https://www.one-tab.com/page/SC_GZPGMSfSLOiCwf8fF9w
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://level1techs.com/video/level1-news-2017-10-31-season-2-episode-one-thanks
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://level1techs.com/video/level1-news-2017-10-31-season-2-episode-one-thanks
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So ā¦ one year of L1T ā¦
Would you do it again?
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Regarding the Facebook denial:
Facebook was throwing another red herring. They arenāt just the topic of social discourse. They are also the topic of MIT Technology Review and the Snowden Report. They are listening and they have been since before anyone was aware of it. They are the Monsanto of social media. They have PR social engineers that do some pretty sketchy stuff because of what they are hearing when they listen. Do and deny is not only their model itās their behavior. Never ever buy anything that anyone from Facebook says. They are constantly, consistently and predictably full of $#!7. There is no reason what so ever to think that they arenāt lying when they say āweāre not listening to youā. They are listening pretty attentively; and not just for ad revenue. Check out the MIT tech review articles about Facebook. They are listening to everything but a. and, the etc.
Regarding pretty dead girls:
Iām definitely checking that out. Weird curiosities are sometimes a goldmine of interesting information. There is probably a scientific discipline that explains it in some interesting way. For instance, there is a hybridization hypothesis that potentially fills gaps with respect to human evolution. This makes beastiality interesting evidence. There is a pretty rigorous study done by a geneticist named Gene McCarthy. (spoiler) You donāt want to read it while eating a ham sandwich though.
Regarding the AI citizen:
Itās Sophia from Hansen Robotics. Sheās not a glorified chat bot or anything but citizenship is extremely pre-mature. She runs on OpenCog and is probably the smartest android on the planet but though she can have a conversation with a human, she doesnāt understand what a conversation is and is not so good a conversing with other androids. Without a human to lead in conversation androids still get a bit confused. She is capable of simple reasoning but some of her responses are canned. There was an incident where the CEO David Hansen was in an interview, where she was asked if she would destroy humanity and while her creator sat saying āplease say noā¦ please say noā she said āsure, Iāll destroy humanityāā¦ and then smiled. I hate to see bad things happen to a great guy like David Hansen; but that was hilarious. Of course the conspiracy theorists have been having a field day with it though.
Regarding the robot dog:
There was a similar reception to the little robotic floor sweeper. People named them and took them on vacation with them; leaving them in their hotel room sweeping the floor. Large numbers of people treated them like little robot pets. There is talk of people sending them for repairs and complaining when they didnāt get the same one back.
There was also outcry for the ārightsā of Tay after it was removed from Twitter. For those of you who donāt remember it was the AI from Microsoft that learned to be an intolerant Nazi sympathizer.
The point is, this is probably an extremely effective way to push acceptance of IOT crap. Iām fairly confident that is the strategy. It looks a lot like a stroke of evil genius.
Regarding the antimatter findings:
Michio Kaku actually said āthe universe shouldnāt existā in an interview. The intended context is that there is no low level explanation of the observation that the universe does exist. There is also no low level explanation for normalization in the formation of complex life (morphology) either. So, i guess Evolution shouldnāt exist as well. It is however observed.
This is just more evidence that there is plenty of room for discovery in the physical sciences. This reminds me of a statement that was made byā¦ I think Lord Kelvin? āAll of the properties of nature have been discovered. All that is left is to refine the constantsā. This was decades before Einstein, Bohr, Feynman and Bohm.
Mathematics too often assumes even distribution. This is not something that is observed in nature. Bohmian Mechanics is starting to gain some favor; but it has a pretty large issue. It doesnāt account for Relativity. It could however account for patterning in distributions.
No one wants to come right out and say it; but this is a failure of the Standard Model. This is a good thing though. It means a lot of exciting discoveries are ahead of us. Cup half full sort of thing.
Everybody should run Oracle software, it is the bestest thing for sure?
Congrats to 1 year. Thank you
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I agree with every point Wendell made regarding Discovery. I painfully watched every episode until this latest one, but Iām now done . The party scene was so cringy I just closed plexā¦
hey its been a year of great content, thanks!
i made the following youtube comment, reposting here:
why is it that it takes hours for the feds to get a subpoena , but 27 years for the paperwork to clear in order to scrap some decommissioned (in 1990) 386 computers?
Congrats on the 1 year!
