pjlegato (u/pjlegato)

pjlegato commented on What New Orleans Taught Me commonedge.org/what-new-o... · Posted by u/tintinnabula

SJC_Hacker · 10 months ago

Didn't grow up in the city, but relatives came from there, I still have an "ear to the ground" so to speak, am Saints fan and visit occasionally.

Pros: - Great food

- History (relative to the US at least)

- Laid back culture

- Decent public transit. Not as good as NYC or SF, but in the city and even outlying areas like Metarie the streetcar gets you alot of places

- Interesting architechture in places like the Garden District and French Quarter

- All-in-all, one of the most unique places in the US

Cons:

- Weather is shyte, although winters tend to be mild (ironically it can get cold at times, even worse than say the SF Bay)

- K-12 education outside of private and parochial Catholic is mostly, not good

- The politics. Depending your perspective, you get the worst of both worlds (batshit insane conservatives running the state vs. corrupt liberals running the city)

- Every other commercial you see will be for personal injury lawyers. The tort decisions there are out of control and insurance rates are high.

All this is probably OK for childless young adults. I'd think twice before settling down there though

pjlegato · 10 months ago

Public transit is abysmal in SF. The fact that it exists by no means qualifies it as "good".

pjlegato commented on Platforms systematically removed a user because he made "most wanted CEO" cards eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01... · Posted by u/mhitza

ilovetux · a year ago

This is the argument against allowing private ownership of utilities.

Utilities lend themselves to monopoly well.

The economy of scale allows one company to efficiently become the only source of that utility for an region.

Meanwhile, the customers of the utility are subject to the dark side of monopoly. Unjustified rate increases or cutting off service for any reason whatsoever.

It makes no sense.

This setup only works well for Power companies, airlines, water, waste, etc. when there are robust regulation around them.

Could you imagine if the power company could cut you off because of your political leanings? or the water company?

It is no different for monopolies on the internet.

pjlegato · a year ago

Private utilities are very common. There are many listed on the stock exchange.

Everything they do is heavily regulated. They cannot do things like cut off service for any reason whatsoever, or raise rates without justification.

pjlegato commented on The Fannie and Freddie trade is back bloomberg.com/opinion/art... · Posted by u/ioblomov

forinti · a year ago

In a socialist country, you would have a government entity (backed by a public bank) build houses and give them to workers or sell them at a loss or with subsidised interest rates.

This is purely a misguided (maybe corrupt) government policy in a capitalist country.

pjlegato · a year ago

In a socialist country, you would have a government entity building various qualities of housing.

The best houses in the best locations go to the nomenklatura, to the governor's cousin, to the nephew of the town party boss, and to black market operators who are capable of providing large bribes to those who decide housing allocations.

Normal people live three hours outside the city center in a low quality concrete highrise.

pjlegato commented on ELKS: Linux for 16-bit Intel Processors github.com/ghaerr/elks... · Posted by u/emersonrsantos

anthk · a year ago

Could nethack be compiled under elks? Frotz? Inform6?

pjlegato · a year ago

There was a DOS port of nethack, so likely it could be made to run on elks.

pjlegato commented on Pigment Mixing into Digital Painting scrtwpns.com/mixbox/... · Posted by u/tlarkworthy

pedrovhb · a year ago

That's very interesting!

My first thought, looking at the webpage: "Huh, that's neat. I didn't know that painting software didn't even attempt to do color mixing beyond naive interpolation, though I guess it figures; the physics behind all the light stuff must be fairly gnarly, and there's a lot of information lost in RGB that probably can't be just reconstructed."

Scrolling down a bit: "Huh, there's some snippets for using it as a library. Wait, it does operations in RGB? What's going on here?"

Finally, clicking the paper link, I found the interesting bit: "We achieve this by establishing a latent color space, where RGB colors are represented as mixtures of primary pigments together with additive residuals. The latents can be manipulated with linear operations, leading to expected, plausible results."

That's very clever, and seems like a great use for modern machine learning techniques outside the fashionable realm of language models. It uses perceptual color spaces internally too, and physics based priors. All around very technically impressive and beautiful piece of work.

