woko

It is mentioned in the README that there is a Gimp plugin for Christian Wolf's binarization. This could be handy at times.

Otherwise, the C++ code on Github requires converting images to PGM format.

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The page is in French, so I will mention that the Python script is here: https://www.vvpix.com/gmp_Telecharger_script.php?sFichier_a_...

To install it, copy the file to: `C:\Program Files\GIMP 2\lib\gimp\2.0\plug-ins`

Then call the script via the `Python-fu > Color > Binarize` tab in Gimp.

The algorithm is quite slow for large images. Aim for 1440p at most.

That being said, the results on my quick experiments look great, so it saves my time compared to other more manual methods in the end!

Archive for people who cannot read Medium: https://web.archive.org/web/20210626084045/https://chrisavel...

One can publish online a pre-print for free, which is very close to the final version of the paper.

That blog post is disgusting, and 2007 was not such a long time ago. There is no way one can be:

- the head of diversity, i.e. THE LEADER pushing for justice and equality for minority groups,

- while having an anti-Semitic inner-self, i.e. secretly advocating for the discrimination of a minority group.

> What if you’d dedicated most of your life to trying to save the planet, but then you realised that you may have actually—potentially—made things worse?

If you are radical about a subject, you'd better be right. That is one reason why most people try not to be too radical about subjects which they do not or cannot fully comprehend.

Moreover, I cannot help but sigh, when I see this person go from one extreme to another: wearing a pro-nuclear T-shirt on the first picture, calling out "the ideology that worships renewables" which have "become the latest green god: sun-like, literally", talking about a "boomer environmentalist in the UK", etc.

Do we really have to be radical all the time, going North full speed, doing a U-turn and going South full speed? Come on, be humble, you now think you were not right in the past, maybe you are not right today. It is pretty annoying to get told what to do (or not to do) by inconsistent people who are always 100% convinced that they are right when they talk.

The label is very blurry.

Plus, the point is that the picture is not a blurred picture of a finger. There is a lot of information in this photo which could be used to help to guide the de-blurring process.

> I struggle to believe that most scammers in the world are that good that make deliberate mistakes in their letters to reduce false positive rate. More realistic solution is that the average scammer is not well educated, he makes mistakes unintentionally and out of pure luck it works well for him.

These people are doing it as their actual job.

The scammers are not kids who are having fun with a prank, or hobbyists who make mistakes because they do not spend enough time on the task. The scammers are smart human beings who do their jobs, as professionally as they can.

If they wanted a foolproof version of their text, they would be able to find an automated correction tool (e.g. on Gmail), or to ask someone to proof-read it. The fact that they do not is a hint that it is either a waste of time from their perspective, or detrimental to the efficiency of their jobs.

It is not about ethics. It is about making money without risking big troubles.

Ditto with drug dealers: they want to sell their drugs, without the trouble of dealing with the cops (whenever possible).

It cycles. Win+Spacebar or Alt+Shift. Same cycling.

> specifically to the folks who have applied

I like how you distinguish between the people who are eligible and the people who have applied, because some eligible people do not know they are and therefore do not apply.

It is brought up in the press [1] from time to time, and the percentage in France is somewhere between 40% and 50% of the eligible people, which is huge!

[1] in French: https://www.leparisien.fr/economie/votre-argent/aides-social...

True. The "root cause" could be that one improves one's diet:

- if you take "sardine" supplement pills and go on eating burgers and fries, do not expect a miracle with respect to type 2 pre-diabetes,

- if you eat sardines as part of a meal, I suspect that you are likely to *replace* parts of your current diet with the (fatty) fish, rather than keep your usual diet and add fish on top of it.

For instance, a funny paragraph from section 4 (Discussion) hints that the SG (Sardine Group) must have added less olive oil to the rest of their meals:

> Another possible limitation of the study to bear in mind is the use of canned sardines in olive oil, which, despite easing distribution and consumption, present differences in MUFA content as compared to fresh sardines. Although this may have modified the pattern of lipids consumed, the SG group decreased their overall MUFA consumption. This could be due to the fact that the use of olive oil added to meals did not occur when they consumed the canned sardines and, therefore, there are no differences in its consumption with respect to CG.

NB: I don't want to dismiss any part of the article, I only want to insist that it is hard to isolate causes because of this effect of "communicating vases".

Exactly.

Every time I have used an add-on like ClearURLs, I have had issues at some point due to some zealous clean-up of URLs which breaks a redirection.

Typically, I don't want the browser to mess with my browsing if I am on the websites of my bank, a shop, etc.

I have submitted your post as input to your AI, and I am impressed with the results (both informal and formal). That is a really interesting tool!

Thanks, because the end of the blog post mentions 8 instead of 9:

> At the time of publishing this blog post, all phone numbers beginning with international codes 4, 6, 8 and 8 have completed loading. The other codes are in progress and may take several hours more before they're searchable.

So I was like: what about another 8?

Edit: Actually, it is "4, 6, 7 and 8"! cf. https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1379377818618884098

> Use the AZ vaccine on older people and the others on younger people, the risk calculus changes as you get older.

I am not sure older people would be too fond of this risk calculus. What about using "the others" on older people, and producing more of "the others" to vaccinate younger people later on?

The risk for the general population of younger people is low, they are not too afraid about the virus, and a potentially large part of them have already gotten COVID and recovered just fine. So there is no hurry in general. From what I read, people who are at risk without being extremely ill in the first place are old people and over-weight people (regardless of age). cf. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.120.051936

> Is this some sort of a meta-art piece?

