Do you think your landlord isn't factoring in home repairs in your rent???
You got that entirely backwards. What the poster was saying is that many renters looking to become owners initially neglect to put on their unforgetful landlord hat when making the financial comparison, which advantages owning unfairly.
No. It is VERY HARD to see how this could go wrong.
One barely needs to be awake to the present day to see how this can go wrong, because we're already living it.
Next to Samoa and Saudi Arabia (and one or two others), America is pretty much the most obese country in human history. Did the bariatric hover-chairs in WALL-E seem altogether implausible? No, they didn't. (Well, not unless unless you think too much about the hovering part.)
Evolution equipped us with a survival heuristic: pursue sugar.
And then, practically overnight, what had been a scarce resource for a hundred million years became almost too cheap to meter.
Evolution equipped us with a social survival heuristic: monitor the other person's facial expression when you flap your gums. In traditional social settings, communities with fewer than 200 core members, you can guarantee that what goes around, comes around. Elephants have long memories, but they don't hold a candle to tribal grievance.
And then, practically overnight, society's primary discourse setting turns into an adolescent fucktard's wildest wet dream.
Meanwhile, back at Gradient HQ, Facebook invents algorithms to prioritize outrage sugar. ("Sugar!" is the reported to be the strongest expletive ever uttered by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, even when he dropped the priming mechanism of a hydrogen bomb on his own toes, not counting that one time Leslie Groves put his military boot up Orlando's ass over the contaminated cooling oil in the first edition magnets installed at Y12.)
You don't think it launches a whole new can of worms when Pretty Woman raises the curtain on three different degrees of Revelations: one for the early evening show, one for the late evening show, and one for the xtra-late night show (that squeaking sound when you walk out of the theatre?—this time it's not sugar)? Bonus: if you bring your VR goggles, you can complete the Terminator fantasy questionnaire before the movie begins, and with the SQUID hairnet accessory, it can be auto-calibrated to your exact mental response pattern throughout.
First truly sentient thought of human technological matrix: be damn careful what you wish for, because no concerted counter-offensive against sugar has ever gone well for the first hundred years.
Carfentanil is an analog of the synthetic opioid analgesic fentanyl. A unit of carfentanil is 100 times as potent as the same amount of fentanyl, 5,000 times as potent as a unit of heroin and 10,000 times as potent as a unit of morphine.
Bots copy and remix the corpus matched to context, but we're still miles away from an observable thread of thought.
The whole point of "the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed" is that "miles away" is not a viable unit of measure.
Generative adversarial networks are the Ajax of DNN 1.0.
I was reading O'Reilly's new book the other day, and he was talking about how little use was made of XMLHttpRequest because people were suffering from the last-cognitive-mile problem, until suddenly it was everywhere (with a cynical conference branding cherry on top).
Just wait. The GANs are already here—and they are coming soon.
It starts with knowing the difference between the problem domain (keeping track of a mess) and the solution domain (git rebase).
Of course, some solution domains are themselves problem domains...
Second tactic.
Have you ever heard of "work to rule"? This was a tactic used in the golden era of unions when they weren't allowed to actually strike, but wanted to have the same effect.
Well, there are two kinds of digital systems: those that work to rule, and those which have been bitten by a rabid dog.
I'm in BC on Koodo. After being badly overcharged a couple of years ago, I decided to turn off my data modem service until I had recouped the entire overcharge.
This will take a while, as this is only saving me $5/month (measured against the impossibly small 25 MB/month plan). I must have misunderstood something in the TOS, but after a server crash (the only server in a company just coming out of post-2008 mothballs), just the panicky phone calls from the server room the following week (where it wasn't convenient to use a land line) ended up costing me enough to have paid an unlimited voice and data plan for the entire upcoming year. I got one week for the same price.
Koodo noticed my unwillingness to run up data charges about a year later.
Before this happened, back in June 2015, I got a notice that they will now send out data usage notifications in real time when you hit 50% and 90% of your bucket. (But I had only had one data overcharge, and this didn't mean much.)
Back in April 2017 (offer repeated in November), I was told I could text "SAVE" to Koodo and get 500 MB/month for $10/month, or I could text "YES" to get 250 MB/month for $5/month. (Apparently this is for "additional" data, so I would probably have to pay $5 to activate my modem for something disgustingly paltry, then pay another $5 to obtain the 250 MB limit.)
Back in August, I got a text from Koodo offering me wireless home phone for $5/month for 12 months (surely there's a giant price jump baked in at the end of the year).
Around this time I also got a message that my "Tab" (a savings plan toward a new phone purchase) was "retired". I had $105 bucks there, which they have now credited to a one-time future purchase (probably a captive device on awful terms), but I will no longer see 5% of my monthly expenditures credited to this account. Basically a fee hike (had I planned to ever use it).
On 14 November, I got a text that they gave me 1 GB/month for two months with no charge. (I never turned on my modem.)
On 5 December, I got a text that I can say goodbye to unexpected data charges, where the new Shock-Free plan will pause your data before you ring up extra charges.
The other problem is that I'm still using an older Galaxy II X, which hasn't seen a patch for years now. As hardware, it's working just fine.
So basically, I uninstalled almost every application, and mostly just treat it as a fancy glass flip phone with an annoying tendency to pocket dial. I never did install any applications (other than Google and maybe one Pebble thing) which allowed access to my contacts folder. As a Smartphone, I sometimes use Chrome to browse the internet on trusted connections. And it sometimes plays my podcasts, but mostly I still use an old iPod nano. And I use the camera every so often.
