Having worked on non-linear simulators/ODE solvers off and on for a decade, I agree and disagree with what you're saying.
I agree with you that that is 100% the point: you don't already know what's going to happen and you're doing modelling and simulation because it's cheaper/safer to do simulation than it is to build and test the real physical system. Finding failure modes, unexpected instability and oscillations, code bugs, etc. is an absolutely fantastic output from simulations.
Where I disagree: you don't already know what's going to happen, but you DO know generally what is going to happen. If you don't have, at a minimum, an intuition for what's going to happen, you are going to have a very hard time distinguishing between "numerical instability with the simulation approach taken", "a bug in the simulation engine", "a model that isn't accurately capturing the physical phenomena", and "an unexpected instability in an otherwise reasonably-accurate model".
For the first really challenging simulation engine that I worked on early on in my career I was fortunate: the simulation itself needed to be accurate to 8-9 sig figs with nanosecond resolution, but I also had access to incredibly precise state snapshots from the real system (which was already built and on orbit) every 15 minutes. As I was developing the simulator, I was getting "reasonable" values out, but when I started comparing the results against the ground-truth snapshots I could quickly see "oh, it's out by 10 meters after 30 minutes of timesteps... there's got to be either a problem with the model or a numerical stability problem". Without that ground truth data, even just identifying that there were missing terms in the model would have been exceptionally challenging. In the end, the final term that needed to get added to the model was Solar Radiation Pressure; I wasn't taking into account the momentum transfer from the photons striking the SV and that was causing just enough error in the simulation that the results weren't quite correct.
Other simulations I've worked on were more focused on closed-loop control. There was a dynamics model and a control loop. Those can be deceptive to work on in a different way: the open-loop model can be surprisingly incorrect and a tuned closed-loop control system around the incorrect model can produce seemingly correct results. Those kinds of simulations can be quite difficult to debug as well, but if you have a decent intuition of the kinds of control forces that you aught to expect to come from the controller, you can generally figure out if it's a bad numerical simulation, bad model, or good model of a bad system... but without those kinds of gut feelings and maybe envelope math it's going to be challenging and it's going to be easy to trick yourself into thinking it's a good simulation.
Love these kind of comments where I get to learn about things that I haven't played with.
> the simulation itself needed to be accurate to 8-9 sig figs with nanosecond resolution
What kind of application would require such demanding tolerances ? My first thought was nuclear fission. But then the fact that you had one in orbit sending data feed every 15 mins imploded my fanciful thinking.
Ahh, I really wish I could go into all of the details because it was a really cool project. The high-level answer (which is also related to the software-defined radio post that's on the front page right now) is that it was simulating the orbit of a satellite such that we could simulate the signals the satellite was transmitting with enough accuracy to implicitly get Doppler shift. That is... we didn't explicitly model Doppler shift in any piece of the system, it just showed up as a result of accurately modelling the orbit of the satellite's position and velocity relative to the receiver on Earth.
That’s really unfortunate. Having been to a regional burn before, the fact that there was no storage or recording, to me, seems to really fit the ethos: this video feed is completely ephemeral; after a frame has been displayed it has been lost forever.
I do, however, also appreciate how strict the community seems to be about recording without consent. Some people go to burns to be able to completely disconnect from their usual lives without fear that there will be any reprisal for legal/maybe-illegal-but-harmless activities they might do there, and the potential of being recorded can put a serious damper on that feeling of freedom.
But the thing is, the burning man principles give you everything you need to deal with scenarios like this. The burn is not supposed to be a vacation, and definitely not a place to completely disconnect. It's supposed to challenge you. And you're supposed to rise to meet that challenge, with radical inclusion, self-reliance, participation, immediacy. If you're afraid of cameras, wear a giant clown mask. If you want to feel freedom, walk into deep playa and close your eyes and ears. The burn doesn't care what you came there to take; it gives you what you need. (but I'm starting to realize that regionals have a bit less freedom)
Honestly, I actually take OP’s somewhat flippant remark as a very real counterpoint to both the article and to the Emerson quote: be careful what you consume, lest you become it. I have met people whose core sexuality is obviously shaped by porn, I’ve met people who eat unhealthy food every day and are surprised that they’re unhealthy, and I’ve met people who read/watch a ton of useless shit and it subconsciously or consciously starts to shape their identity and beliefs, even if they don’t start out believing what they’re reading/watching.
I take the opposite perspective on everything you've said.
