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I grew up cooking rice on the stove. My mother preferred it this way because she liked crisping the bottom. It's definitely an art. Even picking what kind of rice you want is an art. Even slight variations in your technique can yield wildly different results. How much you rinse the rice changes the gluten content and stickiness, how long you let it soak changes the texture and size. Things like water quality, pot material and heat source make a big difference for smaller amounts.

Being a minute late is too much sometimes. I used to have to "learn" how to cook a new bag because the grains are different sizes, sometimes it's not really brown or white but white-brown or brown-white. The best Japanese rice is in my opinion, from California. I like Koda Farms, their brown rice is just about as close as you can get to the flavor of white rice while having a decent amount of nutrition. Fun fact, the "flower name" for America is 米国. Means rice country. Nowadays people just say Amerika in Katakana which technically has a kanji representation as 亜米利加 but even that has the word rice in it. China calls us 美利坚合众国, which means beautiful country.

It's not difficult to eyeball what it takes to make good rice. Quick and dirty rule is having just enough water to cover the rice. I just stick my pinky in and measure up to the second phalange. You basically just heat until it boils, quickly escape the air, release to mid heat and then keep an eye on it for about 10-15 minutes without opening the lid. If your technique is good, you can kind of estimate how long it takes on a linear scale for cups to cooking time. A clear lid helps, it'll just look right. Key thing to do is take your rice spatula and just carve out the edges when it's done so you're getting a more consistent mix.

Later in life, I got the 1.8L Neuro Fuzzy Rice Cooker by Zojirushi. I fell in love with the name, which is apparently from artificial intelligence. Not sure how they come up with that.

Here's the thing: sure, it's easy to make one kind of rice and costs almost nothing to do. With a dedicated rice cooker though, I can make any kind of rice, in any amount, without having to think about it. The inside of the pot has markers for your rice quantity and water volume for each type. I have the larger cooker, so it kind of takes longer (it consistently takes one hour to cook about 3-4 cups, which is simple to plan around). There's a quick cook setting which makes no discernible difference in consistency. Every time I turn it on, it sings a cute little song and then sings another one when it's done. I find it utterly delightful.

Here's why you get a rice cooker. Sure, you can make rice in like 15 minutes on the stove. But then what do you do if you have leftovers? Put them in the fridge where it gets stale? With a rice cooker, I make 5-6 cups at the beginning of the week, and I can leave it there for at least 72 hours and it stays incredibly fresh. I wouldn't recommend it, but I've left it in there for 4 days. Constant heat kills any bacteria or mold that might take.

I don't have to worry about my rice technique. I don't have to worry about storing and heating leftovers. I can make as much rice as I want and save myself time and effort throughout the week. If I wanted to be even more efficient, I could let the rice soak overnight, and set a timer for it to start cooking right before I wake up. It's one less thing to worry about, and I can time all of my meals around it so that everything's ready at the same time.

You can also make other things besides rice such as pancakes or pasta in it. Pasta's a bit more difficult, but I've made perfect pancakes in this thing.

Highly recommend Zojirushi for their excellent insulation products.

The color of plants and the statistics of light is fascinating.

Tangentially related, I was developing a CV app for farmers in an early stage weed startup right before legalization in California so they could monitor analytics on the health of their sprouts as well as identify strains. The camera conditions were all over the place and data preprocessing stage was an absolute nightmare. We tried everything from filters to background removal, augmentation techniques through transformations, noise induction for generalization - nothing really improved the baseline models because the photos honestly sucked. Farmers ignored our guidelines on lighting and framing and format and kept sending in inconsistent garbage.

I had a eureka moment. What if we sent each of the farmers a little piece of square cardboard painted magenta? The idea was that the increase in contrast would allow us to process the leaf contour a little bit better. The fact that the card was square meant some farmers even took the time to take the plant indoors so they could frame it better within the edges. Data quality improved dramatically. It worked.

Unfortunately legalization did not work out as we planned, farmers disappeared and the market was monopolized by corporations, there wasn't any interest in helping develop strains locally.

Doesn't surprise me but the study also seems to be just trying to measure academic achievement.

I mean sure, I'm incredibly skeptical of "baby Mozart" approaches to music. Certainly starting young and practicing early goes a long way towards being successful in anything. Discipline in any field builds discipline towards others.

We can go on and on about the mathematical nature of music but I would argue it's easier for people to do it by not thinking about those things and being in touch with how it feels.

I'm kind of bothered that anything to do with IQ these days is pursued by researchers or is given a fair shake by our dear readers at Hacker News.

Stop trying to max your kids stats. It's incredibly dehumanizing. I get that we all want children to have the best opportunities, but maybe it'd be a more equitable situation if we stopped reducing ourselves to a numbers game.

