I tried to donate noise; using a mac under 10.12.6. Mic is working fine. Safari asks if it can use the mic. The record button stays in for 60 seconds. The playback produces nothing.
I have great noise sources, and would not mind contributing.
Now they need to prove it's possible by actually using this method to excavate and move a stone as large as the largest one in the pyramids.
No need to get fancy about such ideas; levers, rollers, ramps, chisels, hammers, muscle. It's not only possible, it's obviously possible. They were metalworkers.
And that's not to say they didn't apply something, or several somethings, more clever to the problem, either - it's just that excavating such blocks can be done with those things and nothing more.
I think you're missing the GP's point. It isn't about political parties or the 'far-right'.
Yeah, mostly at this point in time, it is about the far right. Because they're very active right now. The nail that sticks up the furthest is the nail that gets hammered down.
Either way, it's bad to repress anyone's speech. Anyone's speech, IMHO. But what's going on right now is a flare-up being caused by some very prominent far, far-right-wing talk. Moderate ideas don't tend to lead to repression of speech. Extreme ones do, and right now, the extremists are mostly evident on the right facet of the spectrum. They're pissing people off not just on the left, but in the middle as well. This leads to muttering of the form "someone oughta shut those people up" because, to be blunt, it's irritating and people tend to want to scratch the itch without really thinking about the scab and scar that will result.
If my new company wants to truck boxes to my new customers, I can get on the road just as sure and fairly as Fed Ex can.
Can you, though? I just sent a gift to a friend on the opposite coast. The package weighed 52 lbs. I paid about $70 to get it there. Can you do that? I don't think you could even do it for fuel costs, much less pay the driver and the wear and tear on the transport vehicle(s.)
What the mega-corps want is for the road people to put up blocks that say only the big established companies can get though, while the upstarts still looking to make their first profits will either be grossly slowed or blocked.
Yes, there's a lot of truth to this, especially since we now have a bought-and-paid for legislature. Net neutrality is definitely very high up on the list of things like this, too.
So the consumer, even as you seem to be suggesting, would not be well served should the particular mega-corps get their way here, as competition, variety and lower prices would be stifled.
I'm not really suggesting that. I'm more suggesting that the consumers aren't the problem. IMHO, the regulators are the problem. The people that are supposed to be watching out for the best interests of the consumers. The post which I replied to was proposing that consumers were a significant part of the problem - I don't see it that way.
and consumers money can be funneled from their wallets constantly.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, the other side of that coin is that goods and services can be funneled to the consumer constantly as well. That's sort of the whole idea of a consumer. It's not a one-way street. When it is, consumers aren't consumers any longer, and their willingness to let the funneling of their resources away will also go away.
At the most basic level, either you consume, or you die. Next step up, you consume and your life / lifestyle can be enhanced. These are all desirable to some degree. There are legitimate issues about reasonable and unreasonable levels and kinds of consumption, but what makes that really tricky is that it almost always varies from person to person.
...all because this content or web sites affected didn't express a far-left political viewpoint
Um... no.
...all because this content or web sites affected expressed a far-right political viewpoint
FTFY
Not saying it's a good thing, one party impeding another party's freedom to express themselves basically isn't a good idea, even if for no other reason than it's far better to know what's actually going on around you than not, but your case is always better if you're accurate about describing what's actually going on.
o Mac pros prior to the trashcan: (more than) good enough. o Mac pros since the trashcan: (not even) good enough.
And they know it, too. The question is, will they go back to what actually worked best, or will they continue to screw up?
Apple's problem, IMHO, is that in their quest to think different, they have thought so differently that the systems they are selling are breaking paradigms that the entire market for all PCs has validated as good in favor of paradigms that are outright poorly functional.
The trashcan is the peak expression of this - its flexibility and upgradability are compromised. Its desktop footprint when expanded includes security problems and desk warts. It's not easy to rack efficiently. Even they can't upgrade it because the "too clever" design is thermally limited. Basically, compared to almost any reasonable tower design that preceded it, it's an outright fail.
Ive's "contribution" to OS design took a lovely 3d sensibility that included actual visual hints as to WTF things did, and turned it flat as a nun's imagination, ugly, and bereft of the cues that had made operating a complex device just a bit easier. (Even more sadly, other manufacturers copied this, and now my Android phone looks just as bad as my SO's iPhone. Goddammit.)
Pulling the headphone jack from the iPhone rudely obsoleted most people's listening hardware, raised the price for audio with every subsequent USB-c dongle the user had to buy / replace, broke the device's ability to charge while actually doing what the user wanted, and was just generally a profoundly stupid move.
