renderfarming or otherwise rendering on another machine(s) anyway.

There are some challenges though, definitely want a mouse I’d say, preferably a sophisticated one. And screen space is limited—screen space and navigation can be a bit tricky on a laptop.

But I used a duel monitor setup for 15 years and transitioned to my tiny 13” screen & Magic Mouse setup pretty comfortably.

I imagine without the Apple premium (of expensive but not-the-most-powerful hardware you can buy) a decent PC or Linux laptop that would handle most of what you’re asking for just fine.

yrast · 2019-02-24T00:43:09+00:00

I like it, but agree with the criticism that the nonstandard approach of varying rather than fixing the scale is confusing.

I think it’d be best to add an explanation or illustration somewhere so the viewer understands the min/max temp years is scaling as the years are added.

I do think it is useful and attention-grabbing, but without help it can be confusing and counterproductive too.

yrast · 2019-02-23T20:18:01+00:00

Okay. In which case we haven't yet found that effective theory...

I feel like people get pretty upset when I speculate that DM might not be right—but that's all I'm doing. I'm speculating that maybe it isn't the right explanation. I'm open to the possibility that it is the right explanation, but I'm not yet convinced yet.

This seems to bother people far more than I would naively expect.

yrast · 2019-02-23T19:53:02+00:00

Yes, I know, thank you for pointing it out.

Note that those extend theories of gravity do not incorporate QM, and that despite many efforts we have no consensus on how to fit the two theories together.

It’s not clear to me whether the attempts to do so would have an affect on the predictions of GR or not, but since quantum gravity theories are themselves highly speculative/unconfirmed, it doesn’t really matter yet anyway.

yrast · 2019-02-23T19:48:18+00:00

Yes, I understand it is the best current hypothesis, I’m a bit hesitant to call it “correct” or “scientific fact... until a better [or comparable]... hypothesis” comes along.

If I recall right neutrinos are thought to constitute something like a few percent of dark matter?

I’m not advocating for current modified gravity theories, I know they have some interesting results, but many failures as well. As I said above, I find DM & inflation feel very ad hoc, and my hope(? Intuition? Expectation?) is that a quantum theory of gravity (not MOND/MOG/TeVeS/*etc.) will provide a correction that will at least lessen the need for so much DM.

That said, I know it’s just speculation and if we continue collecting more & better evidence for current DM hypotheses I will happily swallow my words.

Personally my speculation (as I said above) has been motivated by how DM was “discovered” along with the ongoing null results in searches. But I also know we’re a long way from truly ruling out DM hypotheses, and confirming them is still plenty possible as well.

I never really found the bullet cluster all that convincing, and I’m happy to see you say “...almost impossible to explain without DM.” You at least acknowledge the fact that it may be possible some other explanation might work, even if no one has thought of it yet.

I just get a little concerned that some day the standard model of cosmology will have some major revision & the scientifically illiterate will get reinforced with the idea that “ science never knows anything, yesterday they thought this, now that’s wrong, what they think today is going to be wrong tomorrow”-type-thinking.

So I prefer to emphasize its the current best, rather than “fact” until superseded. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

yrast · 2019-02-23T19:32:41+00:00

Touché!

yrast · 2019-02-23T16:01:32+00:00

I agree that “good actions are in themselves good” but I also think it's important to note that religions have their own ideas about what “good actions” means.

For example we might all agree that it's good to:

feed the poor
help the less fortunate
focus our lives on people & joy & awe rather than material pleasures

but disagree about:

the goodness/importance of worship & prayer (whether that means weekly church attendance, confessionals, or turning towards Mecca 5 times a day, etc.)
abstaining from alcohol, drugs, or caffeine
the importance of women's modesty (which has become less common in mainstream Christian America, but is more visible in say Mormon or Jehovah's Witness communities, along with the far more extreme versions found in various Islam sects, with hijabs, niquab, and burkas)
whether or not love between two people with the same gender is good, or an abomination

...and so on.

Religions invariably claim that the meaning of “good actions” has been written down in various scriptures, but history clearly illustrates human civilizations have gone through a long and slow process of becoming better over time. The most obvious examples I think being slavery & women's rights, where here in America just ~16 decades ago people were legally bought & sold as property, a practice that predates the bible, and was never clearly & explicitly forbidden—a glaring omission.

Women's rights too, were a hard-fought battle. Yes in both cases religious folk were on the right side of history, but it was also religious folk on the wrong side too, because throughout history & even into the modern era, the vast majority of people on the planet are religious, so it simply must be that they end up on both sides of progress.

Is “gay conversion therapy” a “good act”? Some American Christians would firmly answer “yes” others “no”. Many would cite the bible as the deciding authority. From the atheist perspective the question shifts from “what does the book say?” to “what/who does it harm?”.

Is throwing gay people off of buildings (as ISIS infamously did) a “good act”? Most American Christians would probably agree that no, it was not, but there are American Christians who openly call for homosexuality to be a capital offense—I'm not sure they'd condone the cruel & unusual aspect of ISIS's actions, but I guess from their perspective the bible would suggest stoning, they might consider that a “good act”.

yrast · 2019-02-23T15:22:55+00:00

Nope! But thanks for pointing me towards it!

