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fernly

3,250 karma · joined August 2, 2012

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fernly··on Waterway Map
There are several narrowboaters who record their travels on YT, perhaps the best, certainly one of the first, is "Travels by Narrowboat", with 6 seasons on Prime[1] and the more recent years on YT[2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=travels+by+narrowboat

[2] https://www.youtube.com/@CountryHouseGent

fernly··on SDXL Turbo: A Real-Time Text-to-Image Generation Model
about my 8th prompt, it told me I had used up my usage and offered an option to sign up for "pro".
fernly··on Show HN: Perfect Pitch Puzzle – a musical Wordle daily ear training game
What is the rule for the shifting octave? The first puzzle I got starts with E4 E4 and as soon as I click that on the keyboard (or type EE), the keyboard jumps to octave 3 and I can't enter the next note which should be C4.

Or... is that the game, I should be able to ID the notes irrespective of octave?

fernly··on Autonomous excavator constructs a six-metre-high dry-stone wall
ETH Zurich[1, 2] is fairly famous as an engineering school. Somehow in my mind it is linked with computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra[3], but according to the Wiki he was never based there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Zurich [2] https://ethz.ch/en.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra

fernly··on Whole Earth Catalog (1968) [pdf]
This PDF is from a rather poor scan, with low resolution and lots of moire in the half-tone prints.

The one at TIA is much sharper, altho still some moire.

Interesting that at wholeearth.info the earliest they show is the 1970 issue. But very sharp, photographed in color rather than a monochrome scan.

fernly··on AI real-time human full-body photo generator
It completely ignores details in the "add something" box. I asked for gray trousers, it gave blue jeans. I told it doc martin boots, it continued showing white sneakers. I told it "burgundy sweater", it produced a sweater at least, but pink.

In short, as a tool for an art director or illustrator trying to avoid the expense of a model or a photo shoot, it's fuckin' useless.

fernly··on Laniakea Books: Public domain books for everyone
There are vast quantities of public domain books freely available online, Gutenberg.org, Archive.org, standardebooks.org to name three. The latter in particular emphasizes careful production and proper editing, in effect republishing old books in modern editions, but not on paper.

I guess I can see how a person might want to promote some old book whose present-day relevance is being overlooked, but the utility of actually printing hardcopy seems minimal.

fernly··on Unveiling Ravenchord: A Radical Piano Redesign from Dan Harden
So it doesn't exist? At least, if it did exist, one would think there would be some video. Certainly searching for "ravenchord" on YT nets a lot of unrelated things, including a piano simulator app named "Raven Chord".
fernly··on LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor
Oh man yeah, so many dedicated amateurs building calorimeters and learning that calorimetry is hard as hell to do right... all talking over UseNet. Fun days.
fernly··on Stable Diffusion XL 1.0
It only replies, "module 'diffusers' has no attribute 'StableDiffusionXLPipeline'"
fernly··on Tea as Hepatoprotective Agent: A Revisit
"Sci-Hub is a shadow library website that provides free access to millions of research papers, without regard to copyright,[4] by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

fernly··on Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators from Subreddits Continuing Blackouts
Lemmy.world is doing pretty well off "Rexxitors".
fernly··on Bay Area woman is on a crusade to prove Yelp reviews can’t be trusted
Posted article couldn't trouble to link Ms. Dean's actual channel. Here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/@fakereviewwatch

It's pretty good stuff. She builds a devastating case very methodically, showing how the identical glowing review text is posted to yelp, to FB, and to Google, by different users -- and then traces other reviews posted by those same user ids showing how they are plagiarizing Tripadvisor posts.

fernly··on Scent back in time: how ancient odours can bring the past to life
I looked at their menu[1] and they appear to be missing an important scent: "1960s computer room". This is a not-unpleasant combination of warm electronics (another scent), light lubricating oil, and ink that was characteristic of a mainframe computing center of the 1950s-1980s. You can still smell it when walking into the 1401 computer lab at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. There it is produced naturally by two old mainframes and some punch card equipment in use.

[1] http://www.aromaprime.com/

fernly··on Bytes are all you need: Transformers operating directly on file bytes
Yeah, yeah, we know it is all matrices and numbers. But the Apple group seems to be asserting that there is a difference,

> We also demonstrate ByteFormer's ability to perform inference with a hypothetical privacy-preserving camera which avoids forming full images by consistently masking 90% of pixel channels, while still achieving 71.35% accuracy on ImageNet.

So the way this algorithm smooshes the matrices is "privacy-preserving" because it doesn't actually take in all the bytes. Just some of them. So it is not an invasion of your privacy, if your phone checks all your stored photos for child pornography, because it never actually _looks_ at the images. It just _peeks_ at a bit of them.

fernly··on Bytes are all you need: Transformers operating directly on file bytes
Fascinating philosophical question: if an AI observes a stream of bytes but doesn't decode a camera's output into an image -- and yet can raise an alarm if the camera is aimed at a certain class of subject -- does the AI "see" the camera image?

