It's not that they're calling you something derogatory that gets people riled up. It's that by the derogatory use they're implying that the referenced class or group of people is inferior or less desirable. You can't insult somebody by saying "you cry like a girl" unless when and how girls cry is humiliating. I doubt "God, you're such a pussy" refers to you being a cat but rather a member of the weaker sex. Unlike men, who "got balls". And calling someone a faggot or cocksucker isn't an insult unless there's something wrong about being a homosexual. Using the word n1gger implies something about the value of black people.
Of course you could try to dodge that and say it's a behavior not a racial/ethnic/religious/sexual slur, that being a cunt isn't directly related to being female, being a dick isn't directly related to being male and being a n1gger isn't directly related to being black, which is how you get "white n1ggers" = the Irish and such. But it usually ends up expanding on an existing slur like you may not look like a n1gger but you sure act like one/are one on the inside rather than exclude anyone or remove the underlying implication. Though that could of course be intentionally used for sarcasm or irony, like a black man saying I might look like a n1gger but you act like one.
Is it getting blown out of all proportions? I think so. But if anyone takes a huge offense to a position being called a chairMAN even though it can be filled by a man or a woman, eh... whatever. For me it's a little bit of semantics and a low-priority TODO, for others it seem like anyone not willing to drop everything else they're doing to stop this misogyny right now is with the patriarchy and the good old boys club and secretly want women back in the kitchen and popping out babies. Call anyone a n1gger is not nice, but I have the feeling most people use these insults from habit or simply to "kick where it hurts" rather than any real bigotry. Like if you really stub your toe and go like "fuck damn shit crap ow ow ow" at nothing, at least that's how I think when someone rants of half a dozen swear words in a row...
However there are a few parties around that are absolutely livid over the idea of relations between U.S. and Cuba being normalized. My money is on it turning out to be U.S.-based Cuban group whose families hated Castro for one reason or another possibly in partnership with counter-revolutionaries still in Cuba. Less likely is someone in Cuba who thinks Raul Castro is betraying the Revolution by engaging with the U.S. But it is possible.
Those people exist. But who of them would think we hate that, let's create a secret sonic screwdriver to give US diplomats hearing loss and light brain damage. I mean whatever is creating this must have gone through a pretty big R&D project with a non-trivial chance of failure. It must have been tweaked and tested pretty well to both be strong enough to cause damage and weak enough to remain stealthy for quite some time. That sounds to me like a secret intelligence/military program, not some ragtag rebels. Even if they stole a prototype, somebody would know and using it correctly would not be easy - look at the rebels in Eastern Ukraine who couldn't tell the difference between military jets and a civilian airliner.
The second thing that doesn't add up is motivation, if you're trying to sabotage US-Cuba relations you'd better not look like a third party trying to do just that. You'd try to discredit or frame Cuba, you might stage some blatant attack like a car bomb or poison their food to say the US is not wanted but this FUD? Let's be honest, diplomats are an archaic leftover from when they were trusted emissaries and negotiators because getting instructions from home took days and weeks. Even if they pulled out physically, the US could maintain normal diplomatic relations virtually. You'd only need a booth to handle physical matters, though you could probably move most things like visa applications online too. The actual embassy is today mostly for show.
My guess is that this is an intelligence project gone wrong. This is supposed to be a form of scanner, picking up on something trying to punch through some countermeasures that are in place and causing long term damage that wasn't caught in testing. To me that's by far the most plausible explanation for why this would exist and why they'd target diplomats in particular. I mean there are probably other ways you could damage economic ties, tourism or whatever that could damage relations but only diplomats would have political information of any real value. Everything else seems a bit contrived, like you could but it wouldn't really make any sense.
Every 10 years or so, we revisit the definition of what we expect from "Strong AI" - thus ensuring that the goalposts will remain firmly 5 years in the future. When "I Robot" robots are fetching your drycleaning for you, growing vegetables in your home garden and cooking your meals, they still won't be "Strong AI" because their imaginative abilities are limited to preprogrammed fusions of existing narratives.
Pretty much, the thing is if you take it to the limit humans rarely do something truly novel. For most of history people have learned a craft or trade that was passed down, parent to child, master to apprentice. In modern times schools and universities pass tons of knowledge to pupils and students, including university I've spent 17 years of my life in school. And yes, it's a little more than rote passing of knowledge but if you've never, ever seen or heard descriptions of anyone starting a fire it's not something most people would figure out on their own, even if they'd seen fire after a lightning strike and knew it existed.
Now obviously we do things that haven't been done before but it's like maybe nobody has driven this car, on this road, with these exact traffic and weather conditions but lots of people have driven similar cars on similar roads in similar traffic and weather conditions. A plumber is doing similar plumbing as many other plumbers. Heck, even in software there are many GUIs, workflows and reports that I think could be partially built by an AI talking the user through it and mocking up examples on the fly.
The problem is more of breaking it down into parts and remixing it instead of becoming a blender that turns everything to a gooey mush. That's where I've managed to trip up chat bots and such pretty easily, like you don't find much country music at a rave party and you don't find much techno music at a barn dance, in the abstract sense they're types of music and venues of music but they don't go together. If you can make a coherent narrative it'd get much further in a Turing test. They're getting there on the is-a and has-a relationships though, but other relations are tough.
