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You need to find more clever methods to grab the noise of my PC fan, however.

Why do you think they are sonic?

Anything you can vibrate can produce sonic waves, but cause of the vibration doesn't need to be sonic in the first place. You know like this one

So please, at long last, stop with this silliness. We are doing nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

So please do nothing in response, it will all be over soon.

The complete absense of any examples of Rust code that is better than the equivalent C code would be

You mean except for Stylo or how Tor is moving to Rust?

The lack of traction of Rust outside of those that back it

You mean except for when companies like Google use Rust and Dropbox use Rust?

You're welcome.

I think you're a little confused about what evidence is.

You really haven't been paying attention, have you? Yes, the Russians are well ahead of the curve. They've been doing this for a LONG time. Our allies warned us that they've been doing for a long time. They warned us that we were going to be targeted. Putin isn't fucking stupid. He caught on to how powerful (and cheap) using social media was as a tool. You get something to go viral even just once, and it's already paid back a thousand fold.

And that's what happened. Not just here, but also in Europe. More to the point, it was extremely successful.

I've been paying attention for a long time now, and what I see is the same old thing - using Russia as a boogeyman. Before, it was the USSR's massive tank formations, submarines and nuclear weapons which everybody had to fear. Now, since their tank formations are just an outdated shadow of their former glory, their submarine fleet is tiny compared to the US' one, and the nuclear weapons are regulated by treaties, we need to fear something else they're oh-so-good at, right?
And where exactly in Europe have they been doing it? Because I've seen frontpage articles on CNN, in NY Times and elsewhere saying how it seems that Russians are targeting French and German elections. Weeks or months later I've read reports - which somehow didn't get frontpage attention - that French security services ruled out Russian involvement in their elections, and no hacking or something similar has happened in German elections. So who is not paying attention?
Compare these two articles: The NSA Confirms It: Russia Hacked French Election ‘Infrastructure’ and The Latest: France says no trace of Russian hacking Macron. Who is lying? Is it the French themselves, or is it maybe Rogers just riding the wave to get more funding for NSA? And this one is hilarious - NY Times going existential over missing Russian hackers in German elections in an article, where they cite their previous article on how Macron's campaign got hacked by Russians (from May) even though by now it is known that no such thing has happened. Am I the only one who sees a massive number of various interests riding the very, very old wave of russophobia in order to get more money, more readers, more views, more attention? It is all a theatre, keeping us occupied and entertained so we part with our money more easily.

Eventually entropy will destroy the universe.

(Not that it makes any difference to your argument), but when this particular embodiment of entropy comes up (inexorable fate of all matter) I can no longer help but can't help but think about the interesting fact that our existence (biology) contradicts the idea of entropy as a rule that dictates all matter absolutely: biology distils information; a book of tricks, to reduce entropy like Maxwell's demon. https://www.wired.com/2017/02/...

In full relevance to this exploration of CA: The article goes full circle at the realisation that biology is not unique in this aspect, and that this tendency to seek to reduce entropy actually emerges from the rules of the universe... as does CA.

One of my favorite articles of all time from any source is the piece Neal Stephenson wrote for Wired about the Fiber Optic Link (around the) Globe, or FLAG, in 1996.

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/...

It went from England to Japan (about 28,000 km/17,500 miles) and carried "just under 8 Gbps of actual throughput". 21 years later, this new cable has TWENTY THOUSAND times the bandwidth. Nice.

You know the NSA can't wait to tap into that. https://www.wired.com/2016/09/...

Not to hear them whinge about it. Each used sale takes money away from them in their own whines and words. Because if they could keep you from buying the used copy, they could sell you the new one (If I'm disinterested in spending the money, no, you wouldn't- but they don't see things that way...)...

Here's an example of the thinking there...and a study that shows how dangerous the thinking actually might be...

If a person was knowingly harmed due to this security lapse, I think we would have heard about it.

Yea it's a shame "we" haven't heard any examples.

