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EdamAnchorman

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Posts posted by EdamAnchorman

    Elon Musk's Starman - Is this shit real wtf

    in General Banter

    Posted

    8 hours ago, ignatius said:

    teslas killing in similar (higher) numbers than the infamous Ford Pinto. Pinto was recalled i think. basically ford cheaped out on putting a part between the bumper and the gas tank so if a Pinto was rear ended it would catch fire/explode. an inexpensive part.. a piece of metal that shielded the gas tank was added after the recall. but ford knew about it for ages and didn't do a recall. but it was a long time ago and i forget about the details. it's probably more complicated than my memory. 

    https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-deaths

    Fun Fact: Teslas have killed over twice as many people as the exploding Ford Pinto did at a roughly similar level of sales. the Pinto sold ~3 million units & killed at least 27 people. Tesla is now creeping up on 5 million total vehicles & 95 deaths from battery fires or autopilot crashes.

    It's very clear what they're doing.  Musk decreed that LIDAR and other capabilities that literally every other level 3/4 self-driving vehicle uses are stupid and too expensive, so Tesla is relying on cameras only.  To do this and to do it well requires a shit-ton of data (real-world data is best, obv.) so Musk turned his fanbois into beta-testers.  These people are putting their lives (and the lives of others) on the line so that Tesla can save a few $ per unit, not to mention that it's just foolish to continue to attempt to get to level 4 autonomy with cameras alone, especially when such better supplementary technology exists.

    Tesla were even so cheap that they only very recently added a camera which monitors the driver's eyes to ensure that they are paying attention to the road while using autonomous systems, something that every other company has done from the beginning (again, risking lives strictly to cut cost and make share price go up / burn the shorts).

    • Like 1

    I think the computers just won.

    in General Banter

    Posted

    1 hour ago, auxien said:

    hopefully all this will make people start to really question why they listen to what what they listen to, what it means to them, if it connects them with the artist’s experience/story in some way… 

    Not an exact parallel, but did McDonald's make people stop and question why they like the foods they like and what food means to them?  No, they just shove it down their gullet.

    Like someone above said, music to most people is something that's ancillary, disposable, on in the background while they work/jog/exercise, etc.

    I think there are enough people out there who value music enough to create a market for human-made music, as long as it can still offer a superior experience.

    • Like 8

    I think the computers just won.

    in General Banter

    Posted

    Idk, some of the stuff I find most interesting is when I hear something I didn't necessarily expect or something that I didn't necessarily know that I wanted to hear.

    Seems to me that this kind of thing would be great at churning out representative examples of what's out there but might not be as good or good at all at actually generating something good, new, and exciting that rests in a musical whitespace, so to speak?

    • Like 1

    Interesting things

    in General Banter

    Posted

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46346-0

    Quote

    Predicting and improving complex beer flavor through machine learning

    The perception and appreciation of food flavor depends on many interacting chemical compounds and external factors, and therefore proves challenging to understand and predict. Here, we combine extensive chemical and sensory analyses of 250 different beers to train machine learning models that allow predicting flavor and consumer appreciation. For each beer, we measure over 200 chemical properties, perform quantitative descriptive sensory analysis with a trained tasting panel and map data from over 180,000 consumer reviews to train 10 different machine learning models. The best-performing algorithm, Gradient Boosting, yields models that significantly outperform predictions based on conventional statistics and accurately predict complex food features and consumer appreciation from chemical profiles. Model dissection allows identifying specific and unexpected compounds as drivers of beer flavor and appreciation. Adding these compounds results in variants of commercial alcoholic and non-alcoholic beers with improved consumer appreciation. Together, our study reveals how big data and machine learning uncover complex links between food chemistry, flavor and consumer perception, and lays the foundation to develop novel, tailored foods with superior flavors.

    Fig. 3

    Fig. 3: Correlations between online reviews and trained tasting panel scores.

    RateBeer text mining results can be found in Supplementary Data 7. Rho values shown are Spearman correlation values, with asterisks indicating significant correlations (p < 0.05, two-sided). All p values were smaller than 0.001, except for Esters aroma (0.0553), Esters taste (0.3275), Esters aroma—banana (0.0019), Coriander (0.0508) and Diacetyl (0.0134).

     

    • Like 1

    2020 US Election

    in General Banter

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Squee said:

    Wow, you guys are just your own worst enemy.

    Half of me wants to say:

    Quote

    “If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? ”

    -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

    But the other half of me would be fine if the R party was just blown into nonexistence.

