Awwww RIP Norm. I went down a deep youtube hole on his stuff recently. My favorite is him doing the roast of Bob Saget where he just does a series of shitty one-liners until he fully loses the audience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-9wo_apQ1s
One of my favorite engineering nightmare stories. I really wonder why they didn't just hire some entomologists to research this. Seems like entomologists must have fairly open schedules.
Love that the internet will tell. You mazda had to do a model recall because spiders were uncontrollably attracted to their cars in 2014 then you read more and find it happened before woth the same car company in 2011
Mazda spokesmen say “lol idk”
For those wondering apparently this breed of spiders fucking loves gasoline, mazda built anti spider springs to push them out and a software patch to. Do something with fuel pressure in case they did get in and weaved loads of webs that fucked up thr fuel capacity and no one knows why it was mazdas in particular that got infested
this is one of those problems you have to solve in a dream
hehehe, here's a contentious claim for you: I'm pretty good at python at this point, even at figuring out weird path issues. And I still think that python environments are not easy to understand.
"The average age of incoming CEOs for S&P 500 companies has increased about 14 years over the last 14 years."
Classic boomers. The "horde everything for ourselves" generation.
This is a profound trend. The average age of incoming CEOs for S&P 500 companies has increased about 14 years over the last 14 years.
From 1980 to 2001 the average age of a CEO dropped four years and then from 2005 to 2019 the averare incoming age of new CEOs increased 14 years!
This means that the average birth year of a CEO has not budged since 2005. The best predictor of becoming a CEO of our most successful modern institutions?
This is a Jack Handey quote, actually. People talk about certain writers shitposting before shitposting was a thing, but Jack Handey practically invented shitposting. He wrote these short nonsense one liners and they published them in the National Lampoon and played them on SNL in the 90s. There’s a shit ton of them and they all sound like shitposts. Here’s just a few:
“I hope if dogs ever take over the world, and they chose a king, they don’t just go by size, because I bet there are some Chihuahuas with some good ideas.”
“Contrary to what most people say, the most dangerous animal in the world is not the lion or the tiger or even the elephant. It’s a shark riding on an elephant’s back, just trampling and eating everything they see.”
“To me, it’s always a good idea to always carry two sacks of something when you walk around. That way, if anybody says, “Hey, can you give me a hand?,” you can say, “Sorry, got these sacks.“”
“If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I’d say Flippy, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong, though. It’s Hambone.”
“I think a good novel would be where a bunch of men on a ship are looking for a whale. They look and look, but you know what? They never find him. And you know why they never find him? It doesn’t say. The book leaves it up to you, the reader, to decide. Then, at the very end, there’s a page you can lick and it tastes like Kool-Aid.”
“If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.”
“If you’re an ant, and you’re walking along across the top of a cup of pudding, you probably have no idea that the only thing between you and disaster is the strength of that pudding skin”
“I wish I lived on a planet that had two suns—regular sun and “rogue” sun. That way, when somebody asked me what time it was, I’d say, “Regular time?” And they’d say, “Yeah.” And I’d say, “Sorry, all I have is rogue time.” It’d be fun to be a stuck-up rogue-time guy.”
“If you’re a cowboy, and you’re dragging a guy behind your horse, I bet it would really make you mad if you looked back and the guy was reading a magazine.”
“I hope some animal never bores a hole in my head and lays its eggs in my brain, because later you might think you’re having a good idea but it’s just eggs hatching.”
“If your friend is already dead, and being eaten by vultures, I think it’s okay to feed some bits of your friend to one of the vultures, to teach him to do some tricks. But ONLY if you’re serious about adopting the vulture.”
“If you ever fall off the Sears Tower, just go real limp, because maybe you’ll look like a dummy and people will try to catch you because, hey, free dummy.”
“We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can’t scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me.”
There were so many of these, and they were all hilarious. Still are.
“It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.”
“The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.”
“I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every
culture, is the story of Popeye.”
“Anytime I see something screech across a room and latch onto someones
neck, and the guy screams and tries to get it off, I have to laugh,
because what is that thing.”