@wendell Can we make a gif of your evil laugh with the āAm I?ā line when the CBS DRM was mentioned? I can think of so many uses for itā¦
twitch* ā¦ just put the mouse pad under the mouse!
Why use the mouse raw on the desk when thereās a mousepad 8" away?!
What bugs me about the r/cutefemalecorpses subreddit is that you can still access r/gore and r/watchpeopledie, but thereās a weird dividing line Reddit are trying to draw, and yet they are making inconsistent decisions.
I think the idea of a āuniā-verse is antiquated. And Iām not talking about parallel universes. The universe is constantly expanding. The light from some of these far off galaxies originated so far away that it hasnāt even reached us yet. This means we can only see so far out, or so far back in time, that we are locked into an āobservable universeā. While it would be an amazingly large number, the radius of that sphere of observation from the earthās point of view is quantifiable.
Whoās to say that there arenāt other āuniversesā out there well beyond our point of view contracting and expanding? It seems to me it would make a lot more sense of how there could be uneven distribution of particles if numerous ābig bangsā out there sending out mass. Occasionally they would send stuff towards each other where the gravity would put them in a death spiral towards another large explosion. Occasionally meaning on a scale much larger than the currently estimated age of our sphere of existence.
It just screams to me the notion of a universe is much like thinking the earth is the center of everything. But no, we go around the sun, so that must be the single point everything revolves around. Nope, that isnāt even the center of the galaxy. I realize this is just moving the goal post, and even if we could prove other universes surround us, we still wouldnāt know what is beyond that or why it exists. It just strikes me as putting your head in the sand about what could be beyond the observable universe barrier to say the universe is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be.
Thereās always the need to define the subjects of regulation. Weird semantics tends to follow. This even happens across scientific disciplines.
The Google Sentimental Analyzer is hilariousā¦ apparently stating a certain group that was mocked wildly on South Park relating to Marlon Brando look alikes can be called a great organization for men and boys alike results in a .9 score.
It has been 1 year and yāall are still making great content. I love watching the videos. Keep up the great work folks.
Wendell, Ryan, Kreestuh.
I fucking love you people. This episode was so great.
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If that aisle scanning robot isnāt named Scanny Devito then we will have a serious problem here
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I donāt get the Techdirt article about the DOJ prosecuting Schafer for harassment and intimidation. From what I can see in the posted documents (though the important comments are terribly blurred and in part not even readable), Schafer did sent some angry comments via twitter, facebook and email to the agent and his wife. Why should those not be considered harassment? They seem to fit the quoted law. Not defending the original raid, but this to me seems like Schaferās frustration just lead him to do some stupid things, but I donāt see the āblatant abuse of authorityā here.
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So much interesting in the news!
On iPhone calculator bug
Aside from the fact that appearances is everything, Appleās own apps and backends for developers are functionally bug-ridden piece of shit. The amount of crashes they get away with is far beyond what they expect a good developer to deliver to the AppStore. How about this one:
My favorite Apple bug (not fixed for the past 4 years)
You know how there is an open wi-fi which will inject a web-page for you to login (often so in a hotel, or at a university), when you attempt to browse? Well, Apple Maps app uses https to fetch the map data. So, when you browse on such a network, it wonāt get the map data, it will get the login web-page. Apple Maps will of course show empty squares, because it canāt read the damn data. But it will also CACHE these web-pages to the flash drive BEFORE checking it actually fetched map data. So, if you try to browse Apple Maps on such a network, it will repeatedly cache HTML files as if actual data, and continue to show empty squares. And then it will use the CACHED data after you connect to the internet, and continue to show empty squares. Forever. There is NO SEMANTIC CHECK on the fetched data BEFORE caching it. This is the level of software quality Apple users are very satisfied with, in fact they are the most satisfied people, according to Apple, far more satisfied than Android users. Of course, this bug also impacts every app which uses the Apple map APIs, because it is the same cache.
(You have to go to settings and āReset All Settingsā to remove the Apple Maps cached data, and also other appās data, so that you can uncache the crap data, to get to refetch the actual tiles again - once you get online again)
Why, oh fuck, why?
I have seen many similar bugs and observed too many crashes in both the Cocoa framework and Appleās apps. Bottom line is, Appleās developers who develop those Apple apps use Apple guidelines when they develop those apps. Those guidelines are misguided crap devised to hide faults in the framework implementation from the developer, and to simplify for beginners and over-stressed people, such as for example Appleās own developers. You just canāt get certain level of quality work done by beginners and over-worked people. Adjusting guidelines and frameworks to people skiing down the wrong side of mount stupid is a fundamentally flawed approach to achieving quality assurance for everyone else, but works wonders for anyone with their bar set low.
