Robert Trivers' original papers, or any decent rehash thereof.
Trivers proposed the theories of reciprocal altruism (1971), parental investment (1972), facultative sex ratio determination (1973), and parent–offspring conflict (1974).
He has also contributed by explaining self-deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy (first described in 1976) and discussing intragenomic conflict.
I really didn't know Trivers' work until edge.org starting featuring these ideas in the early 2000s.
Instead I slogged through my teenage years reading Roots (icch), Airport (icch), Mere Christianity (icch), Your Erroneous Zones (icch), The Arms of Krupp (painful, but worth the effort), and The Sovereign State (of ITT) (even more painful, but also worth the effort).
I was a sampler of all things.
As such, it looks like I managed to read nearly every non-fiction work mentioned on this young thread either A) by the age of 23, B) shortly after first publication.
The one exception being Ayn Rand, a permanent no-fly zone.
Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive story known as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.
My second vote goes to Wikipedia. Yes, I mean this seriously.
Since elementary school, I was no stranger to the Encyclopedia Britannica, its many gaps forming the permanent, eroding skyline of my bedroom bookshelves. Every month or so, I'd have 20 gaps and 3 volumes standing, so I'd gather them up off every available surface, shelve them in order, and start again.
Then a miracle happened in 2005.
For the last decade, I've been randomly looking things up in Wikipedia, that I would have liked to have looked up long before, only it wasn't immediate, organized, and convenient.
Just yesterday I started randomly looking up all the cartoons I grew up with, and a few more recent ones:
* xkcd — 2005 * Calvin and Hobbes — 1995 * Dilbert — 1989 * Bloom County — 1980 * The Far Side — 1980 * Doonesbury — 1970 * The Family Circus — 1960 * B.C. (comic strip) — 1958 * Dennis the Menace (U.S. comics) — 1951 * Peanuts — 1950 * Blondie (comic strip) — 1930
Doesn't that shine a different light on ye olde Dagwood sandwich?
According to Blondie scripter Dean Young, his father, Chic Young, began drawing the huge sandwiches in the comic strip during 1936.
Where else would one go to systematically back-fill these (perhaps) inconsequential gaps?
You know, long before Moore's law became bow-legged from the heavy burden of asterisks. (Yes, like always before, we do indeed have more transistors, but just try to use them all at the same time and see what happens...)
So that's seventeen years ago. Subtract another seventeen years, and we're back to 1983.
Back in 2000, your karmic twin would have been moaning about the loss of 8-bit software compatibility.
Subtract another seventeen years, and we're back to 1965.
Back in 1983, your karmic triplet would have been moaning about the loss of slide rules.
Why waste money supporting them when you can send it to a lean organization that is run by people who are ruthlessly dedicated to not repeating Wikipedia's mistakes?
Would you put it on an Infogalactic fact page that the original Nupedia editors were anything less than "ruthlessly dedicated"?
No, you would not.
This is a high-risk social technology fork.
When in doubt about how to apply the rules or interpret the philosophy, ask your fellow Galaxians. If they don't know the answer, ask a Starlord.
Their ruthless dedication to going boldly forth with new, improved post-cosmic-rapture mistakes is alarmingly evident.
I've personally never held the WMF up as a paragon of wart-free social order. In the end, they're probably far less corrupt than many upstanding institutions with a long history of presenting a clean front.
Superforecasters always ask themselves this question: what's the base rate?
Well, it's not good. Not good at all. And I didn't even regard this as being more than a single bogie, as these things go. There needs to be an offshore bank account involved just to add one more stroke.
Standard drinks in Canada all work out to roughly 2 units.
The lower threshold of high risk drinking in Canada is presently 14 units of alcohol per week for women, or 21 units of alcohol per week for men.
When my wife and I have wine around (not always) we average about two bottles a week: 8 units/week for her, 12 units/week for me.
That's basically your foodie-Euro mainstream consumption level (medium). This study is being alarmist in not defining any consumption level between medium and burnt.
What is a search engine's purpose? To find you relevant information? Or to find you less relevant free information?
Here's an interesting thing.
Information becomes relevant only when people consume it. Then everyone can collectively chew it over around the water cooler on Monday morning, etc. Opinions can be posted online. A discussion culture can emerge. The underlying information itself can grow and evolve.
What are you relevant to? The tribe of people who delight in shaving the corners off language to see what breaks.
I wish someone would run a longitudinal study of your cohort. After years of repetition, it must surely leave a mark on your cognitive style. This would be such a groundbreaking and important study, I'd strongly commend the researchers to publish their results in an open access journal, so that their insights will spread far and wide to the benefit of all humanity, rather than narrow and deep to the benefit of one small coterie of psychologist wonks.
The network is the computer.
Surely it took you some doing to forget that on this website.
Transistors per chip still kinda going up on the same trend, as always.
But what they don't tell you is that there's an entire CPU inside your CPU devoted to turning those nice transistors off if they work too hard.
Welcome to union rules.
It's just like the gig economy where you only get twenty hours per week on average, but they won't tell which hours ahead of time, so you can't actually get yourself another 20-hour gig to achieve full-time gainful employment.
Official unemployment down; hours and hours of Counter-Strike alone at home (waiting for the phone to ring) way way up.
No, he just knows that WaPo has ties to the CIA, so they should be viewed with similar skepticism as Russia Today.
The core ideology here is that all institutions are corrupt and incompetent unless the institution is shadowy, directed by secret strings, and engaged in conspiracy and mass deception, in which case the institution runs as efficiently and flawlessly and smoothly and competently as a German-railroad Seal Team 6.
But no.
Mass-deception conspiracy is hard, and the cracks around the edges usually become evident before long (without the use of tinfoil).
This appears to be a highly evolved perceptual representation of a core social competence. Even if it doesn't generalize, it's the biggest science result since the second LIGO detection.
It's already enough to further manipulate the masses, once exploited by the ad men, the plastic surgeons, and the mayfly scions of social media.
As a reliable bijection, research can already begin correlating the genomic racial space with 50-dimensional face space, no electrodes required. I'm betting Africa and Australia get all the love.
