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This one too.

What, nobody has posted the obligatory xkcd yet?

fish.

... and also, are you sure we're looking for the right thing? ants

What, nobody has posted the obligatory xkcd yet?

fish.

... and also, are you sure we're looking for the right thing? ants

It was monitored for signs of radio signals as weak as one-tenth of a cellphone-strength signal, but nothing was detected.

Obligatory...

It's only "censorship" when the government does it, under the Constitution, dumbass.

If that is true, why is not having net neutrality bad? It should be perfectly acceptable to the xkcd free speech crowd for ISP's to limit what their customers can do and see online. It's not censorship if the government isn't doing it after all.

Or what about minorities? Why is it wrong for a private institution, like google, or microsoft, or amazon, or facebook, or a private university, to disallow the ability for anyone to say there are more than two genders on their platforms or within spaces they control? Surely people that are for deplatforming transphobic people on grounds that the government isn't involved makes it not against free speech must also be for allowing google and amazon to show no results for any pro-trans content on the same grounds.

Free speech is a principle. In the US it's nominally considered a "natural right." A right everyone has all the time. You can't get to pick and choose with free speech.

https://xkcd.com/463//

How much inertia it has, however, does not necessarily mean that it reacts to gravity the same way as normal matter.

General Relativity is based on the assumption that inertial mass and gravitational mass are equivalent. IM=GM is one of those things, like P!=NP, "No FTL", and the Riemann Hypothesis, that everyone assumes, so a confirmation will have little effect. However if the answer is IM!=GM, physics will be turned upside down.

Which would be pretty cool.

And because your sister got married yesterday, she'll have two more husbands by tomorrow.

Relevant XKCD: #882: Significant

The confidence interval is 98%, sometimes 95%. That is, just by random chance, 2% or 5% of the time, a study will turn up a correlation which doesn't really exist. The die rolls just happened to come up snake eyes that time. The chances increase the more correlations a study looks for. Like the massive Netherlands study a couple decades back which found a strong correlation between cell phone radiation and certain types of cancer. But it turned out they looked at thousands of possible correlations, so just by chance alone you'd have expected them to find a few hundred random correlations, with a few "strong" ones (strong by chance, not because it was real). Like if you throw a thousand darts at a dartboard, just by pure chance a few will hit the bullseye; not because you're good at throwing darts, but because of random chance.

If (as the media tends to do) you then choose to publicize the studies finding a correlation while ignoring all the studies finding no correlation, then you're committing confirmation bias. Studies which find no positive result still generate valid data. And dismissing them in favor of studies with a positive result is a statistical and logical error. To properly assess what's going on, you need to compare the number of positive result studies with the number of negative result studies. And given the huge number of negative result studies, the greater likelihood here is that this is one of the studies which found a correlation due to a random blip, not something that's real.

Obligatory XKCD comic.

Obligatory XKCD of that: https://xkcd.com/1338/

https://xkcd.com/605/

We've had this discussion cunt. Quite lying. Didn't your parents teach you anything about integrity?

These companies aren't sitting down Gab's patrons free speech.... they're simply choosing not to do business with a company that doesn't follow their rules. You're either too fucking stupid to understand that, or you're a fucking liar... and my money is on the latter as you keep posting the same bullshit over and over after being corrected. Fucking conservatives love playing the victim card; what whiny little bitches.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

https://xkcd.com/225/

Says it all.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/f...

A clever lawyer might have added some 'special' text to the NDA https://xkcd.com/327/

Those issues were resolved through study of the Ballmer Peak

https://xkcd.com/323/

this one.

I don't think anyone is asking for the government to step in and police hate speech. Certainly nobody who has any pull. But for the same reason you don't see Alex Jones on Fox News you're not seeing him on Twitter and Facebook anymore: Advertisers.

Heck, guys doing silly videos about big chested anime girls are getting banned on Youtube left and right (eh hem... or so I've heard) because they're not advertiser friendly. Bloody Call of Duty streamers are having a tough time. A guy like Alex Jones isn't going to last. Especially with the veiled threats of violence (anyone remember the Pizza Gate shooter?).