“The memories of my family outings are still a source of strength to me.
I remember we’d all pile into the car - I forget what kind it was - and
drive and drive. I’m not sure where we’d go, but I think there were some
trees there. The smell of something was strong in the air as we played
whatever sport we played. I remember a bigger, older guy we called
“Dad.” We’d eat some stuff, or not, and then I think we went home. I
guess some things never leave you.”
Yeah, part of the problem of UAW's monopoly over unionization (i.e. I believe you usually have to join the UAW to work at places like GM) is that it makes the union brittle. So even when we find out a given union is corrupt or not fighting for its workers, the workers don't have an alternative.
I wonder if there's a way where a small number of unions could compete for members. That way, no union feels entitled to members, the members get to choose the union which gives them the best wages / lowest dues. Since the larger unions would strike better deals, each will tend to be large percentage of the workforce, so it would still serve as a useful check on corporate power. And if GM fucks up, the unions can still all agree to strike together.
A regional director with the United Auto Workers union was charged Thursday with embezzling union funds and other corruption charges as part of a widening federal corruption probe into the union.
Federal prosecutors say UAW Region 5 Director Vance Pearson, a member of the union’s highest governing board, conspired with other union officials to embezzle hundreds of thousands of dollars in union money “for their own personal benefit along with other crimes.”
Pearson, 58, of St. Charles, Missouri, was arrested Thursday and faces charges of embezzlement of union funds, money laundering, aiding and abetting, conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and filing and maintaining false union reports to the government. […]
Pearson’s arrest and charges against him are likely to add to what were already expected to be contentious contract negotiations between the union and the automakers. The current contracts expire at 11:59 p.m. Saturday.
While workers are discussing and preparing for strike action, the UAW, which forced through concessions for years in exchange for company bribes, is doing everything it can to sabotage a struggle. If they are forced to call a strike, they will seek to wrap it up as quickly as possible before it has any significant impact on corporate profits.
This was made clear by a brochure the union is distributing in the auto plants on the UAW Strike Assistance Program. The document contains a veiled threat: if you strike, we will starve you into submission.
The brochure includes the following details:
* Weekly benefits are $250.00 per week
This paltry sum, which was actually increased from $200 in March, is totally inadequate for workers to survive on the picket line. It increases to $275 per week only after January 1, 2020, three and a half months after Saturday’s contract expiration date.
But even this comes with a laundry list of eligibility requirements. As one Fiat Chrysler worker told the WSWS, “There are 22 reasons why the union won’t pay us strike benefits.”
* Workers will not even be eligible for strike pay until the 8th day of any strike
This gives the UAW a direct financial incentive to wrap up the strike as soon as possible to avoid paying out any strike benefits at all.
The strike fund is the workers’ own money, financed through dues payments, which were increased before 2015 supposedly to bolster the fund for a strike.
The economic desperation the UAW is seeking to take advantage of is the result of the policies of the UAW itself. A large portion of the UAW membership, nearly half at Ford alone, are second-tier or temporary part-time (TPT) workers living just above the poverty line. Many of them have little to no savings to supplement their strike pay.
If, faced with destitution, they obtain additional work during the strike to pay their bills, they will lose their strike pay if their wages are greater than their strike pay. […]
In addition, workers who are eligible for government assistance, such as food stamps or (in certain states) unemployment benefits during the strike, are required to apply in order to remain eligible for strike benefits. Strikers who obtain unemployment benefits in excess of $250 per month lose their eligibility for strike pay.
One particularly odious passage states that “members who are denied unemployment compensation because of the strike shall be paid benefits in the form of a loan, which must be repaid to the strike fund immediately upon receipt of unemployment compensation. Failure to do so may result in legal action being taken.” […]
For the UAW officialdom, limiting payouts from the strike fund is also an act of financial self-preservation. To compensate for its dwindling dues base, as a result of decades of plant closures and layoffs with which the UAW itself has collaborated, the union uses the strike fund as a slush fund to pay the bloated six-figure salaries of top bureaucrats.
