Why is the amount of space a report takes up still an issue?
Details are important. If you want a short version, then make a summary, but don't cut out the detail available to do that.
In terms of ascii/unicode text, we're not going to run out of bytes to explain important scientific details.
Heck - make videos of the processes, mention part numbers, and even show mistakes that you encountered along the way in your notes! Video hosting is free, and shouldn't be going away anytime soon. Making a process replication video should be a normal thing.
If you're spending so much time anyway, so much of your life in these studies, what's the value in holding back important information?
I'm a pretty liberal dude - but this age-information-protection thing is the wrong role for any governance to be playing.
It's an objective, publicly available piece of information. Birth records aren't secret, or in any way protected from public view. Trying to punish websites for listing that among other pertinent details on public figures like actors is just crazy.
That's not to say age discrimination is an unrealistic thing to fear - but this is exactly the wrong way to combat it, akin to punishing kids spreading rumors of an upcoming fight, rather than any of the participants. It's just bad tactics too - objecting to information only spreads that information further (justly called the Streisand effect).
I'm struggling just to wrap my head around how stupid an idea this law was, or who would propose it as a valid way to use law.
Was this some kind of a protest law, or a game of legislative chicken gone wrong?
Here's the thing - basic income CAN theoretically not work out... but some an economist with a stake or two against it working is NOT evidence that this version of it hasn't panned out. Especially when it's posted on fricken Bloomburg news!
That's what the experiment is for. Instead, it's to see if the money spend on THIS style of program is as effective as the several other programs it can replace, and whether that replacement will be practical. It's money that will be spent in any case! You need experimental comparison to judge the merit of the approach.
Again though - until RESULTS are in, hearing some talking head berate the idea of it as not to his liking isn't helpful.
It's like folks who dismiss needle exchange programs to reduce communicable disease, without actually bothering to look at the numbers, and what the studies actually account for.
This is more on the entertainment side, but also feature some of the deeper discussions on important topics than you'd find almost anywhere:
This Week in Science (TWIS) - going for over a decade, and still just as energetic, and honestly hilarious as ever. Just the right mix of solid detail and genuine humor.
Skeptics Guide to the Universe - has also been going for over a decade, and has some of the warmest, funniest folks out there. Lots and lots of science too - since at the heart of modern skepticism is the drive to understand why we can know things more than others.
Data Skeptic - relatively new, but really good, deep dives into what makes meaningful data, in a very entertaining manner.
As with most all podcasts, just make sure whatever you're listening through has a handy 30-second skip to jump past any sponsor bits, they're usually quite well-labelled in those podcasts.
Why? I want the design for mouse to be something at the forefront for developers, alongside controller support.
For the past half-decade or so, UI developers for cross-platform projects really seemed to give mouse/keyboard users a raw deal over interfaces, acting as though everything was just emulating a joystick, with horrible positive/negative acceleration logic, capping allowed movement per second, etc. Really bad controls on their ports to mouse-based systems.
Both mouse and joystick controls have their virtues. But man, when you have a choice, mouse controls with a TINY bit of practice are just amazing for their rapid precision. Controllers are cool for their analog inputs, compactness and portability.
The nice thing is that when you support both of these styles, you make it much easier to future proof your product. Once you have those handled, controls like a Steam-controller trackpad, or a trackball, or a wiimote/virtual reality controller become much easier to pick up, however they appear on later control systems.
As for the guy in TFA, yeah - I can see how he doesn't want to have to ask his funders to support any additional costs in testing. I can empathise, but as a mouse user, I say, the more platforms that get them, the better!
None of this is news. Almost all jobs these days exist more for 'coverage' rather than full-on throughput. On an instant-to-instant basis, 90+% of human 'work' time is waiting/transition/communication rather than raw action. You can often tell a long-time professional by how they spend 'in-between' time as much as traditional knowledge domain stuff, there's a sort of performance art folks pick up that's no longer 'looking busy', but instead putting folks at ease when there's nothing else to actively do.
Sure, anything repeated with predictable variance can be increasingly automated. But the job market we've grown into is based on low-balling everyone possible, then selecting the 'expensive' folks based on a random hodgepodge of subjective expectations (largely self-serving for the hiring folks). Automating lets you hire fewer grunt workers for serialized tasks - but it doesn't free you of the need for 'coverage', and it makes a larger portion of your hiring effort the 'expensive hire' style, which is a VERY mixed bag.
Don't get me wrong - almost everything we count as a 'job' WILL eventually be obviated indirectly by automation assuming we don't find a way to stagnate. There's just too much a reward at large scales to automating supply, even when wasteful, and although we'll keep getting waves of demand, it simply won't make sense to spend 40+ hours a week as a workplace like now. We'll find ways of needing less 'people coverage' and more 'system coverage' over time. Greed for time may start pushing back at greed for stuff in the mix of all that.
The video says "Holiday 2017" for Mario Odyssey, and if history is any indication, there will be delays. Launch lineup is very likely going to be primarily cross-platform ports and Zelda Breath of the Wild.
Still, that will be enough to sell a lot of units, and provide a lot of great entertainment, just don't expect an avalanche of first-party top content out the gate this time. It'll appear in pretty wide intervals, but when they're putting their focus on something, the quality level from Nintendo tends to beat just about anyone outside of Blizzard and a few other top-end developers.
