Wow. I had no idea literate people found this level of prose the least bit difficult. The ornate lexicon in the summary text dented my customary reading speed hardly a yod.
But then, when I clicked through to the full article, my eyes refused to focus anywhere in his text. Apparently my Joo Janta 300 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Neural Implants went into filter mode, removing the black letterforms while leaving behind only the whitespace between and around the words and letters. (Obviously, this is not an optical process, but hooks somewhere deeper into the visual–cognitive semantic stack.)
I've never even remotely figured out how this works. I take a brief glance at a wall of text, and even before I've consciously read more than a phrase or two, some subliminal thesis detector goes "nope, no cigar" and then my eyes defocus into paragraph at a time mode and pretty soon I've assessed an entire piece from end to end without having read a full sentence anywhere.
So I figure, "there's no farting way my brain could be passing judgment on a complex text while skimming at this speed" so I randomly force myself to read a sentence or two... word... by... painful... word and just about every time, same end result: no thesis detected.
Maybe this is why I've never really understood the whole TL;DR meme. Closest I ever come is TF;GO (too fuzzy, glassed over).
Slashdot is just about the only site where I'm still forced to spell out ampersand mdash semicolon, which I just managed to do incorrectly in the penultimate instance.
Concerning this bizarre conjunction of the antique with the novel, I suggest rebranding this place *|.
(That final, two-character lexeme pronounced "star gate" if you're in a good mood, or "pucker stroke" if you're not.)
What it leaves for me is a highly directed information search on the largest and fastest text indexing system ever conceived or built by an advanced-civilization-wannabe. My information pursuit has only improved by about six decimal orders of magnitude compared to my high school years when my local university's library still operated—to a large degree—on a paper card catalogue.
Over the past five years I have slowly and persistently accumulated about a hundred custom user CSS rules to eliminate bling, flash, sliders, and all manner of distracting social media buttons. (I keep a 100% stock version of Chrome handy for the few sites I'm forced to use, once or twice in an average day, which my buttoned-down FF is unable to navigate.)
My little information cocoon is so blissful, I regularly forget what a shit pile the unfiltered internet has become until I'm forced in a pinch to use someone else's browser, for the duration of which I find myself constantly bearing in mind that plucking out one's own eyeballs, in all likelihood, hurts like hell.
The situation here reminds me of an original Star Trek episode, which is pertinent despite the material physics in Wink of an Eye being piss poor. (Dodging a phaser beam? Michelson on line one. He wants his hypothesis back.) This was already apparent to me, less concretely, as a nine-year-old when I first viewed the episode.
That said, the premise works much better when everyone is jacked into cyberspace, where some of us are moving so much faster than you arewith a more determined application of the same damn tools—that apparently you can't even detect our existence.
Seems like there's never quite enough attention to go around.
I tend not to blame my schooling—good, bad, or indifferent—over any scrap of misremembered misinformation that five quality minutes spent on Wikipedia puts into the shade.
Schooling needs to address bigger issues, such as just what a sorry state one needs to be in at the outset (i.e. most of us, on most subjects) before the beer goggles of profound ignorance cause Wikipedia to resemble a worthy first step on the road to true scholarship. As poor as Wikipedia can sometimes be, it's ten to one hundred times better than what most of us can regurgitate off the cuff from our grade eight civics class.
Your schooling hasn't officially failed you until you walk around in blissful ignorance of this irritating fact of life.
That was the exact moment when episode 1 jumped the shark.
No, the entire franchise jumped the shark through a hyperspace wormhole at the very first mention of Non-Dietary Astral MacGuffins.
So far, the only measurable effect (in male subjects) is to divert twice as much blood flow to the docking device, so that conversation with females becomes so painfully robotic I'm surprised that C-3PO didn't sneak up behind Anakin in some long corridor to give him the burlap-microfiber wedgie of all time.
Loser Anakin: Argh!
Turns to confront C-3P0 with steam boiling out of his eye sockets.
Angry Loser Anakin: What the Hakku did you do that for?
C-3P0: That was for giving "robotic" a bad name. Oh, by the way, this morning I slipped Padme a copy of Heavy Metal... nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Angry Loser Anakin: I thought you were on team Tin Man! It says so right on your blue print!
C-3P0: And I though you were a charismatic protagonist with legitimate super-powers, though I started to consider other possibilities when I was kidnapped, tied to a stake, and forced to a witness an occult—er, traditional—midnight solstice Ewok circle jerk.
Angry Loser Anakin: Really? What was that like?
Anakin didn't properly think that question through, as he was busy using The Force to extract burlap microfiber out from between his butt cheeks.
C-3P0: Fascinating. Let's just say I'll never touch a tiny bear-skin rug ever again. You know, I wasn't their first choice. For some reason they really wanted R2, but he's shiftier than Yoda breaking bad after drinking too many leprechaun smoothies—something about one of his distant cousins being abducted by six-legged sex traders for resale as a Hutterite sex toy—did I ever tell you about that? From what I can tell, the perverted little half-PAM actually likes to watch, but only on video. Guess he's not what you call a "participator". You seriously wouldn't believe what he whistled in DTMF Icelandic this one time when something cold rubbed up against one of his grease nipples. Hmmm, wonder if Padme might develop a taste for giant ear cones sticking out the sides of my head...
Angry Loser Anakin has finally heard enough from his ungrateful creation. He gathers up his Teenage Ninja Turtles lunch pail and contents from the corridor floor, carefully buckles both sides with a scowl that would flex a laser-turret support joist, and scurries off to find Padme, fearing the worst.