Given that it was posted on April 1, you might be onto something.

One cannot transform 1 million into 100 millions without having 1 million in the first case (unless some debt leverage is used, but that is besides the point here). Right.

However, I fail to see how that removes any value (or makes the task look easy) regarding Mc Donald's perspective. For that one guy who transformed 1 million into 100 millions, how many actually lost most of their initial million (in stock trading)? I am like most of us here: I imagine that if I had a million somehow, then I could easily become a billionaire thanks to my wonderful intelligence and wits, because I am better than every other millionaire out there, right? That is all wishful thinking though, and I dread confronting reality to my ego.

In reality, if I had a million, I guess I would invest it into the most risk-free assets rather than bet it all in stock trading.

OpenAI has a reputation and a history for pushing compute forward (AI in Dota2, GPT, CLIP, DALL-E, etc.).

They have everything to lose by lying. If they say that these examples are not cherry-picked, then we have no reason (a priori) to doubt them.

On a side-note, the fact that you could doubt the results are real is telling: each of their compute-heavy experiments shakes our belief and further reinforces their reputation.

> Unicode allocates 2²¹ (~2 mil) characters called codepoints. Sorry, programmers, but it’s not a multiply of 8 .

Why would 2^21 not be a multiple of 2^3?

Hoarders will buy the rest of it.

During the 2-month lockdown a year ago, I would purchase 4 frozen pizzas at a time when I had a chance to buy them, because I was so upset that I could not buy one when I wanted a single one during the 2 previous weeks, because of hoarders who had been faster than me.

People think of toilet papers, but it is not just that. Pasta, rice, flour, yeast, plenty of useful things went missing due to hoarders during lockdown. Thankfully, I don't eat meat, because there was no meat at the supermarkets. Fish was also hard to find in the frozen shelves of the supermarkets. I am not a big fish eater either, so it was fine for me as well, but you get the idea: if you don't hoard a tiny bit, you get increasingly frustrated because hoarders will hoard, and you will have to wait for weeks before you get the chance to have what you want.

That was my thought as well after reading the first comment on this page, about identifying the roots of these traits and about avoiding superficial copies.

It is important to try to be yourself, know your strengths and accept your weaknesses. Because if you don't and blindly try to copy others' qualities, you are likely to have a wrong and superficial understanding of the way these traits are acquired. Due to the superficial understanding, the attempt to copy the traits is likely to fail in some cases, and get you crawling desperate about how you could not achieve your target.

Naturally, there is truth on both sides. Maybe the piece advice should have been: *be attentive* to remarkable traits in people around you, then *be inspired* by their good traits and try to avoid replicating their bad traits. The important parts are the self-consciousness and the effort to improve oneself.

And yet, in practice, none of the engineers at Rockstar has done this work in 7 years and a half. I do not believe that it is fair to value *a posteriori* a one-million-dollar fix with "if" sentences.

Let us spin it differently: contact Rockstar before publishing the details of the fix, and offer to help them on this issue. How much do you believe that Rockstar would value the fix *a priori*?

The truth is this kind of fix is worth a lot, but it is always tempting for the company to be penny-pinching (and come up with justifications for being so) after the fact.

This sounds like a good application for GPT-3 and the likes.

Yes, interests is for chit-chat. If the interviewer assumes special qualities based on the interests of the interviewee, it is on the interviewer.

I would add that "politics" is all about seizing and exerting power over other people's lives. And a small minority of people can seize the power if they are smart enough, even in a democracy, because the majority of people are apathetic with respect to politics and do not envision the stakes, so it is possible to win them over through propaganda and misinformation.

That reads like something I would write if I wanted to troll the Godot project and could not find any actual point to attack. Poe's law is at work once again.

I cannot take this sentence seriously:

> "mobile gamers got trashed all the [...] time for being [...] women"

Plus, Godot's text is about practices preying on mobile gamers (you can find these practices on PC too, but it is more common on mobile platforms), so it is criticizing mobile gaming (and the companies behind the predatory practices) rather than mobile gamers. So the quoted sentence about "mobile gamers" looks like a straw-man, which goes in favour of a trolling attempt.

I don't think this remark is warranted here. Your sentence ("3.27 times faster") is clear, but conveys the same meaning. His sentence ("loading times are cut down by 70%") does not refer to "speed" or "fast" (Ctrl+F the blog post to check for yourself) and is technically correct and clear. So the criticism raised in the WordPress article (about the usage of the words "speed" and "fast") does not apply. The mistake would have been to talk about "70% faster" or a "70% speed-up", because then there is ambiguity for the reader.

> actually measure performance and try to improve it

This reminds me that I used to do that all the time when programming with Matlab. I have stopped investigating performance bottlenecks after switching to Python. It is as if I traded performance profiling with unit testing in my switch from Matlab to Python.

I wonder if there are performance profilers which I could easily plug into PyCharm to do what I used to do with Matlab's default IDE (with a built-in profiler) and catch up with good programming practices. Or maybe PyCharm does that already and I was not curious enough to investigate.

Interesting. It gives one plausible animation, but it is one of many plausible animations. So it looks good for people whom you have never met before, because it is plausible. Yet it is not as good if you know the person, because then you are able to notice the discrepancy. It reminds me of what happens with super-resolution algorithms for tiny faces.

More precisely, the B in LGBT:

> And in Generation Z, bisexual people make up an even greater share of the LGBT community - 72% said they identify as bisexual. [...] In comparison, about half of millennials who identify as LGBT say they are bisexual, while in older age groups, identifying as bisexual is about as common as identifying as gay or lesbian.