The process of imaging is taking the incomplete information that we get from a couple of places on our virtual telescope, and trying to fill in all the missing information to get the picture an actual Earth-sized telescope would have produced
There’s an infinite number of possible images that could have been created from the sparse measurements that we took. The goal of imaging is to find the image that not only reconstructs and matches the data that we measured, but also is the one that is most likely.
We have to impose some information about what the image should look like in order to recover that image. Some stuff that we impose is natural and easy — we know that light is positive. You can’t have negative light.
Other things we might impose would be how smooth the image is. You wouldn’t expect an image of a black hole to look like the white noise you get when you pull a cable out of your television.
You really don’t want to accidentally tell our imaging algorithms that, for example, “Oh, what is likely is this ring shape,” because then we just recover that ring back, and we’ve learned nothing.
To avoid shared bias, we split ourselves into four different teams that had different focuses and different kinds of algorithms. We worked separately for a month, not talking to each other about anything.
Then after one month we all gathered together in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we put all the images up on a screen at one time. I think that was the most amazing moment, because even though each of the other images had different underlying assumptions and looked different, this ring appeared in all of the images.
The ring was always the same size, and it was brighter in the south. That was huge.
That was in late July of last year. Since then, we’ve spent months trying to break our images by training our algorithms on synthetic data. [In other words, the teams tried to mislead their algorithms with fake data that portrayed a flat disk with no hole in the center. They then applied the actual information collected by the Event Horizon Telescope to those new, misled algorithms.]
Even when we then applied those algorithms to the real data, we still got the ring in the end. You would have to bend over crazy backwards to not get this ring.
In the end, what was shown today was from three different pipelines, three different methods that we trained on the synthetic data. We got an image from each of those, and we blurred and averaged them together so they were all consistent.
I read through a bunch of news articles this morning but can't remember who said what and where I read it.
From what I gathered, they gave the algorithm basic rules like "the image should be smooth and not grainy" but definitively not rules like "it should be a torus". They also split into 4 teams who worked independently with no contact to avoid biases. All teams produced images of a slightly oval torus with more light at the bottom left. They also "trained" their algorithms on solid flat disc images, but they still showed a torus so the claim is that the torus is very likely real. I have no idea what that last part means. I just assumed there was no AI magic involved.
While she led the development of an algorithm to take a picture of a black hole, an effort that was the subject of a TED Talk she gave in 2016, her colleagues said that technique was not ultimately used to create this particular image.
But that doesn't diminish her contribution to the project or her skills. She is clearly a skilled scientist but you have to read her actual articles to see that. By misrepresenting her role in the project you miss an opportunity to give her credit for the cool things she actually did. Not to mention the other 39 women and 160 men who also worked on the project.
Safer, simpler and more expressive are all relative measures and depends on what the language was like before the changes. C++11 made it easier to write safer, simpler and more expressive code. You don't have to, but it is easier to do it now. Just the addition of shared_ptr is enough to claim all three improvements.
Here's the interesting bit about what they actually did:
The platform needed the capacity of a traditional software language like C++ and the logical syntax and structure of proof-assistant programs like Isabelle and Coq, which mathematicians have been using for years. No such all-in-one platform existed when the researchers started work on EverCrypt, so they developed one — a programming language called F*. It put the math and the software on equal footing.
“We unified these things into a single coherent framework so that the distinction between writing programs and doing proofs is really reduced,” said Bhargavan. “You can write software as if you were a software developer, but at same time you can write a proof as if you were a theoretician.”
Quite, if the headline had been Republican Party Announces It's Merging With the Flat Earth Society I might have been tempted to believe it for a few seconds.
But if the headline had been Donald Trump Announces Membership in the Flat Earth Society it would have been too believable to be funny. A good April fools joke should be both funny and believable. It should definitively not be a sad reminder of the reality we live in.
Last time I looked the risk seems to be related to long term lack of recovery and not the stress itself. From what I remember, as long as your stress doesn't affect your recovery (sleep etc) you have a low risk of clinical burnout. Once it starts affecting sleep and preventing recovery there is an increased risk.
If we assume lack of recovery is the real cause and then guess a lot, it could explain the current trend. There would not be one single factor but many like the increased efficiency of many jobs where simple and repetitive tasks are eliminated (thus fewer short breaks for the brain). Smartphones also remove a lot of short mental breaks when our brains used to rest (for example during commutes or waiting for the water to boil).