I skipped the WiiU since none of the first-party games appealed to me - no Mario Galaxy/Metroid Prime/Zelda games - Pikmin was cool, but not enough, and I despise time limits on open world games. The switch, however, I'm seriously considering picking up, if only for a nice open world Zelda game and eventually the Xenoblade/Mario games. Here's hoping they bring back the Metroid Prime team, and make Metroid Other M retroactively (pun intented) non-canon.
Several methods I can think of. First, just leave the printing stage off, let any libraries that find that important just print off their own copies, and remove that excuse for high fees. That's like version 0.01.
After that, you can experiment (which is sort of being done) with proper reputation systems to replace the "we're a big organization with $X, no one else can play" model. Sure - the big organizations would still dominate most of those, and scoring 'points' in such a system would still require money - but that money should hopefully go more towards people doing work, and less towards organization fees, licenses, etc. That would get you to something like version 0.35.
Getting to this point would involve lots of scandals - but proper ones that really should happen. To get further, you'd want replace the flawed "because we're older and got more mentions" system with a proper interactive vetting process, where replications are worth a larger percentage, even if they don't get 'published'. You can start to bring the newer system into the hiring process instead of 'must have published in x or y' process we've got now. That would get you around 0.5.
To get further than that, you'd have to get outside parties interacting with the process better. Imagine a world where not only free access, but journalists would actually use it, because it's mostly as convenient as 'industry sources' info. That, and being able to contact often obscure scientists to ask a question without having to wait for days in administrative limbo as often.
I'm not coming at this from a 'oh, why won't they support my pet topic' perspective - but as someone whose had friends that have had to deal with the system as it has existed, and who is into proper James Randi-style skepticism (not "science skepticism"), who sees flaws in journals and journalists covering topics lead to mass public misunderstandings greater than just a few simple scandals.
Any system is going to have flaws - I just don't see the journals as useful to anything at this point, when expert gatekeeping can be done so much better in other circles.
They are absurd. They exists purely for the purpose of acting as gateways to science, except they're largely privately owned, and often deeply corrupt.
It's not helpful anymore. All the benefits of such a system can be achieved in far better ways in the modern era - peer review doesn't need a publishing system anymore, nor does statistical analysis, replication studies or metastudies.
The closest thing to a remaining benefit would be reference count - but even that's a dubious statistic, since so many journals exist largely to provide networks of references.
I mean, the whole process has always been somewhat corrupt in the past too - but better options can be built, and better standards should be valuable to enough people to be worth replacing these absurd journals.
I agree with the notion that we need networks to separate science from psuedo-science, but making everything crazy expensive is NOT fulfilling that logical need, nor is it reducing fake science reported as real when you get right down to it.
A real modern science network would inform journalists and laypeople about the best science available as much as the current approach. This is desperately needed, but instead, we still have journals dominating the field, to the point where jobs depend more on the journals than the actual science...again, truly absurd.
I'm working on a project right now using CMU Sphinx (because it's free/open source) to identify word starts/ends for the sake of syncing word display to audio. All the tools available for speech-to-text are going to require human editing:
...lots of words end up word salad with any tools, even custom-trained, but the tools are nice for being able to at least have the words show up on beat once they are human-corrected.
Syncing video frames of talking without the audio has got to be even more ambiguous, with more reliance on context.
Sounds like a good challenge for a learning system to pick up on. The 5000 hour mark seems almost analogous to what a human child might pick up raised watching TV in a language different from their family.
Agreed, actually - I was just saying for the motivations expressed, the better technique towards the same end would not be secession, but equal vote counting. Easier to accomplish, since liberals don't work in that headspace that would allow breaking away from a common governance.
Lots of compelling arguments against that, just this approach suits the desires of those same tech guys.
Just put a indentation stamp into every product you sell, stating "replace the electoral college with actual democratic representation".
Provide details on why the Electoral college exists, and why it's a horrible idea. Tell how the founders wanted to prevent democracy, and how that has hurt us, and how we're now stunted by our lack of actual democratic representation through equal vote impact for citizens in each state..
It's more likely to succeed, and if it does, population centers like California would essentially govern the nation from a more progressive stance going forward.
Secession isn't really a hallmark of modern liberals anyway - they want to make government WORK, and won't really fight to break a government the way modern conservatives will. Instead, they'll tend to only really agree to a fight to defeat profound inequities, like ethnic cleansing or terror - but having their vote not count as much as a rural state might just be enough if it's presented strongly enough.
There's plenty of counter-arguments against this line of reasoning - but for what you're asking for, seems that's your best choice. Ryan Fenton
Like, as in Windows Installer XML?
It wasn't a bad alternative to Installshield for especially complex installs, Strange that they... oh, it's just some lame free web builder website.
Yeah - I'll keep ignoring that then.
Ryan Fenton
You know, where the character is actively rewarded for, and celebrates some 'negative' ethical attribute? Dungeon Keeper, God of War, most action video games, etc.
