China is an economic competitor to the US. Being roughly the same geographic size, but a population 10x the amount of the United States.
Of which 8x are liabilities, rather than assets.
You can't even send China's bottom billion into battle without somehow having to feed them. If China declared war on Russia, the general M.O. would be to launch an invasion of Moscow in the early spring, while providing the troops with no warm clothing should the invasion fail to conclude promptly. That would be the Chinese army's only logistical answer.
I'd think twice before conflating subsistence-farming diaspora with industrial strength in numbers. Yes, I exaggerate a bit (these are educated people), but not a lot. Wake me up in another generation (or two).
I consider myself slow to identify people by faces alone, but quick to realize by gait alone that a person in a coffee shop was also there the previous day.
I recognize facial mannerisms quite quickly, as well. First, there's the "oh, I've seen that look before". That maps onto a psychological profile. And finally (most of the time) the psychological profile finally indexes onto identity. I also find that gait is more psychological than facial features. How people amble about expresses a lot about their personality and presentation style. Even speech rhythm strikes me as more informative and specific.
At the same time, given an old year book, I recognize all my own schoolmates without any difficulty. I just think my circuit is relatively slow compared to the general population, and I'm not able to rely on it in fluid social situations, where other factors control the pace.
I have a non-genetic sibling who will recognize and identify everyone assembled in a crowded environment in one glance, then move through the room resuming her last conversation with each person wherever it broke off (could be months ago), while also commenting on any physical change or added bling.
And she thinks of herself as not very smart, because both of her brothers were academic eggheads.
The other thing about my ability to pick up mannerisms is that I'm always the first to interpret an oddity. After a weird interaction, someone will go "what was that expression?" about some participant and I'll go "it was nothing; that person momentarily starting to think about something else unrelated to the conversation, and it leaked out".
How do I know this? I have no idea. Somehow I'm extremely alert to cognitive task switching.
The human face is basically just a front panel, one where I recognize the patterns in the blinking lights faster than I recognize the layout of the LEDs.
We know Podesta got phished because there's a damned phishing email in the dump.
That isn't how you know this. Your argument depends upon a chain of competent IT administration all the way back to Hillary's private DKIM key, which must also be of sufficient strength to resist being cracked by nation-state actors.
But, hey, don't let the nitty gritty details sully your glib narrative arc.
I just spend ten minutes checking out the reams of unstated assumptions involved here, and on balance, these DKIM signatures should probably be regarded as valid.
Who administrates hillaryclinton.com to ensure the secrecy of the private DKIM key? Some 400-lb guy in Hillary's basement? Or a competent cloud provider?
It sure would have made my day if your implicitly vaunted admin authority had turned out to be the fat guy in Hillary's basement.
(Even with a competent host, any party competent enough to crack the server can then make the fruits of that crack widely available. Amazing what you can procure for a Bitcoin these days at the fake-Mennonite farmer's market.)
Moreover, IIRC, you didn't get your franchise until after releasing from the service [...] It takes an incredibly thoughtless person to read "fascism" into that.
Not if you've studied the revolving door on Wall St, where yesterday's swing-from-the-rafters bare-knuckle trader becomes today's sober, no-blame Free Market Vizier (a government post in name only) becomes tomorrow's cushy, corner office Senior Vice Potentate.
Picture the post-government regulator SVP seated at a giant mahogany desk complete a giant jar of loose contact lens to bungle onto the plush pile as the need arises.
"Yoohoo, jailbait, I seem to have lost another lens!"
"Hold your horses, Honcho, I'm still adjusting my skirt from our last fumble."
"Don't you mean my last fumble."
"Yes, of course, that, too."
And good times were had by all, Wall to Wall.
Footnote: Charlie Wilson was a saint compared to these retreats.
Also, if you noticed the Nazi symbolism in Starship Troopers (my roommate at the time nailed it in under three minutes), you probably also identified this post as one of the most deliberately least-assed Lord of the Flies analogies ever composed, in homage to Paul Verhoeven's brilliant masterwork.
I think you'll find that your approach will produce legal chicanery the likes of which you have never before imagined.
To a certain degree, this doesn't matter. Especially where banks are concerned, because each corporation, no matter how byzantine, files for bankruptcy independently.
It such a world, when the stock market tanks, and the wizards of Wall St say "we the profits coming, but the losses caught us off guard, help Obi Wan Greenspan, you're our only hope" we can sit back and let the micro-container corporations die on the vine one by one, until enough blood is let to finally get the f-f-f-financial message across that profits and losses are joined at the hips.
This is a simple property of corporations as legal failure boundaries. All the barnacles in Byzantium don't change that one, simple, elementary, essential, free-market fact.
Bankruptcy law makes capitalism fundamentally anti-symmetric (failure has a fixed absorbing boundary, but success does not). The power of mitigating this enormous systemic artefact, even in relatively small ways, should not be flipped the bird.
The thesis in this thread was that Pebble fell victim to a single-sourced display technology, which was contested a few posts later. But supply issues can be complex, and available replacements unsuited in form factor, process, or price.
If it really was death by supply chain, that explains a lot about Fitbit consuming the carcass rather than resuming the company.
At this point, the display is a Sharp Microelectronics memory LCD.
Did some critical vendor actually go tits up?
In any case, my old Pebble is still on my wrist, functioning as a vibrating pill timer and I'm not presently in the market for something less open, but with more bling.
I would expect that anybody acting in a professional manner would know not to shit talk their employer.
Laszlo Bock's book about Google's HR practices said that Google permits a fair amount of shit-talk on public forums, but not so much on internal forums, if the subject matter becomes heated or divisive.
There are professional ways to shit talk your employer. Calm language with "I" at the front of the sentence is a good start.
