https://ciechanow.ski/cameras-and-lenses/
Over the course of this article we’ll build a simple camera from first principles. Our first steps will be very modest – we’ll simply try to take any picture. To do that we need to have a sensor capable of detecting and measuring light that shines onto it.
https://labzilla.io/blog/force-dns-pihole
Smart devices manufacturers often “hard-code” in a public DNS server, like Google’s 8.8.8.8, and their devices ignore whatever DNS server is assigned by your router - such as your PiHole.
Nearly 70% of smart TVs and 46% of game consoles were found to contain hardcoded DNS settings - allowing them to simply ignore your local network’s DNS server entirely. On average, Smart TVs generate an average of 60 megabytes of outgoing Internet traffic per day, all the while bypassing tools like PiHole.
https://dadabots.com/music.php
We started with the original SampleRNN research code in theano. It's a hierarchical LSTM network. LSTMs can be trained to generate sequences. Sequences of whatever. Could be text. Could be weather. We train it on the raw acoustic waveforms of metal albums. As it listens, it tries to guess the next fraction of a millisecond. It plays this game millions of times over a few days. After training, we ask it to come up with its own music, similar to how a weather forecast machine can be asked to invent centuries of seemingly plausible weather patterns.
It hallucinates 10 hours of music this way. That's way too much. So we built another tool to explore and curate it. We find the bits we like and arrange them into an album for human consumption.
It's a challenge to train nets. There's all these hyperparameters to try. How big is it? What's the learning rate? How many tiers of the hierarchy? Which gradient descent optimizer? How does it sample from the distribution? If you get it wrong, it sounds like white noise, silence, or barely anything. It's like brewing beer. How much yeast? How much sugar? You set the parameters early on, and you don't know if it's going to taste good until way later.
We trained 100s of nets until we found good hyperparameters and we published it for the world to use.
https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-50-year-old-grand-challenge-in-biology
We have been stuck on this one problem – how do proteins fold up – for nearly 50 years. To see DeepMind produce a solution for this, having worked personally on this problem for so long and after so many stops and starts, wondering if we’d ever get there, is a very special moment.
You're welcome
https://stdw.github.io/cm-sdr/
This is the type of nerdy hacking that makes me jealous.
After removing a few screws from the plastic housing to get access to the board, my first thought was to look for UART headers to take a peek at the serial console. After identifying two candidates consisting of four vias surrounded by a rectangle near the edge of the PCB, it was time to identify the pins. Using a multimeter, the ground pin can be easily identified by checking the continuity with one of the metal shields on board. The VCC pin can be identified by measuring the voltage of each pin when powering on the board. It should be a steady 3.3v, or in some cases 1.8v or 5v. This pin is not needed, but is still useful to identify the operating voltage and eliminate one candidate for the Tx and Rx pins. While booting, the Tx pin will sit on average a little lower than the VCC pin and drop much lower when a lot of data is being output. This leaves the last pin as Rx.
https://thehustle.co/the-economics-of-vending-machines/
It is estimated that roughly ⅓ of the world’s ~15m vending machines are located in the US.
Of these 5m US-based vending machines, ~2m are currently in operation, collectively bringing in $7.4B in annual revenue for those who own them. This means that the average American adult spends ~$35 per year on vending machine items.
What makes the vending industry truly unique is its stratification: The landscape is composed of thousands of small-time independent operators — and no single entity owns >5% of the market.
There are a ton of ways companies can track if you view an email. This site tests which of these methods work even if you are blocking images for example:
https://www.emailprivacytester.com/
You have to click the link in the first email, then click "test this email" for a second email that actually runs the test by the way. I was confused at first why it wasn't doing anything.
https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/gkqfxa/walk_with_me_though_the_hilariously_inconsistent/
I couldn't resist the pedantry of this post.
"The Best of Both Worlds"
"The Best of Both Worlds" Part II
Okay, here we go. This is TNG's first actual two-parter. Note now the "Part II" is placed outside the quotes, adopting the style from TOS before it. The difference, other than dropping the "Part I" from part one, is that we’re not using ALL CAPS anymore, so we learn that “Part” is meant to be rendered in title case, with the “P” capitalized. A boring fact that you'll soon learn is the only constant in the universe."Redemption"
"Redemption II"
Okay, another season-ending cliffhanger resolved! But... now we're just naming them like heavy metal albums, I guess. The only actual established rule for TNG so far is that "part one" does not get a roman numeral…