Well, if they're paying you money to lie, and more money to lie bigger, then seems to me that's the same dynamic. It's a reward loop, with a context. Doesn't seem to me that this would be any more likely to cause an increase in general preference for lying, than the millions who played Dungeon Keeper being more likely to turn to workplace abuse as a first resort.
That said, context adds a lot - the classic Stanford Prison experiment and similar studies showed how far context and roles can push people with very little prodding.
Seems to me, that more thought should be put into what roles we're building for folks, especially with things like the stock market, the legal system, and managerial roles. Unbounded reward loops have a way of being pushed until something really bad breaks, even with 'normal' people.
Now available in my "NotExista' store page, I have large stickers featuring the following civic-minded messages:
"Remember kids, look both ways before crossing the street, to prevent accidents!"
and
"Be on the lookout for police brutality! It's all our jobs to record police in order to prevent crime!"...along with the FINEST of google-translated Swedish-language versions. Yours for only 50kr! Or get 2 for 80kr! Some shipping and taxes may apply.
Transform your old-fashioned 'drone' into the latest in mobile crime-prevention and accident-prevention platforms today!
Fortunately, looks like the controllers will function disconnected - but I'm just wondering how durable those controller slide rails will be.
One of the problems with the NDS series has been that the screen hinge often gets stressed and broken through normal use.
Here, the 'hinge' will be the connection between the controllers and the device you're connecting them to. Just looking at the grip style, I'd thing it would be a constant thing for players to tighten/angle their grip during play. I'd be interested in seeing the hardware reviews before buying to see if stress on those rails might flex the entire shell of the device over time.
On a similar note, I'm wondering if those slide rails also function as a controller charging mechanism, and how that might play into durability.
Still, looking very much forward to playing the upcoming Zelda game someday, just have to decide if it'll be on this thing, or buying a cheap used WiiU eventually.
Suddenly those spent costs no longer seem like they should have cost as much.
And those lessons learned? We should have just known those!
It's why industry refuses to spend anything on basic research anymore. SOO inefficient, and with priorities that make no sense to some random consultant or investor.
[sarcasm] Pff - NASA, I could do better than that! Here - I'll just make up an ideal, say, random number generation that I just happen to have a library of code on, and WOW - I do SO MUCH BETTER than them. Not impressed, NASA, not impressed.
I don't even have to bother understanding the ideals that their code was actually built towards! [end sarcasm]
Neurons work primarily in terms of communicating - I'd say they're basically communicating machines as much as muscles are movement machines. They store states, query other neurons, take external inputs, and work together to do virtually everything an animal can do, as a macroscopic being. As they grow, they have to figure out their particular role based on their inputs and outputs.
So, why can't we just query them for their contents? With stories like this, we're making artificial nerves - shouldn't there be some way we can signal the nerves, push some simple neurotransmitters, and experiment until we get enough singnal+noise to figure out the 'language'? Even in simple creatures, it seems like we should be able to do this enough to ask a neuron its contents, then query neighbors, until we at least get a loose map of queryable resources.
Every once in a while I search google scholar and the like to see what folks are doing along these lines, and I never seem to see anyone take this approach, or even attempt to reach for mechanisms of this form. But if we can see, learn, imagine in real-time, and so on, there has to at least some analogue of an informational query system we can use, static purpose neuron maps just wouldn't make sense even with the scale, even with specialization.
No - no, it could NOT be! Those zero-sum *whackos* got to Slashdot too! It's not true I tell you - everything is a positive sum game, where you more you reward the rich and *deserving*, the more resources just *exist* to better serve the sheer excellence of the intentions of those in the market!
Entropy is a lie! Hope must win! If we only *trust* in the market enough, it WILL provide! Rational skepticism will only doom us all!
And with enough sarcasm, I might *just* be able to express how little a surprise this but of news is!
I know, it DOES sound absurd, and in practice, it is. Now, it's "only" around 800 individual products actually delivered fresh each year, but because I'm having to touch and test older games as a part of that process, I'm in effect coding for thousands of shipped products per year, just to make it as sane as possible to continue each product line.
And yes, that means each day, I'm jumping between 15 minute mini-projects, reviewing and raising issues on design documents, throwing together project directories and rapidly configuring them, throwing those project into automated testing suites of tools (which I'm also cross-developing), testing the various inputs/outputs of other teams to make sure nothing will prevent delivery to spec.
I'm making active progress on around a dozen separate projects each day, contacting clients as needed to hammer out shared documents, then reacting to rare but important issues as they are raised.
I code for thousands of mostly-unique commercial software products a year, using 8 languages (mostly C#), for many dozens of major customers, and lots of smaller ones.
Because of this, I have a huge chain of demands I keep track of, and methods of automation in order to collectively manage a constant flow of data requirements, and of course tracking issues both shared and common between these scenarios.
When I'm coding, I've got to code in a way that communicates these details to myself, consistent between all the languages I might have to touch for coding, scripting, database, reporting, and specialized languages a client may suddenly require.
Because of that, my code has to be a loose framework, a late-binding train station of logic, where demands may switch at any moment, and limitations imposed from other teams may similarly pop up.
My code is littered with multi-paragraph discussions of a technology I once had to interact with (customers often switch back), large sections of functions commented out rather than deleted, and other 'bad' practices just to give me landmarks and a 'flavor' of what a customer is occasionally interested in, amidst a never-ending avalanche of context switching between products and customers.
