I've never understood the support for panspermia as an origin of life theory. Or rather, I don't understand the continued enthusiasm given how much we've learned in the past few decades about pre-biotic chemistry - other than perhaps the exotic notion that we're evolved from alien life. There is nothing magical about the chemistry found in our biological makeup. All the building blocks are here, and scientists are already fabricating self-replicating, highly organized biological molecules in lab conditions that could easily be precursors to organic life. Occam's Razor seems to lead to a more mundane conclusion: that given appropriate conditions, simple organic life springs into existence fairly easily and quickly (in cosmic timescales at least).
I'd argue that the fast formation of life supports local bio-genesis much more strongly than seeding from elsewhere. After all, seeding would tend to happen at some random time in a planet's history, because it has nothing to do with local star system conditions. A seeding event that occurs immediately after local conditions are favorable to life seems incredibly improbable to me.
To help visualize, look at the life timeline on Earth. Almost as soon as there's liquid water, life springs up. Keep in mind that Earth still has another couple billion years left in it's predicted lifespan.
along with a combination of ES7, Electron, React, and MobX technologies
Welp, this means that this music player is going to take up a hell of a lot more memory and CPU power than should conceivably be necessary for a simple music player. It's hilarious to me that this music player is probably going to eat up more RAM than an instance of Microsoft Word, which clocks in at a svelte 23MB on my computer with a reasonably substantial document loaded. Yes, I know they meant "small as in pixels", but a music player should also be small in size and complexity.
Is an embedded web browser the only cross-platform UI these types of projects seem capable of reaching for these days? Electron is mighty convenient if all you have are web programmers, but the user pays a very heavy price for that programmer convenience. I'm not usually one of those guys who moans about modern code bloat, but Electron apps just take it to a whole other level.
I'm convinced that 90% of flat earthers are just trolls who don't actually believe what they say, but love seeing the consternation of people trying to convince them they're wrong. Or maybe some of them just enjoy the intellectual challenge of trying to invent counter-arguments to scientific reality. The other 10% are just gullible saps who have been taken in by the former group.
There are many thousands of logical fallacies to the flat earth theory. You'll go crazy if you try to argue logically with these people. You can't argue with trolls or stupid.
I just say "I program videogames", and pretty much leave it at that. There's almost no way to effectively convey what I actually do beyond that. That's enough for 99% of people anyhow. In a way, I'm sort of lucky that the "videogames" part of my job distracts them from the "programming" part.
Of course, there's always the oft-retorted line of "man, it must be nice to play videogames all day," and I simply smile and lie "Yep, it sure is!"
If you hadn't enabled telemetry and studies, you wouldn't see it. Also, given that it's some sort of marketing tie-in to Mr. Robot, it might very well be US only.
Presumably only Mozilla has access to this sort of system. But then again, that's just an assumption of mine.
You can turn this off in the Privacy section: "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla", and under that "Allow Firefox to install and run studies".
It's the latter one that allows those experimental add-ons to be added and run. I had those both enabled, because I thought that Mozilla would be responsible in how it used them. Obviously, I was mistaken. So, at the very least disable the latter if you don't want more mysterious add-ons showing up. As soon as you uncheck that box, the add-on disappears.
“Firefox worked with the Mr. Robot team to create a custom experience that would surprise and delight fans of the show and our users. It’s especially important to call out that this collaboration does not compromise our principles or values regarding privacy. The experience does not collect or share any data,” Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, chief marketing officer of Mozilla, said in a statement to Gizmodo. “The experience was kept under wraps to be introduced at the conclusion of the season of Mr. Robot. We gave Mr. Robot fans a unique mystery to solve to deepen their connection and engagement with the show and is only available in Firefox.”
So, no apologies for those of us who spotted it, freaked out, and spent a bunch of time trying to figure out WTF this was, and if it was malicious or not.
Seriously, on what planet do you essentially prank all your users with a stunt like this? I was actually pretty happy with Firefox after the Quantum update, as it went better than I was expecting. After that, I immediately turned off telemetry and experiments, because they've now abused my trust with this stunt.
And now comes this statement, doubling down on their incredibly poor judgment. This is the last straw for me. If Mozilla had been the least bit contrite, I might have forgiven this. I've been using Firefox almost since it's inception 15 years ago. That ends today.
You misspelled 'whose' repeatedly. What are they teaching you Americans in your schools? German is my first language, but even I wouldn't make a mistake like that.