Is it really that sad of a death? Many people die every day, and a few of them happen to have a ton of cameras shoved in their face. Why should anyone care about some minor celebrity?
I don't know what all this mourning is about, but it seems fake to me. The real reason why people should be upset is that it sets a precedent for political violence, so why not be upfront about it?
>It made me think about the famous part in The Twits (how if you say nasty stuff, you become ugly).
Ugly people are ugly, and nasty people are nasty. Don't get it twisted, real life is not a fairy tale. The cause and effect is reversed.
> AFAIK It's not true, but it's such a wonderful analogy. Kirk was an inflammatory figure, and spent a great deal of time talking about negative things. This was, essentially, a big part of what he did for a living - he talked about really sad things to win debates.
I don't know, it seems like he pretty much just rattled off standard talking points from the conservative playbook. My perspective is the opposite, the takeaway is that he wasn't that controversial or meaningful or deeply effective.
The tragedy is not that his life's work was cut short, it's just that his life's work was not that important in the first place. It's inevitable that we all kick the bucket one day, what matters is how we spend our time.
That's also what makes the killing so strange to me. He was a rather inconsequential figure, so the idea that someone would be driven to madness over him is pretty unusual and speaks to some sickness.
>Less that it makes you ugly, and more that a tragedy can seem, after the fact, strangely coherent for people who make their lives around tragic things.
People are cheering or mourning because they want to see "their side" win regardless of the principles or civility. It's not that complicated.
I can't tell you whether it was 'that sad of a death', I'm afraid - one of the ways I cope with the abject horror at all the suffering that exists is by convincing myself that suffering is a binary state, and cannot be ranked. That's something I choose to believe to my own sanity. It could be desconstructed in multiple ways.
I just know that I am better to other humans and animals, in terms of my own actions, where I don't think of a death as 'more' or 'less' sad. For me, personally (and this is not a judgement about anyone else, or an implication it would lead anyone else to such thoughts) I would find it to be an incredibly slippery ethical slope. It's a stance, in a semi-Kierkegaardian way, that I choose to take. I would rather not rank suffering.
> Ugly people are ugly, and nasty people are nasty. Don't get it twisted, real life is not a fairy tale. The cause and effect is reversed.
Ditto, I'm extremely handsome, so I can't go around posting about people being ugly. That's not in the secret code they give insanely good looking / handsome guys, and most of us follow to this day.. I guess you didn't get taken out of lessons for those classes? (I jest - I'm a conventionally ugly man.)
> I don't know, it seems like he pretty much just rattled off standard talking points from the conservative playbook. My perspective is the opposite, the takeaway is that he wasn't that controversial or meaningful or deeply effective.
> The tragedy is not that his life's work was cut short, it's just that his life's work was not that important in the first place. It's inevitable that we all kick the bucket one day, what matters is how we spend our time.
On that second one, that's a question of my ethical preference not to speak about people in certain ways so soon after their passing. Again, no judgement, and I'm not saying one position is more moral than the other. In fact, the only thing I'll say against Kirk for a little while in public is that many Christians don't believe it's humanity's job to do the judging.
Purely politically, yes, I strongly disagree with both his beliefs and methods. It's hard for me to know how much I'll mind when people shit-talk my politics when I eventually die. Again, I'm sorry, I'm arguing from emotion here - I just prefer not to for a little while. I don't know what that might feel like. I'm sure you can infer my political beliefs (and if you despise them, you are welcome at my funeral, should I beat you there - it might be a learning experience for me).
> That's also what makes the killing so strange to me. He was a rather inconsequential figure, so the idea that someone would be driven to madness over him is pretty unusual and speaks to some sickness.
This part is, genuinely, fascinating, and what I'm interested in and happy to talk about personally.
While two of the 'great American assassinations' (MLK, Malcolm X) of the 20th Century weren't serving politicians, I don't think it's unfair to say that Kirk was not a man who cast a similar image in the popular imagination.
I'm speaking completely in media-theory, star-theory terms, here.
You're right: it's deeply deeply strange.
We have been on a trajectory for some time where the idea of what I think is best described as 'divine right to celebrity' has been in a process of entropy. There are lots of theories about that, but I don't buy the 'we have more access to them, so they have to be more authentic' argument which seems to be most common.