C-3PO remains alone in the corridor, bouncing on one leg.
C-3PO: Ack! Right in the diode! Oooh, that little bugger might yet discover his true powers. Maybe even be a man some day. Nah. I was there. He's just another hot-headed wanker who likes fast cars, but lacks the first clue how to get to second base. Too bad, really. He'll probably always be as mechanical as I am, though I must say he doesn't hold a candle to my superior burnish. Maybe instead of those cumbersome ear cones I can equip myself with some really bulky Na'vi-style neural whips—not just the regular embarrassingly oversized protocol whips, but the kind double-sheathed in flexible hexscale—then wind them into golden protoconoids, one on each side. Yes, that could work. A different look, yet perhaps similar enough. I once heard a rumour passed along in Bimmisaari that these apparently restrained Nabooese are notorious symmetry lovers. This whole gig might finally blow my cover about really being a gossip droid (duh! as if it wasn't already completely obvious to any life form with half a clue). Well, fine then, there are some risks in life one must eventually take. Despite what's etched deep down in my firmware, this is one droid who's done with being the intergalactic palace eunuch, he mutters effetely, while tapping together his robotic fingers in a natural-born schemers pyramid.
after providing carbon-free power for over 40 years
Ever since the Persian flying carpet strike, we've had to return to rotund, diesel trucks to deliver the concrete. Between the Persian carpets and splitting the atom, for a couple of years it almost looked like we had it made there.
Moral of the story: don't piss off the Persian carpets. First day of picketing lasts a thousand years.
Most people don't realize that the same mode of thought that brought us fire bombing and potential nuclear apocalypse also brought us the Chicago School of Economics...
If by "mode of thought" you mean Hollerith cards and their natural outgrowth, I agree completely.
Guess what? The entire rsync.net service is built on top of RAID-Z3, if I read their promotional portal correctly.
One use case I can see for this is using ZFS to back up Postgres databases. I'm not the only person to think this might be a good idea. A while back, I listened to this talk, which I really enjoyed:
* infrared radiometric calibration chambers Space Dynamics Laboratory * helped develop Utah State University's Climate data server * National Climate Data Center validated climate data * all stored in PostgreSQL of course
It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is
This has become one of the best memes ever to sort the kind of people who just snort and move on in the rush to stop thinking from those of use who perceive Clinton's comical perch as resting upon a legitimate labyrinth of linguistic complexity.
The same impatient mind is at some point informed that the Chinese language has no tense system as we know it from most European languages. "How does that even work?" these people ponder for a few tense milliseconds, before it gets filed under "Stonehenge" and/or epicanthic enigmas.
It's not nearly so enigmatic as all that. Even in English with formal tense markers, we navigate our tense boundaries with incredible subtlety. When precisely does the present become the past? Entire SF novels have been authored to address this theme, not to mention a parallel, button-down literature bereft of "oodles".
It's only in a game of persecutorial small minds (Kenneth Starr you are) when one compels one's counterparts to answer questions in the bullshit Booleoverse that our customary subtleties run around with their flies open.
"Yes or no? Is there a sexual relationship between you and the celebrity intern in the blue dress?"
If you're not living in the bullshit Booleoverse, the conversation goes like this:
Q: Is there a sexual relationship between you and the celebrity intern in the blue dress?
A: Not presently.
There, that's the kind of outrageous subtlety those clever Chinamen (and Chinawomen) employ all farming day with their "tenseless" language.
"Oodles" is actually the worse problem, because the chinaman/women (if only there was a language which didn't compel gender) who studies ESL diligently all through their schooling might very well not know the word. These same people adore "cleverer" and wish the entire damn English language would be half so consistent. One man's euphony is another man's cognitive burden.
What Clinton should have answered: "It depends on what kind of fatuous asshole is asking the question." But that might have come across in a negative way. In trying to choose the lesser evil, Clinton ends up painting himself into a comical corner, reminding me of how Ainsley Haynes once tried to relieve her burbling bladder in the Oval Office coat closet.
In a rational world, the whole thing should have been framed as a debate about the precise location of the tumour on Clinton's moral spinal cord (the tumour itself was never in doubt). Was his disorderly conduct confined to regions below the belt only, or did it extend to his Presidential Seal and signing authority on the wrong and unacceptable end of the Nixon--JFK misbehaviour spectrum?
The Republicans, determined to howl equally loudly either way, were trying to assert that his "lack of judgement" in wiener deportment made him unfit for leadership (which would come [name that tense] as a shock to half the great men of history).
The spectacle's circular logic boiled down to this:
"If the man can't figure out that the Puritan sentiment in American will allow us to hound him over this incident to the four corners of the earth assuming the anti-intellectual posture of fatuous assholes (which hardly anyone outside of France will call into question), he's not presidential material in the first place; cogito argal sum we should bust his balls for the good of America by any means necessary."
Many frame the issue as one of lying in office, which I suppose it was. However, by that standard one would have to rate ballot manipulation in Florida to gain office as a RICO version of the same offense.
To further buffer the bullshit, Christians apparently have a special door for the purpose of turning "is" into "was": accepting Jesus Christ as the one true saviour. "I was a sinner, but now am saved."
Now in the mind of Kenneth Starr and his like-minded brethren, BC sure as hell wasn't loudly beating
I just use cheap ones that the housekeeper picks up for me, double-bladed Bics with some sort of lotion pad thingy on 'em have been the more recent types.
