xaedes

Burn it to ash, collect info about the ash and reconstruct - no problem. But if you burn it in a way, that the only remains are "random thermal radiation" all the information is lost and we have a serious paradox to resolve...

There is a minimum contrast specified for a reason, because more contrast is better to read.

Modern designers argue that high contrast is "harder on the eyes" and they seem to prefer solid colored boxes. It is a real pitty, infested the web with sites that are basically gray on gray. Great, the text is now out of the way for the beautiful design and the eyes can relax from all the reading. Except when you actually want to read it.

No really, low contrast text is a real strain and these "too much contrast" arguments are too blame that it still happens.

The sky being a vault, or dome or touchable FIRMament, like "terrible crystal" (Ezekiel 1:22), separating the waters from the waters.

I think it relates to the common Sky on Earth and Sky Earth Separation theme in myths from on around the world. Often people/ancestors/heroes/gods seem to have lived in a hollow between Sky Father and Earth Mother. Later in time both always get separated.

Now for the interpretation - What is Sky Father?

Is it the sky as we know it? We can't touch it, so probably not. Suppose it actually is something touchable, that looks like "terrible crystal", maybe even looks like the sky that we know. Something where people could take shelter in like in a vault, or cave.

I think the Sky Father is some kind of (ice age?) glacier and the hollow between Sky and Earth is a glacial cave. Ice is a terrible cold crystal, firm, touchable, looks like the sky. Ice caves exist, but they dont provide a great home, but they separate the waters above from the waters below. There is always something to find with subterranean water in mythology.. Now if there is a geothermal spring below a glacier or chunk of ice, it could form a survivable space, that ticks all the marks.

Many myths from all around the world share those elements to some degree, but I will here point only at one particular example, from - least expected - the Māori, that I find especially interesting, because of its mentioning of "extreme cold".

https://www.sacred-texts.com/pac/lww/lww3.htm

Some excerpts (my comments marked with > at line begin):

  The Rangi-nui [great sky], which stands above, felt a desire towards Papa-tua-nuku [the earth], whose belly was turned up [towards him]; he desired her as a wife. So Rangi came down to Papa. In that period the amount of light was nil; absolute and complete darkness [po-kutikuti kakarauri] prevailed; there was no sun, no moon, no stars, no clouds, no light, no mist—no ripples stirred the surface of ocean; no breath of air, a complete and absolute stillness.

  And so Rangi-nui dwelt with Papa-tua-nuku as his wife; and then he set [hikaia = whakato, to set, plant] plants to cover the nakedness of Papa; for her armpits, her head, and the body; and after that the smaller trees to clothe them both, for the body of the earth was naked. Subsequently he placed the upstanding trees of the forest, and now Papa felt a great warmth, which was all-embracing.

> and some more.

  Because Rangi-nui overlaid and completely covered Papa-tua-nuku, the growth of all things could not mature, nor could anything bear fruit [or increase]; they were in an unstable condition, floating about the Ao-pouri [the world of darkness], and this was their appearance: some were crawling [after the manner of lizards], some were upright with the arms held up, some were lying with the knees partly drawn p. 118 up, some lying on their sides, some were lying stretched out at full length, some on their backs, some were stooping, some with their heads bent down, some with their legs drawn up, some embracing, some kicking out with legs and arms, some kneeling, some standing, some inhaling deep breaths, some with exhausted breath, some crawling, some walking, some feeling about in the dark, some arising, some gazing, some sitting still, and in many other attitudes—they were all within the embrace of Rangi-nui and Papa.6

> Sounds cramped and not a nice place to be..

  It was after this manner that they dwelt in Pō, within the space included in the embrace of their parents. It was very long that condition of affairs existed; until at last a faint glimmering of light, a scintillation like the light of a star was seen, or like the Will-o-the-wisp at night. And now commenced a desire on the part of the family of gods to go forth from between their parents to follow the faint appearance of light. Some of them [the gods] consented, some did not; and thus it became a matter of strife between them. Tāne (68), Tu-pai (69)11 and others said, "Let us seek a means by which we may go forth." The matter was then assented to.