If my employer were to publish op-eds in major news outlets about how net neutrality is bad for business, I would certainly pipe up in public with my personal view that this corporate policy was misguided, short-sighted, and lamentable.
Adults can choose to disagree.
We should not have to park our adulthood to profitably engage in our professional sphere.
Up to a point—as recounted by their own former SVP of People Operations—Google itself shares this view.
BTW, Damore did more than just write a heated memo. He also engaged in some misguided external interviews after the fact with parties whose motives he did not properly assess (this by his own admission). We don't really know where he crossed the line on Google's internal policy, and there's a good chance that the whole story will never out.
I originally started this post by asking when did Google ever innovate as I would argue that from a product/solution perspective Google has never produced anything before anybody else or entered an under-serviced market with a truly game changing product.
Microsoft spent decades queering the word "innovation" until the conversation degenerated to this level.
Look up every time a Microsoft executive spouted the word "innovation" as one of their first-paragraph talking points. (Try not to break Google while doing so.) Every damn time "innovation" was used in the context of product innovation, as if that's the only (or main) kind of innovation worth paying attention to.
They did this because Microsoft was a spectacularly innovative company, but their preferred field of invention was "business methods (unethical)". They didn't really want people asking how they became worth hundreds of billions of dollars with very little product-side innovation under their belts. (The other explanation conveys a bitter whiff of anti-trust.)
There was at least a decade where Google was easily one of the most innovative companies ever founded.
The core innovation was figuring out that they could only monetize each search result to a fraction of a cent. Hence they had to deliver each search result for far less than a fraction of cent. Their innovations in algorithmic efficiency, parallel computing, computing at scale, data center management, hardware efficiency, and internal network efficiency are legendary, and with just cause.
On the revenue side, Google innovated running a sponsorship auction on every search result (I don't know this side very well myself, but Laszlo Bock talks about it in his recent book).
It's hard to say how this all rolls out internally, but Google remains formidable in the machine learning space. AlphaZero is one of the most jaw-dropping results of my lifetime, and I still remember 1972 with a fair degree of clarity. My family was so insular, I barely understood that hockey was part of the Canadian zeitgeist until the Canada–Russia series. Somehow that culture shock woke up my internal PVR, and I've been archiving my impressions of the greater world around me ever since.
Frankly, at this point, I'm not actually sure that Google should be in the business of innovating whole new product categories. When Yegge signed up, that was probably part of the mission that attracted him, but the world changes, and not every company grinds away in the same groove forever and ever.
Google's manta is "organize the world's knowledge" and the various product categories they developed were a means to an end. ML is far more instrumental to their long-term vision. Page understood from the beginning that ML is highly dependant on big data, so they innovated preferentially in product categories with an accrued data payoff (geography, the social graph, speech recognition, machine translation).
The problem for Google at this point is that they have become king of Passive Advertising Mountain. I'm using the word 'passive' here to mean that their advertising approach is largely based on influencing the lizard brain.
'Active' advertising (for which the word 'advertising' might not even be appropriate) is finding out where your users want to go in life, their deep goals and aspirations, and then helping to filter out everything that does contribute to this.
Filter bubbles are great, so long as the bubble is a mentorship cocoon with your own best interests at heart, rather than sculpted out of libidinous landfill.
99% of silicon valley is presently suffering from VC lock-in to libidinous-landfill business models.
The opposing business model hasn't been figured out, yet, so far as I can see.
One could envision a Guild system, rehashing MOOC technology, where a person signs a contract with a Guild, wh
This is a big deal, in the longer term, but not because it stirs up a hornet's nest of kompromat as usual.
When every rumour is true, no rumour is true.
Slowly, but surely, this will ultimately devalue prurience.
Still, it will be pretty embarrassing to be caught doing your homework, not with Natalie Portman 2.0 (hey, dude, bump my phone), but the sweet young thing who sits beside you in English class baring her soul implausibly, while perfecting her special calligraphy.
The other directions this could go is society bans possession of prurient imagery of actual human beings altogether.
Facebook already has a pretty good algorithm for sniffing out actual human likeness.
Besides, you can just upload all the IRL chicks that hit your buttons, have an advanced ML algorithm map out your dark side, then synthesize your ultimate dark fantasy, which/who pushes all your buttons simultaneously.
Recently, I had to brush up on all this Jungian crap because Jordan Peterson. It's both interesting and creepy.
The Internet used to be a metaphor for the great profusion of the world's knowledge instantly at your fingertips.
These days, "on the Internet"—in the context of a hapless, hang-wringing headline—can only mean one thing: disregulated, dopaminic discursion loops, aka social media, YouTube "fail" videos, and "whatever happened to that slutty celebrity one-shot-wonder from the 1970s with the fat ass" click bait (news flash: you'll never believe).
On the Internet as in on drugs.
Nevertheless, if one spends twenty-hours-per-week consuming DNN machine-learning lectures on YouTube as delivered by world-famous practitioners, no harm done in averaging those hours into the mix, too, using the special math of drug-addiction epidemiology.
Because, you know, those two shots of coffee I drink every morning have me "on drugs" about 80 hours per week, not even counting alcohol.
What used to be at your fingertips is now under your nose.
They say that smell triggers memories. Move over smell, nothing takes me right back to the strike-riddled seventies than "job" and "hit" spiked into the same headline.
All that extra time, and the slow story authors still didn't manage to rummage around in their duffel bag of virtuous clarity long enough to fish out the phrase "most protracted".
Sorry, I was laughing so much at the idea of Murdoch and quality news being in the same sentence that I passed out...
I was too busy picturing the Australian supervillain Cyberswine swinging into battle on a long rope, emitting a leather-lunged battle cry of "scuuuuurilouusss".