Maybe they'll be smarter when they learn to do things they feel passionate about and not conditioned to perform like a trained monkey. We already have enough performative identity for careerism in high school kids. Maybe intelligence and success comes from knowing yourself, and not from being told to do things because you get points?

Sorry parents! An essential part of culture and discipline of art and pleasure might not be inherently advantageous to your child's ability to fill out tests so while you're at it make sure they never do anything for themselves beyond the sole purpose of getting in somewhere just so they can realize they don't know who they are!

Edit: Also the use of "put down the banjo". Let's talk about that. This is a study done in Japan and the UK. Are they even playing the banjo? Nothing wrong with the banjo, banjo's great. But specifically going with the banjo as their title and image lends itself to a specific tone for some readers. Not exactly what some people would consider "intellectual" music for vague reasons in class and race perhaps. I'm detecting a bias here against the "utility" of folk music. I wish they'd link the actual paper. Did the researchers give a bunch of banjos as part of a controlled study? I'm so sure a lot of well-to-do parents in Tokyo and London are feeling burned by having to keep up with the competitive nature among children in banjo culture.

> Floating point? In MY deep learning?

It's more likely than you think.

Maybe not the most appropriate place for an "X? in MY y?" meme despite its relatively innocuous presentation

It's kind of gross so I'll refrain from linking it

Interesting! How did you construct your network builder? I've had to use a combinatoric approach or constraint solver to validate layer compatibility but hit a wall trying to generalize it

Maybe not books per se, but I often find more exhaustive treatments and variations on a proof in survey papers.

Katamari is a Japanese term used for "clump" or "clod".

It is basically what dung beetles do. They roll things up until they're bigger. The bigger the ball, the faster it grows from size. Like making a snowman.

I'm referring to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEAP-4iUirY

To answer your question, in this sense: I mean to say that the more space debris there is hurtling through our orbit capturing other space debris, the more likely we are to end up with micrometeroids building up mass, momentum and velocity until we just end up with an extremely hostile environment for our satellites and vehicles.

Debris in orbit has a finite limit until we're then trapped on this planet. Micrometeroids and space trash will katamari until we then have to start thinking about blowing significant parts of our geocentric orbit. Warfare in space is a negative-sum game for every player.

Slightly relevant, possible spoilers:

SPOILERS BELOW: Here is some lore on the Destiny universe. https://i.imgur.com/Nank6YH.jpg

Sorry, I tried to give this submission the benefit of the doubt on the issue of feminine voices as the default standard for voice assistants and the outright use of "sexy" as clickbait is egregious enough.

Seriously, the only "sexiness" there is to this is the individual preference with two lines of code:

>"She speaks smooth enough. Turning up a bit of the pitch will make her voice cuter"

Was that really worth being part of the title?

We already have outstanding issues of misogyny in machine learning, data science and computer science writ large.

The title implies some kind of golfing being done here as if API copypasta constitutes an achievement.

I'd be more forgiving but the fact that this made it to my front page with any idea of sexualizing existing content and technology when we are tirelessly trying to demonstrate gender equity in the field frustrates me altogether.

This is the largely case for the Japanese Buddhism as well in sync with Chinese Taoism.

The fifth element is synonymous with "void" or "sky", ie "空".

For a slightly abstract and colorful philosophy of martial arts, you may enjoy Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Void. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Five_Rings

It is more related to Aether in its Sanskrit origins. "आकाश"

If you're willing to make a linguistic leap, you could argue that "nothingness" or "無" constitutes the essential foundation of modern Japanese philosophy or philosophical Buddhism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kyoto-school/

From the Cambridge seminars:

    WITTGENSTEIN: I won’t say anything which anyone can dispute. Or if anyone does dispute it, I will let that point drop and pass on to say something else.

    TURING: I understand but I don’t agree that it is simply a question of giving new meanings to words.

    WITTGENSTEIN: Turing doesn’t object to anything I say. He agrees with every word.

    TURING: I see your point.

    WITTGENSTEIN: I don’t have a point.

Now is the age of splinternets and digital sovereignty and social media populism. No mention of the Digital Iron Curtain?

I do not think it is hyperbolic at all that I immediately just felt the hand move a full minute towards midnight.

This is suspiciously underwhelming use of an exploit.

Fascinating. I've seen political organizations using a zcash address for collecting donations, is that technically any better? I'm aware that creating bit tumblers for laundering currencies in cycles is largely out of practice now, has there been any recently development towards traceless transactions? How does is traceability compatible or incompatible with the process of verifying transactions via chaining blocks?

It was the top transaction block at the moment I checked!

1JustReadALL1111111111111114ptkoK 0.00000666 BTC

1TransactionoutputsAsTexta13AtQyk 0.00000667 BTC

1YouTakeRiskWhenUseBitcoin11cGozM 0.00000668 BTC

1forYourTwitterGame111111112XNLpa 0.00000669 BTC

1BitcoinisTraceabLe1111111ZvyqNWW 0.00000670 BTC

1WhyNotMonero777777777777a14A99D8 0.00000671 BTC

bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh 0.00001337 BTC

Can anyone explain what happened in this block of transactions to me?

