austinjp

"It's not stupid if it works" :)

Nice. Here's a version with snow falling down instead of up.

clear ; while true ; do tput cup 0 0 ; tput ri ; head -n 1 /dev/random | cut -c "1-$COLUMNS" | tr -c '.,x*oO@'$'\n' ' ' ; done

It won't get cheaper, the non-ad version will get more expensive.

Some speculation in this thread about the causes of tinnitus. There are several, including hearing loss, which (as someone here points out) possibly produces tinnitus in a manner similar to how limb loss can cause phantom limb pain. The nervous system isn't like plumbing, it's a tangled web of self-adjusting feedback loops. Once an input is severed, an area of the tangled web may lose an important calibrating input. Neurons don't emit "noise signals" (or "pain signals" or whatever) they just depolarise in response to stimulation, and altered calibration alters which neurons depolarise and how often. The frequency and number of certain neurons depolarising is experienced as noise (or pain or whatever) by the conscious human they belong to.

Good talk here[0] BUT BE WARNED, I recall* that there's a high-pitched squeal during this talk as a demonstration of what tinnitus is like for done people. It's extremely nasty especially if you're wearing headphones.

Incidentally, the self-adjusting feedback loop model helps explain why things like wiggling your jaw can alter the experience of tinnitus. Due to wiring issues, sensory input from muscles and joints can get mixed in with the auditory inputs. A similar mechanism (which isn't fully understood) helps explain why, for example, people having a heart attack can experience pain in the left arm. There's nothing wrong with the arm, the normal sensory signals from the arm are mixing with those from the heart.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=XGq3MXQlRJs

* Can't verify right now, trusting my memory.

Mochi and red bean paste I already enjoy, so I was curious about 卵かけご飯 but frankly it's just made me consider egg fried rice as a legit breakfast option :)

I appreciate the frank honesty, I'll be taking the same approach :)

I really like roadmap diagram on that site. It gives a good overview of progress and where work is required, so an order of delivery can be inferred.

Nice, can you share info on the rpi setup?

A piece of sound art in which Alvin Lucier repeatedly played back and re-recorded his voice in a room, until his words became completely unintelligible, and only resonant frequencies of the room remained. It's a pivotal piece of minimalist music.

Edit to add link to YouTube of the recording: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fAxHlLK3Oyk

I can still see these examples as auto-completed conversations between two "people".

Love it. A small piece of feedback: On mobile, the page jumps after the electron cloud PNG loads. This causes the dreaded 'tapping something I didn't mean to tap' effect. Could you set the height of the space before the image loads to prevent the jumping, or something similar?

Not sure I follow. You disagree? Why, on what basis, etc...?

Whenever I read about sun exposure, I remember tWilliam McElligott who accumulated sun damage on one side of his face after being a delivery truck driver for 28 years.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/An-authentic-photo-delin...

This is reductio ad absurdam.

Planetquake. Or just quake.

Incidentally, Sol isn't an 'official' name for our sun. The term 'solar power' is more like a brand-name that's been genericised.

Oh well, it seems we're talking past each other. I had no intention of moralizing at you, and no intention to suggest my experience is universal. Not at all, it's a grumpy interpretation. We see the same things and interpret them differently. I may be an introvert too, but still see automated checkouts as alienating and exacerbating social ills.

> Where I see self-checkouts, I see customers choosing them voluntarily

Yeah there are confounding factors at play here, such as there being many automated checkouts but only one with a person.

> staff ... "training" less-savvy customers to use them.

Training the customers is one of the things I find most depressing. From the supermarket's perspective, customers have apparently accepted that they must do unpaid work that used to be done by paid staff. Scanning items, typing in product codes when the scanner doesn't work, looking up loose goods in a catalogue and weighing them, responding to beeps and prompts, etc. And even better, watching advertising. Sure, these are all 'first world problems', but societies should be improving their citizens' lives rather than whittling away their autonomy. It might be just a papercut, but it's death by a billion papercuts.

> I'd much rather minimize my interactions with strangers while shopping.

Social isolation is a major and growing problem in western societies (see my other comment). People choose the path of least resistance even if it's long-term suboptimal, and minimising interactions with strangers seems like an unfortunate choice. Obviously, I'm making a bunch of assumptions that might not be fair, and you have my sympathies if your neighbourhood is full of arseholes :)

Orthogonal to what? :) Loyalty schemes, staff reduction, staff deskilling, foisting unpaid work onto customers, etc etc are all perfectly aligned.

