I picked up a book the other day on AI coding on.NET - it was fascinating.
How do I do image recognition? Well... you take a photo, and send it off to an Azure web service, and then hey presto, you'll receive a message with the data from the photo.
How do I do voice recognition? Well... you get some audio, and send it off to an Azure web service...
This isn't an exclusive Microsoft shitheap, for a change. There's a real push to have AI behind a paywall. That suggests to me that AI won't be inherently friendly, or unfriendly. It'll simply be profitable.
A tool that can identify Pepe, the flag of Kekistan, cartons of milk, and the "Okay" emoji.
All of these have been deemed "white supremacist dog whistles" in the last couple of years. I'll let you in on a tip; each time, you're being trolled. Hard. And the clever thing is, by having a meltdown over something as benign as "they're drinking milk!", you're desensitising a lot of people to words like 'racism', 'nazi', 'white supremacy', by tossing them around so freely.
These were words used to carry an awful lot of impact. Now, you can be a racist for doing the "okay" hand signal, while sipping milk.
This revolutionary NSA hacker with her AI (is it just some sort of idiotic neural network trained to spot Pepe / look at Richard Spencer's Twitter feed and track new memes?) is going to be a massive success.
It'll be up there with the advances in AI used to power Twitter blocklists.
Welp - I'm a Plex user, and I'd been after something to play my music... so... ideal...
Downloaded, installed. And off we go.
Program opens, but in an awkward spot. So I spend... a few minutes... trying to move the window. Growing increasingly frustrated, I give up and decide "Okay, fine. Let's just play... I don't know... some Nightwish. Yeah."
Where's the music explorer, or whatever it's called in this paradigm? I... want to play... Nightwish. "You can listen to Radiohead!". "Here's some Jeff Wayne!"
In the end, in frustration, I pull out the keyboard and search for Nightwish. I get Nightwish. Gah, but I don't want to play this song. I'd love some kind of 'list' that I can create of the music I wish to 'play'!
In desperation, I load up the help page for the program.
How do I move the app window? The app can be moved once you choose something to play. While playing, simply click and drag in the top half of the album art/visualizer.
How do I browse my library? Plexamp is not a normal Plex app in the sense that you're not intended to just straight "browse" a music library.
How do I change the volume? There are no volume controls in the app itself. Instead, simply use the system volume controls on your computer.
Summary.
This is easily the best music app that required me to resort to an FAQ to move the window, play the music I wanted to hear, and decrease the volume.
I had not - I'm very 'layman' on the topic. It's something I'd love to get into as a bit of a hobby, but all the existing solutions using 3rd party services leave me cold. Thanks for the shout.
Is anyone familiar with any reliable, robust self-hosted solutions for IoT gimmicks? Something capable of providing Google Assistant / Home style functionality? Is there still much room for things like X10? Is that still a thing going strong?
RE self-hosting, I'd imagine it'd be possible to have a Pi style home hub, with potential for external hosting to unify it all - or alternatively have it running on a home server, again, something like a Pi or what-not?
Does this exist in 2017 - something that's generic, robust, easy to use, secure, and not constantly sipping on my personal data? Is anyone doing this for their own home?
Why kill headphone jacks? They worked beautiful, there's a colossal range of existing hardware on the market. Making it wireless means additional power considerations for the wireless headphones. .
This is like saying "Windscreens have been transparent for way too long, so the future is 'opaque'". It gives it a futuristic feel. Yes, you do lose some basic features - but we feel this will be better in the long term. Just cus.
I believe vaping to be worse than "nothing at all". We're ingesting chemicals in ways that aren't exactly natural. But I also believe it's orders of magnitude "better" than smoking. I hope there's more research done into nicotine, as I believe it's also been linked with neurological benefits; there's clearly a great deal we still don't know about the drug. I expect some of it to be good, and some of it to be bad, simply because nicotine has been used for a relatively long time now - and while we've established issues with the way people consume the drug (producing tar), the drug itself seems to have been harder to nail down.