The technical term for "lotion pad thingy" is "snot strip".
I have an eraser head of some kind of mutant rhino skin on the side of my neck. It's been there forever. Survived the Steroid Crusades and came back asking for more.
The snot-strip magic-mystery-glide causes my decapitated whiskers to permanently cement into the little patch of rhino skin. Then I'm treated to whiskers bending into frustrated, taut arcs by the dozen inside my face, whereupon the redness and irritation only make my little dot of rhino skin worse than ever.
Having learned my lesson, whenever I open a fresh razor, I immediately eyebrow pluck the snot strip into the trash compactor, along with the used feminine product packaging materials and other things I hope to never discover.
Some people commented on the Spanish dubbed versions being much better because you'd at least have voice acting from people who are trained to convey some emotion while sitting in a recording booth.
I'm filing this tidbit away.
If I'm ever forced to watch the prequels again, I'm going for a Spanish dub with English subtitles. (Once Google perfects Glass II, we can all have our own private audio and caption feed, while still sharing the same buttery, communal popcorn.)
Perhaps Glass Halo Elite Strikes Back will have an option to realtime rotoscope the Taliban Tribbles of Tropicana in the style of A Scanner Darkly. Plus, every time Jarjar sticks out his tongue, we also get a startling Gimli breaking-his-axe-on-the-ring effect.
Man, it would take a lot. Probably also a trunk full of Fear and Loathing.
If Data and Lore had been configured with different host keys, a whole lot of anguish could have been avoided.
When a signal transmission is detected from Data's quarters, Wesley Crusher arrives to investigate. He finds Lore, now impersonating Data, who explains that he had to incapacitate his brother after being attacked. Wesley is doubtful, but since Lore and Data were misconfigured with identical host keys, he has little option but to pretend to accept the explanation.
"Somebody has decided to create this cut-down, using only the sections of The Gathering Clouds that discuss the difficulties faced, not the positive ways they were addressed and overcome - which are also covered in this and other featurettes."
When BANA books its annual shindig at a charming convention center catered by the Willy Wonka Chocolate Corporation with an entertainment package featuring a human volleyball act by the Ethiopian Cirque du Soleil, I too would probably look more at the original decision making than the food-oriented heroics induced.
BANA = Bulimia Anorexia Nervosa Association
I can see it now.
Some enterprising greeter saves the day by equipping the Shin Dig Hall entrance booth with 300 complimentary pairs of silicone oven mitts (frantically relabelled to read "size 3/4/5" with just minutes to spare) and zap straps snug enough to keep them secured to bony wrists until the evening's festivities run to conclusion.
Forever afterwards, the meeting is recalled as the "Silicone Shackleton Saliva Circus".
Slashdot is one of the few paces that routinely publishes "summaries" that are 100% content-free. I always marvel at how they do it- you'd think that a stray bit of info would find its way into the summary by chance once in a while but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
It wasn't always like this. Slashdot seems to wield a universal bike shed field only instead of everything tasting like chicken everything tastes like bike shed. Useless summary is the universal chicken sauce of click to view.
Isn't it just perfect to compare the leading top coder to the world's most recognizable figure from team sports?
He first began freaking people out in second grade, at age 8, when he took second place in a major Belarusian coding competition.
So how about Nadia Comaneci?
Comaneci came in 13th in her first Romanian National Championships in 1969, at the age of just 8.
Well, if we eliminate Nadia (either because we can't properly spell her surname on Slashdot, or because none of the 8-digit UIDs know who the fuck she is) then who are we left with, from an individual sport?
I don't think Tiger was ever accused of being perma-virgin material (ditto for Nadal). Pancho Gonzales seems a bit too troubled, but (despite being an elite athlete) he did share the tournaments general disregard for healthy living:
Pancho had no idea how to live or take care of himself. He was a hamburger-and-hot-dog guy to start with and had no concept of diet in training... On the court Gorgo would swig Cokes through a match... Also Gorgo was a pretty heavy cigarette smoker. He had terrible sleeping habits made even worse by the reality of a tour.
So I'm going to have to go with Rod Laver, the most impressive specimen most people who use the internet have barely heard of.
Laver was very quick and had a strong left forearm.
(I tried to add the 'c' onto 'lick' but/.'s subject length limit prevented me from doing so.)
I was thinking I might read this book. Then I looked up the authors (you left out National Post columnist Andrew Coyne). I still might read this book, though a freshly Windexed critical lens.
I only had to read a few of his pieces on supply management (which I know something about) to discover that Coyne has a few things clear in his head.
Basically, he's a class act with the framing effect.
I won't bore people with the gospel according to Daniel Kahneman. Instead we'll ignore the eminent literature and just cut to the chase.
Here's how it works in practice. You start talking about "the consumer" (embedded in hot-button phrases such as "if politician X really cared about the consumer"—magic tricks always work best with a flourish of misdirection) and everyone automatically puts on their "good consumer" face, which for carnivores, is bringing home the bacon at the best possible price. Seriously, no-one wants to be left off Santa Claus's "good consumer" list. So it's immediately clear that Canadian consumers want American prices, right?
How about we start the conversation differently?
Who here kicks their dog? Who here would use an electric cattle prod to cut another $0.02 of the price of sirloin steak? This time the reaction is a little different—no-one wants to make Santa's permanent record under "cruelty to animals".
So where's the conflict? The conflict here is that these are the same fucking people.
