Slashdot Mirror

Hyperthreading v. hypervisors is a really difficult and long topic to talk about. There's a lot of information and performance comparisons on the net and in the end it boils down to the type of work that you're doing.

https://medium.com/data-design...
https://medium.com/data-design...
https://medium.com/data-design...
https://www.phoronix.com/scan....
https://blogs.vmware.com/apps/...
https://blog.heroix.com/blog/s...

Also, last time I checked OpenBSD is not widely used as a virtualization platform.

Hyperthreading v. hypervisors is a really difficult and long topic to talk about. There's a lot of information and performance comparisons on the net and in the end it boils down to the type of work that you're doing.

https://medium.com/data-design...
https://medium.com/data-design...
https://medium.com/data-design...
https://www.phoronix.com/scan....
https://blogs.vmware.com/apps/...
https://blog.heroix.com/blog/s...

Also, last time I checked OpenBSD is not widely used as a virtualization platform.

Psychology Today is the best you can do? Whose side are you on, anyway?

The Lifespan of a Lie — 7 June 2018

About the author:

* Ben Blum was born and raised in Denver, Colorado.
* He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California Berkeley.
* He was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.
* He received an MFA in fiction from New York University, where he was awarded the New York Times Foundation Fellowship.

The author did mundo research, which including, near the end, an interview with Zimbardo himself, which included the following Frost–Nixon interaction:

"If [prisoners] said, 'I want to get out,' and you said, 'Okay,' then as soon as they left, the experiment would be over," Zimbardo explained. "All the prisoners would say, 'I want to get out.' There has to be a good reason now for them to get out. ... That's the whole point of the Pirandellian prison [Ed. note: Pirandello was an Italian playwright whose plays blended fiction and reality]. ... "

Zimbardo confirmed that David Jaffe had devised the rules with the guards, but tried to argue that he hadn't been lying when he told Congress [and others] that the guards had devised the rules themselves, on the grounds that Zimbardo himself had not been present at the time.

He at first denied that the experiment had had any political motive, but after I read him an excerpt from a press release disseminated on the experiment's second day explicitly stating that it aimed to bring awareness to the need for reform, he admitted that he had probably written it himself under pressure from Carlo Prescott, with whom he had co-taught a summer school class on the psychology of imprisonment.

The entire article is awesome. Read it now.

In summary, the entire experiment was conducted on the basis of publish or perish, and Zimbardo left few stones unturned—acting mainly through compliant Lieutenant Jaffe—to ensure that the end result was "publish".

Here's another link I dropped into a Slashdot thread a few days ago, of an academic whose pursuit of his local career incentive crossed more than a few lines:

Why the Joy of Cooking is going after a Cornell researcher — 28 February 2018

Plus, Orwellian popcorn swells enrollment and sells textbooks:

For psychology professors, the Stanford prison experiment is a reliable crowd-pleaser, typically presented with lots of vividly disturbing video footage. In introductory psychology lecture halls, often filled with students from other majors, the counterintuitive assertion that students' own belief in their inherent goodness is flatly wrong offers dramatic proof of psychology's ability to teach them new and surprising things about themselves.

On the other hand, there's a responsible, modern literature, such as Robert Sapolsky's Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017).

There are specific passages in there about the neurobiology of bad cops (under stress, unreliable neural pathways become faster and stronger than reliable neural pathways, operating entirely beneath the level of executive self-control).

Another recent book, Matthew P. Walker's Why We Sleep (2017) explains why—in modern society—operating at far less than our best has become de rigueur.

At the center of this book, with more laboratory studies than you can shake a stick at (many of these conducted until the cold, impartial eye of clinical fMRI scans),

[*] fMRI scans are cold and impartial when applied to slow, global brain phenomena such as sleep; for the fast and small, this, too, can be Wansinked.

I colourful

"The money came in four installments of $50,000, starting in early 2017 and ending in January 2018, right after Trump’s pick for FCC chair, Ajit Pai, rushed through the repeal of net neutrality, despite overwhelming outcry from across the political spectrum." ref

an argument that the lack of these observations would exclude all other hypotheses, including the null.

The lack of certain observations excludes all hypotheses except one? How does a lack of observations exclude these hypotheses exactly?

there has never been presented any necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement of AGW

Says you.

mere existence of CO2 doesn't imply that AGW must be true

Of course not, but climate scientists agreed fairly consistently in the 1970s that human CO2 emissions would cause the gradual cooling trend of the previous 30 years to reverse, and it most certainly did! A few highly successful predictions from climate scientists don't prove AGW either, but neither can you show it's "not science" by claiming it isn't falsifiable, when it most obviously is.

