SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
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User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
The problem is that the entire educational establishment is absolutely dedicated to keeping them in the same classroom
I don't think that's actually the case. It's more accurate to say that the educational elite (who design curriculums and whatnot) is dedicated to that. These are the same people who keep thinking that "open classrooms", major emphasis on group work and so on are a must have even though the people on the ground tell them those are just making everything shit.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
I learned way back in the reddit days that I should add any writer commonly referenced on The Motte to my "never read them"-ignore list.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
I suspect it's something to do with this, and also the Protestant roots. Protestants took the infernalist rhetoric and turned it up to never before seen extremes. Contemporary Protestant churches have chilled out a lot, but besides the Quakers, most of the early sects were all-in on motivation through fear via fire and brimstone preaching.
Didn't Martin Luther, the OG protestant, basically say that as long as you Believe, your sins are forgiven and you avoid hell?
I'm far from a theologian or historian but to me it seems that the "fire and brimstone" preaching was less a general feature of protestantianism and more related to those denominations that originated from Calvinism.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
Yes, US and UK were retarded about it. That does not mean that the only options were "do nothing" or "be completely retarded" and we have examples of western nations that had generally sane responses that didn't involve locking everyone indoors or forcibly shutting down workplaces but also didn't literally tell people to go out to bars and restaurants (which Sweden did in 2020 spring) or keep elderly and other high risk groups during the highest case peaks without masks or any visiting restrictions.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
That’s been common advice for voles locally for decades because the only native hantavirus is transmitted by vole droppings. It isn’t deadly but can be nasty, particularly if you have any kidney issues and applying basic precautions is so easy that you’d have to be a stupid not to take them (ie. wear a mask).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
I’m reminded of when Covid hit Finland in early March 2020 and within a week everything shut down (except workplaces that couldn’t go remote, stores and so on of course).
That had nothing to do with any government decisions. You can’t exactly run eg. a restaurant when 95% of your customer base disappears overnight. Business owners were outright begging for official restrictions because then they could at least apply for some types of benefits.
One industrial equipment manufacturer was in the news for major furloughs right in the beginning. The catch: They did that two weeks before things shut down locally because their international customers had already canceled or delayed so many orders due to general disruption in the far east.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
Agreed. What most frustrates me about Covid talk on The Motte is the insistence that there were only ever two situations in the western countries: a full lockdown or the Swedish "let's do nothing"-approach. As if my country (you know, right next door to Sweden) with zero legally mandated "lockdowns" but a bunch of voluntary recommendations and public health response changes didn't exist.
I kept track of restrictions during the Covid era and the only government mandated ones were restrictions to large events, bars, restaurants and gyms. Everything else was voluntary (including bar / restaurant closures when the pandemic started) or just recommendations with no penalties. The officials outright recommended that "going out in the nature is a very good idea now".
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
Whoosh... (see also and from 1:10 onwards)
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
Do you use commercial models/implementations or do you have a recommendation where to start if I want to set it up myself?
For photo noise reduction I've used Lightroom and (free but specific to Olympus / OM cameras) OM Workspace. I don't think there are good open source models as the models are camera specific due to different sensor and bayer filter characteristics (and why they can produce really impressive results - check the OM-1 original vs denoised comparison here where the original is far from what I'd consider usable while the Lightroom one is perfectly fine).
For audio stem separation Ultimate Vocal Remove is my tool of choice (you can download the models from the settings page). I start by removing vocals with MDX-Net / Kim Vocal 2, take the residual and remove drums with Demucs and then possibly remove the bass from the residual of that. Be aware that if you just split the stems from the original they will not sum to 100% and thus you want to go the recursive route. I'm sure there are some newer models that you can install manually but I haven't used those as the existing ones work well enough for my purpose (removing distracting vocals or emphasizing instrumental part to better hear what's happening).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
Also extremely impressive considering it predates any non-research AI models by at least half a decade or more.
LLMs and other generation AIs are much more HW intensive than domain specific neural networks. 500M - 1B parameters is plenty when the model doesn't have to understand instructions or global context (hell, there are some task specific audio models in wide use that can fit in just a couple of megabytes while performing well). Sure, a more powerful gpu will run the models faster but when you're doing noise reduction on a dozen culled and selected photos it doesn't really matter if it takes 15 seconds or a minute to run the process when on cpu it would take half an hour. Likewise stem separation taking a few minutes is a non-issue when you only need to run it once or at most a few times for a song (such as when remixing or isolating instruments for practising the lines).