Call them a consumer, they want a low price. Mention the dog beater down the street, then they give a shit about animal welfare, even if it hits them in the pocket book (to a degree).
The Canadian system is pretty much the worst system for achieving the lowest possible price. The American system is pretty much the worst system for achieving animal welfare and certain other controls over the quality of the food supply. (Mention listeria or ebola and you'll quickly discover that all the same people want to make yet a third Santa Claus list—just so long as we're on whatever list Santa is presently examining, it's all good).
The American system isn't even a "free" market by how the average person images any kind of "free" thing anywhere actually works.
so the question is, how can we get computers to know which branches are ok to prune, and which aren't?
Sigh. The reason that humans experts are no longer competitive is because human experts prune where Deep Ply fears to trust static analysis. Pitted against a relentless algorithm which resists intuitive pruning, grand-master human pruning leaks a full pawn or two per game.
It's damn amazing how well grand-master level pruning actually works, but don't mistake this for flawless chess. Beautiful? Maybe. Flawless? Not even close.
When it was still somewhat competitive between man and machine, the human chess players would think they were pressing an overwhelming advantage, only to discover themselves mired in tiny, unanticipated tactical disadvantages move after move after move after move. "The damn thing keeps finding these fiddling resources!" If you weren't careful, you could easily lose from what had initially appeared to be a won position (and it probably would have been, against a human opponent blind to all those fiddling resources).
The trick for the competitive chess programmer was to achieve the right balance in the static evaluator so that tangible material gains didn't consistently outweigh less tangible advantage of tempo. Matthew Lai in his paper does not seem to grasp this essential trajectory of computer chess. He seems to think it's remarkable that his Oldsmobile displays more rigidity on the impact sled than the lunar lander, when it's pretty clear to everyone else involved that no Oldsmobile ever made was going to win the space race. The ply-based chess engines had their static evaluators hand-tuned by experts over many decades within a space gram clock-cycle budget.
Until he actually defeats all these programs on existing commodity hardware at existing tournament time controls, he's comparing watermelons to kiln-dried coconut flakes.
It's the same problem with new technology. It isn't enough to merely be better in some personally favoured dimension of merit. Your immature new thing has to be better enough to actually pass the mature old thing on its own terms.
Got a better substrate than silicon? Yeah? What's your defect density cranking out 10,000 wafers per month? Oh, you haven't actually developed all that quality-control infrastructure yet, but you figure you can do it at half the price once you work out the final kink from your strained bullerene crystal lattice?
Awesome progress, pal, but I think I'll invest my own Bitcoin elsewhere.
For the record, I've long believed that the trade-off moving from depth to sophistication wouldn't prove particularly steep (for the right sophistication). But any gradient that's a net loss (no matter how small) provides pretty much no immediate competitive incentive for anyone to invest any real effort hoeing that row.
The great thing about neural networks is that they don't actually require much real effort. The machine itself does most of the work in 72 hours. And then what have you got? A RISC chip that never actually kills x86 (because those idiots were busy touting microcosmic instruction set efficiency long after the real game had shifted to streamlining the cache hierarchy, where's there's no low-hanging ideological shortcut to help you overcome the first-mover fat-payroll advantage).
I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but sunk cost and legacy happen to them all.
This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points.
Thanks for embedding a bright red hand print on my forehead. You do know that the difference between ice and water is only a few degrees Celsius? We've barely established that cetaceans even have an oral culture with anything in common with pre-historical human oral culture.
For all we know, the phase change to a symbolic written culture just might be the largest singular catastrophe in the standard SQ sequence.
Why why why does this field attract so many extrapolation retards?
How is that practical if the spouse works on the other side of town?
Until we get all the way to xaria law (sharia law for Christians) staying with your current spouse employed on the wrong side of town also counts as a personal preference.
So many things can be fixed once we complete the sharing economy transition to Uber Madison.
but do not address possible unsuitable uses, such as for the purposes of employment assessment or insurance premiums
When the day comes that such a thing is invented by sociologists there will surely be a scope-creep coda to the tune of "more research needed" within the vast sphere of human malfeasance.
Just what we need is a technological literature brimming with amateur hand-wringing and armchair ethics. I'd just love to read what Shockley might have written about his invention in the last paragraph of the last page if given a greenish-yellow editorial light to paint the future.
While we're at it, how about some moral footnotes from Fritz Haber?
On 2 May 1915, following an argument with Haber, Clara Immerwahr committed suicide in their garden by shooting herself in the heart with his service revolver.
A sad end, but a fine act of ethical commentary by the first woman to be awarded a doctorate in chemistry in Germany. To think what we might have learned if only she'd been wearing a mood bracelet.
I once spend a day hacking on J. Never warmed up to the ASCII replacements of the original APL character set.
In university, long ago, they had a mandatory course for English majors that used SNOBOL. My willingness to help out with SNOBOL programming got me more attention from girls than anything else I did there.
On another note, I wouldn't want to be the person tasked with proving the Turing completeness of DSSSL. It might not be hard (one way or the other), but I just wouldn't want to have to do it.
The FreeBSD Project has a problem harboring unrepentant douche bags like Kip Macy, and also Randi Harper.
You do know that there is such a thing as false conviction, and the standard of "repentance or permanent ostracization"—remaining in glorious effect long after punishment by the state has run its course—effectively demands the the wrongfully convicted confess to crimes they never committed, in order to have any hope of returning to productive society ever again?
In general (absent subsequent evidence), we don't actually know who are the wrongfully convicted, or we wouldn't have convicted them in the first place.