Restrictions on diverting cash from the strike fund were progressively dismantled, before being removed entirely in 2006.
Because of this and other “administrative” expenses, the value of the strike fund fell from $1 billion in 2001 to $600 million in 2015. While it has partially recovered to $760 million, the fact remains that the UAW has a direct financial incentive to prevent strikes.
To predict what strange economic practice the US will create next you need only ask: Will this make tipping both more mandatory and more confusing? Door Dash becoming popular + stealing tips forcing you to tip in cash nicely checks both boxes.
Okay, I’m happy to have learned this because I use DoorDash a lot.
This is true of basically all third-party delivery services!!
I worked for OrderUp and then for GrubHub for a while and they all do this.
You’re guaranteed $10/hr. If you make that in tips, they don’t give you anything else. If you don’t make that, they give you whatever gets you to $10. If you make more than that, you keep everything you make.
The thing is, they have no way of knowing if you tip us in cash. It just looks like we got no tip.
You essentially pay us double when you tip us with physical money.
This makes me so angry. At first they came for the weird Mormon Family-Friendly Video Editing companies and I said nothing because I was not a Mormon Family-Friendly Video Editing company.
Founded in 2013, Utah-based startup VidAngel entered the video streaming market with a rather innovative business model.
The company allowed its users to rent popular movies and TV-shows, with the option to filter out violence, sex, profanity, and other objectionable content.
While there was plenty of demand for the service, it operated without permission from the major movie studios. Instead, the company acquired DVDs, which it would then rip using AnyDVD, so they could be streamed online.
Users interested in a movie were able to rent it for $20, and then sell it back after a day for $19. This made rentals as cheap as $1 per streamed movie, effectively beating all legal competitors.
VidAngel made sure that it would have physical DVDs in its archive for all movies and TV-shows that were rented out at any given time. This resulted in a rather extensive library of duplicate discs, as the massive collection of “The Revenant” DVDs below shows.
“Thousands” of The Revenant DVDs (credit: VidAngel)
After operating its service for a few months, VidAngel drew the attention of several major movie studios including Disney and Warner Bros. In 2016, they teamed up to file a lawsuit against VidAngel, accusing it of copyright infringement and violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision.
“VidAngel does not have permission to copy Plaintiffs’ movies and television shows or to stream them to VidAngel’s users,” the studios’ complaint read.
“Instead, VidAngel appears to circumvent the technological protection measures on DVDs and Blu-ray discs to create unauthorized copies and then uses those copies to stream Plaintiffs’ works to the public without authorization.”
VidAngel was convinced, however, that its business was legal. It argued that it was protected by the Family Movie Act, which allows consumers to skip objectionable movie content without committing copyright infringement.
The movie studios disagreed and earlier this year were backed by the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The Court granted summary judgment, ruling that VidAngel is liable for violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision and committing copyright infringement.
The only question that remained was the scale of the damages. This was determined yesterday, following a multi-day trial where the jury concluded that a $62.4 million damages award was appropriate.
The bulk of the damages, $61.4 million, is for copyright infringement. With 819 titles mentioned in the suit, this amounts to $75,000 per infringed work, half of the maximum statutory damages.
The additional million in damages is for circumventing the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions by ripping the DVDs. This cost VidAngel $1,250 per title.
The movie studios are happy with the outcome. In a joint statement, they state that it sends a clear message to others who might consider operating a similar service.
“The jury today found that VidAngel acted willfully, and imposed a damages award that sends a clear message to others who would attempt to profit from unlawful infringing conduct at the expense of the creative community,” the studios note.
VidAngel, however, vows to fight on and is likely to appeal the case.
“We find today’s ruling unfortunate, but it has not lessened our resolve to save filtering for families. VidAngel plans to appeal the District Court ruling, and explore options in the bankruptcy court.
“Our court system has checks and balances, and we are pursuing options on that front as well,” VidAngel CEO Neal Harmon adds.