Even that will not be enough. In 10 years time or less China will buy off most of Germany's industry and with it the industrial core of Europe.
Should you possess advance information on the psychoactive chemicals the Chinese intend to introduce into the German water supply, the German government would surely pay good money to obtain that information before it happens—if it's not already too late.
Splitting California's electoral votes is a right wing wet dream.
You have to give to get. Any such proposal would be tied to shifting the electoral system to true proportional representation (involving at least a large reform to the electoral college system, if not its outright elimination).
There would, first of all, have to be a vote internal to California, which is already proportional.
To pass, "yes" votes on a proposition must exceed "no" votes (i.e., more than 50% of all voters who vote). Ballots that record neither a "yes" nor a "no" on the proposition are ignored. In other words, the majority of voters required for passage refers to a majority of those voting on that proposition, rather than a majority of those voting in the election held at the same time or a majority of those who are registered to vote.
Perhaps this could be accomplished if only there was a way to systematically suppress voter turn-out in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
I wonder whose technology they would need to use to accomplish this?
How this is going to work, well, I think the Koch brother's exotic French Polynesian volcanic-island think tank has some serious explaining to do under the palm fronds in their upcoming corporate retreat.
Never say never, but this is surely SPECTRE gadget territory.
However, throw in repeal of the electoral college system, you could possibly get urban California on board, by direct appeal to naked self-interest.
Unless of course we are actually fighting a war now - but nobody recognises it?
I nearly finished Tamim Ansary's Destiny Disrupted (2009) last night, a book which I highly commend to anyone as ignorant of the history of Islam as I was before picking up this book.
It reads like hanging out in a bar with your favourite egghead drinking buddy, who casually injects 100 times more information than what you've ever known during an extended bull sessions about the history and politics of the Middle East. Rated against anal-retentive scholarship, there are no doubt many bones to pick; rated against general-information bull sessions, it's an epic romp.
East of Iran, the Cold War simply looked like the Great Game revisited. The differences were only cosmetic. What had been czarist Russia was now called the Soviet Union. The role once played by Great Britain now belonged to the United States. The dynamics, however, were the same: the intrigues, the pressures, the threat of violence, and the actual bloodshed....
The core battlefield of the Great Game had been Iran, Afghanistan, and central Asia, and this region remained in play. The Russians of the nineteenth century has wanted to push south through Afghanistan to the Persian Gulf to secure a warm water port for their navies and shipping. The Soviets had the same interest, but with added stakes: geologists were now confirming that roughly 65% of the world's petroleum lay under and around the Persian Gulf...
Huh. I wonder if any American troops are stationed in Afghanistan this very minute?
"My original instinct was to pull out and, historically, I like following my instincts. But all my life I've heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office," Trump said as he revealed the strategy.
Wow, what an amazing reveal—it sure is news to me that he's ever heard that once in all his natural born days.
Here's to your having a blast with your now spectacularly doubt-free "are we really at war?" executive time in the coming days and months, Mr Trump.
When the Bible says God made man in his image, it doesn't draw special attention to how God configured the more primitive elements of the human brain such that man was predestined to make our punitive system Old Testament primitive.
There's a memforyless version of justice: do the crime, do the time, get kicked back out into society with no lingering black marks, to sin again or not. This is a nice version of justice because no process treads overtly on free will.
Of course, when a previously convicted sex offender claims his next victim, this model offers little consolation to the inflamed amygdala.
So then we add a term to the equation where the punishment itself has memory, and we naturally set the bar such that the second egregious offence leads to permanent incarceration (or the state entering the business of murdering its own citizens—whatever the perp deserves, there's good reason to think long and hard about the state entering the murder business through yet another door).
Only now we have a circulating army of hardened, motivated cop killers (none of whom sees any upside at all in being captured alive for a second time).
So then we add back into the system a pretense of ongoing slope: hormonal young males convicted of the most severe forms of aggravated assault have no hope of release until middle age has dulled the biochemistry.
For a lesser category of assault, the second conviction is pretty harsh: 20 years—a somewhat palatable number to the victim's family at time of sentencing, but with a hope of parole in half that time (presumptively a large enough glimmer of hope to alleviate rampant cop killing. The victim's family generally have their vengeance dials set to +infinity, but there's maybe 1% of their brain able to grasp that 20 years as "a long time", and so we appease this 1%, as it's the only grounds for compromise available (see God: humanity baked—God eventually sends Jesus to remind humanity that this 1% was not a design accident; 2000 years later, this imperative message from on high is withering on the vine, and in dire need of a booster shot).
Of course, it's not possible to practice actual forgiveness&mashmassive fly in the heaven-endorsed ointment—without creating the possibility that the person forgiven will offend again (with terrible, permanent consequences).
"Well, if only you could predict future behaviour," hisses the snake in the garden.
So we enter the God business, and convene panels or algorithms to assign consequences to people for actions they have yet to commit (because we think they probably might).
Abandon free will, all ye who enter here. There's no other way to slice it.
We can soften the blow of Thoughtcrime Incorporated by not applying it to first-time offenders. Loss of free will now becomes a consequence of your first conviction, should you continue to commit crime.
Our justice system being far from perfect, if you take away free will from first time offenders, you have 100% certainty that the state will remove free will from the totally innocent (and not such a small population, at that—hugely biased toward social groups already disadvantaged).
God has a big problem, now. We're not likely to believe the virgin birth story a second time (it caused more than a few gasps and chuckles the first time around). How does he now send a second, major, corrective message? How does He soberly inform humanity that much of crime stems from self-perpetuating social circumstance, and that humanity would be way further ahead mitigating those circumstances, than parsing recidivism after the four horsemen of violent crime have already escaped the barn?