If anyone else is interested in the password-extraction incident alluded to in the summary, here's a writeup: https://medium.com/@lukegorman... Outstanding!

If the shoe fits, then wear it. The Republican Party of the United States mirrors the fascist tactics of the NAZI party of Germany in many ways.

https://medium.com/@yonatanzun...

It's our handling of the opiate crisis that is to blame. People were cut off or drastically reduced, abusers and legit pain patients alike, from their doctor-prescribed opiates with a known dose. The black market was there to meet that demand. Heroin ODs started going up, the demand was so strong fentanyl and its analogs appeared on the scene, causing a massive spike in ODs. The large majority of OD deaths could have been prevented by dealing with overprescribing in a way other than forcing people into the black market. It caused the OD spike, and on top of it countless people now suffer in pain or kill themselves when they were doing just fine before.

Was wondering the same thing and found a really nice article about Voxels. My original assumption seems to be correct in that current GPUs arent designed to render voxel based geometry (it still has to be rasterized like traditional pixel based 3d graphics). It does offer aesthetically appealing results (Ala minecraft) but I'm not sure it would offer any actual benefits when applied to high visual fidelity AAA games or CGI. Voxels by their nature have volume and definite shape/size. This means there is some lower limit to the resolution that a voxel based renderer could offer. At some point, as the voxel size approaches zero, you are essentially in the same situation we have now with zero dimensional pixels.

more like 'merging' with mix.com, a different site created by the same co-founder.

techcrunch, of course and as usual, is guilty of publishing a shitty article that simply paraphrases the original post on medium and only glossed-over that very important detail at the very end.

read the original post from camp here instead:
https://medium.com/@gc/su-is-m...

basically, su users will still get a similar service, just at a different domain. big whooop.

Google him. https://medium.com/@rljunco/er...

Focus Ecuador: nobody ever heard of them before until now

You hadn't, but that doesn't mean no-one had. It only takes a few seconds of Googling to find, for example, an article they published back in 2016 on Medium about corruption in Ecuador.

In March, I met a lawyer named Anas Joudeh, who took part in some of the 2011 protests. Joudeh no longer considers himself a member of the opposition. I asked him why. “No one is 100 percent with the regime, but mostly these people are unified by their resistance to the opposition,” Joudeh told me. “They know what they don’t want, not what they want.” In December, he said, “Syrians abroad who believe in the revolution would call me and say, ‘We lost Aleppo.’ And I would say, ‘What do you mean?’ It was only a Turkish card guarded by jihadis.” For these exiled Syrians, he said, the specter of Assad’s crimes looms so large that they cannot see anything else. They refuse to acknowledge the realities of a rebellion that is corrupt, brutal and compromised by foreign sponsors. This is true. Eastern Aleppo may not have been Raqqa, where ISIS advertised its rigid Islamist dystopia and its mass beheadings. But as a symbol of Syria’s future, it was almost as bad: a chaotic wasteland full of feuding militias — some of them radical Islamists — who hoarded food and weapons while the people starved.

And, deliberately revealed that:

[PHOTO of a bombed hospital]
The roof of the Aleppo Eye Hospital, which rebels used as a military headquarters.

smugfunt: It is undeniable that the White Helmets and the Syrian American Medical Society are western funded yet operate only in jihadi held territory.

And one would wonder why there is no White Helmets in Yemen, why no Western funded "NGO" has ever operated in Yemen and/or is deliberately frequently promoted in MSM like White Helmets.
Everyone who question the role, motive, credibility of White Helmets, no mater who they are, they were/are/will be immediately labeled as problematic/propagandist/misinformed, as if only Russians run fake news:
https://medium.com/@caityjohns...
https://www.rt.com/news/424078...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Also, it's so easy to debunk the rescue videos of White Helmets: no first aid, all are dramatical runnings, the victims are either without or with very little dirt, bruises, etc.

Who controls Tor's DNS traffic? An Analysis of the Tor DNS Landscape

= Article: https://medium.com/@nusenu/who...
= Archived - https://archive.fo/iGQJE

"How is the tor network doing two years after Philipp Winter et al. urged the tor relay operators to stop using Google's DNS resolver?

With new players like Quad9 and Cloudflare on the "DNS resolver market" asking for your DNS traffic, who are the big DNS players on today's tor network?"

Who controls Tor's DNS traffic? An Analysis of the Tor DNS Landscape

= Article: https://medium.com/@nusenu/who...
= Archived - https://archive.fo/iGQJE

"How is the tor network doing two years after Philipp Winter et al. urged the tor relay operators to stop using Google's DNS resolver?

With new players like Quad9 and Cloudflare on the "DNS resolver market" asking for your DNS traffic, who are the big DNS players on today's tor network?"