    Interesting things

    in General Banter

    Posted

    https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2317878121

    Quote

    Unifying fluidic excretion across life from cicadas to elephants

    Can insects weighing mere grams challenge our current understanding of fluid dynamics in urination, jetting fluids like their larger mammalian counterparts? Current fluid urination models, predominantly formulated for mammals, suggest that jetting is confined to animals over 3 kg, owing to viscous and surface tension constraints at microscales. Our findings defy this paradigm by demonstrating that cicadas—weighing just 2 g—possess the capability for jetting fluids through remarkably small orifices. Using dimensional analysis, we introduce a unifying fluid dynamics scaling framework that accommodates a broad range of taxa, from surface-tension-dominated insects to inertia and gravity-reliant mammals. This study not only refines our understanding of fluid excretion across various species but also highlights its potential relevance in diverse fields such as ecology, evolutionary biology, and biofluid dynamics.

     

    • Farnsworth 1
    • Big Brain 1

    How does the World view America these days?

    in General Banter

    Posted

    19 minutes ago, decibal cooper said:

    That's cool you got to go to Cuba. I wanna go so bad to Havana. I imagine the music and food there are so good, even though like you say the country is probably not in great shape economically. Are Americans allowed to go there now? Thought that there was still some kind of embargo or something.

    There is still an embargo and Americans are not allowed to travel for tourism, but there are several reasons for which we are allowed to travel.  Look it up; the most popular is, "to help and support the Cuban people."  Supposedly, you're supposed to do something like 40 hours worth of helping the people each day, and you're supposed to keep receipts that they can check for up to 5 years or something.

    We stayed in privately-owned AirBnBs and did several private tours, all of which count toward that goal.  We did a farm tour in Viñales where our guide (a farmer) took us through tobacco fields and to a tobacco / honey / coffee farm.  The gov't takes 90% of their crop, but they're allowed to do whatever with the remaining 10% and I may or may not have hypothetically in an alternate universe perhaps not purchased 50 cigars from this farmer (there's some gray area there, as they are not "branded" cigars; they are made and sold by the farmer not the government so nobody could tell me if they were illegal but idc because now I have them in my humidor).  We also did a vintage car tour and an Afro-Cuban / Santeria tour in Havana; both supported privately-owned businesses.

    Inflation there recently has been crazy af (something like 100 - 500x?), the gov't ration books don't provide shit, and COVID / Trump's policy shift from Obama wrecked a lot of their tourism (country's main source of income) so they are facing a pretty bad time all around.  Because of the embargo, we had to take a fat stack of cash and change it there (American credit cards and bank cards will not work), but tourists from other countries do not face this restriction, although you can really only use credit in a limited number of shops and there were long lines for the ATMs that were actually working (side note, the gov't restricts Cuban citizens to withdraw max 5,000 Cuban pesos per day, which currently is only about $16 USD).

    Bottom line was that we had an amazing time, and nearly all Cubans we met were friendly and helpful and had a lot of good things to say about American people.  It also helped a lot to have a native Spanish speaker (father-in-law) and fluent Spanish speaker (my wife); I'm not sure how well I could've gotten around with limited Spanish.  It was amazing to hear all kinds of stories like our Viñales hostess and how her 2 sons had to sell drugs for a coyote just so they could get to Grenada where they're barely making enough to eat but she says, "at least they're free".  Or our Havana hostess who was a pharmacist but also does the hosting/AirBnB concierge gig because her pharmacist job pays less than $15 a month and that's not even enough to feed herself let alone her family (doctors make a whopping $20 a month)...  I'd definitely recommend going, but do your research first and plan well.

    • Like 3
    • Thanks 1

    How does the World view America these days?

    in General Banter

    Posted

    1 hour ago, ignatius said:

    h329clwg8voc1.jpeg?width=619&auto=webp&s

    Man, I drag on capitalism a lot but after spending a week in Cuba and talking to a lot of people, the situation there is totally fucked up and a lot of their history should not be celebrated.  (Of course their situation is complicated and due to many problems.............)

    • Like 2

    How does the World view America these days?

    in General Banter

    Posted

    32 minutes ago, Nebraska said:

    zBsQaxa.png

    When it comes to the average breast size, the figure that’s thrown around for American women is 34DD, which is a little bit larger than what people speculate Sweeney’s size to be. That number seems to come from a decade-old survey by lingerie retailer Intimacy, so it’s also hardly a scientific fact.


    great article. allegedly, american's are under such severe censorship they have forgotten the true measurements of an average pair naturally home grown of milk duds- so much so that they confused sydney sweeney's "average" bust for what is universally considered "big boobs". 

    https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/03/sydney-sweeney-breast-size-oscars-snl.html

    Average cup size might be D or DD but there's no way in hell 34 or lower is avg.  I mean, just walk around WalMart.

