Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

You’ll know you’ve made it when you overhear this in a café:

“People were able to Photoshop teeth onto stuff in the past, this is nothing new! Heck, image editing has been around almost as long as images!”

“It’s a matter of scale! Kids today can see anything with human teeth!”

Startup idea: build an ML model that adds human teeth to any picture.

After launching your MVP, target enterprise customers with a model that adds human teeth to 3D models. Maybe some defense contracting adding teeth to predator drones.

Saw two crows attacking a hawk (I think red-tailed hawk) right above my house the other day. Harassing it and chasing it away.

Couldn’t get great pictures because the action was happening so fast, but it was pretty cool to see.

#birding #birds #wildlife

Northern Flicker at my feeder the other day.

These are beautiful birds — and they are even more colorful in flight, because they have yellow-shafted feathers and a yellow underside.

I’ve only seen them at my feeder twice, and they got scared off pretty quickly when they saw me both times.

#birding #photography #bird #nature #wildlife

Apparently this guy is watching his cholesterol — doesn’t want to eat any of these hard-boiled egg yolks…

#photography #nature #wildlife

Made katsu curry for the first time last night. Not so bad, but it made me want to go visit Japan again, which I fear won’t be possible for a few years. 🙁

(Amazingly, I took photos of every stage except the finished product. 🤦)

Apparently CVS Minute Clinics will do it, but not in CT or some other states. We may just go get it done in Massachusetts to minimize the fuss, as annoying as that is.

Would be nice to know why Minute Clinics have this rule in CT, so that I can (I assume) call the relevant legislator.

I can’t seem to find any way to get a flu shot for my 2 year old without going to a pediatrician (we don’t have a pediatrician in the area yet, since we recently moved). Pediatricians won’t give the shot unless you are a patient, CVS won’t do it, urgent care doesn’t do vaccines.

This seems less than advisable for a public health measure. I’d think that for something like preventing a kid from being a vector for a deadly disease, you’d want as little bureaucracy as possible. 😕

@Electronics Probably should have tagged this #electronics as well.

@Electronics Anyone have a suggestion on how to convert an LTSpice model to something that ngspice / oregano can handle?

I found a .asm / .asc schematic for the ULN2003 transistor array that I’d like to try out, but oregano doesn’t seem to have a way to import it.

I’m willing to try other circuit simulators as long as they have a reasonable GUI. I already tried Qucs and it seems to be worse in this regard (and buggy in general).

I would really love it if there were a cultural norm that science journalism aimed at the general public would not publish stories about anything until it’s accepted widely enough to be included in textbooks.

Instead, no one reads textbooks but they read the science section of the newspaper, which spouts out nonsense (and contradictory nonsense) that never gets any further scrutiny or coverage, and the public gets a horrible misunderstanding about both the nature of science and the nature of the universe. ☹

One thing I’ll note about this: it’s easy to think that I’m just talking about political news, but this 100% applies to “science journalism” as well. The scientific news cycle is so horribly broken (which I see as a major contributor to stuff like the reproducibility crisis), and I think a big part of the reason is that people have taken to following science happening “up to the minute”, and as a result the only things that get covered as news are early-phase research papers — and ones that give surprising results!

Both of these things make it much more likely that any conclusions drawn from them would be spurious!

This is one reason I am a fan of targeted advertising in principle — it should prevent people from polluting the information landscape.

In practice, I’m not convinced it works amazingly well, and the pursuit of it has done all kinds of damage to the information consumption and distribution architecture ­— plus it’s involved creating incredibly juicy targets for adversarial actors like governments.

Another thing to note: news is probably more useless than it should be because of the spam problem.

General news is probably fairly useless because there are just not a lot of things happening that everyone in the world needs to know about, so the S/N ratio is very low for any given consumer.

It’s made even worse, though, because attention is valuable and any broad communications medium will be infested by memetic parasites.

Ideally, everyone in the world would be notified of stuff like, “Here’s a new vaccine that will stop a terrible disease if you get it today”, but any sufficiently broad, high-priority channel like that will get hijacked by people who think educating people about their preferred cause justifies using the scarce bandwidth of the high-priority broadcast spectrum.

You might object, “Sure it’s not actionable for me, but if no one consumed the news, even important things wouldn’t percolate through society!”

That is probably true, but we’re so far from the point where the marginal consumption of additional news is a net positive that I don’t think we’re in any danger of an under-informed network here.

It would be interesting to have a service that gives you summaries of the news from 6 or 12 months ago, with care taken to cover the general response and counter-narratives.

I think more people should have this attitude (that you should not consume news):

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.html

I have talked to people who are genuinely distressed by things happening in the news and are afraid to miss something if they cut it out. But usually information in the news isn’t actionable even if it’s important.