I'd like to get a larger phone some day, but my self-imposed rule is that the next phone must promise full OS upgrades for three full years, or I'm sticking with my glass flip phone. (I was actually promised Jelly Bean by Koodo at the time I purchased this phone—which was already in beta on other products—and it never materialized. So I'm still on Android 4.0.4.)
From where I sit (these days I'm mostly a happy homebody), the PC revolution was amazing, the internet revolution was amazing, and the Smartphone revolution was total shit.
Privacy: fuck you.
Security: only on a 2- or 3-year planned obsolescence cycle.
Economic prudence: $80/month for the no-hassle 3-year contract buffet, or you're taking your life into your own hands (with no help from us).
And get this. The one feature I really love is the ability to put telemarketers on my reject list. In about two years I had added 100 numbers to this list and then Android started to tell me I couldn't add any new numbers without first removing old numbers. But which ones to remove? There's no easy record of which entries are still actively rejecting assholes.
Nobody has any intrinsic right to be forgiven for something that happened in the past, or deserves to have any record of a mistake expunged...
Nobody excluding almost everyone under the age of 16 or 18 in almost every high-income social democracy. In some countries, people under the age of 18 amount to half the population.
Note that I'm using a definition of "expunge" roughly equal to "subject to the least necessary controlled and restricted sharing among professionals who would immediately lose their professional certification should they flout this rule".
Secondly, many modern moral philosophers disagree with you across the board, arguing that adults to, in fact, have a natural right to a public reputation that isn't unduly punitive, and that in the digital age, the old de facto social arrangements no longer suffice.
She's easy on the eyes, but it's a trap. In Edge's Superforecaster masterclass she practically loses her shit when informed that a certain strand of software developers are disproportionately represented in the superforecasting group because of their superior breadth of knowledge and worldly engagement.
She just can't bring herself to comprehend that anyone can manage to ingest, digest, and mentally catalogue ten Wikipedia pages per every delicious, cheesy Cheeto.
He also interviews Adria Richards, who publicised the faces of two tech developers at PyCon for a joke comparing the technical term "dongle" and the slang term "dong", leading a developer named Hank getting fired and an online backlash that in turn led Richards to get fired from her job...
One dumb sentence, and suddenly you're the blue dress elect of your generation. When most modern moral philosophers look at this, their eyes water.
No sentient planet prioritizes space exploration over sufficient AGI and rad-hard bio-foliage.
A mere fifty-year delay for an order of magnitude in risk reduction. No brainer.
The only possible counterargument is the one from paranoia: that the little word "mere" above is woefully misplaced, because we might already be living in astro-adolescent end times.
As if space would even begin to solve this problem lacking sufficient AGI.
If unbridled future AGI is going to exterminate humanity, it will exterminate us here by commission, or there by omission.
They forgot that trust, once broken, is damn near impossible to repair.
This is another instance of feedback porn that dulls perception, not actually being so true as we wish to suppose.
Trust is perhaps something that functions in a vigorous, disruptive market. By the time the world k-opolizes (k, a small integer) fomo and habit become the main conditioning force.
Sometimes on the voyage betwixt, a growing company overestimates its grasp on its customer base's short and curlies, and abandons good ship Trust prematurely. But isn't this kind of like a wardrobe malfunction? Who didn't already have a pretty good idea what Janet's boob would actually look like? Her wardrobe, which matched her ambitions, was never that modest to begin with.
What do you think of your antivirus company, the one that didn't notice Sony's rootkit as it infected half a million computers?
But actually, Sony is still in business, despite the furtive business, compounded by hubris, compounded by lies, compounded by incompetence—and so are almost all of the useless antivirus products.
Doh! We can't believe Sony.
Kaspersky, however, is really in the soup. That's one story where trust is never coming back, as advertised.
Star Wars was about selling "franchise crap" from day one. I'm old enough to have seen the first Star Wars movies in a theater in 1977. Star Wars was all about moving merchandise right out of the gate.
It amazes me that this even needs to be stated. It's accepted cannon in the film industry that Star Wars (with a boost from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) changed the financing landscape in Hollywood for all time.
The entire commentary track of Scorsese's After Hours is pretty much devoted to how he was forced to make this oddball film on the cheap, or quit making films altogether. None of his larger proposals had viable merchandise. Scorsese's Taxi Driver came out just a year before Star Wars and didn't move a lot of disaffected perpetrator Yellow Cab action figures (not for all of its eternal social relevance).
Pleasing a critical audience is a hard way to make a living. What you're after is sustained consumption, without taking any large risks exploring new territory.
It's a bird... it's a plane... it's DOPAMINE!
* A-list adoration (e.g. Silence of the Lambs) * merchandise / (mostly) ghastly sequel movie loop * shippers * man-panties escape fantasy (Marvel universe) * actual panties release fantasy
These tropes are about people getting involved in characters' romantic relationships. Since real-life people are infinitely more into pairing fictional people than fictional people are, most of these are Audience Reactions.
Film is an odd genre, because a film works so hard to introduce new and unusual characters, convince the audience to identify with those characters, bang a few pots, then resolve. The formula doesn't really leave time for Friends to explore the entire viable space of choose(6,3)-1 Audience Reaction love triangles (three men in one triangle would be considered unmanly, even today).
Way down the list of viable audience attractors are the motivated cineastes with a chiselled six-pack risk appetite (such a person surely knows that an action sequel predominantly pumping a giant bust line on the promotional poster would require two thumbs up from God himself to even begin to consider; plus we've all seen Phantom and Crystal Skull and Hobbit to reinforce that breast size is but an early, shallow layer in the fully cynical deep-discretion network).