One caveat: how many more dimensions are required to represent male facial hair? Or is the beard recognizer a different neural subsystem altogether, half a neural highway closer to God?
Astrophysicists don't fully understand how such big black holes could have formed. But now, "it seems that these are not so uncommon, so clearly there's a way to produce these massive black holes," says physicist Clifford Will of the University of Florida in Gainesville.
If it's such an insane miracle to get hitched in the first place, it couldn't conceivably happen again.
It does seem as if there's a trend for low-brow films to be scored a bit lower by the overall critic consensus.
We're presently living in an era where almost any tent pole movie avoids nuanced dialogue like the plague, because it's hard to overdub in dozens of different languages. This is a big component of the cloak and man-panties renaissance. Action movies are the easiest movies to i18n (what we call action movies are internally thought of as cross-genre, but that's another matter).
Hence there's a big correlation lately between low-brow movies and cave-troll levels of verbal wit. What Hollywood is pissed about is how RT is making it harder to market the one-size-fits-all, sorry-about-the-shitty-dialogue (see Downey smirk) tent pole hammer-bammer fest.
I've generally found the RT scores to provide a highly effective first-order assessment. Without RT to guide me safely through the Braindead Marshes, I'd simply watch fewer movies.
This whole thing happened before after the original Star Wars. For a decade afterwards, every studio executive wanted to fund a candy placement with a McDonalds toy-promotion tie-in. Scorsese had to make After Hours (and this on a shoestring) because no studio would fund a worthwhile project (his Last Temptation was temporarily shit canned). Serious filmmakers remember the eighties as a lost decade.
I think the critics are far more consistent in their evaluations over the years than what the studios choose to churn out. Ebert rewatched his favourite movies from across the decades many, many times (there are at least half a dozen movies he dissected frame by frame in public venues).
When he had to ask himself in the theatre "who just rammed their peanut butter into my chocolate?" it didn't usually lead to multiple stars.
Especially when the peanut butter gums up the dialogue of all the actors, except for Biff Pow.
Who in 1900 could have foreseen the airplane industry and the number of people it would employ?
I guess the smoke really gets in your eyes from all those trains.
Here's the American track build-out {year, miles}: 1830_______39 1840____2,700 1850____8,500 1860___28,000 1870___49,000 1880___87,000 1890__160,000
At this point, the grand project is essentially finished.
The bigger difference, I think, is that fewer Americans back then looked up those numbers in under two minutes like I just did.
Nor did the mills of Manchester tip the assembly lines of Henry Ford, and neither did the great telegraph boom anticipate the soon heady growth of the information economy (I've previously read that the telegraph sand-grab of the 1860s sucked up a larger slice of global GDP than the internet boom of the 1990s).
John Watkins Brett, an engineer from Bristol, sought and obtained permission from Louis-Philippe in 1847 to establish telegraphic communication between France and England.
The first undersea cable was laid in 1850, connecting the two countries and was followed by connections to Ireland and the Low Countries.
The Atlantic Telegraph Company was formed in London in 1856 to undertake to construct a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean.
It was successfully completed on 18 July 1866 by the ship SS Great Eastern, captained by Sir James Anderson after many mishaps along the away.
The telegraph lines from Britain to India were connected in 1870.
Australia was first linked to the rest of the world in October 1872 by a submarine telegraph cable at Darwin.
The telegraph across the Pacific was completed in 1902, finally encircling the world.
The geopolitics of this deserve to be better known.
From the 1850s until well into the 20th century, British submarine cable systems dominated the world system. This was set out as a formal strategic goal, which became known as the All Red Line.
In 1896, there were thirty cable laying ships in the world and twenty-four of them were owned by British companies.
In 1892, British companies owned and operated two-thirds of the world's cables and by 1923, their share was still 42.7 percent.
During World War I, Britain's telegraph communications were almost completely uninterrupted, while it was able to quickly cut Germany's cables worldwide.
There also seems to be a second prophesy here about the concentration of power and wealth.
If the global economy turns into one great, giant banana republic because the plutocrats have gained a choke hold on the cream separator, a soaring unemployment rate could yet result from a great tinpot ceiling.
In the decades of yore, I've only ever had two subscriptions: The Economist (late nineties) and, briefly, the Toronto Globe and Mail (early nineties). After 2000, why bother? Once the internet really kicked off, I just found stuff. Mostly I rely on highbrow aggregation sites like edge.org and aldaily.com. TED talks were good initially, and I also used to check out Science Daily if I was bored.
These sites often make passing mention to current events (something that's happened in the last three years) and I'll just Google many things mentioned in the articles I read that are interesting or don't smell right. So eventually I catch up with the news cycle, but on my own terms. I prefer to read at a 1- to 3-year remove from the fracas anyway. More perspective, less noise.
Here's one good example. I never paid an iota of attention to Three Mile Island, until they actually finished sawing the failed reactor apart (this took years). Inside, what they finally found bore little resemblance to the official report, which was basically just politicized micro-mea culpa Quaalude bullshit. Meanwhile, billions of nerve cells protected from cubits of crap.
Here's my entire mental file on OJ: there was a police chase, and then something about a glove. The story wasn't ever actual news. Filter set to 99.
For a long time, I ignored a lot of MSM coverage of the Middle East. Then one day I grabbed a copy of The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State by Lawrence Wright (2016), and bypassed dozens of hours of belligerent talking heads.
For technology, I scan the Slashdot headlines and paste articles in my notes, under heading ==Inbox==. For example, I've presently got ten mostly-unread links to Uber malfeasance, should at some future point I decide to give a shit about Uber's extensive adolescent rap sheet. This plus mounds of partially digested material on machine learning. Uber is only interesting to me in the first place as an end-run around entrenched interests (way overdue for a mud fight).
For the Trump administration—which I rank up there with the Cuban Missile Crisis and 9/11 as a potential bifurcation-point on civilization as we know it (Trump basically promised this at every rally)—I decided to try something new. I just instantly Google every name that comes up in the daily/hourly news cycle, and make a page in my peg-board wiki. About half a dozen times so far, I've filed a name on the periphery of the story which had a very strong spin in the first source, then weeks or months later seen the same name resurface in a different context with a very different spin (for example, a person such as Alexander Rovt). Interesting to notice, but it's also a hell of a lot of wiki farming.