As KSL’s excellent timeline shows, VidAngel filed for bankruptcy in 2017 to protect itself from the lawsuit. However, the company isn’t going anywhere just yet.
VidAngel’s original video streaming operation was shut down following a permanent injunction, but it later introduced a new service that allows users to “filter” Netflix, HBO and Amazon content for a fixed monthly subscription.
In May 2015, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed a bill into law prohibiting the retrofitting of diesel-powered vehicles to increase particulate emissions for the purpose of coal rolling. ... The bill was introduced by state Assemblyman Tim Eustace after a pickup truck blasted smoke at Eustace's Nissan Leaf while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Don't fuck with Eustace's fuckin Leaf or he'll legislate your dumb ass into oblivion.
Yeah, we can argue about how "good" crypto is, but the claim that it uses more energy than all the solar panels is definitely false.
Total installed solar is 512 Gigawatts (GW). So it generates 512 Gigawatt Hours (GWh) of energy per hour of sunlight. Bitcoin uses roughly 50 terrawatt hours a year (TWh) == 50,000 gigawatt hours.
So we can generate the same energy if those panels get light for only 50,000/512 = 98 hours this year.
This bothers me a lot. You can make this about literally any job by changing like 20 words. There's just so much self-righteous hatred of working people.
literally can’t imagine a less fulfilling job than what “Learning To Code” sets you up for
work long hours in front of a screen doing what, web dev that allows startups to fulfill online orders 5% more efficiently? quality assurance for someone else’s software that you’ll never see or use again? sure it pays well now but in ten years everyone else who had the bright idea of taking C++ classes at the community college is going to flood the market and suddenly that great career you were going to go into isn’t all so promising. who benefits? ten or twenty guys who are richer than god himself and had a direct hand in encouraging you to go into it
and what does life look like for these people? wake up in your apartment that you’re overpaying for because it’s only a 30-minute commute with traffic, sit down at your workstation, work on what you’ve been assigned, waste time on reddit, watch a stream of someone else playing a video game in the background on your third monitor, ask a few questions on stackoverflow while your code compiles, go home and ignore slack long enough to put a few hours in on the gaming PC that is the primary sink of your disposable income, mash your sad pud to a porn video that you picked from your 500+ gigabyte library like taking a fine wine out of the cellar, go to sleep at 1 am and assure yourself that you’ll make up for it tomorrow with more coffee and adderall. you can work from home? great, now you won’t even leave the house unless you have to.
i only know one programmer that i personally respect and it’s because he has a holistic understanding of computer science and is by all appearances frighteningly competent and knowledgeable about what he’s working with and why it works. he and everyone like him are not representative who’s going into this field en masse with you, the person who’s Learning To Code. all other computer people i’ve had the displeasure of interacting with are universally sad weirdoes who didn’t read as a child and whose only goal in life is to go into the career that will make them the most amount of money with the least amount of effort.
duuude. when did this happen? countdown has begun until regular people just have memory enhancers implanted.
Hippocampal prosthesis restores memory functions by creating “MIMO” model-based electrical stimulation of the hippocampus — bypassing a damaged brain region (red X). (credit: USC)
Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering have demonstrated a neural prosthetic system that can improve a memory by “writing” information “codes” (based on a patient’s specific memory patterns) into the hippocampus of human subjects via an electrode implanted in the hippocampus (a part of the brain involved in making new memories).
In this pilot study, described in a paper published in Journal of Neural Engineering, epilepsy patients’ short-term memory performance showed a 35 to 37 percent improvement over baseline measurements, as shown in this video. The research, funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), offers evidence supporting pioneering research by USC scientist Theodore Berger, Ph.D. (a co-author of the paper), on an electronic system for restoring memory in rats (reported on KurzweilAI in 2011).
“This is the first time scientists have been able to identify a patient’s own brain-cell code or pattern for memory and, in essence, ‘write in’ that code to make existing memory work better — an important first step in potentially restoring memory loss,” said the paper’s lead author Robert Hampson, Ph.D., professor of physiology/pharmacology and neurology at Wake Forest Baptist.