Well, just recognizing that Apple does some innovative hardcore engineering seems to be hard for some. There are always those that claim Apple's business model is wrapping things others have created in white plastic, marketing it to hipsters and selling it at double price. Which is occasionally true but they do have some pretty impressive home brew like the CPUs, Secure Enclave (when the FBI whines they've done something right) and they've fronted some technology like high DPI displays and fingerprint scanning making it mainstream. By the time it's passed through Apple's marketing machine nerds seem to hate it no matter what.
Apple's explanation sounds like people simply moving the phone around caused the phone to try to authenticate via Face ID, and because the authentication attempts failed, the phone required Craig Federaghi to enter his passcode. Seems like the phone could waste electricity trying to face authenticate when no such authentication is wanted.
Well, the presentation gave the impression you had to do a pretty deliberate swipe. But since it's just a touchscreen movement as opposed to the physical pressing of a button, well... I dunno. It'll probably be reviewed to death before long. The word "facegate" will be used, you heard it here first. Personally I'm think that worst case on the fail side, you have to enter the PIN. Big whoop. On the security side, I expect someone to either steal my unlocked phone when I'm handling it or if they really want to then manhandle me to get my fingerprint today or look at the phone tomorrow. Or just force me to hand over the PIN, I mean if you're first mugging me... you might say a pickpocket might try to do an unlock and run instead of just stealing it now, but eh... it seems far fetched. Battery drain might be bad, but I'm sure Apple's engineers have pockets and that's the main point I'm interested in. Carrying it around for extended time in hand is not something I do unless I'm in an app, in which case it is unlocked. But I guess everything breaks somebody's workflow...
If I have to see ads on a web site, my preference is that they are "generic and less timely and useful" since I'm going to ignore them anyway.
Um, if you're ignoring them why do you care what they are? Do you mean that you're trying to ignore them, but those damn timely, relevant ads are tempting you to use money you shouldn't? If so I think you're their primary market...
However, the corner stores in my area make ~80% of their money selling four things: cigarettes, beer, lottery tickets, and milk. These vending machines will, at best, be able to sell one of those four moneymakers.
Yeah, I think somebody really failed to take a step back and ask why people buy it at the corner store.
1. It's a "vice" product, like beer and cigarettes or gambling on the lottery or snacks and sweets. You don't buy a case of beer or carton of cigarettes to have at home because you'd consume more, but those are restricted products. I suppose lottery tickets, snacks and sweets are good though. 2. It's a perishable food, like right now I'm out of tomatoes. But the same reason I'm out is one of the many reasons it doesn't work well for this kind of concept, I can't just stock up on it. Plus that would have all sorts of quality issues in a non-staffed location. 3. The bodega has some kind of food/drink you can just eat on the spot like a fresh sandwich, ice cream, cold soda or whatever where you're crossing over into kiosk/coffee bar/fast food store. Well and snacks and sweets, they're kinda both this and vice.
Yes, they might have some other products too but they're "me too" products once you have the foot in the door. I can't seriously remember when I last went to a corner store to buy something that doesn't fall into one of the three above. And the easy ones with sodas and snacks are actually done well with vending machines today.
Same thing with my big grocery store, there's lots of things there I could buy online. But as long as I'm still going there to see the fruit and vegetables in person it's like I'm already there. That roll of biscuits I could order online that would be exactly the same is exactly the same. And I don't have to have the "overhead" of meeting up with some delivery guy, I can just grab it as I pass that isle.
I don't think including a fast adapter is exactly overcharging on a $999 phone. If they included a $3 USB-C to USB-A adapter like this there would be very little reason to complain since you'd get faster charging with the "native" charger and hey it kinda works with any other USB port too. But chargers are a profit center, most people need more than one (home, cabin, car, travel) and they lose or forget them so hey, let's buy one more. And in some people's mind there's only brand chargers and cheap knock-off fire hazards from eBay, a lot of people will only buy it almost no matter how much they charge.
The EU enforces a two year guarantee for sold consumer goods.
Yeah. Or technically, it's more like you have a statutory warranty which has a minimum coverage and duration that comes without terms and conditions. Then they're free to offer various kind of additional free or paid warranties that can have terms, for example cars have some where having the car for service/check-up is required for the extended warranty to be valid and get free repairs. They can also offer you other services like free road assistance that isn't strictly required by law. For the most part though you can just throw away the "warranty registration card" though because it's bullshit, you're 99.9% covered by law and the 0.1% is just an excuse to collect personal data. Make a warranty claim, show receipt, get free repair/replacement. No registration necessary.
Good documentation in a well documented system is very valuable. Even a little outdated, false or misleading documentation is poison to that value because you just can't rely on it. And a few good pages in a pile of shit is almost worthless. If you're on a team with stupid, lazy or poor programmers or contractors / consultants / outsource staff that don't care much for long time maintainability or you've inherited a big codebase then most likely some or all of them has taken the easy way out. And you probably haven't got management buy-in to really enforce anything and you don't want to be the documentation nazi either.