If you want a free and open platform for video discourse there's an easy solution: National Public Access. Make a national Youtube. You'll have to pay for it though, and that means taxes. Otherwise the price you pay is your watered down, advertiser friendly content.

the technology will enable "machine-speed, real-time moderation of everything we say online."

XKCD #2015

The origins of "shibboleth" are Biblical and go back to Old Testament times. To make a long story short, enemy foreigners couldn't pronounce "sh", so anyone stopped at the border was asked to say "shibboleth". People who pronounced it "sibboleth" were put to death as an enemy spies. Since then, a shibboleth has come to simply mean anything that can be used to distinguish between two groups of people, be it a code word, belief, or practice.

And, as always, there's an obligatory xkcd on the issue: https://www.xkcd.com/806/

In a fun case of fiction becoming fact, a number of systems have actually added the code word mentioned in that xkcd strip.

Heard this and the other conspiracy theory about Linus never being alone in a room with a woman, but never seen any evidence that it's true.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ma...

It seems pretty unlikely that the SJW Illuminati would have been able to blackmail him

Members of the SJW illuminati did in fact succeed in getting the media after Linus just before he decided to leave. Sure seemed to me to check all the boxes for blackmail.

yet much more powerful people like the NSA/GCHQ have apparently failed to force him to weaken Linux for them.

This isn't the way things work. NSA has a dual role of protecting US interests which includes defending against foreign intelligence. NSA doesn't want to weaken the Kernel they want secret advantages nobody else (Linus included) knows about. The Linux Kernel like OpenSSL is an open project anyone can contribute. Access is trivial and not getting caught doesn't seem to be much of a challenge either as innocent errors make their way into code all the time.

Meanwhile Linux hasn't forked

Of course it has, virtually every distro runs its own fork with varying degrees of differentiation from mainline. Many SoCs run forks with significant volume of incompatible change with mainline. Android kernel is a very notable fork.

hasn't been destroyed

https://xkcd.com/386/

the predicted mass exodus of developers and use of the CoC to oust all straight white men hasn't happened.

We used just a little poison and nobody died... YAY.

Exodus was never on the table. What is on the table are the consequences of unnecessary fragmentation brought about by injecting unnecessary politics. Linux generally as an ecosystem is already too fragmented as it is. Political bullshit instigated by a few loudmouth SJWs isn't helping anyone.

Alright, to be less glib, electron is a constituent-less particle (an elementary particle). It doesn't make technical sense to talk about any shape at all, because if it had shape, that would imply it's not an elementary particle (and with the exception of string theory—which I do not well know and am contemptuous of—all theories beyond the Standard Model treat the electron as being an elementary particle).

Even so, the electric dipole moment of an electron is a way to describe "non-roundness" to the electron. After all, the Coulomb field due to monopole charge is spherically symmetric, but the Coulomb field due to dipole distribution (which you still can have with zero charge separation; you just have to imagine ±q (the charge separation) going to infinity so that qd remains constant, as d goes to zero) is not spherically symmetric (and that's what my "Yes" was).

If your complaint is that science journalists should stop treating the public like a baby and stop talking baby-talking to them, with non-sensical phrases like "round", well, take it up with them. But there is a way to make sense of it, the way you can make sense of "rubber-sheet model" of gravity.

> THAT's no moon, it's a ....

https://xkcd.com/307/

Just goes to show you how frightened some people are regarding electric cars. I don't see why so many people (that are not in the gas-powered car industry) are scared of them.

Obviously it's better to concentrate all the emissions at the factories that produce batteries and mitigate the pollution concerns there, rather than at the tail pipe of all the cars that are coming out of the factories.

ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/437/

The pollution concerns of some people is that CO2 is a global warming gas. Some consumers think that since their electric vehicle uses batteries it does not cause pollution. It, like all technology, creates pollution. When, where, and how much are all key questions. Few people are aware that they should be comparing the total carbon footprint of their vehicles including that of all its components being manufactured, assembled, and transported to the end user. Fewer people have access to this information to allow them to make an informed decision.