Personally I never attend a movie with supernatural themes without reading the spoilers first, because if you're not extra careful, halfway through the movie you find yourself gagging on Uri Geller's contorted cock (the one thing he could actually bend like Beckham as a younger man).
See? That just took a hard turn to a bad image, because you didn't check the spoilers first.
Looking at examples of properly served wines on-line I see such bowls never more than half full, and often as little as a quarter full.
When you fill wine glasses to the widest point on the bowl, which is a good rule of thumb, most wine glasses hold a surprisingly similar amount of wine. That is not 25% full. That is 100% filled to an implied fill line.
In related news, a standard cup of coffee is four ounces. SCAA cupping standard. They brew with 5 ounces, but I'm betting most brewing methods leave close to an ounce behind.
Starbucks used to have a short at eight ounces (two cups). Now their "small" is the old tall (three cups).
* Grande: Four standard cups. * Venti: Five standard cups.
Plus now the Trenta so that you can nestle 11 ounces of ice into your Venti beverage. Starbucks also tends to have immoderate caffeine extraction rates.
The studies I've read about caffeine show that the optimal caffeine performance boost involves a four ounce shot of normally caffeinated coffee on waking, with another similar (or slightly smaller) shot later in the morning, and then no more caffeine for the rest of the day. After your body gets used to moderation, you won't get a headache if you miss your first coffee the following day. Of course, if you're chasing after a nasty caffeine dependency, the locally "optimal" amount of caffeine follows a hair-of-the-dog trajectory suggestive of the opiod addiction crisis.
The amount of crank that one gets out of coffee does increase with higher doses, but soon the jitters and the state of flattened affect and circular thinking blemish the cognitive surplus, though I suppose winding up in a permanent state of blemished crankhood is hard to detect in the modern millennial who constantly service their social media feed.
Back to wine, that daily drink after work is something that often takes hold in people for whom relaxed is not a possible state. Since alcohol in the evening is known to degrade sleep quality, it's not hard to see how one large glass serves up another.
The FCC's penalties will no doubt start with being mildly gummed. Eventually, after protracted abuse, the FCC will grow in its first set of baby teeth. There will be a short lull in the rampant abuse as the abusers take a welcome time out to catch their breath.
Then the baby teeth will all fall out again. At which point the corporate abuse will become entrenched forever.
Then some adult teeth will finally grow in, but crooked, requiring many years of cumbersome orthodontics (cumbersome to the oversight mandate of the FCC). Finally, there will be a nice set of straight, white teeth, too little, too late.
Fortunately for the FCC, the wealthy plutocrats will take up collection to have all those pesky wisdom teeth surgically removed by the finest dentist in all of Florin, before any actual wisdom passes into the next generational conflict.
Time and again, it's the sunk cost fallacy. A system that an organization might have spent a few million dollars to build is just not shaping up into anything they can use, but they keep at it rather than ditching it and seeing what they can do to change things.
The collective human neural network uses a simplifying heuristic of only back-propagating blame when triggered by a large political step change.
* the very first superhero story we teach young children is The Little Engine that Could * the very first horror story we teach young programmers is the fallacy of rewriting an annoying legacy system from scratch * the very first right-stuff story we teach young MBAs is Angela Duckworth's grit * the very first war story we teach young patriots is "remember the Alamo"
If you had a single anthropological gene in your body, you might ask yourself why the Lore of Persistence calls shotgun every time.
It's actually a fairly important and instructive life lesson to play out a losing hand. Because when your subconscious mind observes you stubbornly suffering through a losing hand, it goes "well, damn I better organize things to not go in that direction next time".
If you're fickle enough to change your stripes at the first arithmetic breeze, there's a risk that your subconscious mind never fully internalizes consequence.
But then again, if you strive to be 100% rational all of the time, the subconscious mind becomes just a bunch of baggage in the basement one can never properly boot.
In 2009, I bought a bitcoin at $4. Due to a lack of adequate backup strategy, I can't find the Wallet.DAT file. A $10,000 mistake.
If you can't even find your wallet, it's an egregious overestimate of your fiscal competence to assume you would have sold the coin before the nadir of the looming crash.
There are two stripes of could-have-been speculators: * those who are good at buying at the right time * those who are good at selling at the right time
Apparently, being good a both is a form of multitasking that does not come easily to the human brain which shall forever remain short supply.
AND SO ALL OF THESE MULTINATIONALS are not happy? I wouldn't be so sure if I were you.
At the very end, you couldn't resist flying your true shill colours. You don't even seem to grasp the basic distinction between B2B and B2C, or it's elementary corollary.
M2M = level playing field
M2B = ???
M = multinational
??? = probably a lot of quiet sobbing in a private stall of the boy's bathroom, if the Molly Maguire–inspired multinational malefactor doesn't barge in there, too.
I'm personally not making much hay out of your sumo satisfaction survey.
I simply looked up "Michael R. Hayden" and the name of the drug in question and quality reporting landed right at the top of my search results.
Hayden is the most cited author in the world for HD and ABCA1, and has authored over 830 peer-reviewed publications and invited submissions (h-index 105).
