My 6 recovered its speed after a complete reset and restore. I guess the storage needed the flashing after having become too full for years. I thought I’d need a new phone this year but new battery and reset have made it good for another year.
Yes, I use the word SysOp. I've been around that long.
For us with higher Slashdot IDs, could you explain the proper meaning of SysOp in its original context please? Just for my curiosity and general knowledge, thanks.:)
If Google gets self-deceiving tech first (level 1 or level 2) then Ford will license it. Otherwise, if Ford gets there first, they will have a huge competitive advantage over other automakers.
That’s a good point. It’s the free speech v. incitement to violence issue, and where the consequences are bad enough, what can be done other than try to find the perpetrators? Laws have to suit the specific society as it is. Of course, the point about free speech is that its positives outweigh the negatives, especially as it encourages growth and development. But it needs to be paced so that you don’t break the thing which you are trying to grow. There’s always a balance with developmental progress: enough challenge to move things forward but also enough support so things don’t fall apart. It’s a judgement call, how much a society can handle, at any point in time.
Yeah, and also, a problem with religion is that humans have very powerful imaginations, where you imagine that certain practices are highly pure and saintly, and you just build stories around that. Whereas reason uses some feedback loop with causes and effects and by controlling variables. But in the imagination it just has to work as a story, and it could be anything, like wind energy is clean, veganism never kills anything, covering your face is dignified and pure, etc. Not that rational people don’t support these things too, just that there’s plenty of people who live in their imagination on these things too. So yeah, they can just double down on their imagined sanctity of life by claiming your experiments are abominations and so give themselves even more story material to imagine themselves as the pure and good characters of the saga, and so take comfort in how they are going to heaven and you aren’t. I guess TV isn’t enough for some people. The power of the imagination for satisfying ego needs is used more in Eastern religions as exercises, but at least there they do it in a more conscious fashion.
FTTC, which one day suddenly dropped to 1 Mbit/s, and the ISP said the line tests were fine and there’s no obligation to deliver faster. Then another *wonderful* ISP tech said he could relabel the query and thus cause a BT engineer to actually come out and run tests. Which he did. And the on-site tests are more thorough than whatever the ISP people have access to. He found a couple of red flags to do with insulation. So he, the *wonderful* man, traced the fault to a copper section between two cabinets, and so he tested all the spares and switched me to the best one. Broadband speed not only went back up, but became better than I had before the fault ever happened.
But yeah, fibre, then 600m of whatever decent copper you can hope to find. And I am fortunate it is only 600m. I gather it can be up to 2000m.
It sounds like the problem you’re highlighting is HOW people are introduced to programming, in early PHP examples, rather that what a language’s expression space permits theoretically.
It’s like learning to draw. If the first exercises are, draw an imaginary forest, people don’t learn to look. If the first exercise is, draw a portrait, it forces you to change your thinking right from the outset, because it will not work unless you focus on learning how to observe shapes.
Mixing PHP into HTML is satanic.;-) And anyone who is taught to start that way, is a lost soul. So maybe there is a book out there called Architecting Functional PHP Patterns... ? Or maybe not?
Wonder if modern workplace, with so much interfacing with others by email and meetings, requires so much focus and switching, that your brain seriously needs the break.
Ideally, the nation protects the people, and part of that is, good guys can catch the bad guys, and part of that is, having perfect information and knowledge of who the bad guys are and evidence of what they did. But that ideal has to cope with the practical problems of imperfection of all things: good guys are sometimes bad guys; good methods sometimes have bad outcomes; etc. And because encryption is, in practice, more of a binary thing, in that it either “works” or is “broken”, because unlike the locks on your house, if it is weak then the attack can enter from anywhere in the world in an instant, and because unlike tapping a phone call, these days the listening devices are everywhere and always on, and able to convert sound to text, and so everything is automated, it would just give a few bad good guys waaaaay too much power to cause harm, arguably outweighing the damage a lot of other bad guys could cause by other means. It’s the balance. It is one if those things where human nature has to evolve further and become generally less corrupt and biased, and then the bad good guys will stick out like a sore thumb, and then people will be able to trust the other people more, and then a sort of, totally open society can flourish, where anyone can turn on a camera and start talking to you no matter where you are or what you are doing. But until that self sustaining better nature becomes the norm, we need checks and balances.
