embedded machine learning research engineer - georgist - urbanist - environmentalist
Yeah, this is the one piece a lot of people miss: in any decently competitive market, individual firms have effectively zero power to set prices; they must instead accept the prices determined by the market.
Knowing that, the solution to that sort of corporate BS, then, is to ensure markets are competitive by busting monopolies, lowering barriers to entry, and getting money out of politics to reduce the effect of lobbying.
Sounds similar to some of the research my sister has done in her PhD so far. As I understand, she had a bunch of snapshots of proteins from a cryo electron microscope, but these snapshots are 2D. She used ML to construct 3D shapes of different types of proteins. And finding the shape of a protein is important because the shape defines the function. It’s crazy stuff that would be ludicrously difficult and time-consuming to try to do manually.
Back when I was in my first year of uni, I applied for a part-time job on indeed. Found out it was a scam when they wanted to pre-pay me with a too-big check and have me transfer the difference to some other account. I noped right out of there.
For those who might be unaware, the scam is they send you a fraudulent check, but it might take a few days to be discovered as such by your bank. But in the meantime, the amount shows up in your account and you transfer the money they tell you to (which is a legitimate transfer). Then, when the bank discovers the check was fraudulent, they remove the amount from your account, but you’re left high and dry because you can’t undo the transfer because the transfer you did was legit.
Exactly. I rode an ebike one summer to commute to an internship. The sweat factor alone meant I never would have done that by regular bike, as I would’ve arrived at the office sweating like a pig.
On the other hand, a car has far greater maintenance costs. The car has license, insurance, maintenance, gas, parking, etc., whereas an ebike is basically free in comparison. Electricity to power an ebike is pennies, and maintainance is a few basic tools and a new tire or inner tube on occasion.
With all the money saved, you can just rent a car for the handful of days the ebike genuinely is not sufficient.
I moved from California to Montreal a few years back to study, and now I’m staying for good. I tried duolingo on and off for far too long, but I found it super uninteresting and hard to remain committed to.
Best strategy I’ve found is called comprehensible input. The idea is to find books or other reading material that you can get the basic gist of when reading, despite not understanding every single word and phrase and grammatical construction. The more you read, the more you’ll find yourself able to understand, which is also very motivsting!
Also, make sure it’s material that actually interests you. The idea is it’s better to read extensively, reading things that actually interest you to some degree and keep you mentally engaged, than to just really intensively study a much smaller amount of (less interesting) material.
This actually mirrors how we acquire languge. The idea is to intuitively understand French by having seen a lot of it rather than to basically memorize French. You ultimately want to be able to glance at a sign, for instance, and just know what it means without having to translate in your head.
Some resources I found useful were these French illustrated books in Dollarama, but even better is a series of books designed to be comprehensible input by Olly Richards. He’s a native English speaker and polyglot who has written a bunch of graded readers that gradually increase in vocabulary and difficulty. He has several books for French, including beginner short stories, intermediate short stories, beginner conversations, intermediate conversations, climate change, WW2, and philosophy. The nice thing is he actually does a good job of making the stories and content interesting to an adult learner, unlike the children’s books at Dollarama.
Even his beginner books might be a little too advanced for your level so far, though, from what you say. If they are, it’d be best to find some material at a lower level that you can understand a little better. After all, if it’s too hard for you, it will make the process much slower and less enjoyable, which will make it much more likely that you quit. You could even simply try googling “french comprehensible input” to try to find material suitable for your level.
One last resource is the government of Quebec offers free in-person courses for immigrants and many French learners. They are part-time, and they offer multiple options for hours per week, so you could pick what works best for you. It would be worth checking to see if you might qualify for those courses once you move here.
This video by a political science professor explains it best: https://youtu.be/zMxHU34IgyY?si=N5oHElN4Xlbiqznh
In short, the only people who truly know are Hamas, and the best the rest of us can do is speculate.
Some possibilities are that Hamas wanted to sabotage normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Muslim world, that Hamas wanted to bait Israel into a wildly disproportionate response that would garner themselves sympathy and recruits, that Hamas was bluffing and feigning strength and counting on Israel to think the attack was bait, that Hamas was just acting on bloodlust and wanted to attack regardless of the consequences, or many other possibilities.
Further, we focus a lot on the substative issues, i.e., the grievances and disagreements at hand, but we don’t talk about the bargaining frictions nearly enough. There are countless border disputes around the world, and yet they rarely result in war. Why? Because war is costly and most wish to avoid it. War typically happens when there are both substantive issues and bargaining frictions, i.e., things preventing the two sides from negotiating a solution. But us onlookers can’t even know for sure what these frictions are, only speculate.
All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won’t be known for a while, if ever. Anyone who tries to tell you with certainty why they did what they did at this stage doesn’t actually know with any degree of certainty. Nobody but Hamas actually knows.
I do recommend watching the full video above, as the professor is very engaging, rather amusing, and covers this topic quite thoroughly.
And Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in cervids such as deer, moose, and elk, which thankfully has not been shown to be transmissible to humans yet. Prions are the stuff of nightmares.
Oh, and Fatal Familial Insomnia.
Definitely. If you don’t understand how the world works, you can’t tell if someone else does either. Only experts can easily spot fake experts. And that’s exactly the trouble with things like pseudoscience and misinformation; it’s easy to fall for without the domain knowledge necessary to avoid falling for it.
