so we have a student who we asked to train a VAE to generate memes. he was showing us his newest model, which has problems with mode collapse, and was only outputting one thing over and over again (I swear I am not making this up):

"one does not simply make memes"

Here's a fun TIL: Because the ratio of terms in the Fibonacci sequence approaches phi, and because phi is close to the ratio of km to miles, you can approximate conversion between distances with adjacent Fibonacci numbers.

So 2 km ≈ 1 mile, 3 km ≈ 2 miles, 5 km ≈ 3 miles, 8 km ≈ 5 miles, 13 km ≈ 8 miles, etc, etc

Holy crap. Malware hidden in a strand of DNA hijacks the computer that analyzes that particular gene sequence.

We're going to live in a very weird world man.

https://www.wired.com/story/malware-dna-hack