The study focused on improving episodic memory (information that is new and useful for a short period of time, such as where you parked your car on any given day) — the most common type of memory loss in people with Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, and head injury.
The researchers enrolled epilepsy patients at Wake Forest Baptist who were participating in a diagnostic brain-mapping procedure that used surgically implanted electrodes placed in various parts of the brain to pinpoint the origin of the patients’ seizures.
Reinforcing memories
(LEFT) In one test*, the researchers recorded (“Actual”) the neural patterns or “codes” between two of three main areas of the hippocampus, known as CA3 and CA1, while the eight study participants were performing a computerized memory task. The patients were shown a simple image, such as a color block, and after a brief delay where the screen was blanked, were then asked to identify the initial image out of four or five on the screen. The USC team, led by biomedical engineers Theodore Berger, Ph.D., and Dong Song, Ph.D., analyzed the recordings from the correct responses and synthesized a code (RIGHT) for correct memory performance, based on a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) nonlinear mathematical model. The Wake Forest Baptist team played back that code to the patients (“Predicted” signal) while the patients performed the image-recall task. In this test, the patients’ episodic memory performance then showed a 37 percent improvement over baseline. (credit: USC)
“We showed that we could tap into a patient’s own memory content, reinforce it, and feed it back to the patient,” Hampson said. “Even when a person’s memory is impaired, it is possible to identify the neural firing patterns that indicate correct memory formation and separate them from the patterns that are incorrect. We can then feed in the correct patterns to assist the patient’s brain in accurately forming new memories, not as a replacement for innate memory function, but as a boost to it.
“To date we’ve been trying to determine whether we can improve the memory skill people still have. In the future, we hope to be able to help people hold onto specific memories, such as where they live or what their grandkids look like, when their overall memory begins to fail.”
The current study is built on more than 20 years of preclinical research on memory codes led by Sam Deadwyler, Ph.D., professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest Baptist, along with Hampson, Berger, and Song. The preclinical work applied the same type of stimulation to restore and facilitate memory in animal models using the MIMO system, which was developed at USC.
* In a second test, participants were shown a highly distinctive photographic image, followed by a short delay, and asked to identify the first photo out of four or five others on the screen. The memory trials were repeated with different images while the neural patterns were recorded during the testing process to identify and deliver correct-answer codes. After another longer delay, Hampson’s team showed the participants sets of three pictures at a time with both an original and new photos included in the sets, and asked the patients to identify the original photos, which had been seen up to 75 minutes earlier. When stimulated with the correct-answer codes, study participants showed a 35 percent improvement in memory over baseline.
Abstract of Developing a hippocampal neural prosthetic to facilitate human memory encoding and recall
Objective. We demonstrate here the first successful implementation in humans of a proof-of-concept system for restoring and improving memory function via facilitation of memory encoding using the patient’s own hippocampal spatiotemporal neural codes for memory. Memory in humans is subject to disruption by drugs, disease and brain injury, yet previous attempts to restore or rescue memory function in humans typically involved only nonspecific, modulation of brain areas and neural systems related to memory retrieval. Approach. We have constructed a model of processes by which the hippocampus encodes memory items via spatiotemporal firing of neural ensembles that underlie the successful encoding of short-term memory. A nonlinear multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) model of hippocampal CA3 and CA1 neural firing is computed that predicts activation patterns of CA1 neurons during the encoding (sample) phase of a delayed match-to-sample (DMS) human short-term memory task. Main results. MIMO model-derived electrical stimulation delivered to the same CA1 locations during the sample phase of DMS trials facilitated short-term/working memory by 37% during the task. Longer term memory retention was also tested in the same human subjects with a delayed recognition (DR) task that utilized images from the DMS task, along with images that were not from the task. Across the subjects, the stimulated trials exhibited significant improvement (35%) in both short-term and long-term retention of visual information. Significance. These results demonstrate the facilitation of memory encoding which is an important feature for the construction of an implantable neural prosthetic to improve human memory.
Now we might finally be able to use voice interfaces while looking (slightly) less idiotic.