Like almost-exactly a year ago when Krebs was taken offline for three days along with significant damage to the Akamai network when hit by a DDoS attack from D-Link (and others) insecurities:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/krebsonsecurity-hit-with-record-ddos/

Or when hundreds of thousands of websites at OVH were DDoSed offline:
https://securityintelligence.com/news/leaked-mirai-malware-boosts-iot-insecurity-threat-level/

Or when Dyn's entire US east-coast network was taken offline for a good part of a weekend a month later effecting millions of Americans accessing pretty much everything:
https://www.wired.com/2016/10/internet-outage-ddos-dns-dyn/

All of which were caused by a massive botnet of infected embedded devices, such as D-Link routers and D-Link IP cameras.

Shame none of that hit the news for "us" to hear about...

This is NASA, come on, a science institution. Using Fahrenheit?

(The following is a joke)

I'd like to point out that NASA also lands probes on Mars. The Europeans with their vaunted metric system? They tend to crash.

Heck, the one time NASA used a little bit of the metric system? Whammo!

It's like a virus. Start including the metric system and the whole thing gets screwed up!

(The preceding was a joke. Yes, I know the issue with the ESA lander had nothing to do with the metric system. Yes, I know the issue with the NASA lander was converting between metric and imperial units.)

Apple Watch Less Than Excellent

I'm sure the watch is fine. The people experiencing problems are probably just wearing it wrong.

I don't think he'll be successful at all. 4chan did much worse to Ben Garrison where they took it beyond turning his cartoons into antisemitic versions, but also turned the cartoonist himself into a meme of sorts. At this point it's probably better for him to just consider the character dead and gone or just wait for the meme to play itself out.

In my experience, it is exactly what you don't know that can hurt you.

Take the Soviet Doomsday Machine for instance. It is a very limited AI that uses seismometers to detect a nuclear attack and retaliate, even if the human operators are all dead. A nice sized asteroid strike or caldera event could potentially set it off. This would trigger a very short and catastrophic World War 3.

The annoyed researchers seem to have a lack of vision.

Xbox controllers have been used on military robots like the iRobot packbot and the R-Gator. See
http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2...

and

https://www.wired.com/2009/06/...

It's really starting to feel like the year 2000 again with the kind of hubris, absurd valuation claims, etc. coming from the tech world in general. One of my favorites: https://www.wired.com/1999/09/...

It doesn't matter whether or not we learn about history.

Our timeless ability to be ignorant and stupid all but guarantees we will repeat it.

It's really starting to feel like the year 2000 again with the kind of hubris, absurd valuation claims, etc. coming from the tech world in general. One of my favorites: https://www.wired.com/1999/09/...

Cripes, it's not all that big a secret. Here you go - https://www.wired.com/2007/06/...

What doesn't make much sense is why it's being done. Keeping the embassy staff on edge must look like a good idea to someone of significant power in Cuba because putting the requisite technology together isn't something that average Cuban could do.

Mod parent up-
This was tried by a group of MIT's as a project they entered in a local hackathon. In this scenario you could voluntarily mine BTC on a website and the site turns off ads.

They ended up being subpoenaed and told to hand over the source code. EFF got involved though I never heard the outcome. This could have just been a knee-jerk by the attorney general, though it's not quite tin-foil hat level to suspect the ad agencies had a hand in it.

https://www.wired.com/2014/09/...
http://www.businessinsider.com...

apple will probably just dust off this old excuse https://www.wired.com/2008/12/apple-says-cust/

Exactly, when Tesla advertises the self-driving ability of their cars as fun and the self-driving problem as easy and soon solved.

apple has been lying in their ads since forever
https://www.wired.com/2008/12/apple-says-cust/

Don't worry, they'll just roll it into your broadband bill and you'll pay for it whether you watch it or not, like ESPN already does.

Because in the past, wars were fought over resources ands "lebensraum"; farmland, living space, resources. At the national level, these wars could be avoided if countries cooperated and agreed to share resources (fishery stocks, mineral resources, farmland, river waterflow). So the EU seemed a good idea for 50 years after World War II.

