So instead of grabbing stuff from the rich and businesses today, consider the option of waiting, to grab later. If you don’t grab stuff from them today, these actors will invest much of that stuff, producing a lot more stuff later. Yes, you might think some of your favorite projects are good investments, but let’s be honest; most of the stuff you grab won’t be invested, and the investments that do happen will be driven more by political than rate-of-return considerations. Furthermore, if you grab a lot today, news of that event will discourage future folks from generating stuff, and encourage those folks to move and hide it better.
Author: Gregor J. Rothfuss
Tensor Considered Harmful
Despite its ubiquity in deep learning, Tensor is broken. It forces bad habits such as exposing private dimensions, broadcasting based on absolute position, and keeping type information in documentation. This post presents a proof-of-concept of an alternative approach, named tensors, with named dimensions. This change eliminates the need for indexing, dim arguments, einsum- style unpacking, and documentation-based coding. The prototype PyTorch library accompanying this blog post is available as namedtensor.
Boards of Canada
change.org parody
A neural net trained on change.org tries to write its own petitions, eg “Help Bring Climate Change to the Philippines!” and “Donald Trump: Change the name of the National Anthem to be called the ‘Fiery Gator’”
stories about sexual selection (like “women are naturally attracted to dominant-looking men, because throughout evolution they were better able to provide”) are meaningless, because for most of human history women did not choose their own mates, and so women are unlikely to have strong biologically-ingrained mate preferences.
Mayan Civil War?
Trophy skulls, together with a growing list of scattered finds from other sites in Belize, Honduras, and Mexico, provide intriguing evidence that the conflict may have been civil in nature, pitting rising powers in the north against the established dynasties in the south.
Al-Aqsa
“This bread is straight from Jerusalem!” was stated at least 5 times during our stay and it could be felt how significant this was to him. Even in Palestine the bread is unique to the city, travelers from other parts buy many loaves to bring as gifts to their friends and family. The crust is soft and covered in sesame seeds, the bread inside even softer and so light. Despite being almost 1 meter long before cutting, it is not heavy and feels like it might float away.
Chain Letter Evolution
Apocryphal letters claiming divine origin circulated for centuries in Europe. After 1900, shorter more secular letters appeared in the US that promised good luck if copies were distributed and bad luck if not. Billions of these “luck chain letters” circulated in the next 100 years. As they replicated through the decades, some accumulated copying errors, offhand comments, and calculated innovations that helped them prevail in the competition with other chain letters.
Against key-value stores
Fast key-value stores, an idea whose time has come and gone
In ProtoCache, replacing the RInK with stateful application servers resulted in a 29-57% median latency improvement and 40%+ reduction in CPU.
Forecasting Progress
In 2015, the 6 day forecast was as good as its 3 day forecast was in 1975. In 2012, its computers correctly foresaw Hurricane Sandy at least 6 days in advance. By 2025, they are expected to be able to detect high-impact events 2 weeks into the future.
Mars Geology
This week’s map is an artistic rendition of the geologic map of Mars designed by the USGS. I used the same geology data as the original map, but I added more topographic and label data, redesigned the visual style, and also edited the key for a more general audience. One of the most difficult parts of making this map was translating the key into plain English. The original USGS map was designed for geologists, so I had to look up almost all of the vocabulary. For example, my abbreviated definition for a caldera rim was “The rim of an empty magma chamber left behind after a volcanic eruption.” The original description was “Ovoid scarp, outlines single or multiple coalesced partial to fully enclosed depression(s); volcanic collapse, related to effusive and possibly explosive eruptions.”
Gregor J. Rothfuss 