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User: 19thNervousBreakdown

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  1. Re:Machine learning on my phone? on Apple, Huawei Both Claim First 7nm Smartphone Chips (ieee.org) · · Score: 0

    IIRC, Apple uses it to tag your photos.

  2. Re: Follow the lead of the USA on Planet At Risk of Heading Towards Irreversible 'Hothouse Earth' State (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    We’ve spent the last five decades catching up to the safety and efficiency that the initial promises were based on. We sold those initial promises as achievable in 5-10 years and retrofittable onto existing plants, which everyone building them knew was bullshit, but they wouldn’t have been buiilt without the lies.

    These days, we know how to make truly safe and efficient reactors, but a half century of lies means only experts or idiots will support them, and even then they’ve fucked up so much, legislation is utterly intertwined, which means politicians need to be convinced, and they’re rarely either experts or idiots—so basically, short of bribes, nuclear power is fucked until we get truly desperate, even though it can now be safe, profitable, and clean.

    I dunno. It was probably a necessary step. I can’t remember where I saw the concept, or a googlable name for it, but the gist is, we often have to do something awful in the short run to get something good in the long. Provided the short-term necessary step dosen’t kill us, it was worth it.

  3. Heartbeat apps that require nothing more than looking at the camera have existed for years. I’d be mildly surprised if FaceID didn’t require a heartbeat.

  4. Re:MSM at its finest on The Most Important Study of the Mediterranean Diet Has Been Retracted (qz.com) · · Score: 1

    But in another sense, the paper was entirely wrong: the Mediterranean diet does not cause better health outcomes.

    I haven’t read the second link, so I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but I seriously doubt the investigation found that the paper instead proves the null hypothesis. It’s extremely annoying that even purported “science” writers can’t be precise with language.

    Prediction: This article will be quoted, without a direct link to the original paper or investogation, asserting that “The Mediterranean diet [b]does not[/b] cause better health outcomes,” instead of “does not necessarily” or “has not been proven to”. And then the imprecise language will be further extended to call it harmful, based only on the game of telephone going on here. Feel free to link this post and call me wrong on or after 2021-06-15, I’ll find the articles.

    My last official predictiction was to say that even though the Facebook IPO was widely acknowleged to be a ripoff, you would have more money five years after than you started with. I actually think it was much stronger than that, but regardless, I was right. Feel free to find my post from, I think, the day of the Facebook IPO. If my claim wasn’t at least as strong as I’ve claimed, post-inflation (I’m pretty sure I was smart enough back then to take both inflation and opportunity cost into account and think I said you’d at least double your money, but again, please prove me wrong, I’m too lazy to look the post up but refuse to refuse to accept reality), I’ll do something extremely personally embarassing with my real face on Youtube, do my best to make it funny to whoever posts a link to my incorrect post, use my real face, and link it as a reply.

    I’m pretty fucking good though. Unverifiable claims:

    Two weeks prior to the Google acquisiton of the (UHF?) wireless spectrum, I called that they would win, with their bid to three digits of accuracy (11.x million $ IIRC). Reasoning behind it? Slashdot, actually. Back then, there were a lot of very capable and informed people here, and having just started to become truly competent and trying to figure out how to communicate that to my peers and managers, I was really tuned in to identifying actual experts from their posts, and just let my brain pick a random number. I can’t say the reasoning was solid or anything but luck... but I think it was and was.

    On seeing OS X 10.0, I called that Apple stock would skyrocket within 3 years. Reasoning? A company dropping its ego, and more than that, getting their senior devs to make an honest attempt at standing on the shoulders of giants, up-front and not post-hoc? It’s so obviously a path to success, and yet so rare, it’s practically guaranteed to succeed.

    Called iPod success. Laughed at “Less Space than a Nomad”.

    Called iPhone release when everyone said they’d never do it.

    Successes posted as a reminder of confimation bias in case I’m wrong—I’ve only called one thing verifiably correct on Slashdot. Even if I get this one right, 2/2 in 12-ish years is not statistically-significant. Just making sure I can’t rewrite my unverifiable correct claims in case they end up wrong in hindsight.

  5. Re:Encrypted email + html = fail on Encrypted Email Has a Major, Divisive Flaw (wired.com) · · Score: 1

    CDATA is trivially broken out of.

  6. Re:Discarding general relativity on Math Shows Some Black Holes Erase Your Past and Give You Unlimited Futures (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    Sure, but GPS wouldn't work (or rarher, would be simpler) in that case. The weirdest things in the universe are proven by your phone existing.

