devrandomguy

An interesting hypothesis, but difficult to reconcile with the surprisingly successful history of hemispherectomy [1]. Unless, perhaps, many unique neurons still serve nearly identical functions, despite their differences? Perhaps their uniqueness is a defense against disease, rather than functional specialization?

I don't mean "functions" in the sense of classic neuroscience, like specialized regions of the brain; I am using it as a very generic term, for lack of a better one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherectomy

What happens if Uber just pleads guilty, in order to get back to work ASAP? They lose important patents. And then, the victor is obligated by patent law to license patents at a reasonable price, by some unknown definition of reasonable?

It looks to me like Uber could take another PR hit, burn a $billion or more on the fallout, raise more billions, and keep on going. Have ethically motivated boycotts ever worked out, historically?

They could become business consultants, for businesses that operate in regions with minimal human rights protections :(

I am somewhat surprised that our ML is not yet strong enough to make good use of a relatively small, but precisely translated work, such as the Qur'an. The success of human anthropologists in deciphering the Rosetta stone to learn the ancient Egyptian languages must have had as much to do with understanding the context, the culture and tools of the time, as actually cracking a code.

It is really too bad that we can't have things like this in our society. That looks like it would have been a very healthy way to deal with stress and frustration, especially in an otherwise restrained environment like work.

Thank you for that bit of history.

It's pretty good at European languages, but still terrible at Arabic and Japanese. The system still has a very shallow understanding of the content. One of my primarily Arabic-speaking colleagues was actually offended by Google Translate butchering their language so badly; their culture places a relatively high value on poetry, calligraphy, etc.

As an exercise, try translating your search queries into Arabic before searching. Then, let Google translate the results for you. It is hilarious.

What is jwz?

If you live uphill from work, then that car just might help to balance the load. Early in the morning, you leave with a minimal charge, and roll down to work on regenerative brakes while topping up the batteries. After work, you spend that charge and the minimum fuel necessary to get home. You charge your vehicle in the late afternoon, not long after peak sun. Your home power controller is configured to allocate 80% of the car's battery for household usage, overnight.

If you live downhill from work, however, then the only way to use that to your advantage would be to work an evening / night shift.

In a community of entrepreneurs and developers of all stripes, scaling down is an unpopular solution. But, it is the only one that I have been able to follow through on, myself. I have actually come to enjoy the newfound simplicity in my life.

Take a budget cut from the prison system?

Good morning, stranger. I am curious about what you all are up to; the idea of a non-profit that has access to computing resources and bandwidth, is kind of interesting. Do you have something like a blog, a twitter feed, or a github org page?

This Thinfilm company claims to be able print basic displays already, and hints that the process involves 5 layers of material. I'm guessing that there are two outer conductive layers, of longitudinal and lateral electrode arrays respectively. Two of the inner layers would form the P-N junction of an OLED.

Not sure what that fifth layer would be, though. It could be something as mundane as a non-stretchable structural support. Or, it could be that there is more to OLEDs than the Wikipedia article lets on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED#Polymer_light-emitting_di...

As for how this would be printed, that is probably just a matter of coaxing the required layer-chemicals into a suspension that has the right consistency for their own printers. I recall an article a while ago, about some pharmaceutical researchers teaming up with HP to develop chemical print heads that spit out protein solutions, and then spit drugs onto them, in order to rapidly test millions of different concentrations. These people might even be using that same printer.

I'm guessing about 300 dpi.

Imagine if this technology was available as inkjet cartridges. The potential for decentralization of electronics manufacturing, is staggering. So is the potential of electronics at the price of fancy photo paper. We would finally be in a position to begin replicating the open source software revolution, in electronics. The power of the hardware manufacturing giants would melt away.

High performance, nanometer-scale silicon would obviously still have to be manufactured the classic way, because, nanometers. But, instead of buying a precious tablet, you order a ribbon of of peel & stick wafers, of commodity CPU and RAM chips. You then stick them onto a printed, flexible nv-mem + screen to enable it to compute at modern speeds.

As people get used to disposable, custom electronics, they learn that for most of what they do with a single sheet of "paper", they actually need very little computing power. Rugged, cheap, micrometer-scale CPUs make a comeback. Kids study them in grade school, using an ordinary optical microscope. IC designers start to optimize for readability. The general public begins to take responsibility for their hardware and software stack, the way they take responsibility for their vehicle and their home.