Does anyone know if Lennart Poettering designed the MCAS? It reminds me of pulseaudio a lot. It is a system built to solve some problem but it has so many problems of its own that the best solution to any problem is to turn it off... which leaves you with the original problem.
So by disabling the MCAS you can't go full throttle without manually adjusting trim. That's not exactly ideal.
I've heard elsewhere that the purpose of the MCAS was also to make the Max fly like previous 737 and thus reduce retraining. With MCAS disabled, the pilot is flying a plane he is not trained for.
I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with this solution. Instead of a crash you get a high risk situation which sure is better but far from good.
What about stress or being single? I would guess there is a correlation between processed foods and those. They are also known risk factors for all cause mortality.
In this type of study, the list of confounders they have or have not controlled for is more important than the result itself.
I think most of the flame war between different language proponents really comes down to different use cases.
If you're mostly doing web stuff then security and uh... web-stuff... is your main concern. The bare metal languages like C/C++ must seem like nuclear power plants run by squirrels, powerful but a disaster waiting to happen.
If you're doing any kind of number crunching or large scale data management, then things are different. Often, the user is trusted to handle the data so security is not an issue for my application. Presentation (web-stuff, reports etc) is also less relevant since it can often be outsourced to someone dumber / less expensive. But, controlling exactly when and how things are computed, converted or moved around in memory is often essential.
I guess most people only have experience from one type of job and extrapolate from their experience. For example, I dislike Java/C# just because they have never been the right tools for my kind of jobs. But, I know people use them so they must be good for something. I just don't know what.
But if it is, it was filed in 2011 and granted in 2015 so it isn't exactly new. I don't know why he can't show us photos if he's been working on it since before 2011.
I don't see how the transfer of funds would motivate news outlets to care more for quality.
If Facebook pays to those it links to (link tax) then the motivation for making click-bait articles just increases. That's pretty much the situation we are having. Newspapers maximizing ad revenue to survive and quality isn't a priority.
If Facebook pays to a fund which hands out money only to "quality" journalism then you have you the problem of deciding what quality is. Basically, you need some organization which decides and that would be very controversial. There may be some objective measure like "don't publish factually incorrect stuff" but it don't think it would be enough.
The problem is that quality journalism costs a lot to produce and generates very little ad revenue compared to quick click baits like "10 ways bees can kill you".
Ideally, I don't think news should have a political view point at all but that's a different story.
The problem with the FB petition system is that it is open to everyone... As long as you force a threshold before any petition can be seen easily, it will be fine.
No, the problem with Facebook is that it is an echo chamber that is easy to manipulate.
To manipulate, all you need is just a few people who are willing to create and maintain multiple "credible" facebook accounts. It doesn't take much to give the appearance of a "community". Once there is a community, it makes it easier for anyone else to just join without critically evaluating the arguments since "all the others" have presumably already done that. Also, facebook doesn't even have Slashdot like moderation (I think) so any troll comments will be seen, no matter how obviously trollish they are. Slashdot moderation isn't perfect but it helps a lot.
But, you don't even need nefarious intent and fake accounts. Facebook support costs nothing and is cheap and easy to give. Therefore, not too much thought is put behind any supportive decision. Any sound-bitey positive-sounding and well-meaning issue will receive spontaneous likes. A simple but wrong proposal will get more support than a complex but correct one.
In short, Facebook petitions will be even less relevant than the guy in the subway who asks for a signature to "save the whales". People don't know what they're really signing but will gladly do so if a 5-second glance says it is a good cause. Facebook just makes this much much worse.
That's easy: Tribalism. I remember someone saying that the extraordinary thing about the election was that the result was so ordinary. People voted along party lines like they always had.
When a belief becomes a part of your identity, facts no longer matter. Information does change your factual beliefs but not your attitude/position in general. The brain also does motivated reasoning and will find counterarguments for any inconvenient facts. If Trump is caught lying he's not an immoral liar, he's a strategic smart guy playing the opposition etc.
It is important to note this is a universal feature of all humans. We all do top down motivated reasoning. Republicans are not idiots, they just happened to be republicans when an idiot was elected president. It can, and does happen to all of us.
This program explains some of the psychology behind it:
That article does not counter the claims of this study. Most of the claims are also dubious.
