embedded machine learning research engineer - georgist - urbanist - environmentalist
On the other hand, a car has far greater maintenance costs. The car has license, insurance, maintenance, gas, parking, etc., whereas an ebike is basically free in comparison. Electricity to power an ebike is pennies, and maintainance is a few basic tools and a new tire or inner tube on occasion.
With all the money saved, you can just rent a car for the handful of days the ebike genuinely is not sufficient.
I moved from California to Montreal a few years back to study, and now I’m staying for good. I tried duolingo on and off for far too long, but I found it super uninteresting and hard to remain committed to.
Best strategy I’ve found is called comprehensible input. The idea is to find books or other reading material that you can get the basic gist of when reading, despite not understanding every single word and phrase and grammatical construction. The more you read, the more you’ll find yourself able to understand, which is also very motivsting!
Also, make sure it’s material that actually interests you. The idea is it’s better to read extensively, reading things that actually interest you to some degree and keep you mentally engaged, than to just really intensively study a much smaller amount of (less interesting) material.
This actually mirrors how we acquire languge. The idea is to intuitively understand French by having seen a lot of it rather than to basically memorize French. You ultimately want to be able to glance at a sign, for instance, and just know what it means without having to translate in your head.
Some resources I found useful were these French illustrated books in Dollarama, but even better is a series of books designed to be comprehensible input by Olly Richards. He’s a native English speaker and polyglot who has written a bunch of graded readers that gradually increase in vocabulary and difficulty. He has several books for French, including beginner short stories, intermediate short stories, beginner conversations, intermediate conversations, climate change, WW2, and philosophy. The nice thing is he actually does a good job of making the stories and content interesting to an adult learner, unlike the children’s books at Dollarama.
Even his beginner books might be a little too advanced for your level so far, though, from what you say. If they are, it’d be best to find some material at a lower level that you can understand a little better. After all, if it’s too hard for you, it will make the process much slower and less enjoyable, which will make it much more likely that you quit. You could even simply try googling “french comprehensible input” to try to find material suitable for your level.
One last resource is the government of Quebec offers free in-person courses for immigrants and many French learners. They are part-time, and they offer multiple options for hours per week, so you could pick what works best for you. It would be worth checking to see if you might qualify for those courses once you move here.
Yeah, I’m working in embedded ML, and it’s an insanely exciting time. We’re getting more and more microcontrollers and single-board computers with special AI accelerators, many of them RISC-V, by the day it seems. One of the next steps (in my opinion) is finding a good way to program them that doesn’t involve C/C++ (very fast but also so painful to do AI with) or Python (slow unless it’s wrapping underlying C code, and unsuitable for microcontrollers). In fact, that’s exactly what I’m working on right now as a side project.
What’s also cool is RISC-V promises to be the one instruction set architecture to rule them all. So instead of having PCs as x86, phones and microcontrollers as ARM, then all sorts of other custom architectures like DSPs (digital signal processors), NPUs, etc., we could just have RISC-V with a bunch of open standard extensions. Want vector instructions? Well, here’s a ratified open standard for vector instructions. Want SIMD instructions? Congrats, here’s another ratified open standard.
And all these standards mean it will make it so much easier for the compiler people to provide support for new chips. A day not too long from now, I imagine it will become almost trivial to compile programs that can accelerate tons of scientific, numerical, and AI workloads onto RISC-V vector instructions. Currently, we’re stuck using GPUs for everything that needs parallelization, even though they’re far from the easiest or most optimal devices for many of our computational needs.
As computing advances, we can just create and ratify new open standards. Tired of floating point numbers? You could create a proposal for a standard posit extension today if you wanted to, then fork LLVM or GCC or something to provide the software support as well. In fact, someone already has implemented an open-source RISC-V chip with posit arithmetic and made a fork of LLVM to support it. You could fire it up on an FPGA right now if you wanted.
This talk, given by David Patterson (a legend in computer architecture and one of the people who helped create RISC-V at UC Berkeley) is an excellent (and accessible) introduction.
It’s especially dumb because RISC-V is – dare I say it – inevitably the future. Trying to crack down on RISC-V is like trying to crack down on Linux or solar photovoltaics or wind turbines. That is, you can try to crack down, but the fundamental value proposition is simply too good. All you’ll achieve in cracking down is hurting yourself while everyone else gets ahead.
This video by a political science professor explains it best: https://youtu.be/zMxHU34IgyY?si=N5oHElN4Xlbiqznh
In short, the only people who truly know are Hamas, and the best the rest of us can do is speculate.
Some possibilities are that Hamas wanted to sabotage normalizing relations between Israel and the rest of the Muslim world, that Hamas wanted to bait Israel into a wildly disproportionate response that would garner themselves sympathy and recruits, that Hamas was bluffing and feigning strength and counting on Israel to think the attack was bait, that Hamas was just acting on bloodlust and wanted to attack regardless of the consequences, or many other possibilities.