I've redesigned these several systems from the ground floor once (they used to only handle a small fraction of the work, using an antiquated language), and am working with a team to do a better design... but it's been very difficult for a team of perfectionists to understand how to react to an unlimited flow of changing requirements. Fortunately, the code itself has been quite usable, and they're using the same languages, but no system can really handle these demands truly consistently - I'd call it NP ridiculous. It's basically the "mythical man month" writ live, where I've got to do my work, and train a team whose work process may never really be able to do what I can do - definitely healthier long term, but can't help but result in some amazing process failures.
I actually would have made most of these design changes myself, but at the time, I was forbidden by management from making those choices, since I was doing my work directly at the production level - so it's actually a bit of a relief to see someone at least allowed to make some of the better choices.
In short (and yes, for this scenario, this is short), because I'm doing alone, for years, what a team of almost any size would struggle to approximate, as many of us seem to be doing, I've got no choice but to code how I need to in order to have a system that I can sanely maintain in an insane set of requirements. There's not really a choice in the matter, if your put in a position where "oh, we suddenly need this" exists as a live production task in a growing industry.
At least the guy is well educated and experienced.
Not a dramatic choice - but a solid guy all the same. Would be justly called pretty conservative most places outside the US.
I'd have much preferred an Al Franken or Elizabeth Warren emotionally - but see the virtue in a low-key centrist technocrat.
Perhaps he's exciting by virtue of being boring in this environment. Get the guy training with some comedians before the debate, and a few good lines with low expectations could have OK results.
In other news: No news is news, in this news cycle. Which isn't news, with 24 hour news.
A large portion of our (and virtually all other life) is partially composed of virus-inserted code.
To a virus, life isn't really a thing to begin with, only DNA interactions, with rare opportunities to copy.
From that perspective, death of the host body just means it's bacteria party time, and even if 99% of organelles used to copy are kaput, almost all viruses are bacteria-predators anyway. So, hiding away in human DNA for a few hundred generations or whatever is just a distraction from getting to the (ambiguous) goal of a bacteria to infect.
So, now that they're not suppressed, some random virus code passively sends a request to the organelles to write a copy of themselves for the 83rd billionth time, and this time don't get their message scrambled. All this happens trillions of times, infects perhaps millions of bacteria that manage to escape, which spread off into the world to keep the messy process going.
Niches for DNA code are massively multidimensional, and even though the possibility space for success is outrageously sparse, the life that lives in the outer reaches of possiblity doesn't have be intelligent to know it's a bad idea, and so spreads where we can't imagine. Things like life that only has the chance to reproduce every few hundred years (using another life form's mechanisms to keep their DNA active in the meantime), or has to jump between 3 species in order to continue a full reproduction cycle.
Heck, the only reason we can move around and talk and stuff is because some odd other microlife got mixed in with an ancestors cells to become mitocondria. With that, we can live away from immediate energy sources, and use sugars. To this day, bacteria are constantly mixing DNA with eachother, getting into the oddest combinations, with some help from viruses, who get everyone else involved in the party.
And from a microscopic perspective, we're mostly mobile apartments for bacteria, that protect the bacteria/helpful viruses we like from the bacteria/viruses that tend to wreck the apartment. Fortunately, most bacteria are boring tenants, and most viruses only target bacteria.
Microsoft makes very good developer tools - but the decision on how to make them, unfortunately, has constantly been shaped by a LONG series of internal political decisions on what products they want to be promoting at that very second.
DirectX, Crystal Reports, 'Modern' (metro to everyone else), the dot Net framework, phones, MS-specific java,, etc., etc... Some of them ended up good ideas, some of them were just what they wanted to push to capture some market. It's a big part of why it's actually something of a bad idea to just read Microsoft documentation on their own products - they'll tend to color every piece of introductory material in light of what they want to promote at that moment, what they want YOU to do for THEM.
They also tend to stall on some technologies that they feel will shift resources in a way that won't help them at that very moment. Shifting to 64-bit developer tools might be a bit expensive to test binary interoperability with everything - and Microsoft also hasn't found a very good consistent method of hosting 32-bit DLLs into 64-bit executables that isn't just some piped communication between different process spaces. I can understand their reluctance to commit resources into something they're not sure they can make work seamlessly.
But really, I've seen a lot of my Visual Studio exe memory usage stats floating up to the large-address-aware 32-bit limit. Even if it doesn't meet 100% compatibility/interoperability, I think it would still be a good idea to start an experimental option of a set of 64-bit build environments. Perhaps with embedded 32-bit memory spaces that you can host stuff in without loading errors, if at all possible - but 64-bit-only restrictions if that's not possible would also be acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are we still using printed journals?
Why is the amount of space a report takes up still an issue?
Details are important. If you want a short version, then make a summary, but don't cut out the detail available to do that.
In terms of ascii/unicode text, we're not going to run out of bytes to explain important scientific details.
Heck - make videos of the processes, mention part numbers, and even show mistakes that you encountered along the way in your notes! Video hosting is free, and shouldn't be going away anytime soon. Making a process replication video should be a normal thing.