We're still having those fights but now but on a smaller scale; affordable housing, green spaces, rights of way along new property developments.

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/...

The EU managed to grind along, until one country decided unilaterally they they would invite millions of people in from the South Mediterranean, they discovered that they didn't have the resources to handle this, and would the rest of Europe please take their fair share. At the same time, it's getting increasingly obvious that the EU is one giant gravy train for ex-national politicians (MEP's) lobbyists and euro-corporations, especially through alternative media like forums and blogs.

When the population starts seeking their news from alternative sources where everyone can join in the discussion, the incumbents suddenly decide that this is "fake news" and start to campaign to have it blocked. Then nationalist parties are starting to question all the money being sent to the EU in return for economic policies being decided hundreds of miles away that have no benefit for the local population. That is then labelled "populism" and a return to the 1930's.

Every government in the world would go to war for that power or to keep that power out of t hehe hands of another.

Your fundamental argument is that the nation state has already achieved post-biological escape velocity.

In most biological models, actual conflict peaks when the status hierarchy is uncertain or in flux (e.g. merging two flocks of chickens). The rest of the time, most of the conflict is symbolic, and even conspicuous losers are marginalized, rather than killed outright.

If you believe in evolution, this is a natural (and opt repeated) outcome for cooperative–competitive systems.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Almost everyone in who functions to a reasonable degree in human society has internalized some way to navigate the simultaneous cooperate–compete dynamic.

But the human mind loves to manufacture autobiographic memory and then adorn this with various stories used to project and inject the chosen autobiographic self-reduction into the social realm.

I can't find the quote just now, but Nabokov said of his own autobiography Speak, Memory that if an author can only write one valid autobiography, he or she isn't trying very hard.

(I was instead rewarded for my snipe hunt by chancing upon Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov, which will surely stand up as the best-spent 30 minutes of my entire week.)

Between the ages of 10 and 15 in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—English, Russian and French—than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlanie, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Alexander Blok.

On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library.

At a later period, in Cambridge, England, between the ages of 20 and 23, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Joyce, Proust and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several—Poe, Verlaine, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orczy, Conan Doyle and Rupert Brooke—have faded away, have lost the glamor and trill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned.

So, too, for myself, have Poe, Verne, and Doyle faded away.

But this vertical-gradient singularity, status-hierarchy winner-take-all narrative of the Looming AGI Ascension continues to promulgated by those for whom Poe, Verne, and Doyle have not faded away.

The Gilder Paradigm — 1 December 1996

Though its details are complex, its basic tenet is startlingly simple: Every economic era is based on a key abundance and a key scarcity.

This notion of vertical-gradient AGI is even worse than brick-and-mortar rubbishing Gilderism (he was not wrong, but the gradient turned out to be twenty years rather than two years—and even at twenty years, Amazon has not yet engorged Whole Foods past its tonsils).

Here's a thing: if you discover that a class of problems admits good solutions using stochastic algorithms, it's probably because optimality is a prairie plateau rather than a pointy peak.

(How does one achieve Commanding Heights amid the dreary Saskatchewan vastness—find the most industrious gopher, add steroids to its local water supply until it's hindquarters resemble a modern chicken's forequarters, and then take up prominence upon its excavation mound).

Here's the thing about the thing: AGI might help you find a bigger, better s

There are already AI processors that are many times faster than a traditional microprocessor.

Google rattles the tech world with a new AI chip for all

and

Intel’s AI Chip Available in a USB Stick

Something like this.

Razer. They made a laptop since 2011 with this: https://www.wired.com/2011/08/...

Obviously not the same thing. It still has a conventional trackpad in the trackpad-location. That is just a laptop with a small, secondary touchscreen display.

Didn't we just have an article on here about an OTA (or network) update disabling TVs? I really wouldn't want that happening to cars...