Computer engineering is not like any other kind of engineering that it's cool to just improvise as we go along. A colleague of mine describes our job as re-engineering the airplane while it's in the air. I don't write much documentation because I don't read much documentation, most of it is dog poop and it's usually more efficient to just dive into the code and figure out WTF it's really doing. And very often there's a long TODO-list of things that ought to be done, where I seem to make the most people happy - both users, other developers and my boss - by whack-a-mole'ing as many as possible as quickly as possible.
Very often if you get a lot of questions about something it's because it's stupidly built and what it really needs is either a refactoring of the code or redesign of the UI or both. It's extremely rare that I end up thinking this is how it should be or has to be, they only need a better explanation of it. As in, I find the solution to 90% of the issues is to write more code or better code. Documenting a convoluted mess sometimes only makes it a documented, convoluted mess. That said, I try to cover every error path and throw useful error messages. The worst I get are things that just silently fail or corrupt or just give gibberish in return. There's enough coders who can't even do that.
There would not have been a problem if someone hadn't stared a misinformation campaign a full year after Debian had already had an internal debate, weighed the pros and cons and went with systemd. Yes, there were growing pains, but theve all been pretty much ironed out by now and most people who do this for a living don't actually care. The distros who switched, haven't seen any loss of users because of it and life moves on.
Pretty sure that's not correct, I remember quiteafew negative opinions before the decision was made that resemble the current criticism. In any case, if you're replacing a very old and familiar system that's not obviously broken with something new then you can be assured that most of the debate and the arguments will be made by the people who want change. Because you get like 20 years of "we want to replace X11" discussion they can't be arsed to follow and then finally, when the switch to Wayland is happening then you get the "OMG you're breaking X and I need it, stop that". A year later would perhaps be around when the first systemd-based distro version would be released, actually breaking things for users?
The smartest robot in the world is still dumber than an amoeba. We have a long way to go before AI can replace people. AI is mostly well defined problems and pattern recognition. Even something as trivial as "unpacking and sorting a box" like in the summary is impossible for robots currently.
I agree with you on the home scale... on the industrial scale? Take a look at Amazon Robotics Challenge 2017 and compare them to Amazon Picking Challenge 2015 to see how rapid progress is. Odd assortment of about 30 things where half was revealed shortly before the test, winners can now pick up about 90% of them mostly through a combination of suction cups and grabbers. That's hard things, soft things, odd shapes, transparent items, items with holes etc. you can look at a screenshot here you can see they're not making it easy. Full video of runner-up here, couldn't find one of the winner. Note that it's at 4x speed, they had half an hour to sort the box.
And here's the thing, it doesn't have to be super fast or perfect to be useful for Amazon. They just have to flag goods as "auto-pickable" and you can start pre-loading boxes with those first and possibly fill some orders entirely. My guesstimate is that a human would maybe sort it in three minutes, if you're doing that all day long and include all the little breaks. Now the human works eight hours a day five days a week, the robot 24x7. I'd assume the person is working minimum wage, the cost estimates for the picker were around $25k. So it's doing about $15k*4.2 (working hours)*0.10 (productivity) = $6.3k worth of work each year, ~4 years for down payment.
Give it a few more years of R&D, five more years for industrialization and roll-out... I think it's a pretty generous guess for the humans when I think that almost nothing will be hand-picked in Amazon's warehouses by 2025. Don't also forget that they have such volume that if something turns out to be particularly troublesome they could probably get some kind of tweak to the packaging for the picker to grab onto, if they promise to buy a big bulk order manufacturers won't object too hard. This is exactly the type of job that's going to disappear, they're automating all the way around the human so they can be more efficient pickers but eventually there's nothing left to automate but the picking itself.
Home automation is so much harder because we do so little of each, there are experiments with robots chefs. But are they going to end up in an industrial kitchen serving hundreds of guests a day or your house cooking a few meals a day? It doesn't really make sense at home until it can do a little of a hundred different things. But hey, if they get autonomous cars going I expect I'll order out more...
That seems like a stretch. As soon as we actually hit the wall, there's going to be a great incentive to push forward with alternative technology.
Why? How? Is there any process today that would pay 100x to have it solved at 10x the speed? Is there any reason to believe it won't be like the Concorde, techincally superior but not really fast enough to be economically sustainable? We have gigahertz processors with gigabytes or memory and terabytes of storage, what are we really short on? I'd like to think of myself as a computer geek, in fact I'm pretty sure I am one... yet I know I could comfortably buy 128GB of memory but in practice I haven't had >16GB. My impression is that the workloads where that is not enough could use many TBs of memory. Oh well....
You're assuming accuracy is the only useful measure here. If you hate gays and don't want to hire gays you can reduce the risk of hiring someone gay from 3.8% to 0.09*0.038 = 0.34% simply by not hiring anyone who looks gay. You'll also wrongfully exclude 0.09*0.962 = 8.66% of straight people but you got like 88% of the pool left. That might be entirely acceptable to a bigot.
That said, dating pictures might reflect different courting rituals between heterosexuals and homosexuals that probably won't show up in a similar degree in say cover letter or passport photos, so I doubt it's useful as a general "gaydar". But it's pretty impressive that computers are able to pick up on such subtle differences and humans not. Then again, how often have humans actually looked at dating pics of people who aren't interested in you? Even bisexuals would look at both men and women interested in their own sex, not the other way around.
