Not social media. Advertising, and any business that is funded by advertising. Social media before the maturing of internet advertising was great.

You lead with "Moreover, it is an optimal algorithm that minimizes state estimation uncertainty." By the end of the tutorial I understood what this meant, but "optimal algorithm" is a vague term I am unfamiliar with (despite using Kalman Filters in my work). It might help to expand on the term briefly before diving into the math, since IIUC it's the key characteristic of the method.

That's a good point. "Optimal" in this context means that, under the standard assumptions (linear system, Gaussian noise, correct model), the Kalman Filter minimizes the estimation error covariance. In other words, it provides the minimum-variance estimate among all linear unbiased estimators.

You're right that the term can feel vague without that context. I’ll consider adding a short clarification earlier in the introduction to make this clearer before diving into the math. Thanks for the suggestion.

I love all these. I'd add Blightsight by Peter Watts to the list. It has the creepy, psychological bent of Annihilation combined with the hard science elements common to qntm's, Neal Stephenson's and Greg Egan's books.

Would love to find more books like Blindsight, something about the way it described agency without consciousness was both creepy and extremely memorable.

Blindsight is spectacular.

Blindsight was great. I had such high hopes for their follow up novel Echopraxia, but sadly it felt rushed and under-edited, but the ideas were spectacular.

Where I thought this was going: entering the Brand Age of AI. LLMs become commoditized, so the big labs increasingly focus on marketing and rhetoric to maintain market share. See the Anthropic spat with DoD (though I do applaud them for that, whatever their motivations).

Ditto. I kept waiting for the AI comparison. My interpretation was less agentic coding than the commodification of LLMs, forcing Anthropic and OpenAI into a pivot to focus on brand. Anthropic's spat with the DoD could be viewed through that lens: losing money on a deal to better position the brand.

It's only effective if "Children's devices are almost always set up by parents", which is a big assumption. My parents were about as tech savvy as you could reasonably expect but I still got away with buying R-rated video games and such. Kids are persistent and the dangers aren't always obvious.

If kids are being persistent and the parent is indifferent to it, then online age verification won't be effective either. Children will just ask mom and dad to verify their Roblox and Discord accounts.

For sure, I'm not blanket supporting age verification technology. Just saying the alternative proposed by the parent commenter isn't very reliable either.

The question is whether parents should bear this responsibility or the state.

Both. The same as for other materials we don't want kids to access, like alcohol. We can't expect parents to always be watching their kids. That's not how societies have ever worked.

But what I'm actually questioning in my comment above is effectiveness of the technology solution proposed at the device level.

It's effective insofar as the parents secure the device. If it's a general purpose computer, and the parent forgets to lock the bios, kids will just live boot into Ubuntu or some other OS and do as they please.

Or they may install keyloggers (including hardware loggers) to get the parents' password and then go update their account.

Certainly this may help hinder them, but it won't take long for them to learn the basics of curcumvention, and the cost is regulated speech for OS manufacturers.

How do you stay injury free climbing every day? I feel like at even twice week I am entering the danger zone with ligamentisis.

I suspect they mean "days that I deal off" rather than "every day". Even elite climbers struggle with ligament issues climbing every single day

Name checks out! Your clarification makes sense on a second read. Thanks

Yeah I definitely meant on days I feel off, and not that I climb every day haha. My body wouldn’t allow me to do daily climbs :)

Sourdough is the bomb though. I agree about the lack of variety, but in its defense, sourdough starter can be used for a variety of other baked goods.

Yes it's a common misconception that you can only make wide crumbed hipster crusty loaves. Those are great but if you want plain white bread, buns, croissants, etc etc it's all possible to do.

Plus bread itself is used in other recipes, like sandwiches or toasts or for mopping up sauced dishes.

Or even brew beers and meads.

As others have said it’d wreck the flavour but you can go the other way and use spent grain from the mash in making bread which adds some pretty interesting texture and flavour.

With sourdough these would not be great. I did something similar with a mead and it came out like a sauerkraut wine

> Not sure what the point of the website is

I think it's just informative. I found it interesting at least. I formed my own conclusions from it.

Really? Since it’s lacking any comparison to other states and because many of these complaints single out metropolitan areas comparison to nationwide census of metro areas, what actual conclusions are you drawing that are valid?

Context matters a lot. We haven’t built a lot of mercury based hat felting shops lately in California. What conclusion do you draw from that?

I assume you're being a little obtuse. The comparison to wherever manufacturers phones and EVs is implicit. They are manufactured somewhere with looser environmental regulation than California, where they are purchased en masse. You can draw your own conclusions from that.

I saw complaints that amounted to “it’s more expensive to build out large industrial facilities in bay area than in Reno”

okay what’s different in Reno hmmm I could be like the website and try to imply it’s only environmental regulations… or I could acknowledge that land price and availability is drastically different and also labor costs…. But then that wouldn’t help my contrived argument that it’s all the pesky regulations.

Again, without apples to apples comparisons to other areas, wha are you actually able to conclude from the website other than stoking confirmation bias?

It's providing a single geographic data point to you, for free. You're welcome to do your own research if you want a complete picture.

I like that your vague response to the question is either “this provides no value without context” or “the value it provides without context is a secret that only I know” but phrased in a silly way

Fair point. My actual conclusion: California has made it structurally impossible to manufacture things it consumes, and has exported the environmental burden to places with fewer protections.

You have a good point. California is an area that makes some things but not all things. From this data we can conclude that California is an area on earth where there are people.

This places California somewhere between the north pole (produces no things) and replicators from Star Trek (produces all of the things) in terms of productivity. This is useful information because it makes the reader feel li

Nice, you’ve just described how confirmation bias works.

Out of context, incomplete single data points that feels like one’s already held view is how confirmation bias works.

All data points can be called confirmation bias if you frame them that way. The question is whether the data is accurate, not whether it's complete.

The site isn't claiming regulations are the only factor, just that they're sufficient to make things impossible regardless of other factors.

“The question is whether the data is accurate, not whether it is complete”

Oh so Lies of omission don’t exist? Deception researchers will be very keen to hear how that works.

So if someone Mormon bubbles a photo of you that also has a kid in it, you’re fine being arrested for indecency and registering as a sex offender? After all, that’s just omitting a few pixels, not a lie or deception in your book.

Agree to disagree, I guess. Not everything interesting has to be comprehensive.

I think I'm done with this conversation now you're comparing a website about manufacturing to child porn. That's in bad taste.

We can't do without garbage trucks though

- have less garbage

- collect garbage more frequently in smaller trucks

taiwan has very cute small garbage trucks and they have a ice-cream-truck like song signalling for people to bring whatever trashbags they have out to the truck, so you don't even have piles of garbage outside for days waiting for the weekly truck. quite nice.

Having less garbage is a whole other issue. Small utility vehicles makes a lot of sense but doesn't seem to be the way it's done in NA. Maybe it’s a labour cost thing. But even the long haul trucks are huge here compared to the rest of the world. They haul the same amount but the cab and engine are enormous. Maybe because the roads are wider they can just make everything bigger.