superb.

totally usable in contexts where comic sans might be seen as kind of mocking.

This is more of a fair comparable to reason about when comparing taxing wealth and taxing wages.

In nerd-speak, taxing the Derivative of Wealth is comparable to taxing Income.

You could argue that a fair comparison of wages and wealth would first subtract the minimum cost of living, so that wage tax is effectively a tax on the growing wealth of wage-earners. This would arguably be a fairer tax comparison - in both cases it is the derivative of wealth that is being taxed.

If a large portion of the populace spends all their income on basic food, rent and petrol then they have no chance of wealth increase, and perhaps should fairly be charged 30% of their $0 growth in annual wealth.

Computationally 2D is simpler, less dof, also conceptually. I decided to bring the scope in to get some wins on the board and early revenue.

I did do a lot of prior work in pure 3D, detecting walls and pipes :

  https://youtu.be/-o58qe8egS4
  https://youtu.be/8fjHNDGKeu4

You are quite right, pipes do bend and jump thru 3D in complicated ways - and so flat slices only pick up part of their journey.

My rationale is most people want an accurate floorplan first, and quickly, and this saves time and captures much of whats needed.

Obviously the same 2D technique can be used in sequence - floorplan first, then get a slice of a wall, and get vector lines for all the door and window openings, or the stairs using the same process [ pointcloud slab slice -> ortho xray image -> vectors -> CAD ]

Feel free to contact via email

Melbourne has spent a lot on extensive bike pathways and new train stops, and recently made some tram travel free [ as a crowd-pleaser to counter petrol price hikes ], so its quite a pretty city to explore on foot or bike.

Bangkok and Danang have some great cafes .. the best seem to be when you wander a few sois away from the main shopping zones.

I especially like seeing the old wooden elevated Thai houses, which are becoming rare. Another way to find hidden gems, is walk along the banks of a klong - you get to see the underbelly of the city, without the makeup.

The locals in Bangkok tend to love the new shiny hypermalls and pristine train stations that segway into them. The air-con is nice after an hour of roadside bargain hunting.

In BKK, if you like bargains on clothing or bricabrac, I _highly_ recommend going to the top floor of the Pantip building across and west down the road from the shiny upgraded 'The Mall' Ngamwongwan. The weekend indoor market is crazy busy with affordable bargain stalls with the cheapest jeans, tees etc. Smaller but more enjoyable than the massive and more famous Chatuchak. If by chance you need alterations, there are a couple of great shops on the 5th floor, iirc - 60 baht hems, wow. The 4th? floor foodcourt is quieter than most. There is a whole floor of Thai buddhist good luck charm amulets. You'll have to run the gamut of outdoor stalls to get into the place, but that can be fun. There is also an incredible coffee shop down soi 27, called "High Coffee Roaster". I was stranded looking for my airbnb, and a local came out of a shop and asked me if I was lost .. then recommended a local cafe I could wait at until checkin. The cafe staff caught me smelling my coffee, as it was so good, and then gifted me a tiny dish of ground coffee specifically to smell .. incredible coffee and superb service.

Amid the massive hype of the Web3 Crypto era, there was a kernel of useful innovation : that you can choose to have unique digital copies of things, and thus you can have a way of sending value that bypasses the middlemen, be they local thugs, bent politicians, violent regimes, benevolent dictators, or the dominant hegemony.

Having central big-Corp approve your content or sign your executable or take a vig on your sales, or license your hardware - these may be common, but are not a universal law of nature.

The internet itself is our best example of the value of technology open for all to use. Frankly, that is in danger.

Whether it is bogus age-checks in your OS, a hidden bios OS, or the move away from owning your own compute [ because the GPU / CPU and RAM are priced so high you have to rent them ], consumers need to pool resources and ensure open access.

Kudos to France for mandating a Linux OS for their public service workforce. Good on the Europeans for doubling down on renewables to insulate themselves from petrodollar volatility, and making sure portable devices have replaceable batteries.

Cory Doctorow has some great rants on enshizzification. Garys Economics YT channel has some great rants on why high inequality steals resources, see also Piketty.

The technocrats on this forum have an understanding of these measures the common person may not, and thus a moral obligation to weigh in on the issues and warn 'genpop'.

Resist, dont let the buzzkills wear you down.

In my ideal future, Joanna would write about things like :

  - how do we secure LLMs leading up to AGI, presumably they can bypass our best attempt at airgap firewalls
  - is consciousness different from thinking from intelligence ?
  - how do we ensure AI is distributed so all humans can benefit, and not used as a multiplier of extreme wealth inequality ?
  - whats missing in current AI LLMs ?