I also consume a lot of information-heavy podcasts (EconTalk, RadioLab, Hardcore History, HowSound, Talking Machines, the O'Reilly Data Show are my current rotation) and then use the good ol' Google-grapnel to on-board associated material by the barge load. The ultimate trick is engagement, curiosity, attention, and excellent note-taking skills. 90% of my knowledge base is motivated bycatch.
Cognitive currency. Ultimately, you get what you pay for.
At this point, I'm not even sure searching by publication-venue reputation is a top-five discrimination signal in my implicit sorting algorithm (this signal is way stronger on the other side: do not click here—in practice, it's basically just a shit list).
IMHO what is mostly needed is faster memory. Modern ML often involves working with multi-Gigabyte domain models, stored in DRAM, where the access latency hasn't changed particularly in the last 10 years.
You should write advertising copy.
What is needed is faster relief. We've improved the package perforation. Now rips open 2x faster!
Faster has many dimensions, yet you fixate on just one. It turns out, however, that slapping you down was a royal PITA: all of the vendors involved in HBM{1,2,3} pony up sweet-shit-all concerning latency (wanted: an edible, colour-coded haymark).
Finally I found this comment by one Tuna-Fish from 2010:
Memory latency of many devices using GDDR5 (like GPUs) is a lot higher than on the typical device that uses DDR3, but this has nothing to do with the RAM, and everything to do with the controller.
Basically, GPUs can expect to see a lot of accesses to addresses reasonably close to each other (like reading color values out of a texture) in a relatively short time, and the devices are typically good at finding other work to do while waiting on memory accesses. Because of this, and the fact that larger transfers are more efficient, GPUs tend to delay initiating transfers a bit to wait for opportunities to combine them.
It's entirely possible to have a memory controller that does this to GPU-like transfers and doesn't do it to CPU-like transfers.
Bandwidth, however, is just one characteristic of memory performance. Latency is equally important, but data on HBM latency compared with GDDR5 is much harder to come by. The implication, if I've read the various slide decks and data sheets correctly, is that HBM latency should be modestly better than GDDR5's — but possibly not by much. Certainly it won't improve by anything like the bandwidth jumps we're going to see.
The gist of the fragments I managed to find is that HBM latency is roughly on par with the concurrent GDR generation, and this is—in most controllers—actually worse than the concurrent DDR generation, hence the industry-wide light-lip syndrome.
Only that's not the whole story. Because HBM has more channels than GDR and allows more pages to be open concurrently. For a sufficiently parallel workload, HBM latency as a function of bandwidth can be excellent compared to the alternatives.
And certainly the thermal density is yards superior. Which is itself interesting, because you hardly ever see plots pitting latency against J/bit-ns. Awesome! A brand shiny new thermal wall. Physical distance, aka latency, actually functions as an implicit thermal spreader, and this goes away when the engineers get too pie-eyed over rail-gun-drone–accelerated rolling drive-thru nirvana (recommended: a Kevlar fish net on a titanium pole, and a Quick eye).
It actually has the endurance to be used as an on-chip SRAM replacement with eDRAM access times, but I don't know whether joint fabrication with CMOS is viable (in particular, at the high end). Note that ultimate durability is as yet unknown, because their 10^14-cycle test bench is taking a while to return 0/1.
Over the years, I've listened to most of the EconTalk back catalog. I agree with Russ Roberts about 60% of the time, yet I have some pretty strong disagreements in the other 40%.
Part of his standard spiel about diminishing the role of government in all practical venues is his model of private charity. I just found this now, but it turns out he's actually written a paper on the subject:
The whole point of relying less on government to adjudicate public life is that every side of the argument can stump up their own pocket books, as they see fit as private citizens. My own gut instinct is that this would devolve into an extremely capricious network of civic concern and attention, by the standard mechanism of charismatic megafauna getting all the grease.
So if these protesters (or some subset thereof) turn out to have deep pockets behind them, that actually means, in certain well-established strands of orthodox libertarian theory, that they are in good standing with the giant neoliberal program of dragging big government into a small bathtub, and it would be entirely their own business how they raise their protest stake. Because under Libertarianism, all dollars are created equal, and from this assumption (and possibly also God) unencumbered moral equilibrium shall automatically flow.
Nevertheless, suck-and-blow types somehow always seem to show up with a steady supply of nefarious labels concerning the hidden ka-ching. The standard smoke machine demands this narrative. (Business As Usual wouldn't much mind if the protesters did conform to their established narrative lot of being eternally impoverished and poorly organized, so it wins either way.)
I actually prefer government as a player in many issues, because it aims (until corrupted) to be somewhat transparent (no-one ever accused government of getting anything exactly right, which I regard as a false standard, because no-one ever accused any human system of getting anything exactly right, modulo "law of the jungle, the losers can suck it"; government is simply better at counting up losers than most private-sector alternatives).
I guess many people out there figure that if America went much further toward the Libertarian end of the spectrum, we'd all be united in the Church of the Profit Motive, and this kind of dispute simply wouldn't transpire among gentlemen, and we would not be constantly up to our ankles in dark money vs. deep money shit storms. Well, I'm not personally signing up to test drive that experimental fork in the road. I'm not saying it couldn't possibly work. The world is a complicated place. But I'd rather not risk my own skin to that experiment.
Constructive public discourse is fragile. This one thing, for sure, we all know.
Back in 2014 the town of Seneca, Nebraska was deeply divided. How divided? They were so fed up with each other that some citizens began circulating a petition that proposed a radical solution. If a majority wanted to they'd self-destruct, end the town, and wipe their community off the map.
Bike shed? Or canary in the coal mine?
In this instance, it's hard to say. The politics of division have this strange, new, frightening face.
To my eye all these posts about the giant pile of garbage are a giant pile of bike-shed garbage.
It looks and smells like standard online disruption tactics, when there are far bigger fish to fry.
Also, any post (or poster) citing "roommate" as a source (with or without ambiguous irony) needs to mentally hell-banned. Don't waste mental effort attempting to parse ambiguous irony bait. Anyone with a constructive intent would know better than to further cloud a crap fight.