Liberals love law enforcement too-- there's simply no other conclusion to draw from their support of the War on Drugs. That's responsible for the large number of police, their military-like tactics including viewing us as the enemy, what has enabled the vast expansions of their power completely trashing the 4th Amendment, and the total erosion of trust in police almost everywhere.
Legalizing marijuana isn't going to put the brakes on any of that. The biggest disappointment in liberal support for marijuana is that it in fact has not come from a realization that drug prohibition increases harm; it's really just about marijuana being harmless. You need look no further than the current opiate crisis to see that, liberals and conservatives are hand in hand calling for more policing and longer sentences. The liberal-backed prohibition policies this time have the wonderful effect of essentially being pro-torture; a direct result is severely restricted access to relief for people in debilitating pain who previously had a life but are now bedridden or even killing themselves as control is ceded to the black market resulting in the OD spike. Liberals are backing police and DEA overriding best medical practices full throttle.
Until liberals actually back off on their support for a policy that takes a dangerous substance and increases the harm it causes along with devastating side effects, inevitably resulting in law enforcement issues I described up top, it's entirely disingenuous to say liberals aren't fans of law enforcement.

serious work done making sure that all phases of the workflows creating systems "that have the potential to cause human casualty or death" are secure and error free.

Well some companies are indeed building tracks to begin neural net training live. Additionally, there's been enough failures and near misses from other car companies to begin edge testing as well.

Additionally, map makers are now refocusing on a new emerging market of maps for self driving cars. These maps differ from the typical on-line map in that they need typical pattern usage of a given intersection or piece of road that initial algorithms create too many edge cases for. Good example might be the 65/440 split in Nashville where I've seen map cars out there going over and over the exact same spot. Apparently it's confusing to self driving cars.

I think some companies are nearing the peek of the Dunning-Kruger chart and realizing that this problem is a lot harder than they expected. However, there is a lot of money if someone gets the self driving car right and so where in other ventures that peak would mean the end of research, the potential profits are driving some past the peak into the long valley.

I definitely echo your sentiment in that more testing to harden the product is needed and I think a few folks early on knew that (BMW, Ford, etc...). I think that Uber and Tesla might be going too fast, too soon on their implementations.

So you're saying Milton Friedman was a communist. https://medium.com/basic-incom...

Hmm, interesting.

This reminds me of a Medium article I read last night about StackOverflow and its problems. The thing I like about Reddit is that Karma isn't as important. Like it matters because at a certain point your posting privileges are limited but I feel karma isn't really that important. I think Reddit is vulnerable to gamification, but I feel it just doesn't matter as much. Like there was this "one troll" on r/linux and that person just kept making new accounts. Honestly if I'm on Reddit, I'm just shitposting most of the time if not lurking. But StackOverflow is different. It's supposed to be a community of developers just discussing technical things. And I think I agree with April that the moderation team really needs to do something about the whole issue of gamification and out-group/in-group and reputation.

First off, any effort to reduce emissions is great news. Thanks Lyft for the early Earth Day gift :) It's effectively cleaning up someone else's mess (in this case, capturing landfill methane was one example from the announcement) rather than their own, but it's an improvement nonetheless. If you have to use Lyft or Uber, use Lyft.

That said, a couple notes:

1) Lyft is most likely just offsetting for the ride itself, not for "deadhead" miles between "rides" (without passengers) or between a driver's house and the first or last ride, which may be a large amount. See this CPUC report, p. 11.

2) Another import note is that Lyft is currently opposing a bill (see the 4/20 legislative analysis, bottom of page 4) which

"would require, beginning January 1, 2030, that 100% of the vehicles that are purchased, leased, owned, or contracted for by a transportation network company be zero-emission vehicles"

as well as setting interim goals for increasing zero-emissions VMT.

Lyft's opposition apparently is partly because Lyft doesn't have faith in their efforts to increase zero emission miles, and partly from a distaste for rules of any kind ("We're going to oppose any version of the bill that can be seen as a mandate", according to Tim McRae, VP of Energy at Silicon Valley Leadership Group, who argued on behalf of Lyft and Uber during the bill's hearing in committee on 4/17).

The bill is SB 1014, going through the California Senate this session. (And of course, Uber is opposed as well.)

Reddit's problem is that it allows for "-1 disagree" votes. This results in positive contributions being downvoted in to oblivion because they do not agree with the (often times toxic) agenda which a given subreddit has. This results in each subreddit being an echo chamber.

I much prefer Medium because:

• You can upvote a given post up to 50 times
• There is no "-1 disagree" option
• Threads require additional clicks to read, discouraging long "staircase" back-and-forths
• The owner is devoted to making positive Internet discussion

This should be required reading for this debate:

https://medium.com/civic-tech-...