It's not too late in terms of customer base for Apple to come back from all this. And at least with the Mac Pro, there's an indication they know they have screwed up. But Apple strikes me as a proud company. Admitting that they've been engaging in "think dull" in a parody of trying to "think different" instead of "think of the customer" isn't something I really expect from them, even though it seems broadly obvious to me.
There are opportunities aplenty for them to come roaring back: the sadly downgraded Mini. The trashcan. Even the iMac, really the staple of their computer line, could use some serious love in terms of I/O and upgradability. A gaping hole in the product line remains where a midline, reasonably priced tower does not exist. Certainly the OS could use a good bit of attention that wasn't aimed at making it look bad. The iPhone could really be improved with the restoration of the headphone jack, the ability to slap a memory card in there, a user-replacable / upgradable battery, additional sensors and ports, etc. The minimalist approach has left them far behind others in terms of feature count and usability across a wider spectrum of tasks, so they could, if they were minded to, take advantage of that.
Someone also needs to tell them "okay, okay, thin enough."
My home used to be an Apple stronghold. But I now own an S7 phone, and there's a brand new Windows PC in my office next to my 2009-vintage Mac Pro. Our last mini was retired a year ago in favor of far more powerful small machines from other market sectors; the new minis are too anemic to bother. My SO is outright jealous of my S7, and she swears (often) that her iPhone is going to be replaced with an Android phone next time around. We're almost certainly outliers, because we're high end users and developers with more needs than just being notified of the next twaddle or faceberk post. So we're probably not an indication of a current trend. OTOH, we're definitely not the only ones. The question is, do we matter to Apple? It appears that we do not. The replacement Mac Pro design will tell the most important part of the tale for me, anyway.
The elephant in the room is Apple's continuing profitability. That particular carrot is likely to continue to lead them to continue on their stampede towards dysfunctional blah for quite some time yet. Fortunately, Windows has come a long way. That's the path that beckons outside of Apple's domain.
Nobody that I know who liked Star Trek from years past has told me that they were going to sign up for CBS pay streaming just to watch Star Trek Discovery and this from serious long time fans of the franchise.
I did, and was happy to do it, on the chance that it might have been a good show - it can happen, witness Firefly.
Of course, now that I've seen how dismally bad those two episodes of Discovery were in so many ways, CBS-all-access gets the boot.
No even slightly competent science advisor got anywhere near these plot lines.
Between that, the angst, the rather awesome lack of discipline and order among the bridge crew, the pointless nattering when serious matters needed addressing, and O lord, the inundation with commercials...
Yeah, I wanted to see this show. So the show - the visuals, I mean - was very pretty, the acting was terrible, the plot was positively drowning in angst (not uncommon for shows these days, sigh), the Klingons ridiculously slow to communicate (a warrior race that can only speak at turtle-like rates is pretty damn disadvantaged against humans) and the presentation was wounded mightily by commercials. Plus, what, yet another version of Klingons? Good grief. And the incompetence and lack of discipline on the part of the bridge crew, that was just... well, I'll call it "highly unlikely" in order to keep my language clean.
So we cancelled our CBS all-access subscription and will wait for the show to come out on bluray, assuming that happens (I expect it will.) We might even buy it at that point. Maybe the pain of the problems with these two episodes will have faded from memory by then...
That could certainly be. I'll look around and see if we have any active translators that would enable reception on such a thing. Back when I was doing OTA, indoor antennas weren't even remotely practical here, but it's entirely possible that with the shift to digital, they changed the TX infrastructure...
Yep. Good call. They did. There are quite a few very strong digital channels here now. My flat panel hears them with a wire hanging out the connector. I stand corrected.
I think what you're presuming is that the show will be watched OTA to any significant degree. There are very few TV antennas left in my town; the inconvenience is just too high compared to the ability to time-shift streaming. Not to mention being inundated with commercials.
I haven't watched anything OTA in years, nor do I ever expect to again.
There's some thought that the neurons are just control systems and the real thinking happens in a biological quantum computer...
There is zero evidence for this. Zero. You can also say, with exactly as much evidentiary backing (none), that "there's some thought that the mind is outside the body" and "there is some thought that the mind is a program running in a computer simulation."
The evidence has thus far pointed in exactly one direction: That the mind is a product of electrical and chemical signals channeled by living cells in manners fairly conventional and guided by topology, both innate and developmental (as opposed to the quantum nature of photosynthesis, for example.)
Yes, quantum effects come into play at extremely low levels with pretty much everything; but no, they are not known to be a common modulating force from cell to cell in nature. Furthermore, the harder we look, the more normal (non-quantum) activity and complexity we find.