A worthwhile post: (1) does not mention giant piles of abandoned garbage, (2) does not employ irony or sarcasm on any level, (3) does not mention roommates or any other form of "some person I know".
I guess that's just for future reference, as I figure this thread is fried by opposing ideological troll armies, no matter what.
What a shitty world we're creating.
This place simply can't support this discussion, unless we're going to add:
-1 small-fish bike shed -1 failure to speak plainly -1 second-hand non-entity
Oh, a sleeping drunkard Up in Central Park, And a lion-hunter In the jungle dark, And a Chinese dentist, And a British queen-- All fit together In the same machine. Nice, nice, very nice; Nice, nice, very nice; Nice, nice, very nice-- So many different people In the same device.
Hmm, how about:
Apple Devising iAI ASIC
Clearly iAI is pronounce "aye yai".
[*] By the way, Apple, for you that's Aye Yai(TM). Me first. Ching ching.
Maybe someone in the DoL is trying to make a name for themselves?
A universal lightning rod offered up to people who are tired of thinking.
In my experience, either a person already views the world through this lens—in which case it's redundant—or a person tries extremely hard not to open this appalling box until some directly corroborating evidence forces the issue—in which case floating the possibility prematurely without offering up a smoking gun (or at least a lipstick-stained cigarette butt)—is an obnoxious waste of breath.
This particular anxiety harp string is only two strings over from SJW. Expertly woven together they manufacture the beautiful chord of tinfoil minor.
Look at it this way - If you grow plants to absorb all the CO2 a power plant produces, you would be growing enough plant matter to run the plant on the biomass.
You don't get it, do you?
You simply bury all this biomass in a downward-sucking rift valley, so that the glorious post-civilization reboot a billion years from now has a convenient carbon source to prime the pump.
Only they won't call it "priming the pump". They'll have a new word, meaning "better than prime".
Here's the thing.
If "better" maps onto "bigger than", they're equally doomed.
If "better" maps onto "less myopic", they just might have a pincer's chance.
Good on you, but you do know that that is just the first step in the 5 Whys of mea culpa?
The 32-bit uptime bug in Windows 95 was the poster child of a toy operating system.
NTFS (and the giant NT/2000/XP fork in the road) was the poster child for Microsoft escaping their toy reputation.
The entire joke here is that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Now this new $MFT fiasco is just a stupid edge case in something that actually works well enough, most of the time.
The joke under the joke here is that Microsoft has a predilection for death by self-inflicted edge case that beggars imagination, almost as if its a fixture of the organization's eternal DNA.
The whole point of the Emperor's New Clothes was Microsoft attempting to sell the world on the innovation that they had finally put away their childish things. But no, not entirely. You can still see the boy in the man. Bigger and hairier, but still flopping around like a fish out of water.
You reveal that you were actually afflicted with this problem in a big way (the time overflow bug) and yet somehow the larger story around it was going whoosh over your head (no one who cottoned onto this story at the time would have filed this Out of Africa II family-tree distinction under "minor detail").
Stage two of the 5 whys of mea culpa: Where was your head at the time?
Stage three: Whatever happened then, are you still captive to childish things?
etc. etc.
For our purposes here, there's an extremely interesting fork in the road upon entering stage five.
A) man, I was such an ass B) look Ma, we made a trillion dollars
An honest-to-God trillion dollars.
Microsoft has hit $1 trillion in all-time revenue, and with more profit than Apple — 9 May 2016
When 10% of the population uses a product in a serious way, it is usually viable to support a substantial niche of demanding users.
When 90% of a population uses a product on a daily basis, in a myriad of subtle ways the ecosystem begins to pander to the careless and barely invested.
What needed to be discussed here was the collapse of Firefox's plug-in ecosystem. For one thing, it stopped being cool to start new projects, so it started to become a legacy ecosystem, and many of the original plug-in developers (most of whom started young) were getting older and moving on in life.
Plus there was a financial incentive for the Anarchy Syndicate to treat the entire plug-in ecosystem as a threat vector, the policing of which creates a permanent burden.
As Mozilla began to flee the policing burden, two things happened: it shifted a huge maintenance burden on their already tired plug-in developers to adapt to a succession of ever-more-restrictive APIs (more work, less reward), and its last important differentiation from Chrome starting spiralling down the drain pipe.
So Andreas Gal comes along and wants to put Firefox OS on his resume, and doesn't invest hardly a thought in their dangerously eroding extension ecology.
Or maybe he had a plan for Firefox OS to somehow make experimentation and customization sexy again?
If so, you certainly wouldn't know it from this lame essay.
So let's sum up. My only available path forward is to spend the better part of a year, probably more, on the tedious and stressful task of rewriting one of my add-ons and part of another, both of which will result in only already existing functionality that brings me no gain and in which I have no personal interest, to retain maybe a third of my current user-base, in favor of a system that will exist for reasons with which I don't agree, with further development of novel features being subject to a bottleneck on Mozilla's side rather than on myself.
Luis deserved a better answer from Captain Capsize.
I would guess that Julian Assange gets much better food, treatment, visitation and access to communications compared to what he would in a federal prison.
Step right up folks, what we have here is AAA deterrence porn. It always follows the same model. You know, no matter how your life has suffered, the real punishment is the next degradation. If complete loss of freedom isn't hitting you where it hurts, just wait until we serve you wormy food. Suck on them apples, shit bag.
Life is pretty soft. Assange probably doesn't lie awake with the Shawshank shakes, either (nothing spells punishment like being ass-raped by government fiat). He's probably not being waterboarded. And he has probably not been subjected to Chinese water torture.
In other words—I think this is your intended implication—it's all blow jobs and unicorns in the Ecuadorian embassy.
Right.
For your charming contribution, today we have a special prize.
You are henceforth the newly appointed Slashdot ambassador to Junior Soprano. It is your job to visit Junior and inform him that house arrest does not count as "meaningful punishment", and wouldn't he please also whip himself bloody with a macrame horse whip hand-crafted by his sweet niece, Janice, just to make his penance really count.