Two articles actually. At least in the smart lock case there was still the manual option of a normal key, the tv users were screwed. Hopefully these car manufacturers are taking notes and designing their system that if the update fails the car still retains it's "car" functionality, like starting and driving. You're point about a hacker sending code to break a vehicle is a valid one, but imagine being some dude working a 9-5 who can't get into work for a couple weeks because the manufacturer bricked his car with a real update. That has it's own dimension of suck.

You realize a lot of us just don't care about Bitcoin, right? It's just another commodity <yawn> There are millions of them in the market. What makes Bitcoin special? That it requires a energy expenditure that makes alt.pavers look like a model of efficiency?

There's little else interesting about Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a digital money that works independently of the state and which cannot be easily shut down by the state. It has the potential to radically change the way humans interact with one another and challenge the legitimacy and power of the world's governments. To me, Bitcoin is by far the most interesting thing happening today, and one of the most important inventions of the past 500 years.

There's certainly no envy: I put my money into the "traditional" stock and commodity market, and they have made more money for me than if I had used it for Bitcoin.

Bullshit! Bitcoin's up more than 700% over the last 1 year and 40000% over the last 5 years.

You realize a lot of us just don't care about Bitcoin, right? It's just another commodity <yawn> There are millions of them in the market. What makes Bitcoin special? That it requires a energy expenditure that makes alt.pavers look like a model of efficiency?

There's little else interesting about Bitcoin.

There's certainly no envy: I put my money into the "traditional" stock and commodity market, and they have made more money for me than if I had used it for Bitcoin.

I see a bunch of insightful comments to the effect that "mitigating DoS is a good thing", etc., and decrying infosec folks because of crying wolf, not balancing security with other factors, not understanding engineering, etc. Your car likely has a network-accessible device on your CAN-BUS. Got bluetooth in your car stereo? Also got nav system or steering wheel controls for the stereo? Guess what?

If an attacker compromises a system on your car that is connected to your CAN-BUS, then they might be able to co-opt that system into doing nasty things on your CAN-BUS. Your entertainment system probably has the biggest wireless attack surface, but more and more frequently CAN-BUS is externally accessible, as through your side mirrors, likely the case if you have mirrors that tilt in reverse, etc.

And, these aren't even theoretical vulnerabilities; entertainment system remote exploit has already been demonstrated to disable brakes, etc.:
https://www.wired.com/2015/07/...

This is the FBI, fer crissakes! The guys who were deeply, deeply penetrated by the Chinese military intelligence during the Clinton/Bush administrations (and are probably still in control). And then there is this: https://www.wired.com/2016/02/... http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/08/... http://fortune.com/2016/02/09/...

Jet Airliners and Jet Fighters...Neither of them take off or land by themselves.

Actually, then do:

Jet Airliners:
Every major Jet Airliner must have an automatic land feature.

Jet fighters:
The F/A-18 Hornet and the EA-6 Prowler have it. Looks like it is used for carrier landings since they are so difficult. Ooh, so does the F-35. The experimented with it on the F-16

The trouble is that debating a stupid idea, while showing how stupid it is to people already smart enough to know that it's stupid, spreads the idea to more stupid people who will never be dissuaded through debate:

https://www.wired.com/story/me...

Think of it this way, stupid ideas are like a disease which can be easily cured in smart people, who are often already immune, but become incurable chronic illnesses in stupid people, who are especially susceptible to infection. Debating these ideas is spraying the pathogen over whole crowds along with the cure.

It's also outright harmful to them. Part of the reason Google's mapping information is great and Apple's isn't is that anyone can report problems with Google's data.

You misspelled "Google's biggest problem" - https://www.wired.com/2014/07/...

And that's ignoring that for both Apple and Google Maps, everybody who can access the maps can also report errors in it.