It was also gerrymandered up the wazoo when Democrats were in power.

Yes. Reynolds v. Sims and Baker v. Carr. Of course, those Democrats were often entirely different in politics. Such is history.

Gerrymandering simply strengthens whoever is currently more popular.

Wrong. In some cases, actually weakens those who are more popular, as shown in Wisconsin and North Carolina.

If congressional districts were assigned rationally, Democrats wouldn't do very well anyway

Yes, but that's because your definition of rational which is 100% Republican Agenda. You do realize your biases, however, are not supported in actual math that is independent of your partisan bias.

The only way Democrats could do well if the US went to strict national popular majorities, but that is utterly unacceptable and incompatible with federalism.

Or you know, actually voting. Of course, that is utterly unacceptable to the Republican agenda which relies on voter suppression.

In actual fact [people-press.org], liberals only make up about 17% of the US political spectrum and California is thoroughly unrepresentative of the country.

Actually, California is highly representative of the country, and it's only because of zealots like you that it gets demonized as some outside nemesis.

The reason Republicans are so strong is because Democrats have fallen out of favor with the political center: moderates and independents.

Also untrue, the truth is quite contrary.

It is actually the Republicans who have become more extremist, but they rely on moving the perceptual concept to turn the tables instead of embrace reality.

I'm a good example of that: I used to be a registered Democrat but loathe what the Democratic party has become over the last decade. I won't vote for Democrats again until they clearly disavow people like Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Corey Booker, and Elizabeth Warren.

You're actually a good example of the lying fraud of the GOP, as you vacuously and repetitively pretend to claim to be a Democrat and a moderate, yet entirely espouse the hard-core right-wing agenda, and blame Obama for creating conflict.

Tell you what, maybe people will believe you when you disavow individuals like Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thoma

That's called "Texas sharp shooter fallacy".

Nice try but that would only be true if they changed the model results after the observations were made. That is not something that they have done. Even a model from 1967 by Manabe and Wetherald made a reasonably accurate projection of temperatures.

The first climate model turns 50 and predicted global warming almost perfectly

I'm not saying that changes in the sun's output don't affect the climate on Earth. They most assuredly do. But the changes in climate are directly related to the changes in the sun's output. Lynwood Rooster's cite above shows for the last 400 years solar output has varied between about 1360 w/m^2 and 1361.75 w/m^2. That's a total variation of 1.75 w/m^2 which is about 0.129% change in the sun's output. That isn't enough change to fully account for all of the temperature change we've observed. And since around 2000 solar output has dropped slightly but temperatures continue to rise.

I got a C in diffy Q but it was one of the most difficult C's I ever got.

https://medium.com/s/the-futur...

Used correctly, lead acid batteries have far longer lifetimes, and can do far more cycles than lithium ion.

No they do not. Quite the opposite actually. It's not even close.

Cambridge Analyitica paid Facebook a lot of money

On this, and much about how you're characterizing this, you're simply incorrect. Get some basic facts:

https://medium.com/@CKava/why-...

More specifically, Fukushima and Chernobyl were "generation II" reactors, newer reactors are "generation III" (which achieve greater safety via expensive safety systems - hence the death of the dream of electricity "too cheap to meter").

Soon we will have "generation IV" reactors, and in this category the grassroots favorite is Molten Salt Reactors or MSRs. It's odd to call these things "generation IV" actually - it's like referring to the jet engine as a "generation IV propeller". MSRs, which are liquid-fueled and salt-cooled, are on a totally separate technology path from traditional reactors that are solid-fueled and water-cooled. They achieve higher safety and lower cost simultaneously through a philosophy of "don't manage risks - eliminate them."

The LFTR (liquid fuel thorium reactor) is the most well-known proposed MSR, and this has led to some confusion, because people sometimes think that the use of thorium is the main innovation, when in fact the molten salt is the main innovation. The main advantage of thorium is that the world supply is unlimited - we can never run out of it, making LFTR a fully sustainable technology. The advantages of molten salt reactors include high safety, lower cost, higher efficiency, high temperature (so they can use the same inexpensive turbines as fossil fuel plants), production of waste heat (which can be combined with desalination or negative carbon emission technology), ability to burn existing nuclear waste as fuel, and better load-following ability.

...or due to changes made in wake of the Google-Uber lawsuit settlement. But the questions probably need to be asked, in light of statements made by both companies: 1. A note on our lawsuit against Otto and Uber: "Recently, we uncovered evidence that Otto and Uber have taken and are using key parts of Waymo's self-driving technology." 2. Uber and Waymo Reach Settlement: "We are taking steps with Waymo to ensure our Lidar and software represents just our good work."

