fumblebee

This is cool! Thanks for sharing. I've played around with some random Colab notebooks that have surfaced on HN but the results have been underwhelming compared with some of the polished AI Art I've seen in the wild. Some questions that popped into my head:

What's your setup (Cloud/Colab/Custom hardware)? Did you borrow the code in its entirety or is there a secret source? How long did it take you to fiddle around with the hyper-parameters until you were happy with the results? How many iterations did you settle on before stopping? Thanks!

Revolut just launched the same feature this week [1]

[1] https://www.revolut.com/payday

I learned more from educational YouTube videos than I did during my (very expensive) lectures at university.

I expect with the quality of videos that are now being churned out, that the "education gain coefficient" between old style lectures and brilliantly produced video content would only have increased further. (Of course this only works in practice if you're engaged with the video, which is also true for lectures).

Non-paywall link: https://outline.com/F43cPG

Ear-plugs for when I sleep. I used to wake up at the slightest noise, which made me extra groggy the next day. Now I can sleep soundly.

Eye masks are far cheaper than new black-out curtains.

I rate Tyler Cowen's (the author of the linked post) podcast highly because his questions are so incredibly well crafted.

(Incidentally, I just found this article on the blog which suggests a set of guidelines for asking high quality questions. [1])

However, the issue I take with his interviews is that, because the questions are often pre-meditated, the conversation oftentimes fails to flow smoothly as tangential questions follow an interviewee's answer. It sometimes feels more of a Q&A than a conversation.

[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/06/ho...

> I always say that important scientific discoveries arise from better tools.

This is something I hadn't thought about before, but it makes total sense.

When I read that, my first thought for current technological toolage that might lead to new discoveries is the massive transformer language models that Open-AI / EleutherAI / others are building.

Some basic extrapolation on how-far-how-soon technology like GPT-X has come suggests that future versions could (should?) be revolutionary for knowledge discovery.

I wonder how advanced technology would be today if the Greeks realised the potential of this mechanism at the time.

* 200 AD: the industrial revolution.

* 300 AD: cars, the radio.

* 350 AD: the first electronic, programmable computer.

* 370 AD: live TV, first human steps on the moon.

* 380 AD: the internet, satellite communication.

* 400 AD: smartphones, laptops, social media.

* 450 AD: (good) immersive VR, CBDCs, a GPT type of AI wins a Nobel prize, space tourism.

* 500 AD: nuclear fusion, personal quantum computers, humanoid robots, simulation VR a la The Matrix.

* 2021 AD: we’ve probably solved the Fermi Paradox — humanity died out long ago.

> “Judge Norris said he was giving Sonderman the maximum sentenced allowed by law under the statute — 60 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release, but implied that his sentence would be far harsher if the law permitted.”

Sadly, it appears the judge’s hands were tied.

I find browsing used-bookstores tranquil and comforting. I've spent far too long in my life craning my neck looking at books in the quiet maze of these stores.

Incidentally, as someone who tends to move around a lot, this has also been a burden. Once I've bought a second-hand book and spent hours reading it, I find it very difficult to abandon it (especially if I enjoyed it). So whenever I move from a city, I inevitably spend a small fortune on funnelling them back to my Ma's house.

When I finally buy a place I plan to gather them all and have my own little library of used books, from all round the world.

This is where fintech has been headed for some time -- a bundle of complimentary products all in a single app (payment provider + bank + loan company + crypto + etc.).

Square are demonstrating this here for business, some Chinese finance apps went down this road years ago, Revolut are billing themselves as a "financial super app".

There's tremendous advantage in having everything in one place. Each individual product can be 70% as good as best in market, but the value-add by having everything bundled in one place is huge.

My experience with dinosaur banks (specifically HSBC and TSB) has been one of pure frustration. I can generally tolerate some friction in the system, but just dumb things like "to change your address we need to send you a letter that you need to sign and return to us" make using the dinosaur banks totally radioactive to me relative to using the new generation of fintech apps.

Does watching an anti-procrastination video course count as procrastination?

But in all seriousness, great work!

I also had to change my Apple ID country once — the system blocked me because I had credit left on my account after applying a gift card. The amount remaining on my account? 4 cents.

I love atlasobscura's content, but why can't I easily opt out of cookies?

I would pay good money for a solution to the cookies popup problem.

Maybe, hopefully. But this paragraph suggests that he thought the police were onto him before he turned himself in.

> According to the news reports, the suspect said he had moved the paintings there in May after reading that the police might be onto him.

The article sub-heading "It’s good for your mental and physical health [...]", should probably be caveated with *though this is less clear in places with high air pollution [1], where many people around the world dwell.

[1] https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a33367315/exercise-health-...

So, a social media site for the 0.1% of people in the world who'd be willing to pay for it.

Count me out.

Twitter isn't Twitter without the wide range of people it attracts, for better or worse.

I fell victim to this a couple of years back! Sometime later I discovered I'd inadvertently published a public dashboard that I really shouldn't have.

I once wrote a script to record the Tinder profiles I swiped left and right on, then fine tuned a CNN using the data and integrated it into an automatic swiper. It swiped right on my now partner!

A lot of commenters are hating on the article -- I fail to see why. Whether all the ideas are good or not is up for debate, but putting control in the hands of users for combatting dark patterns and dampening addictive habits at source is only a good thing. During the pandemic I've seen my daily phone usage soar, I wish I had some form of iOS 15 Humane.

What a depressingly resentful and scornful take against op’s well reasoned comment. Taking a position is fine, shouting through your keyboard is discouraged.

Not all news is made equal, though maybe you implied this by using the term mainstream.

There's a profound difference in what you get out of a curated editorial in the Economist and the talking heads on Fox News.

I'd argue the former has tremendous value and isn't presented in a way that pokes at our anxieties.

> ... I finally feel good about having access to my photos.

I only realised how much joy I get from being able to access my photos when I wasn't able to anymore. Back in ~2012, I lost several years worth when the hard-disk on my Acer laptop failed and I didn't keep any backups. Devastating. Backing up is something I learned the hard way.

Unfortunately, the issue then is that I'll run out of local storage. Meaning the only option is to spend much more on an iPhone with more storage.

iCloud is a thorn in my side. When it comes to downloading my photos on demand, I've found it to be infuriatingly slow. (The high quality versions of photos are stored on iCloud, and only if I want to view, edit, or send one are they then downloaded).

Meanwhile I can stream a 4k YouTube video just fine.

Either sort it out, or give me more local storage space for a price that isn't exorbitant!

Google owns up to 10% of SpaceX [1].

Honest question, could that have had any bearing on the decision to award this cloud partnership, or is Google’s part-ownership inconsequential here?

Note - I couldn’t track down a precise ownership figure, but along with Fidelity they invested $1bn back in 2015.

[1] https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2015/01/21/te...

Red flags don't mean much. Building AML models is hard, and often yield an overwhelming number of false positives that arise from an over-reliance on those indicators. Sure, a positive prediction might lead to a SAR, but unfortunately that doesn't mean much either. In the majority of cases it will lead to the customer being off-boarded, in which case they'll simply go to another bank with more lacklustre controls. A SAR won't lead to a prosecution unless it sparks a new case in law enforcement (rare due to resource constraints), or whether it supports part of an ongoing case.

Sadly, that money will probably be laundered.