jinto36 (u/jinto36) - Readit News

jinto36 commented on What Is WebTV? goblin-heart.net/sadgrl/s... · Posted by u/joebig

jinto36 · a year ago

WebTV largely worked better than I think it often gets credit for, and I echo the sentiment elsewhere that it felt "futuristic" in a sense. I had a Windows desktop, but we came into possession of a Philips WebTV box since my father was in sales and his company had a catalog of sales incentive items you could get for meeting sales targets. I really did not want use AOL like it seemed everyone else did, and the WebTV subscription was pretty reasonable compared to other options. We had the version with the hard drive and wireless keyboard. The hardware was really pretty decent- the keyboard was ok, I could print with it, and the feature I thought that really set it apart was the ports for video capture. I don't think they ever implemented a good way to use that capability for video, but I used it to capture screenshots from our family camcorder and attach them to email or post them on the webtv personal "website" or print them.

My early use of eBay was through WebTV, with both buying and selling, and it largely worked. You could browse webrings and read email from the couch!

Most of all, the dialing music was fantastic and I still listen to it once in a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brZYWcGgg4Y

When free ad-supported dialup services came around (Juno, Bluelight, NetZero) I alternated using those and WebTV for a while. As pages moved away from simple text/table/image based sites, page rendering quality unsurprisingly degraded. I think the version we owned had some Flash support but it was slow.

Looking back on it, it's impressive how legible text was on a 20" CRT TV in the interface (through S-Video). It was more usable than some modern "smart" TV interfaces.

jinto36 commented on What Is WebTV? goblin-heart.net/sadgrl/s... · Posted by u/joebig

empressplay · a year ago

WebTV licensed a bunch of music from me (XM/MOD) but then got acquired by Microsoft before they got around to paying me, and Microsoft didn't pay me either.

Somebody managed to extract them years later from an MSNTV and luckily I was able to recover a couple of songs I had lost.

https://turdinc.kicks-ass.net/Msntv/msnMusic/PlusBGmusic_v25...

jinto36 · a year ago

Speaking of WebTV music, I was a huge fan of the original Philips WebTV dialing music. Sometimes I would just let it loop in the background when I was doing housework. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brZYWcGgg4Y Perhaps unsurprisingly, a couple of years later I started listening to a lot of music in the Demoscene.

jinto36 commented on Mumbai embraces its booming flamingo population hakaimagazine.com/feature... · Posted by u/Vigier

dilawar · 3 years ago

According to at least one anthropologist, the religious leaders were so obsessed with the idea of ritual purity and pollution that physical cleanliness took a beating. It is not easy to understand even for an Indian. Caste system foundations were also based on, or at least justified by, the idea of ritual purity and pollution. 'The remembered village' by MN Srinivas hints a bit about these things.

While growing up in village, there were so many sayings now I understand. Like my soul is pure what if my hands are dirty or I havnt took bath for two days. Cleaniness of place is even less cared for and personal cleanliness.

I get it that other dont understand why its so hard to keep your neighborhood clean. Its not hard, its just most dont care!. And before thr age of plastics, nature did all the cleaning during monsoon and summer.

PS: It is not the politician. It is the people and culture.

jinto36 · 3 years ago

Japanese culture also has a number of "ritual purity" elements, such as taking shoes from outside off in the genkan (vestibule) before stepping into the main part of a house, and ritual cleansing with water when visiting a shrine. I understand that Japan is far more economically advantaged than India, but even so, the difference in how clean things are between New York City (for example) and any major city in Japan is quite stark. [I'm from the US but lived in Japan for a year. Haven't been to India but I know a lot of people from there.]

jinto36 commented on Lights have been on at this school for a year because no one can turn them off nbcnews.com/news/us-news/... · Posted by u/isaacfrond

jinto36 · 3 years ago

Reminds me of this article: "1980s computer controls GRPS heat and AC" About a single Amiga controlling HVAC systems for 19 public schools. https://www.woodtv.com/news/grand-rapids/1980s-computer-cont...

jinto36 commented on I've procrastinated working on my thesis for more than a year thoughtsbyaashiq.bearblog... · Posted by u/memorable

KVFinn · 3 years ago

If you're not just making slow progress but literally unable to make a single bit of progress, my goto strategy is similar to what writers call a vomit draft.