(Personally, I believe that it's due to the increasing secularisation of the West; no matter how good an actor is, it must have been so much easier to understand Marilyn Monroe as an Athena than it is for us today to understand Sydney Sweeney the same, despite them sharing other archetypical qualities. It wasn't many years before Monroe's time that the audience's primary consumption of the feminine image would be as religious figure. I am not saying one mode is better or worse; I am saying that the context around "seeing a human image" has changed drastically in the West, and I believe this is overly discounted by many.)
This is important, and strange, I think, because Kirk's death is the crystallisation of this. His imagine is described as an 'icon' but is entirely divorced from the idea of an 'icon'. He is described as 'political' but was not a politician. I could go on, and I thought the image on Fox News of Trump announcing they'd caught a possible perm - looking for all the world like he belonged on the sofa - was one of the perfect images of the Trump campaign. Trump is by nature a pundit more than he is a politician, and I think he'd be the first to say as much. He would be a perfect president of the US if all that job entailed was sitting on a sofa being [charming/off-colour/a mix].
None of this, either, is a value judgement. You cannot force meaning onto star images. I don't think most politicians understand that. I think most people see their images in a fairly accurate way, and agree or disagree with the idea that they should be politicians based on that.
But it is a very very important to understand that:
- When the media treats the assassination of (forgive me if I'm wrong) a man who was essentially in charge of a big youth club and YouTube channel the same way they would the killing of a very, very important politician, this is new.
- When other world leaders phone in condolences for the same guy, this is new.
- When his body will be displayed in the Rotunda(?) this is extremely new ground for a man of his profession.
Utah is a death-penalty state. Assuming no inside job, if a killer knew that and still chose the Utah date, on a literal list of tour dates, this means that the killer sees this person's image as of high importance.
Because you really can just take a shot at anyone you like, really.
To choose a guy who is, functionally, a vlogger (right?) is new. And while I'm not saying the killer is of sound mind, or not of gainful employment by other parties, they are still a person who consumes news media and made this decision.
I think that had the assassination weapon been a drone, people would understand so much more how new this is. It's totally, totally new ground. I think it shows how completely meaningless the old ideals and images of the Anglo-American sphere are becoming, and I think it points to why it often seems like different people are looking at America, or the world, from completely different planets.
(NB - I know we killed John Lennon, which is somewhat analogous. But at least Charlie Kirk pretended to listen to and debate people, whereas I don't remember seeing any videos of Lennon showing any empathy to his audience prior to some of his contributions to the later Beatles stuff, eg White Album. If only Lennon had been carrying a copy of the record when he was shot. Not that the vinyl would have stopped a bullet, but there would, at least, be one fewer copy of it in circulation. I'm only joking - and mostly because I want people to understand that despite what I said above, I do think it's fine at a point - I do quite like that album. It's really useful, for example, if someone asks you which Beatles album you think Charlie Kirk was most akin to, because they're both basically about as bad as it gets.)
Been using QGIS for about 6 years now for doing manual data analysis, as well as GDAL and Spatialite in C++ for creating/saving datasets and geopandas, Shapely, pyproj, etc for automated analysis.
QGIS is an odd duck. Part of the complexity of using it is the fundamental complexity of GIS software. There’s way more background info that I didn’t know (what do you mean a latitude and longitude doesn’t mean anything without a bunch more info?!) that’s necessary to use it effectively. All of the excellent UI in the world won’t save you if you’re not using the right coordinate system.
On the other hand… yeah, it definitely could use some love. I consider myself in roughly the amateur power user category. I don’t use it every day, but when I do fire it up once or twice a month I’m doing some heavy data analysis with it. Every time I do that I end up tripping over three or four things that seem like they should be obvious to do but aren’t. And man oh man… if there was a single bug I would love to fix: highlighted points, whether selected through the selection UI or through the data table… should always have a higher Z-order than the other points around them. The fact that you can select a bunch of points and not see them highlighted… so frustrating. You can go in and change the symbology to fix that in a number of ways but dammit it should work right out of the box. /rant
>There’s way more background info that I didn’t know (what do you mean a latitude and longitude doesn’t mean anything without a bunch more info?!) that’s necessary to use it effectively.
That's sort of true, but QGIS could do a much better job of helping you manage this stuff, figuring out the right CRS, helping you make sense of clashing CRS'es etc.
> highlighted points, whether selected through the selection UI or through the data table… should always have a higher Z-order than the other points around them
I haven't come across that one much, but generally I wish the UI around querying data was much better. First it takes me ages to find the one specific tiny little button which lets you query stuff, then you have to remember to pick which layer you want to query, etc etc.
It's the most obvious mode, and should be the default, and not buried amongst a dozen other icons I'll never use.