I'd disagree with your point about effective nagging. A human might get the message, particularly if they know you. An automated checkout never will, every transaction is identical.

Obviously my perspective is very "bah humbug". However, there are several major issues in modern western societies, including social isolation, spiralling cost of living, and the ongoing death of the highstreet. I see automated checkouts as another nail in the coffin. Melodramatic perhaps, but there it is. I'd happily exchange an automated supermarket for a string of corner shops run by flawed humans.

"Solved" seems an odd way to view self-checkout. I find it a hideous experience. Everyone is irritable, staff and shoppers. The handful of staff have fewer tasks that involve any degree of skill, so they are reduced to simply keeping the machines working. Any issue is addressed just pressing the relevant button combo to resume regular function. If it can't be solved, maybe just close the till and move the customer to a different machine. Perhaps in busy periods the job might involve chivvying customers to available machines while calling "cash or card? Cash or card?"

Customers are either bored or frustrated. Beeping your own shopping is like doing unpaid work, without even the distraction of some inane chat with a checkout jockey. And don't forget to tap your loyalty card so you can get ripped off with crumbs that are worth far less than the data you're handing over.

I actively avoid the whole degrading, isolating circus. It's not "solved", quite the opposite: it's ripe for 'disruption'.

Bah :)

Oh dear, far more damning. Thanks for the links.

The post you link uncovers apparent frauds in research from 2012 and 2020. Ariely's reply says that he received the data in good faith, and that it was provided by private insurance companies. He also thanks the post authors for their work.

This doesn't paint him as a fraud, but as a victim of fraud.

A term to pop into PubMed or similar would be "non-specific effects". There's a ton written about it.

Just FYI, the ASCII art on the website front page is broken on mobile, it's all very misaligned. Firefox on Android.

This conflates the ends and the means. They're different and both deserve consideration.

Some reading:

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_end_justifies_the_mean...

https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_the-business-ethics-work...

For those unaware, Libet's experiments appeared to show that conscious decisions to move a body part follow unconscious preparation to perform the movement. One interpretation is that consciousness is merely an 'observer' of the unconscious, and hence free will is an illusion.

I'm sure there are better places to read refutations of Libet, both philosophical and neurophysiological, but a quick search pointed me to this, which was interesting:

https://neurosciencenews.com/libet-free-will-23756/

I can't watch the videos in tfa right now, but it sounds from parent's comment that at least the first is worth watching.

It is legit, but it's rare and old-fashioned.

"Highly optimised" depends what you're optimising for.

It's a shame that "Marxism" is a trigger-word for some folks, because there's been a lot of writing on this problem for decades.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production

AI and associated tech are currently implemented as an accelerated form of industrialisation. The rich (the overwhelming majority anyway) have always sought to consolidate the security of their advantage. The multipliers in this equation are growing exponentially, and as 'the means of production' grow more powerful and all-encompassing, there is no reason to believe that today's tech CEOs have any incentive to relinquish their advantages.

Here are a few options to consider. First, Google Scholar. If you're logged into Google it will make a handful of recommendations on its front page. I've not really paid attention to how good the recommendations are. It says they're based on your Google Scholar record and alerts, so I guess you'll need both/one of those for it to work.

https://scholar.google.com

Second, Scopus from Elsevier (a company that plenty of people dislike). You'll need to create an account, and I don't know if non-academic accounts have the same access as academic ones. It has a new "researcher discovery" function I've not used so again can't vouch for its quality. You can set up various alerts apparently, although again I've not used them.

https://scopus.com

If an author is registered on ORCID you can check their works, but it doesn't appear that anything like RSS feeds are available, unfortunately. Plenty of journals have RSS feeds, but you'll have to hunt them down yourself.

https://orcid.org

Finally, you might want to check out other platforms and preprint servers, which might have better alerts etc. Try OSF, which hosts a bunch of preprint servers, and also provides hosting for documents and files that accompany published papers. However, it looks like there isn't much comp-sci stuff on there.

https://osf.io

I guess you could have a look at figshare.com too for similar reasons.

Just build a second machine to power the first!

Possibly a tangent, but I'd suggest that happiness and suffering are not opposites, so aren't both "x" in your function.

Someone might choose to maximise their personal happiness even knowing that their personal suffering would also increase (or even be maximised). Trite example: prisoner released from jail who sets out to kill the person who double-crossed him, knowing that he'll be re-incarcerated or even executed.

Happiness and suffering might be related but they're (somewhat) independent.