Awww, spent a few days away from Hubski and missed this. Hope it went well! I still remember discovering Hubski way back then when looking for something more pleasant than reddit. Glad it's still here and still more pleasant than reddit. Well done mk and everyone! I'm a bit of a lurker but still an appreciator.
No one who might be able to break the spell of Trump seems willing to rip off the Band-Aid. It's revealing that the Republican Party acts around Trump the way people acted around Stalin or Hitler. No-one dares to be the bringer of bad news. Except with these men there was proven reason to be afraid. To behave this way around Donald Trump, of all people, just makes Republicans look pathetic.To sum up the current situation, the U.S. is experiencing a fake self-coup that requires the administration to do exactly the things a regime would do if it were attempting to stage an actual self-coup, with millions of people sincerely believing the stated justifications for the strongman’s consolidation of power and with the regime’s legislative allies playing along, under the apparent belief that eventually the courts, which are stocked with unqualified loyalists, will soon say the game is done.
From the article, there are other costs apart from the amount of water used:This practice requires two scarce resources: water and energy. More attention is given to the showers’ high water consumption, but energy use is just as problematic. Hot water production accounts for the second most significant use of energy in many homes (after heating), and much of it is used for showering. Water treatment and distribution also use lots of energy.
As someone who builds software for a living, it's interesting to see how this is an issue for AI in exactly the same way it's an issue for software teams. If you just build what you are asked for, it will be the wrong thing. And even if you're careful, you will learn what people actually want only from their disappointed response to you actually building something. This is why we build things in small chunks and get feedback along the way: people are not good at converting their imaginative vision into written, spoken or encoded instructions, and there will always be something silently assumed. The AIs have it even harder than the human teams though, since we humans are (for the time being) better at predicting common human oversights and reading between the lines of the instructions. Perhaps one day we'll be able to preprocess our instructions through a "figure out what the human probably meant to say" AI.
Hey, this guy has been through it. He also had to suffer the indignity of being yelled at by his dad while broadcasting a live chat with his Nazi buddy. If only there were some way of not constantly being humiliated for being a Nazi...
Just like how on reddit the combined wisdom of the public causes the most intelligent and well considered content to rise to the top, and humanity through its combined sincere efforts discerns the wisest path towards the future. Except with higher stakes, and run by an egotistical billionaire.
It's not just the usual 11-year cycle. As the article explains, the solar shield is weakening so that the maxima and minima of the cycle are lower than they were a few decades ago (see the first graph in the article). This means that more radiation reaches the Earth's own magnetic shield at each point in the cycle compared to the same point in the cycle in previous decades. And that effect will be compounded by the weakening of the Earth's own magnetic field. So for a number of reasons we're all getting higher doses these days. The article doesn't say anything about why solar activity is weakening. So it seems this could just be a temporary fluctuation. The article's first graph shows that there was a weak cycle peaking around 1970 too, then it got stronger and recently weaker again. Are there studies of longer trends? And is there any understanding of the causes inside the sun? The small window of data shown in the article doesn't seem an adequate basis for prediction beyond the next few years.
It's not that hard. ... - overhead aerial imagery - oblique aerial imagery - 3d radar imagery - hand-assembled solid construction based on human interaction (exemplars and data) - parcel data - ownership data But wait, there's more. Because this is Google, and because every time you use it to look up an address and go there with your phone, it also has - ground truth verification of GPS coordinates - travel paths - perimeter verification But wait. If you're using your phone to take pictures there it also has - imagery within - imagery without As someone who works in software, synthesizing all of that into a global 3D map actually sounds really hard.look
So google is synthesizing:
Barron is using a GPS ping to upload the IP address into a Visual Basic GUI via the firewall as we speak."We take all cyber related issues very seriously and are looking into these incidents further," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told CNN.
That photo! Money and power can't buy you happiness, folks!
Didn't Snowden leak NSA files, not CIA?The agency’s own overreach and mistakes have created a new vulnerability, further exacerbated by the publishing of Edward Snowden’s stolen files.
They want users to pay an amount of money that they will then share among themselves, the website owners, and suppliers of non-intrusive ads.