"There's not much research". No, but there isn't much research on keto, paleo, or most other diets. The reason is that human long term trials are difficult to get right and expensive. There is a reason most diets are hyped at first as being "special" but when science catches up they turn out to be no better than a similarly calorie restricted diet.
"It's hard to do". Depends on the regimen and your body. Time-restricted fasting is much easier than intermittent (or longer) in my experience. But, I suspect this differs a lot from person to person.
"It can be unhealthy!"... for people with who have a history of eating disorders... Yeah, that was really dumb.
"Other forms of calorie restriction are more effective". Misleading, it depends. If you find fasting easy, you can go for a more extreme regimen and thus make it more effective. Effectiveness is really based on how difficult you find a particular type of diet. If counting calories is hard for you, then fasting might be easier or vice versa.
I think a calculator, dictionary or just a copy of wikipedia would make you smarter if the access was just as natural as remembering your own name or the capital of France. It would free up a lot of resources for actual smart thinking and possibly the ability to make new brain connections between topics. So, yeah, I would love to have direct brain access to a classical computer (assuming no safety and security issues).
An AI on the other hand... um... why? I can already accurately recognize a cat. I don't need an AI to tell me it is probably 96% cat but perhaps 4% cucumber. What matters are the features the added hardware provides. Even a human-like intelligence would perhaps not be the best addition since we already have one of those and more of the same might not be better.
So, before we consider adding "AI" to our brains, can we perhaps start with a pocket calculator?
I've tried Cython a couple of times but it always came out slower than a real rewrite. I can't remember how much but enough not to bother.
I've mostly used boost python which is not the most popular option. It simplifies the wrapping a lot and I can make sure the C++ code is independent of any Python dependencies (except for the interface of course).
As for profiling, I really don't see the problem the article author has. I use the built in profiler and if the hotspot is "a_python_function" I optimize the python function. If it is "a_wrapped_function" I optimize that...
Wow! That was hilarious! One ridiculous statement after the other. Best summed up by this paragraph:
In their 2015 book Superforecasting, University of Pennsylvania political scientist Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner refer to Kudlow as a "consistently wrong" pundit, and use Kudlow's long record of failed predictions to clarify common mistakes that poor forecasters make
First, a couple of caveats, porn/sex addiction is a highly debated diagnosis. I will not enter that debate since it seems to be yet another can of worms.
Most of the linked articles concerns self reported problematic behavior. They do not show causality, i.e. porn causing problematic behavior, just that some report their porn use as problematic. I have mostly skipped those articles and may have missed something interesting.
The first section contains 20 reviews so it seems like a good place to start:
The first 8 concern addiction and Compulsive Sexual Behaviour (CSB). Thus not any causal effects of porn.
Number 9 sounds better: Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports. Behav. Sci. 2016, 6, 17 It suggests causality and claims to be a review but is makes some dubious claims. Let's see if someone who knows more has reviewed it... ooops: https://retractionwatch.com/20... That was a lot more damning than I had imagined.
Turns out, one of the authors, Gary Wilson is also the author of the book "Your brain on porn" which may be related to the website you linked to (yourbrainonporn). Also, he is donates all the proceeds from the book to the Reward Foundation which has a clear anti-porn agenda. This was not disclosed in the original paper but was later corrected.
In short, I doubt I'll find anything useful further down the list but let's continue. The linked articles are not suspect even if Gary is.
10-16 is more addiction and CSB. I stopped at 17 but that was another addiction study, not showing a causal connection between porn and addiction (that is, there are people with problematic porn habits but it isn't necessarily porn causing those habits). 19-20 are more about addiction.
Ok, so out of the first 20, one was perhaps relevant but it turned out to be utter shite. Up next 20 neuroimaging studies.
Again, 1-3 are studies about self reported problematic behavior / addiction.
Number 4 is interesting though. It is a small study (28 ppl) but it showed a worse performance in a working memory test right after watching pornographic pictures (compared to controls). They did not test how long the effect lasts though so it may be a very short lived effect.
Number 5 is similar showing "negative impact on decision making" when porn pics are right on a "bad" deck of cards vs a "good". (i am getting a bit tired now so won't go into details). Again, probably a very short lived effect and difficult to extrapolate the effect into real life.
Number 6 is another addiction study (I think).