Hey, remember when you asked me to let you know when there are a few tens of thousands of miles of self-driving? Well, we've finally hit that. So, just sharing the news.

In all seriousness though, I don't think there's any way to know these numbers, but I bet the 5 million Waymo miles alone (I misstated 4 million above) contain at least tens of thousands of miles with no intervention. But, unless you're looking at sources that I'm not, I don't think it's possible to say exactly how many. The sources range from this, which looks like marketing, to this, which is over a year old.

Next you'll tell me the mafia isn't real. Or that Paul Manafort is a figment of my imagination.

Or you could stop waiving those hands for five seconds and post some evidence. If, say, I'm arguing with an Obamabot who insists 44 had the greatest intentions but was held back by a Republican Congress, I will bury his dumb ass with facts and citations on how the worst policies from the Obama Administration came from Obama himself, not Republicans.

If you Russiagaters weren't completely full of it, you would come into any discussion armed with hard facts and citations. You don't because you can't. All you have is a classic Gish Gallop:

• The term Gish gallop, named after a Young Earth creationist who was notoriously fond of employing it, refers to a fallacious debate tactic in which a bunch of individually weak arguments are strung together in rapid-fire succession in order to create the illusion of a solid argument and overwhelm the opposition's ability to refute them all in the time allotted.

And that's why you're in the same club as Birthers, Chem Trailers, and Lunar Conspiracy nuts. Because you have as much evidence for your crackpot ideas as they do.

as forensic analysis of the email thefts of the dems

You mean Crowdstrike that cites blog posts as evidence? Their analysis isn't fit to be toilet paper. And have you ever noticed that Mueller has never bother to subpoena the DNC servers for a proper FBI investigation, even though the alleged hacking of said servers is the entire foundation for Russiagate?

Either this was a farce of an investigation from day one, or Mueller is too incompetent to wipe his own ass, much less lead an investigation of a sitting president. Pick one.

American 'poor' typically have subsidies for a roof over their head, drinkable water, cheap reliable electricity, cable/satellite TV, smartphones, internet access, free healthcare, and food assistance.

Eliminate all subsidies and pay people a basic income. Those subsidies are enough to cover most if not all the costs of the basic income. Hell the corporate welfare queens Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, the largest private corporation in the US, each receive billions of dollars in subsidies.

Poor' is a lot wealthier than you may think. American 'Poor' typically receive more in gov't benefits than entry-level jobs pay, removing the incentive to get off the gov't teat.

Poor' is a lot wealthier than you may think. American 'Poor' typically receive more in gov't benefits than entry-level jobs pay, removing the incentive to get off the gov't teat.

Not even, on two accounts. One, because I survived a Traumatic Brain Injury, TBI, I have a disability income. If I had a minimum wage job I worked at fulltime I'd make $300 more than my Disability income. Two, abasic minimum income does not reduce the desire of most people to work. Because I hate being idle, as many others do too, I volunteered at a nonprofit. In my first 3 years I put in more than 4000 hours building pcs from used parts so low income people, and those who were trying to start their own business, could buy or earn a fully functional computer even if it was made from parts a few years old. And if they helped build pcs then they could learn to upgrade their pc for a lower cost than buying a new one.

FalconWolf

Lol, over 100 charges so far.

None of which have anything to do with Russia changing the results on voting machines or colluding with Trump.

I don't think "falling apart" means what you think it means.

Oh, but it does. See above. The rest of your post is a classic Gish Gallop:

The term Gish gallop refers to a fallacious debate tactic in which one barrages one's opposition with a deluge of individually weak arguments which take far too long to debunk individually in a way that sustains the audience's interest. This is all Russiagate amounts to. When Russiagaters tell you that there's "too much smoke for there not to be fire", they are unwittingly telling you "I've been won over by a Gish gallop fallacy." Every single aspect of their argument can be easily debunked without exception, but since there's so much of it and since pundits are assuring them of its reality so confidently, they believe.

Every few weeks there's some major new "bombshell" revelation which Russiagaters get all excited about, only to have people read the actual information in the "bombshell" and find out it's not actually anything incriminating or particularly remarkable. Take all those "bombshells" together, though, and you create the illusion of something real. That's all this nonsense is.

Wrong. And is is just one company's stats. https://medium.com/waymo/waymo...

Comparing "SDC that is continuously corrected by a driver" with "drivers" is incorrect. And stupid. But also incorrect. All we know from your link is that "SDCs+aware and monitored human driver" has better statistics than "unmonitored human driver".