MIT Media Lab researcher Arnav Kapur demonstrates the AlterEgo device. It picks up neuromuscular facial signals generated by his thoughts; a bone-conduction headphone lets him privately hear responses from his personal devices. (credit: Lorrie Lejeune/MIT)
MIT researchers have invented a system that allows someone to communicate silently and privately with a computer or the internet by simply thinking — without requiring any facial muscle movement.
The AlterEgo system consists of a wearable device with electrodes that pick up otherwise undetectable neuromuscular subvocalizations — saying words “in your head” in natural language. The signals are fed to a neural network that is trained to identify subvocalized words from these signals. Bone-conduction headphones also transmit vibrations through the bones of the face to the inner ear to convey information to the user — privately and without interrupting a conversation. The device connects wirelessly to any external computing device via Bluetooth.
A silent, discreet, bidirectional conversation with machines. “Our idea was: Could we have a computing platform that’s more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?,” says Arnav Kapur, a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab who led the development of the new system. Kapur is first author on an open-access paper on the research presented in March at the IUI ’18 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces.
In one of the researchers’ experiments, subjects used the system to silently report opponents’ moves in a chess game and silently receive recommended moves from a chess-playing computer program. In another experiment, subjects were able to undetectably answer difficult computational problems, such as the square root of large numbers or obscure facts. The researchers achieved 92% median word accuracy levels, which is expected to improve. “I think we’ll achieve full conversation someday,” Kapur said.
Non-disruptive. “We basically can’t live without our cellphones, our digital devices,” says Pattie Maes, a professor of media arts and sciences and Kapur’s thesis advisor. “But at the moment, the use of those devices is very disruptive. If I want to look something up that’s relevant to a conversation I’m having, I have to find my phone and type in the passcode and open an app and type in some search keyword, and the whole thing requires that I completely shift attention from my environment and the people that I’m with to the phone itself.
“So, my students and I have for a very long time been experimenting with new form factors and new types of experience that enable people to still benefit from all the wonderful knowledge and services that these devices give us, but do it in a way that lets them remain in the present.”*
Even the tiniest signal to her jaw or larynx might be interpreted as a command. Keeping one hand on the sensitivity knob, she concentrated to erase mistakes the machine kept interpreting as nascent words.
Few people used subvocals, for the same reason few ever became street jugglers. Not many could operate the delicate systems without tipping into chaos. Any normal mind kept intruding with apparent irrelevancies, many ascending to the level of muttered or almost-spoken words the outer consciousness hardly noticed, but which the device manifested visibly and in sound.
Tunes that pop into your head… stray associations you generally ignore… memories that wink in and out… impulses to action… often rising to tickle the larynx, the tongue, stopping just short of sound…
As she thought each of those words, lines of text appeared on the right, as if a stenographer were taking dictation from her subvocalized thoughts. Meanwhile, at the left-hand periphery, an extrapolation subroutine crafted little simulations. A tiny man with a violin. A face that smiled and closed one eye… It was well this device only read the outermost, superficial nervous activity, associated with the speech centers.
When invented, the sub-vocal had been hailed as a boon to pilots — until high-performance jets began plowing into the ground. We experience ten thousand impulses for every one we allow to become action. Accelerating the choice and decision process did more than speed reaction time. It also shortcut judgment.
Even as a computer input device, it was too sensitive for most people. Few wanted extra speed if it also meant the slightest sub-surface reaction could become embarrassingly real, in amplified speech or writing.
If they ever really developed a true brain to computer interface, the chaos would be even worse.
— From EARTH (1989) chapter 35 by David Brin (with permission)
IoT control. In the conference paper, the researchers suggest that an “internet of things” (IoT) controller “could enable a user to control home appliances and devices (switch on/off home lighting, television control, HVAC systems etc.) through internal speech, without any observable action.” Or schedule an Uber pickup.
Peripheral devices could also be directly interfaced with the system. “For instance, lapel cameras and smart glasses could directly communicate with the device and provide contextual information to and from the device. … The device also augments how people share and converse. In a meeting, the device could be used as a back-channel to silently communicate with another person.”