Further, we focus a lot on the substative issues, i.e., the grievances and disagreements at hand, but we don’t talk about the bargaining frictions nearly enough. There are countless border disputes around the world, and yet they rarely result in war. Why? Because war is costly and most wish to avoid it. War typically happens when there are both substantive issues and bargaining frictions, i.e., things preventing the two sides from negotiating a solution. But us onlookers can’t even know for sure what these frictions are, only speculate.
All this is simply the nature of the fog of war, that the true strategies/goals won’t be known for a while, if ever. Anyone who tries to tell you with certainty why they did what they did at this stage doesn’t actually know with any degree of certainty. Nobody but Hamas actually knows.
I do recommend watching the full video above, as the professor is very engaging, rather amusing, and covers this topic quite thoroughly.
And Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in cervids such as deer, moose, and elk, which thankfully has not been shown to be transmissible to humans yet. Prions are the stuff of nightmares.
Oh, and Fatal Familial Insomnia.
Definitely. If you don’t understand how the world works, you can’t tell if someone else does either. Only experts can easily spot fake experts. And that’s exactly the trouble with things like pseudoscience and misinformation; it’s easy to fall for without the domain knowledge necessary to avoid falling for it.
A great example is when you’re in elementary school and you get that one really athletic kid on your team for some team sport in gym class. You know you’re not on that level and never will be, so you tie yourself to them, knowing that them succeeding is good for you.
Likewise, we like to attach our fortunes to a designated person, and they become greater than just a person in our mind. Like, that athletic kid is not longer simply a kid who’s good at sports; they’re the athletic kid. Our favored 19th-century political thought leader is no longer just some person who had opinions on society and wrote them down; they’re a political messiah.
The type of biome you get depends largely on availability of water, not temperature.
Deserts are deserts because they have very poor availability of water most of the time. This is most often caused by simple lack of precipitation, but other factors can influence this:
As for why we largely don’t see desert at the equator, it’s because of precipitation. Due to the circulation of cold and warm air in the atmosphere, the equator typically sees warm air, often laden with moisture due to the oceans and the high moisture capacity of warm air, rise. As it rises, it cools, and because cool air cannot hold as much moisture as warm air can, it drops a lot of that moisture as rain. This results in most of the equator getting a lot of rain.
Once the air has risen and cooled, it cycles north and south into the subtropics, where it falls down to earth again. And in falling, it warms up again, especially as these regions still receive a ton of sunlight, particularly in the summer. But the air has already lost much of its moisture, so now it’s just a bunch of hot, dry air blasting down over the subtropics. This is why we have bands of deserts across most of the subtropics, from the Sahara to the Middle East to the desert of the SW US and northern Mexico. Same on the opposite side of the equator, with the Kalahari desert in southern Africa, the Australian outback, and the Patagonian desert.
There are other factors, too, of course, such as rain shadows from mountains and ocean currents, but the atmospheric circulation is the big one to answer your question.
They don’t just look like diamond; chemically they’re extremely similar, too. Diamond is just a bunch of carbon atoms covalently bonded together into a 3D crystal, which is why they’re so incredibly hard. Moissanite is basically the same but it’s carbon and silicon atoms mixed together. Silicon has the same number of valence electrons, so it can function similarly chemically as carbon, hence why it works. Thus, moissanite is also extremely hard and refracts light in beautiful ways, too, except imo even more beautifully. Instead of a colorless luster, it’s a subtle rainbow luster to moissanite.
Source: I got my fiancée a moissanite ring, and it’s lovely. And because it’s lab-made, I got her blue moissanite (the coloring is just from adding certain impurities) that matches our cat’s eyes perfectly. It’s way more unique, cheaper, and more ethical than diamond, but doesn’t sacrifice on quality one bit.
Exactly. I’d honestly rather have paid social media than engagement algo and ad-driven social media. When your algorithms chase engagement over all else, it leads to real harms, like the youtube alt-right pipeline. Fediverse ain’t perfect, but I like that there’s no engagement-chasing algorithm, no ads, just donations.
I am struggling to find any online testimonials from third parties. I have seen other similar deals with other legit companies, but how they usually work is you sign a contract with them to give them a certain percentage of your salary for the first year or two of any job they help get you hired for. This is important as it gives them an incentive to actually follow through and get you as good a job offer as they can. With an upfront payment like this, they have no material incentive to follow through and actually try to get you a good job. Even if they’re not a straight-up scam, it might be sufficient for them to avoid a lawsuit by getting you one or two crappy job offers, then throwing up their hands and saying, “We’ve done our job; it’s on you if you don’t wanna accept these jobs.”