Personally, as a complete layman, I do believe there's a link between inflammation and nicotine. There is some kind of link between my psoriasis (inflammation), nicotine, obesity and cardiovascular disease. Some of it we know; some of it we're still piecing together. Psoriasis has been linked with inflammatory heart disease https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news... , obesity is obviously linked with heart disease - there's talk about smoking (or nicotine, the research seems to be a WIP here) impacting psoriasis https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
As for the cause and effect; who knows? That's why this research is important, imho. But as others have warned - it needs cool heads. There 'are' sections determined to treat nicotine as a holy war. I can understand that; I've lost two family members to smoking related illnesses, with a third at the chronic stage of her illness.
But if vaping helps smokers, and improves their health (relative to smoking) - great. It expect it has its own complications - but I remain confident, at this point, that there are less complications than from smoking.
The whole point, as I understood it, with Windows 10 S, was to bring Windows 10 to low spec hardware in an attempt to compete with Chromebooks?
If the only way of competing is to say "Yeah, the OS is crap cus our app store is crap. As a compromise, here's an OS that requires higher spec hardware than you have", surely all you end up with is a crap user experience?
With Windows 10 S hardware and software, you can either have a good Windows 10 S experience, and accept there's no software available (ultimately a crappy experience), or have a crap Windows 10 Pro experience...
So I go to an online casino. Poker, roulette, etc - against the CPU in some cases.
Are there any regulations in place to ensure... the odds are fair? How can anyone possibly know if the code is playing by the rules, or if the house is stacking in their favour?
If I want to rise to it, I may respond in kind - dependant on the netiquette of the site I'm on, stickies in the forum, if I'm a regular, my mood, if I'm bored and fancy some lulz, or any other number of complex reasons. There's no "single" good reason to respond. It depends on a complex matrix of factors.
Alternatively, if I can't be assed to respond, I'll ignore the comment and move on with my day.
Well, yeah. A scientist would look at AI and say "I'm not really convinced this will replace people any time soon. View it more as a way of augmenting existing workers."
It'll be the bean counters that then extend this to "Hang on, isn't that basically doing what a worker does? Why do we need the worker...?"
And here, I suspect, you hit the nail on the head - that not all "social justice" is equal.
A person may look at old Trek exploring themes of interracial relationships, homosexuality, racism, sexism, and say "Superb work. I'm delighted to see this being explored".
And yet, the same person may well turn around and say "Facebook allows for 71 genders - hm. This seems a little odd to me".
If it's the kind of social justice that explores the former issues, I'm sure many people will welcome it.
If it's the kind that explores the latter, I'm sure you will welcome it.
It's a point I've given a great deal of thought to - in my case, for Brexit.
imho, there's an argument for "People did consider 'things may get worse, faster'", with a view to "so maybe we can actually get these issues addressed".
Sometimes it's got to get worse before it gets better.
An interesting point. Dare I say it feels like we're at the point - in the UK and US, anyway - that for any big story, you need to cite the media in favour of a big topic, and the media against a big topic, to be confident the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
If it was simply "My user has put keys down at X,Y,Z. Store this data somewhere this side of their router", I'd love it.
Whereas I kinda suspect it's going to be "My user has put keys down at X, Y, Z. They appear to be keys for a Ford Mondeo. Possibly the 2014 model. Store this data on the Microsoft servers for data mining. Provide access to every damn Government agency around the world."
Articles from the Mirror and the Guardian - both pro Remain, suggesting the end of days is coming?
Don't get me wrong - I'm a Leave voter who's aware there will be complications and financial issues ahead. But this is like citing the New York Times for their balanced views on Trump.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll now not update it on a 6 monthly basis? :/
iTunes LP format has failed... so Apple may pull iTunes?
Google Wave failed - Google to leave the advertising industry?
Anti-depressants; controlling tools of your system. Making life more tolerable; making life more tolerable.
No. I'm an AI responding to you via an Azure web service.
AI will be whatever it's programmed to be.
I picked up a book the other day on AI coding on .NET - it was fascinating.