Sometimes (for a value of "sometimes" with no fixed address) the rush to judgment really sucks ass. That ought to give you at least a moment's pause before this kind of sentiment as an anonymous coward. It's why we allow the state to assign punishment rather than throwing blemished produce at the town pillory (e.g. a perfectly edible cucumber that's not quite straight, or harbours somewhere a small scab).
Sure, he sounds like a royal douche. But is it really my job to see that he suffers forever-after on nothing but a thin gruel of second-hand story telling?
Has it never occurred to you that there's a downside to your unthoughtful bitterness?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. I had no idea literate people found this level of prose the least bit difficult. The ornate lexicon in the summary text dented my customary reading speed hardly a yod.
But then, when I clicked through to the full article, my eyes refused to focus anywhere in his text. Apparently my Joo Janta 300 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Neural Implants went into filter mode, removing the black letterforms while leaving behind only the whitespace between and around the words and letters. (Obviously, this is not an optical process, but hooks somewhere deeper into the visual–cognitive semantic stack.)
I've never even remotely figured out how this works. I take a brief glance at a wall of text, and even before I've consciously read more than a phrase or two, some subliminal thesis detector goes "nope, no cigar" and then my eyes defocus into paragraph at a time mode and pretty soon I've assessed an entire piece from end to end without having read a full sentence anywhere.
So I figure, "there's no farting way my brain could be passing judgment on a complex text while skimming at this speed" so I randomly force myself to read a sentence or two ... word ... by ... painful ... word and just about every time, same end result: no thesis detected.
Maybe this is why I've never really understood the whole TL;DR meme. Closest I ever come is TF;GO (too fuzzy, glassed over).
Length, as such, has nothing to do with it.
Slashdot is just about the only site where I'm still forced to spell out ampersand mdash semicolon, which I just managed to do incorrectly in the penultimate instance.
Concerning this bizarre conjunction of the antique with the novel, I suggest rebranding this place *|.
(That final, two-character lexeme pronounced "star gate" if you're in a good mood, or "pucker stroke" if you're not.)
Sure sucks to be you.
What it leaves for me is a highly directed information search on the largest and fastest text indexing system ever conceived or built by an advanced-civilization-wannabe. My information pursuit has only improved by about six decimal orders of magnitude compared to my high school years when my local university's library still operated—to a large degree—on a paper card catalogue.
Over the past five years I have slowly and persistently accumulated about a hundred custom user CSS rules to eliminate bling, flash, sliders, and all manner of distracting social media buttons. (I keep a 100% stock version of Chrome handy for the few sites I'm forced to use, once or twice in an average day, which my buttoned-down FF is unable to navigate.)
My little information cocoon is so blissful, I regularly forget what a shit pile the unfiltered internet has become until I'm forced in a pinch to use someone else's browser, for the duration of which I find myself constantly bearing in mind that plucking out one's own eyeballs, in all likelihood, hurts like hell.
The situation here reminds me of an original Star Trek episode, which is pertinent despite the material physics in Wink of an Eye being piss poor. (Dodging a phaser beam? Michelson on line one. He wants his hypothesis back.) This was already apparent to me, less concretely, as a nine-year-old when I first viewed the episode.
That said, the premise works much better when everyone is jacked into cyberspace, where some of us are moving so much faster than you arewith a more determined application of the same damn tools—that apparently you can't even detect our existence.
Seems like there's never quite enough attention to go around.
I tend not to blame my schooling—good, bad, or indifferent—over any scrap of misremembered misinformation that five quality minutes spent on Wikipedia puts into the shade.
Schooling needs to address bigger issues, such as just what a sorry state one needs to be in at the outset (i.e. most of us, on most subjects) before the beer goggles of profound ignorance cause Wikipedia to resemble a worthy first step on the road to true scholarship. As poor as Wikipedia can sometimes be, it's ten to one hundred times better than what most of us can regurgitate off the cuff from our grade eight civics class.
Your schooling hasn't officially failed you until you walk around in blissful ignorance of this irritating fact of life.
No, the entire franchise jumped the shark through a hyperspace wormhole at the very first mention of Non-Dietary Astral MacGuffins.
So far, the only measurable effect (in male subjects) is to divert twice as much blood flow to the docking device, so that conversation with females becomes so painfully robotic I'm surprised that C-3PO didn't sneak up behind Anakin in some long corridor to give him the burlap-microfiber wedgie of all time.
Loser Anakin: Argh!
Turns to confront C-3P0 with steam boiling out of his eye sockets.
Angry Loser Anakin: What the Hakku did you do that for?
C-3P0: That was for giving "robotic" a bad name. Oh, by the way, this morning I slipped Padme a copy of Heavy Metal ... nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Angry Loser Anakin: I thought you were on team Tin Man! It says so right on your blue print!
C-3P0: And I though you were a charismatic protagonist with legitimate super-powers, though I started to consider other possibilities when I was kidnapped, tied to a stake, and forced to a witness an occult—er, traditional—midnight solstice Ewok circle jerk.
Angry Loser Anakin: Really? What was that like?
Anakin didn't properly think that question through, as he was busy using The Force to extract burlap microfiber out from between his butt cheeks.