House arrest is a sentence issued by a judge as an alternative to prison time and helps keep track of convicted criminals after or as an alternative to a prison sentence.
The sentence states that the person cannot leave their main domicile and can only be released for important family functions, medical appointments, or funerals. Junior is also able to leave his residence when he needs to visit a supermarket.
Junior's social life begins to dwindle under his sentence.
Tony is in a similar, albeit self-imposed, situation when he tries to curtail his interactions with his crew.
Tony very nearly loses his mind just trying to maintain a sightly lower profile—with all the money, all the sex, the big house, the big car, the family, the prestige and the power, yada yada yada...
Junior's situation is closer to Julian's, only he (Junior) makes it worse than it needs to be by failing to ask his friendly GP for the little blue pill (it's a pride thing).
Julian has probably managed to find himself a physician who makes house calls. Probably an older guy, one who never really believed in this new-fangled MRI business in the first place.
But of course, it's the worm in the Federal prison apple that really terrifies Assange. Because that would strip him of human dignity. Whereas undiagnosed cancer would merely put a premature end to his miserable existence.
Slashdot Mirror
Robert Trivers' original papers, or any decent rehash thereof.
I really didn't know Trivers' work until edge.org starting featuring these ideas in the early 2000s.
Instead I slogged through my teenage years reading Roots (icch), Airport (icch), Mere Christianity (icch), Your Erroneous Zones (icch), The Arms of Krupp (painful, but worth the effort), and The Sovereign State (of ITT) (even more painful, but also worth the effort).
I was a sampler of all things.
As such, it looks like I managed to read nearly every non-fiction work mentioned on this young thread either A) by the age of 23, B) shortly after first publication.
The one exception being Ayn Rand, a permanent no-fly zone.
Big Sister Is Watching You — 1957
My second vote goes to Wikipedia. Yes, I mean this seriously.
Since elementary school, I was no stranger to the Encyclopedia Britannica, its many gaps forming the permanent, eroding skyline of my bedroom bookshelves. Every month or so, I'd have 20 gaps and 3 volumes standing, so I'd gather them up off every available surface, shelve them in order, and start again.
Then a miracle happened in 2005.
For the last decade, I've been randomly looking things up in Wikipedia, that I would have liked to have looked up long before, only it wasn't immediate, organized, and convenient.
Just yesterday I started randomly looking up all the cartoons I grew up with, and a few more recent ones:
* xkcd — 2005
* Calvin and Hobbes — 1995
* Dilbert — 1989
* Bloom County — 1980
* The Far Side — 1980
* Doonesbury — 1970
* The Family Circus — 1960
* B.C. (comic strip) — 1958
* Dennis the Menace (U.S. comics) — 1951
* Peanuts — 1950
* Blondie (comic strip) — 1930
Doesn't that shine a different light on ye olde Dagwood sandwich?
Where else would one go to systematically back-fill these (perhaps) inconsequential gaps?
AMD64 was introduced back in 2000.
You know, long before Moore's law became bow-legged from the heavy burden of asterisks. (Yes, like always before, we do indeed have more transistors, but just try to use them all at the same time and see what happens ...)
So that's seventeen years ago. Subtract another seventeen years, and we're back to 1983.
Back in 2000, your karmic twin would have been moaning about the loss of 8-bit software compatibility.
Subtract another seventeen years, and we're back to 1965.
Back in 1983, your karmic triplet would have been moaning about the loss of slide rules.
Lament for the Slide Rule — August 1985
Unfortunately, that's paywalled, so we're stuck with this belated cuckoo:
When Slide Rules Ruled — Cliff Stoll (2006)
Check out this giant pull-quote:
Nice. That saves me from craning my neck to look through my window for plummeting petunias. You just never know anything with absolute certainty.
Would you put it on an Infogalactic fact page that the original Nupedia editors were anything less than "ruthlessly dedicated"?
No, you would not.
This is a high-risk social technology fork.
Their ruthless dedication to going boldly forth with new, improved post-cosmic-rapture mistakes is alarmingly evident.
I've personally never held the WMF up as a paragon of wart-free social order. In the end, they're probably far less corrupt than many upstanding institutions with a long history of presenting a clean front.
Superforecasters always ask themselves this question: what's the base rate?
* How Donald Trump Shifted Kids-Cancer Charity Money Into His Business
Well, it's not good. Not good at all. And I didn't even regard this as being more than a single bogie, as these things go. There needs to be an offshore bank account involved just to add one more stroke.
Corruption is an exponential scale.
I think I crossed my wires with something else on my screen.
* 10 drinks a week for women, with no more than 2 drinks a day most days
* 15 drinks a week for men, with no more than 3 drinks a day most days
That's 20 and 30, numbers I find hard to process.
http://www.cclt.ca/Resource%20...
Standard drinks in Canada all work out to roughly 2 units.
The lower threshold of high risk drinking in Canada is presently 14 units of alcohol per week for women, or 21 units of alcohol per week for men.
When my wife and I have wine around (not always) we average about two bottles a week: 8 units/week for her, 12 units/week for me.
That's basically your foodie-Euro mainstream consumption level (medium). This study is being alarmist in not defining any consumption level between medium and burnt.
Not well done.
Here's an interesting thing.
Information becomes relevant only when people consume it. Then everyone can collectively chew it over around the water cooler on Monday morning, etc. Opinions can be posted online. A discussion culture can emerge. The underlying information itself can grow and evolve.
What are you relevant to? The tribe of people who delight in shaving the corners off language to see what breaks.
I wish someone would run a longitudinal study of your cohort. After years of repetition, it must surely leave a mark on your cognitive style. This would be such a groundbreaking and important study, I'd strongly commend the researchers to publish their results in an open access journal, so that their insights will spread far and wide to the benefit of all humanity, rather than narrow and deep to the benefit of one small coterie of psychologist wonks.
The network is the computer.
Surely it took you some doing to forget that on this website.
I'm with you, 100%
New Kaby Lake iMacs arrive from Apple
Does "upgradeable" merely mean ka-ching ka-ching pre-sale "configurable" at 4x street price?
If so, buh bye, sweet spot. No sale.
Once upon a time I would have trusted Ars to know the difference. These days, I'm not so sure.