Finally, the more our simulations of neural activities have been advanced to model what we learn of real neural systems, the more performant they have gotten. The arrow is pointing in one pretty specific direction - and to date, it's not pointing at quantum activity as mechanism for mind even a little bit.
It's not impossible – but it's also not indicated, at all, at this point in time. It's speculation, and more to the point, it's uninformed, evidence-free speculation.
I have a 2009 Mac Pro. It's a 12/24 core, 3 GHz-ish, 64 GB machine, lots of monitors. It's really pretty quick and there's certainly nothing wrong with it.
Apple, however, has made the next version of the OS unavailable to it, which in turn will make it slowly become incompatible with new software, etc.
I suspect that the whole "you aren't allowed to repair your iPhone" debacle is based on the same basic policy, which I would sum up as "screw you, customer, buy from us again or go without."
Particularly because the idea that no one but Apple's authorized money generators can repair an iPhone is patently absurd.
We are in our best light when we are facilitating the debate on important issues that face the web.
The the people in the W3C are not in any kind of a "best light" when the organization is obviously and outrageously fluffing corporate behemoths over the needs of everyone else, though.
The degree of pro-corporate spin in Jaffe's remarks is appalling.
There are no AI companies, because there is no AI. We have a rtificial, but we don't have i ntelligence.
What there are is marketing companies.
They're waving neural networks around - basically a vaguely neuron-like means to do "if something like this, then that" - and calling it AI so they can sell more of it.
If/when AI gets here, the stuff they're calling "AI" today will be the subject of raucous laughter - at the people who swallowed the label. At the same time the marketing people will get an "atta boy" for using the term to suck more money out of people's pockets.
No part of Google is "an AI company." Google is a marketing giant with a popularity-based search engine. Resulting in what popularity usually results in - mediocre results. Well salted with advertising.
As for the distinctions about AGI and so forth... yep, that's them, marketing you. Exactly what I'm talking about. Intelligence is that thing you have, that a thermostat, toaster, or go playing program does not. That's what it's always been, and it's still that. When something else has it in any like degree, you'll know it. Because it won't just play go - it'll argue with you about what intelligence is, among many, many other things. Intelligence incorporates the ability to generalize. Saying "general intelligence" is like saying "pizza pie" or "cha tea." Not that it stops people looking to market their shite. Nothing stops them.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled buzzword fest.
Jesus Christ is resurrected from the deads. My hope. Our hope.
As far as that goes, I'll go with hoping Richard Feynman is resurrected. At least people actually paid attention to his messages rather than just posturing and pretending.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried to donate noise; using a mac under 10.12.6. Mic is working fine. Safari asks if it can use the mic. The record button stays in for 60 seconds. The playback produces nothing.
I have great noise sources, and would not mind contributing.
No need to get fancy about such ideas; levers, rollers, ramps, chisels, hammers, muscle. It's not only possible, it's obviously possible. They were metalworkers.
And that's not to say they didn't apply something, or several somethings, more clever to the problem, either - it's just that excavating such blocks can be done with those things and nothing more.
Yeah, mostly at this point in time, it is about the far right. Because they're very active right now. The nail that sticks up the furthest is the nail that gets hammered down.
Either way, it's bad to repress anyone's speech. Anyone's speech, IMHO. But what's going on right now is a flare-up being caused by some very prominent far, far-right-wing talk. Moderate ideas don't tend to lead to repression of speech. Extreme ones do, and right now, the extremists are mostly evident on the right facet of the spectrum. They're pissing people off not just on the left, but in the middle as well. This leads to muttering of the form "someone oughta shut those people up" because, to be blunt, it's irritating and people tend to want to scratch the itch without really thinking about the scab and scar that will result.
Can you, though? I just sent a gift to a friend on the opposite coast. The package weighed 52 lbs. I paid about $70 to get it there. Can you do that? I don't think you could even do it for fuel costs, much less pay the driver and the wear and tear on the transport vehicle(s.)
Yes, there's a lot of truth to this, especially since we now have a bought-and-paid for legislature. Net neutrality is definitely very high up on the list of things like this, too.
I'm not really suggesting that. I'm more suggesting that the consumers aren't the problem. IMHO, the regulators are the problem. The people that are supposed to be watching out for the best interests of the consumers. The post which I replied to was proposing that consumers were a significant part of the problem - I don't see it that way.
I predict these comments will be buried.
I know. We'll call it "Playboy."
So all of it, then. Gotcha.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, the other side of that coin is that goods and services can be funneled to the consumer constantly as well. That's sort of the whole idea of a consumer. It's not a one-way street. When it is, consumers aren't consumers any longer, and their willingness to let the funneling of their resources away will also go away.