Ok so my comment was too terse. But we've known, as a culture, for hundreds of years, that reality isn't just given, it is semi-constructed by a perceiving mind, and whatever is really out there, we only see what our mind allows us to see. Even if you choose to report an event with 100% fidelity, you still have to choose which details constitute the "event" and which are irrelevant. Like the insurance claim for the Twin Towers collapse, the best legal minds had to decide whether it counted as one event or two, as that affected the insurance payout. This is basic, practical, "how do we know what we know" stuff.
Or you might prefer what John Wayne said: "people say things are not black and white, and I say, well why the hell not?"
The word “fake” can suggest there’s such a thing as “real”, but all factual events are open to interpretation, so that’s the first point. The second point is that, being open to interpretation doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as truth and reality, rather, truth can only be revealed by taking a point of view, so to understand any truth claim, one needs to see it alongside the point of view which was used to reveal it. Eleven thirty AM is meaningless without knowing which time zone the time device is set to. So that’s how news should be reported - - like a science experiment where you aren’t just told a result but you can see the methods used - - and then people can, if it matters to them, understand whether it makes sense, and what to make of that news. The notion that we just trust authorities, is long dead, or should be, because there are so many different vested interests and news is always partly an interpretation anyway.
Being intellectually rigorous and honest does not seem to carry the same weight in the liberal humanities that it used to, it seems.
I think social standards in general evolve, and tend towards more care and compassion, and importantly, society keeps trying to deal with men and their testosterone. So that's all good in general.
Specifically on the humanities, though, it is worse than you think! See, it comes down to something called "structuralism" and its variants.
This is where you begin with the observation that a person does not "create" English or German, rather, they learn English by being part of a group or society of English speakers. That language then becomes the dominant background structure of the person's thoughts. And likewise, patterns such as racism and sexism, are part of the background structure which people live in.
So the exercise becomes, read a text by some famous person, and then interpret or reveal the embedded racisms and sexisms within the structure of the text. This is why you "deconstruct it", because you are looking at embedded structures. A point about this is that the author of the original text is not themselves aware of their own background racism, whereas you as the structuralist, are able to spot the structures and reveal them.
Now this is all fine and well and kinda useful in some contexts. But there is unfortunately a bad tendency:
because YOU are the one revealing the background faults within the structure of the OTHER person's text, this puts you at the immediate advantage, in that, if the other person is saying something you don't like, for example, "climate change is man-made" or "climate change is natural", YOU can just say, well that person has a sexist/imperialist/bigoted/oppressive background structure to their thinking and so you never have to take notice of their arguments.
Rather than doing the normal thing of, well let us examine your arguments and evidence, you just say they are inherently a voice of racism or oppression or some such.
The problem is, it is about analysing other people's shadow, instead of starting with one's own shadow, and trying to reveal one's own biases, which would have more intellectual integrity. So it becomes a witch hunt, and you can just accuse anyone of hidden witchcraft and there is nothing they can do to refute the claim, because anything they say is just more witchcraft.
So yeah unless this stops soon, who knows what problems will develop. And unfortunately they tend to dominate the social justice issues and so people get fed up with it and just vote for people like Trump.
True. Take my supermarket. I always shop there. And I have a apecifi diet. I am strict about my diet. You’d think by now some AI could have spotted a pattern and not given me offers constantly for stuff I never buy in years. AIs have to be trained.
I guess it’s a question of intent. And much of society is built on trust. So although the amount of information that’s being gathered will surprise people, for most it’s a big meh. They have lots of “data” scraps and computers are not terribly smart about making sense of it. Psychology is more art and guesswork than science. There’s plenty of real problems to worry about in life.
I still think that is begging the question and invoking infinity. How do we know impossible odds can be defeated? Because we are here to see it! But only us, only once.
I don't see how people can honestly talk about defeating near impossible odds, whilst in all other areas of life, it would be a silly thing to do.