SDCs have never been proven safer than humans because they have never driven without a human chaperone to correct the errors.

The other problem is that all the SDC companies are using the same basic technology. Assuming that their ANNs get a fully representative set of training data, all the end-results would be the same.

Wrong. And is is just one company's stats. https://medium.com/waymo/waymo...

Was that meant to be a joke? If not, please go ahead and lay out the economic case for renewables plus sodium ion batteries. They may be economical when paired with nuclear for leveling peaks, but that is about all. The amount of storage capacity needed for supporting intermittent generators is staggeringly larger, and can't be waived away with a Wikipedia link.

Also, don't pretend that the storage and grid costs can be externalized, because a 100% nuclear grid is viable without any. Intermittent renewable sources are driving the need for massive storage and grid upgrades, and they should be charged for it.

Let it not be forgotten that the primacy of information remains, but the gatekeepers of primary information are becoming increasingly specialized and dispersed throughout the social graph. One of the problems here is not that information is waning, but that the social internet deluge refuses to wane.

The Purpose of Mathematics in a Classical Education — 1 March 2017 by Thomas Treloar

In approximately 300 B.C., Euclid brought together much of what was known in mathematics up to that point in 13 volumes. He systematically organized this material, beginning with a short list of first principles and piecing together a body of knowledge as an extended chain.

The Elements became the standard textbook in geometry for the next twenty-two hundred years. It is only in the last one hundred years that it has been discarded as required reading for all educated people.

The expectation used to be that an educated person could somehow manage to cram the essential information working-set into their brain's as a young adult, and that would provide a solid (and shared) operational basis throughout adulthood. In modern mathematics, one often sees Poincare mooted as the last universalist.

No longer do we even cram the essence of one field into our brains all at once.

One approach to this conundrum is just to accept that you're working at second (or third, or fourth) hand most of the time. The other is to dump the knowledge itself, and turn your brain into a glorified index-card compendium: rarely to have the knowledge, but to have the Knowledge about where it lives (which is rarely more than three inspired search keywords and a click or two away).

The Knowledge, London's Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS — November 2014

Actually, "challenge" isn't quite the word for the trial a London cabbie endures to gain his qualification. It has been called the hardest test, of any kind, in the world. Its rigors have been likened to those required to earn a degree in law or medicine.

It is without question a unique intellectual, psychological and physical ordeal, demanding unnumbered thousands of hours of immersive study ... a process which, on average, takes four years to complete, and for some, much longer than that.

PBS's edumentary The Brain with David Eagleman (2015) has a segment on neurological change induced by this learning process (not a small effect, either). The specific subject of this giant, journalistic wall-of-text from turns out to be a crazy man:

He sold his engineering outfit and devoted himself full-time to the Knowledge, living off the savings he'd gained from the sale of his business.

Nevertheless, I relate to his endeavour. Half of the time on the Internet, I feel like a "butter boy" endlessly committing to mind the knowledge graph. Not the knowledge itself, just the graph, with just a little help from my own personal wiki.

Strangely, the key organizational principle in my wiki is a social graph: the names of people who discovered or wrote things. People make for the best landmarks. This was reinforced for me by a remark in a Bryan Cantrill video, where he said "corporations don't innovate, people do". I've borne this maxim in mind ever since. When a corporation talks about corporate innovation, ask yourself who the people are. If you don't know, you're being sold a bill of goods. Why is clang so great? Because it was Chris Lattner, as supported by Apple, and not some generic Apple product team. And usually when the key people leave, the innovation does, too. So my social graph consists of the people

"slow and high-fee transactions" are a thing of the pass now that the heavy hitters like Coinbase have begun consolidating transactions *greatly* reducing fees and mempool size.

Also, read up on a well formed critique of lightning network:
https://medium.com/@jonaldfyoo...

The subway runs an operating profit, I think it came out to something like 20 cents a passenger.

This says it loses $6 billion a year. I think you're wrong. Or are you talking about a "gross profit", like those Tesla fanbois? You know, profit before you actually count all costs needed to collect the revenue?

https://medium.com/swlh/how-i-...

There, now you know one. Leaving the walled garden is hard but some do manage.

None of Google, Microsoft or Apple can be trusted. Nor any of the Android or Windows OEMs.

When it comes to buying a phone or a laptop you're deciding who is least untrustworthy, not who is trustworthy.

So I've got a couple of PCs, a Macbook and some Android and iOS devices to develop/test on.

That doesn't mean I'm a fan of any of these companies. At least with Android and Windows you can punish a hardware vendor by switching to a competitor. With Apple you pretty much need to junk their entire ecosystem. Then again with the world arguably moving towards progressive web apps rather than native ones it may well be that you'll be able to build apps without needing a Mac -

https://medium.com/@firt/pwas-...