Number 7 is a funny one. Psychology Today summarizes it as NOT showing porn addiction exists. Yourbrainonporn interprets it differently of course.
Number 8, correlation between something in the brain and self reported porn use. Not causation. Did I mention I'm tired now?
Number 10-20 seem to be about self reported addicts, CSB or showing some kind of correlation and not causation.
Number 21 is a bit interesting. Basically, abstaining from porn is different than abstaining from your favorite food when it comes to delay discounting. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Number 22-40 is more of the same (but I reading through it a lot quicker now). A lot of studies on people with self reported problematic behavior, some correlation studies etc. Nothing about how porn actually affects people. Just that some people have problems with it (and a lot of specifics about them).
Many of the web authors claimed conclusions are just conjectures. It is often claimed that study X shows that porn "causes" Y but when you read the study it did not show causality or if the effect transfers to ordinary life. Reduced decision making skills while watching porn is hardly a problem as long as you don't watch porn while making important de
I saw far too many studies of how damaging it is to the human male.
[citations needed].
I haven't seen any credible studies at all so if you have anything, I'd like to read it. There is a lot of pop-culture conjecture but very little scientific support. I do remember reading a study about the lack of high quality porn studies though. From what I remember, most studies were non-experimental (literary analysis etc) the few that were experimental were low quality (poor design, small sample etc).
When I first heard about the Linux vs GNU/Linux debate many years ago I thought it was really silly. Why bother with GNU when Linux is descriptive enough?
Now, I'd say it is an important distinction. Android/Linux or IoT/Linux is nothing like GNU/Linux. As it turns out, Stallman is not just a great singer, he is also right (again).
Slashdot Mirror
How typical. I found the article after posting. It is an interview with Katie Bouman.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/s...
The process of imaging is taking the incomplete information that we get from a couple of places on our virtual telescope, and trying to fill in all the missing information to get the picture an actual Earth-sized telescope would have produced
There’s an infinite number of possible images that could have been created from the sparse measurements that we took. The goal of imaging is to find the image that not only reconstructs and matches the data that we measured, but also is the one that is most likely.
We have to impose some information about what the image should look like in order to recover that image. Some stuff that we impose is natural and easy — we know that light is positive. You can’t have negative light.
Other things we might impose would be how smooth the image is. You wouldn’t expect an image of a black hole to look like the white noise you get when you pull a cable out of your television.
You really don’t want to accidentally tell our imaging algorithms that, for example, “Oh, what is likely is this ring shape,” because then we just recover that ring back, and we’ve learned nothing.
To avoid shared bias, we split ourselves into four different teams that had different focuses and different kinds of algorithms. We worked separately for a month, not talking to each other about anything.
Then after one month we all gathered together in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we put all the images up on a screen at one time. I think that was the most amazing moment, because even though each of the other images had different underlying assumptions and looked different, this ring appeared in all of the images.
The ring was always the same size, and it was brighter in the south. That was huge.
That was in late July of last year. Since then, we’ve spent months trying to break our images by training our algorithms on synthetic data. [In other words, the teams tried to mislead their algorithms with fake data that portrayed a flat disk with no hole in the center. They then applied the actual information collected by the Event Horizon Telescope to those new, misled algorithms.]
Even when we then applied those algorithms to the real data, we still got the ring in the end. You would have to bend over crazy backwards to not get this ring.
In the end, what was shown today was from three different pipelines, three different methods that we trained on the synthetic data. We got an image from each of those, and we blurred and averaged them together so they were all consistent.
Pretty cool indeed!
I read through a bunch of news articles this morning but can't remember who said what and where I read it.
From what I gathered, they gave the algorithm basic rules like "the image should be smooth and not grainy" but definitively not rules like "it should be a torus". They also split into 4 teams who worked independently with no contact to avoid biases. All teams produced images of a slightly oval torus with more light at the bottom left. They also "trained" their algorithms on solid flat disc images, but they still showed a torus so the claim is that the torus is very likely real. I have no idea what that last part means. I just assumed there was no AI magic involved.
She designed the algorithm.
The NY Times says it wasn't the algorithm used to make the final picture. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...
While she led the development of an algorithm to take a picture of a black hole, an effort that was the subject of a TED Talk she gave in 2016, her colleagues said that technique was not ultimately used to create this particular image.