It rhymes with an idea that's been floating in my head for a bit - would generative image models, or image encoder models, work better if rather than rgb, we fed them with wavelength data, or at least a perceptually uniform color space? Seems it'd be closer to truth than arbitrarily using the wavelengths our cone cells happen to respond to (and roughly, at that).

pjlegato · a year ago

AI and machine learning aren't necessary at all. You 'just' have to empirically measure a few constants that describe and bound the various nonlinearities of different real pigments, and then plug them into a relatively straightforward paint mixing equation.

Paints have predictable mathematical properties in terms of what color they produce when mixed; they just mix nonlinearly, which is counterintuitive for people who have not practiced mixing paint a lot.

Photoshop and the other comparison programs on the page illustrate the linear mixing that most people intuitively expect.

pjlegato commented on The Soldiers' Philosopher (2014) philosophyforlife.org/blo... · Posted by u/aways

mturmon · a year ago

Full agree.

The preceding paragraphs are terse and add further insight about the limits of Stoicism (or perhaps the little-s version that one might commonly adopt if under stress) and its effects on curtailing emotions.

pjlegato · a year ago

Common misconception; Stoicism is not about curtailing or repressing emotions.

Stoicism is about not allowing your emotions to govern you.

Subtle but profound difference.

pjlegato commented on Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/jimbob45

giraffe_lady · a year ago

I didn't say that either, maybe you should reread what I did say.

pjlegato · a year ago

You said "yes exactly" when I asked if personal sentiment was the means of determining when an unfair power differential exists and ought to be legislated against.

Then you said "there is no point at which the process is 'complete' for a given policy and must be merely accepted..." This sounds very much like you believe it is both possible and correct to revisit any policy topic at any time, and with no particular criteria for when it is valid to do so -- it is always valid to do so, under that statement.

Thus, I asked for clarification -- it sounds like there are no possible objective standards for the lawmaking process in your formulation above; any law or policy can be revisited at any time, and without any objective criteria that leaves purely emotional arguments and whoever successfully gathers a bigger band of followers to their side as the main determining factor in what policy we get.

pjlegato commented on Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/jimbob45

digging · a year ago

My point was that drawing arbitrary lines for what's legal isn't the new invention you acted like it was.

This most recent comment has shifted the topic entirely, and I'm not going to address it because it's obviously either written in bad faith or just painfully unthoughtful.

pjlegato · a year ago

The lines for what is legal are not at all drawn arbitrarily in a constitutional legal system such as the United States.

pjlegato commented on Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/jimbob45

giraffe_lady · a year ago

There's no point at which this process is "complete" for a given policy and must be merely accepted. We continue to evaluate based on the results of implementation, and can make changes with that new information.

So yes, I "and a few others" disapprove of this outcome and are acting to change it within the constraints that we have. You oppose that or not that's your business.

pjlegato · a year ago

So there are no objective standards possible or even relevant in the lawmaking process -- it's purely a question of might makes right, whoever can marshal the most people to their team through sophistry should win?

pjlegato commented on Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake theatlantic.com/ideas/arc... · Posted by u/jimbob45

unethical_ban · a year ago

>How shall we as a society decide who is to be denied agency in this way

By advocacy and persuasion and some level of agreement through democracy.

>By that standard, we're done

Laws can change, so we're never done.

Society is a never-ending churn of social forces. There will always be a matrix of people who are good and bad and indifferent, who think similar and different to one another. It will never settle.

To answer your question about sports gambling in particular (though you did not ask me): I think the bets on specific things happening in a game are more manipulable and thus damaging to sports in general, as well as to the addictive properties of gambling, than simply betting on an outcome of a game.

So yeah, some aspects of gambling are bad enough that, now that we've seen the impact it's having, we should consider some more guardrails.

Even the college kid libertarian I used to be would say that the government should enforce "an informed consumer": That people should know what mechanisms gambling companies use to entice and addict people.

[edited for tone]

pjlegato · a year ago

Interesting. Do you then view the lawmaking process as nothing more than a chaotic and never-ending expression of the randomly changing emotions of the people?

No ongoing rational standards, logic, or objective argumentation is required or even relevant -- just might makes right, anything goes, whoever convinces the most people to agree through sophistic "advocacy" wins?

I suppose that such a system could exist in theory, but it seems to be heavily at odds with the constitutional legal system that the United States uses.