So the guy who mortgaged his house to buy 10 bitcoins for $19,000 worth $4,000 today adds $150,000 to "losses".
That 150,000 doesn't just fall into a sinkhole. It goes to other people who sell the coins. So yes, there are people getting rich off Bitcoin by simply trading it. I know a handful of people who earned millions of EUR and/or bought their own apartment with their Bitcoin profits.
I'm not sure if it's all reasonable and fair, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to all the shady deals of traditional finance and stock markets. I do think that mortgaging your house for almost any kind of investment is beyond stupid, though.
Hell no! I'll couchsurf with the locals and find the real culture, just like every other hipster does these days. Later I'll post something sad about having had to fly there, and promising to plant some trees to compensate for the CO2 emissions.
This. A lot of people seem to misunderstand standing desks because they have never really tried them. For starters, it's not about standing in attention for hours, but letting your body move and find its natural positions freely. To me, there's a huge psychological element in not being tied to a chair. It seems to help with attention deficit issues to some extent.
One problem is that it takes a while to get used to standing desks to get all the benefit. For me it took a few months of alternating between sitting and standing, though I still prefer sitting by a table for many things -- there's no need to choose either-or. I started with ad-hoc setups with a stool or a table on top of a regular desk, and I only got a real standing desk about a year ago.
That's hardly the whole story. I don't see the current US government caring much about the environment or people's health. What I do see is "America first" protectionism.
To clarify, imagine that the Chinese steel plant was identical in operation to the US one, with all the labour and environmental regulations etc. Further, imagine that the cost of transport were negligible, so that the final price for both products in the US were roughly the same. Which one would you buy? More importantly, would you still have those tariffs in place? I'm guessing you would.
I don't think the mechanism of "meaning" is anything more than a network of associations. The more associations something triggers, the more meaningful it becomes to me. Particularly if the network leads to strong basic emotions, which by themselves are more or less hardwired by evolution.
I don't see why a machine couldn't do all this. As others have pointed out, we train our machines wrong by focusing on quantity rather than quality of data. Also, we don't seem to guide the machine by stating what's essential about the data (as in the example of Russian tank images having grainier quality).
First time I've heard "neat" applied to coffee. Pouring it at room temperature seems pretty strange to me, but who am I to play gatekeeper?
I couldn't find a better word (not a native English speaker) to describe coffee without any mixers. "Black coffee" is a tautology because coffee is black by itself, like "black coal" or "black African-American". If you make coffee not black, then it's no longer coffee, hence it shouldn't be counted as drinking coffee.
Those who can't drink their coffee neat shouldn't be counted as coffee drinkers. If you like milky drinks with a splash of coffee, fine, but please don't call the whole thing coffee. It's like saying "I'm a C programmer, but I don't really know much C, I only use it via the Python interpreter".
"A professor of surgery says students have spent so much time in front of screens and so little time using their hands that they have lost the dexterity for stitching or sewing up patients."
I don't see anything about touchscreens there. When Windows made computing "easy" for the masses in the 90s, it meant you could just click around with a mouse, and the keyboard was just a prop to make the thing look like a real computer. No touchscreens there, but the same issue. Or you could go back a few more decades and complain that young people are just staring at TV screens all day and night.
I'm not a big fan of touchscreens, and I believe proper use of keyboards is much better for dexterity than swiping on touchscreens. But even that is far from building things with your hands, which is something a surgeon should be able to do.
"Such skills might once have been gained at school or at home, whether in cutting textiles, measuring ingredients, repairing something that's broken, learning woodwork or holding an instrument."
Touchscreens are only a part of the problem, and the article doesn't specifically single them out. Otherwise, a nice article about the practical downsides of our consumer-oriented culture.
CPU's traditionally optimize for latency but not bandwidth.
In my experience, memory latency hasn't essentially improved since the days of SDRAM. As each DDR generation doubled the throughput, it also doubled the latency as measured in clock cycles (e.g. CL2.5 to CL5 to CL10) meaning the actual latency stayed the same.