Is it significant at all that this is happening on US Tax Day?

Right, the decision to use ultrasonic pairing is actually cogent since it doesn't involve hopping onto Wi-Fi or competing with Bluetooth devices.

I don't think it's outrageous to claim average speakers can comfortably emit 20-20khz.

I don't think it's outrageous to claim that this is the comfortable range for most adults who experience some kind of hearing loss over time with age.

Children most definitely can hear above 20khz. I at least have the anecdotal experience ("most" here is keyword to argue against) that I experimented with testing ultrasonic frequencies on multiple devices to see if audio file formats made any discernible difference in range performance. This involved "swooping" a frequency starting at 20hz to as high as you can emit it (which usually starts to sputter in consistency around 18kHz.

In many ways it's no different from what Bluetooth already does and the range of security issues with it, so I'm not really sure where the meat of my complaint arises from.

I definitely notice that any jammers or sound-cancelling devices interfere with my connectivity though. And I can imagine that if that's the case here, people may not be able to use their favorite noise-cancelling headphones with this monitor.

I think from an engineering perspective for compatibility, probably not using Bluetooth is good to separate concerns? In my experience Bluetooth is iffy, randomly connects all the time, requires fussy configuration and sometimes imposes maximums on how many devices can be connected (like if I use 5 bluetooth devices it turns off my wifi, not sure how that happens but now I know). I absolutely hate using it to pair with anything.

Ultrasonic pairing?

Okay... from TechCrunch: "not Bluetooth".

Also it says it emits from "18 and 22 kHz" which "most people can't hear". Um, most adults. 18-22 kHz is DEFINITELY audible to teenagers and children. Or how about a dog! On the flipside, insects don't like hypersonic frequencies either, maybe I'll get less bites. Anyone remember mosquito ringtones blaring during class where the teacher would not even notice? That's how they get kids to quit loitering. So that might be a benefit for the WFH parent. This is what they use to see babies so imagine what it can see beyond your camera.

I already know from using ultrasonic devices that I can hear this. They're loud and sound weird.

From my understanding, frequencies in that range also interfere with hearing aids, monitors, and smart devices. In my head I'm like oh man, a bigger microphone array is going to make harvesting that audio data so much sweeter, that's a huge value proposition! If those devices are vulnerable to 'dolphin' attacks, or inaudible commands, this is yet another security concern.

I wonder if they'll include support to map the acoustics and layout of your room through sound detection for projection optimization. Scary and enticing. This seems like a reasonably well designed tool that can either make my life more productive or help destroy it simultaneously. I mean if it's covered as an office expense, it's better than opting for webcam, monitor, microphone, speakers in a more svelte package.

Apologies if this comment seems par for the norm to hate on Zoom. I'm actively trying to give them the benefit of the doubt to balance discussion here, but some of these choices are specifically bad.

That's my understanding as well, that Platinum is more of a sweet spot compared to Titanium or Gold for these tradeoffs.

The future is now, I mean in 2016 there were conferences about how easy it is to turn off utilities with a USB key on the ground or checking if they run Windows 98 in their control plants. By law, the power network is listed online to combat climate change and pollution.

In the sense that information has always dictated war, has the world really changed since WW2 in this regard?

Point taken, and especially with recent development in the ongoing war for whether or not discrimination against trans patients is legal, it's probably safer to bet towards situations where nobody even sees you.

The whole question of will they cover it, won't they cover it, will they sabotage me, won't they sabotage me is not a silly question anymore if federal protections for patients are increasingly politicized, just looking at the past few months alone. I was only able to push for certain policies in what is covered or offered at all through my provider by basically defeating their arguments with "I won't be your patient next year if the government makes it okay for you to deny me. You need to offer these services now or I will have to seek care outside your system and make it more expensive for you to care of anyways. Work with me here, I'm trying to not die."

This might seem overtly politically correct and I'm actually a bit surprised in myself for saying this, but have you considered changing instances of male/men to just generic families? (e.g., We help families have children vs we help men become fathers).

I will state up front, I'm not trying to police language, just pointing out that deciding specific keywords up front affects how people find your business online or how it's talked about through referrals.

1) Should you ever decide to expand your business to include eggs, the importance of branding and search results is much more efficient by targeting families instead of retrofitting the keywords.

2) Say for instance, the mother is just as interested in their partner's sperm as the "man" is. Here gendered language can be both useful and detrimental to specific targeting campaigns based on the keywords.