They should have named the system "Blindsight"[1].

Apple has a serious corporate concern about proposed legal requirements to detect and report child porno[2], while other legal requirements try to protect user privacy. This appears to be an attempt to say, "We can detect your CP image storage without ever actually looking at your stored images."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...

fernly··on Induction of a torpor-like state in rodents by ultrasound
Original paper is accessible: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-023-00804-z

Everything about travel to Mars and medical applications is contained in the final sentence of the discussion section,

> UIH may unlock applications ranging from new medical treatments to long-duration human spaceflight.

From that sentence the livescience reporter spun out a couple thousand words of speculation.

fernly··on 25 things I’ve learned about life the hard way before turning 25
You missed the caveat back in his point #4,

> as long as you don't cross societal norms

fernly··on The Web I Want (2018)
Case in point: http://68k.news/
fernly··on Bard now open to use
To a very specific product-choice question(1) it offered a very detailed and (at first glance) accurate and useful list of alternative products.

OTOH when I asked it to write a specific piece of PyQt6 code it botched it in several ways -- as did chatGPT4, to be fair. That's a niche area in which their training sets are probably deficient.

(1) Name some economical alternatives to the "Sennheiser XSW 1-835 Dual-Vocal Set"

fernly··on Show HN: Presentation Tool for Haters of PowerPoint
Clicking "Try Interactive Demo" gets "Presentation not found."

Bye bye

fernly··on Show HN: Presentation Tool for Haters of PowerPoint
Supposedly smooth integration with stock photo sites but I don't see any kind of link or button or menu item for that.
fernly··on Show HN: Presentation Tool for Haters of PowerPoint
Deleted all the slides, couldn't delete the last, so typed new content on it.

Now, to add a new slide... um how? Add new slide isn't on the popup menu.

Ah, it's command-return (I'm on a Mac)

fernly··on Show HN: Presentation Tool for Haters of PowerPoint
overview and "about" on root URL https://meetslides.com/
fernly··on 4GB of Xerox PARC Archives Online at Computer History Museum
Top link is to the archive portal. Here is a lengthy blog post giving the history of backups at PARC from 9-track through multiple stages to DVD:

https://computerhistory.org/blog/a-backup-of-historical-prop...

fernly··on Codon: Python Compiler
Just for reference,

* Nuitka[0] "is a Python compiler written in Python. It's fully compatible with Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, and 3.11."

* Pypy[1] "is a replacement for CPython" with builtin optimizations such as on the fly JIT compiles.

* Cython[2] "is an optimising static compiler for both the Python programming language and the extended Cython programming language... makes writing C extensions for Python as easy as Python itself."

* Numba[3] "is an open source JIT compiler that translates a subset of Python and NumPy code into fast machine code."

* Pyston[4] "is a performance-optimizing JIT for Python, and is drop-in compatible with ... CPython 3.8.12"

[0] https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka

[1] https://www.pypy.org/

[2] https://cython.org/

[3] https://numba.pydata.org/

[4] https://github.com/pyston/pyston

fernly··on Show HN: What do you think about my metasearch engine?
Not sure if this is a bug or what, running the query "succulent plants" in the Brave browser, it shows an error message to one side,

Error! Engines cannot retrieve results:

brave ( Suspended: too many requests )

fernly··on Atari 800XL Remake
Have we hugged to death? "revive-machines.com refused to connect."
fernly··on Prehistoric timeline in Africa pushed back by more than 10M years
In case anybody else was puzzled, C4 grasses are those that "use the C4 carbon fixation pathway to increase their photosynthetic efficiency by reducing or suppressing photorespiration, which mainly occurs under low atmospheric CO2 concentration, high light, high temperature, drought, and salinity."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_C4_plants

fernly··on I’ve been single all my life
I think the word that Rosenstock was searching for, was "Introvert"[1]. I'm an introvert who had the good fortune to marry another introvert, and live contentedly with her for 40+ years. Following her death a few years ago I reflected on the differences between being part of a couple, and being solitary. There were many.

Health maintenance was one; somebody else in this thread has already commented on married men living longer. It works both ways, too. Each partner keeps tabs on the other, notices problems, encourages them to stick to health resolutions, etc. Plus you both are much less likely to forget things or miss appointments, because the other one is there to say, "Didn't you say..." or "Weren't you going to...?" and so on.

There were other, more subtle but still powerful effects. In general, I and my wife, as a couple, were a bolder, smarter, more adventurous "person" than either of us was alone.

So my advice to Rosenstock would be to seek another dedicated introvert. Of course it's hard to get their attention...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraversion_and_introversion

"Introversion is the state of primarily obtaining gratification from one's own mental life". There is a considerable popular literature on the benefits and drawbacks of being introverted.

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