kjander79

This is an awesome read, and likely correct in the narrative, but the cubes they have at hand to study have a bit of a provenance problem - how do we know they were the ones used for the German research?

At any rate, getting a reactor running still was a long way from the industrial capacity the Americans used to get a working device. Industrial capacity Germany just didn't have late in the war. And after Afrika Korps' defeat, they weren't getting any easily accessible materials anymore.

I feel the title editorializes a bit too much. The thread only confirms the bug, not a specific cause yet. As sibling comments indicate, the effect on GrapheneOS users is undetermined.

I just wish many of the software projects the code in the book depends on had been maintained. Portable Aserve and the Shoutcast server are two examples that come to mind off the top of my head, and of course the Lisp in a Box environment is long gone, and the replacements, like Portacle, are also getting left behind.

It's just an event loop, watching for status changes in a memory location. Talking to the hardware just occurs when the keyboard changes the values in memory.

The iMuse system really is remarkable. Games like X-Wing took great advantage of the features, when a Star Destroyer jumps into the game the music would seamlessly transition to the imperial March and it felt just like being in the movies. I don't think any modern system even tries to do those seamless transitions from one music piece to another.

One thing I wonder about .. he mentions CD-audio (Redbook?) as being one capability of the system. But the CD-Audio games like X-Wing vs Tie Fighter were much more limited in that sense. You'd literally just hear the music switch to the new track. And the Force Unleashed, the last game that used iMuse, wasn't particularly remarkable if memory serves. I wonder if that was a limitation they just couldn't quite make as seamless?

I figure today you could do it, with a "virtual MIDI" system using MP3 audio of individual instrument sounds ..

Edited to add: that last sentence is essential what a DAW provides.

I really enjoyed having the kids introduce it

This really is a beautiful book, applicable to breaking down problems into manageable parts, whatever language you are using. Highly recommend.

Actually that's an interesting point, since the images are already in use in the article this one is responding to. It seems likely.

> but how much actual understanding does it have?

That's always the question, isn't it? The article does a pretty convincing job of showing that at least in the given examples, it has pretty good "understanding" of what's taking place in the scenes and what makes them remarkable to people, and 7 years for comparison is going back a long ways, just the last 2 or 3 years has been where much of the most interesting progress has revealed itself.

Image segmentation, object detection and tracking, are all on display already here.

I'm editing this because I'm wrong but leaving original comment below.

On second thought, this research wouldn't be looking at genes that would be highly variable among human populations, that DNA tests would profile to identify individuals, but on genes highly conserved among the human genome, where 4303 changed genes would be a significant amount. I was ranting about the wrong thing.

Original comment: Point taken. Speciation is certainly messy.

4303 statistically significant coding genes is just essentially "a good start" when it comes to identify what, if any, Neanderthal inheritance modern humans might have, compared to a potential "4% of genes DNA tests bother profiling, which now could have still come from some undetermined modern human population, that just so happened to have the same alleles as Neanderthals, including non-coding genes that we couldn't pinpoint effects anyways".

I think that would explain the ambiguity in the articles about actual effects of these identified genes, that's for the follow-up research.

Sounds to me they are saying this is a significant reduction in the Neanderthal genes that survive today, down to 4303 that can't be attributed to other human variants. This would make more sense to me, as the usual statement of up to 4% of a person's genes would be enough to create a unique species, wouldn't it?

In theory I agree, but in practice...

The exploit given here works on any device with the given driver, regardless of OS. Android is just the primary example since it is the 800lb gorilla.

And as the article mentions, just 2 hardware stacks make up nearly the whole ecosystem.

This write up highlights a depressing fact we all know: the mobile security situation is bleak, to the point of being untenable.

I checked my own device, and despite owning it just about a year, security updates have likely already stopped (although the manufacturer website hasn't exactly confirmed that, just yet) and even if the security updates were still coming, the gap between when they are released and then reach the devices are measured in months, not days, making these exploits worse than zero-days. I have seen no movement in correcting these issues from any of the manufacturers.

You too can check for yourself at source.android.com/security/bulletin

Chaotic systems, at least, were not known to Einstein. They weren't described until after his death, from Lorenz' computer simulations. Earlier hints of the theory were there, but no one took them seriously. Ian Malcolm, though, is a solid authority.