At the most basic level, either you consume, or you die. Next step up, you consume and your life / lifestyle can be enhanced. These are all desirable to some degree. There are legitimate issues about reasonable and unreasonable levels and kinds of consumption, but what makes that really tricky is that it almost always varies from person to person.
Um... no.
FTFY
Not saying it's a good thing, one party impeding another party's freedom to express themselves basically isn't a good idea, even if for no other reason than it's far better to know what's actually going on around you than not, but your case is always better if you're accurate about describing what's actually going on.
o Mac pros prior to the trashcan: (more than) good enough.
o Mac pros since the trashcan: (not even) good enough.
And they know it, too. The question is, will they go back to what actually worked best, or will they continue to screw up?
Apple's problem, IMHO, is that in their quest to think different, they have thought so differently that the systems they are selling are breaking paradigms that the entire market for all PCs has validated as good in favor of paradigms that are outright poorly functional.
The trashcan is the peak expression of this - its flexibility and upgradability are compromised. Its desktop footprint when expanded includes security problems and desk warts. It's not easy to rack efficiently. Even they can't upgrade it because the "too clever" design is thermally limited. Basically, compared to almost any reasonable tower design that preceded it, it's an outright fail.
Ive's "contribution" to OS design took a lovely 3d sensibility that included actual visual hints as to WTF things did, and turned it flat as a nun's imagination, ugly, and bereft of the cues that had made operating a complex device just a bit easier. (Even more sadly, other manufacturers copied this, and now my Android phone looks just as bad as my SO's iPhone. Goddammit.)
Pulling the headphone jack from the iPhone rudely obsoleted most people's listening hardware, raised the price for audio with every subsequent USB-c dongle the user had to buy / replace, broke the device's ability to charge while actually doing what the user wanted, and was just generally a profoundly stupid move.
It's not too late in terms of customer base for Apple to come back from all this. And at least with the Mac Pro, there's an indication they know they have screwed up. But Apple strikes me as a proud company. Admitting that they've been engaging in "think dull" in a parody of trying to "think different" instead of "think of the customer" isn't something I really expect from them, even though it seems broadly obvious to me.
There are opportunities aplenty for them to come roaring back: the sadly downgraded Mini. The trashcan. Even the iMac, really the staple of their computer line, could use some serious love in terms of I/O and upgradability. A gaping hole in the product line remains where a midline, reasonably priced tower does not exist. Certainly the OS could use a good bit of attention that wasn't aimed at making it look bad. The iPhone could really be improved with the restoration of the headphone jack, the ability to slap a memory card in there, a user-replacable / upgradable battery, additional sensors and ports, etc. The minimalist approach has left them far behind others in terms of feature count and usability across a wider spectrum of tasks, so they could, if they were minded to, take advantage of that.
Someone also needs to tell them "okay, okay, thin enough."
My home used to be an Apple stronghold. But I now own an S7 phone, and there's a brand new Windows PC in my office next to my 2009-vintage Mac Pro. Our last mini was retired a year ago in favor of far more powerful small machines from other market sectors; the new minis are too anemic to bother. My SO is outright jealous of my S7, and she swears (often) that her iPhone is going to be replaced with an Android phone next time around. We're almost certainly outliers, because we're high end users and developers with more needs than just being notified of the next twaddle or faceberk post. So we're probably not an indication of a current trend. OTOH, we're definitely not the only ones. The question is, do we matter to Apple? It appears that we do not. The replacement Mac Pro design will tell the most important part of the tale for me, anyway.
The elephant in the room is Apple's continuing profitability. That particular carrot is likely to continue to lead them to continue on their stampede towards dysfunctional blah for quite some time yet. Fortunately, Windows has come a long way. That's the path that beckons outside of Apple's domain.
I did, and was happy to do it, on the chance that it might have been a good show - it can happen, witness Firefly.
Of course, now that I've seen how dismally bad those two episodes of Discovery were in so many ways, CBS-all-access gets the boot.
That was Fox, not SyFy. No less despicable for that. Firefly was the best SF-ish series show I've seen. Ever.
Discovery is not SF. It's fantasy. Bad fantasy.
No even slightly competent science advisor got anywhere near these plot lines.
Between that, the angst, the rather awesome lack of discipline and order among the bridge crew, the pointless nattering when serious matters needed addressing, and O lord, the inundation with commercials...
Ugh. Terrible. Bye bye, CBS-all-access.
