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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • SLS is on track to be more expensive when adjusted for inflation per moon mission than the Apollo program. It is wildly too expensive, and should be cancelled.

    This coupled with the fact that the rocket is incapable of sending a manned capsule to low earth orbit which is the the lunar gateway is planned to a Rectilinear Halo Orbit instead.

    Those working in the space industry know that SpaceX’s success is not because of Elon but instead Gwynne Shotwell. She is the President and CEO of SpaceX and responsible for all things SpaceX. The best outcome after the election is to remove Elon from the board and revoke his ownership of what is effectively a defense company for political interference in this election. Employees at SpaceX would be happy, the government would be happy, and the American people would be happy.


  • The technical definition of AI in academic settings is any system that can perform a task with relatively decent performance and do so on its own.

    The field of AI is absolutely massive and includes super basic algorithms like Dijsktra’s Algorithm for finding the shortest path in a graph or network, even though a 100% optimal solution is NP-Complete, and does not yet have a solution that is solveable in polynomial time. Instead, AI algorithms use programmed heuristics to approximate optimal solutions, but it’s entirely possible that the path generated is in fact not optimal, which is why your GPS doesn’t always give you the guaranteed shortest path.

    To help distinguish fields of research, we use extra qualifiers to narrow focus such as “classical AI” and “symbolic AI”. Even “Machine Learning” is too ambiguous, as it was originally a statistical process to finds trends in data or “statistical AI”. Ever used excel to find a line of best fit for a graph? That’s “machine learning”.

    Albeit, “statistical AI” does accurately encompass all the AI systems people commonly think about like “neural AI” and “generative AI”. But without getting into more specific qualifiers, “Deep Learning” and “Transformers” are probably the best way to narrow down what most people think of when they here AI today.


  • This is truly a terrible accident. Given the flight tracking data and the cold, winter weather at the time, structural icing is likely to have caused the crash.

    Ice will increase an aircraft’s stall speed, and especially when an aircraft is flown with autopilot on in icing conditions, the autopilot pitch trim can end up being set to the limits of the aircraft without the pilots ever knowing.

    Eventually the icing situation becomes so severe that the stall speed of the ice-laden wing and elevator exceeds the current cruising speed and results in a aerodynamic stall, which if not immediately corrected with the right control inputs will develop into a spin.

    The spin shown in several videos is a terrifying flat spin. Flat spins develop from normal spins after just a few rotations. It’s very sad and unfortunate that we can hear that both engines are giving power while the plane is in a flat spin towards the ground. The first thing to do when a spin is encountered is to eliminate all sources of power as this will aggravate a spin into a flat spin.

    Once a flat spin is encountered, recovery from that condition is not guaranteed, especially in multi-engine aircraft where the outboard engines create a lot of rotational inertia.


  • Valve is a unique company with no traditional hierarchy. In business school, I read a very interesting Harvard Business Review article on the subject. Unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall, but this is Google AI’s summary of the article which I confirm to be true from what I remember:

    According to a Harvard Business Review article from 2013, Valve, the gaming company that created Half Life and Portal, has a unique organizational structure that includes a flat management system called “Flatland”. This structure eliminates traditional hierarchies and bosses, allowing employees to choose their own projects and have autonomy. Other features of Valve’s structure include:

    • Self-allocated time: Employees have complete control over how they allocate their time
    • No managers: There is no managerial oversight
    • Fluid structure: Desks have wheels so employees can easily move between teams, or “cabals”
    • Peer-based performance reviews: Employees evaluate each other’s performance and stack rank them
    • Hiring: Valve has a unique hiring process that supports recruiting people with a variety of skills



  • I am a pilot and this is NOT how autopilot works.

    There is some autoland capabilities in the larger commercial airliners, but autopilot can be as simple as a wing-leveler.

    The waypoints must be programmed by the pilot in the GPS. Altitude is entirely controlled by the pilot, not the plane, except when on a programming instrument approach, and only when it captures the glideslope (so you need to be in the correct general area in 3d space for it to work).

    An autopilot is actually a major hazard to the untrained pilot and has killed many, many untrained pilots as a result.

    Whereas when I get in my Tesla, I use voice commands to say where I want to go and now-a-days, I don’t have to make interventions. Even when it was first released 6 years ago, it still did more than most aircraft autopilots.



  • This is done by combining a Diffusion model with ControlNet interface. As long as you have a decently modern Nvidia GPU and familiarity with Python and Pytorch it’s relatively simple to create your own model.

    The ControlNet paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.05543.pdf

    I implemented this paper back in March. It’s as simple as it is brilliant. By using methods originally intended to adapt large pre-trained language models to a specific application, the author’s created a new model architecture that can better control the output of a diffusion model.


  • CodeInvasion@sh.itjust.workstoMemes@lemmy.mlAny time now.
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    1 year ago

    A lot of people in this situation have already tried everything, and they are complaining on the internet because they feel like there is nothing else they can do. Most people won’t even complain about it with their friends. I know I didn’t until one day I got drunk camping. That was the trigger for me to do something about it, because it was clearly eating away at me.

    I had many conversations with my wife following that, and how much our sexless marriage really bothered me, but that I am still completely and totally in love with her. We don’t have kids, so there’s not anything keeping us together. We agreed to an open relationship with our rules, and each of us has a veto which could stop the arrangement at any time. We are still completely committed to one another and love spending time together. Things haven’t been better, now when I think about being with another woman, I don’t need to feel guilty about it.

    And I think this is the natural state of humanity. Everyone needs a long-term partner for stability and to care for one another, but people always felt the need to cheat as well. Monogamy is as core to our DNA and survival as is Adultery. But because we’ve talked about it, there is no sneaking around necessary, no lying. We are completely honest with each other on everything.



  • The same argument could be said for an apartment building too. We need to collectively realize that Single Family Houses are a luxury that most of us will never see in our lifetimes. Our grandparents were able to enjoy them at low prices because the US had half the population it does today.

    Restrictive building codes that only permit building SFH is the cause of our housing shortage and not short term rentals that consist of 0.2%-1% of all dwellings.



  • At it’s core, this is the root cause of the housing crisis. We do not have enough supply. The amount of Airbnb’s that exist is extremely miniscule and the targeting of Airbnbs is an intentional distraction tactic.

    Depending on the source, 1% to 0.2% of all dwellings are listed for short-term rental in the US. That’s crazy small and has very little impact on housing prices overall.

    The fact of the matter is that Single Family Homes are an incredible luxury that our parents and grandparents were able to enjoy when the country had half as many people as it does now. It is no longer sustainable to expect a SFH in the US, and the American public continuing to cling to that dream and restrictive zoning practices are really what is driving up prices.

    If you want an affordable house you will need to move to a rural area where land and labor are cheap. If you want to live near any reasonably sized city, you better be upper middle class to even think about buying a SFH.


  • We used to run an Airbnb out of the spare rooms in our house. It was very cheaply priced, and we were always booked out for months. Super host status and everything. It was clear most people just look at the price and never the description or rules. We rented two bedrooms with a shared bathroom, and the amount of complaints we received because they had to share a bathroom with someone else was obnoxious.

    We closed up shop during the pandemic and just used those rooms as guest rooms instead. In hindsight it wasn’t worth the hassle of dealing with self-centered people who expect an experience superior to that hotels at a quarter the price. We also had some fantastic guests that we loved having stay with us, but the few bad experiences dramatically overshadowed all the good decent people.

    Airbnb’s are so shitty today because their customers are just as equally shitty on aggregate.