Recent submissions

Comment · 8 years ago
> We know that some people without access to medical care will die.

That actually sounds like an argument for allowing patients the option of a "fast lane" to their hospital for telemedicine and monitoring with higher priority than Netflix and YouTube.

Comment · 8 years ago
I haven't done it myself yet, it's on the to-do list. There is a lot of academic material on PID autotuning, not always with neural networks but that seems the most straightforward way. A Raspberry Pi is probably overkill for the job, actually.
Comment · 8 years ago
It's worth having a self-contained option available. For something like a drone, you don't need all that much computation for on-the-fly PID tuning in response to changing weather or different piloting styles, etc.
Comment · 8 years ago
Even if that were true and it were also true that privacy features would harm shareholders, then lobbying to make those privacy features mandatory would itself be acting against shareholder interests.
Comment · 8 years ago
In the voice assistant example, the server is one of the endpoints. The point they're making is that E2E doesn't really help there if you can't be sure who is looking over shoulders on the other end. If the two ends are both under your control or scrutiny, then it doesn't matter who's hiding in the clouds... Except for metadata of course.
Comment · 8 years ago
Even though you're technically wrong (the best kind of wrong), I can see where you're coming from. Even microcontroller ICs without enough memory to store this comment are real computers and are silent, but if you say you've built a silent computer and then unveil some Arduino contraption, expect eyes to roll.

That said, I still think smartphones qualify as computers even by your productivity definition. Newer smartphones would sit somewhere above older netbooks on a ranking of overall utility.

Comment · 10 years ago
Depending on their attitude, I don't think you should necessarily treat a lowball offer as an insult. The problem isn't that the user is offering (say) $10 for the work, but that not enough users offer $10 for the work.
Comment · 10 years ago
Yes, I would look for something like that if I had an expensive city-bike. But the availability of trackers doesn't seem to have much effect on thefts or the perception that bikes are an easy target.
Comment · 10 years ago
I wonder if there is more that bicycle manufacturers/dealers can do to prevent theft or help recover stolen bikes - not because they're obligated but just to improve sales. Especially as the price approaches four digits, "what if this gets stolen?" has to be near the top of most potential buyers' list of concerns and probably chills sales to some degree.
Comment · 10 years ago
I think either most people are exaggerating about their ability to visualize or I have this impediment to a degree. My mental "images" are extremely faint, distant, wavering, ghost-like. Any parts I'm not focused on immediately poof away. Definitely can't conjure up a whole scene and explore it. But at least it's something.

The reason I think people may be exaggerating is because there are very few people with the artistic or mechanical aptitude that I would have if I could produce stable and detailed mental images at will. Also, police sketches.

Comment · 10 years ago
Adding to the creepiness factor, they think I'm 9 and want my location.
Comment · 10 years ago
To me it seems our ability to preserve and share knowledge is far more important for our intellectual pursuits than the individual brain is. E.g. it took hundreds of thousands of years for someone to think up the number 0, and then it spread like wildfire (after the authorities stopped resisting).

What I find curious is that parrots can vocalize at least as well as humans, they show some pretty solid reasoning ability, their tongue is practically an opposable thumb, and yet they don't seem to have developed complex spoken language or technology.

I wonder what's missing from bird brains that would help them with language. Actually, I just had a flash of memory about some part of the brain involved with putting ideas into linear sequences, as we do with words. Maybe that plays a part.

Comment · 10 years ago
Well of course not if your number system doesn't even exhibit fractal resonance in holistic projective encodings, given the angular momentum of the universe.
Comment · 10 years ago
Warning: Auto-playing video with audio.
Comment · 10 years ago
I've disabled search history and Google still tends to give me the most relevant results. Perhaps they also do some customization based on session cookie or something (I know YouTube does for recommendations) and I'm pretty sure IP location still plays a role. But I think it's mainly that I know how to ask Google for what I want, not that Google knows what I want necessarily. I still give DDG and Bing a chance once in a while, just in case, but old habits die hard.

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