If you're spending so much time anyway, so much of your life in these studies, what's the value in holding back important information?
Ryan Fenton
I'm a pretty liberal dude - but this age-information-protection thing is the wrong role for any governance to be playing.
It's an objective, publicly available piece of information. Birth records aren't secret, or in any way protected from public view. Trying to punish websites for listing that among other pertinent details on public figures like actors is just crazy.
That's not to say age discrimination is an unrealistic thing to fear - but this is exactly the wrong way to combat it, akin to punishing kids spreading rumors of an upcoming fight, rather than any of the participants. It's just bad tactics too - objecting to information only spreads that information further (justly called the Streisand effect).
I'm struggling just to wrap my head around how stupid an idea this law was, or who would propose it as a valid way to use law.
Was this some kind of a protest law, or a game of legislative chicken gone wrong?
Ryan Fenton
Here's the thing - basic income CAN theoretically not work out... but some an economist with a stake or two against it working is NOT evidence that this version of it hasn't panned out. Especially when it's posted on fricken Bloomburg news!
That's what the experiment is for. Instead, it's to see if the money spend on THIS style of program is as effective as the several other programs it can replace, and whether that replacement will be practical. It's money that will be spent in any case! You need experimental comparison to judge the merit of the approach.
Again though - until RESULTS are in, hearing some talking head berate the idea of it as not to his liking isn't helpful.
It's like folks who dismiss needle exchange programs to reduce communicable disease, without actually bothering to look at the numbers, and what the studies actually account for.
Ryan Fenton
This is more on the entertainment side, but also feature some of the deeper discussions on important topics than you'd find almost anywhere:
This Week in Science (TWIS) - going for over a decade, and still just as energetic, and honestly hilarious as ever. Just the right mix of solid detail and genuine humor.
Skeptics Guide to the Universe - has also been going for over a decade, and has some of the warmest, funniest folks out there. Lots and lots of science too - since at the heart of modern skepticism is the drive to understand why we can know things more than others.
Data Skeptic - relatively new, but really good, deep dives into what makes meaningful data, in a very entertaining manner.
As with most all podcasts, just make sure whatever you're listening through has a handy 30-second skip to jump past any sponsor bits, they're usually quite well-labelled in those podcasts.
I'm ALL FOR mouse controls on consoles!
Why? I want the design for mouse to be something at the forefront for developers, alongside controller support.
For the past half-decade or so, UI developers for cross-platform projects really seemed to give mouse/keyboard users a raw deal over interfaces, acting as though everything was just emulating a joystick, with horrible positive/negative acceleration logic, capping allowed movement per second, etc. Really bad controls on their ports to mouse-based systems.
Both mouse and joystick controls have their virtues. But man, when you have a choice, mouse controls with a TINY bit of practice are just amazing for their rapid precision. Controllers are cool for their analog inputs, compactness and portability.
The nice thing is that when you support both of these styles, you make it much easier to future proof your product. Once you have those handled, controls like a Steam-controller trackpad, or a trackball, or a wiimote/virtual reality controller become much easier to pick up, however they appear on later control systems.
As for the guy in TFA, yeah - I can see how he doesn't want to have to ask his funders to support any additional costs in testing. I can empathise, but as a mouse user, I say, the more platforms that get them, the better!
Ryan Fenton
None of this is news. Almost all jobs these days exist more for 'coverage' rather than full-on throughput. On an instant-to-instant basis, 90+% of human 'work' time is waiting/transition/communication rather than raw action. You can often tell a long-time professional by how they spend 'in-between' time as much as traditional knowledge domain stuff, there's a sort of performance art folks pick up that's no longer 'looking busy', but instead putting folks at ease when there's nothing else to actively do.
Sure, anything repeated with predictable variance can be increasingly automated. But the job market we've grown into is based on low-balling everyone possible, then selecting the 'expensive' folks based on a random hodgepodge of subjective expectations (largely self-serving for the hiring folks). Automating lets you hire fewer grunt workers for serialized tasks - but it doesn't free you of the need for 'coverage', and it makes a larger portion of your hiring effort the 'expensive hire' style, which is a VERY mixed bag.
Don't get me wrong - almost everything we count as a 'job' WILL eventually be obviated indirectly by automation assuming we don't find a way to stagnate. There's just too much a reward at large scales to automating supply, even when wasteful, and although we'll keep getting waves of demand, it simply won't make sense to spend 40+ hours a week as a workplace like now. We'll find ways of needing less 'people coverage' and more 'system coverage' over time. Greed for time may start pushing back at greed for stuff in the mix of all that.
Ryan Fenton
The video says "Holiday 2017" for Mario Odyssey, and if history is any indication, there will be delays. Launch lineup is very likely going to be primarily cross-platform ports and Zelda Breath of the Wild.
Still, that will be enough to sell a lot of units, and provide a lot of great entertainment, just don't expect an avalanche of first-party top content out the gate this time. It'll appear in pretty wide intervals, but when they're putting their focus on something, the quality level from Nintendo tends to beat just about anyone outside of Blizzard and a few other top-end developers.