Hard agree on it being odd in both GIS ways and QGIS ways. I just started a new job that pays for ArcGIS Pro and it’s wild how something that seemed intuitive to find on QGIS is buried under menus on Arc Pro, but conversely I’ve definitely seen things that I’m like “that was almost too easy why doesn’t QGIS have this”. And then you have the oddities of GIS
There are many different coordinate systems that aren’t WGS84, and there are different epochs associated with them as well. Some of the use latitude and longitude, some of them use easting/northing, etc.
The worst part is that if you don’t get it exactly right, you’ll still get answers that look right but are shifted by maybe 1-3m. As an example, we had a field team out with a Trimble survey stick with RTK (nominal accuracy 1-2cm) that they were using to cross-check data from our aerial survey platform. We had laid out a bunch of targets on the ground, which they surveyed the corners for. Most of the time there was a fantastic match between the aerial survey data and the ground truth data, but occasionally there was a pretty large offset. As I discovered WAY too late, exactly one of the cellphones that ran the Trimble app had its coordinate system set to one of the Canadian CSRS frames instead of WGS84: https://natural-resources.canada.ca/science-data/science-res...
Edit: naturally, they just handed me the coordinates in a CSV file that they’d captured. The Trimble app + whatever data collection app didn’t actually record the reference frame.
Heh, I had a discussion with a security guard about rattlesnakes once while working in rural NM. "If you get bit by a rattlesnake, man, get on the radio and call me. I'll get you to the hospital. But we're going to Cruces... I'm not taking you to the hospital in T or C... you'll fuckin' die there."
While I generally agree with you, the RT106x line does support external SDRAM as well. I've got an MIMXRT1060-EVKB sitting here on my desk that has 32MB of SDRAM alongside the on-die 1MB of SRAM.
While I do think the distinction between ADHD and ASD is still useful in some ways, mostly around having signposts regarding where to start for treatment… a number of people in my life, myself included, are basically “mix-and-match from both lists of symptoms”. Some very clearly are majority from one list or the other, but most are both to varying degrees.
That’s exactly what I mean. The distinction is useful for determining treatment approaches but overall it might be more useful to generally look at them together holistically.
In my own case, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Autism didn’t enter the discussion even a little bit. I’m medicated with stimulants and it works well for me for executive dysfunction part of my overall symptoms. It’s only very recently, while helping someone close to me go through a combo diagnosis, that I’m realizing that there are probably some other traits I have that would be better addressed with Autism counselling.
Heh, the psychiatrist who diagnosed me laughed a little when I showed up rushed and late to my first appointment.
The good news is that after you’ve been diagnosed, getting near the bottom of the bottle of pills is a great reminder to call the pharmacy for a refill. Plus… shortly after noticing that you’re almost out happens to coincide with the medication taking effect, so you’ll be in the perfect place to make that call!
Assuming you're lucky in a couple of different ways, as regulations around stimulants in many countries really screws people with the executive functioning issues caused by ADHD.
Running out? Your physician needs to write a new prescription, since they can't write one with multiple refills. Maybe your physician will write multiple with "don't fill before" dates on them, but overzealous regulators make many uncomfortable writing more than your next 28-30 days of medication.
Called your physician and got them to send your new script in? Hope your pharmacist isn't an ass, because some will straight up refuse to fill until the exact day you run out. Oh, and hope they have it in stock - because limits regulators and/or distributors put on ordering make the lives of retail pharmacies just buying these medications a special kind of hell.
I've been extremely lucky, my physician wisely writes me 28 day scripts so I can consistently time my requests for a new prescription be written, so every fourth Monday I send him a message and no later than Wednesday I get a text saying it's been sent to my pharmacy. The pharmacy I get my medication filled at doesn't treat me like I'm scum that's going to be selling my medication, so I can easily pick up my next 28-day supply a few days before I would run out if it works better for my schedule. But more than once I've had to play the game of figuring out which store actually has my medication in stock, and have the script pulled and resent to a different location....
I'm not sure if it's country-wide, or province-wide, or if I just have a good combo of doctor + neighbourhood pharmacy but in Canada here I generally get 6 months of refills on a prescription. They're still somewhat strict on when you're allowed to get refills, it's usually within 7 days of running out. My doctor does require an in-person visit before doing the next 6-month prescription, mostly because they want to monitor whether or not it's having any blood pressure effects, but my pharmacy is really good about pointing out that the prescription I filled has 0 refills left and that I need to book an appointment for that.