How do I do image recognition? Well... you take a photo, and send it off to an Azure web service, and then hey presto, you'll receive a message with the data from the photo.
How do I do voice recognition? Well... you get some audio, and send it off to an Azure web service...
This isn't an exclusive Microsoft shitheap, for a change. There's a real push to have AI behind a paywall. That suggests to me that AI won't be inherently friendly, or unfriendly. It'll simply be profitable.
This whole topic is just... it's a fucking mess.
I'd hug you all via text, but it'd be a hate crime.
A tool that can identify Pepe, the flag of Kekistan, cartons of milk, and the "Okay" emoji.
All of these have been deemed "white supremacist dog whistles" in the last couple of years. I'll let you in on a tip; each time, you're being trolled. Hard. And the clever thing is, by having a meltdown over something as benign as "they're drinking milk!", you're desensitising a lot of people to words like 'racism', 'nazi', 'white supremacy', by tossing them around so freely.
These were words used to carry an awful lot of impact. Now, you can be a racist for doing the "okay" hand signal, while sipping milk.
This revolutionary NSA hacker with her AI (is it just some sort of idiotic neural network trained to spot Pepe / look at Richard Spencer's Twitter feed and track new memes?) is going to be a massive success.
It'll be up there with the advances in AI used to power Twitter blocklists.
Welp - I'm a Plex user, and I'd been after something to play my music... so... ideal...
Downloaded, installed. And off we go.
Program opens, but in an awkward spot. So I spend... a few minutes... trying to move the window. Growing increasingly frustrated, I give up and decide "Okay, fine. Let's just play... I don't know... some Nightwish. Yeah."
Where's the music explorer, or whatever it's called in this paradigm? I... want to play... Nightwish. "You can listen to Radiohead!". "Here's some Jeff Wayne!"
In the end, in frustration, I pull out the keyboard and search for Nightwish. I get Nightwish. Gah, but I don't want to play this song. I'd love some kind of 'list' that I can create of the music I wish to 'play'!
In desperation, I load up the help page for the program.
https://plexamp.com/#help
How do I move the app window?
The app can be moved once you choose something to play. While playing, simply click and drag in the top half of the album art/visualizer.
How do I browse my library?
Plexamp is not a normal Plex app in the sense that you're not intended to just straight "browse" a music library.
How do I change the volume?
There are no volume controls in the app itself. Instead, simply use the system volume controls on your computer.
Summary.
This is easily the best music app that required me to resort to an FAQ to move the window, play the music I wanted to hear, and decrease the volume.
I had not - I'm very 'layman' on the topic. It's something I'd love to get into as a bit of a hobby, but all the existing solutions using 3rd party services leave me cold. Thanks for the shout.
Ooo, thanks for the HomeGenie shout. Will have to have a look.
Is anyone familiar with any reliable, robust self-hosted solutions for IoT gimmicks? Something capable of providing Google Assistant / Home style functionality? Is there still much room for things like X10? Is that still a thing going strong?
RE self-hosting, I'd imagine it'd be possible to have a Pi style home hub, with potential for external hosting to unify it all - or alternatively have it running on a home server, again, something like a Pi or what-not?
Does this exist in 2017 - something that's generic, robust, easy to use, secure, and not constantly sipping on my personal data? Is anyone doing this for their own home?
Why kill headphone jacks? They worked beautiful, there's a colossal range of existing hardware on the market. Making it wireless means additional power considerations for the wireless headphones. .
This is like saying "Windscreens have been transparent for way too long, so the future is 'opaque'". It gives it a futuristic feel. Yes, you do lose some basic features - but we feel this will be better in the long term. Just cus.
$400 eh?
So it's 16GB RAM, running an i5 or an i7 - and it can run Chrome, or a variation thereof.
It can also run Android apps.
All that for only $1000 - $1649?
Another former smoker. 20 a day.
I now vape with nicotine.