You are so dating yourself. Just ten seconds on Wikipedia concerning EUV lithography would shave a decade off your musty knowledge.
The whole point of the post-2009 lithographic era is that nothing traditionally used as a benchmark of progress comes for free.
Advantage: fewer masks
Disadvantage: vastly longer step time
Moore's law is still hobbling along, but it definitely lost a testicle circa 2004–2009. You can see it in any honest graph.
Even this article lies a bit.
The chips are down for Moore's law — 9 February 2016
Transistors per chip still kinda going up on the same trend, as always.
But what they don't tell you is that there's an entire CPU inside your CPU devoted to turning those nice transistors off if they work too hard.
Welcome to union rules.
It's just like the gig economy where you only get twenty hours per week on average, but they won't tell which hours ahead of time, so you can't actually get yourself another 20-hour gig to achieve full-time gainful employment.
Official unemployment down; hours and hours of Counter-Strike alone at home (waiting for the phone to ring) way way up.
The core ideology here is that all institutions are corrupt and incompetent unless the institution is shadowy, directed by secret strings, and engaged in conspiracy and mass deception, in which case the institution runs as efficiently and flawlessly and smoothly and competently as a German-railroad Seal Team 6.
But no.
Mass-deception conspiracy is hard, and the cracks around the edges usually become evident before long (without the use of tinfoil).
This appears to be a highly evolved perceptual representation of a core social competence. Even if it doesn't generalize, it's the biggest science result since the second LIGO detection.
It's already enough to further manipulate the masses, once exploited by the ad men, the plastic surgeons, and the mayfly scions of social media.
As a reliable bijection, research can already begin correlating the genomic racial space with 50-dimensional face space, no electrodes required. I'm betting Africa and Australia get all the love.
One caveat: how many more dimensions are required to represent male facial hair? Or is the beard recognizer a different neural subsystem altogether, half a neural highway closer to God?
Second detection
Date: December 26, 2015
Mass of first black hole: 14.2 solar masses
Mass of second black hole: 7.5 solar masses
Merged mass: 20.8 solar masses
Third detection
Date: January 4, 2017
Mass of first black hole: 31.2 solar masses
Mass of second black hole: 19.4 solar masses
Merged mass: 48.7 solar masses
LIGO snags another set of gravitational waves
If it's such an insane miracle to get hitched in the first place, it couldn't conceivably happen again.
We're presently living in an era where almost any tent pole movie avoids nuanced dialogue like the plague, because it's hard to overdub in dozens of different languages. This is a big component of the cloak and man-panties renaissance. Action movies are the easiest movies to i18n (what we call action movies are internally thought of as cross-genre, but that's another matter).
Hence there's a big correlation lately between low-brow movies and cave-troll levels of verbal wit. What Hollywood is pissed about is how RT is making it harder to market the one-size-fits-all, sorry-about-the-shitty-dialogue (see Downey smirk) tent pole hammer-bammer fest.
I've generally found the RT scores to provide a highly effective first-order assessment. Without RT to guide me safely through the Braindead Marshes, I'd simply watch fewer movies.
This whole thing happened before after the original Star Wars. For a decade afterwards, every studio executive wanted to fund a candy placement with a McDonalds toy-promotion tie-in. Scorsese had to make After Hours (and this on a shoestring) because no studio would fund a worthwhile project (his Last Temptation was temporarily shit canned). Serious filmmakers remember the eighties as a lost decade.
I think the critics are far more consistent in their evaluations over the years than what the studios choose to churn out. Ebert rewatched his favourite movies from across the decades many, many times (there are at least half a dozen movies he dissected frame by frame in public venues).
When he had to ask himself in the theatre "who just rammed their peanut butter into my chocolate?" it didn't usually lead to multiple stars.
Especially when the peanut butter gums up the dialogue of all the actors, except for Biff Pow.
I guess the smoke really gets in your eyes from all those trains.
Here's the American track build-out {year, miles}:
1830_______39
1840____2,700
1850____8,500
1860___28,000
1870___49,000
1880___87,000
1890__160,000
At this point, the grand project is essentially finished.
The bigger difference, I think, is that fewer Americans back then looked up those numbers in under two minutes like I just did.
Nor did the mills of Manchester tip the assembly lines of Henry Ford, and neither did the great telegraph boom anticipate the soon heady growth of the information economy (I've previously read that the telegraph sand-grab of the 1860s sucked up a larger slice of global GDP than the internet boom of the 1990s).
The geopolitics of this deserve to be better known.
There also seems to be a second prophesy here about the concentration of power and wealth.
If the global economy turns into one great, giant banana republic because the plutocrats have gained a choke hold on the cream separator, a soaring unemployment rate could yet result from a great tinpot ceiling.
In the decades of yore, I've only ever had two subscriptions: The Economist (late nineties) and, briefly, the Toronto Globe and Mail (early nineties). After 2000, why bother? Once the internet really kicked off, I just found stuff. Mostly I rely on highbrow aggregation sites like edge.org and aldaily.com. TED talks were good initially, and I also used to check out Science Daily if I was bored.
These sites often make passing mention to current events (something that's happened in the last three years) and I'll just Google many things mentioned in the articles I read that are interesting or don't smell right. So eventually I catch up with the news cycle, but on my own terms. I prefer to read at a 1- to 3-year remove from the fracas anyway. More perspective, less noise.
Here's one good example. I never paid an iota of attention to Three Mile Island, until they actually finished sawing the failed reactor apart (this took years). Inside, what they finally found bore little resemblance to the official report, which was basically just politicized micro-mea culpa Quaalude bullshit. Meanwhile, billions of nerve cells protected from cubits of crap.
Here's my entire mental file on OJ: there was a police chase, and then something about a glove. The story wasn't ever actual news. Filter set to 99.
For a long time, I ignored a lot of MSM coverage of the Middle East. Then one day I grabbed a copy of The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State by Lawrence Wright (2016), and bypassed dozens of hours of belligerent talking heads.