If a zebra suddenly appeared in my office, I would not say that quantum physics allows for a zebra to suddenly tunnel from Kenya to my office, even though the probabilities are virtually impossible, but the fact that I see it, proves it can happen, sometimes to someone. That's basically what the "we are alone" scenario claims.
Rather, I would look for a more LIKELY explanation, namely that somebody put a fucking zebra in my office and I would start looking for the rich joker who could manage that, probably a TV production company for some candid camera thing.
Assuming that we are alone, the reason for it would likely simply be because complex life is so astoundingly improbable, and that we just plain got very lucky.
It is a nice combination of begging the question and invoking infinity. We are alone because life is virtually impossible; we alone defeated the impossible odds; how do we know impossible odds can be defeated? because we are here to see it. Hence, impossible odds can be defeated, but only once, by us.
God works in mysterious ways. How do we know? Because we can never see how the ways work, as they are so mysterious.
Quite. We started evolving to human, around 3 million years ago, and meanwhile, most of what we count as "technology" today only appeared in the last 12,000 (agriculture), to 300 (Western Enlightenment), to 115 (flight), to 70 (nuclear), years ago. We haven't begun to scratch the surface, and we don't even know where the surface is yet. Another 2000 years is nothing, yet unimaginable to us today.
My own simple explanation for the Fermi "paradox" is the Prime Directive.
Would you visit another world by zooming across the sky in your saucer yelling "WEEEEEE!!!!" and blasting fun targets with your ray gun, or would you simply transfer your consciousness into a humanoid body and walk around and talk to people?
I agree with your conlusions, but if you're open minded you need to be open to things that annoy you. "We are alone" in no way implies there is a god. That's a weird bias you picked up.
Fair point about being open to ideas I don't like. I agree.
The implication comes from, why would this one planet be so different to the, something like, ten raised to the twenty-four planets, in the universe? Even if we are one in a trillion... there's plenty of life out there. The universe seems to have had no trouble manufacturing a wide variety of stars and planets all over the place, everywhere. Why does it suddenly struggle to manufacture life, and so does it only a single time?
Once it got going here, it all happened very quickly. Why, elsewhere, would it stop just short, everywhere else, of an animal with capacity for abstract thought? Why would we be so "special"?
Either we are a natural part of the patterns of the universe and natural laws, or some weird magical power put us here. I don't think this is bias, I think it is a natural conclusion. So yeah, if we are special, then it implies gods and stuff (and they in no way would have to resemble any man-made idea about god, just that it is some otherworldly creative something).
Much easier to assume life is normal and repeatable.
I'd buy that intelligent life appears only a few times in a galaxy. But once in a universe? Nah.
Largely agree. It’s an EXPERIMENT and so you cannot know what might go wrong. Their method of “testing” suggests they believe they have tons of data showing the thing is already very very safe. Which they cannot know.
If this was a drug trial, it would be like giving the first experimental injection to 100 people. Nobody does that. You give it to maybe TWO people and wait for unexpected reactions.
They’re apparently very cavalier about their tests. Nothing to do with the person in the seat.
It's the microblogging format. I invented it once (also) as an art project in 1995, but using blank business cards at a coffee table. People should jot something on a card, and leave for others to see. It's that short little message, which can be scanned through for something good. It's the focus. Which worked wonders for the miracle on the Hudson, a single Tweet and photo from someone right there. It is those moments. Now excuse me whilst I put on my Jon Ham voice and start talking about Carousels. But that's the point. Somebody is somewhere noticing something in the moment and you want a little message to put you there. And for that we can put of with the billions of messages which are just noise to us. But they might not be noise to someone else. The other day there was an unexpected road closure. Within a minute, I see on Twitter, someone who lived local posted a message as to what had happened (someone had gone off the road a couple hours earlier).
Slashdot Mirror
My 6 recovered its speed after a complete reset and restore. I guess the storage needed the flashing after having become too full for years.
I thought I’d need a new phone this year but new battery and reset have made it good for another year.
I like the sig. And as for snagging and bugs...
But yeah I cannot understand people being so precious about any city in America. It’s supposed to be the new world, no?
Yes, I use the word SysOp. I've been around that long.
