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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 9h

(My mind was blown by the "more women are willing to undergo a hormonal cycle and surgery than men are willing to donate sperm" - that was just unimaginable to me previously)

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 9h

According to the podcast the bottleneck is exactly that: An insufficient number of volunteers in France at least.

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 9h

So my information is from a French podcast called "Les couilles sur la table" (episode here: www.binge.audio/podcast/les-...) and it had the most insane data point: Up until last year, there were more women willing to donate eggs than men willing to donate sperm in France.

binge.audio

Le réseau de podcast nouvelle génération

www.binge.audio

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 13h

Random bizarre data point btw: In France, there's a 10k waitlist for receiving a sperm donation, average waiting time is ~2 years. So in theory, any man could participate in procreation, if not in fatherhood. Would one get a tax rebate then?

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 1d

I did some science today, and it looks good, and I'll leave this computer to do some computing, but I am pretty happy about what I am seeing.

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 3d

It's pretty nuts how much of an intrinsic bias toward geometric shapes the ReLU network seems to have. It extrapolated much more of the shape than I had anticipated (in Adam, the SGD variant looked more overfitty).

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 3d

Ok, convergence with SGD was too painfully slow, so I did a few thousand iterations with Adam, then switched to SGD. The result looks like this:

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 3d

We talk about teaching coding in school but what about the fundamentals of CAD/CAM and at least one multi-part assembly?

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 3d

Current state is this. It's early in the training process, though - I chose SGD instead of ADAM (which becomes unstable when trained to very low loss), and the weight initialization which led to many creases in the upper left corner is still visible.

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 4d

Today's experiment: What shape will a deep neural network learn if trained on the sparse set of training points on the left? Will it learn a circle?

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 6d

I'll be at Hexacon next week in Paris. If you want to meet to chat about security, AI, data compression, efficient computing, profiling, eBPF, or anything else that's interesting: Hit me up.

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 8d

Kinda wild to think the Berkshire's 350bn cash pile is likely in T-Bills, and that 350bn is almost 1% of the 37Tn in total US debt. Berkshire alone holds 1% of US debt.

Financial Times @financialtimes.com · 8d

Berkshire Hathaway nears $10bn deal for Occidental’s petrochemical unit ft.trib.al/L06ionJ

Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway nears $10bn deal for Occidental’s petrochemical unit

Sale of division would further oil and gas group’s efforts to reduce its $24bn debt pile

ft.trib.al

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Reposted

Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 13d

The US Army in 1945 also noted that fascistic political figures would seek to whip up animosity toward disfavored groups like Black people, religious minorities, and the foreign born, creating "convenient scapegoats" to rile up their followers. bsky.app/profile/seth...

Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · Aug 1

The first fascistic tactic to look out for is a hate campaign against a particular religious, racial, or ethnic group. Like, for example, let's say a candidate emerges who calls all people of one nationality "rapists" and "criminals," while promising to ban immigrants from only one religious group.

1. Pitting of religious, racial, and economic groups against one another in order to break down national unity is a device of the "divide and conquer" technique used by Hitler to gain power in Germany and in other countries. With slight variations, to suit local conditions, fascists everywhere have used this Hitler method. In many countries, anti-Semitism (hatred of Jews) is a dominant device of fascism. In the United States, native fascists have often been anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-Negro, anti-Labor, anti-foreign-born. In South America, the native fascists use the same scapegoats except that they substitute anti-Protestantism for anti-Catholicism.
Interwoven with the "master race" theory of fascism is a well-planned "hate campaign" against minority races, religions, and other groups. To suit their particular needs and aims, fascists will use any one or a combination of such groups as a convenient scapegoat.

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 13d

I remember just sending an invoice and getting paid in the 2000s. When did we lose that technology and why do I have to click through 20 screens and set up 2 accounts nowadays?

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 15d

This is kinda wild, but kinda good?

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 19d

Kinda wild that the insignias of the iron front are now deemed "far left". I mean c'mon, the SPD was always center-left, the iron front was "centrists to protect the democratic constitution of Weimar against fascist takeover". That's not far left, that's "I want democracy".

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Reposted

UNITED24 Media @united24media.com · 22d

⚡️ Zelenskyy says the world is slowly starting to “forgive Putin for this war.”

He told Sky News that Putin stalls talks to delay sanctions, ramp up arms production, and chip away at his isolation.

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Reposted

Ulrike Franke @rikefranke.bsky.social · 21d

A new Sicherheitshalber episode is online! We do a deep dive into the German defence industry (things have been changing!) and talk about the need for more Bundeswehr personell.

Sicherheitspod @sicherheitspod.de · 22d

🚨Neue Folge! 🚨

Wir sprechen über die deutsche Rüstungsindustrie - wer ist das überhaupt? - und wie sich die Situation in den letzten Jahren mit der Zeitenwende verändert hat.
Und wie sieht es nun aus mit Wehrpflicht, Wehrdienst und co?

Jetzt online 👇

sicherheitspod.de/2025/09/16/9...

#98 Die Rüstungsindustrie und die Zeitenwende | Der “neue Wehrdienst” und ein Brandbrief - Sicherheitspod

“Sicherheitshalber” ist der Podcast zur sicherheitspolitischen Lage in Deutschland, Europa und der Welt. In Folge 98 diskutieren Thomas Wiegold, Ulrike Franke, Frank Sauer und Carlo Masala zuerst über...

sicherheitspod.de

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 21d

Your dose of (not very pretty) truth for the day.

Ben Nagy @rantyben.bsky.social · 21d

Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris (Tac. Agr. 42)

"it is human nature to hate whom you have hurt"

I think about this quote pretty much every time I read the news these days; mostly because I don't understand it at all, and yet it is clearly true

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 21d

Word.

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 21d

I was on EPSD's "Velocity's edge" podcast and had a great discussion with Nick Selby and Chris Swan about organisational scar tissue, decision records, writing things down, and "Murders & Acquisitions".

open.spotify.com/episode/1HTS...

S1E6 - Thomas Dullien and Chris Swan on Decision Records

open.spotify.com

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Reposted

Shane Huntley @shanehuntley.bsky.social · 23d

I'm still tracking down broken things in various accounts from an international move over 2 years ago.

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 24d

Google Family Calendars: Typical Google product design: can't have family members in more than one country.

*Facepalm*

Google is so great at infra and so utterly shit at product.

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halvarflake.bsky.social @halvarflake.bsky.social · 26d

The political discourse in the US will argue that "Bella Ciao" is a radically left-wing song.

It's not, it's the song of everybody that opposed the fascists. Opposing fascism is not radical left-wing.

JFYI.

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