Another example is in the maritime world. Nearly all vessels beyond a canoe or row boat now carry a VHF radio with DSC capabilities. This includes an MMSI (Maritime Mobile Service Identifier) which is a globally unique registration number for that vessel/owner.
Lolwut? I checked here in Norway and even though all commercial craft are required to have it I found an old article saying 90% of private boats don't have VHF radio. With the spread of cell phones and towers it's probably even less today. If anything it's a counter-example that registering large ships is fine but trying to register all boats would be completely ridiculous.
Just choked on my coffee after reading that. What possible use case could there be for allowing a blank page to even run javascript for document.write in the first place?
I can't begin to phantom where the thought process comes form, but developers do the stupidest shit to make things work right now. Whether it's documented behavior, undocumented behavior, bugs, unintentional side effects, race conditions or whatever Microsoft has probably found that some developers have used this in a non-malicious way because drumroll it works. And that's really the whole of the story, if you break it you don't just break malware authors you break some website that paid idiot developers or cheap-ass outsourcing company for it. Then the get angry at Microsoft because it worked before, so they keep the broken behavior. It's not gone even though IE6 is finally exorcised.
Until you understand the whole problem, don't fuck around with anything. The atmosphere is a complex and chaotic system, and we can't even predict the weather accurately for more than a few days (or even on the day).
Summer is hot. Winter is cold. Often we're better at this than whether it'll rain tomorrow, because the scenarios have feedback loops and they're divergent. Like if it starts raining it'll continue, if it doesn't start raining it'll stay overcast and the difference is within the error margin. Also known as the butterfly effect.
Or they pull off the Amazon gig, despite having an absurd P/E ratio in the dotcom boom and causing massive losses in the dotcom bust they were the biggest of the failures and rebounded better than the competitors. Sometimes if everybody believes in you will succeed that's what happens even though reason has nothing to do with it. See also crypto-currencies.
Anyway they would not need to look for transits when we are blasting radar beams and TV broadcasts in all directions, the latter of which which might be shit but nevertheless has strong self-correlation, such as we ourselves look for in the SETI project.
With the distance and dispersion they'd still have to have an helluva big antenna pointing in our direction. So much so that AFAIK we're assuming they have better technology than we have, we couldn't pick up a TV broadcast from an alien world. If we point a radio telescope at them and "ping" them they'd get the message with current technology - assuming the antenna is pointing in the right direction, but that's quite different from an accidental pick-up of a signal intended for Earth.
Amazing that the fact that landing skyscraper-sized objects with pinpoint accuracy after a hypersonic reentry from outer-freaking-space has now become "boring";) I love living in the future.
Not to take away your personal sense of awe and wonder, but I think most people for the last few hundred centuries has felt that way. Apollo program? The wonder. Radio? The wonder. Horseless carriages? The wonder. Electricity? The wonder. Telephones? The wonder. Airplanes? The wonder. Photography? The wonder. It just happens to be what is possible now, that wasn't possible when you were born. The next generation will think, duh rockets land. They've always landed, what's the big deal. It would be kinda fun if you could pull someone out of the distant past and watch their awe and wonder at things we consider mundane. They'd probably flip the first time you hit a light switch.
At least, the garbage polls for 2016 that had Hillary in the lead by 8-10 points.
The sample size is big enough that it almost certainly was not a statistical fluke. If people didn't answer truthfully because Trump was such a controversial candidate you could have called 7000 or 70000 or the whole fucking country and you'd still have a poll that was way off compared to the voting booth. It's a limitation of polls, not of the sample size.
And after 90 years there is still nothing worth watching on...
And all mainstream music is shit and Hollywood sucks right? The more I learn about snobs of all varieties - not just the classic intellectual snobs but also the anti-intellectual counter-snobs and even the grumpy everything was better before-snobs the more I realize they're just shooting themselves in the foot by not enjoying what other people enjoy in order to somehow feel superior to them. Take the serious for what it is. Take the silly and fun for what it is. If you go to the opera, enjoy the opera. If you go to a barn dance, enjoy the barn dance. Things get a lot more fun when you stop comparing to the things it is not.
Well, that would make me try to game the system. Say my bill is $30 each month. I'll pay $29.01, every month, just to get the free $0.99.
Every system I know that works like this will add the outstanding balance on the next bill, so it'd be $30.99 the next month. Also that hanging dollar may prevent them from closing out your account until the balance is paid in full so it may not be a free dollar, just the free loan of a dollar. Yay.
Or it can lose its license and pull the works from Google Play, and end users will end up having to buy an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad in order to continue to watch notable movies and television series once the licensed apps become iOS-exclusive.
You mean after the major movie and television studios see a mysterious 80-90% drop in revenue and torrents get another vitality boost. There's no way they could afford dropping Android as a market, it's like saying that if we broke the protection on DVD/BluRay/UHD BluRay they'd stop selling discs and force us to the cinema. Everyone can see that's a bluff.