Just goes to show you how frightened some people are regarding electric cars. I don't see why so many people (that are not in the gas-powered car industry) are scared of them.

Obviously it's better to concentrate all the emissions at the factories that produce batteries and mitigate the pollution concerns there, rather than at the tail pipe of all the cars that are coming out of the factories.

ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/437/

Reading between all the weasel wording in the summary it sounds like the emissions come from the grid that supplies the factories. So making EV battery packs uses a lot of electricity?

It’s interesting that the immediate effect of more EVs is higher CO2 output because the grid sucks, but yah... fix the grid, that ain’t a new idea.

Just goes to show you how frightened some people are regarding electric cars. I don't see why so many people (that are not in the gas-powered car industry) are scared of them.

Obviously it's better to concentrate all the emissions at the factories that produce batteries and mitigate the pollution concerns there, rather than at the tail pipe of all the cars that are coming out of the factories.

ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/437/

When people discuss "I have no fear of crude AI" - Send this obligatory XKCD reference

I disagree. The problem is not that people are being falsely accused of being bots for holding contrary opinions - the problem is that, on social media, everyone looks and talks like a bot.

The format of most social media (Facebook and Twitter especially) pushes people towards bot-like behavior. The brevity pushes you to skip any supporting information, just blindly assert your position as correct. It tends to erode nuance - you don't say "evidence suggests that X probably causes Y", you just say "they proved X causes Y", if not just "X therefore Y". The rapid-fire structure of comment threads, and general lack of a good bio, makes it hard to look at someone's account and tell what they're really all about. And both tend to expose you to a massive wall of people who are shouting their opinions into the void, rather than any sort of community, especially when you choose to look at "trending" or "what's happening now".

And, on top of that, there are so many obvious bots, that having to consider whether every single person you're talking to is a bot or not is rational. Every single Elon Musk tweet, for something like a year now, gets swarmed by bots pretending to be Elon giving away some cryptocurrency, if only you download this sketchy app - and this is after Twitter put special protections in place to prevent just anyone from setting their name to "Elon Musk". The people running social media clearly don't care about keeping bots-impersonating-humans out, so it falls on each user instead to worry about it. We're not given enough information to decide accurately, so it's just inevitable that some people end up falsely accused.

And then, yes, there's the organized campaigns, of which the Russians are merely the most prolific. The "Internet Research Agency" (the one hit with Mueller indictments) didn't merely try to manipulate election news, they tried to stir up chaos. They'd organize two protests for opposing sides at the same place and time, hoping it would turn violent. They spread anti-vax stuff, just to erode trust in authorities. They've spread disaster hoaxes and fake hate crimes, just to get people to panic. And, as I mentioned, Russia isn't the only one. Remember the Chinese "50 Cent Party"? Or America's own "Operation: Earnest Voice"?

As always, there's an XKCD for it. You don't even need bots, per se - just a decent budget and enough people who will work for cheap, and anyone can manufacture not just a consensus, but a culture. Shout enough into a crowd, and some of them will take root, and now you've got another person shouting alongside you. It's not like it's a new phenomenon - how often, back in the day, did you or I accuse someone of being a Microsoft shill, or astroturfing for some corporation or another? A lot of those may have been true, but I'm sure many of them were not.

But what does it matter, whether someone is a machine or a human, when the opinion they shout is not their own? That is the real problem - social media has allowed too much pollution of the discourse. It's no longer about debate, building a logical case to support your position and poking flaws in your opponent's reasoning, but about who can state their position loudest and longest. It's about endurance, not smarts - forcing your opponents to waste so much time responding to a never-ending stream of lies and bullshit that they eventually give up.

I don't know if there's a solution. I used to think Slashdot's system protected it, but after seeing a spree of explicitly anti-democratic posts here in the past few weeks, I'm starting to think it just delayed it by a few years. Perhaps something that gave users the information they need to more accurately spot the bots and troll farms, coupled with a strict moderation team to purge them when spotted and confirmed. Or maybe it's just inevitable that any sufficiently-large social network site has a collapse of trust, and the solution is to fracture into smaller communities. I still use a bunch of old web forums, and they don't seem to have fallen victim, yet.

