Notices by mark (mjn@icosahedron.website)

I'm no wildlife photographer, but got lucky taking a photo of a humpback whale breaching in Húsavík, Iceland. Not very sharp, but otherwise pretty happy with it...

it's weird to see advice about going to grad school in 'STEM', b/c the S/T/E/M parts have virtually no similarities between them, in terms of either what grad school is like or what post-grad career paths & prospects look like

Noticed that posting images here stopped working, and it seems to be b/c trying to upload an image somehow involves twitter.com, which my config of uBlock Origin blocks? Why would Mastodon call out to twitter.com to upload an image?

Is your child practicing questionable machine learning? Know the signs—

lol: let's overfit lots
tbh: totally bogus hypothesis
btw: bias the weights
omg: 'obtain' more gpus
smh: singularity might happen
rofl: reference only friends & labmates
brb: beat ridiculous baseline
lmao: let mturkers answer obv
smdh: sorry my data's hardcoded

While I'm inventing conspiracy theory origins for recent technologies, here's another one:

Bitcoin was invented by an unknown person pseudonamed "Satoshi Nakamoto". Before people used their spare computing time to mine bitcoins, one of the big things they did with spare compute was to run the SETI@Home client, helping to search for extraterrestrials. Who might have a vested interest in redirecting resources away from the search for extraterrestrials? Is "Satoshi Nakamoto" really a /person/?

Neural Information Processing Systems would've been a good name for a Front Line Assembly album