For technology, I scan the Slashdot headlines and paste articles in my notes, under heading ==Inbox==. For example, I've presently got ten mostly-unread links to Uber malfeasance, should at some future point I decide to give a shit about Uber's extensive adolescent rap sheet. This plus mounds of partially digested material on machine learning. Uber is only interesting to me in the first place as an end-run around entrenched interests (way overdue for a mud fight).
For the Trump administration—which I rank up there with the Cuban Missile Crisis and 9/11 as a potential bifurcation-point on civilization as we know it (Trump basically promised this at every rally)—I decided to try something new. I just instantly Google every name that comes up in the daily/hourly news cycle, and make a page in my peg-board wiki. About half a dozen times so far, I've filed a name on the periphery of the story which had a very strong spin in the first source, then weeks or months later seen the same name resurface in a different context with a very different spin (for example, a person such as Alexander Rovt). Interesting to notice, but it's also a hell of a lot of wiki farming.
I also consume a lot of information-heavy podcasts (EconTalk, RadioLab, Hardcore History, HowSound, Talking Machines, the O'Reilly Data Show are my current rotation) and then use the good ol' Google-grapnel to on-board associated material by the barge load. The ultimate trick is engagement, curiosity, attention, and excellent note-taking skills. 90% of my knowledge base is motivated bycatch.
Cognitive currency. Ultimately, you get what you pay for.
At this point, I'm not even sure searching by publication-venue reputation is a top-five discrimination signal in my implicit sorting algorithm (this signal is way stronger on the other side: do not click here—in practice, it's basically just a shit list).
You should write advertising copy.
Faster has many dimensions, yet you fixate on just one. It turns out, however, that slapping you down was a royal PITA: all of the vendors involved in HBM{1,2,3} pony up sweet-shit-all concerning latency (wanted: an edible, colour-coded haymark).
Finally I found this comment by one Tuna-Fish from 2010:
I'm not the only frustrated person.
* AMD's upcoming Fiji GPU will feature new memory interface — Joel Hruska, 30 April 2015
The gist of the fragments I managed to find is that HBM latency is roughly on par with the concurrent GDR generation, and this is—in most controllers—actually worse than the concurrent DDR generation, hence the industry-wide light-lip syndrome.
Only that's not the whole story. Because HBM has more channels than GDR and allows more pages to be open concurrently. For a sufficiently parallel workload, HBM latency as a function of bandwidth can be excellent compared to the alternatives.
And certainly the thermal density is yards superior. Which is itself interesting, because you hardly ever see plots pitting latency against J/bit-ns. Awesome! A brand shiny new thermal wall. Physical distance, aka latency, actually functions as an implicit thermal spreader, and this goes away when the engineers get too pie-eyed over rail-gun-drone–accelerated rolling drive-thru nirvana (recommended: a Kevlar fish net on a titanium pole, and a Quick eye).
A Study of Application Performance with Non-Volatile Main Memory — Yiying Zhang (2015)
The fastest of the prospective non-volatile technologies (which are thermally desirable due to lack of refresh) is NRAM.
Fast NRAM to be released 2019-epsilon by Nantero/Fujitsu — August 2016
It actually has the endurance to be used as an on-chip SRAM replacement with eDRAM access times, but I don't know whether joint fabrication with CMOS is viable (in particular, at the high end). Note that ultimate durability is as yet unknown, because their 10^14-cycle test bench is taking a while to return 0/1.
[*] I wou
One more thing about the money angle.
Over the years, I've listened to most of the EconTalk back catalog. I agree with Russ Roberts about 60% of the time, yet I have some pretty strong disagreements in the other 40%.
Part of his standard spiel about diminishing the role of government in all practical venues is his model of private charity. I just found this now, but it turns out he's actually written a paper on the subject:
A Positive Model of Private Charity and Public Transfers
The whole point of relying less on government to adjudicate public life is that every side of the argument can stump up their own pocket books, as they see fit as private citizens. My own gut instinct is that this would devolve into an extremely capricious network of civic concern and attention, by the standard mechanism of charismatic megafauna getting all the grease.
So if these protesters (or some subset thereof) turn out to have deep pockets behind them, that actually means, in certain well-established strands of orthodox libertarian theory, that they are in good standing with the giant neoliberal program of dragging big government into a small bathtub, and it would be entirely their own business how they raise their protest stake. Because under Libertarianism, all dollars are created equal, and from this assumption (and possibly also God) unencumbered moral equilibrium shall automatically flow.
Nevertheless, suck-and-blow types somehow always seem to show up with a steady supply of nefarious labels concerning the hidden ka-ching. The standard smoke machine demands this narrative. (Business As Usual wouldn't much mind if the protesters did conform to their established narrative lot of being eternally impoverished and poorly organized, so it wins either way.)
I actually prefer government as a player in many issues, because it aims (until corrupted) to be somewhat transparent (no-one ever accused government of getting anything exactly right, which I regard as a false standard, because no-one ever accused any human system of getting anything exactly right, modulo "law of the jungle, the losers can suck it"; government is simply better at counting up losers than most private-sector alternatives).
I guess many people out there figure that if America went much further toward the Libertarian end of the spectrum, we'd all be united in the Church of the Profit Motive, and this kind of dispute simply wouldn't transpire among gentlemen, and we would not be constantly up to our ankles in dark money vs. deep money shit storms. Well, I'm not personally signing up to test drive that experimental fork in the road. I'm not saying it couldn't possibly work. The world is a complicated place. But I'd rather not risk my own skin to that experiment.
Constructive public discourse is fragile. This one thing, for sure, we all know.
Seneca, Nebraska — 12 October 2016
Bike shed? Or canary in the coal mine?
In this instance, it's hard to say. The politics of division have this strange, new, frightening face.
To my eye all these posts about the giant pile of garbage are a giant pile of bike-shed garbage.
It looks and smells like standard online disruption tactics, when there are far bigger fish to fry.
Also, any post (or poster) citing "roommate" as a source (with or without ambiguous irony) needs to mentally hell-banned. Don't waste mental effort attempting to parse ambiguous irony bait. Anyone with a constructive intent would know better than to further cloud a crap fight.
A worthwhile post: (1) does not mention giant piles of abandoned garbage, (2) does not employ irony or sarcasm on any level, (3) does not mention roommates or any other form of "some person I know".