   Now, at a certain time after [that discussion] Ue-poto (28) went to bathe and wash away the clammy feeling arising through the warmth of their dwelling place [within the embrace of their parents]. He was carried away outside on the current of their mother's urine, and found himself outside in a gentle cooling breeze, which was sweet scented in the nostrils of Ue-poto. He thought, this is the best place, here outside, so he called out under the sides of his parents: "O sirs! Come outside, for this is a pleasant place for us."

> urine could be hint for geothermal activity and accompanying sulfuric smells

  When the menstruous time of their mother Earth came, then Tāne (68) came forth. This was in the seventh Pō, or age of their desire to search for the "way of the female"12 in order to go forth. On reaching the outside world, they then saw that it was indeed a pleasant place for them [to dwell]. There was, however, a drawback; for the different kinds of the cold of Heaven [or space], Wero-i-te-ninihi, Wero-i-te-wawana, Kŭna-wiri, Maeke, and Kotokoto, there spread out their intense cold.13 Hence, did Rangi and Papa closely embrace [to exclude the cold from ther offspring], and, hence, also originated the 'goose-flesh,' and trembling through cold [from which mankind suffers to this day]. These are the enemies that afflicted the family14 of their father. In consequence of this, they sheltered under the sides of their mother, where they found warmth, which they named Whakaruru-taha [shelter-by-the-side], which name came down to us, and is applied to a warm and pleasant place where no winds blow.

> Here we learn about the cold outside. Later on Tāne climbs up to the Sky and deals with some knowledge preservers

  Now, when Rangi-nui had been properly placed in position as is now to be seen, the blood from the arms dripped down on to Papa [the Earth], and hence is the horu [red oxide of iron], and the pukepoto [blue phosphate of iron], that his descendants in this world use in painting.19 And hence also is the red appearance that inflames the skies at sunrise or sunset—that is the blood of Rangi's arms.

> This sounds a lot like the Blood Falls (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Falls) an outflow of an (red) iron oxide-tainted plume of saltwater, flowing from the tongue of Taylor Glacier onto the ice-covered surface of West Lake Bonney in the Taylor Valley of the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Victoria Land, East Antarctica. The part of Antarctica that is closest to New Zealand and the Māori. As it is the blood of Rangi's [sky's] arms, Rangi is actually the Ice of Antarctica, or more generally glacial ice.

Powershell always feels like writing enterprise editions (like https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...) of simple tasks.

Hm yes. I also played with a few a examples. I have to admit, the order seems to only be really irrelevant when averaging rotations around one axis to avoid triangles. Thanks for pointing out. For averaging rotations that are similar the differences are tiny, but still. What a bummer.

Slerp is no binary operator, but suppose we only look at the two quaternions, then it is "commutative". You can swap both quaternions, but you must use (1-t) for the interpolation factor instead of just t.

Wikipedia[1] lists some equivalent formulas for quaternion slerp:

  slerp(q0, q1, t) = (q0 * q1^(-1))^(1-t) * q1
  slerp(q0, q1, t) = (q1 * q0^(-1))^t * q0

There you can see that quaternion products are used, yes, but the operation is also commutative, when using (1-t) instead of t.

When the order in online average computation is different, the t naturally adapts to the correct value, depending on the weights.

These arguments about commutativity and order are really just the same as for regular linear interpolation (LERP) and online average computation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slerp#Quaternion_Slerp

Oh you can absolutely average rotation quaternions, even weighted. You just use regular online computation of mean, express it in terms of linear mix operations (x k + (1-k) y) and then use quaternion slerp for the linear mix:

  mean = zero_rotation_quaternion
  wsum = 0
  for w,qt in zip(weights, quaternions):
    wsum += w
    # regular online mean computation:
    # delta = qt - mean
    # mean := mean + delta*w/wsum
    # express as linear mix:
    # mean := mean + qt*w/wsum - mean*w/wsum
    # mean := mean * (1-w/wsum) + qt*w/wsum
    # i.e. mean is linear mix between mean and qt, with k=w/sum
    mean = slerp(mean, qt, w/wsum)
  return mean

Nice stuff, but that scrolling navigation? Well I am gonna send you bills of my doctor.

Here are some keywords for further research. It is a rich and beautiful topic!