This. The whole idea of "shine a light on them/keep them visible/debate, don't silence" which is apparently widely held among Slashdotters, is perfectly counterproductive to the goal of extinguishing nonsensical and hateful ideas. This article should help explain why the correct tactic to use on any kind of terrible nonsense thinking that is unworthy of debate among intelligent people is "Don't feed the trolls:"

https://www.wired.com/story/me...

the "justification" for moving jobs overseas has nothing to do with it being "better" for *US* or the 'economy' as a whole than a wage increase.. it had everything to do with just being *cheaper*, period. companies are evil. they're greedy as fuck. they will choose the cheaper option 999 times of 1000 without any other considerations.

Actually companies are inherently amoral, not evil. For example, most companies wouldn't direct their employees to go out of their way to harm innocent bystanders. Companies generally exist for one purpose, to create profits for the owner(s). Companies can be good if the owner(s) or the customers wish it to, and they can be evil because the owner(s) wish it and the customers can't stop it (for example, in monopoly or oligopoly situations). Most of the time they are neither explicitly evil nor explicitly good, most of the time they're simply doing what their employees think will make them the most money.

automation is coming, *regardless* of what the minimum wage is. because for many, many jobs, it is *cheaper* than people doing the same thing.. even at the lowest possible wages in the u.s. the companies don't give a shit about lost jobs if they can do or make more with less money, their bean counters are happy.

Quite true.

It's reasonable to explore them, but it has to be in an informed way. If Damore had actually asked the people who wrote the sources he thought he understood, they would have told him that he was wrong.

That's the basic problem here. It's called the incoherence problem. Smart people read these sources, think they understand them, combine them all together than reach an unwarranted conclusion.

So in order to have a good debate about these issues, we need to first accept that we need to ask questions of the experts who write these papers, and not try to infer too much from our own reading or interpretation.

Did it say anything about women being inferior to men

Yes. To quote directly: "higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance"

There is no qualification. He takes that as a simple statement of fact and proposes solutions based on it.

The author of the source he cites to back it up says that the conclusion is unwarranted:

"Women as a group score higher on neuroticism in Schmitt's meta-analysis, sure, but he doesn't buy that you can predict the population-level effects of that difference. "It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That's a huge stretch to me)," writes Schmitt. So, yes, that's the researcher Damore cites disagreeing with Damore."

But, the good guys are still there and they are somewhat left behind as well. They quietly watch the bullies from the Lord of the Flies and go about their business.

I have seen this happen and as a man it can be hard to speak up. You get accused of political correctness, and excluded from anything remotely fun because you are labelled a killjoy. Sometimes it goes the other way, the guy being a dick ends up ostracised, it really depends on the workplace.

Hence why this guy was fired.

I think it was more to do with his unwarranted conclusions. He has been debunked by the authors of the very papers he was citing in the memo.

"Women as a group score higher on neuroticism in Schmittâ(TM)s meta-analysis, sure, but he doesnâ(TM)t buy that you can predict the population-level effects of that difference. "It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. Thatâ(TM)s a huge stretch to me)," writes Schmitt. So, yes, thatâ(TM)s the researcher Damore cites disagreeing with Damore."

You give them a platform with which to spread their message if you don't. And the idea that it's better to debate ideas based on lies rather than smother them is misguided:

https://www.wired.com/story/me...

Here are some links to more information on atomic clocks, their development, and why they're needed:
How and why atomic clocks were invented
How atomic clock accuracy was greatly increased
How atomic clocks work
Animations showing how atomic clocks work
Why atomic clocks are needed for GPS
Video showing how atomic clocks are used for GPS

A Google search turns up nothing for that quote.

That quote is probably made up, but it does mostly line up with the sentiment of the GO AI researchers in the years leading up to Google's 2017 win. Here is the first article I found about how difficult GO AI programming is from before 2017, and it has a leading GO AI competition developer saying computers could beat professional GO players in "maybe 10 years" (said in 2014). I doubt anyone outside of Google's team felt much differently in early 2017, and I couldn't find any articles which claimed researchers were on the verge of beating human GO players using AI until after the fact.

Considering this is the trend for nearly all AI accomplishments, general AI will most likely be invented when nearly all AI researchers think it is decades away from happening.