Ah, good point. That was a bad choice of words. I think perhaps "unnecessary expenses" would be better, given this quote:
Government agencies often pay dramatically different prices for the same IT item, the report said, sometimes three or four times as much.
I suppose we're all sort of used to that thing by now, but it's still annoying that it's just accepted as the way it is.
One could also argue that perhaps not enough funding is going to the right places, instead, letting security standards lapse because it it's easier to leave the old technology in place, vulnerabilities and all.
Forgive me for slightly playing Devil's Advocate here. I'm also a bit wary of the rush to cloud services, but...
Haven't most of the worst security disasters we've heard of in the past few years come from companies or government departments losing control of their own in-house systems and data? So, what do you think is more risky... apparently incompetent IT management / staff who don't know how to keep things patched (e.g. Equifax, previous government SNAFUs), or the risk of turning over sensitive information to someone else, who one presumes has more expertise in keeping stuff secure.
For all the potential risks of cloud services, I haven't heard of too many major breaches of Amazon, Google, Intel, or Microsoft services, even though those have got to be very significant targets. Most "breaches" I've heard of involving AWS, for instance, are due to misconfiguration, not necessarily the fault of the platform.
If you read the article, you see a lot of compelling reasons for at least modernizing and consolidating many of those very expensive and often obsolete systems. Naturally, each federal agency has their own completely unique-as-a-snowflake system, and often pays many times what a more modern commercial system should typically cost. This is apparently an effort to get some runaway costs under control, and if it can be done safely, that's a big win. Whether this should be done with commercial cloud services rather than trying to consolidate internally is certainly a valid point of debate.
The worst of both worlds, of course, would be contracting with a cloud vendor who ALSO has incompetent management / IT staff. If the "unnamed cloud-based e-mail vendor" mentioned in the article turns out to be Yahoo, I'm going to sit in a corner and cry.
Let's try to cut through the hyperventilating and click-bait headlines a bit, shall we?
First, keep in mind that the SPCA complex takes up an entire city block, and that they were having a real issue with safety and crime on their property. Prior to this, SPCA employees were literally not able to safely use some of the sidewalks due to discarded needles, obstructions, and so on.
Second, the robots are set to detect any illegal trespassing or activity, and simply report it to human security personnel. It's not like the robots have mounted tazers that drive the homeless out, running for their lives. In fact, people have vandalized the robots by tipping it over, covering its sensors with BBQ sauce or feces, etc. These robots are completely harmless, and in fact, are downright defenseless.
City Hall is great at lecturing others to be tolerant and risk their own safety while they can just nudge the police commissioner to quietly push homeless toward someplace where they don't have to look at them. I mean, we can't have homeless tents blocking off City Hall, right?
Reference counting seems somewhat homophobic by nature. Two strong references pointing to each other will end up leaking memory. Why can't two shared_ptr instances be a couple in the same way a shared_ptr and weak_ptr can?
And C-style manual memory management? Seems a bit ageist to me. As a senior citizen with one foot in the grave myself (meaning I'm over 40), how can I possibly be expected to remember to free() all those malloc()s? It's a little unfair that we can't make the compiler take care of that for me, with my rapidly failing memory, rigid mindset, and rapidly failing memory. What were we talking about again?
A better application: use this in MMOs to shape the current expression of your avatar. Another idea: use to auto-select emoji in messaging apps on request. Yet another application might be when doing in-house beta software testing. Testers are often recorded in an attempt to gauge reaction to the software they're using. Detecting emotion might be very helpful here, and in fact, less intrusive than the typical "keep talking about your thought process" approach. There's typically no expectation of privacy in these situations - gauging reactions is the entire point.
It's fine if people deliberately opt-in to this in a transparent manner. It's creepy as hell if you're doing it without their knowledge or consent. If a company was actually using this on me during a job interview, they'd immediately be placed on the "only if I'm in danger of starving to death" list.
Yep, same with me. I don't care at all about any NFL games except for my local team. Currently, within my family, only my parents still subscribe to cable. So, every few weeks, we all gather there to watch the Sunday game and enjoy dinner afterwards. Otherwise, I just listen to the radio at home. I was able to watch ONE game this season because Amazon Prime Video streamed Thursday night games.
If the NFL sold per-season streaming for specific teams (or heaven forbid, even games on demand) for a reasonable cost, I'd certainly sign up. There is literally no simple way to stream just the NFL games I'd like to see on my big-screen TV.