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It's not that they're calling you something derogatory that gets people riled up. It's that by the derogatory use they're implying that the referenced class or group of people is inferior or less desirable. You can't insult somebody by saying "you cry like a girl" unless when and how girls cry is humiliating. I doubt "God, you're such a pussy" refers to you being a cat but rather a member of the weaker sex. Unlike men, who "got balls". And calling someone a faggot or cocksucker isn't an insult unless there's something wrong about being a homosexual. Using the word n1gger implies something about the value of black people.
Of course you could try to dodge that and say it's a behavior not a racial/ethnic/religious/sexual slur, that being a cunt isn't directly related to being female, being a dick isn't directly related to being male and being a n1gger isn't directly related to being black, which is how you get "white n1ggers" = the Irish and such. But it usually ends up expanding on an existing slur like you may not look like a n1gger but you sure act like one/are one on the inside rather than exclude anyone or remove the underlying implication. Though that could of course be intentionally used for sarcasm or irony, like a black man saying I might look like a n1gger but you act like one.
Is it getting blown out of all proportions? I think so. But if anyone takes a huge offense to a position being called a chairMAN even though it can be filled by a man or a woman, eh... whatever. For me it's a little bit of semantics and a low-priority TODO, for others it seem like anyone not willing to drop everything else they're doing to stop this misogyny right now is with the patriarchy and the good old boys club and secretly want women back in the kitchen and popping out babies. Call anyone a n1gger is not nice, but I have the feeling most people use these insults from habit or simply to "kick where it hurts" rather than any real bigotry. Like if you really stub your toe and go like "fuck damn shit crap ow ow ow" at nothing, at least that's how I think when someone rants of half a dozen swear words in a row...
1. Leave site
2. Don't come back
That would get autoplay removed pretty quick. This is not like ads that they need to make money, it's just being a dick.
However there are a few parties around that are absolutely livid over the idea of relations between U.S. and Cuba being normalized. My money is on it turning out to be U.S.-based Cuban group whose families hated Castro for one reason or another possibly in partnership with counter-revolutionaries still in Cuba. Less likely is someone in Cuba who thinks Raul Castro is betraying the Revolution by engaging with the U.S. But it is possible.
Those people exist. But who of them would think we hate that, let's create a secret sonic screwdriver to give US diplomats hearing loss and light brain damage. I mean whatever is creating this must have gone through a pretty big R&D project with a non-trivial chance of failure. It must have been tweaked and tested pretty well to both be strong enough to cause damage and weak enough to remain stealthy for quite some time. That sounds to me like a secret intelligence/military program, not some ragtag rebels. Even if they stole a prototype, somebody would know and using it correctly would not be easy - look at the rebels in Eastern Ukraine who couldn't tell the difference between military jets and a civilian airliner.
The second thing that doesn't add up is motivation, if you're trying to sabotage US-Cuba relations you'd better not look like a third party trying to do just that. You'd try to discredit or frame Cuba, you might stage some blatant attack like a car bomb or poison their food to say the US is not wanted but this FUD? Let's be honest, diplomats are an archaic leftover from when they were trusted emissaries and negotiators because getting instructions from home took days and weeks. Even if they pulled out physically, the US could maintain normal diplomatic relations virtually. You'd only need a booth to handle physical matters, though you could probably move most things like visa applications online too. The actual embassy is today mostly for show.
My guess is that this is an intelligence project gone wrong. This is supposed to be a form of scanner, picking up on something trying to punch through some countermeasures that are in place and causing long term damage that wasn't caught in testing. To me that's by far the most plausible explanation for why this would exist and why they'd target diplomats in particular. I mean there are probably other ways you could damage economic ties, tourism or whatever that could damage relations but only diplomats would have political information of any real value. Everything else seems a bit contrived, like you could but it wouldn't really make any sense.
Every 10 years or so, we revisit the definition of what we expect from "Strong AI" - thus ensuring that the goalposts will remain firmly 5 years in the future. When "I Robot" robots are fetching your drycleaning for you, growing vegetables in your home garden and cooking your meals, they still won't be "Strong AI" because their imaginative abilities are limited to preprogrammed fusions of existing narratives.
Pretty much, the thing is if you take it to the limit humans rarely do something truly novel. For most of history people have learned a craft or trade that was passed down, parent to child, master to apprentice. In modern times schools and universities pass tons of knowledge to pupils and students, including university I've spent 17 years of my life in school. And yes, it's a little more than rote passing of knowledge but if you've never, ever seen or heard descriptions of anyone starting a fire it's not something most people would figure out on their own, even if they'd seen fire after a lightning strike and knew it existed.
Now obviously we do things that haven't been done before but it's like maybe nobody has driven this car, on this road, with these exact traffic and weather conditions but lots of people have driven similar cars on similar roads in similar traffic and weather conditions. A plumber is doing similar plumbing as many other plumbers. Heck, even in software there are many GUIs, workflows and reports that I think could be partially built by an AI talking the user through it and mocking up examples on the fly.
The problem is more of breaking it down into parts and remixing it instead of becoming a blender that turns everything to a gooey mush. That's where I've managed to trip up chat bots and such pretty easily, like you don't find much country music at a rave party and you don't find much techno music at a barn dance, in the abstract sense they're types of music and venues of music but they don't go together. If you can make a coherent narrative it'd get much further in a Turing test. They're getting there on the is-a and has-a relationships though, but other relations are tough.