I skipped the WiiU since none of the first-party games appealed to me - no Mario Galaxy/Metroid Prime/Zelda games - Pikmin was cool, but not enough, and I despise time limits on open world games. The switch, however, I'm seriously considering picking up, if only for a nice open world Zelda game and eventually the Xenoblade/Mario games. Here's hoping they bring back the Metroid Prime team, and make Metroid Other M retroactively (pun intented) non-canon.
Ryan Fenton
Several methods I can think of. First, just leave the printing stage off, let any libraries that find that important just print off their own copies, and remove that excuse for high fees. That's like version 0.01.
After that, you can experiment (which is sort of being done) with proper reputation systems to replace the "we're a big organization with $X, no one else can play" model. Sure - the big organizations would still dominate most of those, and scoring 'points' in such a system would still require money - but that money should hopefully go more towards people doing work, and less towards organization fees, licenses, etc. That would get you to something like version 0.35.
Getting to this point would involve lots of scandals - but proper ones that really should happen. To get further, you'd want replace the flawed "because we're older and got more mentions" system with a proper interactive vetting process, where replications are worth a larger percentage, even if they don't get 'published'. You can start to bring the newer system into the hiring process instead of 'must have published in x or y' process we've got now. That would get you around 0.5.
To get further than that, you'd have to get outside parties interacting with the process better. Imagine a world where not only free access, but journalists would actually use it, because it's mostly as convenient as 'industry sources' info. That, and being able to contact often obscure scientists to ask a question without having to wait for days in administrative limbo as often.
I'm not coming at this from a 'oh, why won't they support my pet topic' perspective - but as someone whose had friends that have had to deal with the system as it has existed, and who is into proper James Randi-style skepticism (not "science skepticism"), who sees flaws in journals and journalists covering topics lead to mass public misunderstandings greater than just a few simple scandals.
Any system is going to have flaws - I just don't see the journals as useful to anything at this point, when expert gatekeeping can be done so much better in other circles.
They are absurd. They exists purely for the purpose of acting as gateways to science, except they're largely privately owned, and often deeply corrupt.
It's not helpful anymore. All the benefits of such a system can be achieved in far better ways in the modern era - peer review doesn't need a publishing system anymore, nor does statistical analysis, replication studies or metastudies.
The closest thing to a remaining benefit would be reference count - but even that's a dubious statistic, since so many journals exist largely to provide networks of references.
I mean, the whole process has always been somewhat corrupt in the past too - but better options can be built, and better standards should be valuable to enough people to be worth replacing these absurd journals.
I agree with the notion that we need networks to separate science from psuedo-science, but making everything crazy expensive is NOT fulfilling that logical need, nor is it reducing fake science reported as real when you get right down to it.
A real modern science network would inform journalists and laypeople about the best science available as much as the current approach. This is desperately needed, but instead, we still have journals dominating the field, to the point where jobs depend more on the journals than the actual science...again, truly absurd.
Ryan Fenton
Sounds about right, for the circumstances.
...lots of words end up word salad with any tools, even custom-trained, but the tools are nice for being able to at least have the words show up on beat once they are human-corrected.
I'm working on a project right now using CMU Sphinx (because it's free/open source) to identify word starts/ends for the sake of syncing word display to audio. All the tools available for speech-to-text are going to require human editing:
Comparrison of commonly used speech-to-text tools
Syncing video frames of talking without the audio has got to be even more ambiguous, with more reliance on context.
Sounds like a good challenge for a learning system to pick up on. The 5000 hour mark seems almost analogous to what a human child might pick up raised watching TV in a language different from their family.
Ryan Fenton
Agreed, actually - I was just saying for the motivations expressed, the better technique towards the same end would not be secession, but equal vote counting. Easier to accomplish, since liberals don't work in that headspace that would allow breaking away from a common governance.
Lots of compelling arguments against that, just this approach suits the desires of those same tech guys.
Ryan Fenton
Just put a indentation stamp into every product you sell, stating "replace the electoral college with actual democratic representation".
Provide details on why the Electoral college exists, and why it's a horrible idea. Tell how the founders wanted to prevent democracy, and how that has hurt us, and how we're now stunted by our lack of actual democratic representation through equal vote impact for citizens in each state..
It's more likely to succeed, and if it does, population centers like California would essentially govern the nation from a more progressive stance going forward.
Secession isn't really a hallmark of modern liberals anyway - they want to make government WORK, and won't really fight to break a government the way modern conservatives will. Instead, they'll tend to only really agree to a fight to defeat profound inequities, like ethnic cleansing or terror - but having their vote not count as much as a rural state might just be enough if it's presented strongly enough.
There's plenty of counter-arguments against this line of reasoning - but for what you're asking for, seems that's your best choice.
Ryan Fenton
Like, as in Windows Installer XML? It wasn't a bad alternative to Installshield for especially complex installs, Strange that they... oh, it's just some lame free web builder website. Yeah - I'll keep ignoring that then. Ryan Fenton
You know, where the character is actively rewarded for, and celebrates some 'negative' ethical attribute? Dungeon Keeper, God of War, most action video games, etc.
