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Never toured the inside of the Houses of Parliament before, seeing all the red and green colour coded areas (lords and commons – look at the benches next time you see debates in either place) and busts and statues of some of the shapers, for better or worse, of much … Click to continue reading this post → The post Westminster Wonders appeared first on Asymptotia.

A search engine is a vast mechanical Turk - a reinforcement learning engine that uses human activity to understand the web. PageRank used signal from links created by people, but once people started using Google at scale, that usage itself created far more signal: which results you clicked on, how you changed your searches to get better results, and what else you searched for before and after. That then applies …

In yesterday's post, we looked at a vintage photoshoot from the mid-'50s that featured some rather peculiar bikinis. Today, let's travel further back in time while staying on the same topic, as we explore a feature published in Life magazine in its July 9, 1945, issue. The cover model, 20-year-old Paddy Ellerton, sported a striped panung bathing suit with trunks that buttoned up the sides and the magazine included an …

A few stunners from a yearly delight – the Flower Exhibition at the Carbon County, Penna Fair. All shot with a fully manual TTArtisan 50mm f/1.2 on a Canon digital back (the TT is a $100 corker of a Chinese copy of a ZEISS Sonnar 50mm, amazing build quality & response. More here) Shooting fully manual was a joy that late afternoon – gold, creamy light soaked everything. Beyond exposure …

A dataset of 187 thousand high resolution face images from movie trailers! Download it from huggingface. # Before the advent of giant web scale image datasets FFHQ used to be considered a big dataset full of images of faces on which many, many GANs were trained. One of the many issues with FFHQ (side note: don’t get me wrong there are lots of others, but I was focused on this …

I realize I don’t need ruler to draw little house this since every line is organic and natural. Same for its construction. Just nearby resources, simplicity, easy and can be made in a few days with help of family and friends. The result is something in harmony with the place. I guess this is real wisdom.I saw that giant lizard around my hut most of the days there. Quite scary …

Howdy to Deliberate Internet – my newsletter combining nuanced perspectives on Remote Work, Technology, Psychology, and other latest obsessions. Guilt, like pain, is a very useful signal: It means you are doing something you should not be doing. So when we feel guilty about “not being productive enough”, why do we do the same thing twice as hard? In this issue of Deliberate Internet, I’m going to share my simple …

The rise and fall of our interest in progress?

Looking to the next 50 years of Houston Foresight. We hope you’ll join us in 2025 as we glimpse back on the last 50 and get ready for the next! Registration coming soon, but mark your calendars now for this special event with alumni, students, faculty, and foresight friends.

Garbage Collection and Metastability Cleaning up is hard to do. I’ve written a lot about stability and metastability, but haven’t touched on one other common cause of metastability in large-scale systems: garbage collection. GC is great. Garbage collected languages like Javascript, Java, Python, and Go power a big chunk of the internet’s infrastructure. Until Rust came along, choosing memory safety typically implied choosing garbage collection. For almost all applications, languages …

The Chicago Surface Lines ran a fantrip on October 23, 1938 using PCC #4002, then just two years old. It toured the city carrying many railfans, and was credited as giving the fledgling Central Electric Railfans’ Association a big membership boost. The excursion was also covered extensively in Surface Service, the CSL’s employee publication. This scan was taken from an original 3 1/4 x 5 1/2″ negative. The photographer is …

Another year full of being surrounded by my family . The post This is 33 appeared first on @Kevuhnn.

We’re thrilled to announce our second cohort of our Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship! This year’s fellows are a group 25 of impressive progress thinkers and writers, selected from a pool of over 350 applicants. They are founders, researchers, academics, policy-makers, capital allocators, and journalists from across the U.S., Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, the U.K., and Hong Kong. They will be writing about nuclear fusion, reproductive longevity, space manufacturing, housing reform, urban …

‘Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy’, Josh O’Kane (2022)A short, legally-bound note on Josh O’Kane’s recent book ‘Sideways: The City Google Couldn’t Buy’ (2022), about Sidewalk LabsI imagine that some day I’ll be able to tell stories of my time working on Sidewalks Labs. Today is not that day. Nor is tomorrow. The non-disclosure agreements that we consultant designers, architects and other advisors were asked to sign in order to …

Meet Murphy! a 13 month old Working Cocker Spaniel who we have rehomed after owners realised how much time outdoors a Spaniel needs. He has been well trained so far and has a couple of small possesion issues we are ironing out (Socks, Mail, Books) and recall is good but not perfect yet but he is a cracker!Pedigree so docked tail and we see improvements daily as he settles in …