AI requires a lot of education and quite a background in technical expertise.

Actually ... it doesn't. Deep learning uses a lot of linear algebra, differential equations, and complicated algorithms to deal with regularization and efficiency. But all that is tucked away in libraries. For a real-world AI app, you just slap together a Tensorflow pipeline using Python, and fiddle with the parameters until you get good results. It is more art than science.

This is how it works.

If I'm reading the XKCD correctly, there will be a lot of "AI" jobs for those of us that actually know the underlying math, even if it means we're closer to 41 than 15.

AI requires a lot of education and quite a background in technical expertise.

Actually ... it doesn't. Deep learning uses a lot of linear algebra, differential equations, and complicated algorithms to deal with regularization and efficiency. But all that is tucked away in libraries. For a real-world AI app, you just slap together a Tensorflow pipeline using Python, and fiddle with the parameters until you get good results. It is more art than science.

This is how it works.

My son is 15, and he went to an "AI bootcamp" this past summer. It was a two week course, and he built a pretty snazzy reinforcement learning application, using Python and some canned visualization tools. Later he made a generative NN to create animations. This is a kid that is just starting high school.

It's certainly out of reach for me at 41 years old.

Probably, but because of your attitude, not your age.

I really hate the whole concept of AI because it is putting people out of work

There is zero evidence that AI is "putting people out of work". How many people do you know that have lost their jobs to deep learning?

What this sounds like is Late Stage Capitalism.

You should spend more time on professional development, and less time reading The Communist Manifesto.

My noggin runs differently. I'm super interested in what I don't understand. Besides, I'm afraid of rocks 8^)

Umm, they didn't know it was a rock back then. Not for certain anyway. And an eclipse isn't a rock - it's an entire world traveling at terrifying speed going in front of and blocking the light on our world from a giant ball of gas undergoing nuclear fusion millions of kilometers away through the void of space. Good luck explaining what is actually happening to someone a thousand years ago without sounding like a lunatic. I appreciate your scientific fervor and world view but not everyone thinks like that and we are fortunate to live in an era where such information is readily available.

That's terribly sad, don't you think?

I just think of them as one of the lucky 10000. Bear in mind that not everyone is smart or mentally stable or well informed or cares. A lot of people are paranoid or just scared. A lot of people believe in imaginary beings because a book told them they were real. I'd say cut them some slack and try to educate those who can be educated.

Also here.

Forks and derivative software Well that looks like a mess! At least the re-mergers keep it from being a 100% textbook case of the xkcd on standards? .

At this point it hardly even makes sense to refer to LibreOffice as a fork, except in the barest historical sense.

More like "OpenOffice is a primitive ancestor of LibreOffice" or something.

It's like insisting on always calling Joomla a "fork of Mambo" or something ...

Forks and derivative software

Well that looks like a mess! At least the re-mergers keep it from being a 100% textbook case of the xkcd on standards?

.

who agree that climate change is both real and a threat seem to fail to grasp that. Here's the obligatory XKCD comic

The ruling class has been able to keep the pleebs in line for thousands of years without Climate Change. They've got much, much better tactics to use than a complex boogie man like Climate Change. There's religion, racism, classism, war. All are much more effective at controlling a population. Easier to understand and proven to work. Hell, ignoring the damage from Climate Change is a better bet. It'll result in rampant food shortages, which are always an effective way to keep the working class in line (so long as you control who eats, which the ruling class does).

I don't know if you really believe what you wrote, but, well, this is a science forum, and the science is settled. There's some details to work out, but they're details. Go do some reading on google, and step outside the right wing blogosphere and into actual scientific papers.

That lives my entire for me, why don't you.

Looks like you've already had your entire.

is too short. You should give him a break, he's not messing with your.

I understand where you are coming from. Someone is WRONG on the Internet.
But, that's all IMHO. Don't forget YMMV and to HAND.

Obligatory xkcd.

"enforcing free speech" isn't a thing. Obligatory XKCD comic.

