In the past, fascist politics would focus on the dominant cultural group. The goal is to make them feel like victims, to make them feel like they’ve lost something and that the thing they’ve lost has been taken from them by a specific enemy, usually some minority out-group or some opposing nation.

This is why fascism flourishes in moments of great anxiety, because you can connect that anxiety with fake loss. The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their status and power. Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative.

Part of what fascist politics does is get people to disassociate from reality. You get them to sign on to this fantasy version of reality, usually a nationalist narrative about the decline of the country and the need for a strong leader to return it to greatness, and from then on their anchor isn’t the world around them — it’s the leader.

Fascists are always telling a story about a glorious past that’s been lost, and they tap into this nostalgia. So when you fight back against fascism, you’ve got one hand tied behind your back, because the truth is messy and complex and the mythical story is always clear and compelling and entertaining. It’s hard to undercut that with facts.

"Only those safe from fascism and its practices are likely to think that there might be a benefit in exchanging ideas with fascists.”

I find this next part sadly hilariously true

"Much of American media and press on this side of the Fox News darkness does not dare to call out a fascist. That is partly out of knee-jerk complicity with the culture of leadership and celebrity worship. But I believe that it is also a matter of unbearable fear that the shape of American society, and the practices it has long depended on to maintain some semblance of democracy, are being destroyed, and no one quite knows what to do about it, save hoping to be saved by Mueller and/or impeachment."

we didn't know what to do, and still don't. Mueller and impeachment had no effect on the public discourse. we should stop hoping that engaging with bad faith "arguments" flaunting disregard for the truth in favour of building a narrative of lost glory to be remade through out-group fear and hatred will do anything either.

Once defined by his loathing for Trump, he’s now all-in for the president. Why?

The company says it was essential to President Trump's victory, but both Trump and other former clients are downplaying the role of its trademark psychological profiling.

sed 's/,,/, ,/g;s/,,/, ,/g' data.csv | column -s, -t

rev file | column -t | rev

“How long can we sugarcoat the nitty-gritty of politics in order to draw the apolitical masses to the carnival? Are we afraid of the fact that the answer will probably divide the masses that we’ve only just lured to the party and strung along with carnival spirit?”

“If we are not politically active or reactive, then the act of understanding turns into only the expression and exchange of emotional responses. Our reactions gradually retreat to become nothing more than a sad cabaret”.

(cd /tmp/.X11-unix && for x in X*; do echo ":${x#X}"; done)

disable error sound

nine leadership coaching skills... how are these not things you do when you train someone?
listening
questioning
giving feedback
assisting with goal setting
showing empathy
letting the coachee arrive at their own solution
recognizing and pointing out strengths
providing structure
encouraging a solution-focused approach

fastai is a modern, open source, deep learning library which is organized around two main design goals: to be approachable and rapidly productive, while also being deeply hackable and configurable

that using a layered API in deep learning has very significant benefits for researchers, practitioners, and students. Researchers can see links across different areas more easily, rapidly combine and restructure ideas, and run experiments on top of strong baselines. Practitioners can quickly build prototypes, and then build on and optimize those prototypes by leveraging fastai’s PyTorch foundations, without rewriting code. Students can experiment with models and try out variations, without being overwhelmed by boilerplate code when first learning ideas.

a bewildering array of comparisons, useful as a literature review of sorts

The concept of non-linearity in a Neural Network is introduced by an activation function which serves an integral role in the training and performance evaluation of the network. Over the years of theoretical research, many activation functions have been proposed, however, only a few are widely used in mostly all applications which include ReLU (Rectified Linear Unit), TanH (Tan Hyperbolic), Sigmoid, Leaky ReLU and Swish. In this work, a novel neural activation function called as Mish is proposed. The experiments show that Mish tends to work better than both ReLU and Swish along with other
standard activation functions in many deep networks across challenging datasets. For instance, in Squeeze Excite Net- 18 for CIFAR 100 classification, the network with Mish had an increase in Top-1 test accuracy by 0.494% and
1.671% as compared to the same network with Swish and ReLU respectively. The similarity to Swish along with providing a boost in performance and its simplicity in implementation makes it easier for researchers and developers to
use Mish in their Neural Network Models.

We propose a decentralized variant of Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) that is suitable for a variety of tasks in multi-robot active perception. Our algorithm allows each robot to optimize its own actions by maintaining a probability distribution over plans in the joint-action space. Robots periodically communicate a compressed form of their search trees, which are used to update the joint distribution using a distributed optimization approach inspired by variational methods. Our method admits any objective function defined over robot action sequences, assumes intermittent communication, is anytime, and is suitable for online replanning.

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

The fact that China’s authoritarian system is particularly poor at dealing with public health emergencies that require timely, transparent and accurate information makes this far more significant than any other challenge Mr Xi has faced so far.