The CPUs themselves have gotten longer pipelines and wider SIMD units to improve throughput at the expense of latency (in clock cycles). While the clock speeds have also increased from the days of SDRAM, the design as a whole doesn't exactly seem to optimize for latency.
Patents don't cover scientific discoveries (which can be quite abstract and wide-ranging), they cover specific practical methods. I've only written two patent applications back in the day so I'm not the best expert on the field, but I specifically remember the wording "method and apparatus", or whatever the proper translation would be.
Reading comprehension fail: I didn't say anything about not paying our scientists. I said "We publish scientific discoveries openly" which is quite different. Governments and businesses do pay scientists for such research, because they too will eventually benefit. I have personally worked as a research scientist and I did get paid well enough.
Seems a bit shady though that you put your stuff out for free that someone else can pick it up, package it and sell it on.
Open source is like science (it was more or less modelled after it). We publish scientific discoveries openly because that's the best way to advance common knowledge. But then we let engineers and salespeople make and sell products out of them. I'm OK with that, because it's a lot of work to develop/sell/maintain/support a product even if you get the science for free.
If scientific discoveries were copyrightable in the way of music and movies, we'd probably be paying the Faraday family estate for each gadget that uses electricity. You can imagine it's not a great way to advance either the science or the engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
So the guy who mortgaged his house to buy 10 bitcoins for $19,000 worth $4,000 today adds $150,000 to "losses".
That 150,000 doesn't just fall into a sinkhole. It goes to other people who sell the coins. So yes, there are people getting rich off Bitcoin by simply trading it. I know a handful of people who earned millions of EUR and/or bought their own apartment with their Bitcoin profits.
I'm not sure if it's all reasonable and fair, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to all the shady deals of traditional finance and stock markets. I do think that mortgaging your house for almost any kind of investment is beyond stupid, though.
You will go to tourist traps
Hell no! I'll couchsurf with the locals and find the real culture, just like every other hipster does these days. Later I'll post something sad about having had to fly there, and promising to plant some trees to compensate for the CO2 emissions.
In the 90's we saw PCs go from 50 MHz to 550+ MHz. Today Intel offers incremental upgrades.
Who needs upgrades when an Intel CPU from 2004 is enough to run the latest applications:
This. A lot of people seem to misunderstand standing desks because they have never really tried them. For starters, it's not about standing in attention for hours, but letting your body move and find its natural positions freely. To me, there's a huge psychological element in not being tied to a chair. It seems to help with attention deficit issues to some extent.
One problem is that it takes a while to get used to standing desks to get all the benefit. For me it took a few months of alternating between sitting and standing, though I still prefer sitting by a table for many things -- there's no need to choose either-or. I started with ad-hoc setups with a stool or a table on top of a regular desk, and I only got a real standing desk about a year ago.
yeah but orange man is teh new black man!
Bowties are cool. I'm with The Doctor.
I know it's pendantic, but you can use a small object hanging from a string to measure the local ratio between mass and weight.
That's hardly the whole story. I don't see the current US government caring much about the environment or people's health. What I do see is "America first" protectionism.
To clarify, imagine that the Chinese steel plant was identical in operation to the US one, with all the labour and environmental regulations etc. Further, imagine that the cost of transport were negligible, so that the final price for both products in the US were roughly the same. Which one would you buy? More importantly, would you still have those tariffs in place? I'm guessing you would.
the six-second videos that shaped modern internet culture could be coming back in a big way.
Of course, you can justify anything with the word "culture". For example: gun culture, rape culture, stem cell culture.
We already have CPUs with some of the cores or cache disabled due to defects. No need to ditch the whole thing.
I don't think the mechanism of "meaning" is anything more than a network of associations. The more associations something triggers, the more meaningful it becomes to me. Particularly if the network leads to strong basic emotions, which by themselves are more or less hardwired by evolution.