Applications of the technology could also include high-noise environments, like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, or even places with a lot of machinery, like a power plant or a printing press, suggests Thad Starner, a professor in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. “There’s a lot of places where it’s not a noisy environment but a silent environment. A lot of time, special-ops folks have hand gestures, but you can’t always see those. Wouldn’t it be great to have silent-speech for communication between these folks? The last one is people who have disabilities where they can’t vocalize normally.”
* Or users could, conceivably, simply zone out — checking texts, email messages, and twitter (all converted to voice) during boring meetings, or even reply, using mentally selected “smart reply” type options.
What's up it's your boy Ben here with some unpopular opinions.
1. I think it's great to focus high schools around the idea that you need to figure out what you're doing after high school. Obviously, pushing people to go be foot soldiers would probably be bad. But preventing you from graduating because you choose to join the military would also be silly, especially when most jobs are not combat-related. The clear goal of this program is that high school is not enough and high school should make you choose a next step. And I think that is genuinely a good goal, as long as the high school helps you get there.
2. Some people are definitely homeless on purpose. This is not saying that this is a common reason for homelessness. This is also not saying that those people would turn away a free apartment if it was offered. But there is a minority of homeless people who are aware of the tradeoff they are making and if asked will say that they have chosen to be homeless.
Oooh, feedback loops like this are fascinating to me bc
1) SF is a mess and if you look at the research (e.g. https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/982752963201511425) on displacement and rent growth, it's obvious that building more housing, even if it's market rate, helps reduce displacement.
2) A problem with housing politics is so many people don't want to build more housing because they are ancient homeowners who have benefited from home appreciation. A system which makes labor more expensive in proportion to rent makes prices go up for everyone, even if you're not renting. If my favorite restaurant becomes more expensive gradually because they have to pay more to their employees, I have an incentive to make housing cheaper, even though I don't directly benefit from cheaper housing.
Now in practice, jacking SF's minimum wage to $70/hour would cause immediate mass unemployment and small business failure rather than a low housing price utopia. BUT it would be interesting if a city tried something like this with the current wage as a starting point. For example, we're at $14/hour now, so if rents go up 10%, so do wages.
Minimum Wage should be indexed to 2% of a city’s median rent.
And here’s why:
Housing costs are the single biggest financial burden facing Americans today.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development define being cost-burdened as spending more than a third of your income on rent. By that definition, over half of the households in this country are cost-burdened. Source
If we want people to be able to afford to live in cities and not get priced out, we have to make a two pronged approach. One is to build houses towards all incomes and price ranges, not just luxury condos. And the other is a robust wage floor so people can actually afford to live.
Fight for 15 is doing an amazing job and I love them, but we have to realize that is quite a few places, $15/hr still isn’t enough to live on.
Which is where the 2% comes in. It allows a minimum wage that is flexible with regards to the costs of living.
And it wasn’t plucked out of thin air either:
Rent should be a third of a persons income, or to restate the equation: income should be three times a person’s rent.
And since a full time job is 8 hrs a day / 40 hrs a week / 160 hrs a month.
So when you do the math, the ideal hourly minimum wage as a percentage of rent works out to around 1.875%, which for ease of calculation is 2%.
I currently live in Boulder. The average apartment costs $1800.The minimum wage would have to be about $36/hr.
In Denver it would be about $30.18/hour
god do i feel underpaid now (in nyc)
Well yeah, I live in Denver, and you CANNOT find a studio apartment, even in the cheapest neighborhood in town for under $800-$900/month. I’ve tried. When you combine that with health insurance, gas/car insurance (which you are required to have), and food, it gets pretty pricey. I work 40 hours a week at $11/hr (which is well above the city’s minimum wage). After taxes I make roughly $1200-1300/month. I have student loans to pay off and transition-related expenses 2 times a month in addition to all the other necessary expenses (including mental health medication). So I’m still living with my parents because I can’t afford to live in Denver otherwise.