There are apps that can run in the cloud but they're (expensive) subscription or credit based and having to pay $30-$50 per month per app gets really expensive. Not to mention they tend to have ridiculous censorship (think photos of people on a beach where you want to remove some distractions and the cloud version complains that your content breaks the terms of use).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
I'm a firm believer that nothing important has happened in the PC space for the last 15 years
There is one exception to this: A gpu that can run local AI models. Not LLMs or image generators but the sorts of custom neural networks that have become quite common for eg. photo noise reduction, audio stem separation etc. In those cases even a fairly low end "good gpu" will do fine (such as this ancient NVidia Quadro P2000 Mobile aka Gefore GTX 1050) but the difference between "have" and "have not" is massive.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
Office documents and PDFs, along with even many browser tabs, are definitely a solid set of real-world work computer requirements, but they're also not that demanding.
A better way to think about it is that web pages and apps are ridiculously ineffective while Office and PDF viewers are if not optimized, at least not 1000x pessimized by design simply due to having decades long history, no time for rewrite from the ground up in "modern" languages and generally the core is written by people who have at least some idea what they're doing.
A general rule of thumb I've found is that it's flat out impossible to have too much disk space if you use the computer for any sort of entertainment or hobby stuff beyond web browsing and the right amount of RAM is to take your initial estimate and double it. Hence me using this 2018 model laptop for C++ development, photo editing, running AI audio tools etc without problems because I made sure to upgrade to 64 GB ram and many TBs of SSD storage.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
'Man wakes up in 2040, tells his friend "I want to fuck a toaster". The friend replies "You know you can just order a sexbot, right? I really don't want to know about the details."'
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
You just told me that it's not common for Mormon ladies to have massive mammaries. That is the biggest downsell you could hand me
That is just because you're a heretical unbeliever who is doomed to eternity in hell...
Unlike those of us who are righteous unbelievers because we can appreciate the beauty of smaller breasts.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
Our feeds must be very different.
Probably, as I have zero interest in American media or general purpose forums, what with living in Finland and all that. It is possible that the American media is sensationalist but The Motte is an international forum so a generic "why do people care" is going to be taken as "why do people everywhere (in the west at least) care" to which the answer is "actually they mostly don't seem to care".
This is the latest news here about the virus (article is in Finnish and text copy pasted here in case paywall goes up - you'll need to use google translate or something). It seems to have a very "This is very interesting but it doesn't have any effect on us" sort of approach to me.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
On Meddit everyone seems aware of all the pieces
FWIW, that has been the approach of the Finnish media. "This is very unusual and a deadly outbreak but there is no reason for concern as human to human transmission is very inefficient and thus risk of any sort of pandemic is very low".
Basically the same as if there was an Ebola outbreak on a cruise ship. That'd be newsworthy and reason for cautioning travelers who may have interacted with people from that ship but otherwise just "stuff happens abroad, evening news as usual".
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
5d ago
I also don't know why.
Imagine there was an Ebola outbreak on a cruise ship. That would obviously also be story even though there is no risk of global pandemic or spread in western countries.
A deadly virus (in the very literal sense) outbreak in such situation is always newsworthy even though there is little risk of it spreading further.
Why do people care so much about the hantavirus outbreak?
They do?
I’ve seen more denials here on The Motte than I have seen any actual caring about the outbreak in the news or other forums. Obviously an outbreak of such virus on a cruise ship is newsworthy so there have been a few articles in local papers about it and one about two locals who were exposed on an airplane but that’s it. No alarmism whatsoever because hantaviruses just don’t transmit between humans well (or at all depending on the specific virus).
I think there is more demand for alarmism (that can then be used to point how ”the establishment” is overreacting) here on The Motte than there is any actual alarmism in the news or from officials.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
What part do you not believe?
That hantaviruses are found all over the world? That there are around 100000 cases per year? That this strain spreads between humans? That the spread is not particularly effective?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
In other words, they try pretty hard.
I don't think they do. They certainly could but frankly their recommendation algorithms have always been utter garbage and they've gone out of their way to make it impossible for users to even manually help them. For example I can't say "Never recommend this artist for this playlist" nor can I say "Never recommend this album or song for anything (but do recommend other songs from this artist)". Their recommendations to playlists keep repeating the same small number of songs over and over and can't even distinguish multiple identical versions (so a playlist that has song X from the original album will get recommendations for song X from a compilation album).
This runs in parallel with them having a massive team to work on the Spotify client with the result that it has only degraded with time since people need to justfify their existence while the real development needs could be filled by just a couple of small teams.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
It's pronounced "shitter" for a reason.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
I don't have any numbers but there's probably a reason you don't hear anything about similar utter devastation that's common in North American natives and Australian Aboriginals communities.
AFAIK more or less every human farming civilization has developed alcohol so most of the people in those who were at very high risk of alcohol dependency simply died off centuries or millenia ago and the rest developed physical and cultural resistance mechanisms.
Don’t know about that but very few people could beat him in sound and sample design back in the day. There was a very noticeable drop in the quality of new sounds and sample rom contents after he left Roland. D-50, JDs, JVs and the early expansion cards were brilliant and iconic in all sorts of popular music. Anything for the next 15+ years was solidly meh at best and total garbage at worst even though being technologically far more capable.
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