Well, if they're paying you money to lie, and more money to lie bigger, then seems to me that's the same dynamic. It's a reward loop, with a context. Doesn't seem to me that this would be any more likely to cause an increase in general preference for lying, than the millions who played Dungeon Keeper being more likely to turn to workplace abuse as a first resort.
That said, context adds a lot - the classic Stanford Prison experiment and similar studies showed how far context and roles can push people with very little prodding.
Seems to me, that more thought should be put into what roles we're building for folks, especially with things like the stock market, the legal system, and managerial roles. Unbounded reward loops have a way of being pushed until something really bad breaks, even with 'normal' people.
Now available in my "NotExista' store page, I have large stickers featuring the following civic-minded messages:
"Remember kids, look both ways before crossing the street, to prevent accidents!"
and
"Be on the lookout for police brutality! It's all our jobs to record police in order to prevent crime!" ...along with the FINEST of google-translated Swedish-language versions. Yours for only 50kr! Or get 2 for 80kr! Some shipping and taxes may apply.
Transform your old-fashioned 'drone' into the latest in mobile crime-prevention and accident-prevention platforms today!
Ryan Fenton
Fortunately, looks like the controllers will function disconnected - but I'm just wondering how durable those controller slide rails will be.
One of the problems with the NDS series has been that the screen hinge often gets stressed and broken through normal use.
Here, the 'hinge' will be the connection between the controllers and the device you're connecting them to. Just looking at the grip style, I'd thing it would be a constant thing for players to tighten/angle their grip during play. I'd be interested in seeing the hardware reviews before buying to see if stress on those rails might flex the entire shell of the device over time.
On a similar note, I'm wondering if those slide rails also function as a controller charging mechanism, and how that might play into durability.
Still, looking very much forward to playing the upcoming Zelda game someday, just have to decide if it'll be on this thing, or buying a cheap used WiiU eventually.
Ryan Fenton
D'oh - NSA, not NASA. Nevermind - Feel like an old SNL sketch there.
Ryan Fenton
In retrospect.
Suddenly those spent costs no longer seem like they should have cost as much.
And those lessons learned? We should have just known those!
It's why industry refuses to spend anything on basic research anymore. SOO inefficient, and with priorities that make no sense to some random consultant or investor.
[sarcasm]
Pff - NASA, I could do better than that! Here - I'll just make up an ideal, say, random number generation that I just happen to have a library of code on, and WOW - I do SO MUCH BETTER than them. Not impressed, NASA, not impressed.
I don't even have to bother understanding the ideals that their code was actually built towards!
[end sarcasm]
Ryan Fenton
Neurons work primarily in terms of communicating - I'd say they're basically communicating machines as much as muscles are movement machines. They store states, query other neurons, take external inputs, and work together to do virtually everything an animal can do, as a macroscopic being. As they grow, they have to figure out their particular role based on their inputs and outputs.
So, why can't we just query them for their contents? With stories like this, we're making artificial nerves - shouldn't there be some way we can signal the nerves, push some simple neurotransmitters, and experiment until we get enough singnal+noise to figure out the 'language'? Even in simple creatures, it seems like we should be able to do this enough to ask a neuron its contents, then query neighbors, until we at least get a loose map of queryable resources.
Every once in a while I search google scholar and the like to see what folks are doing along these lines, and I never seem to see anyone take this approach, or even attempt to reach for mechanisms of this form. But if we can see, learn, imagine in real-time, and so on, there has to at least some analogue of an informational query system we can use, static purpose neuron maps just wouldn't make sense even with the scale, even with specialization.
Ryan Fenton
No - no, it could NOT be! Those zero-sum *whackos* got to Slashdot too! It's not true I tell you - everything is a positive sum game, where you more you reward the rich and *deserving*, the more resources just *exist* to better serve the sheer excellence of the intentions of those in the market!
Entropy is a lie! Hope must win! If we only *trust* in the market enough, it WILL provide! Rational skepticism will only doom us all!
And with enough sarcasm, I might *just* be able to express how little a surprise this but of news is!
Ryan Fenton
I know, it DOES sound absurd, and in practice, it is. Now, it's "only" around 800 individual products actually delivered fresh each year, but because I'm having to touch and test older games as a part of that process, I'm in effect coding for thousands of shipped products per year, just to make it as sane as possible to continue each product line.
And yes, that means each day, I'm jumping between 15 minute mini-projects, reviewing and raising issues on design documents, throwing together project directories and rapidly configuring them, throwing those project into automated testing suites of tools (which I'm also cross-developing), testing the various inputs/outputs of other teams to make sure nothing will prevent delivery to spec.
I'm making active progress on around a dozen separate projects each day, contacting clients as needed to hammer out shared documents, then reacting to rare but important issues as they are raised.
Ryan Fenton
I code for thousands of mostly-unique commercial software products a year, using 8 languages (mostly C#), for many dozens of major customers, and lots of smaller ones.
Because of this, I have a huge chain of demands I keep track of, and methods of automation in order to collectively manage a constant flow of data requirements, and of course tracking issues both shared and common between these scenarios.
When I'm coding, I've got to code in a way that communicates these details to myself, consistent between all the languages I might have to touch for coding, scripting, database, reporting, and specialized languages a client may suddenly require.
