P Stewart @pstewart@mastodon.sandwich.net

so we have a student who we asked to train a VAE to generate memes. he was showing us his newest model, which has problems with mode collapse, and was only outputting one thing over and over again (I swear I am not making this up):

"one does not simply make memes"

"University of California terminates subscriptions with world’s largest scientific publisher in push for open access to publicly funded research"

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/uc-terminates-subscriptions-worlds-largest-scientific-publisher-push-open-access-publicly

Context for those not in the US: this is huge. UC is a uniquely enormous and influential university system in our country. When they do things, many other universities follow suit.

This has been said much more eloquently by many more qualified people, but the news media has a persistent and poisonous unconscious bias towards describing police actions in inevitable, naturalistic, and proceduralist terms.

From a copyediting perspective, the gulf between “had to confiscate” and “CPD confiscated” is immense. See also: the rampant use of passive voice in police shootings, making sure the police officer is never the subject of the sentence that ends in “…killed an unarmed man.”

Also from the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory Baker-Nunn telescope. By combining a series of images taken over the lunar eclipse, a picture of the Earth's shadow. #astrophoto

Anticipating and Addressing Student Resistance in Your Courses https://doug.holton.space/2019/01/student-resistance/ #highered #teaching #activelearning #facdev #profdev

Our country is racist, the media are racist. Case closed.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/01/12/if-ever-you-doubted-the-existence-of-media-bias/

Why are 200 million workers on strike in India?
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2019/01/08/why-are-200-million-workers-on-strike-in-india
'...India has a workforce of over 520 million, only 6-7% of whom are employed in formal enterprises, of which barely 2% of are unionized. Most of the unionization is limited to public sector employees, with very few instances of a formal union being active within the private sector or informal sector. In the last Employment and Unemployment Survey to be conducted by the government in 2012, over 62% of the employed were estimated to be daily wage workers, making their source of income seasonal and very vulnerable to market fluctuations. There is very little to indicate that things have changed radically in the past seven years. If anything, the very nature of unorganized labor has changed...'

It's interesting to think of the concept of the "free and open web" as a generational thing. I can't imagine that that phrase means much to someone born in Generation Z, who grew up with "the internet" meaning an array of chiclet-sized apps built by companies in Silicon Valley.

Like being able to mow down dozens of zombies in seconds is cool and all, but that's not going to help me build a sustainable farm.

Instead of having missions to get more guns, imagine how cool it would be to have to go on missions to recruit specialists to address specific needs in your growing community.

Don't have proper plumbing? Go find a civil engineer. Having trouble building sustainable housing. Trade grain with another community to have their architect​ teach you.

That would be LIT.

I feel like we still haven't hit the peak of survival gaming yet.

Most survival games are centered around the individual experience of a dude, usually a white guy, arming himself to the teeth and progress is measured by how easily they can kill.

I'd like a game that has a more holistic and community context. Yes, defending yourself is important, but so is housing, a power grid, water, schools, manufacturing etc. You know, community building.

I don't know of a game that goes that far with it.

Me: "I want an official Mastodon instance with 128 GB of memory and 10 TB of hard disk."

Santa: "You'll toot your eye out, kid."