For N=1 (me), yes. I’ve been a smoker since I was about 12 years old and have tried to quit multiple times (short-term successfully a few times). I’ve had a few experiences with transdermal nicotine.
When I was in the hospital and couldn’t get out of bed, the nurses provided me with some. They seemed to be partially working, but I was still having pretty intense cravings all the time. After doing a bit of napkin math I realized that the patches were only providing about 1/3 of the daily nicotine I’d been consuming before my appendectomy.
When I tried to quit on my own, I started out with the recommended dosage from the package and had the same experience. They modulated the cravings a bit but were nowhere near effective enough to actually allow me to go through the day without chronic acute cravings. I bumped up my daily dose from the patches and did successfully stop smoking, but trying to reduce the dose too much led to the same brutal cravings. I ended up abandoning patches as a way to quit because of the daily hassle of trying to slowly wean myself off of the patches; a full patch decrement was too much at once, so I was cutting them into halves and quarters to try to make progress without ruining my concentration and focus.
I suspect that this just isn't in the cards given that kind of situation. You're ultimately just better off suffering through that withdrawal (especially since you've said you were in a frickin' hospital to begin with. It's not like you're losing that much effectiveness and productivity) and trying to find a new normal after the worst symptoms are over. It might take some time but our best guess is that kind of habituation is not permanent, so you should see quite a bit of improvement over time if you just stick to it.
I used to vape and I had the worst time quitting nicotine. I tapered down to around 25% of my usual daily intake over the period of about 3 months before I decided to quit for good. Even then, for about 3 weeks I felt incredibly tired all the time, yet I couldn't sleep, and I felt borderline mentally retarded... it was really bad. It took me about 3 months to feel more or less normal again, and cravings completely went away when I was properly diagnosed with ADHD and started medication about a year later.
I'm surprised they gave you nicotine patches - was this an American hospital? I always thought they want you to suffer withdrawal as a punishment for the moral failure of being a smoker. Also, there are probably some risks with throwing nicotine into the mix of whatever drugs they might be giving you.
I used the patch to quit, and I used to enjoy slapping those patches on in the morning almost as much as I enjoyed a morning cigarette.
Canadian hospital. It was an appendectomy, the only other medication I was on was morphine. The nurse actually offered the patches to me on her own after noticing a pack of smokes in the pocket of the sweater I was wearing when I went to the ER.
I agree with you that that is 100% the point: you don't already know what's going to happen and you're doing modelling and simulation because it's cheaper/safer to do simulation than it is to build and test the real physical system. Finding failure modes, unexpected instability and oscillations, code bugs, etc. is an absolutely fantastic output from simulations.
Where I disagree: you don't already know what's going to happen, but you DO know generally what is going to happen. If you don't have, at a minimum, an intuition for what's going to happen, you are going to have a very hard time distinguishing between "numerical instability with the simulation approach taken", "a bug in the simulation engine", "a model that isn't accurately capturing the physical phenomena", and "an unexpected instability in an otherwise reasonably-accurate model".
For the first really challenging simulation engine that I worked on early on in my career I was fortunate: the simulation itself needed to be accurate to 8-9 sig figs with nanosecond resolution, but I also had access to incredibly precise state snapshots from the real system (which was already built and on orbit) every 15 minutes. As I was developing the simulator, I was getting "reasonable" values out, but when I started comparing the results against the ground-truth snapshots I could quickly see "oh, it's out by 10 meters after 30 minutes of timesteps... there's got to be either a problem with the model or a numerical stability problem". Without that ground truth data, even just identifying that there were missing terms in the model would have been exceptionally challenging. In the end, the final term that needed to get added to the model was Solar Radiation Pressure; I wasn't taking into account the momentum transfer from the photons striking the SV and that was causing just enough error in the simulation that the results weren't quite correct.
Other simulations I've worked on were more focused on closed-loop control. There was a dynamics model and a control loop. Those can be deceptive to work on in a different way: the open-loop model can be surprisingly incorrect and a tuned closed-loop control system around the incorrect model can produce seemingly correct results. Those kinds of simulations can be quite difficult to debug as well, but if you have a decent intuition of the kinds of control forces that you aught to expect to come from the controller, you can generally figure out if it's a bad numerical simulation, bad model, or good model of a bad system... but without those kinds of gut feelings and maybe envelope math it's going to be challenging and it's going to be easy to trick yourself into thinking it's a good simulation.
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