Here's Ron Paul, wearing his mechanical heart on his sleeve:
Uniform Federal mandates are a clumsy and ineffective way to deal with problems such as employers making hiring decisions on the basis of a potential employee's genetic profile. Imposing Federal mandates on private businesses merely raises the costs of doing business and thus reduces the employment opportunities for all citizens. (src)
Others disagree, noting that genetic discrimination was deemed significant enough to spur the United States and many countries in Europe to enact legislation. The question of what information genetic testing may reveal and how it can be used shouldn't be left up to insurance companies, said Bev Heim-Myers, chair of the Canadian Coalition for Genetic Fairness.
The problem is, if society imposes nothing, business tends to devolve into a crass race to the bottom with real human casualties.
So I'm generally in favour of the government foreclosing on the worst of the worst, while leaving plenty of scope for businesses to morally disgrace themselves (or not).
Almost as if by the hand of God himself, the category of the unexplained accumulates the unexplainable, and no amount of explanatory liposuction ever fully drains this ponderous pond.
Bezos is an apex predator, who has never even pretended to not be an ignore-what-I-say planet-destroying hypocrite where his business interests were concerned. To some degree, Google really has to fight fire with fire here. I remain a long ways away from tarring Google and Amazon with the same brush.
Check out The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013). Captures the general tone of the organization brilliantly.
Robin Handaly, an Amazon spokesperson, pushed back on criticism of the move.
"In the fall when we released Fire OS 5, we removed some enterprise features that we found customers weren't using," Handaly wrote in an email. "All Fire tablets' communication with Amazon's cloud meet our high standards for privacy and security including appropriate use of encryption."
Their customers didn't agree, and in this instance, Amazon was forced to eat crow and restore the feature.
... I contacted both Amazon Retail and AWS expressing my disappointment and asking them to put a note on my account that it is at extremely high risk of being socially engineered, and that I will always be capable of logging in. Amazon Retail said they would put a note, and have a specialist contact me (who never did) while AWS was dismissive of even a risk existing.
Amazon divulged his personal information to J. Random Blackhat twice more, despite this interaction.
A former advertising executive for Kindle is suing Amazon for wrongful dismissal. The saga begins in 2012 with the launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire Tablet. Amazon was seeking launch partners in order to build traction with their Special Offers edition. Credit card company Discover signed on, as they normally participated with pilot projects at Amazon. Then things got interesting.
A classic Bezos manoeuvre. We know how that ended.
If Zuck hadn't gone derp, derp, derp earlier this year about what was actually happening inside his company, some microscopic crumb of this story might now be believable.
I'm not sure anyone using "gmail" as their primary e-mail service is very worried about "tracking."
So far I trust Google's immense appetite to keep all the cream for themselves. They might track, but they don't share (so far as I've read).
I've also never seen anything from Google that I didn't know was from Google, so as a personal privacy attack surface, it's so far been fairly conspicuous.
Google knows everything about me from my search history already (on the order of one million data points).
Not that I don't have my own e-mail service (as well), but I estimate the my added exposure from Google knowing 99% of my life (by means of my e-mail) instead of 98% of my life (through search alone) as fairly small.
While is technology being singled out, when most of the 20th century was on board with woman mainly being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen?
This was an official plank of conservative family values, necessary for the upholding of the fine social fabric, etc. etc. yada yada. I can't recall a time in my life where I didn't believe that women ought to be able to do whatever the hell they want, to the same extent as men. I was an attentive child. I remember much about the 1970s quite well.
However, I've never been 100% comfortable with trying to force any complex system into a normative state. If you are intervening on behalf of one variable (out of thousands), you are usually throwing those other thousand variables to the wind.
I'm progressive enough that I've even argued in the past for separating achievement from ability (with equal ability, those with more opportunity should be expected to demonstrate more achievement).
Schools and other organizations intake on some mixture of ability and achievement, but to the extent that ability is the main factor (as viewed through an achievement lens), women deserved an intake boost (in Canada, we already have more women than men in higher education, so there's not a lot of residue left here).
I suspect men are hard wired to put up with more crap in the pursuit of extreme narrowness (otherwise, you don't get the girl; this is basic sexual competitiveness asymmetry from Robert Trivers). We don't have any reason to believe that exact equality is a natural outcome on any dimension.
I'm simply not wired to give any employment at all to the Handicapper General.
In the year 2081, the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else.
Almost every other mechanism of promoting equality appeals to me (those that don't involve normative head counts).
A string of recent events suggest the steps currently being taken by tech firms to address these issues are inadequate.
Not a possible conclusion when dealing with wicked-problem systems theory. Not even a possible provisional conclusion.
Possible conclusion: We have yet to see compelling evidence that recent steps taken by tech firms amount to a hill of beans. But that conclusion would be true of 99% of everything, 99% of all the time.
Sometimes with complex systems, there can be a brief flash of obviousness, but not very often.
It's about time we stopped judging a picture by its pixels alone.
We already have the situation in art and archaeology that nothing is considered real without provenance. Perhaps provenance will become easier to fake. Never fear, for this problem, there's always the blockchain.
The far more interesting aspect of this is the impact on trafficking in child pornography.
What are we going to do? How does one legally demonstrate the apparent age of a digital model? Connect a jury of thirteen convicted paedophiles to brain-scan augmented plethysmographs? (Could be a messy conviction.)
If the model renders in real time, there could be user-adjustable dials (think the original Terminator). Does the generated image self-destruct if the user adjusts the dials to a combined setting of less than 20 mR?
Jessica is renowned as one of the most well known sex symbols in animation. She is also well known for her movie quote "I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way."
And since smart people avoid things like Facebook, it only amplifies the noise-to-signal ratio and makes it seem even worse than it is.
Meanwhile, the gradient of escape couldn't be limned in brighter lights.
