FreeHugs

What happened to the real x, "gene x", "photographer and friend of lemurs"?

https://web.archive.org/web/20220906224326/https://twitter.c...

At the core of Web3 projects is the idea that one can own their identity via cryptographic proof.

Over time, this concept will find its way into many projects. Especialy into open source projects which try to make the web a better place.

For example, as soon as browsers support a DNS based on cryptographic proofs like ENS, other technologies which have URL based identities (like ActivityPub) will automatically support cryptographic identities. Which would bring it to projects like Mastodon and Bluesky automatically.

The big question is if this will be a net positive or just adds more bloat.

They tried the same with Bing and failed. Bing did not see any uptick even with the new AI features:

https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/deskto...

My takeaway is that users are not as stupid and lazy as Microsoft thinks they are. They want a clean UI. And if they have to sign up for ChatGPT to get it, they will. ChatGPT already gained as many users as Bing has. With a clean UI, Bing might have already doubled it's userbase.

Why doesn't Microsft just remove all the clutter from Bing and enjoy the benefits of having their search engine being the default on all the Windows tablets and laptops out there? Why waste it all and make every user change their search engine to Google?

Why is Termux not on the Google Play Store?

Reminds me of https://www.literature-map.com

Which is a map of all authors in the world sorted by overlap in readership. I found some of my favorite writers by browsing it.

I wonder which approach is better suited to find something that is spot on to my interests.

When I think of my favorite books, they usually are the most popular books of their authors.

Are there any counterexamples, where an author wrote a book that is more profound than their biggest hit but got overlooked for some reason?

I don't think it's the loop implementation. The stuff in the loop should take multiple orders of magnitude more time than the loop itself:

    for poly in polygon_subset:
        if np.linalg.norm(poly.center - point) < max_dist:
            close_polygons.append(poly)

The rest is not a fair comparison, because it rewrites the used libraries, not the application code.

You can always speed up an application if you rewrite the used libraries to match your specific use case.

The time is spent in this 3-line loop:

    for poly in polygon_subset:
        if np.linalg.norm(poly.center - point) < max_dist:
            close_polygons.append(poly)

I don't think the entire feature set of the Python runtime is involved in this.

The most important part of the article seems to be that this Python code is taking "an avg of 293.41ms per iteration":

        def find_close_polygons(
            polygon_subset: List[Polygon], point: np.array, max_dist: float
        ) -> List[Polygon]:
            close_polygons = []
            for poly in polygon_subset:
                if np.linalg.norm(poly.center - point) < max_dist:
                    close_polygons.append(poly)

            return close_polygons

And after replacing it with this Rust code, it is taking "an avg of 23.44ms per iteration":

        use pyo3::prelude::*;
        use ndarray_linalg::Norm;
        use numpy::PyReadonlyArray1;

        #[pyfunction]
        fn find_close_polygons(
            py: Python<'_>,
            polygons: Vec<PyObject>,
            point: PyReadonlyArray1<f64>,
            max_dist: f64,
        ) -> PyResult<Vec<PyObject>> {
            let mut close_polygons = vec![];
            let point = point.as_array();
            for poly in polygons {
                let center = poly
                    .getattr(py, "center")?
                    .extract::<PyReadonlyArray1<f64>>(py)?
                    .as_array()
                    .to_owned();

                if (center - point).norm() < max_dist {
                    close_polygons.push(poly)
                }
            }

            Ok(close_polygons)
        }

Why is the Rust version 13x faster than the Python version?

Even just "anemia in dogs" is sufficient.

The first Google hit goes to a page that lists IMHA right away.

I am sure LLMs already are helpful to do medical research. But this case seems not to be a great example to show their superiority to old fashioned googling.

For smaller LLMs, there is also Gnod Search:

https://www.gnod.com/search/ai

Just enter a question and then select which AIs shall reply.

Not by the definition of money I am using when I refer to "the money supply" or the term "printing money".

I am referring to sum of money the FED has created.

