sandpaper26

This reads like an LLM generated response that simply restates the comment it's replying to

"map of NYC" does not include Staten Island. That's how we like it

This is cool, but more as a demonstration of interesting CSS techniques than optical illusions in my opinion.

Also, interestingly, I seem to be able to force myself to "see through" all of these illusions except for induced gradients, which I can't stop seeing unless I cover part of the screen.

Can someone give an example use case of this? I'm not sure I understand why a very public long string of random characters on a block chain is useful, except as a way to prove an event didn't happen prior to a certain time

Why would the author even make a point about the different seasons between hemispheres and then immediately get it wrong? He tells the reader to "reverse the seasons and add six months to the dates," but doing both of these operations cancels them out. "The summer solstice in June" becomes "the winter solstice in December," which is still the northern perspective.

Beginning to think you're actually incapable of understanding what I'm saying so I'll be as clear as possible.

You said, "the point of a command economy is to reduce individuals freedom." I have provided numerous arguments that a command economy could serve another purpose -- survival in extremis, provision of public goods at a loss, and creation of a communal sense of obligation.

I made no argument about the specific context of this thread. I made no argument that it does not decrease individual freedom. It does, as does any situation where the principal decision maker and executive agent are not the same person. But that is not always the purpose. Your inability to understand your own words and their implications astounds me.

Claiming that you've made an unsupported generalization, and then making one, is not a contradiction; it's hypocrisy.

In any case, your statement still fails to hold water. Consider the ISS: there is central planning and command of the entire economy of the vessel, from its air, water, and food to its electricity and the time of the astronauts themselves. But the 'point' of this command economy is not to limit freedom; it is to keep the astronauts alive. This is the most extreme example, but obviously there are other situations (ships at sea, camping trips with a group, military operations) where centralized control of the goods produced and services performed serve the goods of the group's goals, and have nothing to do with intentional limits on freedom.

Any memoryless continuous function between two Euclidean spaces, I think you mean. The experts-and-manager model would need to be able to do more than that (as do most neural networks).

And part of the reason why single-hidden-layer networks aren't enough even in continuous memoryless Euclidean cases is, again, because of how loss functions work; you're unlikely to converge on a good approximation with very few hidden layers.

After some reflection, it's maybe more accurate to visualize this in reverse: all expert models see the problem and attempt a solution, and then some "manager" model decides which expert model has the best solution and outputs it.

It's not a likely solution given how loss functions work, but in theory a single model could learn to perform exactly the function you describe. When you say "just do X" where X is any function (in this case, a piecewise function), a large enough model could do it.

If you pointed out any contradiction, you did an unfortunately poor job of elucidating exactly where that contradiction occurred. Furthermore, you failed to support your claims even a little bit.

But I hope you sleep well! It's crucial for proper brain function.

It looks like we're working off fundamentally different definitions of central planning, so of course we disagree. Central planning, in my vernacular, does not at all imply government control. It simply means that most decisions are made by some sort of central authority and executed by decentralized agents, rather than plans being made by the agents themselves. This is how most non-franchise businesses operate.

If you require central planning to retain an element of planning by the government in your definition, then I agree, energy is not a good example of this.

Regardless of whether this is a "problem" that gets "resolved," surely you understand you have failed to support your conjecture that my command of the economy is purpose-built to limit freedom.

What if there is no profit? What if I operate at 100% loss, year after year, propped up by the subsidy of a fiat currency, to provide something everyone needs, and don't think the goods and services which sustain life should come at any cost? I am overwhelmingly popular. Nobody is going to seriously compete with me, although they're free to try. Nobody is forced to work for me. Whose freedom have I limited? Doesn't this sound like a lot of things we take for granted every day which are centrally planned?

> I own all factories that can produce X, and am by some benefit of scale now the only one reasonably able to make an X-factory. If I didn't do it, probably nobody could.

> I have command of the X-economy and can mandate the production and distribution of these goods

> The intended point of all this is somehow to deny individuals their freedom to fail to create an X factory, rather than to ensure that X gets created and distributed at all

Right, so let's say Duke Energy is a private profit-seeking company in the eastern US. In many areas it is the only energy company in town. Are you trying to say that, just because it's a private company, it's not centrally planned? That each section of its business is in some sort of free market?

Private corporate ownership and central planning are not mutually exclusive. Texas is maybe the only place in the US where energy production isn't centrally planned, for any reasonably local definition of "central."