My feeling is that the NFL is going to be about 5-10 years behind the ball on giving us decent streaming options. It will take a younger, more internet savvy generation to make those decisions. The current execs still think of internet streaming as a sideshow, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy since they currently offer crappy packages.
Why did they go to such lengths over traffic lights?
Generally speaking? Because small-minded people in power love to push others around, just because they can. Doubly so when someone dares to calls them out on an issue within their two-bit little fiefdom.
I actually quit the paid tier of Hulu largely because of the bugs advertising the local affiliate station plastered in the corner of the videos for the entire duration of the show. I think for a lot of people it just disappears, but it always grabs my eye and distracts me for some reason. When I sign up for ad-free programming, I want 100% ad-free programming, and I'm willing to pay for it.
So, yeah, "free" TV would come with lots of advertising, and I don't want to waste my time like that.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that I'm just talking about the term as a general description, not about the technical definition as it's currently used. And I misspoke when I said "for these narrowly defined tasks". I meant to say "for these algorithms which solve narrowly defined tasks". Naturally, the term is about the method used, not the task.
I also think that "machine learning" is also a more intuitive term for lay-people, which describes the process and algorithm much better.
But interesting description of a contemporary definition of deep learning, thanks.
The reason this shit is in consumer-grade hardware is because it's a "free feature". So, why not include it? It's the same reasoning as to why we can't buy a consumer TV without tons of "smart TV" features we don't want. After all, it's cheaper to offer only a single SKU.
Companies throw in these "extras", but apparently don't really consider the fact that sometimes, extra features can actually be "anti-features", in that they might have an actual penalty in terms of security or usability. It's why companies hoard their customers personal data, because its seen as nothing but beneficial, and not a potential privacy disaster for everyone else.
Only when companies that willfully put their customers security at risk are heavily penalized will they start treating security and privacy with the respect it deserves. Until then, it's going to be an uphill battle.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if the author had a hobby or something to occupy his free time, he wouldn't be worrying so much about how other people choose to spend theirs.
I've never understood the support for panspermia as an origin of life theory. Or rather, I don't understand the continued enthusiasm given how much we've learned in the past few decades about pre-biotic chemistry - other than perhaps the exotic notion that we're evolved from alien life. There is nothing magical about the chemistry found in our biological makeup. All the building blocks are here, and scientists are already fabricating self-replicating, highly organized biological molecules in lab conditions that could easily be precursors to organic life. Occam's Razor seems to lead to a more mundane conclusion: that given appropriate conditions, simple organic life springs into existence fairly easily and quickly (in cosmic timescales at least).
I'd argue that the fast formation of life supports local bio-genesis much more strongly than seeding from elsewhere. After all, seeding would tend to happen at some random time in a planet's history, because it has nothing to do with local star system conditions. A seeding event that occurs immediately after local conditions are favorable to life seems incredibly improbable to me.
To help visualize, look at the life timeline on Earth. Almost as soon as there's liquid water, life springs up. Keep in mind that Earth still has another couple billion years left in it's predicted lifespan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
the goal was to build a small player
Failed out of the gate. Why is that?
along with a combination of ES7, Electron, React, and MobX technologies
Welp, this means that this music player is going to take up a hell of a lot more memory and CPU power than should conceivably be necessary for a simple music player. It's hilarious to me that this music player is probably going to eat up more RAM than an instance of Microsoft Word, which clocks in at a svelte 23MB on my computer with a reasonably substantial document loaded. Yes, I know they meant "small as in pixels", but a music player should also be small in size and complexity.
Is an embedded web browser the only cross-platform UI these types of projects seem capable of reaching for these days? Electron is mighty convenient if all you have are web programmers, but the user pays a very heavy price for that programmer convenience. I'm not usually one of those guys who moans about modern code bloat, but Electron apps just take it to a whole other level.
It lets people of even average intelligence or scientific knowledge feel smugly superior.
I'm convinced that 90% of flat earthers are just trolls who don't actually believe what they say, but love seeing the consternation of people trying to convince them they're wrong. Or maybe some of them just enjoy the intellectual challenge of trying to invent counter-arguments to scientific reality. The other 10% are just gullible saps who have been taken in by the former group.
There are many thousands of logical fallacies to the flat earth theory. You'll go crazy if you try to argue logically with these people. You can't argue with trolls or stupid.
I just say "I program videogames", and pretty much leave it at that. There's almost no way to effectively convey what I actually do beyond that. That's enough for 99% of people anyhow. In a way, I'm sort of lucky that the "videogames" part of my job distracts them from the "programming" part.