But that doesn't diminish her contribution to the project or her skills. She is clearly a skilled scientist but you have to read her actual articles to see that. By misrepresenting her role in the project you miss an opportunity to give her credit for the cool things she actually did. Not to mention the other 39 women and 160 men who also worked on the project.
Safer, simpler and more expressive are all relative measures and depends on what the language was like before the changes. C++11 made it easier to write safer, simpler and more expressive code. You don't have to, but it is easier to do it now. Just the addition of shared_ptr is enough to claim all three improvements.
Here's the interesting bit about what they actually did:
The platform needed the capacity of a traditional software language like C++ and the logical syntax and structure of proof-assistant programs like Isabelle and Coq, which mathematicians have been using for years. No such all-in-one platform existed when the researchers started work on EverCrypt, so they developed one — a programming language called F*. It put the math and the software on equal footing.
“We unified these things into a single coherent framework so that the distinction between writing programs and doing proofs is really reduced,” said Bhargavan. “You can write software as if you were a software developer, but at same time you can write a proof as if you were a theoretician.”
Quite, if the headline had been Republican Party Announces It's Merging With the Flat Earth Society I might have been tempted to believe it for a few seconds.
But if the headline had been Donald Trump Announces Membership in the Flat Earth Society it would have been too believable to be funny. A good April fools joke should be both funny and believable. It should definitively not be a sad reminder of the reality we live in.
Yes, there are a self questionnaires:
Maslach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
and there's also this which I can't find an English version of:
KES/KEDS: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Last time I looked the risk seems to be related to long term lack of recovery and not the stress itself. From what I remember, as long as your stress doesn't affect your recovery (sleep etc) you have a low risk of clinical burnout. Once it starts affecting sleep and preventing recovery there is an increased risk.
If we assume lack of recovery is the real cause and then guess a lot, it could explain the current trend. There would not be one single factor but many like the increased efficiency of many jobs where simple and repetitive tasks are eliminated (thus fewer short breaks for the brain). Smartphones also remove a lot of short mental breaks when our brains used to rest (for example during commutes or waiting for the water to boil).
Does anyone know if Lennart Poettering designed the MCAS? It reminds me of pulseaudio a lot. It is a system built to solve some problem but it has so many problems of its own that the best solution to any problem is to turn it off... which leaves you with the original problem.
So by disabling the MCAS you can't go full throttle without manually adjusting trim. That's not exactly ideal.
I've heard elsewhere that the purpose of the MCAS was also to make the Max fly like previous 737 and thus reduce retraining. With MCAS disabled, the pilot is flying a plane he is not trained for.
I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with this solution. Instead of a crash you get a high risk situation which sure is better but far from good.
No, it's about the copyright, not the truthfulness. Fake news is just as copyrighted as real news.
What about stress or being single? I would guess there is a correlation between processed foods and those. They are also known risk factors for all cause mortality.
In this type of study, the list of confounders they have or have not controlled for is more important than the result itself.
I think most of the flame war between different language proponents really comes down to different use cases.
If you're mostly doing web stuff then security and uh... web-stuff... is your main concern. The bare metal languages like C/C++ must seem like nuclear power plants run by squirrels, powerful but a disaster waiting to happen.
If you're doing any kind of number crunching or large scale data management, then things are different. Often, the user is trusted to handle the data so security is not an issue for my application. Presentation (web-stuff, reports etc) is also less relevant since it can often be outsourced to someone dumber / less expensive. But, controlling exactly when and how things are computed, converted or moved around in memory is often essential.
I guess most people only have experience from one type of job and extrapolate from their experience. For example, I dislike Java/C# just because they have never been the right tools for my kind of jobs. But, I know people use them so they must be good for something. I just don't know what.
It could be this:
https://patents.google.com/pat...
But if it is, it was filed in 2011 and granted in 2015 so it isn't exactly new. I don't know why he can't show us photos if he's been working on it since before 2011.
I don't see how the transfer of funds would motivate news outlets to care more for quality.
If Facebook pays to those it links to (link tax) then the motivation for making click-bait articles just increases. That's pretty much the situation we are having. Newspapers maximizing ad revenue to survive and quality isn't a priority.