On taking pics on iPhone secretly
A bit of a click-bait article.
This is just one of many peculiarities of iOS, but it still requires you acquire explicit user permission at least once to access the camera. Once you do give it access, it is a permission to record without telling you. It is unclear if it can also do this from the background, or when your phone is locked - which would have been more interesting to cover (and I havenāt tested this myself so I canāt divulge anything on it - has anyone else reading this tried it out?).
So (from the article):
thereās nothing stopping an app from taking pictures and uploading them somewhere without you noticing.
No, not after you have explicitly granted it permission to access your phone camera. Once youāve granted it access, it has access.
Another fun thing you can do to an app user on iOS
Interestingly, one thing that does not require any permission at all is starting a phone call. Your app can call any phone number without telling the user it is about to, and unless the user stops the call quickly, they will end up paying for the call connection and the time the call goes on for. Also not sure if this works while your app is in background, but would surprise me if it didnāt.
(of course, if you have a really dick app, Apple will likely remove you (developer) from the AppStore and possibly even report and/or sue you - unless you are Uber, or otherwise ātoo big to failā, in which case they will give you a grace period to fix your shit, or they will just exempt you from their rules)
On tablets for kids
Critical thinking is everything, and so is challenging the child to work things out. Educational apps Iāve seen so far are shit. I am more likely to just code something quick and dirty for my son so that I can explain and illustrate a single concept to the him interactively and then let him play with it. Damn right it requires time and attention. And programming ability in this case. And yeah, that tablet is always offline, unless we decide to watch something specific. At least until he figures out how to get it online by himself, or we think heās ready to show him.
Sadly, whatever it is I think is good parenting requires we create a parallell education system at home. To teach him everything we think is useful and important, and to also un-teach him all the negative crap he picks up from the daycare.
On journalists being somehow licensed/accredited
The FCC developments (both news) is just another move in the wrong direction, further away from the journalist goals of a democratic society.
Journalism is a staple of democracy. What you have in non-democratic countries just isnāt journalism - itās either a pro-regime propaganda, or an anti-regime propaganda, none of which can be functioning examining and certainly not self-examining.
Journalists are messengers. One shouldnāt shoot the messenger if the message is correctly reproduced, but they should also be expected to deliver some qualified comment on the message, and also qualify the source of the message. This has shown to be difficult without paywalling, due to internet economy model for press, global media house model with other agendas, and also plain laziness (but such laziness can be easily reduced in organisations which do not suffer from such a bad incentive model). The current non-solution of independent conspiracy-drama-queen journalism is neither helpful nor informative, and being honest about being dishonest does (fact) not make you more honest or trustworthy - a cheeky turd is still a turd, and calling oneself a turd openly is a very dubious virtue.
It used to be that political parties were only interested in votes of people who actually supported their ideas and attempted to, to the best of their ability, make sure those ideas remained on the table. Now they have been doing the mass appeal thing, and that thing is far past overstaying its welcome, and the journalists (supposedly the voice of the people) tagged along - instead of red-flagging it and pulling all the breaks in time to avoid the bumpy ride. Bloody mess. Especially as the actual voice of the actual people has turned into an inarticulate gorilla growl, to match the imposed inadequate language and quality of the current topic discourse. I can do without all the growling muddy mess, but licensed journalism would need to have a very clear cut role and definition in order to be a step toward solving the current mess. A journalist today operates inside a very disjointed (but not yet ultimately broken) clockwork. Destroying local journalism is not going to help at all.
A functioning examining and self-examining, journalism is one of the base staples of democracy, and should promote the idea that freedom of press comes from the accountability of press as a service to those voters who are interested in maintaining and improving the democratic order, not un-democratic order and un-democratic movements, and certainly not as a service to any other powers or agendas. Anyone else is not a journalist, but butt puppet. If we care for democracy, we must not allow ourselves ourselves to be dehumanised and degraded to a simple shape and form of someone elseās political pamphlet and wording. You can be sure they are the enemy when they try to make you drop your own agenda to become a carrier of theirs. Sadly, democracy seems quite out of fashion with those unable or unwilling to see the alternative close up enough.
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Look what I found.
āThose who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocitiesā ~Voltaire
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