Though I reckon I'll still be buying Apple, Android and Windows devices in five years time just because being able to target Android, Apple and Windows natively as platform is still pretty useful.

But if I didn't need to target Apple platforms, I wouldn't buy Apple stuff. I'd just get a cheap Windows laptop and a cheap Android device when I needed to replace the old ones. That would be significantly cheaper than owning an Apple device that was still supported.

If you don't need to build apps for Apple devices, don't buy any Apple devices because they're a rip off and they're getting worse.

See, this is why it's actually sometimes useful to argue with trolls. Nothing quite motivates me as delivering a brow-beating on an ignorant dumbfuck.

Remember when I said I was running with assumptions? Yeah, turns out I right about that and things have come a long way since 2012. Just like I mentioned in the other post that you likely didn't really read, This article points out that there has been significant advances. And they've got tools to help object recognition figure out object localization (drawing a bounding box around stuff to look at), sematic segmentation (figuring out what parts of the image are different things), instance segmentation (figuring out that there are multiple similar objects), keypoint detection (known objects have known details, like humans have arms which it can know the position of and faces have mouths that smile or frown)

It can and does recognize sheep in a field. Some of the time. Possibly most of the time. There have been incremental improvements in the field of object recognition for decades.

We have been training NN for 40 years now.

mmmmm, not even wrong. Training any given NN has diminishing returns after a point. The research and development has been making them better at learning from any given training. Case in point, DeepMind was trained on a massive set of past games. DeepMind's successor, AlphaGo, needed no such training set. It could self-teach starting from just the rules of Go. It could play a better game than DeepMind in about half-an-hour's training.

If you're not going to read any of this, you're just spamming the same questions over and over.

tell the difference between a sheep and a letter, yes. So you are saying that all you need is a big neural net with different training set, or multiple sub-NN?

Yeah, if you want an NN to know about something you have to train it. If you want it to know about two different things, you have to give it a training set that spans both. Or you could have some sort of tiered affair. The letter recognition wouldn't see anything while the animal recognition would see a sheep, with something managing both. Generally the broader the training set the longer it takes to figure anything out.

You know this, stop feigning ignorance.

If that is the case, why don't we have one?

We do. Like the article mentions. Microsoft's Azure is an object recognition program. HERE. Just go play with it. Find a picture of a sheep. Load it into the API, hit submit, and one of the tags will, likely, be "sheep".

NN have been around for 40 years. When are we going to have one that can recognize sheep?

Around 2012. At least it was a nice mile-stone. There has been incremental improvements and the hit-rate has been getting progressively better.

What is your explanation?

I'd explain this line of inquiry with: You're a willfully ignorant troll that refuses to admit at the thing that's right in front of his face and that AI is a real thing.

The article is about how Azure failed ONE TIME to accurately identify an image. Does your imaginary 2 year old ALWAYS correctly identify objects? Do you? Are you some infallible god-like being? Are you omniscient? Does this line of hyperbolic inquiry lend any meaningful credence?

I saw a lot of people complaining about bloat that wasn't really related to the core browsing functionality

This.

Pocket, Hello, Personas, Suggested Sites, search engine integration...

Even Mozilla employees don't use Firefox:

I head up Firefox marketing, but I use Chrome every day.

Firefox is finished. I switched to Waterfox a while back, but I don't like the idea of relying on one guy (or whatever it's up to now) for security updates. I'll probably be looking at Opera soon.

True.
You need to register on a central server using your unique mobile number.

According to this Wikipedia article they've so far only once had to hand over data.
Interestingly this data is limited to the time the registration was done and the last time you accessed the service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Their privacy policy:
https://signal.org/signal/priv...

Reading material for the rightfully paranoid:
https://medium.com/@thegrugq/s...

Interesting article

https://medium.com/incerto/the...

Ergodicity

As we saw, a situation is deemed non ergodic here when observed past probabilities do not apply to future processes. There is a "stop" somewhere, an absorbing barrier that prevents people with skin in the game from emerging from it -and to which the system will invariably tend. Let us call these situations "ruin", as the entity cannot emerge from the condition. The central problem is that if there is a possibility of ruin, cost benefit analyses are no longer possible.

Consider a more extreme example than the Casino experiment. Assume a collection of people play Russian Roulette a single time for a million dollars -this is the central story in Fooled by Randomness. About five out of six will make money. If someone used a standard cost-benefit analysis, he would have claimed that one has 83.33% chance of gains, for an "expected" average return per shot of $833,333. But if you played Russian roulette more than once, you are deemed to end up in the cemetery. Your expected return is ... not computable.