God puzzled over this for a long time (a very long time, by His standards) and here's what he decided: 600 years ago, He sent us QED. It was just a tiny tweak to our underlying OS, compatible with all previous data
Basically, the ad-sponsored revenue model suffer from implicit censorship through the pedestrian sensibilities of the major advertisers and this probably can't be fixed.
If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
In the modern eyeball economy, the coyote walks off the branch into space, but doesn't fall down. He just floats there on a hidden wire gathering eyeballs. Once enough eyeballs are harvested, coyote retires the hidden wires, and then all the sparrows sputter in disappointment that economic gravity was never truly suspended in the first place.
In an economy with a large cognitive surplus, the barrier of entry of explicit motivation (payment scheme) over intrinsic motivation (scratching your own creative itch) tends to be a daunting increment, open to the select few.
Ignore the levitating coyote. Thus it has ever been.
The underlying force here is how the average consumer votes with his or her wallet. Most people use an extremely narrow high-pass salience filter over emotional valence, with negatives weighted about five times higher than positives (the cognitive norm).
And then we all sit around and wonder why the pedestrian sensibilities of major advertisers has them acting en masse like unhappy rabbits.
People seem think they can funnel other people money with hardly any thought involved (I wants it, because I saw it on TV!) and not end up ultimately making their own beds to lie in.
The more YouTube tightens its rules, the more people are going to find themselves on the unprofitable side of those rules through no fault of their own or anyone else's.
Your entire sentence was built around "wrong" and "fault", but actually makes no solid claim.
Funny this topic came up today. My first waking thought was a desire to insert this into that. Sleep is amazing. True story.
This = Mel Brooks voice-alike from Springtime for Hitler in Germany with the line "don't be stupid, be a smarty, come on join the Nazi party".
That = the first skinhead refrain in Aqua's Barbie Girl with the line "come on Barbie, let's go party". You'd need to find a slightly longer version of this refrain to make the splice, but that's far enough for me for now.
I had only ever listened to Barbie Girl once (about six months ago), but it was enough to trigger some form of pattern recognition while I slept after another Producers micro-binge yesterday.
Damn if I couldn't get Mel to rewrite (and dance) that entire Danish disaster.
Mattel claimed that "Barbie Girl" violated their trademark and turned her into a sex object, referring to her as a "Blonde Bimbo".
In 2002, a Court of Appeals ruled the song was protected as a parody under the trademark doctrine of nominative use and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The judge, Alex Kozinski, also threw out the defamation lawsuit that Aqua's record company filed against Mattel, concluding his ruling: "The parties are advised to chill."
Not that lawsuits have anything to do with the sad state of lyrical insight these days.
Barbie, at 1/6 scale, would be 175.26 cm in height { 69 inches | 5'9" tall } and have the following measurements...
91.44 cm bust | 36 inches 45.72 cm waist | 18 inches 83.82 cm hips | 33 inches 55.88 cm head circumference | 22 inches 22.86 cm neck circumference | 9 inches <= insert pencil here
A healthy 19 year old girl, 163.3 cm in height { 64.3 inches | 5'3-1/2" tall } and measurements below, come from CDC.gov and [the] Huffington Post...
85.4 cm waist | 33.6 inches 35.8 cm upper arm length | 14.1 inches 36.7 cm upper leg length | 14.5 inches 50.8 cm head circumference | 20 inches 38.1 cm neck circumference | 15 inches
Ouch. And I do mean penetrating pencil neck pain. WTF, Meagan?
Arithmetic is hard: The given precision ranges from two to five significant digits (for equivalent values). Presentation is hard: the tables aren't row equivalent (a healthy girl has different measurements), and aren't column parallel either (that might make it easy to read). Geometry is hard: "Barbie, at 1/6 scale,..." should probably be "Barbie, assuming a 1/6 scale,..." Sentences are hard:A healthy 19 year old girl [] come from CDC.gov... Punctuation is hard:A healthy 19-year-old girl [] come from CDC.gov...
And—geek drum roll—the two ellipses in the quotation above (standing in for colons after "measurement" and "Post") is from the original.
==Final irony==
As a final irony, the UK measurements in the original were actually rendered using U+2033 : DOUBLE PRIME for the inch symbol, but I had to ditch that small sequin of geek enlightenment to format for Slashdot.
it seems obvious his intent was to get someone hurt or killed
If I were redesigning the school system, the four major food groups would be reading, writing, arithmetic, and intent is never obvious (keep your head up, and your eyes on a swivel on social media, boys and girls).
She's accurately portraying real research, although I don't even like this talk, because she's skating over necessary context in an unhelpful way.
The way that we see emotions in others are deeply rooted in predictions. So to us, it feels like we just look at someone's face, and we just read the emotion that's there in their facial expressions the way that we would read words on a page. But actually, under the hood, your brain is predicting. It's using past experience based on similar situations to try to make meaning. This time, you're not making meaning of blobs, you're making meaning of facial movements like the curl of a lip or the raise of an eyebrow. And that stone-faced stare? That might be someone who is a remorseless killer, but a stone-faced stare might also mean that someone is stoically accepting defeat, which is in fact what Chechen culture prescribes for someone in Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's situation.
I read a book recently with the title Do No Harm (2014) by Henry Marsh where he devotes half the book to the admission that without the rituals of patient depersonalization, some of the unbelievably desperate and risky procedures would be impossible to perform for any normal person (though a beneficent sociopath—these really do exist—might find a way—including some already in the profession).
This giant farce where the jury stares at the face of a person in a strange, threatening situation, under extreme stress, a person that the jury hardly knows (and has never witnessed interacting in a less artificial context) is strictly for the birds: the birds of not having to take too personally whatever harsh (possibly fatal) judgment the jury decides to hand down.