  7. Re:People are Stupid on Are Music CDs Dying? Best Buy Stops Selling CDs (complex.com) · · Score: 1

    In which case, your incredibly accurate studio monitor speakers that you hooked up to a consumer-level receiver with the HPF/LPF turned off (filters still aren't common on woofers and tweeters in consumer receivers) will play weird resonances from the tweeters and woofers as they recieve signals they either are too heavy to vibrate at or too light to deal with the amount of power it takes to move the heavier speakers they were intended for, and if you don't pair them right (overlapping frequency responses, set the H/LPF filters there) you'll get certain freqencies standing way out (and usually distorting) or you'll have your subwoofer playing 150Hz, which if it's bigger than 6" you'll then turn way up to even out the volume with the mids, but never manage to get "Nine Inch Nails - Closer" to properly be "Boom - (inaudible because of your brain Boom) - Tiss".

    Seriously, if you're buying a stereo, play Closer. Make sure your sub is at least 10 inches, and has at least 50% db at 20Hz (closer to 100% the better). Set the mids to mid, treble to mid, base keep turning up to where it goes "Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom Boom". Slowly decrease the bass, at some point that weird thing your brain does that MP3 exploits will take over, and it'll become "Boom Tiss Boom Tiss Boom Tiss", but the Tiss will just "feel" impactful. If it's a single unit, speakers and all, that should be very close to halfway. Next, increase treble until the Tiss and other highs make it sound cheap, then back it off by a half-number (on a 1-10) until it sounds crisp. This will be +/- 2 numbers on a good pairing of speakers, and +/-1 on integrated tweets and woofs. Finally, bring the mids to where Reznor's voice is easily understandable without trying (this is a really, really well-mastered album) but the music is still in the foreground enough that you lose words by being distracted by new layers or progressions in the instruments.

    Been my main stereo-benchmark song for ~8 years, and it's both saved me from some clunkers and got me incredible deals. Just make sure you have a lossless copy, and don't play it over bluetooth unless that's specificially what you want to test (although you'll do better by checking the A2DP protocols your devices support for that--bluetooth play is only worth it as a final smoke test).

    Also, if anyone has other songs that really exercise a system's edge cases, I'd love to add it to my rotation.

    Portishead - Roads, aside from making any white noise in the area sound really strange, should sound amazing with the Closer tuning--the bass that makes the wah-wah should almost be inaudible unless you're in a white-noise-free room. If it doesn't, the high/low filters between mids and sub is fucked, or even worse you've got a gap (4" "woofers"), and you'll never find a non-annoying song without a fill-in speaker + EQ that will be a huge investment of time to get a smooth response from.

  8. Re:People are Stupid on Are Music CDs Dying? Best Buy Stops Selling CDs (complex.com) · · Score: 1

    Lossless purchases are extremely easy to find, and in the last 3 years have been mostly equal or superior to CDs.

    Not that I'm aware of a single A/B/X test where people were able to tell the difference, but hey, it's as good, unless you have a janky playback system without correct high/low-pass filters.

  9. Re:Just another cut out of 1,000. on Are Music CDs Dying? Best Buy Stops Selling CDs (complex.com) · · Score: 0

    Wait. You think your CDs, that even if you don't play them on an internet-connected device, can reproduce frequencies the human ear can't hear right next to your phone that can pick up those same frequencies, that you purchased online, or at the store with a credit card, or customer discount card, or that you googled first, you think you're immune to being tracked with them?

    As for DRM, that's been a non-issue for digital music for at least 5 years, more like 8-10.

  10. Re:Its the content, stupid! on Are Music CDs Dying? Best Buy Stops Selling CDs (complex.com) · · Score: 1

    Yeah, no. Any audio content can be distributed on CD that (at least 3 9s) of human ears can hear. I have yet to see a band, from Radiohead, to Phish, to bands that only play local ~100-person venues, that doesn't have a CD of everything they've ever made.

    I love live music, but unless you have a massive and/or high-quality PA system, expert mixers who've tuned to the venue, bartender, and at least 20 friends to enjoy it with you, CD is just plain better, usually even when it's a live show. And it's always available. Maybe there's a niche where that's not common, but that niche isn't going to kill the CD.

    50's and 60's mastering was objectively terrible. I don't think there's a single frequency or intensity that record can reproduce that a CD can't. I might be wrong about that, but if I am it's a frequency you can't directly hear. If you think CDs suck, you're a victim of the Loudness Wars. Listen to CDs mastered in ~'92 to ~'96 ('93-'94 was the peak)--some of the best, clearest music you will ever hear, and I challenge you to give a single example of an alternate format that captures the live sound better.

    CDs are dying because you have to go to the store or get them delivered. That's the entirety of it, and there's no reason for concern--compressed music will eventually get a no-comprimises engineer combined with a band intricate and talented enough to make it worth it, and incredible speakers are so cheap these days somebody just needs to make one that's Bose-compatible, Base-boosted-monitor-quality, and Apple-easy, and HiFi will be the new rage.

