Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

Also, there’s reason to believe that current standard heat index numbers are actually severe underestimates at the high end of the range: https://romps.berkeley.edu/papers/pubdata/2022/heatwave/22heatwave.pdf

I hope US news media learns to take these heat waves as the serious disasters they are, not merely as inconveniences. In terns of excess deaths, say, what’s happening in the South right now is likely to do as much harm as a once-in-a-generation hurricane, tornado, or earthquake.

I know a lot of people are very anti–e-mail, and I respect that, but the idea that unlimited words from friends can show up any time still has a bit of the wonder for me that it had in 1996. I’m sad that contemporary e-mail culture displaced that.

It’s good to see Mastodon and Bluesky showing a lot of life, but I will say that I was secretly hoping Twitter would die without a replacement and we’d start sending personal e-mails again. I miss those.

The NANOGrav papers are open access: https://iopscience.iop.org/collections/apjl-230623-245-Focus-on-NANOGrav-15-year

I am actually giving it one more chance by trying it as the merge block for upsamples and residuals in a U-net, but when it was the final head-to-tail residual merge, the early training of the network was almost flat, so my hopes are not super high.

This was a clever idea! Signals should have approximately standard normal distributions, and you mix two Gaussians of the same σ by doing a×sqrt(t) + b×sqrt(1-t) to get output with the same σ at any t. This gives you a nice compromise between concatenation (information-preserving but wasteful) and addition (vice versa). Great!

It didn’t work at all!

Sign up for my course to learn techniques such as SLRBTH (Setting the Learning Rate a Bit Too High)!

And under some assumptions about the resolution of your monitor and how far you are from it, if you look at the image full-size, it’s probably very roughly the right angular diameter.

Back of an envelope: DSCOVR EPIC’s resolution is about what someone with “normal” vision would see if they were sitting on a GPS satellite. https://botsin.space/@dscovr_epic/110607835638112191

Going to reset the “Hours Since Silly Bug Found” counter, finding it already at zero, taking the zero plaque off, looking around for the zero plaque, not finding it in the stack of plaques, and crashing.

Like, look, there are real problems around how we think and act about expertise In These Times. That’s real.

In addition to (not instead of) that, it’s, you know, the thing where people complain about stuff posted by people they follow. If you don’t want to see people talking about what they had for lunch, unfollow @69_lunchlover_420. If you don’t want to see topical takes from people who tend to post a lot of topical takes, there is solution to that too.

I appreciate the “Amazing that so many submarine experts are also Kremlin experts!” zingers going around, because yeah, sure. But also, logging into social media and being annoyed that people you follow have opinions on issues of the day seems a bit narrow?

Neat. https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html

Like I can totally see both the “AI now corrects itself, is unstoppable; how does this affect bitcoin?” headlines and the “Yes, I spent all of March calling people credulous fools for not knowing that self-correction is the exclusive purview of ensouled life, but nevertheless this is Just Math” takes and I wish we could just skip that part of everything.

As long as I’m in a listy mood, this language model that backspaces out of dead ends is interesting because:

1. It’s an example of something categorically less interesting than the pro-LLM camp is going to claim, and more interesting than the anti-LLM camp wants to talk about; that gap seems important.

2. It points toward the text diffusion models I keep trying to subtly warn people are probably coming without saying so explicitly, oops, backspace backspace backspace.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.05426

It’s the time of year when you can see a little dab of blue on the far edge of the arctic sea ice. https://botsin.space/@dscovr_epic/110580368514917463

1. From the abstract, I think the actual article is much less about blaming scientists for policy failures than the headlines make it sound.

2. I can’t read past the abstract of this article on interpreting science for public use because it’s paywalled.

https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4057045-catch-22-scientific-communication-failures-linked-to-faster-rising-seas/