Some rituals are more for the surgeon than the patient; more for the jury than the accused; more for the police than the perpetrator.
What makes Lisa Feldman Barrett's talk irritating is that she never even mentions FACS.
So you watch the talks given by the people who either a) are world class at actually doing this; or b) are in the business of imparting some dangerous modicum of this skill to law enforcement professional and to the last man and woman a full one third of the talk is the long road from salient observation to supportable interpretation.
There's this thing called mental multitasking, and to judge from 90% of their students, most of the world has never heard of this.
The salient facial micro-twitches can arise from any thought or emotion passing through the other person's head. But no, 100 people surveyed, 99 people are cock sure that the other person's fleeting facial twitch is all about their own narcissistic central concern of the moment.
The experts require a cluster of three to five twitches each in close proximity to the same stress point (which is why police interrogation done correctly involves more circling around than cleaning up after a fender bender on the main runway).
Let's look at an example. You have a gun. There's a crisis going on: rioting, violence, people running around. A stranger is running at you in an agitated state -- you can't quite tell if the expression is fr
It's far from obvious to me that any of these (no doubt mostly pathetic) apocalyptic machinations pass the "very interesting" test.
Nor is it obvious to me that the government of America (in the large) is just a grown up version of that strange kid in sixth grade who snuck a live iguana into the girl's change room—just to see what they would do.
Slashdot Mirror
Of which 8x are liabilities, rather than assets.
You can't even send China's bottom billion into battle without somehow having to feed them. If China declared war on Russia, the general M.O. would be to launch an invasion of Moscow in the early spring, while providing the troops with no warm clothing should the invasion fail to conclude promptly. That would be the Chinese army's only logistical answer.
I'd think twice before conflating subsistence-farming diaspora with industrial strength in numbers. Yes, I exaggerate a bit (these are educated people), but not a lot. Wake me up in another generation (or two).
I consider myself slow to identify people by faces alone, but quick to realize by gait alone that a person in a coffee shop was also there the previous day.
I recognize facial mannerisms quite quickly, as well. First, there's the "oh, I've seen that look before". That maps onto a psychological profile. And finally (most of the time) the psychological profile finally indexes onto identity. I also find that gait is more psychological than facial features. How people amble about expresses a lot about their personality and presentation style. Even speech rhythm strikes me as more informative and specific.
At the same time, given an old year book, I recognize all my own schoolmates without any difficulty. I just think my circuit is relatively slow compared to the general population, and I'm not able to rely on it in fluid social situations, where other factors control the pace.
I have a non-genetic sibling who will recognize and identify everyone assembled in a crowded environment in one glance, then move through the room resuming her last conversation with each person wherever it broke off (could be months ago), while also commenting on any physical change or added bling.
And she thinks of herself as not very smart, because both of her brothers were academic eggheads.
The other thing about my ability to pick up mannerisms is that I'm always the first to interpret an oddity. After a weird interaction, someone will go "what was that expression?" about some participant and I'll go "it was nothing; that person momentarily starting to think about something else unrelated to the conversation, and it leaked out".
How do I know this? I have no idea. Somehow I'm extremely alert to cognitive task switching.
The human face is basically just a front panel, one where I recognize the patterns in the blinking lights faster than I recognize the layout of the LEDs.
A little bit weird, but it has its pros and cons.
The obvious retort here is that Brad wasn't the one doing the choosing.
If you knew anything about women, you'd have guessed that the literature reports that women do far more of the choosing than men do.
Men desire, women decide.
That isn't how you know this. Your argument depends upon a chain of competent IT administration all the way back to Hillary's private DKIM key, which must also be of sufficient strength to resist being cracked by nation-state actors.
But, hey, don't let the nitty gritty details sully your glib narrative arc.
I just spend ten minutes checking out the reams of unstated assumptions involved here, and on balance, these DKIM signatures should probably be regarded as valid.
Who administrates hillaryclinton.com to ensure the secrecy of the private DKIM key? Some 400-lb guy in Hillary's basement? Or a competent cloud provider?
It sure would have made my day if your implicitly vaunted admin authority had turned out to be the fat guy in Hillary's basement.
(Even with a competent host, any party competent enough to crack the server can then make the fruits of that crack widely available. Amazing what you can procure for a Bitcoin these days at the fake-Mennonite farmer's market.)
Sheesh, my fingers just automistyped it the same way, again, and I only barely caught it.
Not if you've studied the revolving door on Wall St, where yesterday's swing-from-the-rafters bare-knuckle trader becomes today's sober, no-blame Free Market Vizier (a government post in name only) becomes tomorrow's cushy, corner office Senior Vice Potentate.
Picture the post-government regulator SVP seated at a giant mahogany desk complete a giant jar of loose contact lens to bungle onto the plush pile as the need arises.
"Yoohoo, jailbait, I seem to have lost another lens!"
"Hold your horses, Honcho, I'm still adjusting my skirt from our last fumble."
"Don't you mean my last fumble."
"Yes, of course, that, too."
And good times were had by all, Wall to Wall.
Footnote: Charlie Wilson was a saint compared to these retreats.
Also, if you noticed the Nazi symbolism in Starship Troopers (my roommate at the time nailed it in under three minutes), you probably also identified this post as one of the most deliberately least-assed Lord of the Flies analogies ever composed, in homage to Paul Verhoeven's brilliant masterwork.
To a certain degree, this doesn't matter. Especially where banks are concerned, because each corporation, no matter how byzantine, files for bankruptcy independently.
