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conjectures

1,465 karma · joined October 12, 2010

http://refute.me.uk matthew@refute.me.uk
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conjectures··on Does the EU's ban on RT also ban Tor?
The way to read this is:

- they think the restriction is necessary;

- they have considered whether the said rights outweigh the need for the restriction, and believe they do not.

conjectures··on Why I will never buy another Samsung device
Folding screen breaks in the crease. I'm shocked! Shocked. Well, not that shocked.
conjectures··on Audiblegate
Yes, also because then it feels less like you're committing to buying N books per month from a particular vendor.
conjectures··on BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute
> However, you run into the starting problem of needing a trusted authority to verify a rights holder is in fact the rights holder.

Again, this is a different problem. One can imagine a service with a seignorage fee to verify such things when an NFT is minted after which that particular question is settled. The point of it being on a blockchain would then be subsequent ease of sale, transfer etc.

conjectures··on BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute
> Is AI art (eg. VQGAN+CLIP stuff) public domain?

Iirc cdpa 1988 in the UK holds it to be copyright of the authors of the program. But I'd be surprised if the law was a comfortable fit for practice 30 years on, or that it had been tested much in court.

conjectures··on BBC cryptocurrency documentary pulled from air at last minute
Fairly clearly what you 'get' is dependent on the surrounding system. It's one for a legal-crypto startup but you can imagine selling some NFT being linked to a contract for transfer of copyright. Maybe nobody is doing this, idk, but they could. It's also irrelevant for some applications of NFTs, so it would be a design error to expect every NFT system to enforce copyright transfers.
conjectures··on TikTok shares your data more than any other app and it’s unclear where it goes
> On social issues average European and its country is way more conservative than average American.

Dubious.

conjectures··on A virus helped a woman survive a dangerous antibiotic-resistant infection
lol, yeah, I am ancient.
conjectures··on A virus helped a woman survive a dangerous antibiotic-resistant infection
I first saw this on a documentary about 20 years ago. Still hoping :)
conjectures··on IBM’s Watson Health is sold off in parts
> I really think Watson is one of the biggest tech marketing bamboozles of the 21st century.

The weird thing was that to anyone following ML this was detectable bs.

conjectures··on Urea prices increase 270% in 1 year
Depends what the cause is.
conjectures··on Ask HN: How did you learn math notation?
Khan academy and Schaum's Outlines are your friends.

Then some textbooks with exercises (e.g. Axler on lin alg).

The notation is usually an expression of a mental model, so just approaching via notation may cause some degree of confusion.

conjectures··on Ghost Protocols
Could it be the advert for his book 'Be slightly evil: A playbook for sociopaths' by any chance?
conjectures··on American spy hacked Booking.com, company stayed silent
The Wire nailed this with, "I'm not even Greek."
conjectures··on Thousands of phone boxes around the UK will be protected from closure
> had saturation coverage of the cities with lots of 1m^2 blocks of real estate

Tfw learning a new perspective every day :)

conjectures··on REvil Ransom Arrest, $6M Seizure, and $10M Reward
IIRC most of these stories are about bitcoin payments. If they switch to monero, sure that's different.

But then we need to conduct the debate on the basis of different cryptos requiring different policy. Rather than saying crypto->criminal.

conjectures··on REvil Ransom Arrest, $6M Seizure, and $10M Reward
> when you see how it allows criminal to move money anonymously.

Pseudonymously. Cash in a bag is anonymous and very widely used by criminals.

The other big difference is with the public ledger currencies the whole transaction history is visible, including to the authorities. Which is considerably more transparent than the current financial system with shell companies, tax havens etc etc.

If you're familiar with this, why reiterate the old canard?

conjectures··on Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89
> I quite fancy doing a Phd myself one day, but I assume I'd have to do it in "stealth mode" unofficially for a few yrs without a supervisor first

I'd suggest you think very carefully about this first. There's a very high chance the stealth mode work will be non-useful for getting onto a programme. Similar to how working on a 'build it and they will come' approach is generally disadvised for startups. Obviously it depends on how much of a lone genius you are but only you know that ;)

conjectures··on Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89
Ba-dum tish!
conjectures··on Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89
> in most EU you can do your PhD while working.

You really can't at good universities in the UK. At Cambridge we had to get special permission to live more than 10 miles from Great St Mary's. My advisor's advice was that it was near impossible to finish up while working.

Had enough of Americans telling me about their excruciatingly long PhD programmes when half of that time is spent teaching and doing exams which we'd probably call an MSc. Or half of a post-doc position.

3-4 years is a great length of time for a contract where you're subject to such a power imbalance.

conjectures··on Artificial muscles robotic arm with full range of motion [video]
This and op is all wholesome content.

On the criticism, do you think more limited / lab-bound systems will help develop control technology in advance of better muscles?

conjectures··on How to replace estimations and guesses with a Monte Carlo simulation
> If you do error propagation using uncertainty on your parameters, you can get non-sense results.

Only if you do it wrong, generally. Events which are impossible under some hypothesis should have zero probability under a model for it and not be sampled.

conjectures··on When listeners pay attention to stories, their heart rates rise and fall in sync
Not sure we can fault them if it is a justified true headline but we expect that 'other people' can't read.

Per the Wason selection task this is a great experiment to run, because if it isn't true then that's strong evidence many more complex theories relating to sync are likely to be false.

conjectures··on Developer, you may need a co-founder in marketing
I think the lesson is that competence is scarce.
conjectures··on Who Is Being Monitored?
User called fnord posts bait ideas, yeah I'm not biting.
conjectures··on The slow collapse of Amazon’s drone delivery dream
This would actually be a thing.
conjectures··on The surreal experience of my first developer job
> A senior dev in London makes 60-80K

This is just not true. Senior dev at non FAANG could well add 50% to those numbers.

conjectures··on Infrastructure bill cryptocurrency surveillance provision is a privacy disaster
Well, that escalated quickly.
conjectures··on Dlib: Modern C++/Python Toolkit for Machine Learning
Nice to know there's a python wrapper, might make it easier to mock up / do initial validation before heading into the long grass.
conjectures··on MicroK8s – Low-ops, minimal Kubernetes, for cloud, clusters, Edge and IoT
Is this a minikube alternative?
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