An actual self-perpetuating feedback loop would be the small pockets of intelligent life who have sequestered themselves from social media deliberately dimming the lights and darking the drapes so as to escape notice by the ravening, mutually-loathing hoard.
Turns out, intelligent company is something one must earn by deserving to belong. And even worse, it doesn't pay for itself by being a conspicuous Mensa membership you can crow about and lord over the epsilons and deltas.
But maybe with luck, your biographer will discover your long, secret membership in the eminent Dark WELL.
when someone gets in your face screaming obscenities, you tend to knock their teeth out, most people only need that experience once to modify their behavior
That a nostalgic frontier-society masturbation fantasy.
Even if you do manage to show someone up physically (without going to jail yourself in the process) the target doesn't magically become socially clued-in, they just pursue different outlets to continue to indulge in their horrible behaviour (returning to the favourite haunts as soon as the teeth-busting coast is clear).
Lasting solutions almost always require the exercise of diplomacy, patience, and other grit-your-own-teeth social skills.
Absence of teeth-gritting social self-regulation might just be why you're self-pleasuring in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
You got that entirely backwards. What the poster was saying is that many renters looking to become owners initially neglect to put on their unforgetful landlord hat when making the financial comparison, which advantages owning unfairly.
One barely needs to be awake to the present day to see how this can go wrong, because we're already living it.
Next to Samoa and Saudi Arabia (and one or two others), America is pretty much the most obese country in human history. Did the bariatric hover-chairs in WALL-E seem altogether implausible? No, they didn't. (Well, not unless unless you think too much about the hovering part.)
Evolution equipped us with a survival heuristic: pursue sugar.
And then, practically overnight, what had been a scarce resource for a hundred million years became almost too cheap to meter.
Evolution equipped us with a social survival heuristic: monitor the other person's facial expression when you flap your gums. In traditional social settings, communities with fewer than 200 core members, you can guarantee that what goes around, comes around. Elephants have long memories, but they don't hold a candle to tribal grievance.
And then, practically overnight, society's primary discourse setting turns into an adolescent fucktard's wildest wet dream.
Meanwhile, back at Gradient HQ, Facebook invents algorithms to prioritize outrage sugar. ("Sugar!" is the reported to be the strongest expletive ever uttered by Ernest Orlando Lawrence, even when he dropped the priming mechanism of a hydrogen bomb on his own toes, not counting that one time Leslie Groves put his military boot up Orlando's ass over the contaminated cooling oil in the first edition magnets installed at Y12.)
You don't think it launches a whole new can of worms when Pretty Woman raises the curtain on three different degrees of Revelations: one for the early evening show, one for the late evening show, and one for the xtra-late night show (that squeaking sound when you walk out of the theatre?—this time it's not sugar)? Bonus: if you bring your VR goggles, you can complete the Terminator fantasy questionnaire before the movie begins, and with the SQUID hairnet accessory, it can be auto-calibrated to your exact mental response pattern throughout.
First truly sentient thought of human technological matrix: be damn careful what you wish for, because no concerted counter-offensive against sugar has ever gone well for the first hundred years.
And how is that going?
So, in summary, I completely agree with you, with only one proviso: that more of what we want proves to be worth having.
The truest thing I've ever heard is that the one big secret of Area 51 is how they spend their money.
Toys for boys.
Nothing beats a blank cheque like a black CC.
Sometimes I don't even know why Slashdot exists.
The whole point of "the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed" is that "miles away" is not a viable unit of measure.
Generative adversarial networks are the Ajax of DNN 1.0.
I was reading O'Reilly's new book the other day, and he was talking about how little use was made of XMLHttpRequest because people were suffering from the last-cognitive-mile problem, until suddenly it was everywhere (with a cynical conference branding cherry on top).
Just wait. The GANs are already here—and they are coming soon.
DNN = deep neural networks.
It starts with knowing the difference between the problem domain (keeping track of a mess) and the solution domain (git rebase).
Of course, some solution domains are themselves problem domains ...
Second tactic.
Have you ever heard of "work to rule"? This was a tactic used in the golden era of unions when they weren't allowed to actually strike, but wanted to have the same effect.
Well, there are two kinds of digital systems: those that work to rule, and those which have been bitten by a rabid dog.
I'm in BC on Koodo. After being badly overcharged a couple of years ago, I decided to turn off my data modem service until I had recouped the entire overcharge.
This will take a while, as this is only saving me $5/month (measured against the impossibly small 25 MB/month plan). I must have misunderstood something in the TOS, but after a server crash (the only server in a company just coming out of post-2008 mothballs), just the panicky phone calls from the server room the following week (where it wasn't convenient to use a land line) ended up costing me enough to have paid an unlimited voice and data plan for the entire upcoming year. I got one week for the same price.
Koodo noticed my unwillingness to run up data charges about a year later.
Before this happened, back in June 2015, I got a notice that they will now send out data usage notifications in real time when you hit 50% and 90% of your bucket. (But I had only had one data overcharge, and this didn't mean much.)
Back in April 2017 (offer repeated in November), I was told I could text "SAVE" to Koodo and get 500 MB/month for $10/month, or I could text "YES" to get 250 MB/month for $5/month. (Apparently this is for "additional" data, so I would probably have to pay $5 to activate my modem for something disgustingly paltry, then pay another $5 to obtain the 250 MB limit.)
Back in August, I got a text from Koodo offering me wireless home phone for $5/month for 12 months (surely there's a giant price jump baked in at the end of the year).