I guess that's just for future reference, as I figure this thread is fried by opposing ideological troll armies, no matter what.
What a shitty world we're creating.
This place simply can't support this discussion, unless we're going to add:
-1 small-fish bike shed
-1 failure to speak plainly
-1 second-hand non-entity
And probably more.
When all you've got is a deep frier, everything looks like browbeaten Timbit tempura.
42 years now, and still haven't changed the original oil.
Dared to lowercase "a", but not "On", "To", or "On". I guess that makes this news More Impressive.
So that gets us to:
Oh oh, lameness filter activated:
* nice main verb: "is working on"
* nice pablum phrase: "dedicated chip"
* nice cliche: "to power"
* nice hipster slang: "devices"
Hmm, how about:
Clearly iAI is pronounce "aye yai".
[*] By the way, Apple, for you that's Aye Yai(TM). Me first. Ching ching.
A universal lightning rod offered up to people who are tired of thinking.
In my experience, either a person already views the world through this lens—in which case it's redundant—or a person tries extremely hard not to open this appalling box until some directly corroborating evidence forces the issue—in which case floating the possibility prematurely without offering up a smoking gun (or at least a lipstick-stained cigarette butt)—is an obnoxious waste of breath.
This particular anxiety harp string is only two strings over from SJW. Expertly woven together they manufacture the beautiful chord of tinfoil minor.
You don't get it, do you?
You simply bury all this biomass in a downward-sucking rift valley, so that the glorious post-civilization reboot a billion years from now has a convenient carbon source to prime the pump.
Only they won't call it "priming the pump". They'll have a new word, meaning "better than prime".
Here's the thing.
If "better" maps onto "bigger than", they're equally doomed.
If "better" maps onto "less myopic", they just might have a pincer's chance.
Good on you, but you do know that that is just the first step in the 5 Whys of mea culpa?
The 32-bit uptime bug in Windows 95 was the poster child of a toy operating system.
NTFS (and the giant NT/2000/XP fork in the road) was the poster child for Microsoft escaping their toy reputation.
The entire joke here is that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Now this new $MFT fiasco is just a stupid edge case in something that actually works well enough, most of the time.
The joke under the joke here is that Microsoft has a predilection for death by self-inflicted edge case that beggars imagination, almost as if its a fixture of the organization's eternal DNA.
The whole point of the Emperor's New Clothes was Microsoft attempting to sell the world on the innovation that they had finally put away their childish things. But no, not entirely. You can still see the boy in the man. Bigger and hairier, but still flopping around like a fish out of water.
You reveal that you were actually afflicted with this problem in a big way (the time overflow bug) and yet somehow the larger story around it was going whoosh over your head (no one who cottoned onto this story at the time would have filed this Out of Africa II family-tree distinction under "minor detail").
Stage two of the 5 whys of mea culpa: Where was your head at the time?
Stage three: Whatever happened then, are you still captive to childish things?
etc. etc.
For our purposes here, there's an extremely interesting fork in the road upon entering stage five.
A) man, I was such an ass
B) look Ma, we made a trillion dollars
An honest-to-God trillion dollars.
Microsoft has hit $1 trillion in all-time revenue, and with more profit than Apple — 9 May 2016
Revenue 1, zipper 0.
When 10% of the population uses a product in a serious way, it is usually viable to support a substantial niche of demanding users.
When 90% of a population uses a product on a daily basis, in a myriad of subtle ways the ecosystem begins to pander to the careless and barely invested.
What needed to be discussed here was the collapse of Firefox's plug-in ecosystem. For one thing, it stopped being cool to start new projects, so it started to become a legacy ecosystem, and many of the original plug-in developers (most of whom started young) were getting older and moving on in life.
Plus there was a financial incentive for the Anarchy Syndicate to treat the entire plug-in ecosystem as a threat vector, the policing of which creates a permanent burden.
As Mozilla began to flee the policing burden, two things happened: it shifted a huge maintenance burden on their already tired plug-in developers to adapt to a succession of ever-more-restrictive APIs (more work, less reward), and its last important differentiation from Chrome starting spiralling down the drain pipe.
So Andreas Gal comes along and wants to put Firefox OS on his resume, and doesn't invest hardly a thought in their dangerously eroding extension ecology.
Or maybe he had a plan for Firefox OS to somehow make experimentation and customization sexy again?
If so, you certainly wouldn't know it from this lame essay.
Luis Miguel bails out of the Firefox WebExtensions scene — 29 January 2017
Luis deserved a better answer from Captain Capsize.
I suspect I recall the 1990s with a great deal more clarity than you do.
Step right up folks, what we have here is AAA deterrence porn. It always follows the same model. You know, no matter how your life has suffered, the real punishment is the next degradation. If complete loss of freedom isn't hitting you where it hurts, just wait until we serve you wormy food. Suck on them apples, shit bag.
Life is pretty soft. Assange probably doesn't lie awake with the Shawshank shakes, either (nothing spells punishment like being ass-raped by government fiat). He's probably not being waterboarded. And he has probably not been subjected to Chinese water torture.
In other words—I think this is your intended implication—it's all blow jobs and unicorns in the Ecuadorian embassy.
Right.
For your charming contribution, today we have a special prize.
You are henceforth the newly appointed Slashdot ambassador to Junior Soprano. It is your job to visit Junior and inform him that house arrest does not count as "meaningful punishment", and wouldn't he please also whip himself bloody with a macrame horse whip hand-crafted by his sweet niece, Janice, just to make his penance really count.
House Arrest (The Sopranos)
Tony very nearly loses his mind just trying to maintain a sightly lower profile—with all the money, all the sex, the big house, the big car, the family, the prestige and the power, yada yada yada ...
Junior's situation is closer to Julian's, only he (Junior) makes it worse than it needs to be by failing to ask his friendly GP for the little blue pill (it's a pride thing).
Julian has probably managed to find himself a physician who makes house calls. Probably an older guy, one who never really believed in this new-fangled MRI business in the first place.
But of course, it's the worm in the Federal prison apple that really terrifies Assange. Because that would strip him of human dignity. Whereas undiagnosed cancer would merely put a premature end to his miserable existence.