I wouldn’t bother with these guys. If you really want this sort of coaching, go for a reputable one that you would sign a contract giving them a percentage of your salary. And definitely one with plenty of third-party reviews online.
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Me, who’s not in web dev:
Remember that in social media (including Lemmy) there’s always some sort of general audience, lurkers that are following the discussion but not interacting with it. What matters is less to convince the moron(s) and more to inform the general audience.
This 100%. The rule of thumb I’ve heard is that about 90% of people are lurkers, 9% are commenters, and 1% are posters. This might be skewed somewhat on lemmy, as the reddit migration resulted in a disproportionate amount of commenters and posters to move to lemmy, plus the general sense of “doing my part” to provide content for this platform.
Anyhoo, regardless of the actual numbers, the most important people to convince in an online discussion are the onlookers. Rarely will you convince the person you’re debating, but if you come in calm and rational and bring good links and supporting evidence to your claims, most lurkers will recognize that in my experience. If you look deranged and/or ignorant, you’re unlikely to sway many except those who already agree with you.
The reason this is important is because, unfortunately, misinformation can spread like wildfire on the internet if you let it, so convincing onlookers of the actual facts is important. Sure, it’s not healthy to dedicate our lives to schooling ignoramuses on the internet, but it’s always good to help in the ways you can in the fight against misinformation.
For science news/communication, Sabine Hossenfelder is really good. She’s an actual physicist and does a great job at presenting science news in a no-bs way. Also a good sense of humor.
For climate-related stuff, Climate Town is very good. He has a master’s degree in climate policy, and he cites a ton of sources. His videos have a lot of humor and sarcasm, but they’re very strongly fact-based and in-depth. He’s not strictly news, but he does more mini-documentaries of topical topics relating to climate science and especially climate policy.
For general journalism and analysis, The Atlantic and The Economist are very good in my experience. They’re both subscription-based (which honestly might be why they’re so good; they don’t have to chase clicks for ad revenue), but you can just browse their website for articles, then copy-paste the article links into archive.is to bypass the paywall. Both have a lot of excellent explanatory journalism and analysis.
I also find public broadcasters produce a lot of good content, as they likewise don’t have to chase clicks for ad dollars. PBS and NPR (American), CBC (Canadian), DW (German, but they have English-language documentaries on youtube here), and Al Jazeera (Qatari, just don’t trust their reporting on Qatar; their English international journalism is highly reputable, though, and they produce good documentaries available on youtube here) are some examples. In general, I find the long-form content produced (i.e., longer videos and documentaries as well as long-form articles) by these outfits to be better for “getting informed” than their regular just-the-facts news.
Amongst the above public broadcasters, I especially recommend the DW documentaries. They’re really prolific and produce a ton of high-quality documentaries, all available for free on youtube.
For geopolitics and the war in Ukraine, William Spaniel is the best I’ve found. He’s a professor of political science, and his videos are in-depth and topical on the happenings of the war. He also gives great insight into political science and geopolitics as a whole. Also has a good sense of humor and engaging style. He’s also very quick to upload an analysis whenever there’s a major development in the war.
For general data-based analysis, Our World in Data is a really good website. All the data is open-access and open-source, and they have a treasure trove of good charts and accompanying analysis for exploring the world by data. You can filter by subject category as well.
The main issue I find with strict factual reporting like Reuters or the AP is that most of us simply don’t understand the context on every single issue to think critically about every story we read. Like, I know I have certain topics I do know a lot about, but the world is just too complex for me to know a lot about every topic.
This is where good explanatory journalism can come in, like Vox does. If you can find a good explanatory journalism outlet that you can trust (for me Vox is one of them), it can do a lot for your understanding of the news. There are also solo journalists doing this, scientists doing science communication, and so forth. Explanations by experts are worth their weight in gold.
Honestly, the best way to get informed is outside of social media. What gets people talking isn’t always what you should know, and what people talk about on social media isn’t typically a very high level of discourse. Sure, you do find occasional people putting in high-effort, informed comments, but it’s hard to separate those from all the noise.
Probably my top recommendation is to find a non-fiction book (or several!) with good reviews and written by an expert on a topic that interests you and read it. As an example, I’m really interested in sustainable agriculture and gardening, so I got a few books on the topic, Farming the Woods and Silvopasture, and I read them. The nice thing about entire books written by experts is they’ll include a lot of details and specifics that you simply wouldn’t know that you don’t know. And because it’s a book, not some short video that has to appease an algorithm, they can take the time to guide you through all the depth you would miss from more superficial material.
Be wary to find legit books by legit experts, as there’s unfortunately nothing stopping charlatans from pretending to be experts to sell you stuff or peddle a weirdo ideology.
Exactly. I rode an ebike one summer to commute to an internship. The sweat factor alone meant I never would have done that by regular bike, as I would’ve arrived at the office sweating like a pig.