Because of that, my code has to be a loose framework, a late-binding train station of logic, where demands may switch at any moment, and limitations imposed from other teams may similarly pop up.
My code is littered with multi-paragraph discussions of a technology I once had to interact with (customers often switch back), large sections of functions commented out rather than deleted, and other 'bad' practices just to give me landmarks and a 'flavor' of what a customer is occasionally interested in, amidst a never-ending avalanche of context switching between products and customers.
I've redesigned these several systems from the ground floor once (they used to only handle a small fraction of the work, using an antiquated language), and am working with a team to do a better design... but it's been very difficult for a team of perfectionists to understand how to react to an unlimited flow of changing requirements. Fortunately, the code itself has been quite usable, and they're using the same languages, but no system can really handle these demands truly consistently - I'd call it NP ridiculous. It's basically the "mythical man month" writ live, where I've got to do my work, and train a team whose work process may never really be able to do what I can do - definitely healthier long term, but can't help but result in some amazing process failures.
I actually would have made most of these design changes myself, but at the time, I was forbidden by management from making those choices, since I was doing my work directly at the production level - so it's actually a bit of a relief to see someone at least allowed to make some of the better choices.
In short (and yes, for this scenario, this is short), because I'm doing alone, for years, what a team of almost any size would struggle to approximate, as many of us seem to be doing, I've got no choice but to code how I need to in order to have a system that I can sanely maintain in an insane set of requirements. There's not really a choice in the matter, if your put in a position where "oh, we suddenly need this" exists as a live production task in a growing industry.
Ryan Fenton
Milktoast centrist put in vice president status. Courage required: 0
WIkipedia entry
At least the guy is well educated and experienced.
Not a dramatic choice - but a solid guy all the same. Would be justly called pretty conservative most places outside the US.
I'd have much preferred an Al Franken or Elizabeth Warren emotionally - but see the virtue in a low-key centrist technocrat.
Perhaps he's exciting by virtue of being boring in this environment. Get the guy training with some comedians before the debate, and a few good lines with low expectations could have OK results.
In other news: No news is news, in this news cycle. Which isn't news, with 24 hour news.
Ryan Fenton
A large portion of our (and virtually all other life) is partially composed of virus-inserted code.
To a virus, life isn't really a thing to begin with, only DNA interactions, with rare opportunities to copy.
From that perspective, death of the host body just means it's bacteria party time, and even if 99% of organelles used to copy are kaput, almost all viruses are bacteria-predators anyway. So, hiding away in human DNA for a few hundred generations or whatever is just a distraction from getting to the (ambiguous) goal of a bacteria to infect.
So, now that they're not suppressed, some random virus code passively sends a request to the organelles to write a copy of themselves for the 83rd billionth time, and this time don't get their message scrambled. All this happens trillions of times, infects perhaps millions of bacteria that manage to escape, which spread off into the world to keep the messy process going.
Niches for DNA code are massively multidimensional, and even though the possibility space for success is outrageously sparse, the life that lives in the outer reaches of possiblity doesn't have be intelligent to know it's a bad idea, and so spreads where we can't imagine. Things like life that only has the chance to reproduce every few hundred years (using another life form's mechanisms to keep their DNA active in the meantime), or has to jump between 3 species in order to continue a full reproduction cycle.
Heck, the only reason we can move around and talk and stuff is because some odd other microlife got mixed in with an ancestors cells to become mitocondria. With that, we can live away from immediate energy sources, and use sugars. To this day, bacteria are constantly mixing DNA with eachother, getting into the oddest combinations, with some help from viruses, who get everyone else involved in the party.
And from a microscopic perspective, we're mostly mobile apartments for bacteria, that protect the bacteria/helpful viruses we like from the bacteria/viruses that tend to wreck the apartment. Fortunately, most bacteria are boring tenants, and most viruses only target bacteria.
Ryan Fenton
Microsoft makes very good developer tools - but the decision on how to make them, unfortunately, has constantly been shaped by a LONG series of internal political decisions on what products they want to be promoting at that very second.
DirectX, Crystal Reports, 'Modern' (metro to everyone else), the dot Net framework, phones, MS-specific java,, etc., etc... Some of them ended up good ideas, some of them were just what they wanted to push to capture some market. It's a big part of why it's actually something of a bad idea to just read Microsoft documentation on their own products - they'll tend to color every piece of introductory material in light of what they want to promote at that moment, what they want YOU to do for THEM.
They also tend to stall on some technologies that they feel will shift resources in a way that won't help them at that very moment. Shifting to 64-bit developer tools might be a bit expensive to test binary interoperability with everything - and Microsoft also hasn't found a very good consistent method of hosting 32-bit DLLs into 64-bit executables that isn't just some piped communication between different process spaces. I can understand their reluctance to commit resources into something they're not sure they can make work seamlessly.
But really, I've seen a lot of my Visual Studio exe memory usage stats floating up to the large-address-aware 32-bit limit. Even if it doesn't meet 100% compatibility/interoperability, I think it would still be a good idea to start an experimental option of a set of 64-bit build environments. Perhaps with embedded 32-bit memory spaces that you can host stuff in without loading errors, if at all possible - but 64-bit-only restrictions if that's not possible would also be acceptable.
Ryan Fenton