cyberpunk is back, baybee! just in time for 2020!

".. If you had the four original disks from the 1997 release.."

hand me those floppies, I'm going in!

"Blade Runner is on sale for $8.99 on GOG now. After Jan. 2, the price will go back up to $9.99."

give me that pseudo-antiestablishmentarian capitalism, baybee! hack the planet, etc.

32 inch 4K with arm at a decent price?
height adjustable?

will there be "considerable debate" this time around?

from Wikipedia:

"...there was a considerable debate over whether the United States should participate in the 1936 Games. Mahoney, the president of the Amateur Athletic Union, led newspaper editors and anti-Nazi groups to protest against American participation in the Berlin Olympics. He contested that racial discrimination was a violation of Olympic rules and that participation in the Games was tantamount to support for the Third Reich."

Human brains aren’t built for self-rule, says Shawn Rosenberg. That’s more evident than ever.

Rick Shenkman, founder of George Washington University’s History News Network, is the author of Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politic

read her first sci-fi book Infomocracy, but felt it was narrow and idea-light

"how many of the recent “failures of democracy” have come about not because “institutions eroded” but because those institutions either were never intended to be democratic or have recently been adjusted to be exclusionary?"

"Democracy is not a unitary state that can be achieved, but a continuous process. We need to keep reinventing and refining government, to keep up with changes in society and technology and to keep it from being too easy for elites with resources to exploit. And it is worth fighting for. Not because of the founders, or because it sounds good, but because while democracy may be far from perfect, it is still the best system we’ve got. At least so far."

How the United States lost the faith of its citizens—and what it can do to win them back

adapted from Yascha Mounk’s new book, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It.

List of state of the art papers focus on deep learning and resources, code and experiments using deep learning for time series forecasting. Classic methods vs Deep Learning methods.

"China has also taken steps to gain greater control over its technology sector, which flourished largely free from government influence.

Approvals of new video game titles have been frozen since a shift in regulation that has given the Communist Party’s propaganda department a direct role, an unusual degree of power over what had been a government process. Tencent, China’s video game giant and one of the world’s largest technology companies, has lost nearly one-third of its market value. Tencent declined to comment.

Private entrepreneurs are loath to speak out for fear of attracting official condemnation. But signs of distress aren’t hard to find.

Last month, Chen Shouhong, the founder of an investment research firm, asked a group of executive M.B.A. students — many of whom already owned publicly listed companies — to choose between panic and anxiety to describe how they feel about the economy. An overwhelming majority chose panic, according to a transcript. Mr. Chen declined to be interviewed."

"The growing use of immunity, however, has raised worries that private companies have been given the green light to win business contracts illegally.

A local prosecutor said they dropped the charge because Mr Yang had made good use of the state subsidy. “It is true that he has made up some facts,” said the prosecutor. “But the project is completed and is having a positive impact.”

Quaternions are fundamentally non-commutative, and explain why rotating a three-dimensional object about one axis and then another gives you a different final state than rotating that same object about the same two axes, but in the opposite order.

"With interest rates near historic lows, the Bank of Canada doesn’t have much conventional ammunition to fight a major downturn, a problem faced by most other central banks. That’s aggravated by Canada’s extremely high household debt levels, which will make policy makers even more reluctant to lower borrowing costs.

The end result may be a growing reliance on fiscal policy to manage slowdowns, in coordination with the Bank of Canada in a relationship that could be formalized as early as 2021 when the central bank completes a mandate review.

“It’s pretty clear we are reaching limits to what central bankers can do with conventional instruments,” Perrault said. “That’s going to place a premium on policy coordination. We will need somebody that understands the linkages between monetary and fiscal policy, and how coordination between these policies can and should be executed while maintaining the central bank’s independence.”

GPU speedup: XGBoost 7.3x, LightGBM 3.6x (excluding goss results), Catboost 3.3x
"while XGBoost can explore its space of hyper-parameters very fast, it does not always locate the configuration that results in the best score. While it clearly wins in both multi-class ranking tasks (Microsoft, Yahoo), for the Higgs dataset it loses to LightGBM, despite the latter being significantly slower. Furthermore, for the Epsilon dataset XGBoost cannot be used due to memory limitations.
... there are tasks for which LightGBM, albeit slower, can converge to a solution that generalizes better. Furthermore, for datasets with a large number of features, XGBoost cannot run due to memory limitations, and Catboost converges to a good solution in the shortest time. Therefore, while we observe interesting trends, there is still no clear winner in terms of time-to-solution across all datasets and learning tasks. The challenge of building a robust GPU-accelerated GBDT framework that excels in all scenarios is thus very much an open problem."