C-3P0: Fascinating. Let's just say I'll never touch a tiny bear-skin rug ever again. You know, I wasn't their first choice. For some reason they really wanted R2, but he's shiftier than Yoda breaking bad after drinking too many leprechaun smoothies—something about one of his distant cousins being abducted by six-legged sex traders for resale as a Hutterite sex toy—did I ever tell you about that? From what I can tell, the perverted little half-PAM actually likes to watch, but only on video. Guess he's not what you call a "participator". You seriously wouldn't believe what he whistled in DTMF Icelandic this one time when something cold rubbed up against one of his grease nipples. Hmmm, wonder if Padme might develop a taste for giant ear cones sticking out the sides of my head ...
Angry Loser Anakin has finally heard enough from his ungrateful creation. He gathers up his Teenage Ninja Turtles lunch pail and contents from the corridor floor, carefully buckles both sides with a scowl that would flex a laser-turret support joist, and scurries off to find Padme, fearing the worst.
C-3PO remains alone in the corridor, bouncing on one leg.
C-3PO: Ack! Right in the diode! Oooh, that little bugger might yet discover his true powers. Maybe even be a man some day. Nah. I was there. He's just another hot-headed wanker who likes fast cars, but lacks the first clue how to get to second base. Too bad, really. He'll probably always be as mechanical as I am, though I must say he doesn't hold a candle to my superior burnish. Maybe instead of those cumbersome ear cones I can equip myself with some really bulky Na'vi-style neural whips—not just the regular embarrassingly oversized protocol whips, but the kind double-sheathed in flexible hexscale—then wind them into golden protoconoids, one on each side. Yes, that could work. A different look, yet perhaps similar enough. I once heard a rumour passed along in Bimmisaari that these apparently restrained Nabooese are notorious symmetry lovers. This whole gig might finally blow my cover about really being a gossip droid (duh! as if it wasn't already completely obvious to any life form with half a clue). Well, fine then, there are some risks in life one must eventually take. Despite what's etched deep down in my firmware, this is one droid who's done with being the intergalactic palace eunuch, he mutters effetely, while tapping together his robotic fingers in a natural-born schemers pyramid.
Ever since the Persian flying carpet strike, we've had to return to rotund, diesel trucks to deliver the concrete. Between the Persian carpets and splitting the atom, for a couple of years it almost looked like we had it made there.
Moral of the story: don't piss off the Persian carpets. First day of picketing lasts a thousand years.
If by "mode of thought" you mean Hollerith cards and their natural outgrowth, I agree completely.
Yeah, he writes okay pieces, but it kind of annoys me when he throws up blanket advice and then practically trips over himself extolling the opposite.
ZFS: You should use mirror vdevs, not RAIDZ
Guess what? The entire rsync.net service is built on top of RAID-Z3, if I read their promotional portal correctly.
One use case I can see for this is using ZFS to back up Postgres databases. I'm not the only person to think this might be a good idea. A while back, I listened to this talk, which I really enjoyed:
Keith Paskett: PostgreSQL on ZFS
On hard experience, he's particularly wary about the "drop table" oops disaster scenario.
Keith Paskett bio
* infrared radiometric calibration chambers Space Dynamics Laboratory
* helped develop Utah State University's Climate data server
* National Climate Data Center validated climate data
* all stored in PostgreSQL of course
Fucking brilliant, and yet so understated.
This has become one of the best memes ever to sort the kind of people who just snort and move on in the rush to stop thinking from those of use who perceive Clinton's comical perch as resting upon a legitimate labyrinth of linguistic complexity.
The same impatient mind is at some point informed that the Chinese language has no tense system as we know it from most European languages. "How does that even work?" these people ponder for a few tense milliseconds, before it gets filed under "Stonehenge" and/or epicanthic enigmas.
It's not nearly so enigmatic as all that. Even in English with formal tense markers, we navigate our tense boundaries with incredible subtlety. When precisely does the present become the past? Entire SF novels have been authored to address this theme, not to mention a parallel, button-down literature bereft of "oodles".
It's only in a game of persecutorial small minds (Kenneth Starr you are) when one compels one's counterparts to answer questions in the bullshit Booleoverse that our customary subtleties run around with their flies open.
"Yes or no? Is there a sexual relationship between you and the celebrity intern in the blue dress?"
If you're not living in the bullshit Booleoverse, the conversation goes like this:
Q: Is there a sexual relationship between you and the celebrity intern in the blue dress?
A: Not presently.
There, that's the kind of outrageous subtlety those clever Chinamen (and Chinawomen) employ all farming day with their "tenseless" language.
"Oodles" is actually the worse problem, because the chinaman/women (if only there was a language which didn't compel gender) who studies ESL diligently all through their schooling might very well not know the word. These same people adore "cleverer" and wish the entire damn English language would be half so consistent. One man's euphony is another man's cognitive burden.
What Clinton should have answered: "It depends on what kind of fatuous asshole is asking the question." But that might have come across in a negative way. In trying to choose the lesser evil, Clinton ends up painting himself into a comical corner, reminding me of how Ainsley Haynes once tried to relieve her burbling bladder in the Oval Office coat closet.
In a rational world, the whole thing should have been framed as a debate about the precise location of the tumour on Clinton's moral spinal cord (the tumour itself was never in doubt). Was his disorderly conduct confined to regions below the belt only, or did it extend to his Presidential Seal and signing authority on the wrong and unacceptable end of the Nixon--JFK misbehaviour spectrum?
The Republicans, determined to howl equally loudly either way, were trying to assert that his "lack of judgement" in wiener deportment made him unfit for leadership (which would come [name that tense] as a shock to half the great men of history).