Of course, there's always the oft-retorted line of "man, it must be nice to play videogames all day," and I simply smile and lie "Yep, it sure is!"
Well, I see you'd fit right in at Mozilla.
Nothing of this sort in Privacy Settings whatsoever.
I'm looking at it right now under Options -> Privacy & Security -> Firefox Data Collection and Use.
If you hadn't enabled telemetry and studies, you wouldn't see it. Also, given that it's some sort of marketing tie-in to Mr. Robot, it might very well be US only.
Presumably only Mozilla has access to this sort of system. But then again, that's just an assumption of mine.
You can turn this off in the Privacy section: "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla", and under that "Allow Firefox to install and run studies".
It's the latter one that allows those experimental add-ons to be added and run. I had those both enabled, because I thought that Mozilla would be responsible in how it used them. Obviously, I was mistaken. So, at the very least disable the latter if you don't want more mysterious add-ons showing up. As soon as you uncheck that box, the add-on disappears.
“Firefox worked with the Mr. Robot team to create a custom experience that would surprise and delight fans of the show and our users. It’s especially important to call out that this collaboration does not compromise our principles or values regarding privacy. The experience does not collect or share any data,” Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, chief marketing officer of Mozilla, said in a statement to Gizmodo. “The experience was kept under wraps to be introduced at the conclusion of the season of Mr. Robot. We gave Mr. Robot fans a unique mystery to solve to deepen their connection and engagement with the show and is only available in Firefox.”
So, no apologies for those of us who spotted it, freaked out, and spent a bunch of time trying to figure out WTF this was, and if it was malicious or not.
Seriously, on what planet do you essentially prank all your users with a stunt like this? I was actually pretty happy with Firefox after the Quantum update, as it went better than I was expecting. After that, I immediately turned off telemetry and experiments, because they've now abused my trust with this stunt.
And now comes this statement, doubling down on their incredibly poor judgment. This is the last straw for me. If Mozilla had been the least bit contrite, I might have forgiven this. I've been using Firefox almost since it's inception 15 years ago. That ends today.
"Hubble: We guarantee we'll get the prescription right on the second try!"
You misspelled 'whose' repeatedly. What are they teaching you Americans in your schools? German is my first language, but even I wouldn't make a mistake like that.
EU education > US education
Sweet. It's an actual Grammar Nazi!
Ah, good point. That was a bad choice of words. I think perhaps "unnecessary expenses" would be better, given this quote:
Government agencies often pay dramatically different prices for the same IT item, the report said, sometimes three or four times as much.
I suppose we're all sort of used to that thing by now, but it's still annoying that it's just accepted as the way it is.
One could also argue that perhaps not enough funding is going to the right places, instead, letting security standards lapse because it it's easier to leave the old technology in place, vulnerabilities and all.
Forgive me for slightly playing Devil's Advocate here. I'm also a bit wary of the rush to cloud services, but...
Haven't most of the worst security disasters we've heard of in the past few years come from companies or government departments losing control of their own in-house systems and data? So, what do you think is more risky... apparently incompetent IT management / staff who don't know how to keep things patched (e.g. Equifax, previous government SNAFUs), or the risk of turning over sensitive information to someone else, who one presumes has more expertise in keeping stuff secure.
For all the potential risks of cloud services, I haven't heard of too many major breaches of Amazon, Google, Intel, or Microsoft services, even though those have got to be very significant targets. Most "breaches" I've heard of involving AWS, for instance, are due to misconfiguration, not necessarily the fault of the platform.
If you read the article, you see a lot of compelling reasons for at least modernizing and consolidating many of those very expensive and often obsolete systems. Naturally, each federal agency has their own completely unique-as-a-snowflake system, and often pays many times what a more modern commercial system should typically cost. This is apparently an effort to get some runaway costs under control, and if it can be done safely, that's a big win. Whether this should be done with commercial cloud services rather than trying to consolidate internally is certainly a valid point of debate.
The worst of both worlds, of course, would be contracting with a cloud vendor who ALSO has incompetent management / IT staff. If the "unnamed cloud-based e-mail vendor" mentioned in the article turns out to be Yahoo, I'm going to sit in a corner and cry.
Let's try to cut through the hyperventilating and click-bait headlines a bit, shall we?
First, keep in mind that the SPCA complex takes up an entire city block, and that they were having a real issue with safety and crime on their property. Prior to this, SPCA employees were literally not able to safely use some of the sidewalks due to discarded needles, obstructions, and so on.