It such a world, when the stock market tanks, and the wizards of Wall St say "we the profits coming, but the losses caught us off guard, help Obi Wan Greenspan, you're our only hope" we can sit back and let the micro-container corporations die on the vine one by one, until enough blood is let to finally get the f-f-f-financial message across that profits and losses are joined at the hips.
This is a simple property of corporations as legal failure boundaries. All the barnacles in Byzantium don't change that one, simple, elementary, essential, free-market fact.
Bankruptcy law makes capitalism fundamentally anti-symmetric (failure has a fixed absorbing boundary, but success does not). The power of mitigating this enormous systemic artefact, even in relatively small ways, should not be flipped the bird.
Some previous discussion: Without their needed displays Pebble was doomed — December 2016
The thesis in this thread was that Pebble fell victim to a single-sourced display technology, which was contested a few posts later. But supply issues can be complex, and available replacements unsuited in form factor, process, or price.
If it really was death by supply chain, that explains a lot about Fitbit consuming the carcass rather than resuming the company.
Pebble Teardown — March 2013
At this point, the display is a Sharp Microelectronics memory LCD.
Did some critical vendor actually go tits up?
In any case, my old Pebble is still on my wrist, functioning as a vibrating pill timer and I'm not presently in the market for something less open, but with more bling.
Laszlo Bock's book about Google's HR practices said that Google permits a fair amount of shit-talk on public forums, but not so much on internal forums, if the subject matter becomes heated or divisive.
There are professional ways to shit talk your employer. Calm language with "I" at the front of the sentence is a good start.
If my employer were to publish op-eds in major news outlets about how net neutrality is bad for business, I would certainly pipe up in public with my personal view that this corporate policy was misguided, short-sighted, and lamentable.
Adults can choose to disagree.
We should not have to park our adulthood to profitably engage in our professional sphere.
Up to a point—as recounted by their own former SVP of People Operations—Google itself shares this view.
BTW, Damore did more than just write a heated memo. He also engaged in some misguided external interviews after the fact with parties whose motives he did not properly assess (this by his own admission). We don't really know where he crossed the line on Google's internal policy, and there's a good chance that the whole story will never out.
Microsoft spent decades queering the word "innovation" until the conversation degenerated to this level.
Look up every time a Microsoft executive spouted the word "innovation" as one of their first-paragraph talking points. (Try not to break Google while doing so.) Every damn time "innovation" was used in the context of product innovation, as if that's the only (or main) kind of innovation worth paying attention to.
They did this because Microsoft was a spectacularly innovative company, but their preferred field of invention was "business methods (unethical)". They didn't really want people asking how they became worth hundreds of billions of dollars with very little product-side innovation under their belts. (The other explanation conveys a bitter whiff of anti-trust.)
There was at least a decade where Google was easily one of the most innovative companies ever founded.
The core innovation was figuring out that they could only monetize each search result to a fraction of a cent. Hence they had to deliver each search result for far less than a fraction of cent. Their innovations in algorithmic efficiency, parallel computing, computing at scale, data center management, hardware efficiency, and internal network efficiency are legendary, and with just cause.
On the revenue side, Google innovated running a sponsorship auction on every search result (I don't know this side very well myself, but Laszlo Bock talks about it in his recent book).
It's hard to say how this all rolls out internally, but Google remains formidable in the machine learning space. AlphaZero is one of the most jaw-dropping results of my lifetime, and I still remember 1972 with a fair degree of clarity. My family was so insular, I barely understood that hockey was part of the Canadian zeitgeist until the Canada–Russia series. Somehow that culture shock woke up my internal PVR, and I've been archiving my impressions of the greater world around me ever since.
Frankly, at this point, I'm not actually sure that Google should be in the business of innovating whole new product categories. When Yegge signed up, that was probably part of the mission that attracted him, but the world changes, and not every company grinds away in the same groove forever and ever.
Google's manta is "organize the world's knowledge" and the various product categories they developed were a means to an end. ML is far more instrumental to their long-term vision. Page understood from the beginning that ML is highly dependant on big data, so they innovated preferentially in product categories with an accrued data payoff (geography, the social graph, speech recognition, machine translation).
The problem for Google at this point is that they have become king of Passive Advertising Mountain. I'm using the word 'passive' here to mean that their advertising approach is largely based on influencing the lizard brain.
'Active' advertising (for which the word 'advertising' might not even be appropriate) is finding out where your users want to go in life, their deep goals and aspirations, and then helping to filter out everything that does contribute to this.
Filter bubbles are great, so long as the bubble is a mentorship cocoon with your own best interests at heart, rather than sculpted out of libidinous landfill.
99% of silicon valley is presently suffering from VC lock-in to libidinous-landfill business models.
The opposing business model hasn't been figured out, yet, so far as I can see.
One could envision a Guild system, rehashing MOOC technology, where a person signs a contract with a Guild, wh
This is a big deal, in the longer term, but not because it stirs up a hornet's nest of kompromat as usual.
When every rumour is true, no rumour is true.
Slowly, but surely, this will ultimately devalue prurience.
Still, it will be pretty embarrassing to be caught doing your homework, not with Natalie Portman 2.0 (hey, dude, bump my phone), but the sweet young thing who sits beside you in English class baring her soul implausibly, while perfecting her special calligraphy.
The other directions this could go is society bans possession of prurient imagery of actual human beings altogether.
Facebook already has a pretty good algorithm for sniffing out actual human likeness.
Besides, you can just upload all the IRL chicks that hit your buttons, have an advanced ML algorithm map out your dark side, then synthesize your ultimate dark fantasy, which/who pushes all your buttons simultaneously.
Recently, I had to brush up on all this Jungian crap because Jordan Peterson. It's both interesting and creepy.
How to Contact, Get to Know, and Integrate Your Dark Side
Never fear, soon there will be a handy app for our budding Andy Capp.