For us with higher Slashdot IDs, could you explain the proper meaning of SysOp in its original context please? Just for my curiosity and general knowledge, thanks. :)
If Google gets self-deceiving tech first (level 1 or level 2) then Ford will license it. Otherwise, if Ford gets there first, they will have a huge competitive advantage over other automakers.
Uber already has self-deceiving tech, methinks.
That’s a good point. It’s the free speech v. incitement to violence issue, and where the consequences are bad enough, what can be done other than try to find the perpetrators? Laws have to suit the specific society as it is. Of course, the point about free speech is that its positives outweigh the negatives, especially as it encourages growth and development. But it needs to be paced so that you don’t break the thing which you are trying to grow. There’s always a balance with developmental progress: enough challenge to move things forward but also enough support so things don’t fall apart. It’s a judgement call, how much a society can handle, at any point in time.
Yeah, and also, a problem with religion is that humans have very powerful imaginations, where you imagine that certain practices are highly pure and saintly, and you just build stories around that. Whereas reason uses some feedback loop with causes and effects and by controlling variables. But in the imagination it just has to work as a story, and it could be anything, like wind energy is clean, veganism never kills anything, covering your face is dignified and pure, etc. Not that rational people don’t support these things too, just that there’s plenty of people who live in their imagination on these things too. So yeah, they can just double down on their imagined sanctity of life by claiming your experiments are abominations and so give themselves even more story material to imagine themselves as the pure and good characters of the saga, and so take comfort in how they are going to heaven and you aren’t. I guess TV isn’t enough for some people. The power of the imagination for satisfying ego needs is used more in Eastern religions as exercises, but at least there they do it in a more conscious fashion.
oh :-(
FTTC, which one day suddenly dropped to 1 Mbit/s, and the ISP said the line tests were fine and there’s no obligation to deliver faster. Then another *wonderful* ISP tech said he could relabel the query and thus cause a BT engineer to actually come out and run tests. Which he did. And the on-site tests are more thorough than whatever the ISP people have access to. He found a couple of red flags to do with insulation. So he, the *wonderful* man, traced the fault to a copper section between two cabinets, and so he tested all the spares and switched me to the best one. Broadband speed not only went back up, but became better than I had before the fault ever happened.
But yeah, fibre, then 600m of whatever decent copper you can hope to find. And I am fortunate it is only 600m. I gather it can be up to 2000m.
It sounds like the problem you’re highlighting is HOW people are introduced to programming, in early PHP examples, rather that what a language’s expression space permits theoretically.
It’s like learning to draw. If the first exercises are, draw an imaginary forest, people don’t learn to look. If the first exercise is, draw a portrait, it forces you to change your thinking right from the outset, because it will not work unless you focus on learning how to observe shapes.
Mixing PHP into HTML is satanic. ;-) And anyone who is taught to start that way, is a lost soul. So maybe there is a book out there called Architecting Functional PHP Patterns... ?
Or maybe not?
Perhaps he means that his compiler removes all bugs.
Wonder if modern workplace, with so much interfacing with others by email and meetings, requires so much focus and switching, that your brain seriously needs the break.
Ideally, the nation protects the people, and part of that is, good guys can catch the bad guys, and part of that is, having perfect information and knowledge of who the bad guys are and evidence of what they did. But that ideal has to cope with the practical problems of imperfection of all things: good guys are sometimes bad guys; good methods sometimes have bad outcomes; etc. And because encryption is, in practice, more of a binary thing, in that it either “works” or is “broken”, because unlike the locks on your house, if it is weak then the attack can enter from anywhere in the world in an instant, and because unlike tapping a phone call, these days the listening devices are everywhere and always on, and able to convert sound to text, and so everything is automated, it would just give a few bad good guys waaaaay too much power to cause harm, arguably outweighing the damage a lot of other bad guys could cause by other means. It’s the balance. It is one if those things where human nature has to evolve further and become generally less corrupt and biased, and then the bad good guys will stick out like a sore thumb, and then people will be able to trust the other people more, and then a sort of, totally open society can flourish, where anyone can turn on a camera and start talking to you no matter where you are or what you are doing. But until that self sustaining better nature becomes the norm, we need checks and balances.