Well, just recognizing that Apple does some innovative hardcore engineering seems to be hard for some. There are always those that claim Apple's business model is wrapping things others have created in white plastic, marketing it to hipsters and selling it at double price. Which is occasionally true but they do have some pretty impressive home brew like the CPUs, Secure Enclave (when the FBI whines they've done something right) and they've fronted some technology like high DPI displays and fingerprint scanning making it mainstream. By the time it's passed through Apple's marketing machine nerds seem to hate it no matter what.
Apple's explanation sounds like people simply moving the phone around caused the phone to try to authenticate via Face ID, and because the authentication attempts failed, the phone required Craig Federaghi to enter his passcode. Seems like the phone could waste electricity trying to face authenticate when no such authentication is wanted.
Well, the presentation gave the impression you had to do a pretty deliberate swipe. But since it's just a touchscreen movement as opposed to the physical pressing of a button, well... I dunno. It'll probably be reviewed to death before long. The word "facegate" will be used, you heard it here first. Personally I'm think that worst case on the fail side, you have to enter the PIN. Big whoop. On the security side, I expect someone to either steal my unlocked phone when I'm handling it or if they really want to then manhandle me to get my fingerprint today or look at the phone tomorrow. Or just force me to hand over the PIN, I mean if you're first mugging me... you might say a pickpocket might try to do an unlock and run instead of just stealing it now, but eh... it seems far fetched. Battery drain might be bad, but I'm sure Apple's engineers have pockets and that's the main point I'm interested in. Carrying it around for extended time in hand is not something I do unless I'm in an app, in which case it is unlocked. But I guess everything breaks somebody's workflow...
If I have to see ads on a web site, my preference is that they are "generic and less timely and useful" since I'm going to ignore them anyway.
Um, if you're ignoring them why do you care what they are? Do you mean that you're trying to ignore them, but those damn timely, relevant ads are tempting you to use money you shouldn't? If so I think you're their primary market...
However, the corner stores in my area make ~80% of their money selling four things: cigarettes, beer, lottery tickets, and milk. These vending machines will, at best, be able to sell one of those four moneymakers.
Yeah, I think somebody really failed to take a step back and ask why people buy it at the corner store.
1. It's a "vice" product, like beer and cigarettes or gambling on the lottery or snacks and sweets. You don't buy a case of beer or carton of cigarettes to have at home because you'd consume more, but those are restricted products. I suppose lottery tickets, snacks and sweets are good though.
2. It's a perishable food, like right now I'm out of tomatoes. But the same reason I'm out is one of the many reasons it doesn't work well for this kind of concept, I can't just stock up on it. Plus that would have all sorts of quality issues in a non-staffed location.
3. The bodega has some kind of food/drink you can just eat on the spot like a fresh sandwich, ice cream, cold soda or whatever where you're crossing over into kiosk/coffee bar/fast food store. Well and snacks and sweets, they're kinda both this and vice.
Yes, they might have some other products too but they're "me too" products once you have the foot in the door. I can't seriously remember when I last went to a corner store to buy something that doesn't fall into one of the three above. And the easy ones with sodas and snacks are actually done well with vending machines today.
Same thing with my big grocery store, there's lots of things there I could buy online. But as long as I'm still going there to see the fruit and vegetables in person it's like I'm already there. That roll of biscuits I could order online that would be exactly the same is exactly the same. And I don't have to have the "overhead" of meeting up with some delivery guy, I can just grab it as I pass that isle.
I don't think including a fast adapter is exactly overcharging on a $999 phone. If they included a $3 USB-C to USB-A adapter like this there would be very little reason to complain since you'd get faster charging with the "native" charger and hey it kinda works with any other USB port too. But chargers are a profit center, most people need more than one (home, cabin, car, travel) and they lose or forget them so hey, let's buy one more. And in some people's mind there's only brand chargers and cheap knock-off fire hazards from eBay, a lot of people will only buy it almost no matter how much they charge.
The EU enforces a two year guarantee for sold consumer goods.
Yeah. Or technically, it's more like you have a statutory warranty which has a minimum coverage and duration that comes without terms and conditions. Then they're free to offer various kind of additional free or paid warranties that can have terms, for example cars have some where having the car for service/check-up is required for the extended warranty to be valid and get free repairs. They can also offer you other services like free road assistance that isn't strictly required by law. For the most part though you can just throw away the "warranty registration card" though because it's bullshit, you're 99.9% covered by law and the 0.1% is just an excuse to collect personal data. Make a warranty claim, show receipt, get free repair/replacement. No registration necessary.
Good documentation in a well documented system is very valuable. Even a little outdated, false or misleading documentation is poison to that value because you just can't rely on it. And a few good pages in a pile of shit is almost worthless. If you're on a team with stupid, lazy or poor programmers or contractors / consultants / outsource staff that don't care much for long time maintainability or you've inherited a big codebase then most likely some or all of them has taken the easy way out. And you probably haven't got management buy-in to really enforce anything and you don't want to be the documentation nazi either.