>> iOS hasn't been a "Walled Garden" since iOS 8, over FOUR years ago.
What is it then ?
A golden cage ?

Haha.

What I meant was that Apple has officially supported "side-loading" of applications on iOS devices (without Jailbreaking) since the release of iOS 8, which, IIRC, happened in 2014.

Two ways to do this:

1. If you have a Mac, you can use XCode (free, no developer license required) to download and "make" any one of a number of Open Source iOS Apps available written in Objective-C and Swift. Here's some sources:

https://github.com/dkhamsing/o...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

This list has some amazing Open Source Apps written in Swift:

https://medium.com/@pradeep_ch... ...and that's just the beginning. Search For "open source ios apps" for a real eye-opener!

Ok, so you don't have a Mac? You can still play, thanks to the folks at Cydia...

2. You can upload any number of precompiled ".ipa" packages into your iOS devices using Cydia Impactor (which does not require Jailbreaking), which has versions that run on Mac, Linux and Windows. And of course, there have been websites that offer these packages. Again, Apple is FINE with all this... (Or at least fine with the many apps that don't require Jailbreaking) :

http://www.cydiaimpactor.com/

https://www.ultimatetech.org/t...

https://www.unlockboot.com/bes... ...and like with the open source list, above, there are many other search results. Try a search for "iOS .ipa files download sites".

So, THAT's what I meant by "no longer a Walled Garden"; because it just ISN'T, and hasn't been since September, 2014:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Weren't expecting THAT answer, were you?

This may not be a freedom of speech issue but it is still a dick move by Google. One that I hope comes back and bites them in the ass.

Why?

See point 3:
      https://medium.com/@yonatanzun...
Google did not start this, but they needed to end it, rather than spending months and months bleeding into the water. You might think I'm over-hyping that, but we're out here talking about it almost a year later! A company can't afford to let that kind of thing burn out of control internally.

Basically this - the stock market is a casino now. It has little or nothing to do with "price discovery".

High Frequency Trading can not, by definition, take into account anything about the fundamentals of the company to determine its "correct" stock price. Instead HFT is quite literally an example of Core War using real money and companies. HFT algorithms are merely programs fighting other programs using strategies the reflect only the nature of the competitor programs' algorithm and nothing to do with anything related to the real world. Today >80% of all trades by dollar in every market (stock, bonds, commodities, derivatives) are performed by HFT.

Free money from Quantitative Easing (QE) has flooded the market over the last 10 years and flooded out anything that hadn't been driven out by HFT. Cheap money means massive distortion of the market and has enabled most public companies to obtain bond money on the cheap which uniformly they've used to buy-back stock. This link creates a causal cross correlation between bond and stock markets.

On top of this you have Goldman-Sachs manipulating commodities and investments to drive up prices in other markets. There is NO shortages in most commodities from copper to housing but contrived, created shortages explicitly created to goose public markets.

We have further proof in that bond, stock, commodity and derivatives markets are ALL lock-step cross-correlated. This was never true before but it indicates that there are common co-dependencies that should not be there. This co-dependencies are precisely all of the above entities and systems that have made all these markets into casinos where the house has all the advantages over any actual investor.

The problem with cross-correlation in markets is that diversity and independence are REQUIRED for portfolio effects to enable risk-reduction. Unless you have a portfolio of INDEPENDENTLY PRICED investments, NONE of the risk reduction effects are present - instead you have a monoculture that can crash all at once like an epidemic. So markets can no longer enable this even if you create a portfolio or invest in an index stock that automatically "portfolio effects".

So as an entrepreneur, all that "going public" does for you is put you on-the-line for performance of your stock when you effectively cede any control over the price of the stock. The stock price of your company has NOTHING to do with fundamentals or what makes sense for your customers, employees or even stockholders. It's pretty obvious that ANY OTHER EXIT strategy would give you more control and a better pay off to both you the entrepreneur but also the current and future employees of your company. The stock market is a casino where the house doesn't just have a 1% advantage but closer to 30%-70% advantage over you.

I think the take away from this is that it shows that AI isn't really seeing what we think it's seeing in most cases. Any human would say "there is no selfie stick" or "there is no traffic light", but for some reason the AI sees something where nothing exists, similar to how humans sometimes see a face where no face exists.

Anecdote time/a>. There was an AI that was supposed to be learning to tell wolves from other dogs. They eventually thought the AI learned pretty well and thought it was doing a great job. On all their test photos, the AI was doing a great job in determining "wolf" or "domestic dog". However, they learned later that the AI was just actually seeing if there was show in the picture, as all the pictures of wolves contained snow, while the pictures of other dogs didn't contain snow.