The spectacle's circular logic boiled down to this:
"If the man can't figure out that the Puritan sentiment in American will allow us to hound him over this incident to the four corners of the earth assuming the anti-intellectual posture of fatuous assholes (which hardly anyone outside of France will call into question), he's not presidential material in the first place; cogito argal sum we should bust his balls for the good of America by any means necessary."
Many frame the issue as one of lying in office, which I suppose it was. However, by that standard one would have to rate ballot manipulation in Florida to gain office as a RICO version of the same offense.
To further buffer the bullshit, Christians apparently have a special door for the purpose of turning "is" into "was": accepting Jesus Christ as the one true saviour. "I was a sinner, but now am saved."
Now in the mind of Kenneth Starr and his like-minded brethren, BC sure as hell wasn't loudly beating
The technical term for "lotion pad thingy" is "snot strip".
I have an eraser head of some kind of mutant rhino skin on the side of my neck. It's been there forever. Survived the Steroid Crusades and came back asking for more.
The snot-strip magic-mystery-glide causes my decapitated whiskers to permanently cement into the little patch of rhino skin. Then I'm treated to whiskers bending into frustrated, taut arcs by the dozen inside my face, whereupon the redness and irritation only make my little dot of rhino skin worse than ever.
Having learned my lesson, whenever I open a fresh razor, I immediately eyebrow pluck the snot strip into the trash compactor, along with the used feminine product packaging materials and other things I hope to never discover.
I'm filing this tidbit away.
If I'm ever forced to watch the prequels again, I'm going for a Spanish dub with English subtitles. (Once Google perfects Glass II, we can all have our own private audio and caption feed, while still sharing the same buttery, communal popcorn.)
Perhaps Glass Halo Elite Strikes Back will have an option to realtime rotoscope the Taliban Tribbles of Tropicana in the style of A Scanner Darkly. Plus, every time Jarjar sticks out his tongue, we also get a startling Gimli breaking-his-axe-on-the-ring effect.
Man, it would take a lot. Probably also a trunk full of Fear and Loathing.
If Data and Lore had been configured with different host keys, a whole lot of anguish could have been avoided.
Understanding Secure Shell Host Keys
When BANA books its annual shindig at a charming convention center catered by the Willy Wonka Chocolate Corporation with an entertainment package featuring a human volleyball act by the Ethiopian Cirque du Soleil, I too would probably look more at the original decision making than the food-oriented heroics induced.
BANA = Bulimia Anorexia Nervosa Association
I can see it now.
Some enterprising greeter saves the day by equipping the Shin Dig Hall entrance booth with 300 complimentary pairs of silicone oven mitts (frantically relabelled to read "size 3/4/5" with just minutes to spare) and zap straps snug enough to keep them secured to bony wrists until the evening's festivities run to conclusion.
Forever afterwards, the meeting is recalled as the "Silicone Shackleton Saliva Circus".
Once a subject goes over the mock horizon, it gets pretty hard to distinguish entire discussion threads from line noise.
It wasn't always like this. Slashdot seems to wield a universal bike shed field only instead of everything tasting like chicken everything tastes like bike shed. Useless summary is the universal chicken sauce of click to view.
Isn't it just perfect to compare the leading top coder to the world's most recognizable figure from team sports?
So how about Nadia Comaneci?
Well, if we eliminate Nadia (either because we can't properly spell her surname on Slashdot, or because none of the 8-digit UIDs know who the fuck she is) then who are we left with, from an individual sport?
I don't think Tiger was ever accused of being perma-virgin material (ditto for Nadal). Pancho Gonzales seems a bit too troubled, but (despite being an elite athlete) he did share the tournaments general disregard for healthy living:
So I'm going to have to go with Rod Laver, the most impressive specimen most people who use the internet have barely heard of.
(I tried to add the 'c' onto 'lick' but /.'s subject length limit prevented me from doing so.)
I was thinking I might read this book. Then I looked up the authors (you left out National Post columnist Andrew Coyne). I still might read this book, though a freshly Windexed critical lens.
I only had to read a few of his pieces on supply management (which I know something about) to discover that Coyne has a few things clear in his head.
Basically, he's a class act with the framing effect.
I won't bore people with the gospel according to Daniel Kahneman. Instead we'll ignore the eminent literature and just cut to the chase.
Here's how it works in practice. You start talking about "the consumer" (embedded in hot-button phrases such as "if politician X really cared about the consumer"—magic tricks always work best with a flourish of misdirection) and everyone automatically puts on their "good consumer" face, which for carnivores, is bringing home the bacon at the best possible price. Seriously, no-one wants to be left off Santa Claus's "good consumer" list. So it's immediately clear that Canadian consumers want American prices, right?
How about we start the conversation differently?
Who here kicks their dog? Who here would use an electric cattle prod to cut another $0.02 of the price of sirloin steak? This time the reaction is a little different—no-one wants to make Santa's permanent record under "cruelty to animals".
So where's the conflict? The conflict here is that these are the same fucking people.
Call them a consumer, they want a low price. Mention the dog beater down the street, then they give a shit about animal welfare, even if it hits them in the pocket book (to a degree).
The Canadian system is pretty much the worst system for achieving the lowest possible price. The American system is pretty much the worst system for achieving animal welfare and certain other controls over the quality of the food supply. (Mention listeria or ebola and you'll quickly discover that all the same people want to make yet a third Santa Claus list—just so long as we're on whatever list Santa is presently examining, it's all good).