Not too reassuring. Those of us who oppose the Trump/Bannon juggernaut have to do more than continue to point out how Trump is stupid and wrong, how his policies are ill-considered, how he can't talk properly, can't read, is racist, abuses women, doesn't know shit about anything. These complaints only reiterate that we share values these people don't share. Yes, they're boorish, aggressive bullies. But no boorish, aggressive bully was ever stopped by pointing this out. The real question is: how do you stop him concentrating power towards his own inner circle? A determined autocrat can undermine any and all institutions given time. What can people do now to turn the tide before it is too late? What actions will be effective?“The few among writers who had taken the trouble to read Hitler’s book, ridiculed the bombast of his stilted prose instead of occupying themselves with his program,” he wrote. They took him neither seriously nor literally. Even into the nineteen-thirties, “the big democratic newspapers, instead of warning their readers, reassured them day by day, that the movement . . . would inevitably collapse in no time.” Prideful of their own higher learning and cultivation, the intellectual classes could not absorb the idea that, thanks to “invisible wire-pullers”—the self-interested groups and individuals who believed they could manipulate the charismatic maverick for their own gain—this uneducated “beer-hall agitator” had already amassed vast support. After all, Germany was a state where the law rested on a firm foundation, where a majority in parliament was opposed to Hitler, and where every citizen believed that “his liberty and equal rights were secured by the solemnly affirmed constitution.”
... people refused to believe that the new reality could persist. “This could only be an eruption of an initial, senseless rage, one told oneself. That sort of thing could not last in the twentieth century.”
There's no way to know whether vaccines cause autism. There's no way to know whether humans cause climate change. There's no way to know whether climate change is dangerous. There's no way to know whether Trump will be bad for the world.
Not quite sure why these corporate events always have to be so painful to watch, but the technology is impressive. Makes me wonder: if Adobe's close to turning this into a product you can run on your home computer, then which other organizations already have similar technology deployed? What could the CIA do with a few choice edits to a leaked recording, for example? You have to suspect that similar technologies may be in use outside of the public view.
Yep: Interesting but not quite the sudden drama the headline suggests.A 3.5-billion-year-old eruption gradually forced this ginormous amount of lava to the surface over the space of 2 million years.
From the article:A second structure, the Badush dam, was started 20km downstream, to prevent a catastrophe in the event of the Mosul dam’s failure. But work on Badush halted in the 1990s because of the pressure of sanctions, leaving it only 40% complete.
Tennyson These kids are just improbably young and talented. Electronicy jazz-pop I guess you could call it. I just came across them.
1. A point of detail on the prediction here attributed to Thomas Watson: Wikiquote has this to say: 2. One point that jumps out at me as important is the phenomenon Crichton calls "crisisization". All kinds of groups have their own interests in portraying present states of affairs as crises (most obviously businesses, including the media, and politicians). With all this trumped-up panic in the air it's very easy to be distracted from the reality of one's own life and into a world of make-believe anxiety and doom. I know it was years before i realized this was happening to me, and I'm still vulnerable to it, and it's not good for my mental health. I can't be the only one - what's the effect of this cheap crisis-talk on the well being of us all? Not good I suspect. That said, the answer isn't to just ignore all news, but to be critical about what you hear. Is someone making an overblown claim or is there good reason to think something is a crisis? I can't agree with him about climate change not being a crisis, since here the results of our most careful, widespread, expert investigation suggests that it has all kinds of negative ramifications, and the predictions of earlier models are already being confirmed. The question to ask is whether someone is claiming x is a crisis because of rigorously examined sound evidence or because of intellectual laziness and/or self-interest. More often than not, it's one of the latter. But some things really are crises and then, while no-one knows what's going to happen, not all guesses are created equal. In general, "don't believe you know what's going to happen" is good advice though. We more often err in the direction of overconfidence than underconfidence.* * With the possible exception of kleinbl00. :)Expertise is no shield against failure to see ahead. That’s why it was Thomas Watson, head of IBM, who predicted the world only needed 4 or 5 computers. That is about as wrong a prediction as it is possible to make, by a man who had every reason to be informed about what he was talking about. Not only did he fail to anticipate a trend, or a technology, he failed to understand the myriad uses to which a general purpose machine might be put.