Ok so my comment was too terse. But we've known, as a culture, for hundreds of years, that reality isn't just given, it is semi-constructed by a perceiving mind, and whatever is really out there, we only see what our mind allows us to see. Even if you choose to report an event with 100% fidelity, you still have to choose which details constitute the "event" and which are irrelevant. Like the insurance claim for the Twin Towers collapse, the best legal minds had to decide whether it counted as one event or two, as that affected the insurance payout. This is basic, practical, "how do we know what we know" stuff.
Or you might prefer what John Wayne said: "people say things are not black and white, and I say, well why the hell not?"
The word “fake” can suggest there’s such a thing as “real”, but all factual events are open to interpretation, so that’s the first point. The second point is that, being open to interpretation doesn’t mean there’s no such thing as truth and reality, rather, truth can only be revealed by taking a point of view, so to understand any truth claim, one needs to see it alongside the point of view which was used to reveal it. Eleven thirty AM is meaningless without knowing which time zone the time device is set to. So that’s how news should be reported - - like a science experiment where you aren’t just told a result but you can see the methods used - - and then people can, if it matters to them, understand whether it makes sense, and what to make of that news. The notion that we just trust authorities, is long dead, or should be, because there are so many different vested interests and news is always partly an interpretation anyway.
I think social standards in general evolve, and tend towards more care and compassion, and importantly, society keeps trying to deal with men and their testosterone. So that's all good in general.
Specifically on the humanities, though, it is worse than you think! See, it comes down to something called "structuralism" and its variants.
This is where you begin with the observation that a person does not "create" English or German, rather, they learn English by being part of a group or society of English speakers. That language then becomes the dominant background structure of the person's thoughts. And likewise, patterns such as racism and sexism, are part of the background structure which people live in.
So the exercise becomes, read a text by some famous person, and then interpret or reveal the embedded racisms and sexisms within the structure of the text. This is why you "deconstruct it", because you are looking at embedded structures. A point about this is that the author of the original text is not themselves aware of their own background racism, whereas you as the structuralist, are able to spot the structures and reveal them.
Now this is all fine and well and kinda useful in some contexts. But there is unfortunately a bad tendency:
because YOU are the one revealing the background faults within the structure of the OTHER person's text, this puts you at the immediate advantage, in that, if the other person is saying something you don't like, for example, "climate change is man-made" or "climate change is natural", YOU can just say, well that person has a sexist/imperialist/bigoted/oppressive background structure to their thinking and so you never have to take notice of their arguments.
Rather than doing the normal thing of, well let us examine your arguments and evidence, you just say they are inherently a voice of racism or oppression or some such.
The problem is, it is about analysing other people's shadow, instead of starting with one's own shadow, and trying to reveal one's own biases, which would have more intellectual integrity. So it becomes a witch hunt, and you can just accuse anyone of hidden witchcraft and there is nothing they can do to refute the claim, because anything they say is just more witchcraft.
So yeah unless this stops soon, who knows what problems will develop. And unfortunately they tend to dominate the social justice issues and so people get fed up with it and just vote for people like Trump.
True. Take my supermarket. I always shop there. And I have a apecifi diet. I am strict about my diet. You’d think by now some AI could have spotted a pattern and not given me offers constantly for stuff I never buy in years. AIs have to be trained.
I guess it’s a question of intent. And much of society is built on trust. So although the amount of information that’s being gathered will surprise people, for most it’s a big meh. They have lots of “data” scraps and computers are not terribly smart about making sense of it. Psychology is more art and guesswork than science. There’s plenty of real problems to worry about in life.
I still think that is begging the question and invoking infinity. How do we know impossible odds can be defeated? Because we are here to see it! But only us, only once.
I don't see how people can honestly talk about defeating near impossible odds, whilst in all other areas of life, it would be a silly thing to do.
If a zebra suddenly appeared in my office, I would not say that quantum physics allows for a zebra to suddenly tunnel from Kenya to my office, even though the probabilities are virtually impossible, but the fact that I see it, proves it can happen, sometimes to someone. That's basically what the "we are alone" scenario claims.