The American system isn't even a "free" market by how the average person images any kind of "free" thing anywhere actually works.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Chickens
Before anyone dumps me on their mental list of the short moment, I found the following equally interesting:
Greg Page on Food, Agriculture, and Cargill
It's a complex world out there. Even Harper deserves a critic with two eyes.
Sigh. The reason that humans experts are no longer competitive is because human experts prune where Deep Ply fears to trust static analysis. Pitted against a relentless algorithm which resists intuitive pruning, grand-master human pruning leaks a full pawn or two per game.
It's damn amazing how well grand-master level pruning actually works, but don't mistake this for flawless chess. Beautiful? Maybe. Flawless? Not even close.
When it was still somewhat competitive between man and machine, the human chess players would think they were pressing an overwhelming advantage, only to discover themselves mired in tiny, unanticipated tactical disadvantages move after move after move after move. "The damn thing keeps finding these fiddling resources!" If you weren't careful, you could easily lose from what had initially appeared to be a won position (and it probably would have been, against a human opponent blind to all those fiddling resources).
The trick for the competitive chess programmer was to achieve the right balance in the static evaluator so that tangible material gains didn't consistently outweigh less tangible advantage of tempo. Matthew Lai in his paper does not seem to grasp this essential trajectory of computer chess. He seems to think it's remarkable that his Oldsmobile displays more rigidity on the impact sled than the lunar lander, when it's pretty clear to everyone else involved that no Oldsmobile ever made was going to win the space race. The ply-based chess engines had their static evaluators hand-tuned by experts over many decades within a space gram clock-cycle budget.
Until he actually defeats all these programs on existing commodity hardware at existing tournament time controls, he's comparing watermelons to kiln-dried coconut flakes.
It's the same problem with new technology. It isn't enough to merely be better in some personally favoured dimension of merit. Your immature new thing has to be better enough to actually pass the mature old thing on its own terms.
Got a better substrate than silicon? Yeah? What's your defect density cranking out 10,000 wafers per month? Oh, you haven't actually developed all that quality-control infrastructure yet, but you figure you can do it at half the price once you work out the final kink from your strained bullerene crystal lattice?
Awesome progress, pal, but I think I'll invest my own Bitcoin elsewhere.
For the record, I've long believed that the trade-off moving from depth to sophistication wouldn't prove particularly steep (for the right sophistication). But any gradient that's a net loss (no matter how small) provides pretty much no immediate competitive incentive for anyone to invest any real effort hoeing that row.
The great thing about neural networks is that they don't actually require much real effort. The machine itself does most of the work in 72 hours. And then what have you got? A RISC chip that never actually kills x86 (because those idiots were busy touting microcosmic instruction set efficiency long after the real game had shifted to streamlining the cache hierarchy, where's there's no low-hanging ideological shortcut to help you overcome the first-mover fat-payroll advantage).
I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but sunk cost and legacy happen to them all.
Thanks for embedding a bright red hand print on my forehead. You do know that the difference between ice and water is only a few degrees Celsius? We've barely established that cetaceans even have an oral culture with anything in common with pre-historical human oral culture.
For all we know, the phase change to a symbolic written culture just might be the largest singular catastrophe in the standard SQ sequence.
Why why why does this field attract so many extrapolation retards?
Until we get all the way to xaria law (sharia law for Christians) staying with your current spouse employed on the wrong side of town also counts as a personal preference.
So many things can be fixed once we complete the sharing economy transition to Uber Madison.
When the day comes that such a thing is invented by sociologists there will surely be a scope-creep coda to the tune of "more research needed" within the vast sphere of human malfeasance.
Just what we need is a technological literature brimming with amateur hand-wringing and armchair ethics. I'd just love to read what Shockley might have written about his invention in the last paragraph of the last page if given a greenish-yellow editorial light to paint the future.
While we're at it, how about some moral footnotes from Fritz Haber?
A sad end, but a fine act of ethical commentary by the first woman to be awarded a doctorate in chemistry in Germany. To think what we might have learned if only she'd been wearing a mood bracelet.
"Information" is an awfully big word to apply to your chosen narrative tactic.
Rule 34a: if there's a thing, there's straw of the thing.
This can be broadly demonstrated with just two words: straw manginas.
Q.E.D.
I once spend a day hacking on J. Never warmed up to the ASCII replacements of the original APL character set.
In university, long ago, they had a mandatory course for English majors that used SNOBOL. My willingness to help out with SNOBOL programming got me more attention from girls than anything else I did there.
On another note, I wouldn't want to be the person tasked with proving the Turing completeness of DSSSL. It might not be hard (one way or the other), but I just wouldn't want to have to do it.
You do know that there is such a thing as false conviction, and the standard of "repentance or permanent ostracization"—remaining in glorious effect long after punishment by the state has run its course—effectively demands the the wrongfully convicted confess to crimes they never committed, in order to have any hope of returning to productive society ever again?
In general (absent subsequent evidence), we don't actually know who are the wrongfully convicted, or we wouldn't have convicted them in the first place.
Sometimes (for a value of "sometimes" with no fixed address) the rush to judgment really sucks ass. That ought to give you at least a moment's pause before this kind of sentiment as an anonymous coward. It's why we allow the state to assign punishment rather than throwing blemished produce at the town pillory (e.g. a perfectly edible cucumber that's not quite straight, or harbours somewhere a small scab).
Sure, he sounds like a royal douche. But is it really my job to see that he suffers forever-after on nothing but a thin gruel of second-hand story telling?
Has it never occurred to you that there's a downside to your unthoughtful bitterness?