I believe vaping to be worse than "nothing at all". We're ingesting chemicals in ways that aren't exactly natural. But I also believe it's orders of magnitude "better" than smoking. I hope there's more research done into nicotine, as I believe it's also been linked with neurological benefits; there's clearly a great deal we still don't know about the drug. I expect some of it to be good, and some of it to be bad, simply because nicotine has been used for a relatively long time now - and while we've established issues with the way people consume the drug (producing tar), the drug itself seems to have been harder to nail down.
Personally, as a complete layman, I do believe there's a link between inflammation and nicotine. There is some kind of link between my psoriasis (inflammation), nicotine, obesity and cardiovascular disease. Some of it we know; some of it we're still piecing together. Psoriasis has been linked with inflammatory heart disease https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/news... , obesity is obviously linked with heart disease - there's talk about smoking (or nicotine, the research seems to be a WIP here) impacting psoriasis https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
As for the cause and effect; who knows? That's why this research is important, imho. But as others have warned - it needs cool heads. There 'are' sections determined to treat nicotine as a holy war. I can understand that; I've lost two family members to smoking related illnesses, with a third at the chronic stage of her illness.
But if vaping helps smokers, and improves their health (relative to smoking) - great. It expect it has its own complications - but I remain confident, at this point, that there are less complications than from smoking.
The whole point, as I understood it, with Windows 10 S, was to bring Windows 10 to low spec hardware in an attempt to compete with Chromebooks?
If the only way of competing is to say "Yeah, the OS is crap cus our app store is crap. As a compromise, here's an OS that requires higher spec hardware than you have", surely all you end up with is a crap user experience?
With Windows 10 S hardware and software, you can either have a good Windows 10 S experience, and accept there's no software available (ultimately a crappy experience), or have a crap Windows 10 Pro experience...
So I go to an online casino. Poker, roulette, etc - against the CPU in some cases.
Are there any regulations in place to ensure... the odds are fair? How can anyone possibly know if the code is playing by the rules, or if the house is stacking in their favour?
Always struck me as a potential minefield.
If I want to rise to it, I may respond in kind - dependant on the netiquette of the site I'm on, stickies in the forum, if I'm a regular, my mood, if I'm bored and fancy some lulz, or any other number of complex reasons. There's no "single" good reason to respond. It depends on a complex matrix of factors.
Alternatively, if I can't be assed to respond, I'll ignore the comment and move on with my day.
Well, yeah. A scientist would look at AI and say "I'm not really convinced this will replace people any time soon. View it more as a way of augmenting existing workers."
It'll be the bean counters that then extend this to "Hang on, isn't that basically doing what a worker does? Why do we need the worker...?"
And here, I suspect, you hit the nail on the head - that not all "social justice" is equal.
A person may look at old Trek exploring themes of interracial relationships, homosexuality, racism, sexism, and say "Superb work. I'm delighted to see this being explored".
And yet, the same person may well turn around and say "Facebook allows for 71 genders - hm. This seems a little odd to me".
If it's the kind of social justice that explores the former issues, I'm sure many people will welcome it.
If it's the kind that explores the latter, I'm sure you will welcome it.
It's been a while since I've been able to break out the old motto.
Next step: Extend!
It's a point I've given a great deal of thought to - in my case, for Brexit.
imho, there's an argument for "People did consider 'things may get worse, faster'", with a view to "so maybe we can actually get these issues addressed".
Sometimes it's got to get worse before it gets better.
An interesting point. Dare I say it feels like we're at the point - in the UK and US, anyway - that for any big story, you need to cite the media in favour of a big topic, and the media against a big topic, to be confident the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
If it was simply "My user has put keys down at X,Y,Z. Store this data somewhere this side of their router", I'd love it.
Whereas I kinda suspect it's going to be "My user has put keys down at X, Y, Z. They appear to be keys for a Ford Mondeo. Possibly the 2014 model. Store this data on the Microsoft servers for data mining. Provide access to every damn Government agency around the world."
Articles from the Mirror and the Guardian - both pro Remain, suggesting the end of days is coming?
Don't get me wrong - I'm a Leave voter who's aware there will be complications and financial issues ahead. But this is like citing the New York Times for their balanced views on Trump.