Guillaume 🦗 @guillaume@aleph.land

This is really fun

#recumbentbikes #recumbent #bicycle

On my way to maybe buy an old #recumbent #bike

"On top of everything else, politicians are actually really bad at gerrymandering"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq-Y7crQo44

How to come up with good technical names, like the Unscented Transform, by Jeffrey Uhlmann:

"Initially I only referred to it as the “new filter.” Needing a more specific name, people in my lab began referring to it as the “Uhlmann filter,” which obviously isn’t a name that I could use, so I had to come up with an official term. One evening everyone else in the lab was at the Royal Opera House, and as I was working I noticed someone’s deodorant on a desk. The word “unscented” caught my eye as the perfect technical term."

http://ethw.org/First-Hand:The_Unscented_Transform#What.E2.80.99s_with_the_Name_.E2.80.9CUnscented.E2.80.9D.3F

Zeynep Tufekci: Checking Facts Even If One Can't

https://www.theinsight.org/p/checking-facts-even-if-one-cant

#covid19 #science #conspiracies #facts

On a 60000×60000 sparse matrix, my code went from about 4.5 to 1.5 seconds to build it like that.

A trick to form large sparse matrices quickly in #python / #numpy. It should maybe have been obvious, but it took me a while to find it.

You could do
>>> m = scipy.sparse.lil_matrix(n, n)
and then assign values one by one like
>>> m[i, j] = v
but this is still kinda slow.

It's better to do:
>>> rows = [...] # list/array of row indices
>>> cols = [...] # list/array of column indices
>>> vals = [...] # list/array of values
>>> m = scipy.sparse.coo_matrix((vals, (rows, cols)), shape=(n, n))

It's kind of working now but not as well as I was hoping for.

I'm making Python segfault now. Maybe it's time to go to bed.

Oh I found out why. I'm dumb. Anyway I always wondered if I should try to sell those pictures of bugs. Maybe someone would like them on their living room wall.

I'm confused with this one: somehow I get a discontinuous function as a sum of continuous ones.

#debugging is fun

Oh interesting, apparently #chitosan can be made from #fungi: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128179703000146

(but it's not widely available yet).

It's interesting to see all the conspiracies and pseudoscience bullshit listed on his wikipedia page: illuminati, reptilians, 9/11, global warming, chemtrails, holocaust denialism, JFK assassination, "everything is vibration", reincarnation, etc.

The fact that this is the kind of person being influent in the world today makes me very pessimistic about the chances of converging towards better value systems. How can we talk about what really matters if we can't agree on very basic facts about reality?