For writing it conventionally means means writing words without stopping to plan or edit, no corrections allowed, the rule is you just have to keep typing, no matter what. It's about something being better than nothing, creating momentum, and also avoids being too critical because you literally can not stop and make edits to old work.

Remember the only rule is keep typing. Even if it means typing random nonsense for awhile.

I do all that but I sometimes make it even more extreme. I make it the goal to produce truly terrible version of the the thing I'm trying to make. Full of cliches and tropes in writing. Amateur coding mistakes if it's a technical project. Not just bad but legit so awful that I would truly embarrassed if somebody else saw it. Like literally, what would so shoddy I'd be afraid to have someone look at my screen right now. I mean literally ask yourself what work is so bad you would be humiliated if your advisor saw it. Make that your goal.

But it still works. After you have something even it's an abomination, it gets your brain thinking about it and working on it, and it's so much easier to make the obvious improvements, and then more, and eventually you are just doing things normally.

jinto36 · 3 years ago

One thing that works for me is to just start writing figure legends. That seems easy, it doesn't feel like "writing the paper". I end up basically writing the results section for that figure or table, so I just cut and paste most of it to the actual results later, and keep a summarized version for the actual figure legend. By coincidence, I'm trying to submit a PhD thesis today (Genetics/Computational Biology).

jinto36 commented on Fourth membrane is discovered in the brain newscientist.com/article/... · Posted by u/atombender

knicholes · 3 years ago

I'm truly shocked that we're still adding knowledge to human anatomy. Physiology, sure, but anatomy? Haven't scientists looked at tens of thousands of brains?

jinto36 · 3 years ago

A lot of this is due to advances in imaging, particularly two-photon microscopy, that enable acquiring images (and video to some extent) in live subjects, e.g. mice and rats, below the top surface of tissue. For neuroscience, you can either thin the skull or install a window, and image more than 100 microns into the brain, in live animals that are anesthetized or otherwise immobilized. Here's a nice article with an overview of two-photon for this purpose (direct PDF link): https://www.hifo.uzh.ch/research/helmchen/publication/helmch... that paper was published a while ago now, but the basics are still relevant. Two-photon played a big part in the identification of the "glymphatic system" initially as well. The Nedergaard lab does a lot of imaging, and they've built custom microscopes as well. (Source: I used to work in their department, and I'm doing my PhD work in the same building. edit: in Rochester, not at KU, though I visited there when they were first outfitting the lab space in Copenhagen.

jinto36 commented on Thanks to DALL-E, the race to make artificial protein drugs is on singularityhub.com/2023/0... · Posted by u/FeaturelessBug

soco · 3 years ago

Stupid layman question here: from what I've seen so far the AI generators imagine things starting from their training data. As in, don't find real things. Is the difference relevant in this field? Is the extrapolation and mashup they do enough to help? Is it trustworthy?

jinto36 · 3 years ago

Alphafold is a big improvement, but a structure of a single protein in isolation isn't representative of how these things exist in vivo. Binding substrates can modify protein shapes, and proteins often function in complexes, which can form some pretty complex arrangements, where positioning is critical to function. I think training set bias is an issue to some extent, even with single-protein prediction. For example, I've been looking at a family of transcription factors, and most of the resolved crystal structures are of just the DNA-binding domain, crystallized with the substrate (DNA) bound. Alphafold predictions for homologous proteins that haven't been experimentally resolved but share a decent amount of sequence similarity thus have high confidence for the DNA-binding domain, but lower confidence in other parts of the protein, even if they're "ordered" regions (e.g. helices and sheets rather than floppy loops), and all the predictions for the DNA-binding domain look like the bound-to-DNA conformation. So we don't have a good way yet to predict different "modes" of a protein that has interaction-dependent conformations. Technically with Alphafold if you were interested in modelling a protein that had similar experimentally resolved both with and without substrates bound, but were interested in sampling just one of those states, you could customize your sequence database to include one or the other, which would be mostly manual curation.

