The terminally unemployable type

I mean…a steam engine is a heat engine that uses steam to transfer heat. So you can make a steam engine by getting basically anything “really hot” and running steam through it. This is the working principle behind solar thermal power plants (but not solar panels!). I.e., you don’t necessarily need coal or even a fossil fuel to build a steam engine.

Holy fucking shit yes we do want to get rid of your stupid fucking mortgage along with the rest of this capitalist hellhole

Strictly speaking, that claim is not cited. But how do I cite a measurement? I’m too lazy to go into Google Earth and verify the measurement for myself, so I edited my comment 😆.

Not sure what I expected but yeah, it’s definitely very probably an 8 km road.

Start at the top of the Forbes billionaire list and fit as many names as I can

For the same reason, I’m letting you know here that I messaged you.

Yeah that doesn’t make it better

using more volts than the electric chair

Well…voltage isn’t really the whole story. You really need the voltage and current to multiply to a power, then apply that power for enough time for it to be dangerous. For example, typical static shocks are between 4000-35000V, but they only transmit a few millijoules of energy. By way of comparison, these are similarly sized voltages to those used in primary distribution (i.e., not the lines passing by your house, but the ones feeding those lines), and those can kill you instantly because they carry a shitload of energy.

And in a roundabout way, that’s how the electric chair actually works in the real world: it basically pumps energy into your body until you cook from the inside. There are definitely some deaths due to disruption of the heart. The aim of the machine was to demonstrate that AC is dangerous, and the main danger over DC is that AC causes muscle spasms, particularly your heart if electricity flows through it. However, most victims of them are basically cooked to death. The electric chair as it is currently implemented is not a fast or humane way to die. If you wanted to make it faster, you would need a much higher voltage and current pair, which would make the method (more) infeasible from a financial standpoint. (Obligatory: we should not be executing people at all.)

Which is why fractal wood burning IS super dangerous! It requires you to work close to a live microwave (oven) transformer (or one of similar size) and the circuit it is connected to, which could very quickly pump enough energy into your body to disrupt it and kill you almost instantly.

In case you don’t get notifications for PMs, I also PM’ed you.

Honestly…I don’t.

Like I love my parents but we’re not really into any of the same stuff. (Well technically all of us went to engineering school, but they’re not really interested in engineering/math/physics for its own sake like I am.)

But also that’s fine with me because I know they’re there for me.

For similar reasons, I’m not very close to any of my family members, even the ones I like… which is fine. We don’t need to be close to love/support/trust each other.

So I think that if you really share zero interests with your son, it’s fine if you acknowledge his interests and remind him that you’ll be there for him and that you love him.

Yeah I was being serious. I reported one of the posts but I’m not sure what else to do. Hope they get the help they need.

I think someone is having a psychotic episode. /serious

Wait a minute, that’s not a cat!

But it’s still cute so I’ll forgive it.

All of them.

Sure. America has its slimy tendrils in everyone else’s business, so it’s only fair that you have a say.

USA sux

“Gradient descent” ≈ on a “hilly” (mathematical) surface, try to find the lowest point by finding the lowest point near an initial guess. “Gradient” is basically the steepness, or rate that the thing you’re trying to optimize changes as you move through “space”. The gradient tells you mathematically which direction you need to go to reach the bottom. “Descent” means “try to find the minimum”.

I’m glossing over a lot of details, particularly what a “surface” actually means in the high dimensional spaces that AI uses, but a lot of problems in mathematical optimization are solved like this. And one of the steps in training an AI agent is to do an optimization, which often does use a gradient descent algorithm. That being said, not every process that uses gradient descent is necessarily AI or even machine learning. I’m actually taking a course this semester where a bunch of my professor’s research is in optimization algorithms that don’t use a gradient descent!

They created a good product so people used it and there were no alternatives when it got shit.

They created an inherently centralizing implementation of a video sharing platform. Even if it was done with good intentions (which it wasn’t, it was some capitalist’s hustle, and its social importance is a side effect), we should basically always condemn centralizing implementations of a given technology because they reinforce existing power structures regardless of the intentions of their creators.

It’s their fault because they’re a corporation that does what corporations do. Even when corporations try to do right by the world (which is an extremely generous appraisal of YouTube’s existence), they still manage to create centralizing technologies that ultimately serve to reinforce their existing power, because that’s all they can do. Otherwise, they would have set themselves up as a non-profit or some other type of organization. I refuse to accept the notion of a good corporation.

There’s no lock in. They don’t force you off the platform if you post elsewhere (like twitch did).

That’s a good point, but while there isn’t a de jure lock-in for creators, there is a de facto lock-in that prevents them from migrating elsewhere. Namely, that YouTube is a centralized, proprietary service, which can’t be accessed from other services.

I also respect your freedom to like what you want, but also also

Upvoted because it’s unpopular.