The Internet used to be a metaphor for the great profusion of the world's knowledge instantly at your fingertips.
These days, "on the Internet"—in the context of a hapless, hang-wringing headline—can only mean one thing: disregulated, dopaminic discursion loops, aka social media, YouTube "fail" videos, and "whatever happened to that slutty celebrity one-shot-wonder from the 1970s with the fat ass" click bait (news flash: you'll never believe).
On the Internet as in on drugs.
Nevertheless, if one spends twenty-hours-per-week consuming DNN machine-learning lectures on YouTube as delivered by world-famous practitioners, no harm done in averaging those hours into the mix, too, using the special math of drug-addiction epidemiology.
Because, you know, those two shots of coffee I drink every morning have me "on drugs" about 80 hours per week, not even counting alcohol.
What used to be at your fingertips is now under your nose.
They say that smell triggers memories. Move over smell, nothing takes me right back to the strike-riddled seventies than "job" and "hit" spiked into the same headline.
All that extra time, and the slow story authors still didn't manage to rummage around in their duffel bag of virtuous clarity long enough to fish out the phrase "most protracted".
I was too busy picturing the Australian supervillain Cyberswine swinging into battle on a long rope, emitting a leather-lunged battle cry of "scuuuuurilouusss".
Should you possess advance information on the psychoactive chemicals the Chinese intend to introduce into the German water supply, the German government would surely pay good money to obtain that information before it happens—if it's not already too late.
You have to give to get. Any such proposal would be tied to shifting the electoral system to true proportional representation (involving at least a large reform to the electoral college system, if not its outright elimination).
There would, first of all, have to be a vote internal to California, which is already proportional.
California ballot proposition
Perhaps this could be accomplished if only there was a way to systematically suppress voter turn-out in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
I wonder whose technology they would need to use to accomplish this?
How this is going to work, well, I think the Koch brother's exotic French Polynesian volcanic-island think tank has some serious explaining to do under the palm fronds in their upcoming corporate retreat.
Never say never, but this is surely SPECTRE gadget territory.
However, throw in repeal of the electoral college system, you could possibly get urban California on board, by direct appeal to naked self-interest.
I nearly finished Tamim Ansary's Destiny Disrupted (2009) last night, a book which I highly commend to anyone as ignorant of the history of Islam as I was before picking up this book.
It reads like hanging out in a bar with your favourite egghead drinking buddy, who casually injects 100 times more information than what you've ever known during an extended bull sessions about the history and politics of the Middle East. Rated against anal-retentive scholarship, there are no doubt many bones to pick; rated against general-information bull sessions, it's an epic romp.
The Great Game
Huh. I wonder if any American troops are stationed in Afghanistan this very minute?
Afghanistan: 16 years, thousands dead and no clear end in sight — 2017
The Forever War — 2017
Trump shifts gears on Afghanistan — 2018
Wow, what an amazing reveal—it sure is news to me that he's ever heard that once in all his natural born days.
Here's to your having a blast with your now spectacularly doubt-free "are we really at war?" executive time in the coming days and months, Mr Trump.
When the Bible says God made man in his image, it doesn't draw special attention to how God configured the more primitive elements of the human brain such that man was predestined to make our punitive system Old Testament primitive.
There's a memforyless version of justice: do the crime, do the time, get kicked back out into society with no lingering black marks, to sin again or not. This is a nice version of justice because no process treads overtly on free will.
Of course, when a previously convicted sex offender claims his next victim, this model offers little consolation to the inflamed amygdala.
So then we add a term to the equation where the punishment itself has memory, and we naturally set the bar such that the second egregious offence leads to permanent incarceration (or the state entering the business of murdering its own citizens—whatever the perp deserves, there's good reason to think long and hard about the state entering the murder business through yet another door).
Only now we have a circulating army of hardened, motivated cop killers (none of whom sees any upside at all in being captured alive for a second time).
So then we add back into the system a pretense of ongoing slope: hormonal young males convicted of the most severe forms of aggravated assault have no hope of release until middle age has dulled the biochemistry.
For a lesser category of assault, the second conviction is pretty harsh: 20 years—a somewhat palatable number to the victim's family at time of sentencing, but with a hope of parole in half that time (presumptively a large enough glimmer of hope to alleviate rampant cop killing. The victim's family generally have their vengeance dials set to +infinity, but there's maybe 1% of their brain able to grasp that 20 years as "a long time", and so we appease this 1%, as it's the only grounds for compromise available (see God: humanity baked—God eventually sends Jesus to remind humanity that this 1% was not a design accident; 2000 years later, this imperative message from on high is withering on the vine, and in dire need of a booster shot).
Of course, it's not possible to practice actual forgiveness&mashmassive fly in the heaven-endorsed ointment—without creating the possibility that the person forgiven will offend again (with terrible, permanent consequences).
"Well, if only you could predict future behaviour," hisses the snake in the garden.
So we enter the God business, and convene panels or algorithms to assign consequences to people for actions they have yet to commit (because we think they probably might).
Abandon free will, all ye who enter here. There's no other way to slice it.
We can soften the blow of Thoughtcrime Incorporated by not applying it to first-time offenders. Loss of free will now becomes a consequence of your first conviction, should you continue to commit crime.
Our justice system being far from perfect, if you take away free will from first time offenders, you have 100% certainty that the state will remove free will from the totally innocent (and not such a small population, at that—hugely biased toward social groups already disadvantaged).
God has a big problem, now. We're not likely to believe the virgin birth story a second time (it caused more than a few gasps and chuckles the first time around). How does he now send a second, major, corrective message? How does He soberly inform humanity that much of crime stems from self-perpetuating social circumstance, and that humanity would be way further ahead mitigating those circumstances, than parsing recidivism after the four horsemen of violent crime have already escaped the barn?