Computer engineering is not like any other kind of engineering that it's cool to just improvise as we go along. A colleague of mine describes our job as re-engineering the airplane while it's in the air. I don't write much documentation because I don't read much documentation, most of it is dog poop and it's usually more efficient to just dive into the code and figure out WTF it's really doing. And very often there's a long TODO-list of things that ought to be done, where I seem to make the most people happy - both users, other developers and my boss - by whack-a-mole'ing as many as possible as quickly as possible.
Very often if you get a lot of questions about something it's because it's stupidly built and what it really needs is either a refactoring of the code or redesign of the UI or both. It's extremely rare that I end up thinking this is how it should be or has to be, they only need a better explanation of it. As in, I find the solution to 90% of the issues is to write more code or better code. Documenting a convoluted mess sometimes only makes it a documented, convoluted mess. That said, I try to cover every error path and throw useful error messages. The worst I get are things that just silently fail or corrupt or just give gibberish in return. There's enough coders who can't even do that.
There would not have been a problem if someone hadn't stared a misinformation campaign a full year after Debian had already had an internal debate, weighed the pros and cons and went with systemd. Yes, there were growing pains, but theve all been pretty much ironed out by now and most people who do this for a living don't actually care. The distros who switched, haven't seen any loss of users because of it and life moves on.
Pretty sure that's not correct, I remember quite a few negative opinions before the decision was made that resemble the current criticism. In any case, if you're replacing a very old and familiar system that's not obviously broken with something new then you can be assured that most of the debate and the arguments will be made by the people who want change. Because you get like 20 years of "we want to replace X11" discussion they can't be arsed to follow and then finally, when the switch to Wayland is happening then you get the "OMG you're breaking X and I need it, stop that". A year later would perhaps be around when the first systemd-based distro version would be released, actually breaking things for users?
The smartest robot in the world is still dumber than an amoeba. We have a long way to go before AI can replace people. AI is mostly well defined problems and pattern recognition. Even something as trivial as "unpacking and sorting a box" like in the summary is impossible for robots currently.
I agree with you on the home scale... on the industrial scale? Take a look at Amazon Robotics Challenge 2017 and compare them to Amazon Picking Challenge 2015 to see how rapid progress is. Odd assortment of about 30 things where half was revealed shortly before the test, winners can now pick up about 90% of them mostly through a combination of suction cups and grabbers. That's hard things, soft things, odd shapes, transparent items, items with holes etc. you can look at a screenshot here you can see they're not making it easy. Full video of runner-up here, couldn't find one of the winner. Note that it's at 4x speed, they had half an hour to sort the box.
And here's the thing, it doesn't have to be super fast or perfect to be useful for Amazon. They just have to flag goods as "auto-pickable" and you can start pre-loading boxes with those first and possibly fill some orders entirely. My guesstimate is that a human would maybe sort it in three minutes, if you're doing that all day long and include all the little breaks. Now the human works eight hours a day five days a week, the robot 24x7. I'd assume the person is working minimum wage, the cost estimates for the picker were around $25k. So it's doing about $15k*4.2 (working hours)*0.10 (productivity) = $6.3k worth of work each year, ~4 years for down payment.
Give it a few more years of R&D, five more years for industrialization and roll-out... I think it's a pretty generous guess for the humans when I think that almost nothing will be hand-picked in Amazon's warehouses by 2025. Don't also forget that they have such volume that if something turns out to be particularly troublesome they could probably get some kind of tweak to the packaging for the picker to grab onto, if they promise to buy a big bulk order manufacturers won't object too hard. This is exactly the type of job that's going to disappear, they're automating all the way around the human so they can be more efficient pickers but eventually there's nothing left to automate but the picking itself.
Home automation is so much harder because we do so little of each, there are experiments with robots chefs. But are they going to end up in an industrial kitchen serving hundreds of guests a day or your house cooking a few meals a day? It doesn't really make sense at home until it can do a little of a hundred different things. But hey, if they get autonomous cars going I expect I'll order out more...
That seems like a stretch. As soon as we actually hit the wall, there's going to be a great incentive to push forward with alternative technology.
Why? How? Is there any process today that would pay 100x to have it solved at 10x the speed? Is there any reason to believe it won't be like the Concorde, techincally superior but not really fast enough to be economically sustainable? We have gigahertz processors with gigabytes or memory and terabytes of storage, what are we really short on? I'd like to think of myself as a computer geek, in fact I'm pretty sure I am one... yet I know I could comfortably buy 128GB of memory but in practice I haven't had >16GB. My impression is that the workloads where that is not enough could use many TBs of memory. Oh well....
You're assuming accuracy is the only useful measure here. If you hate gays and don't want to hire gays you can reduce the risk of hiring someone gay from 3.8% to 0.09*0.038 = 0.34% simply by not hiring anyone who looks gay. You'll also wrongfully exclude 0.09*0.962 = 8.66% of straight people but you got like 88% of the pool left. That might be entirely acceptable to a bigot.