Often dated to 1943. Thorough research of Watson's writings and statements have produced no example of him saying this. It appears to be a corruption of a remark by Howard Aiken that four or five computers could meet all of the United Kingdom's computing needs. See Ralph Keyes (2006), The Quote Verifier.
Doesn't seem to work on Windows 10. SmartScreen informed Microsoft and their NSA buddies that I'm using it, then the app itself didn't do anything - except perhaps add me to some watch lists and subscribe me to a botnet or two. Mere teething troubles, I'm sure.
I have about 600 accounts in my password manager. It's not really feasible to do without some tool. But I am uncomfortable with the concept of closed-source cloud-based password managers and continue to look for a better solution. Keepass and its variants look more promising (open source encryption with some open source mobile clients available too), with some other tool to synchronize the file between machines.
How long before we get a system like this in the West? Compare this: http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/26/technology/social/facebook-credit-score/index.html We're tracked constantly. What you say, who you say it to, what you buy and where you go - these are all known by many entities, both government agencies and private corporations. Who knows what the data points are that eventually find their way into the algorithm for calculating a credit score? There'll be some kind of demographic classification being made, and it probably can't be entirely politically neutral. Indeed your political views might tell a credit company a lot about how much money they're likely to make off you, so if they can figure that out from other data points that'd be great for them. How long before governments and corporations team up to use such insidious pressure to coerce people away from inconvenient behaviours?
Here's a couple of photos I took - quite pleased with how they turned out despite my wobbly camera-hands. The second one is the moon re-emerging.
I have to use Windows for work, and I'm beginning to regret switching from 8 to 10. But I really didn't like Windows 8. So, maybe back to 7... I also have my main home PC on Windows 10 because I use a lot of Windows software. Sigh. Maybe that one has to go back too. Or maybe Windows has to go into a VM on Linux. Damn, just when I thought Microsoft were improving they turn out to be shadier than ever.
I don't understand the "he's unelectable" argument. Or rather, it seems to me not so much an argument as plain propaganda on the part of the neoliberal establishment - politicians, media, corporations and the shadowy government departments who prop up the status quo. Keep saying "of course, he's unelectable" and, without any argument, you tarnish someone's image in the eyes of the underinformed public: "the experts seem to think there's something wrong with this guy." Similarly, you can brand left-wing politics as impractical or unrealistic - "of course, that wouldn't work in today's world" - well, maybe it wouldn't work in the face of the overwhelmingly powerful neoliberal establishment, as we saw with Greece's treatment. But "support the powerful because they tend to win" is not a good motto for life. I consider it healthy for a country to have a good political spread. The UK has been sick for a while with only of various shades of right-leaning post-Thatcherites on offer. Corbyn said yesterday that Britain should take a lead in nuclear disarmament. To me it's refreshing to hear that brought back into the mainstream debate after a generation of Blairy cowards didn't dare touch it. A Corbyn-led Labour party might be jeered at but it would once again give a voice in Parliament to many who would put the goal of a happier society before the continued gains of the already powerful.
I have come across people who get into "spiritual" things and start saying "namaste" to one another. Maybe it helps some of them - a reminder to bow. But sometimes it just becomes another new age trinket to collect.
The Vivaldi website made it very far from obvious that Vivaldi is a new web browser. I understand that they want to build a community, but they're really not making that important message, "new web browser", clear enough.
This guy's refreshing. Good luck to him.My greatest fear, now that I have tosesd my hat in the ring, is that I may turn into a politician. As an antidote to that virus I intend to write my resignation letter and keep it in my inside pocket, ready to submit it the moment I sense signs of losing the commitment to speak truth to power.
When you and I have a discussion, or when I have a discussion with a normal person, the whole point of the discussion is to learn from them and hopefully for them to learn from me. But when two politicians talk, especially on the television, the whole point is to undermine one another and to learn absolutely nothing from one another. Now, if that happens to me, please shoot me.