God puzzled over this for a long time (a very long time, by His standards) and here's what he decided: 600 years ago, He sent us QED. It was just a tiny tweak to our underlying OS, compatible with all previous data
For my chosen approach to life, Apple's walled garden has no direct benefit, either (despite some terrible long term implications).
Whatever happened to informed choice?
Basically, the ad-sponsored revenue model suffer from implicit censorship through the pedestrian sensibilities of the major advertisers and this probably can't be fixed.
If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
In the modern eyeball economy, the coyote walks off the branch into space, but doesn't fall down. He just floats there on a hidden wire gathering eyeballs. Once enough eyeballs are harvested, coyote retires the hidden wires, and then all the sparrows sputter in disappointment that economic gravity was never truly suspended in the first place.
In an economy with a large cognitive surplus, the barrier of entry of explicit motivation (payment scheme) over intrinsic motivation (scratching your own creative itch) tends to be a daunting increment, open to the select few.
Ignore the levitating coyote. Thus it has ever been.
The underlying force here is how the average consumer votes with his or her wallet. Most people use an extremely narrow high-pass salience filter over emotional valence, with negatives weighted about five times higher than positives (the cognitive norm).
And then we all sit around and wonder why the pedestrian sensibilities of major advertisers has them acting en masse like unhappy rabbits.
People seem think they can funnel other people money with hardly any thought involved (I wants it, because I saw it on TV!) and not end up ultimately making their own beds to lie in.
Your entire sentence was built around "wrong" and "fault", but actually makes no solid claim.
Try again.
==This into that==
Funny this topic came up today. My first waking thought was a desire to insert this into that. Sleep is amazing. True story.
This = Mel Brooks voice-alike from Springtime for Hitler in Germany with the line "don't be stupid, be a smarty, come on join the Nazi party".
That = the first skinhead refrain in Aqua's Barbie Girl with the line "come on Barbie, let's go party". You'd need to find a slightly longer version of this refrain to make the splice, but that's far enough for me for now.
I had only ever listened to Barbie Girl once (about six months ago), but it was enough to trigger some form of pattern recognition while I slept after another Producers micro-binge yesterday.
Damn if I couldn't get Mel to rewrite (and dance) that entire Danish disaster.
Mel's got the moves, too: High anxiety
==Slightly off-topic addendum==
Not that lawsuits have anything to do with the sad state of lyrical insight these days.
Of course she's not a sex pot.
==Geek sex-pot dumpster dive==
What Would Sex-Pot Barbie Look Like in Real Life? by Meagan Tintari
Ouch. And I do mean penetrating pencil neck pain. WTF, Meagan?
Arithmetic is hard: The given precision ranges from two to five significant digits (for equivalent values). ..." should probably be "Barbie, assuming a 1/6 scale, ..." ... ...
Presentation is hard: the tables aren't row equivalent (a healthy girl has different measurements), and aren't column parallel either (that might make it easy to read).
Geometry is hard: "Barbie, at 1/6 scale,
Sentences are hard: A healthy 19 year old girl [] come from CDC.gov
Punctuation is hard: A healthy 19-year-old girl [] come from CDC.gov
And—geek drum roll—the two ellipses in the quotation above (standing in for colons after "measurement" and "Post") is from the original.
==Final irony==
As a final irony, the UK measurements in the original were actually rendered using U+2033 : DOUBLE PRIME for the inch symbol, but I had to ditch that small sequin of geek enlightenment to format for Slashdot.
If I were redesigning the school system, the four major food groups would be reading, writing, arithmetic, and intent is never obvious (keep your head up, and your eyes on a swivel on social media, boys and girls).
You aren't at the mercy of your emotions — your brain creates them — December 2017
She's accurately portraying real research, although I don't even like this talk, because she's skating over necessary context in an unhelpful way.
I read a book recently with the title Do No Harm (2014) by Henry Marsh where he devotes half the book to the admission that without the rituals of patient depersonalization, some of the unbelievably desperate and risky procedures would be impossible to perform for any normal person (though a beneficent sociopath—these really do exist—might find a way—including some already in the profession).
This giant farce where the jury stares at the face of a person in a strange, threatening situation, under extreme stress, a person that the jury hardly knows (and has never witnessed interacting in a less artificial context) is strictly for the birds: the birds of not having to take too personally whatever harsh (possibly fatal) judgment the jury decides to hand down.
Some rituals are more for the surgeon than the patient; more for the jury than the accused; more for the police than the perpetrator.
What makes Lisa Feldman Barrett's talk irritating is that she never even mentions FACS.
So you watch the talks given by the people who either a) are world class at actually doing this; or b) are in the business of imparting some dangerous modicum of this skill to law enforcement professional and to the last man and woman a full one third of the talk is the long road from salient observation to supportable interpretation.
There's this thing called mental multitasking, and to judge from 90% of their students, most of the world has never heard of this.
The salient facial micro-twitches can arise from any thought or emotion passing through the other person's head. But no, 100 people surveyed, 99 people are cock sure that the other person's fleeting facial twitch is all about their own narcissistic central concern of the moment.
The experts require a cluster of three to five twitches each in close proximity to the same stress point (which is why police interrogation done correctly involves more circling around than cleaning up after a fender bender on the main runway).
The biology of our best and worst selves — April 2017
It's far from obvious to me that any of these (no doubt mostly pathetic) apocalyptic machinations pass the "very interesting" test.
Nor is it obvious to me that the government of America (in the large) is just a grown up version of that strange kid in sixth grade who snuck a live iguana into the girl's change room—just to see what they would do.