On the section about partitioned joins, how is that different from

SELECT sale_dt, name, Sum(quantity) FROM sales LEFT JOIN product ON sales.product_id = product.id GROUP BY sale_dt, name;

Over time, all systems collapse eventually. That sentiment is worthless.

Furthermore, nobody said anything about working hard.

Surely you're not about to claim that all pre-colonial civilizations with functional governments either somehow had free market incentives or collapsed into famine.

"There have never been X" is always an extraordinary claim and you've done a poor job making it.

Interesting note about using "to" for ranges. I see things like "between 15-20" or "from 15-20" all the time at work, and it's never clear whether 20 is included in that range.

Is "from 15 to 20" more clear, without context on any of these? Or is it always context dependent? How about "between 15 and 20"?

The US military's many labs, test sites, software foundries, federally funded research and development companies, and research institutes are laughing at this sentiment. Innovation is routinely commanded -- look at Skunkworks, JPL, heck even the USSR's space program.

> the point of a command economy is to deny individuals freedom.

This is an unsupported generalization. Command systems exist to mandate production and distribution of goods, e.g. to ensure sufficient food production and equitable food distribution. They eliminate the "overhead" of competition and the need for marketing. Look at any self-sufficient commune and tell me their internal economy has anything to do with imposing limits on freedom. Don't let your negative feelings toward certain historical examples cloud your understanding of the matter at hand.

I fear you are confusing the concepts of central planning (which commercial monopolies can and often do have) and government control or ownership.

I used it in grad school a lot, especially when I was running/editing someone else's Matlab code. But if I were to build something on my own, Python would be the way to go.

Currents, on the large scale, are not caused by tides. Surface currents (down to 300m or so) are driven by prevailing winds, and deep currents driven by differences in temperature and salinity (which affect water density), both also affected by Coriolis effect.

Currents are relatively unrelated to tides, and are fairly consistent over time (with some seasonal variation due to differences in hemispheric temperatures).

From [1], "the large scale prevailing winds drive major persistent ocean currents..." Keyword is persistent.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_current

Yes, but I think that's why you're confused. The distance between the individual speakers would be d, not N*d. Because your original comment was about this spacing, that's what I addressed in my answer.

Obviously a larger effective aperture (either physical or synthetic) would be more effective at beam steering.

While there is certainly a difference between near- and far-field approximations, the short answer is that no, the speakers can be closer than one wavelength together in order to have a steerable far field. In fact, the link you provided has a 1/4 wavelength spaced array as one of its first examples. You may be confused here because typically it is harder to make lower frequency waves from a single emitter more directional -- but that has more to do with waveguide and aperture geometry.

There's a wonderful textbook, I think by Griffiths, that starts from the premise that if you learn the math of quantum mechanics first (i.e. how to actually set up and solve relevant systems of equations) then it's much easier to learn the meaning and implications after. It gives you a lot of problems up front to give you a rock-solid grounding in numerical examples, and only in part 2 does he delve into what it all means.

I know this wasn't your point, but because of how orbits and the Earth's rotation works, you can't "hover" above any country that isn't on the equator. At best you can do a highly elliptical orbit that gives you maximum hang time above the target area -- but would also put you maximally far away from the ground if you wanted to deploy anything out of the station. Any realistic scenario involving putting things at specific places on the ground from space in a timely manner involves either flying it from the equator, or using a constellation to ensure persistent coverage.

But I guess my question is this: we're going to spend $XB to send a probe to a distant moon. Once it lands, we get to ask exactly two questions. Question one is confirm/deny organic life (the microscope). Why is question two's ability to provide a meaningful answer so contingent upon a very specific outcome of question one?

Is this a combo of a) the cost of the second question (i.e. the weight and size of sending the DNA sequencer) is fairly small, b) we're confident enough about question one that putting resources toward question two is worth the opportunity cost of asking a different question, or c) we have no other questions that we can reasonably ask for the same amount of resources?

Disclaimer: I am neither a planetary scientist nor a biologist.

Can someone help me understand the desire to put a DNA sequencer on the Enceladus mission? I haven't previously read anything that suggests DNA as being so fundamental to life that it's a safe assumption exotic moon microbes have it. In fact, discovering that exotic moon microbes have DNA exactly like Earth life would seem like the biggest discovery humanity has yet made.

What am I missing?