  - a bias for truth / fact .. or a mode switch to make it bias truthiness
  - reasoning by chains of formal language [ formal logic ]
  - reasoning by chains of probabilistic inference [ bayesian logic ]
  - reasoning by deep simulation [ stochastic modelling ]
  - spatial reasoning [ 3D model of space, machinery, physics. 3D reconstruction. model of humans and animals with bones, muscles, mass ] 
  - mathematical modelling [ proposing formulae, checking fit ]
  - psychological model of humans, of human populations, their needs / motivations / rewards and psychoses

An implication of the above is that future AGI will need to run on fast branching CPU _and_ massively parallel GPU with a fast data path between them - ie. balanced compute.

However, the best part will be discovering what the real Joanna writes about !

Lets say you have a complex industrial plant, or datacenter you want to upgrade.

You scan it with lidar and get a pointcloud and 360 panorama images. This gives you a large dataset, but what you really want is a floorplan, a lite CAD plan showing the racks, cable trays etc.

You take the scan, slice the pointcloud and make an ortho image .. it really looks like an xray of a building from the top down.

Then someone has to manually trace that in CAD to make a useful 3D model they can use for designing the upgrade.

So Im automating the boring manual part - turning the xray plan pixels into vector polylines, using machine learning.

One of our clients scanned their datacenter, and we generated a floorplan that shows all the rack box positions, cable trays, pipes etc.

Other examples : drawing the weld lines of patches in steel storage tanks, drawing in all the steel girder beams in a scan of an old railway bridge, or the windows, doors, ceiling pipes of a commercial realestate refurb.

gord at quato.xyz

As part of this work, were looking at running our custom machine learning kernel on multi-core x86 CPUs.

A couple snippets from my own experience / wow points :

  - browsing bookstores was phenomenal, hand illustrated romance, fantasy and sci-fi covers
  - Turbo Pascal, Dr Dobbs journal
  - Wolfenstein and Quake ushered in the era 3D interactive games
  - shareware and file sharing on BBS boards, via dialup modem
  - tapes, then CDs, then minidisc !
  - digital watches, scientific calculators !!
  - double your hard-drive storage every 18months !!!

Its set slightly earlier in the PC rush.

The magic of that era, I think was that there was this new explosion of technology and a smart teen could figure out how things worked and tinker.

It coincided with a relatively low level of economic inequality, meaning garage bands and garage startups were doable, imo.

Compiler performance was superb and the manuals were a work of art - I just wished I had kept all of mine.

This is a cultural treasure.

ps. Im by no means a saint in this regard, but I have moved to soy milk and eat much less red meat generally, both out of self-interest for the health aspects, but also partially as I think its better for the environment generally. I suppose I should give up chicken, but its a habit hard to break in my social circle. My point is a gradual move by degrees is still improvement, when integrated over the whole population.

Fortunately there are some great resources, far better than the average colorful school textbooks :

- aops.com and their BeastAcademy cartoon series

- an old book "Algebra" by Gelfand

- W W Sawyers old books on how math should be taught

- Geogebra and Desmos web tools

- 3Blue1Brown

- KhanAcademy

I try and introduce math in a more visual way, with multipication as rectangles and the distributive rule being central concepts that lead into all other areas of math :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu8hxgQdvRo&list=PLEInJ-Z4qB...

https://quato.xyz

Basically a google streetview tour of your Datacenter or large industrial plant.

You can do some nice things like draw 3D linework to trace the paths of pipes, conduits, eg : https://youtu.be/t8nRhWUl-vA add notes with markdown and html links at useful places in the 3D space.

We have add-ons for generating an 'xray' view floorplan to make it nicer to navigate a large space.

I think we are the first to have a web uploader that can preview and import .e57 panoramas, directly in the web page [ and skip the points if you dont need them ]

Currently in use by a telco in the Americas.

It is a noble endeavor - science, engineering and peaceful exploration hold the keys to our survival and prosperity.

It is also important psychologically to our survival - a reminder there is a bigger pie, that we can solve hard problems, that progress can be made, that competence and education counts, as does courage, and that we can work together for a common cause.

This is the best of America, and for a while we can be proud of the human race.

If not, who has been paying to lobby for these age verification laws ?

That seems a question that we should have an answer to.

Forcing an age check upon linux install seems anti-competitive, and a violation of freedom of speech allowed by the Constitution.

Also impractical and ineffective, unless they plan on some sort of bio-metric confirmation of age.

Will they outlaw computation itself, or constrain a personal quota so that only corporations can access approved LLMs and certainly not run a local AGI ?

As with the insane "encryption is a weapon and cant be exported" policy of the 80s, this will surely force innovation to migrate outside the US.