Around this time I also got a message that my "Tab" (a savings plan toward a new phone purchase) was "retired". I had $105 bucks there, which they have now credited to a one-time future purchase (probably a captive device on awful terms), but I will no longer see 5% of my monthly expenditures credited to this account. Basically a fee hike (had I planned to ever use it).
On 14 November, I got a text that they gave me 1 GB/month for two months with no charge. (I never turned on my modem.)
On 5 December, I got a text that I can say goodbye to unexpected data charges, where the new Shock-Free plan will pause your data before you ring up extra charges.
The other problem is that I'm still using an older Galaxy II X, which hasn't seen a patch for years now. As hardware, it's working just fine.
So basically, I uninstalled almost every application, and mostly just treat it as a fancy glass flip phone with an annoying tendency to pocket dial. I never did install any applications (other than Google and maybe one Pebble thing) which allowed access to my contacts folder. As a Smartphone, I sometimes use Chrome to browse the internet on trusted connections. And it sometimes plays my podcasts, but mostly I still use an old iPod nano. And I use the camera every so often.
I'd like to get a larger phone some day, but my self-imposed rule is that the next phone must promise full OS upgrades for three full years, or I'm sticking with my glass flip phone. (I was actually promised Jelly Bean by Koodo at the time I purchased this phone—which was already in beta on other products—and it never materialized. So I'm still on Android 4.0.4.)
From where I sit (these days I'm mostly a happy homebody), the PC revolution was amazing, the internet revolution was amazing, and the Smartphone revolution was total shit.
Privacy: fuck you.
Security: only on a 2- or 3-year planned obsolescence cycle.
Economic prudence: $80/month for the no-hassle 3-year contract buffet, or you're taking your life into your own hands (with no help from us).
And get this. The one feature I really love is the ability to put telemarketers on my reject list. In about two years I had added 100 numbers to this list and then Android started to tell me I couldn't add any new numbers without first removing old numbers. But which ones to remove? There's no easy record of which entries are still actively rejecting assholes.
I've got 1 GB of RAM, and g
Nobody excluding almost everyone under the age of 16 or 18 in almost every high-income social democracy. In some countries, people under the age of 18 amount to half the population.
Note that I'm using a definition of "expunge" roughly equal to "subject to the least necessary controlled and restricted sharing among professionals who would immediately lose their professional certification should they flout this rule".
Secondly, many modern moral philosophers disagree with you across the board, arguing that adults to, in fact, have a natural right to a public reputation that isn't unduly punitive, and that in the digital age, the old de facto social arrangements no longer suffice.
Jennifer Jacquet: "Shaming At Scale" — 2014
She's easy on the eyes, but it's a trap. In Edge's Superforecaster masterclass she practically loses her shit when informed that a certain strand of software developers are disproportionately represented in the superforecasting group because of their superior breadth of knowledge and worldly engagement.
She just can't bring herself to comprehend that anyone can manage to ingest, digest, and mentally catalogue ten Wikipedia pages per every delicious, cheesy Cheeto.
Warning: This Post Contains Spoilers For 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'
Best line in the post (spoiler alert):
This is funny, because most of us feel a 10,000 foot perch on the global pillory of public shame like a 10,000 volt electric chair.
So You've Been Publicly Shamed (2015) — Jon Ronson
One dumb sentence, and suddenly you're the blue dress elect of your generation. When most modern moral philosophers look at this, their eyes water.
No sentient planet prioritizes space exploration over sufficient AGI and rad-hard bio-foliage.
A mere fifty-year delay for an order of magnitude in risk reduction. No brainer.
The only possible counterargument is the one from paranoia: that the little word "mere" above is woefully misplaced, because we might already be living in astro-adolescent end times.
As if space would even begin to solve this problem lacking sufficient AGI.
If unbridled future AGI is going to exterminate humanity, it will exterminate us here by commission, or there by omission.
No win.
This is another instance of feedback porn that dulls perception, not actually being so true as we wish to suppose.
Trust is perhaps something that functions in a vigorous, disruptive market. By the time the world k-opolizes (k, a small integer) fomo and habit become the main conditioning force.
Sometimes on the voyage betwixt, a growing company overestimates its grasp on its customer base's short and curlies, and abandons good ship Trust prematurely. But isn't this kind of like a wardrobe malfunction? Who didn't already have a pretty good idea what Janet's boob would actually look like? Her wardrobe, which matched her ambitions, was never that modest to begin with.
Sony's DRM Rootkit: The Real Story — 2005
Sometimes a boob pops out that we didn't expect.
But actually, Sony is still in business, despite the furtive business, compounded by hubris, compounded by lies, compounded by incompetence—and so are almost all of the useless antivirus products.
Doh! We can't believe Sony.
Kaspersky, however, is really in the soup. That's one story where trust is never coming back, as advertised.
Doh! We can't believe our own stupid selves.
It amazes me that this even needs to be stated. It's accepted cannon in the film industry that Star Wars (with a boost from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial) changed the financing landscape in Hollywood for all time.
The entire commentary track of Scorsese's After Hours is pretty much devoted to how he was forced to make this oddball film on the cheap, or quit making films altogether. None of his larger proposals had viable merchandise. Scorsese's Taxi Driver came out just a year before Star Wars and didn't move a lot of disaffected perpetrator Yellow Cab action figures (not for all of its eternal social relevance).
Pleasing a critical audience is a hard way to make a living. What you're after is sustained consumption, without taking any large risks exploring new territory.
It's a bird ... it's a plane ... it's DOPAMINE!