That said, dating pictures might reflect different courting rituals between heterosexuals and homosexuals that probably won't show up in a similar degree in say cover letter or passport photos, so I doubt it's useful as a general "gaydar". But it's pretty impressive that computers are able to pick up on such subtle differences and humans not. Then again, how often have humans actually looked at dating pics of people who aren't interested in you? Even bisexuals would look at both men and women interested in their own sex, not the other way around.
Another example is in the maritime world. Nearly all vessels beyond a canoe or row boat now carry a VHF radio with DSC capabilities. This includes an MMSI (Maritime Mobile Service Identifier) which is a globally unique registration number for that vessel/owner.
Lolwut? I checked here in Norway and even though all commercial craft are required to have it I found an old article saying 90% of private boats don't have VHF radio. With the spread of cell phones and towers it's probably even less today. If anything it's a counter-example that registering large ships is fine but trying to register all boats would be completely ridiculous.
Just choked on my coffee after reading that. What possible use case could there be for allowing a blank page to even run javascript for document.write in the first place?
I can't begin to phantom where the thought process comes form, but developers do the stupidest shit to make things work right now. Whether it's documented behavior, undocumented behavior, bugs, unintentional side effects, race conditions or whatever Microsoft has probably found that some developers have used this in a non-malicious way because drumroll it works. And that's really the whole of the story, if you break it you don't just break malware authors you break some website that paid idiot developers or cheap-ass outsourcing company for it. Then the get angry at Microsoft because it worked before, so they keep the broken behavior. It's not gone even though IE6 is finally exorcised.
Until you understand the whole problem, don't fuck around with anything. The atmosphere is a complex and chaotic system, and we can't even predict the weather accurately for more than a few days (or even on the day).
Summer is hot. Winter is cold. Often we're better at this than whether it'll rain tomorrow, because the scenarios have feedback loops and they're divergent. Like if it starts raining it'll continue, if it doesn't start raining it'll stay overcast and the difference is within the error margin. Also known as the butterfly effect.
Or they pull off the Amazon gig, despite having an absurd P/E ratio in the dotcom boom and causing massive losses in the dotcom bust they were the biggest of the failures and rebounded better than the competitors. Sometimes if everybody believes in you will succeed that's what happens even though reason has nothing to do with it. See also crypto-currencies.
Anyway they would not need to look for transits when we are blasting radar beams and TV broadcasts in all directions, the latter of which which might be shit but nevertheless has strong self-correlation, such as we ourselves look for in the SETI project.
With the distance and dispersion they'd still have to have an helluva big antenna pointing in our direction. So much so that AFAIK we're assuming they have better technology than we have, we couldn't pick up a TV broadcast from an alien world. If we point a radio telescope at them and "ping" them they'd get the message with current technology - assuming the antenna is pointing in the right direction, but that's quite different from an accidental pick-up of a signal intended for Earth.
Amazing that the fact that landing skyscraper-sized objects with pinpoint accuracy after a hypersonic reentry from outer-freaking-space has now become "boring" ;) I love living in the future.
Not to take away your personal sense of awe and wonder, but I think most people for the last few hundred centuries has felt that way. Apollo program? The wonder. Radio? The wonder. Horseless carriages? The wonder. Electricity? The wonder. Telephones? The wonder. Airplanes? The wonder. Photography? The wonder. It just happens to be what is possible now, that wasn't possible when you were born. The next generation will think, duh rockets land. They've always landed, what's the big deal. It would be kinda fun if you could pull someone out of the distant past and watch their awe and wonder at things we consider mundane. They'd probably flip the first time you hit a light switch.
At least, the garbage polls for 2016 that had Hillary in the lead by 8-10 points.
The sample size is big enough that it almost certainly was not a statistical fluke. If people didn't answer truthfully because Trump was such a controversial candidate you could have called 7000 or 70000 or the whole fucking country and you'd still have a poll that was way off compared to the voting booth. It's a limitation of polls, not of the sample size.
And after 90 years there is still nothing worth watching on...
And all mainstream music is shit and Hollywood sucks right? The more I learn about snobs of all varieties - not just the classic intellectual snobs but also the anti-intellectual counter-snobs and even the grumpy everything was better before-snobs the more I realize they're just shooting themselves in the foot by not enjoying what other people enjoy in order to somehow feel superior to them. Take the serious for what it is. Take the silly and fun for what it is. If you go to the opera, enjoy the opera. If you go to a barn dance, enjoy the barn dance. Things get a lot more fun when you stop comparing to the things it is not.
Well, that would make me try to game the system. Say my bill is $30 each month. I'll pay $29.01, every month, just to get the free $0.99.
Every system I know that works like this will add the outstanding balance on the next bill, so it'd be $30.99 the next month. Also that hanging dollar may prevent them from closing out your account until the balance is paid in full so it may not be a free dollar, just the free loan of a dollar. Yay.
Or it can lose its license and pull the works from Google Play, and end users will end up having to buy an iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad in order to continue to watch notable movies and television series once the licensed apps become iOS-exclusive.
You mean after the major movie and television studios see a mysterious 80-90% drop in revenue and torrents get another vitality boost. There's no way they could afford dropping Android as a market, it's like saying that if we broke the protection on DVD/BluRay/UHD BluRay they'd stop selling discs and force us to the cinema. Everyone can see that's a bluff.