Second, the robots are set to detect any illegal trespassing or activity, and simply report it to human security personnel. It's not like the robots have mounted tazers that drive the homeless out, running for their lives. In fact, people have vandalized the robots by tipping it over, covering its sensors with BBQ sauce or feces, etc. These robots are completely harmless, and in fact, are downright defenseless.
City Hall is great at lecturing others to be tolerant and risk their own safety while they can just nudge the police commissioner to quietly push homeless toward someplace where they don't have to look at them. I mean, we can't have homeless tents blocking off City Hall, right?
Reference counting seems somewhat homophobic by nature. Two strong references pointing to each other will end up leaking memory. Why can't two shared_ptr instances be a couple in the same way a shared_ptr and weak_ptr can?
And C-style manual memory management? Seems a bit ageist to me. As a senior citizen with one foot in the grave myself (meaning I'm over 40), how can I possibly be expected to remember to free() all those malloc()s? It's a little unfair that we can't make the compiler take care of that for me, with my rapidly failing memory, rigid mindset, and rapidly failing memory. What were we talking about again?
"There's something very Big Brother about it"...
Yeah, no shit. Seriously, people?
A better application: use this in MMOs to shape the current expression of your avatar. Another idea: use to auto-select emoji in messaging apps on request. Yet another application might be when doing in-house beta software testing. Testers are often recorded in an attempt to gauge reaction to the software they're using. Detecting emotion might be very helpful here, and in fact, less intrusive than the typical "keep talking about your thought process" approach. There's typically no expectation of privacy in these situations - gauging reactions is the entire point.
It's fine if people deliberately opt-in to this in a transparent manner. It's creepy as hell if you're doing it without their knowledge or consent. If a company was actually using this on me during a job interview, they'd immediately be placed on the "only if I'm in danger of starving to death" list.
Yep, same with me. I don't care at all about any NFL games except for my local team. Currently, within my family, only my parents still subscribe to cable. So, every few weeks, we all gather there to watch the Sunday game and enjoy dinner afterwards. Otherwise, I just listen to the radio at home. I was able to watch ONE game this season because Amazon Prime Video streamed Thursday night games.
If the NFL sold per-season streaming for specific teams (or heaven forbid, even games on demand) for a reasonable cost, I'd certainly sign up. There is literally no simple way to stream just the NFL games I'd like to see on my big-screen TV.
My feeling is that the NFL is going to be about 5-10 years behind the ball on giving us decent streaming options. It will take a younger, more internet savvy generation to make those decisions. The current execs still think of internet streaming as a sideshow, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy since they currently offer crappy packages.
Why did they go to such lengths over traffic lights?
Generally speaking? Because small-minded people in power love to push others around, just because they can. Doubly so when someone dares to calls them out on an issue within their two-bit little fiefdom.
Good luck with your legal fees dude.
I actually quit the paid tier of Hulu largely because of the bugs advertising the local affiliate station plastered in the corner of the videos for the entire duration of the show. I think for a lot of people it just disappears, but it always grabs my eye and distracts me for some reason. When I sign up for ad-free programming, I want 100% ad-free programming, and I'm willing to pay for it.
So, yeah, "free" TV would come with lots of advertising, and I don't want to waste my time like that.
Sorry, I should have mentioned that I'm just talking about the term as a general description, not about the technical definition as it's currently used. And I misspoke when I said "for these narrowly defined tasks". I meant to say "for these algorithms which solve narrowly defined tasks". Naturally, the term is about the method used, not the task.
I also think that "machine learning" is also a more intuitive term for lay-people, which describes the process and algorithm much better.
But interesting description of a contemporary definition of deep learning, thanks.
I think the term "deep learning" seems a bit better than "AI" for these sorts of very narrowly-defined tasks.
The reason this shit is in consumer-grade hardware is because it's a "free feature". So, why not include it? It's the same reasoning as to why we can't buy a consumer TV without tons of "smart TV" features we don't want. After all, it's cheaper to offer only a single SKU.
Companies throw in these "extras", but apparently don't really consider the fact that sometimes, extra features can actually be "anti-features", in that they might have an actual penalty in terms of security or usability. It's why companies hoard their customers personal data, because its seen as nothing but beneficial, and not a potential privacy disaster for everyone else.
Only when companies that willfully put their customers security at risk are heavily penalized will they start treating security and privacy with the respect it deserves. Until then, it's going to be an uphill battle.