If you want a platform people can post to that has those protections it needs to be government run. Make a gov't competitor to Facebook & Youtube if you want that. But generally people who deride Democrats for something they have no control over are opposed to "Big G'vmt" doing public works projects...

I'll just leave this here.

Real-time is just the illusion of instantaneous.

So... something like this?
https://xkcd.com/2044/

and you get the obligatory xkcd quote of the day...

I actually started doing this.

Yes, it does reduce the number of invitations I get. But it increases the share of invitations that I accepted and didn't feel uneasy about afterwards.

The local authorities (where you physically are) can throw you in jail (or worse), possibly beat you with the xkcd wrench, and keep your laptop for as long as they like. Hell they can torture it out of you if they like and you have little to no legal rights. Nation states aren't really accountable to anyone if they don't want to be.

It's also not entirely clear how much your own government will care about you if you get held by the local authorities.

This is the great thing about living in a first world democracy, how we have the human rights we deserve because of how we protected them.

So which law trumps the other one?

Sadly for you it doesn't matter most likely. The local authorities (where you physically are) can throw you in jail (or worse), possibly beat you with the xkcd wrench, and keep your laptop for as long as they like. Hell they can torture it out of you if they like and you have little to no legal rights. Nation states aren't really accountable to anyone if they don't want to be. Unless you have some sort of diplomatic immunity and the security to back it up then you are fucked well and good. Your job status (or worse) is probably of little concern to them.

It's also not entirely clear how much your own government will care about you if you get held by the local authorities.

ob $5 wrench

https://www.xkcd.com/955/

Ah, but you are pinpointing it right there! It is more hassle than you want, why? If we could fix that problem, so that it wouldn't be more hassle to have it on your own webserver, then what would you do? And that's like iteration 1 of Solid, we're separating those apps from the data, so that you can have your data on your webserver, but you can use any calendar app you want.

Surely you jest. Anyone can do this today using iCalendar because the interfaces are standardized. Every calendaring system worth using today supports iCalendar URLs out of the box.

The problem isn't web servers, where data is stored, level of centralization, authentication, authorization, access controls or any such thing. The problem is lack of interoperability due to failure to coordinate and agree on data formats and schemas. It's easy to create a system to scratch a particular itch. It's another matter entirely to get everyone who matters to agree on what is actually necessary to ensure meaningful interoperability.

For example REST was sold as a means of improving interoperability. That never happened. In fact the proliferation of nonsensical Verbs and arbitrary hierarchies expressed in URLs that nobody could predict much less agree on unnecessarily increased complexity and reduced interoperability.

https://xkcd.com/927/

That way, companies will be competing to create the best apps, not to suck your data out of you.

Interesting assumption given widespread existence of counter-examples.

Take SMTP email for example. Google now reads something close to a billion users emails. It used to be everyone used an app to read and compose email and mail servers were fairly decentralized. Today decentralization is rapidly unraveling and browsers rather than apps are used while everyone's privacy is still being raped.

So, Solid is about making the infrastructure and the ecosystem to make sure that all those things aren't a hassle, they will be your preferred way to do it.

http is the last technology I would ever consider for data tier access even if only used for transport to say nothing of actually leveraging nonsensical HTTP verbs and associated REST baggage. This heap of crap is completely unsuitable for the task at hand.

So, Solid is doing a massive shift on where the intelligence will be. It will be mostly on the client. The server side will be pretty simple.

More likely for anything non-trivial it'll be a "massive shift" to middleware.

So, in the way it is working in browsers now, is the simple CORS restrictions. It is pretty broken, but it is what we have. So, we're making some hacks to identify web apps. And then, you can assign privileges to them. Since they are running on your device, the security of your browser applies to them.

CORS are constraints commanded by servers enforced by clients. They flow from the server not the browser.

Still, it doesn't mean that you can necessarily trust them, of course, but then, this is a social technology, so we could establish a Web of Trust around that. We're thinking a lot about that.

Given the ratio of garbage to signal on the Internet I wouldn't trust a "web of trust" any more than I could throw it.

Obligatory XKCD from October 15, 2010.

https://xkcd.com/1357/