Having a quick read, they're pointing out that the Bernoulli distribution is only supported for values of 0 and 1 (i.e. it's binary), whereas pixel values for a grayscale image are a decimal value in the interval [0, 1]. When you train a VAE, it's pretty standard to use a BCE loss, but this is wrong because the data isn't binary (i.e. it's not a Bernoulli distribution). They define a continuous analogue of a Bernoulli distribution that is supported in [0, 1], and use this as the loss function for training a VAE, which gives them reconstructions that are closer to the input.
Yeah, agree having skimmed the paper now. It seems kinda meh to me: it's obvious that improving the loss function is a good thing to do, and for any real application (ie, not greyscale mnist) you'd never use this binary value target.
The number of subgraphs increases exponentially with the number of additional layers (and neurons). If you started off with a network the size of the final pruned network, you would have a dramatically lower chance of finding a winning ticket compared to the oversized network you start with.
I'd go even further than that and argue that the reason vegan and vegetarian diets have taken off as much as they have is because they became status symbols in the 90s / 2000s.
Rockets have an exhaust with constant velocity, and they expel mass in the form of fuel. It's this expulsion of mass that generates the force that propels the rocket. Taking a force balance and assuming no external forces (e.g. gravity), you can integrate to get the rocket equation, which tells us how much fuel mass we need to reach a given velocity (the quantity we care about when talking about stellar distances).
>If you're in the USA and fill your tank once a week, you probably spend ~$2000/yr in gas. And that's how much you'd save in gas if you went electric.
The electric bill makes a big difference, because you're really looking at the relative cost of two different forms of energy -- electrical and chemical (fuel). The last time I calculated it, the cost of running an ICE was around 20% more expensive (in my area) than a BEV, but a PHEV was within a percent or so of owning a BEV.
I'm curious to know what percentage of EV owners in Norway have a second car. I'd imagine the uptake rate for families that can afford to own more than one vehicle is significantly higher than for those that can't, but I've never seen any stats on the matter. The reality is that for most people, a car is the second largest purchase they'll ever make (if not the largest), so utility has to be high on the list of priorities. I'm not entirely convinced EVs have the utility to overtake ICE vehicles just yet, especially when incentives are removed.
Anecdotally, thousands of Norwegians have a Tesla as their only car. The Supercharger network makes long trips completely painless, practically equivalent with an ICE vehicle.
I've never understood the range complaints beyond 400km. As long as your car can drive 130km/h or faster it is suitable for a road trip.
It is almost impossible to repair the damage that CO2 emissions cause. You need an even bigger clean energy source to reverse the damage so it is always more efficient to use that energy to never cause emissions in the first place. EVs are a way to reduce emissions at the cost of waiting for them to charge during road trips. But for some stupid inexplicable reason no one actually wants that trade off.
People will adapt. For most people, it's not an inconvenience to stop for 15-20 minutes every four hours on a road trip. They'd have stopped at those intervals anyway, unless they're running military discipline in their driving routine.
Market forces ensure that charging spots will be located in spots where people want to stop and spend money on food, drinks, bathroom breaks. This is what already happens with Tesla's charging network.
These habits will change once people organically get to experience the better driving experience that a properly engineered EV gives.
I think this is the big one. Consoles and CoD dominated the market for a long time. Has the pendulum swung back towards PC games? I have to confess, it's been a long time since I played anything. Games dev companies just stopped making games for people like me.
>50km a day in charge capacity is the absolute best-case scenario. In reality you should count on half of that.
I'd count on even less than that. Industrial solar farms average a capacity factor of around 20-25%, dropping as low as 10%. And that's with farms built for maximizing sunlight. A car is likely to do far worse, especially when you consider imperfect conditions, and how frequently people park indoors. If it's a tossup between protecting my car from the elements, and getting a few miles a day of charge, I'm going to choose the former.
> So successful products optimise for the UX of a user who doesn't yet know how to use the product well. And such users really love touchscreens.
I think the problem is that touchscreens get ported to applications where there should be a reasonable expectation that the end user is an expert in the system. For example, cars, and aircraft. Touchscreens are great when you have portable systems that have to condense a lot of functionality into a small device, but I don't want to be in a position where a pilot has to touch the correct button on a touchscreen in the middle of serious turbulence. Likewise, no driver should be taking their eyes off the road to navigate to the air-conditioning tab. Applying touchscreens in these situations is not only bad engineering, it's outright dangerous. You have to demonstrate competent control of a vehicle just to operate it, so we shouldn't be assuming operators are brand new users that aren't committed to the product.
Wouldn't it be easier to point a camera at the windshield and detect a change in opacity? I would think that's a far easier problem to solve than, say, facial recognition.
Wouldn't both of those solutions undermine the advantage of the airframe, which is the fuel cost savings of the larger engines?
That said, I think seating pitch and spacing is definitely a conversation that needs to be had. I'm an average-sized guy, and I have a hard time with today's airline seats. I would hate to see what it's like for someone taller. There definitely needs to be more stringent regulation of airline seating to mitigate ever-vanishing personal space.