I don't see why a machine couldn't do all this. As others have pointed out, we train our machines wrong by focusing on quantity rather than quality of data. Also, we don't seem to guide the machine by stating what's essential about the data (as in the example of Russian tank images having grainier quality).
You know what? I've been hearing about dead voting all my life.
What's wrong with that? Zombies are people too, you insensitive clod!
I do have some reservations about letting zombies be elected into high offices, but I'm afraid it's too late now.
The 90s called. They want their "one does not simply walk into social problems with technological solutions" back.
Try Machinae Supremacy for a proper geek band.
I'm s-s-so t-t-t-triggered now, you insensitive cl-cl-clod!
I'll just use my llama sweater to stay warm and avoid the flu in the oldskool way. That's nothing to sneeze at.
First time I've heard "neat" applied to coffee. Pouring it at room temperature seems pretty strange to me, but who am I to play gatekeeper?
I couldn't find a better word (not a native English speaker) to describe coffee without any mixers. "Black coffee" is a tautology because coffee is black by itself, like "black coal" or "black African-American". If you make coffee not black, then it's no longer coffee, hence it shouldn't be counted as drinking coffee.
Those who can't drink their coffee neat shouldn't be counted as coffee drinkers. If you like milky drinks with a splash of coffee, fine, but please don't call the whole thing coffee. It's like saying "I'm a C programmer, but I don't really know much C, I only use it via the Python interpreter".
Personally, I'm looking forward to the version every civilian can buy, Mr. Fusion.
"A professor of surgery says students have spent so much time in front of screens and so little time using their hands that they have lost the dexterity for stitching or sewing up patients."
I don't see anything about touchscreens there. When Windows made computing "easy" for the masses in the 90s, it meant you could just click around with a mouse, and the keyboard was just a prop to make the thing look like a real computer. No touchscreens there, but the same issue. Or you could go back a few more decades and complain that young people are just staring at TV screens all day and night.
I'm not a big fan of touchscreens, and I believe proper use of keyboards is much better for dexterity than swiping on touchscreens. But even that is far from building things with your hands, which is something a surgeon should be able to do.
"Such skills might once have been gained at school or at home, whether in cutting textiles, measuring ingredients, repairing something that's broken, learning woodwork or holding an instrument."
Touchscreens are only a part of the problem, and the article doesn't specifically single them out. Otherwise, a nice article about the practical downsides of our consumer-oriented culture.
CPU's traditionally optimize for latency but not bandwidth.
In my experience, memory latency hasn't essentially improved since the days of SDRAM. As each DDR generation doubled the throughput, it also doubled the latency as measured in clock cycles (e.g. CL2.5 to CL5 to CL10) meaning the actual latency stayed the same.
The CPUs themselves have gotten longer pipelines and wider SIMD units to improve throughput at the expense of latency (in clock cycles). While the clock speeds have also increased from the days of SDRAM, the design as a whole doesn't exactly seem to optimize for latency.
Patents don't cover scientific discoveries (which can be quite abstract and wide-ranging), they cover specific practical methods. I've only written two patent applications back in the day so I'm not the best expert on the field, but I specifically remember the wording "method and apparatus", or whatever the proper translation would be.
Reading comprehension fail: I didn't say anything about not paying our scientists. I said "We publish scientific discoveries openly" which is quite different. Governments and businesses do pay scientists for such research, because they too will eventually benefit. I have personally worked as a research scientist and I did get paid well enough.
Seems a bit shady though that you put your stuff out for free that someone else can pick it up, package it and sell it on.
Open source is like science (it was more or less modelled after it). We publish scientific discoveries openly because that's the best way to advance common knowledge. But then we let engineers and salespeople make and sell products out of them. I'm OK with that, because it's a lot of work to develop/sell/maintain/support a product even if you get the science for free.
If scientific discoveries were copyrightable in the way of music and movies, we'd probably be paying the Faraday family estate for each gadget that uses electricity. You can imagine it's not a great way to advance either the science or the engineering.