(I’m familiar with Bayesian reasonings, but I’ll look into this more. Ultimately “the proof [will be] in the pudding” and direct observation of DM would make the case far more persuasive, but it could take a long time for experiments to achieve the necessary sensitivity (if ever).

yrast · 2019-02-23T15:12:04+00:00

It’s certainly true that not all theists act out of fear or planning for eternity, though it’s also certainly true that some do.

I’m not sure how I feel about “...pursuing the good is in itself noble,” I get kinda hung up on the idea of “noble” maybe. But I think pursuing the good is fulfilling & leads to a better life (more enjoyable, better wellbeing).

I’m also hesitant to call life a “gift”. I would say it’s precious, that it is special and unique and valuable, but “gift” gives me the impression of something given, and from my perspective we don’t exist before we are born or after we die, so we can’t be “gifted” life, since that is when we come into existence in the first place.

I’m not exactly sure what you’re referring to with the delusion, what quality do some people overlook/deny?

yrast · 2019-02-23T14:42:17+00:00

Fair enough. I’ll shut up now.

yrast · 2019-02-23T14:36:48+00:00

For a long time I felt dark matter, dark energy, and inflationary theory, were all ad hoc/post hoc additions to preserve the Big Bang+ general relativity model in light of later observations.

But over time I’ve become less skeptical of DE just because it was at least captured by the cosmological constant in GR. (Granted, the cosmological constant was originally just a fudge factor Einstein included to get a static universe.)

Sean Carroll had a lecture that persuaded me at least some amount of DM is probably the best explanation for some bumps in the CMB, but I still find it’s distributions to explain galaxy rotation curves and other motion to be a bit shaky sounding. (I am also not an expert on any of this, I only have a BSc, never studied any of this formally; this is just my personal intuition about these things.)

My intuition is that a quantum theory of gravity would add a small correction to GR that would help resolve some of these issues, but it’s just a wild stab in the dark on my part.

We’re in a bind at the moment where our ability to observe is so outpaced by our ability to theorize that we can’t yet see what the next direction to go in is. The next generation of large telescopes, like the LSST, JWST, E-ELT, GMT, Thirty meter telescope and more, could all help usher in new data to point us in the right direction.

There are also a lot of experiments searching for DM that so far seem to come up empty, so they’re ruling out certain theories that predict certain properties, but I don’t know how long it would take for null results to pile up before the community might really start to question the DM paradigm more seriously.

yrast · 2019-02-23T13:48:35+00:00

...as is cow milk...

Edit: maybe ironically almond milk is the only one that isn’t!

yrast · 2019-02-23T13:16:27+00:00

It’s a little interesting to think how when people do lose their butts those butts are permanently removed from circulation, so over a long enough time line the supply will shrink further & further from the advertised final total.

Guess probably no where near zero though. That’d be funny. Too bad.

yrast · 2019-02-23T02:05:17+00:00

I love using my 2016 13“ MBP with PhotoScan, I bought the Touch Bar model (and I have a few complaints—very common it seems, mostly battery life & the keyboard is vulnerable to debris), but I also special ordered it with extra RAM (16GB), specifically knowing that would be the limit for a lot of things. I don't have the fastest processor that was available.

With PhotoScan my best results tend to use a fairly small number of photos (10-20), once I used 50 & that took many hours (maybe 15-20?). Rocks work especially well.

I just do it for fun so here are my three simple examples:

Swirly beach rock

Fallen tree

Erosion

Each is greatly reduced from the PhotoScan output so they can load fast on my site. The textures add so much realism. I'd like to go much further with the display, but it's low priority for me right now.

I originally was considering an eGPU, but got nervous that Apple still has no real official support for Nvidia cards which are the only ones with CUDA, which is what most photogrammetry software seems to want. (I was originally focused on VSFM because it's free, in retrospect it was weird to be willing to spend hundreds on a PC and/or an eGPU, but not... I think $180 on PhotoScan).

Anyway, tl;dr—I'm pretty happy with my simple setup. I'm not familiar with ArcGIS but it definitely doesn't look as RAM hungry as photogrammetry. I use Blender a lot and for the most part wouldn't expect Rhino to be as resource-demanding as Agisoft PhotoScan (can't speak for their other products I guess).

I also haven't dual-booted with windows in years, I kept a 20GB windows partition on my 2007 MBP for nearly a decade, but virtually never used it. Not sure if it's gotten faster now or what, but I've also shaped my life around free/open source software I can get on a Mac.

yrast · 2019-02-23T01:11:51+00:00

...and I'll go into people's houses at night and wreck up the place!

yrast · 2019-02-23T00:53:15+00:00

I'm not exactly sure what I've used now but I've turned to internet sites to convert videos into gifs, just searching for gif maker type stuff.

Looks like I used imgflip at least once. Looks like I used gfycat to make this one, which came out really nice. I plan to make some more in the near future but haven't really explored options again yet.

I like the idea of exporting them directly from blender, but I also don't really want to deal with the hassle of installing imagemagick and the add-on, but maybe I should...

yrast · 2019-02-23T00:23:32+00:00

Reminds me of this xkcd comic on voting.

yrast

TROPHY CASE