I've been testing out the multimer (protein complex) mode of Alphafold recently, to see if could predict interactions for a family of proteins where some members in the family are known to form complexes, but others previously were found to not form complexes at least when expressed in vitro rather than in vivo. So far I've found that if you try to throw two completely unrelated proteins together, they won't be modeled with any contacts, but for the ones in the family I'm interested in, there's always at least one (of the five models per run) that has them interacting such that there's something that looks like a real DNA-binding domain. For the latter case, it's presently hard to know based just on Alphafold output if it's a structure that could actually form, or if it's just due to bias in the training data, with perhaps the rest of the structured regions of the protein being conformed in unrealistic ways due to less training information for those parts.

TL;DR Alphafold results are biased by existing experimentally resolved structures, and not based on simulating physics, so proteins- or parts of proteins- that don't have good coverage in existing experimental data are not going to be predicted with high confidence.

jinto36 commented on Get Running with Couch to 5K nhs.uk/live-well/exercise... · Posted by u/MonkeyClub

igouy · 3 years ago

Everything that's happening around me in the place that I'm running.

Everything I see that's changed since the previous run.

Everything I see that's changed since the previous season.

Everything I can feel about my body moving

Everything that's happened that day.

jinto36 · 3 years ago

Same for me, I try to make it meditative in a way. I don't use earbuds or anything, just try to continue existing and moving. Sometimes identify birds. Practice talking to myself in languages I'm studying. In races it turns into body state monitoring and trying to determine when/if to adjust pace. Check in on form. On heart rate. Pick someone up ahead to try to catch. Count down to the next gel or electrolyte tab or water station.

I've done quite a few 2hr+ runs (half marathon to marathon) and 100 mile bike rides, and after a while for me it turns into a psychological game.

Trail running, if you haven't tried it, is much more "stimulating" I might say, depending on where you are there's a lot more focus and attention required to stay on the trail, to stay upright (slipping on mud, ending up in a river), to dodge trees and rocks as required, etc. I personally find there's much more of an aspect of being "in the zone" for trail running, and especially in races, when I miss a turn and have to stop and backtrack, it becomes really obvious that I was in some kind of "flow" state and then got pulled out of it.

jinto36 commented on VHS-Decode – Software defined VHS decoder github.com/oyvindln/vhs-d... · Posted by u/muterad_murilax

h2odragon · 3 years ago

Tangential but cool: in 1998 there were commercial, 50GB data VHS tapes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-VHS

about a decade after that someone asked me for help reading a crate of these tapes that had been flooded then stored in a shed for several years. Couldn't help them at all but it was an amusing diversion figuring out what the hell they had.

jinto36 · 3 years ago

There are other weird VHS-based formats, such as WVHS, which was used to store HD-ish analog video on VHS- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W-VHS

Alesis also developed an 8-track digital audio recorder based on VHS, ADAT, which used SVHS tapes and could record 20-bit 48khz. ADAT was pretty popular in smaller studios, and was great for the time before multi-gigabyte hard drives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADAT

jinto36 commented on Synth pioneer and maker of ‘Popcorn’, Gershon Kingsley (2019) djmag.com/news/synth-pion... · Posted by u/susam

jinto36 · 3 years ago

I've heard so many demoscene/8-bit covers of it at this point that I forgot the earlier versions had acoustic drums!

Some examples from scene.org: https://files.scene.org/view/parties/2010/aaa10/music/13_pop...https://files.scene.org/view/music/groups/fusion_music_crew/...