If Facebook pays to a fund which hands out money only to "quality" journalism then you have you the problem of deciding what quality is. Basically, you need some organization which decides and that would be very controversial. There may be some objective measure like "don't publish factually incorrect stuff" but it don't think it would be enough.
The problem is that quality journalism costs a lot to produce and generates very little ad revenue compared to quick click baits like "10 ways bees can kill you".
Ideally, I don't think news should have a political view point at all but that's a different story.
I doubt Fox News would become more trustworthy if Facebook started paying them. Why would they?
The problem with the FB petition system is that it is open to everyone ... As long as you force a threshold before any petition can be seen easily, it will be fine.
No, the problem with Facebook is that it is an echo chamber that is easy to manipulate.
To manipulate, all you need is just a few people who are willing to create and maintain multiple "credible" facebook accounts. It doesn't take much to give the appearance of a "community". Once there is a community, it makes it easier for anyone else to just join without critically evaluating the arguments since "all the others" have presumably already done that. Also, facebook doesn't even have Slashdot like moderation (I think) so any troll comments will be seen, no matter how obviously trollish they are. Slashdot moderation isn't perfect but it helps a lot.
But, you don't even need nefarious intent and fake accounts. Facebook support costs nothing and is cheap and easy to give. Therefore, not too much thought is put behind any supportive decision. Any sound-bitey positive-sounding and well-meaning issue will receive spontaneous likes. A simple but wrong proposal will get more support than a complex but correct one.
In short, Facebook petitions will be even less relevant than the guy in the subway who asks for a signature to "save the whales". People don't know what they're really signing but will gladly do so if a 5-second glance says it is a good cause. Facebook just makes this much much worse.
That's easy: Tribalism. I remember someone saying that the extraordinary thing about the election was that the result was so ordinary. People voted along party lines like they always had.
When a belief becomes a part of your identity, facts no longer matter. Information does change your factual beliefs but not your attitude/position in general. The brain also does motivated reasoning and will find counterarguments for any inconvenient facts. If Trump is caught lying he's not an immoral liar, he's a strategic smart guy playing the opposition etc.
It is important to note this is a universal feature of all humans. We all do top down motivated reasoning. Republicans are not idiots, they just happened to be republicans when an idiot was elected president. It can, and does happen to all of us.
This program explains some of the psychology behind it:
https://youarenotsosmart.com/2...
That article does not counter the claims of this study. Most of the claims are also dubious.
"There's not much research". No, but there isn't much research on keto, paleo, or most other diets. The reason is that human long term trials are difficult to get right and expensive. There is a reason most diets are hyped at first as being "special" but when science catches up they turn out to be no better than a similarly calorie restricted diet.
"It's hard to do". Depends on the regimen and your body. Time-restricted fasting is much easier than intermittent (or longer) in my experience. But, I suspect this differs a lot from person to person.
"It can be unhealthy!" ... for people with who have a history of eating disorders... Yeah, that was really dumb.
"Other forms of calorie restriction are more effective". Misleading, it depends. If you find fasting easy, you can go for a more extreme regimen and thus make it more effective. Effectiveness is really based on how difficult you find a particular type of diet. If counting calories is hard for you, then fasting might be easier or vice versa.
I think a calculator, dictionary or just a copy of wikipedia would make you smarter if the access was just as natural as remembering your own name or the capital of France. It would free up a lot of resources for actual smart thinking and possibly the ability to make new brain connections between topics. So, yeah, I would love to have direct brain access to a classical computer (assuming no safety and security issues).
An AI on the other hand... um... why? I can already accurately recognize a cat. I don't need an AI to tell me it is probably 96% cat but perhaps 4% cucumber. What matters are the features the added hardware provides. Even a human-like intelligence would perhaps not be the best addition since we already have one of those and more of the same might not be better.
So, before we consider adding "AI" to our brains, can we perhaps start with a pocket calculator?
I've tried Cython a couple of times but it always came out slower than a real rewrite. I can't remember how much but enough not to bother.
I've mostly used boost python which is not the most popular option. It simplifies the wrapping a lot and I can make sure the C++ code is independent of any Python dependencies (except for the interface of course).
As for profiling, I really don't see the problem the article author has. I use the built in profiler and if the hotspot is "a_python_function" I optimize the python function. If it is "a_wrapped_function" I optimize that...