    Your Youtube anectote makes me worry I might be wrong, that's straight fucked that anyone could listen to Youtube music and not be annoyed, but I've been right since cassettes, so I'm going to bet on this one as well.

  11. Re:Two Positive Charges? on Scientists Have Detected a New Particle At the Large Hadron Collider At CERN (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    You're thinking way too small.

    If this is real, and stable (given that they didn't even bring up the question, and that the article is at the traditional Slashdot-level of understanding, I'm guessing it's not, because these articles are never anything excition), it'd absolutely transform our understanding of quantum mechanics. Things we think are impossible would become easy.

    But it's not, and it's not, and it won't, and they aren't, at least not in any way that will ever show up on Slashdot.

    Also... really? Electricity is already pretty easy to get like 90% efficient from hundreds of miles away. 2x electric would either be 95% or 180% efficient, depending on how credulous you are.

  12. Re:History is set to repeat. on IBM Promises To Hire 25,000 Americans As Tech Executives Set To Meet Trump (reuters.com) · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Hahaha holy crap, came here to post this. It's like it's a re-enactment of Nazi Germany... I mean other than the fact that we have way, way, way less reason to go crazy than they did.

    Anyway, I dunno, is this real? Can this be real? What the FUCK?

  13. Re:Memory-unsafe is a BS meme on Are Flawed Languages Creating Bad Software? (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    Range checking for things like std::vector is turned on by default in recent compilers.

    ie. "array[-1] = 0x666;" will throw an exception, just like in Java.

    This is absolutely wrong, and would violate the C++ standard if it wasn't. http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/container/array/operator_at

  14. Re:No car hits its official CO2 output level on Volkswagen Emissions Issues Spread To Gasoline Cars (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    Slow, gentle acceleration at low RPMs is about the least fuel-efficient way you could possibly do it. You're wasting gas, and annoying.

  15. Re:Maybe on Ask Slashdot: What's the Harm In a Default Setting For Div By Zero? · · Score: 1

    Does anyone want their div by zero errors to result in anything other than zero?

    Yes.

    No.

    Maybe.

    Maybe not.

    Wrong!

    PHP!

  16. Re:G27 price dip on Logitech Introduces G29, G920 Racing Wheels For PS3, PS4, Xbox One and PC · · Score: 1

    Ugh, give me a shifter that actually grinds if you screw up the clutch. As it is, it'll let you go to neutral without clutching, but then you can't get back into gear without clutching with no feedback at all--the lever still moves into gear. So you think you're in gear, but you're not. Once you realize that, your forebrain is fully into figuring out this thing, and good luck making up that time.

  17. Re:Here's my list on Ask Slashdot: What's On Your Keychain? · · Score: 0

    Creep.

  18. Re:So when do we get to SEE these rules? on FCC Approves Net Neutrality Rules · · Score: 1

    Google large ISPs' refusal to upgrade peering or install free Netflix caching hardware. The courts were/are inadequate because it's not illegal.

  19. Re:No one could replicate Windows? on Interviews: Alexander Stepanov and Daniel E. Rose Answer Your Questions · · Score: 1

    Yes, those are two examples of failures to replicate Windows. Maybe someday!

  20. Re:do one thing and do it well on GNU Emacs 24.4 Released Today · · Score: 1

    Soooo.... what's its name?

  21. Re:Bring back 19.34b on GNU Emacs 24.4 Released Today · · Score: 1

    Yes, how hard can it possibly be to get millions of lines of code written over a span of decades by thousands of authors to interoperate close enough to flawlessly to parse some simple text in hundreds of grammars through the use of a couple dozen basic operations executed billions of times a second? Geez.

    Whenever a computer problem arises, the first thing to remember is that it's not strange that it doesn't work.

  22. Re:Throwing out all compatibility hooks makes it e on 30-Day Status Update On LibreSSL · · Score: 1

    Why is your security code depending on undefined behavior? And why would you port to other architectures to serve as canaries for the architecture you're presumably running on? How about a test suite instead? Do you you tie your shoes in the morning, or do you have an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine try to will them onto your feet?

  23. Re:Shell? Give me a web based browser on A Dedicated Shell For Git Commands · · Score: 1

    OpenGrok

  24. Re:Great timing! on Scientists Print Retinal Cells · · Score: 1

    Maybe you should have checked those limits more closely. Class 2 are the ones that are blink-safe (if you're the trusting sort), limited to 1mW. Class 3 is 5mW, and the description of that is, to paraphrase; Hey, be careful, this shit can blind you before you can blink.

  25. Re:Great timing! on Scientists Print Retinal Cells · · Score: 1

    Yeah. Take the blind guy's advice.