3) Storing sperm is beginning to reach wider availability for transgender women under some plans. Most forgo the process altogether, because guess what, most transwomen suffer economic discrimination as it is and can't afford it. Would you ever consider an LBGTQ-centric campaign towards offering assistance for this community? I think it's a really great idea since I'm already going to be referring your business to my community since you're significantly more affordable but obviously I have not tried you yet. There's also people with sperm who don't identify as men.

Point is, I'm only hesitant to refer because some people are more sensitive at being gendered through a service. I'm not trying to be all like, "hey MAN, you should totally freeze your sperm here, DUDE" while someone is just beginning transition. Not saying that's what you have said or done in anyway, but having not experienced your service I can only be concerned at the possibility. No pun intended, more sterile language that is more focused on families is a better story and more inclusive of various backgrounds. I'd have to go through your customer journey before I'd make any reasonable recommendations to my community but I'm already keen on referring you simply because you seem the most economic and high quality. Just the option alone to be able to self-service and not dealing with anybody instead of going to a clinic where there's even the possibility that they might oscillate between whether you should deal with male or female employees and then offer you pornography mostly targeted for straight men is a jarring experience that is fixed by your service.

From my own shopping experience with these services and consulting with others, the amount of effort it takes to compile statistics on price and storage duration from competitors is difficult. Good job making it obvious and easy to digest.

Your price points are definitely attractive considering most of the people I know jump for a $5000-6000 option at a local clinic that only stores for average 10 years. You're doing a lot of good things here. The branding feels warm and family-friendly versus the clunky and tragic design of most clinics. I definitely get the feeling I'm shipping something extremely sensitive with a responsible entity that isn't just going to disappear overnight.

Good job! Best of luck to you in your endeavors. Seems extremely thoughtful.

Generally I think going jumbo is good for cooling, because honestly the weight for this build probably doesn't matter as I imagine it's not getting transported often.

Conversely, this is not a build for overclocking per se. However I think it's a safe assumption we are running at capacity of over 90% for multiple days or weeks even. If batches run into over a month, probably time to get a server rack instead?

It is worthwhile to note you're not going to save any money in efficiency for computation you don't use.

I'm a bit concerned the build uses a Gold Certified power supply unit?

Even for cheaper builds for non-ML workstations I would still only use Platinum and nothing less. I've been told Titanium is excessive but I mean I leave these things on for a while and power is expensive.

For the DIY enthusiast or the WFH researcher, also the amount of heat involved can be a considerable cost in cooling or utility cost which varies substantially by floor of a building. It's probably not good, but not that bad to aircool this many GPUs as I've done in the past but it definitely means I'm paying a lot for A/C in the summer but almost nothing in the winter.

I think Smerity even said he heated his small bedroom through the San Francisco winter off of one GPU while researching YOLO.

Point: These things get hot. They require a lot of electricity. You should be concerned about a good PSU even for smaller builds. My energy cost for a 6GPU rig ran me about 1/3 of my total rent for a small apartment. That's electricity BEFORE I calculated my A/C bill which was separate and also substantial. My landlord hates me because I initially talked him into including it with my rent.

All in all, it still makes sense to keep investing in local workstations, on-premises builds. No security concerns about a cloud, no futzing around with integrated notebooks, you own it you control it, and the price point up front is extremely attractive compared to base rates for cloud computing even on specialized hardware like a TPU.

The numbers I come up with for batches still have a wide gap of several thousand USD most of the time, and then there's how much time it takes and how likely their service breaks.

So kudos for the person who put in the effort to put this together and share. Any and all efforts towards making ML/DS affordable and DIY rises the tide for all boats.

Question to the audience: Does anyone build GPU rigs like this for cryptocurrency anymore? I was only able to build a workstation once the price for GPU cards crashed.

Media outlets are already using deepfake as a general term for photographic manipulation. You might recall that video of Joe Biden making lewd gestures on Trump's twitter. That was reported as being a deepfake but is in fact just using generic pinching technology.

To expand on the parent comment's point, this is most likely using some variant of StyleGan2 which has plenty of endpoints on the Internet to make it easy for someone to just download a face for free.

However, they all have this uncanny StyleGAN glare. And there are still artifacts. Quality's improving though. Scrubbing it of EXIF data doesn't really deter detection.

Go ahead, try posting some StyleGAN avatars to Facebook or something. Your account will get flagged immediately for doing so. There's already a robust amount of interest in "deepfake" detection, and there are methods to fingerprint or adversarial attacking your machine learning models with data poisoning so you can reasonably determine a dead giveaway. Kind of like putting a dye pack in your bills.

What is NOT helping, is how media outlets can drum up some cheap panic over the "end of truth" or insinuating how the barrier for disinformation campaigns is lowering. Both statements can be valid but I think we are teaching the wrong lesson having people told they can't trust anything rather than to establish what trust means to them in the first place.

I'm impressed by how thoughtful the design and implementation is. Good work! I look forward to seeing this grow.

What's the idea behind calling it Primo?