Evolutionary Algorithms, Genetic Programming, Cellular Automata, Neural Networks, Self-Organisation, other Self-X properties like Self-Healing. Methods from Swarm Intelligence, for example Ant Colony Optimization or Particle Swarm Optimization.

I think the worst thing about student surveillance software is that it teaches a whole generation that it is normal to be and work under surveillance.

"Here's the good news: you already have all the willpower you need. You simply don't know how to use it yet." from "Training The Will"

https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org/tag/will

That new definition sounds pretty broad. Does that make vitamin C a vaccine? I think it also stimulates the body's immune response against diseases.

" When the leader says follow, you don't choose a different path, even if the leader is wrong. Eventually, if they genuinely are incorrect, they'll be dismissed due to poor decisions and performance. "

Disobedience is one of the most important civil and moral duties. Maybe it should even be regularly trained... The people you call for, the Yes-Men, are superb for demonstrating the Milgram experiment and what it stands for.

So NO.

Readable link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505646738627088389.html

The analogy is not perfect by any means, but lets look at a regular computer monitor.

Is the area/space in front of it the same (state) as the area behind the monitor?

With respect to "is there a monitor in this place" they are not that different.

But in front of the monitor is obviously different from behind the monitor. Whatever the monitor shows is only visible from the front. Likewise, what you did in your life, what you leave behind is only accessible after (admittedly also during) your life, but not before your birth.

Does the monitor project those things out of nothing? It won't work by magic, there is no creatio ex nihilo at work. Instead it has input connectors for power and display on the back. When viewed from the front it is easy to forget them, but they are mandatory to see anything. These connectors are like your pre-birth, your parents, your family history, their manners, their culture, the broader circumstances of your birth and life-to-come. These pre-birth things are the inputs that get transformed by you in your life into the things you project into your after-life.

Hahaha... yea.

I actually had to submit my thesis with - lets say not the best - results because I did not use the actual timesteps. My inertial navigation system for an autonomous rc model car would estimate paths that where kinda right, but always strongly distorted.

For weeks and months after the thesis defence it really bothered me and I regularly dived into the system to find the cause for it.

Some day I fiddled with the timesteps, rerun the evaluation and boom all the curves where perfectly aligned with the actual driving trajectory that we used to generate the data. I was amazed how good it now worked, and kinda sad that I could not present _these_ results for my thesis. Should have figured it out sooner. Too bad that all the literature, that I read so far, always only talked about fixed timesteps...

When you implement a Kalman filter, make sure to use the actual timesteps (i.e. delta time = now - last) instead of a theoretical fixed timestep (e.g. delta time = 0.1s or similar) or averaged timestep. Makes all the difference

Won't be easy, drones are small and fast.

RGB based detection will probably be too slow and error prone. Rather put active IR LEDs or similar markings which can be easily detected, use cameras which only let through IR and high framerate! Then use computer vision to spot blobs. Finally compute 3D position by triangulation.

Active IR tracking is still pretty much State of the Art for motion capturing and the like.

Short googling leads to OptiTrack, where they even advertise exactly this use case of drone tracking:

https://optitrack.com/applications/robotics/

I had a (not very long) time where I was heavily into making electronic music. After a while I dreamed in music. It actually scared me a bit as music was all there was. Nothing else. Not even thoughts. Only the sound of music. Yet it did not help me making more or better music. It might have if I would have continued longer, but I stopped some time after that, starting to chase another passion...

But the music dream was a very unique and memorable experience.

Code and programming sometimes plays part in my dreams, sometimes I just continue to work on the program I worked on before going to bed. At least that is what I remember after waking up. Did not bring me any great breakthrough so far. But continuing the real code the next day goes lighter, sometimes.

The feeling of code dreams is not as weird as from the music dream. Maybe I am just used to that from being in the flow in my waketime. When in the flow, code, or the abstract problem I work on, is all there is - similar to the dream. It also has the bonus that I can actually get things done and they persist. No wake-up and puff-all-gone.

To conclude I would liken code dreams to a light version of prototyping. You try out some stuff, throw it away and (hopefully) do better the next time you work on similar stuff. Not that I can consciously remember the lessons learned, but it trains intuition and the feel for handling problems.

Really? Dark cyan on light pink? Where did the colors go wrong? It does reduce readability a lot.

Why do people feel the need to make websites barely readable by going for low contrast?