A great example is when you’re in elementary school and you get that one really athletic kid on your team for some team sport in gym class. You know you’re not on that level and never will be, so you tie yourself to them, knowing that them succeeding is good for you.
Likewise, we like to attach our fortunes to a designated person, and they become greater than just a person in our mind. Like, that athletic kid is not longer simply a kid who’s good at sports; they’re the athletic kid. Our favored 19th-century political thought leader is no longer just some person who had opinions on society and wrote them down; they’re a political messiah.
The type of biome you get depends largely on availability of water, not temperature.
Deserts are deserts because they have very poor availability of water most of the time. This is most often caused by simple lack of precipitation, but other factors can influence this:
As for why we largely don’t see desert at the equator, it’s because of precipitation. Due to the circulation of cold and warm air in the atmosphere, the equator typically sees warm air, often laden with moisture due to the oceans and the high moisture capacity of warm air, rise. As it rises, it cools, and because cool air cannot hold as much moisture as warm air can, it drops a lot of that moisture as rain. This results in most of the equator getting a lot of rain.
Once the air has risen and cooled, it cycles north and south into the subtropics, where it falls down to earth again. And in falling, it warms up again, especially as these regions still receive a ton of sunlight, particularly in the summer. But the air has already lost much of its moisture, so now it’s just a bunch of hot, dry air blasting down over the subtropics. This is why we have bands of deserts across most of the subtropics, from the Sahara to the Middle East to the desert of the SW US and northern Mexico. Same on the opposite side of the equator, with the Kalahari desert in southern Africa, the Australian outback, and the Patagonian desert.
There are other factors, too, of course, such as rain shadows from mountains and ocean currents, but the atmospheric circulation is the big one to answer your question.
They don’t just look like diamond; chemically they’re extremely similar, too. Diamond is just a bunch of carbon atoms covalently bonded together into a 3D crystal, which is why they’re so incredibly hard. Moissanite is basically the same but it’s carbon and silicon atoms mixed together. Silicon has the same number of valence electrons, so it can function similarly chemically as carbon, hence why it works. Thus, moissanite is also extremely hard and refracts light in beautiful ways, too, except imo even more beautifully. Instead of a colorless luster, it’s a subtle rainbow luster to moissanite.
Source: I got my fiancée a moissanite ring, and it’s lovely. And because it’s lab-made, I got her blue moissanite (the coloring is just from adding certain impurities) that matches our cat’s eyes perfectly. It’s way more unique, cheaper, and more ethical than diamond, but doesn’t sacrifice on quality one bit.
Exactly. I’d honestly rather have paid social media than engagement algo and ad-driven social media. When your algorithms chase engagement over all else, it leads to real harms, like the youtube alt-right pipeline. Fediverse ain’t perfect, but I like that there’s no engagement-chasing algorithm, no ads, just donations.
Granted, there is a difference between a temp agency or a third-party recruiter and a “coaching” type service. The former are strictly about finding applicants, and they get paid for that service by the prospective employers. The latter are about 1-on-1 coaching, CV editing, etc., and hence they’re paid for by the prospective employee.
That said, I’ve never used one of them nor do I really see the point, given the wealth of information available for free out there. Then again, I did benefit from speaking to career advisors at my university, which were free to me at the point of service but obviously still paid for by me via my tuition.
I am struggling to find any online testimonials from third parties. I have seen other similar deals with other legit companies, but how they usually work is you sign a contract with them to give them a certain percentage of your salary for the first year or two of any job they help get you hired for. This is important as it gives them an incentive to actually follow through and get you as good a job offer as they can. With an upfront payment like this, they have no material incentive to follow through and actually try to get you a good job. Even if they’re not a straight-up scam, it might be sufficient for them to avoid a lawsuit by getting you one or two crappy job offers, then throwing up their hands and saying, “We’ve done our job; it’s on you if you don’t wanna accept these jobs.”
I wouldn’t bother with these guys. If you really want this sort of coaching, go for a reputable one that you would sign a contract giving them a percentage of your salary. And definitely one with plenty of third-party reviews online.
They show you ads based on your search terms, not based on trackers or digital profiles of you.
66 is recorded currently in my ecosia account, but I used to have well over a hundred on an old PC before I ever realized you could sign in to track across devices. I probably have a ton on my work PC that isn’t tracked to my account either.
I use ecosia as my default search engine! It’s pretty great, and it respects privacy. It even tells you roughly how many trees have been planted from your searches.
Me, who’s not in web dev:
The raison d’être for RISC-V is domain-specific architecture. Currently, computational demands are growing exponentially (especially with AI), but Moore’s Law is ending, which means we can no longer meet our computational demands by scaling single-core speed on general-purpose CPUs. Instead, we are needing to create custom architectures for handling particular computational loads to eke out more performance. Things like NPUs, TPUs, etc.
The trouble is designing and producing these domain-specific architectures is expensive af, especially given the closed-source nature of computer hardware at the moment. And all that time, effort, and money just to produce a niche chip used for a niche application? The economics don’t economic.
But with an open ISA like RISC-V, it’s both possible and legal to do things like create an open-source chip design and put it on GitHub. In fact, several of those exist already. This significantly lowers the costs of designing domain-specific architectures, as you can now just fork an existing chip and make some domain-specific modifications/additions. A great example of this is PERCIVAL: Open-Source Posit RISC-V Core with Quire Capability. You could clone their repo and spin up their custom RISC-V posit chip on an FPGA today if you wanted to.