    I am now convinced that capitalism is evil

    in General Banter

    Posted

    5 hours ago, chenGOD said:

    and repeatedly. corporate jagoff bootlicker.

    And the thing about it is that he's wrong.  He's just wanking into a ceiling fan on LinkedIn.  At most big companies, several hundred thousand dollars is a rounding error. "Every dollar counts", yeah only when they're negotiating your salary / benefits.

    Furthermore, it's typical to actually get punished for not spending out any budget that has been allocated to you.  If I ask for $120k to buy an instrument or $5k for travel to a conference, I get no kudos for coming in under that.  Finance actually gets upset because it creates more work for them if I come in significantly under, AND next year when I ask again they'll say, "well you didn't allocate properly last year, so we're gonna give you less this year."  Vendors have actually tried to give me discounts and I have had to tell them "no" (and then I enjoyed the puzzled look on their face).

    The whole thing is just bonkers.

    • Like 3

    How does the World view America these days?

    in General Banter

    Posted

    16 minutes ago, Nebraska said:

     

    GH772jYbwAAINOs?format=jpg&name=large

    Residents of an Encino neighborhood are the latest victims of wheel thefts.
    Caroline Fratacci found her daughter’s Honda right where she had parked it across the street, but it was missing all four of its wheels.


    In disbelief, Fratacci asked her daughter if her friends were playing a prank. “She goes, ‘That cannot be my friends — that’s, like, a crime,’” Fratacci said. “All four of my wheels disappeared,” Kabel said. “Gone — completely gone.”

     

     

    i honestly don't think the wheels disappeared

    That kinda stuff happens all the time. Happened a few times when I was living in a townhouse development in NJ 2011.

    • Like 1

    2020 US Election

    in General Banter

    Posted

    17 hours ago, may be rude said:

    it's a lame narrative that's not well-grounded in reality. biden is out there being very effective as president. he's fine and great. fox news and other reality subversion operations have been seeding the narrative since 2019. here's a list of accomplishments. 

    • Lowering Costs of Families’ Everyday Expenses
    • More People Are Working Than At Any Point in American History
    • Making More in America
    • Rescued the Economy and Changed the Course of the Pandemic
    • Rebuilding our Infrastructure
    • Historic Expansion of Benefits and Services for Toxic Exposed Veterans
    • The First Meaningful Gun Violence Reduction Legislation in 30 Years
    • Protected Marriage for LGBTQI+ and Interracial Couples
    • Historic Confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Federal Judges of Diverse Backgrounds
    • Rallied the World to Support Ukraine in Response to Putin’s Aggression
    • Strengthened Alliances and Partnerships to Deliver for the American People
    • Successful Counterterrorism Missions Against the Leaders of Al Qaeda and ISIS
    • Executive Orders Protecting Reproductive Rights
    • Historic Student Debt Relief for Middle- and Working-Class Families
    • Ending our Failed Approach to Marijuana
    • Advancing Equity and Racial Justice, Including Historic Criminal Justice Reform
    • Delivering on the Most Aggressive Climate and Environmental Justice Agenda in American History
    • More People with Health Insurance Than Ever Before

     

    of course you're right that we're in a very dangerous situation and we're maybe fucked. but it's not because of biden, it's because people's minds are fucked. there are reasons why someone very seasoned and experienced is exactly what we need right now, and there are trade-offs to younger people. 

    some say obama was a better politician than biden but honestly i'm not sure. biden has achieved a number of bipartisan agreements. biden has achieved a number of deft political wins. biden has navigated very difficult territory very successfully.

    the misconception is a trick that can be illuminated and defused. is he old? sure, he's 81. is he "too old?" no. he's still sharp. biden is fucking great.

    I'm not trying to take the piss or anything but sincerely asking how much of this was due to Biden and how much was due to a competent administration / cabinet / advisors / etc.

    I get what we're up against with orange T, that backing his challenger is important and the situation is different because we have a 1-term incumbent and so forth...  Even if the answer is that a lot of it was due to the administration, that's still not a reason to vote against Biden, just want to be clear and honest about all this.

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