you know, I’m not sure you can have an uncountably infinite number of people. so whatever that abomination is I’ll send the trolley down its way. it’s probably an SCP.

what the fuck is with Windows App? it takes gigs and it’s literally just an RDP wrapper.

exactly everything I need and nothing more. doesn’t need X. reasonably lightweight. no fiddly configuration needed. nice support for tiling alongside floating.

also, very buggy (at least as of alpha.7), somewhat fickle (at least on my hardware), and I can’t remap keyboard shortcuts.

the SG teams embody American ideals, while the NID embodies American history. specifically, the NID acts like '60s CIA.

it pleases me that the actress who played Carter cared about science like the character.

HOG and Hough transforms bring me back. honestly glad that I don’t have to mess with them anymore though.

I always found SVMs a little shady because you had to pick a kernel. we spent time talking about the different kernels you could pick but they were all pretty small and/or contrived. I guess with NNs you pick the architecture/activation functions but there didn’t seem to be an analogue in SVM land for “stack more layers and fatten the embeddings.” though I was only an undergrad.

do you really think NNs won purely because of large datasets and GPU acceleration? I feel like those could have applied to SVMs too. I thought the real win was solving vanishing gradients with ReLU and expanding the number of layers, rather than throwing everything into a 3 or 5-layer MLP, preventing overfitting, making the gradient landscape less prone to local maxima and enabling hierarchical feature extraction to be learned organically.

I recently told my mother that I’m probably the most intelligent person she will ever meet

and so humble, too! seriously though, this is a major red flag. I rarely find smart people to brag about how smart they are.

also, telling someone that their beliefs are wrong because they’re dumb, and that your beliefs are right because you’re smarter than them, has literally never worked. it will just make them resent you, your beliefs, and anyone they meet in the future who believes what you do. this kind of smugness has been the Achilles heel of Dems for years.

I was taught that serious academics favored Support Vector Machines over Neural Networks, which industry only loved because they didn’t have proper education. oops…

also, Computer Vision was considered “AI-complete” and likely decades away. ImageNet dropped a couple years I graduated. though I guess it ended up being “AI-complete” in a way…

I have no scientific basis for this, but my suspicion is that what you do with your brain is more important to cognition than whatever raw intelligence you start with. the more languages you study, the more music you play, the more subjects you study and skills you develop and hobbies you tinker with and deep conversations you have… you learn to learn, you learn to think, it all gets wired up and cross-connected and you become more than the sum of your parts.

how much decline is truly biological vs. being stuck in a rut?

also there’s nootropics that could be helpful for concussion recovery/etc. but they haven’t been too well-studied, there’s many different ones with different sketchiness and sources aren’t always trustworthy… but piracetam (iirc) is actually prescribed in the EU for recovery from brain injury, and it’s fairly safe and well-studied. I’m not recommending it either way though.

Certainly!

Peking (KNT) -Chinese at one time experimented with fertilizing a chimpanzee with human sperm in an attempt to create a “near -human ape,” and they may try it again. The chimp was three months pregnant before the first experiment was halted, one of the original researchers claims. Western science long has scoffed at such an experiment as medically impossible, but Dr. Ji Yongxiang says the research, if it ever resumes, has the potential to develop creatures with higher animal intelligence who could speak and perform simple tasks. A second researcher at the Chinese Academy of Science said there were plans to resume testing.

whoa, I just realized this is basically the left-lib equivalent of the NAP.

they meant well! honestly Esperanto has a really positive community, even still. but I can see how it’d get on someone’s nerves.

Newspeak was inspired by Esperanto, because George Orwell had an annoying Esperantist roommate. “bad” in Esperanto is “malbone,” literally “un-good.” “terrible” in Esperanto is “malbonege,” literally “very ungood.”

Chinese scientists worked to create the “humanzee,” a human-chimpanzee hybrid in the '60s. Female chimpanzees were impregnated with human sperm. The experiment was cut short by the Cultural Revolution - the scientists were sent to labor camps and a three-months pregnant chimpanzee died of neglect. The Soviets attempted a similar program in the '20s.

Russia… Russia never changes.

the most secure possible? you’ll need to learn a ton. you’ll get there, but it’ll take a while.

decently secure? install Linux Mint, install your updates, don’t run sketchy commands with URLs in them unless you know what you’re doing, maybe follow a hardening guide. you’ll be okay.

if you need to be extremely secure and private, install Tails on a USB stick. it will be slow and frustrating, and you’ll need to save files to a second USB drive, but it will probably keep you pretty safe, and it’s decently user-friendly. just make sure you keep Tails updated! you’ll have to do that by flashing the new Tails onto a new USB drive, there’s no easy way around that.

those are your two most user-friendly, safe approaches.

my dad’s tongue turned black and he developed jaundice when he was living in Germany. they sent him to a tropical disease institute. never figured out what it was; it eventually went away. I’m guessing he happened to cross paths with someone who traveled from an exotic location.

there’s a lot of viruses: rhinovirus, other coronaviruses, RSV, etc. and other kinds of bacterial infections too. checking ProMED Mail I don’t see anything too out of the ordinary. there’s usually a flurry of emails there before an epidemic emerges.

if both parents are very sick it’s extremely unlikely to be ME/CFS. ME is a rare consequence of viral illness.

at a museum in the US, a security guard yelled at me for taking a photo of a Miró painting. he pointed to a sign saying that to respect the owner’s copyright, photography was strictly forbidden.

pretty sure I had the legal right to take the photo, but that they had the legal right to trespass me if I kept doing it. :/