. A conference in Vegas becomes a showdown between Owen Pitt and the staff of Monster Hunter International with an ancient god, one that could turn Sin City into a literal hell on earth.

Yeah, ancient gods are so so sci-fi. Moving on, when Torgensen ran the Sad Puppies he explicitly said that it was because "popular" works were being passed over in favor of "literary" works or works with political messages http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-hugo-awards-were-always-political-now-theyre-only-1695721604. Note that that doesn't say anything about whether it is fantasy or scifi. The Rabid Puppies meanwhile explicitly tried to be more extreme and to deliberately nominate "right-wing" sci-fi or simply ruin the Hugos. As Vox Day https://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/ said:

“I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were,” he told me before the winners were announced. “All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt.”

Moreover, the idea that the Hugos classically focused on science fiction that was less fantasy is simply not true. "The Graveyard Book" won in 2009, Bujold's "Paladin of Souls" won in 2004, "American Gods" won in 2002, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" won in 2001, and if one looks at nominations rather than winners, fantasy novels have frequently been nominated, going back at least to "Too Many Magicians" in 1967 and Dragonquest in 1972, and Book of Skulls in 1973. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel. And that's just in the Best Novel category. Similar remarks apply to the other categories.

... did her thesis on investigations of sexuality via fMRI, which has famously been used to detect emotions in a dead salmon.

So many people refer to that paper to rubbish fMRI, so few people have read it. Let me TL;DR the article you just referenced for you:

Bennett's point is that a suite of methods known as multiple comparisons correction can allow researchers to maintain most of their statistical power while keeping the danger of false positives at bay.

The point of the salmon study isn't to prove that fMRI shouldn't be used or is worthless. Brain scientists can do things with fMRI machines they otherwise couldn't, said Ed Vul, an MIT neuroscience graduate.

In short; the whole point of the salmon paper was "Yes, fMRI works, but you have to remember to do the stats right."

Debra W. Soh is an expert in neuroscience. (PhD in sexual neuroscience from the University of York.)

Yep. She's also an author for that esteemed peer review journal Playboy, and did her thesis on investigations of sexuality via fMRI, which has famously been used to detect emotions in a dead salmon.

Both sides of the argument who are worried. Here are the questions that Wired leaked: https://www.wired.com/story/go...

"The doc asserted that Google has a lower bar for diversity candidates,â reads one question ranked highly by employees in an internal voting system. âoeThis is hurting minority Googlers because it creates the perception that they are less qualified. What can we do to combat that perception?"

"I am a moderately conservative Googler, and I am and have been scared to share my beliefs,â the question reads. âoeThe loud voice here is the liberal one. Conservative voices are hushed. What is leadership doing to ensure Googlers like me feel invited and accepted, not just tolerated or safe from angry mobs?"

The best quote I heard on this phenomenon was Wired's interview with someone who was actually good friends with James Damore when he was still a college student -- and who had a surprisingly balanced response when he read about all the angry attacks on Damore.

This classmate says he did not view Damore as “some sort of raving sexist or bigot.” But, this classmate adds, “When you’re really smart you’re prone to thinking that you can solve these big issues if you just think real hard on them, and if you don’t have the social skills to navigate a dicey issue, it can go wildly awry."

Wired has a writeup

Some upvoted questions:

“The doc asserted that Google has a lower bar for diversity candidates,” reads one question ranked highly by employees in an internal voting system. “This is hurting minority Googlers because it creates the perception that they are less qualified. What can we do to combat that perception?”

“I am a moderately conservative Googler, and I am and have been scared to share my beliefs,” the question reads. “The loud voice here is the liberal one. Conservative voices are hushed. What is leadership doing to ensure Googlers like me feel invited and accepted, not just tolerated or safe from angry mobs?”

Of course, the same article has such gems as:

The document cited purported principles of evolutionary psychology to argue that women are not well-suited to be good engineers.

Which is of course not at all what the document said.