No, you can't stalk people.

> NASA is selling the retirement as a “transition of operations to commercial services,” reiterating its emphasis on supporting private-public endeavors in Earth’s orbit.

> It’ll be the sad end to one of the biggest international scientific cooperatives ever undertaken and may well mark the decline of the multi-nation approach to space research and exploration.

In a way... what happened to the internet, the privatization and commercialization, is going to happen to space. I don't know if I should like that.

In the video comments he posted a link [1] to his blog where he explains the design process using simulated annealing. Amazing how close he got to the targeted final ratios using only a sequential gear train.

[1] http://pepijndevos.nl/2022/01/30/predicting-the-tide-with-an...

> If 1000 users try to login as you, the results of our statistics show that one of them may be able to do it.

So each user effectively gets assigned one of ~1000 ids, which is not that different to a three digit decimal PIN, that they then can use as password?

It seems to use it as an authentication scheme a username and 2FA/MFA is _mandatory_. I guess one could then also say: a username is a very strong and efficient authentication method.

Do I read that right? 1 in 1000 are false positives? Does that mean 1 in 1000 users can log in as another by chance?

That is no authentication scheme then.

> how do we avoid breaking the web while keeping privacy needs in balance?

One thing that I feel would help: Massive decentralization. Self-hosting of content and regular synching of the hosted content on the server sides; or tunneling, think duckduckgo.

Self-hosting would make knowledge storage more redundant which protects against (also partial) network blackouts.

On the other hand this knowledge is then harder to control. Removing or redacting content would have to rely on the particular sites to "pull the updates" from the upstream. Copyright will also be problematic: each site would have to make copies of content with the (probably commercial) intent of serving it to consumers.

Still I can't help to think we need more decentralization and self-hosting.

> Ahi , the serpent demon who captured Apas, the water goddess > ahi froze the waters

As for the serpent motive, I think it relates to the movement and shape of glaciers. Here are some pictures.

Snake-like path of a swiss glacier: [1]

The end of a glacier which (with skimming) may look like a snake head releasing streams of melt water: [2]

In these ~110 year old illustrations glaciers are depicted with weird lion head and sluggish lizard body: [3]

Ahi seems to be Azi Dahâka in Zoroastrianism, which also has a lot of long-winter themes [4]:

"The world was imagined as lasting a long year of twelve millenniums. There had been an old myth, connected with that notion, which made the world end in a frightful winter, to be succeeded by an eternal spring, when the blessed would come down from the Vara of Yima to repeople the earth. But as storm was the ordinary and more dramatic form of the strife, there was another version, according to which the world ended in a storm, and this version became the definitive one.

The serpent, Azi Dahâka, let loose, takes hold of the world again. As the temporary disappearance of the light was often mythically described either as the sleeping of the god, or as his absence, or death [...]"

This story about the Vara is also super interesting and similar to the Ark story, though not with a big flood but a long winter and "foul frost". The numbers make more sense, because they gather over a thousand "seeds of men and women" instead of only a single family. [5]

[1] https://www.swisseduc.ch/glaciers/glossary/valley-glacier-en...

[2] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/CTPcUSfYG3c/maxresdefault.jpg

[3] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/04/02/culture-history...

[4] https://www.sacred-texts.com/zor/sbe04/sbe0405.htm

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29802590

Sometimes I could overcome that problem by switching to another virtual desktop/workspace (if necessary creating one temporarily) and using the task manager there.

Maybe it is possible to adjust the hue of the monitor, so the trigger colors are not hit. Maybe desaturate?

> mandatory vaccination will get rid of surveillance solutions like the Greenpass while also protecting everyone.

Would you not still need a vax-proof when vaccination is mandatory? How does it differ then to the greenpass? It would then be mandatory to be able to produce that proof. Failing to do so may result in fines or land you in jail.

How does that help with the greenpass situation you described?

> And what is more annoying is that the "greenpass" is actually (at least where I live in Europe) a way that allows cops to stop, frisk and harass anyone. It enables the busybodies to play "I aM an auThOrItY and will use my imaginary authority to exercise power over you ..."

> The "greenpass" assumes I am always carrying my phone. It gives me anxiety about my battery going flat.

Making it mandatory seems to only make this worse.