Rather, I would look for a more LIKELY explanation, namely that somebody put a fucking zebra in my office and I would start looking for the rich joker who could manage that, probably a TV production company for some candid camera thing.
Assuming that we are alone, the reason for it would likely simply be because complex life is so astoundingly improbable, and that we just plain got very lucky.
It is a nice combination of begging the question and invoking infinity. We are alone because life is virtually impossible; we alone defeated the impossible odds; how do we know impossible odds can be defeated? because we are here to see it. Hence, impossible odds can be defeated, but only once, by us.
God works in mysterious ways. How do we know? Because we can never see how the ways work, as they are so mysterious.
There's no God. We are not alone.
Quite. We started evolving to human, around 3 million years ago, and meanwhile, most of what we count as "technology" today only appeared in the last 12,000 (agriculture), to 300 (Western Enlightenment), to 115 (flight), to 70 (nuclear), years ago. We haven't begun to scratch the surface, and we don't even know where the surface is yet. Another 2000 years is nothing, yet unimaginable to us today.
My own simple explanation for the Fermi "paradox" is the Prime Directive.
Would you visit another world by zooming across the sky in your saucer yelling "WEEEEEE!!!!" and blasting fun targets with your ray gun, or would you simply transfer your consciousness into a humanoid body and walk around and talk to people?
I agree with your conlusions, but if you're open minded you need to be open to things that annoy you. "We are alone" in no way implies there is a god. That's a weird bias you picked up.
Fair point about being open to ideas I don't like. I agree.
The implication comes from, why would this one planet be so different to the, something like, ten raised to the twenty-four planets, in the universe? Even if we are one in a trillion... there's plenty of life out there. The universe seems to have had no trouble manufacturing a wide variety of stars and planets all over the place, everywhere. Why does it suddenly struggle to manufacture life, and so does it only a single time?
Once it got going here, it all happened very quickly. Why, elsewhere, would it stop just short, everywhere else, of an animal with capacity for abstract thought? Why would we be so "special"?
Either we are a natural part of the patterns of the universe and natural laws, or some weird magical power put us here. I don't think this is bias, I think it is a natural conclusion. So yeah, if we are special, then it implies gods and stuff (and they in no way would have to resemble any man-made idea about god, just that it is some otherworldly creative something).
Much easier to assume life is normal and repeatable.
I'd buy that intelligent life appears only a few times in a galaxy. But once in a universe? Nah.
That reminds me that there's the notion that,
reality REPEATS itself. [1]
When something appears, it kinda appears everywhere. So it would be surprising if there were not a lot of other "M-class" planets out there.
Besides, the belief that we are alone, has a weird "we are special God-created creatures" stink about it.
As an atheist, I would assume life is everywhere, as there is nothing special about us. The only question is, how far away are they?
[1] reality, Nature, the universe, fundamental laws, etc.
Heh, but the salt thing is old and wrong. Salt as much as you like.
The cult TV series Babylon 5 called it back in 1996 or something.
And kudos also to South Park for flipping the food pyramid, around three years ago.
Largely agree. It’s an EXPERIMENT and so you cannot know what might go wrong. Their method of “testing” suggests they believe they have tons of data showing the thing is already very very safe. Which they cannot know.
If this was a drug trial, it would be like giving the first experimental injection to 100 people. Nobody does that. You give it to maybe TWO people and wait for unexpected reactions.
They’re apparently very cavalier about their tests. Nothing to do with the person in the seat.
It's the microblogging format. I invented it once (also) as an art project in 1995, but using blank business cards at a coffee table. People should jot something on a card, and leave for others to see. It's that short little message, which can be scanned through for something good. It's the focus. Which worked wonders for the miracle on the Hudson, a single Tweet and photo from someone right there. It is those moments. Now excuse me whilst I put on my Jon Ham voice and start talking about Carousels. But that's the point. Somebody is somewhere noticing something in the moment and you want a little message to put you there. And for that we can put of with the billions of messages which are just noise to us. But they might not be noise to someone else. The other day there was an unexpected road closure. Within a minute, I see on Twitter, someone who lived local posted a message as to what had happened (someone had gone off the road a couple hours earlier).