    Wyre Payments, the company’s upstream payment
    processor, terminated SpankPay’s account because
    Wyre’s new payment processor, Checkout.com
    doesn’t allow processing for payments related
    to sexual businesses

SpankPay, Wyre, Checkoutcom ... How does this all work? What does the person who wants to pay a sex worker via SpankPay do? Do they use their usual Visa credit card or is the process different?

Nothing in this description contradicts my view that printing more of a currency will lower its value.

You showed me a currency that lost 80% of its value while the amount of it was doubled. Not surprising. The plums don't change that.

If it is borrowed from the FED, then it is still paid back with printed money.

What does it mean when you say the turkish bank exchanged their Euros for Liras? Where did the Euros go, where did the Liras come from?

Really? I have never heard about the process of banks lending money from the FED.

Do you have a link where this process is described?

The FED lends someone money? Whom do they lend money?

    The M2 money supply in Turkish liras is climbing,
    but not in the same proportion as the rate cuts and inflation

Not? It looks like the money supply doubled over the last 12 months.

Does it really need an expert on Turkey's economy to see a relation between the doubling of an asset and the asset being worth half as much afterwards?

But was it the lower interest rate that caused the inflation or the printing of money?

Over what time did the inflation rate go up from 20% to 80% and by what percentage did the money supply change during that time?

But the "high yield" investments are a zero-sum game. They don't create new money. If you invest in a company and the company is successful, your return is not printed. It comes from the pockets of the companies customers.

The risk-free returns on government bonds are risk free because the government never goes bankrupt. Because it simply prints the money it needs.

One can take a loan from the government?

Increasing the interest rate is supposed to fight inflation.

I often wonder if that really works.

When the risk-free rate rises, doesn't that mean the opposite? That _more_ money will be printed?

When the government says "You give me $100 and I'll give you back more later" - where is this "more" coming from? Isn't it just more debt that will be paid back with more printed money?

    Astronomers Say They Have Spotted
    the Universe’s First Stars

Isn't the size of the universe potentially infinite?

If that is the case, we can see only an infinite small fraction of the stars in the universe. Under that assumption, I find it hard to have a concept of what spotting the universe's first stars could mean.

The oldest stars among those that we can see?

Just because that the messages might be sent end-to-end encrypted from Sue to Joe does not mean Meta cannot read them.

Meta has control over the app Sue uses. So they could send them to Meta unencrypted in addition to sending them to Joe in an encrypted fashion.

Or they just extract the relevant terms:

Sue->Joe: "Hello Joe, I'm so excited! We are going to have a baby! Let's call it Dingbert. You're not the father! Jim is. I hope you don't mind too much!".

Sue->Meta: "Sue will have a baby"

Insta->Sue: "Check out these cute baby clothes!"

Can you elaborate?

which node: /usr/bin/node

node -v: v10.24.0

And for you?

When I install it from https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x then I get:

node -v: v16.15.0

And indeed, then the time goes down by a factor of 10:

time node -e 'console.log(123);'

Now outputs:

    123
    
    real 0m0.058s
    user 0m0.046s
    sys 0m0.013s

When you say "built in Flutter", does that mean there is no backend? How does it get updated with new gifts?

Interesting. Twitter probably has no inflow of USDC, right? So it will have to buy it for dollars. Which will create demand for USDC.

And Polygon is probably a second layer solution based on Ethereum, so indirectly, this will create demand for ETH?

He says he had hundreds of users and hosting costs were a problem. This made me curious how this could be. Testing SSL for a few hundred users should pretty much free these days.

He said Patreon pledges paid for 25% of hosting. So I looked up his Patreon. Turns out he has 3 (!) patreons, together paying $9 per month.

The web is a strange place.

Here comes a fun fact I can add: He is doing better than me. I have a website with about 500000 monthly users and 5 (!) patreons. So while he only had 1% paying users, I only have 0.001% :)

Did I say the web is a strange place? Will this ever change?