* A-list adoration (e.g. Silence of the Lambs)
* merchandise / (mostly) ghastly sequel movie loop
* shippers
* man-panties escape fantasy (Marvel universe)
* actual panties release fantasy
Shipping Tropes
Film is an odd genre, because a film works so hard to introduce new and unusual characters, convince the audience to identify with those characters, bang a few pots, then resolve. The formula doesn't really leave time for Friends to explore the entire viable space of choose(6,3)-1 Audience Reaction love triangles (three men in one triangle would be considered unmanly, even today).
Way down the list of viable audience attractors are the motivated cineastes with a chiselled six-pack risk appetite (such a person surely knows that an action sequel predominantly pumping a giant bust line on the promotional poster would require two thumbs up from God himself to even begin to consider; plus we've all seen Phantom and Crystal Skull and Hobbit to reinforce that breast size is but an early, shallow layer in the fully cynical deep-discretion network).
Personally I never attend a movie with supernatural themes without reading the spoilers first, because if you're not extra careful, halfway through the movie you find yourself gagging on Uri Geller's contorted cock (the one thing he could actually bend like Beckham as a younger man).
See? That just took a hard turn to a bad image, because you didn't check the spoilers first.
When you fill wine glasses to the widest point on the bowl, which is a good rule of thumb, most wine glasses hold a surprisingly similar amount of wine. That is not 25% full. That is 100% filled to an implied fill line.
In related news, a standard cup of coffee is four ounces. SCAA cupping standard. They brew with 5 ounces, but I'm betting most brewing methods leave close to an ounce behind.
Starbucks used to have a short at eight ounces (two cups). Now their "small" is the old tall (three cups).
* Grande: Four standard cups.
* Venti: Five standard cups.
Plus now the Trenta so that you can nestle 11 ounces of ice into your Venti beverage. Starbucks also tends to have immoderate caffeine extraction rates.
The studies I've read about caffeine show that the optimal caffeine performance boost involves a four ounce shot of normally caffeinated coffee on waking, with another similar (or slightly smaller) shot later in the morning, and then no more caffeine for the rest of the day. After your body gets used to moderation, you won't get a headache if you miss your first coffee the following day. Of course, if you're chasing after a nasty caffeine dependency, the locally "optimal" amount of caffeine follows a hair-of-the-dog trajectory suggestive of the opiod addiction crisis.
The amount of crank that one gets out of coffee does increase with higher doses, but soon the jitters and the state of flattened affect and circular thinking blemish the cognitive surplus, though I suppose winding up in a permanent state of blemished crankhood is hard to detect in the modern millennial who constantly service their social media feed.
Back to wine, that daily drink after work is something that often takes hold in people for whom relaxed is not a possible state. Since alcohol in the evening is known to degrade sleep quality, it's not hard to see how one large glass serves up another.
The FCC's penalties will no doubt start with being mildly gummed. Eventually, after protracted abuse, the FCC will grow in its first set of baby teeth. There will be a short lull in the rampant abuse as the abusers take a welcome time out to catch their breath.
Then the baby teeth will all fall out again. At which point the corporate abuse will become entrenched forever.
Then some adult teeth will finally grow in, but crooked, requiring many years of cumbersome orthodontics (cumbersome to the oversight mandate of the FCC). Finally, there will be a nice set of straight, white teeth, too little, too late.
Fortunately for the FCC, the wealthy plutocrats will take up collection to have all those pesky wisdom teeth surgically removed by the finest dentist in all of Florin, before any actual wisdom passes into the next generational conflict.
The collective human neural network uses a simplifying heuristic of only back-propagating blame when triggered by a large political step change.
* the very first superhero story we teach young children is The Little Engine that Could
* the very first horror story we teach young programmers is the fallacy of rewriting an annoying legacy system from scratch
* the very first right-stuff story we teach young MBAs is Angela Duckworth's grit
* the very first war story we teach young patriots is "remember the Alamo"
If you had a single anthropological gene in your body, you might ask yourself why the Lore of Persistence calls shotgun every time.
It's actually a fairly important and instructive life lesson to play out a losing hand. Because when your subconscious mind observes you stubbornly suffering through a losing hand, it goes "well, damn I better organize things to not go in that direction next time".
If you're fickle enough to change your stripes at the first arithmetic breeze, there's a risk that your subconscious mind never fully internalizes consequence.
But then again, if you strive to be 100% rational all of the time, the subconscious mind becomes just a bunch of baggage in the basement one can never properly boot.
If you can't even find your wallet, it's an egregious overestimate of your fiscal competence to assume you would have sold the coin before the nadir of the looming crash.
There are two stripes of could-have-been speculators:
* those who are good at buying at the right time
* those who are good at selling at the right time
Apparently, being good a both is a form of multitasking that does not come easily to the human brain which shall forever remain short supply.
At the very end, you couldn't resist flying your true shill colours. You don't even seem to grasp the basic distinction between B2B and B2C, or it's elementary corollary.
M2M = level playing field
M2B = ???
M = multinational
??? = probably a lot of quiet sobbing in a private stall of the boy's bathroom, if the Molly Maguire–inspired multinational malefactor doesn't barge in there, too.
I'm personally not making much hay out of your sumo satisfaction survey.
Huntington's disease: the new gene therapy that sufferers cannot afford
I simply looked up "Michael R. Hayden" and the name of the drug in question and quality reporting landed right at the top of my search results.
Hayden is active against genetic discrimination.