I’m an unmarried, childless, able-bodied adult. I’m making several dollars above minimum wage at a full-time job and I can’t afford to live in Denver. For a single parent with even one kid, $30.18/hr is a pretty conservative estimate for what it would take to live here and support a kid.
This is fascinating because it's like an audible subtitle. Devoid of emotional interpretation of what's happening, it is just a plain, literal translation of the words, allowing the emotions of the actors to still speak for themselves.
can confirm. if you want to experience this, here’s the movie THE MASK (starring Jim Carrey) as seen by polish TV audiences: https://www.cda.pl/video/180826725
Love this because I have no way to predict what is going to kill with this crowd. Punchlines include: * Bolton's name is kinda hard to pronounce * Dude looks funny * Kinda like a cartoon character
Mahmoud. It's me, Mahmoud from the future. I need $4,000 in crypto in order to make crypto bail. No time to explain. You'll thank me when our timelines converge.
In the middle of the night, the 83-year-old woman received a call. A
caller identifying himself as a policeman angrily reported that her
grandson – identified by name – had landed in jail. He’d hit a policeman
while driving and TXTing.
The policeman said they needed $4,000 in bail – immediately.
The old woman hung up, but the phone rang again, and
the policeman said she could speak to her grandson: he came on the line,
pleading with his grandmother for bail money. She said she wouldn’t do
it – not because she was hard-hearted, but because something didn’t
“feel right”.
At that point, a man identifying himself as her
grandson’s defence attorney came on the line, exclaiming, “I don’t need
this case – I have 10 others!” But the grandmother remained adamant – no
bail money – and so the call ended.
It didn’t take her long to contact her grandson and
learn the whole thing had been a setup, a scam from masters of the
craft. Yet the level of detail possessed by scammers – that felt weirdly
new. They’d tracked down this woman, obtained her phone number, then
somehow worked out both the name of her grandson, and that he lived in
another town, some miles away.
Could they get all of that personal information from
Facebook? Probably not. But it wouldn’t be terribly hard to find enough
personal details on the social sharing site that it became a relatively
straightforward process to trawl through other public databases,
assembling a more-or-less complete family picture. Names, addresses,
phone numbers: Everything you need to defraud an old lady in the middle
of the night.
That it wasn’t quite good enough to pass a sniff test
says less about the current state of the art than the capacity of the
scammers. The last few months have seen a wealth of reports about “deepfake” videos
– mapping famous celebrity faces into pornographic films. The
technology behind these deepfakes – computer vision and machine learning
algorithms – has been publicly available for long enough, and mastery
of them has grown widespread enough, that the kind of forgeries that
would have required painstaking, highly expert labour can now be handed
to a piped-together set of command-line tools.
What deepfake is to video, Adobe VoCo – its “Photoshop for audio”
– does for speech. Fed a sufficiently long sample of any speaker – such
as Barack Obama, who provides plenty of source material – and arbitrary
speech can be endlessly generated. Obama can be made to say anything at
all.
Imagine if those scammers had gotten a voice sample of that grandson:
When his grandmother spoke to his vocal simulacrum, it would have
responded in the right tones to make her believe – and pay.
All of which points to a big penny-drop moment
concerning our “personal” data. With so many devices now under voice
control – Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Apple HomePod all selling like hotcakes
– capturing a sample of speech long enough that it can be weaponised
and used against us has become easy. Sure, the big players will take all
the right steps to ensure what’s said in the home stays in the home,
but with speech as the new interface, the opportunities to record us at
scale have already multiplied enormously.
We’re approaching a point where we will have to both
guard our speech carefully and be very cautious before we believe
anything anyone else says. We may soon see individuals with a special
need to guard their security adopt a different vocal register when
talking to voice assistants, something analogous to the register one
might have used 100 years ago when communicating with staff “below
stairs”.
welp, given the amount of recordings of me out there, i am fucked (or maybe just my friends/family)
Founded in 2013, Utah-based startup VidAngel entered the video streaming market with a rather innovative business model. 
