embedded machine learning research engineer - georgist - urbanist - environmentalist

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Silvopasture is an ancient practice that integrates trees and pasture into a single system for raising livestock. Pastures with trees sequester five to 10 times as much carbon as those of the same size that are treeless while maintaining or increasing productivity and providing a suite of additional benefits. Livestock continue to emit the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, but these are more than offset by carbon sequestration, at least until soil carbon saturation is achieved.

    Silvopasture also offer financial benefits for farmers and ranchers. Livestock, trees, and other forest products, such as nuts, fruit, and mushrooms, generate income on different time horizons. And help protect farmers from risk. The health and productivity of both animals and the land improve.

    https://drawdown.org/solutions/silvopasture

    Trees in silvopasture systems provide livestock with protection from sun and wind, which can increase animal comfort and improve production. Trees can provide shade in the summer and windbreaks in the winter, allowing livestock to moderate their own temperature. Heat stress in livestock has been associated with decreased feed intake, increased water intake, and negative effects on production, reproductive health, milk yields, fitness, and longevity.[4][5]

    Certain tree types can also serve as fodder for livestock. Trees may produce fruit or nuts that can be eaten by livestock while still on the tree or after they have fallen. The leaves of trees may serve as forage as well, and silvopasture managers can utilize trees as forage by felling the tree so that it can be eaten by livestock, or by using coppicing or pollarding to encourage leaf growth where it is accessible to livestock.[1]

    Well-managed silvopasture systems can produce as much forage as open-pasture systems under favorable circumstances. Silvopasture systems have also been observed to produce forage of higher nutritive quality than non-silvopasture forage under certain conditions. Increased forage availability has been observed in silvopasture systems compared to open-pasture systems under drought conditions, where the combination of shade from trees and water uptake from tree roots may reduce drought impacts.[1]

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture


  • The raison d’être for RISC-V is domain-specific architecture. Currently, computational demands are growing exponentially (especially with AI), but Moore’s Law is ending, which means we can no longer meet our computational demands by scaling single-core speed on general-purpose CPUs. Instead, we are needing to create custom architectures for handling particular computational loads to eke out more performance. Things like NPUs, TPUs, etc.

    The trouble is designing and producing these domain-specific architectures is expensive af, especially given the closed-source nature of computer hardware at the moment. And all that time, effort, and money just to produce a niche chip used for a niche application? The economics don’t economic.

    But with an open ISA like RISC-V, it’s both possible and legal to do things like create an open-source chip design and put it on GitHub. In fact, several of those exist already. This significantly lowers the costs of designing domain-specific architectures, as you can now just fork an existing chip and make some domain-specific modifications/additions. A great example of this is PERCIVAL: Open-Source Posit RISC-V Core with Quire Capability. You could clone their repo and spin up their custom RISC-V posit chip on an FPGA today if you wanted to.



  • Exactly. When the accused has paid off half the jury, you shouldn’t put much stock in the verdict.

    The only thing I care about when determining whether something is a genocide is the facts of the case (which are overwhelmingly in favor of describing the Uyghur genocide as a genocide), not the outcome of a highly political vote by countries all with their own motives and interests.






  • Sounds similar to some of the research my sister has done in her PhD so far. As I understand, she had a bunch of snapshots of proteins from a cryo electron microscope, but these snapshots are 2D. She used ML to construct 3D shapes of different types of proteins. And finding the shape of a protein is important because the shape defines the function. It’s crazy stuff that would be ludicrously difficult and time-consuming to try to do manually.


  • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldtoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.world"Free Market"
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    10 months ago

    This is so true for the housing crisis. Conservative NIMBYs will be like “deregulation good!” and “free market good!”, but then they religiously show up to any and all city hall meetings to rant and rave about how we need to use heavy-handed regulations to protect “historic” parking lots and the “neighborhood character”.




  • 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.




  • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    11 months ago

    Honestly, Adam Smith gets a worse rap than he deserves because all the rich people abused his ideas to peddle unregulated, free-wheeling capitalism. Even Smith knew the inherent danger of privatization and monopolization of land and rampant rent-seeking.

    Kinda like how Nietzsche’s sister exploited and misrepresented his work after his death to further the Nazi cause.

    It seems to be a common thing with a lot of the classical economists that they all recognized (and wrote quite a bit about) these problems of monopolism and rent-seeking, but wealthy elites cherry-picked their books to serve their own economic agenda.


  • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    11 months ago

    You speak a lot about “means of production” for someone who has not once uttered a single word of concrete, tangible solutions in this entire thread. I’m out here posting sources, data, policies, and actual solutions that would measurably improve people’s lives, while you’re here larping online, doubling down on your bigotry against sexual minorities, and doing zero praxis.


  • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    11 months ago

    It’s a libertarian who had his land taken by agribusiness.

    Certainly one of the takes of all time.

    fursona

    I’m no furry, but this is honestly very rude and condescending towards people with that kink. Not sure why you thought that bigoted, conjured-from-thin-air jab was necessary. Maybe don’t be a bigot towards sexual minorities online?

    You know those words in that order are talking about slavery right? The ownership of labor in private hands?

    Just because you say it confidently doesn’t make it true. Read a little bit about the factors of production. Here, private ownership of labor means the value of your own labor is yours, rather than taxed away (such as via income taxes) or otherwise expropriated by the state.

    And yes, of course I’m skipping over a lot of nuance in the difference between communism and socialism, but this is the highest level distinction. Much like there’s a heck of a lot different between humans and E. coli, but the highest level distinction is that one belongs to the domain bacteria and one belongs to the domain eukarya.

    You said yourself you support private capital.

    And I also said I support social ownership of land and natural resource, either directly with government leases or indirectly via taxes, which is very much not a capitalist/libertarian viewpoint by any stretch of the imagination. Very convenient of you to leave out that half, isn’t it?

    And considering Georgism diverges from capitalism at the highest level of categorization, well, let’s just say your pet theory that “georgism = capitalism” falls rather flat. To continue the biological analogy, it’d be like if you said the domain archaea is actually just a subset of bacteria based solely on the fact that you had pre-decided that you think bacteria and eukarya are the only two domains of life. Or if you said all fungi were actually plantae because you pre-decided that you think plantae and animalia are the only two kingdoms of eukarya.


  • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    11 months ago

    Very bold opinion on the categorization of an entire economic ideology for someone who, far as I can tell, literally never heard of it until today.

    I’m not sure if you’re aware, but one of the most basic ways to categorize economic ideologies is based on who owns what factors of production, i.e., who owns land (including natural resources), labor, and capital.

    Broadly speaking, communists believe in social ownership of all three, socialists in social ownership of land and capital, and capitalists in private ownership of all three. Within this framework, Georgism falls squarely on the belief that land should be socially owned (either directly by the government and leased out kinda like Singapore does or indirectly via “full” taxes on land, negative externalities, severance, etc.), while labor and capital ought to be privately owned. Thus, it is equally incorrect to describe Georgism as either socialism or capitalism, as it is simply neither.

    Unlike libertarians, neoliberals, and capitals, Georgists view monopolies and private ownership of land as basically satan. That’s a pretty dang big difference.

    How would you feel if I attempted to reduce down the wild complexity of leftist ideologies – everyone from syndicalists to market socialists to distributists to demsocs to Marxists – into “lmao a bunch of Pol Pot supporters”? Pretty silly and reductive, isn’t it?