Oh, come on, how bad can it be? I know nothing about they guy but I'm sure he has some talents. Let's check Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Wow! That was hilarious! One ridiculous statement after the other. Best summed up by this paragraph:
In their 2015 book Superforecasting, University of Pennsylvania political scientist Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner refer to Kudlow as a "consistently wrong" pundit, and use Kudlow's long record of failed predictions to clarify common mistakes that poor forecasters make
I remember hearing stories of how people would exchange a gold chandelier for a bag of potatoes. The nutritional value of gold is apparently very low.
Fun fact, potatoes are a distributed currency that you can still mine at home with commodity hardware!
First, a couple of caveats, porn/sex addiction is a highly debated diagnosis. I will not enter that debate since it seems to be yet another can of worms.
Most of the linked articles concerns self reported problematic behavior. They do not show causality, i.e. porn causing problematic behavior, just that some report their porn use as problematic. I have mostly skipped those articles and may have missed something interesting.
The first section contains 20 reviews so it seems like a good place to start:
The first 8 concern addiction and Compulsive Sexual Behaviour (CSB). Thus not any causal effects of porn.
Number 9 sounds better: Is Internet Pornography Causing Sexual Dysfunctions? A Review with Clinical Reports. Behav. Sci. 2016, 6, 17
It suggests causality and claims to be a review but is makes some dubious claims. Let's see if someone who knows more has reviewed it... ooops:
https://retractionwatch.com/20...
That was a lot more damning than I had imagined.
Turns out, one of the authors, Gary Wilson is also the author of the book "Your brain on porn" which may be related to the website you linked to (yourbrainonporn). Also, he is donates all the proceeds from the book to the Reward Foundation which has a clear anti-porn agenda. This was not disclosed in the original paper but was later corrected.
In short, I doubt I'll find anything useful further down the list but let's continue. The linked articles are not suspect even if Gary is.
10-16 is more addiction and CSB. I stopped at 17 but that was another addiction study, not showing a causal connection between porn and addiction (that is, there are people with problematic porn habits but it isn't necessarily porn causing those habits). 19-20 are more about addiction.
Ok, so out of the first 20, one was perhaps relevant but it turned out to be utter shite. Up next 20 neuroimaging studies.
Again, 1-3 are studies about self reported problematic behavior / addiction.
Number 4 is interesting though. It is a small study (28 ppl) but it showed a worse performance in a working memory test right after watching pornographic pictures (compared to controls). They did not test how long the effect lasts though so it may be a very short lived effect.
Number 5 is similar showing "negative impact on decision making" when porn pics are right on a "bad" deck of cards vs a "good". (i am getting a bit tired now so won't go into details). Again, probably a very short lived effect and difficult to extrapolate the effect into real life.
Number 6 is another addiction study (I think).
Number 7 is a funny one. Psychology Today summarizes it as NOT showing porn addiction exists. Yourbrainonporn interprets it differently of course.
Number 8, correlation between something in the brain and self reported porn use. Not causation. Did I mention I'm tired now?
Number 10-20 seem to be about self reported addicts, CSB or showing some kind of correlation and not causation.
Number 21 is a bit interesting. Basically, abstaining from porn is different than abstaining from your favorite food when it comes to delay discounting.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Number 22-40 is more of the same (but I reading through it a lot quicker now). A lot of studies on people with self reported problematic behavior, some correlation studies etc. Nothing about how porn actually affects people. Just that some people have problems with it (and a lot of specifics about them).
Many of the web authors claimed conclusions are just conjectures. It is often claimed that study X shows that porn "causes" Y but when you read the study it did not show causality or if the effect transfers to ordinary life. Reduced decision making skills while watching porn is hardly a problem as long as you don't watch porn while making important de
I saw far too many studies of how damaging it is to the human male.
[citations needed].
I haven't seen any credible studies at all so if you have anything, I'd like to read it. There is a lot of pop-culture conjecture but very little scientific support. I do remember reading a study about the lack of high quality porn studies though. From what I remember, most studies were non-experimental (literary analysis etc) the few that were experimental were low quality (poor design, small sample etc).
When I first heard about the Linux vs GNU/Linux debate many years ago I thought it was really silly. Why bother with GNU when Linux is descriptive enough?
Now, I'd say it is an important distinction. Android/Linux or IoT/Linux is nothing like GNU/Linux. As it turns out, Stallman is not just a great singer, he is also right (again).