Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

@migurski May I introduce you to a favorite (disputed) fact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Venezuela#Original_flag

A little free advice from crusty old Uncle Charlie: When an “AI” company (like any other company) says they have to stop doing something because the way they were doing it was dangerously good, our first reaction should be “wow, a PR strategy” and not “wow, it was TOO GOOD, imagine!”

Good-intention–adjacent online shitbirds saying that Boeing whistleblower didn’t die the way he did because he didn’t act exactly like they think someone in that situation must act is just extremely callous and ignorant and bad and will lead to a lot of unnecessary suffering in the world.

@beep Seeing a lot of hypocritical takes on the timeline today. “Oh, I would simply not be awash in blood and bile!” People need to be realistic.

Amusing myself by injecting false reflectances into pansharpening inputs. (CC BY-NC data from Maxar.)

@natevw Woof, I feel this – from a different angle, but still.

It’s Monday and once again time to remind the world that “nation state” has a very specific meaning, different from “country”, and it’s easy to say something on the spectrum from technically wrong to actively ethnonationalist by throwing it around at random.

@marcpfister However much credit you get for doing this, it isn’t enough. I continue to use this program as a stellar example of humanitarian engagement in conversations with others in the industry.

When other people take a long time to reply to e-mail: lazy, unfriendly, irresolute, displaying a kind of disorganization characteristic of an unconscious and wasted life. When I take a long time: busy, thoughtful, rich inner world, applying the effort to do a good job, generous and sincere, an admirable and worthy friend.

@dpiponi Ooh, see, that’s interesting to me!

@dpiponi That makes sense.

I suppose what I’m wondering could be taken from a different angle as: is that fractal “about” waves or is it “about” float32s (or other implementation details)? Presumably at some point in the complexity and time of the system, it changes from the former to the latter, but is that after, say, 100 timesteps? Or 100 billion?

When I said noise, I imagined AGWN in the air, but I suppose another option would be jittering the room dimensions.

@dpiponi So cool – the kind of thing I would ask my (math major) mom about as a kid and she’d say “Sure, in theory, maybe one day when computers are better.”

Two brainstorms just in case they’re interesting:

1. I’ve been reading about shearlets, which are near-optimal at representing the wavefront set, and I can feel things in the back of my brain churning here. (E.g., the “fractal” looks a bit like a noiselet.)

2. Would the results be subjectively different if trained with a little noise?