Yeah, I wanted to see this show. So the show - the visuals, I mean - was very pretty, the acting was terrible, the plot was positively drowning in angst (not uncommon for shows these days, sigh), the Klingons ridiculously slow to communicate (a warrior race that can only speak at turtle-like rates is pretty damn disadvantaged against humans) and the presentation was wounded mightily by commercials. Plus, what, yet another version of Klingons? Good grief. And the incompetence and lack of discipline on the part of the bridge crew, that was just... well, I'll call it "highly unlikely" in order to keep my language clean.
So we cancelled our CBS all-access subscription and will wait for the show to come out on bluray, assuming that happens (I expect it will.) We might even buy it at that point. Maybe the pain of the problems with these two episodes will have faded from memory by then...
See my other reply here; but as far as DVRs go, I'm definitely not convinced DVRs account for much of anything, percentage-wise. Fun as they are.
That could certainly be. I'll look around and see if we have any active translators that would enable reception on such a thing. Back when I was doing OTA, indoor antennas weren't even remotely practical here, but it's entirely possible that with the shift to digital, they changed the TX infrastructure...
Yep. Good call. They did. There are quite a few very strong digital channels here now. My flat panel hears them with a wire hanging out the connector. I stand corrected.
I think what you're presuming is that the show will be watched OTA to any significant degree. There are very few TV antennas left in my town; the inconvenience is just too high compared to the ability to time-shift streaming. Not to mention being inundated with commercials.
I haven't watched anything OTA in years, nor do I ever expect to again.
From TFS:
There is zero evidence for this. Zero. You can also say, with exactly as much evidentiary backing (none), that "there's some thought that the mind is outside the body" and "there is some thought that the mind is a program running in a computer simulation."
The evidence has thus far pointed in exactly one direction: That the mind is a product of electrical and chemical signals channeled by living cells in manners fairly conventional and guided by topology, both innate and developmental (as opposed to the quantum nature of photosynthesis, for example.)
Yes, quantum effects come into play at extremely low levels with pretty much everything; but no, they are not known to be a common modulating force from cell to cell in nature. Furthermore, the harder we look, the more normal (non-quantum) activity and complexity we find.
Finally, the more our simulations of neural activities have been advanced to model what we learn of real neural systems, the more performant they have gotten. The arrow is pointing in one pretty specific direction - and to date, it's not pointing at quantum activity as mechanism for mind even a little bit.
It's not impossible – but it's also not indicated, at all, at this point in time. It's speculation, and more to the point, it's uninformed, evidence-free speculation.
I have a 2009 Mac Pro. It's a 12/24 core, 3 GHz-ish, 64 GB machine, lots of monitors. It's really pretty quick and there's certainly nothing wrong with it.
Apple, however, has made the next version of the OS unavailable to it, which in turn will make it slowly become incompatible with new software, etc.
I suspect that the whole "you aren't allowed to repair your iPhone" debacle is based on the same basic policy, which I would sum up as "screw you, customer, buy from us again or go without."
Particularly because the idea that no one but Apple's authorized money generators can repair an iPhone is patently absurd.
++insightful
[Jeff Jaffe, CEO of W3C] speaking for the W3C:
The the people in the W3C are not in any kind of a "best light" when the organization is obviously and outrageously fluffing corporate behemoths over the needs of everyone else, though.
The degree of pro-corporate spin in Jaffe's remarks is appalling.
There are no AI companies, because there is no AI. We have a rtificial, but we don't have i ntelligence.
What there are is marketing companies.
They're waving neural networks around - basically a vaguely neuron-like means to do "if something like this, then that" - and calling it AI so they can sell more of it.
If/when AI gets here, the stuff they're calling "AI" today will be the subject of raucous laughter - at the people who swallowed the label. At the same time the marketing people will get an "atta boy" for using the term to suck more money out of people's pockets.
No part of Google is "an AI company." Google is a marketing giant with a popularity-based search engine. Resulting in what popularity usually results in - mediocre results. Well salted with advertising.
As for the distinctions about AGI and so forth... yep, that's them, marketing you. Exactly what I'm talking about. Intelligence is that thing you have, that a thermostat, toaster, or go playing program does not. That's what it's always been, and it's still that. When something else has it in any like degree, you'll know it. Because it won't just play go - it'll argue with you about what intelligence is, among many, many other things. Intelligence incorporates the ability to generalize. Saying "general intelligence" is like saying "pizza pie" or "cha tea." Not that it stops people looking to market their shite. Nothing stops them.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled buzzword fest.
Oh yes, totally equal. The supplicant with the most money in their pockets gets what they want.
Works just like politics.
Totally fair.
You bet.
(checks pockets... nope)
As far as that goes, I'll go with hoping Richard Feynman is resurrected. At least people actually paid attention to his messages rather than just posturing and pretending.
++moderation