The House GOP is pushing a bill that would let employers demand workers' genetic test results — March 2017
Here's Ron Paul, wearing his mechanical heart on his sleeve:
Health insurance and 'genetic discrimination': Are rules needed? — January 2012
The problem is, if society imposes nothing, business tends to devolve into a crass race to the bottom with real human casualties.
So I'm generally in favour of the government foreclosing on the worst of the worst, while leaving plenty of scope for businesses to morally disgrace themselves (or not).
DNA Analysis Finds That Yetis Are Actually Bears
Almost as if by the hand of God himself, the category of the unexplained accumulates the unexplainable, and no amount of explanatory liposuction ever fully drains this ponderous pond.
Bezos is an apex predator, who has never even pretended to not be an ignore-what-I-say planet-destroying hypocrite where his business interests were concerned. To some degree, Google really has to fight fire with fire here. I remain a long ways away from tarring Google and Amazon with the same brush.
Check out The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013). Captures the general tone of the organization brilliantly.
Amazon just removed encryption from its tablet devices — March 2016
Their customers didn't agree, and in this instance, Amazon was forced to eat crow and restore the feature.
Amazon's customer service backdoor — January 2016
Amazon divulged his personal information to J. Random Blackhat twice more, despite this interaction.
Amazon Advertising Executive Fired for Refusing To Lie — November 2014
A classic Bezos manoeuvre. We know how that ended.
Prince Longshank's "high counsellor" shown the exit
Back when Amazon still mailed out DVDs, Bezos probably had that scene on repeat piped through the entire building.
My files on Google's malfeasance are hardly empty, but by comparison, they tend to lack that special Braveheart touch.
If Zuck hadn't gone derp, derp, derp earlier this year about what was actually happening inside his company, some microscopic crumb of this story might now be believable.
So far I trust Google's immense appetite to keep all the cream for themselves. They might track, but they don't share (so far as I've read).
I've also never seen anything from Google that I didn't know was from Google, so as a personal privacy attack surface, it's so far been fairly conspicuous.
Google knows everything about me from my search history already (on the order of one million data points).
Not that I don't have my own e-mail service (as well), but I estimate the my added exposure from Google knowing 99% of my life (by means of my e-mail) instead of 98% of my life (through search alone) as fairly small.
While is technology being singled out, when most of the 20th century was on board with woman mainly being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen?
This was an official plank of conservative family values, necessary for the upholding of the fine social fabric, etc. etc. yada yada. I can't recall a time in my life where I didn't believe that women ought to be able to do whatever the hell they want, to the same extent as men. I was an attentive child. I remember much about the 1970s quite well.
However, I've never been 100% comfortable with trying to force any complex system into a normative state. If you are intervening on behalf of one variable (out of thousands), you are usually throwing those other thousand variables to the wind.
I'm progressive enough that I've even argued in the past for separating achievement from ability (with equal ability, those with more opportunity should be expected to demonstrate more achievement).
Schools and other organizations intake on some mixture of ability and achievement, but to the extent that ability is the main factor (as viewed through an achievement lens), women deserved an intake boost (in Canada, we already have more women than men in higher education, so there's not a lot of residue left here).
I suspect men are hard wired to put up with more crap in the pursuit of extreme narrowness (otherwise, you don't get the girl; this is basic sexual competitiveness asymmetry from Robert Trivers). We don't have any reason to believe that exact equality is a natural outcome on any dimension.
I'm simply not wired to give any employment at all to the Handicapper General.
Almost every other mechanism of promoting equality appeals to me (those that don't involve normative head counts).
Not a possible conclusion when dealing with wicked-problem systems theory. Not even a possible provisional conclusion.
Possible conclusion: We have yet to see compelling evidence that recent steps taken by tech firms amount to a hill of beans. But that conclusion would be true of 99% of everything, 99% of all the time.
Sometimes with complex systems, there can be a brief flash of obviousness, but not very often.
It's about time we stopped judging a picture by its pixels alone.
We already have the situation in art and archaeology that nothing is considered real without provenance. Perhaps provenance will become easier to fake. Never fear, for this problem, there's always the blockchain.
The far more interesting aspect of this is the impact on trafficking in child pornography.
What are we going to do? How does one legally demonstrate the apparent age of a digital model? Connect a jury of thirteen convicted paedophiles to brain-scan augmented plethysmographs? (Could be a messy conviction.)
If the model renders in real time, there could be user-adjustable dials (think the original Terminator). Does the generated image self-destruct if the user adjusts the dials to a combined setting of less than 20 mR?
[*] mR = milli-Rabbits; see Helen
Meanwhile, the gradient of escape couldn't be limned in brighter lights.
An actual self-perpetuating feedback loop would be the small pockets of intelligent life who have sequestered themselves from social media deliberately dimming the lights and darking the drapes so as to escape notice by the ravening, mutually-loathing hoard.
Turns out, intelligent company is something one must earn by deserving to belong. And even worse, it doesn't pay for itself by being a conspicuous Mensa membership you can crow about and lord over the epsilons and deltas.
But maybe with luck, your biographer will discover your long, secret membership in the eminent Dark WELL.
That a nostalgic frontier-society masturbation fantasy.
Even if you do manage to show someone up physically (without going to jail yourself in the process) the target doesn't magically become socially clued-in, they just pursue different outlets to continue to indulge in their horrible behaviour (returning to the favourite haunts as soon as the teeth-busting coast is clear).
Lasting solutions almost always require the exercise of diplomacy, patience, and other grit-your-own-teeth social skills.
Absence of teeth-gritting social self-regulation might just be why you're self-pleasuring in the first place.