dls2016

My old man was a Navy nuke turned instrument tech at Three Mile Island... he can go on and on about steam tables.

I worked there one refueling outage while lazing about after college. Highlights include: sweeping river muck out of the empty cooling towers, scrubbing pipes for x-ray analysis, standing "fire watch" since doors were propped open, taking a smoke break on top of the Unit 2 control room building (that Unit 2), staring at the humongous, partially-disassembled turbine (they may have replaced it that year), spotlighting deer at the end of the island. I also remember a very strange feeling while listening to radiation monitors go crazy when the spent fuel was being removed... if you walked a few dozen feet past the warning tape you were probably dead.

Sounds great!

Stink bugs, gypsy moths, Japanese beetles... I get it. The wave of SLF hit Central PA right as my first grape vines were maturing.

But Tree of Heaven is also an invasive species, native to China like the SLF; it's their favorite host plant. The SLF invasion can be very "spotty". If I eliminate the stand of Tree of Heaven from my yard, the SLF will probably go elsewhere. I don't use pesticides or herbicides of any sort... just some copper fungicide for my fruit trees.

I have one in my yard from previous owners, maybe this is the kick I need to cut it down. Maybe replace it with a native mulberry or pawpaw. Still have a few Trees of Heaven that were covered in spotted lantern flies the last two summers (2021 moreso). Those jerks destroyed my first grape harvest.

> There is another counter balancing force...numerous other opportunities.

The "take it or leave it" attitude strongly insinuates that corporations should be allowed dictatorial control over the manner in which work is completed. There are too many examples to point to which demonstrate the b.s. in this line of thinking.

I may be reading too much into what you wrote, but I never understand the libertarian need to reject government and union control but embrace everything corporate. It's plain weird.

Unions are comprised of large groups of people, and are subject to make the same kinds of "self-serving" mistakes as any other large group of people (like corporations and governments and universities and churches and...).

Which is entirely the point!

Why should we trust a large monopoly like Google to have workers' best interests at heart when there's no counter-balancing force with the same power (be it a union, or trust-busting arm of the federal government)?

Everyone forgets that Google and Apple already colluded to suppress wages! https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...

James Prigioni (one of the videos in the article) inspired me to start an orchard a few years ago. Hoping to get my first apples and plums this year, as well as a very nice amount of berries. Regarding shade-tolerant plants, I planted two kiwiberries last year (male and female) in the same spot where I had some honey berries (not mentioned on list but need 6-8 hours for best production).

Outside the wire, there’s a lot of black raspberry, I think allegheny blackberry and wineberry. I prune many of the black raspberry and wineberry and harvest those as well. The wineberry seems to do particularly well in the shade. Also probably one of my favorite berries.

Same as any profession, the reason for the tests is to sort for compliant employees. Check out the book “Disciplined Minds” by Schmidt.

https://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/01BRrt.html

I don’t understand how natural origin is your “bias” while everyone else is “jumping to conclusions”. There’s a lack of conclusive evidence for either scenario. And politics aside, SARS has leaked before resulting in deaths… no conspiracy required!

How many SARS lab leaks should we tolerate? It has happened before and killed people and with this attitude will continue to happen.

https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/6/news.pdf?ua=1

Not regarding omicron, but SARS viruses have escaped the lab numerous times in the past… even killing people. It’s not like the lab-leak hypothesis is the whackiest idea, some might even say it has a “strong prior”.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/

https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/6/news.pdf?ua=1

Why is a cover up necessary? SARS has leaked from the lab many times before, yet this fact is almost never mentioned in these discussions. The media does plenty of self-censorship.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/

I’m genuinely surprised this (and similar articles) don’t have greater citation counts.

For anyone out of the loop, his paper "The Rendering Equation" is very readable.

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.63....

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Good point, which I didn't appreciate. But I'd argue the pre-programmed gaits are more analogous to "presets" and not samples. To be honest I don't if use of presets falls under the same copyright rules as use of samples.

I finished a NASA SBIR before Thanksgiving with my buddy. Mixed results on the technical end and, after lots of discussions with potential gov/industry customers, we realized the market is probably not big enough if we could productize it.

I learned a lot about myself. Was previously in a stagnant job, in my opinion due to management. After managing my own project I am even more certain this was the case.

Besides my partner, there was no one else to get things done. I wrote the proposal and most of the budget, selected and integrated many hardware components, learned to use a CNC and pour foam and solder 17-pin connectors. Constructed and operated an off-grid sensor site for a few months with great uptime. Lashed together an ETL system with Python and Postgres. Wrote and delivered briefings to potential gov and industry partners who knew A LOT more about the topic than I did. In the middle of the thing we were selected as finalists in a pitch contest, though didn’t win.

Gave me back a lot of confidence lost in that other job. I know I can jump into a relatively new area and do decent enough work as judged by experts in that area. I doubt we’ll get a Phase II (and sort of don’t want it as I’d pay myself dookie for two years with questionable payoff), but will crank through some leet code or something for a few weeks and have a eye-catching project on my resume!

And, to me, creating bones of a character seems a lot like extracting individual hits of a beat. Both allow you to easily re-arrange the original creation. (Let's assume that you own the copyright to the underlying recording in the ReCycle situation, so as to avoid a discussion of the legal implications of sampling music.)

I'm sure if I dug into a professional animation application, I could find a dozen more analogous tools.

I don't see where the legal complexity is. Not that I'm a lawyer, but I can't think of a single case where a tool to automate artistic tedium resulted in some transfer of copyright.

There are thousands of tools out there for automating tedious parts of animation or drawing or video editing or audio production…

Where is the complexity?

For instance ReCycle was a tool written in the 90s for chopping up a sampled beat (waveform) to allow easy re-arranging. (Now the company makes Reason.)

If the authors of this story would like to help out Mr Markovich, perhaps they should write an article that gets to the point.

I believe it's more the rampant insider trading that illustrates their selfishness.

Similar: Libertarian Police Department

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...

F=ma and you need initial conditions on position and velocity to pin down a trajectory… you can always apply a change of coordinates (e.g. ephemeris) to make computation easier in some specific case.

> Carmack’s recent “But here we are” speech resonated with me.

Watching this right now and all I can think about is Microsoft Bob.

Somehow we’re supposed to believe that there’s no white supremacy, that mathematics simply lives in a platonic ideal world where it doesn’t matter that so few African America mathematics phds are awarded each year, for instance.

Thanks, I should really look into this more closely.

Isn't this kind of the core of Section 230 protection?

I said “I’ve been worried…” not that the worry is necessarily rational. The worry is based in what I view as weaknesses in human organizations. But it is also based in scenarios outlined by IPCC, so I’m not sure why you’re going on about “trusting the experts”.

In the IPCC case, the report itself says the evidence rules out less than 1C of warming but can't rule out more than 5C of warming by the end of the century. My views are perfectly consistent with the science... it's simply that the science is very limited when it comes to analyzing "tipping point" scenarios.

But, yes, I also have some qualms about peer review.

> This sounds like an odd negotiating tactic in business (or anything): 'I'll take whatever you say, just please don't leave!'

Remember the Amazon HQ2 race to the bottom?

I've always been worried that estimates and predictions in the IPCC reports, for instance, are much too conservative. The reports are averages, in some sense, of thousands of peer-reviewed publications.

It's hard to get your publication accepted into the scientific mainstream if your predictions make you sound like an alarmist crank.