/dream

> Ideal for simple indicator displays

Looks to me like just about any low frequency, low power circuit is a possibility.

Sure, as long as their users unanimously abide by a very large rulebook ;)

If you can prove that your testing process is perfect, then your entire development process can then be reduced to the following, after the test suite is written:

  cat /dev/random | ./build-inline.sh | ./test-inline.sh | tee ./src/blob.c &&
  git commit -Am "I have no idea how this works, but I am certain that it works perfectly, see you all on Monday!" &&
  git push production master --force

When presented like this, relying on human intelligence and experience doesn't seem like such a bad thing after all.

Just so we're clear, my username was not inspired by this scheme.

It seems to me that management is taught that a dependence on expensive experts, is a problem to be optimized. They want to manage the development process in a way that allows them to easily swap out one developer or team for another, or to ramp up production simply by increasing the number of developers assigned to a task.

It is almost as if they see the success that we have had in dev/ops with the "cattle, not pets" philosophy, and want to apply that in their own field. Making the subject behave consistently and predictably, whether it is a machine or a human professional, would be a prerequisite for that.

Yes, that is what I do. Like I said, now that him and I have made our positions clear, we no longer attempt to communicate with each other. I can only hope that he discovers the value of rational thought on his own, and I imagine that he is hoping that I will someday choose loyalty to my peers over cold logic.

In my opinion, this would only reinforce his assumptions, and possibly even radicalize him to the point of violent rebellion. It would be a form of oppression, and we all know how that plays out over the long term.

Sun Tzu's philosophy of "taking whole", of carefully manipulating your opponent into aligning their goals with yours, is the best strategy that I can come up with. But, because of the communication barrier between us, I am unsure of how to apply it.

First, you have to convince them that science is a good thing. I have a friend, who literally believes that scientists are either evil people, who's primary goal is to gain power over others by outsmarting them, or, willfully ignorant tools of a predatory political / economic system. To him, big-S Scientists represent a threat to his way of life.

I reminded him that many of my own family members, people that he trusts, work in scientific endeavors; a marine biologist, for example, who has dedicated his life to the wellbeing of the various Pacific salmon species, for the sake of our food supply and forest health. He just lumped me into the second category, insisting that salmon are only managed for profit. That the funding for wild salmon research was being redirected towards improving the yield of fish farms, to the detriment of both the forests of western Canada, and to the detriment of the families and communities that live off of the wild salmon fisheries.

We don't talk much anymore. In order to convince people like this to support science, instead of attacking it, we must convince them of two things: that "real, working" scientists have a conscience, and that they have the power to follow their conscience without losing their status as real, working, scientists.

Let's try "Ja'wut". As in "'thentikayshun? Ja, wut am I gonna use for that?"

Thank you for voting, comrade :)

Ah, good times. Win95 used to crash so much, that my brother and I became quite adept at resurrecting Explorer by causing a surviving process to trigger it. Eventually, we discovered the infamous "Login? No, just help yourself to the desktop" hack. No one cared, it was normal for stuff to be broken.

https://imgur.com/rG0p0b2

I'm probably no more knowledgeable than you in this area, but I have a free morning, and this is interesting. My hypothesis, is that the heat that we produce or release to generate usable energy, is an insignificant factor in global warming, compared to the solar heat that we trap with greenhouse gases. Let's find some quick simple stats and do some arithmetic, to figure out how much we are directly heating the surface of the Earth.

According to Wikipedia, the global energy production for 2012 was about 5.616e+20 joules, or 156 petawatt-hours. The Earth has about 1.386e+21 liters of water on it, and I will assume that that water represents the bulk of the relevant thermal mass, when considering weather patterns and sea level.

Now, let's estimate the heating caused by that energy. According to www.bickfordscience.com/03-05_State_Changes/PDF/Specific_Heat.pdf, 4,184 Joules of energy applied to 1 KG of water will raise its temperature by 1 degree Celsius, and this scales linearly with mass. Assuming that Earth-water averages out a density of 1 KG per liter, our 5.616e+20 joules, applied over a year to our 1.386e+21 liter water mass, would heat that water by 1.036e-38 degrees Celcius.

It has been a while since I've done a dimensional analysis, and the scale here are so extreme that I can't tell if my result is sensible. However, if my assumptions are reasonable and my math is correct, and the processes that I have chosen to ignore are insignificant (i.e. radiation into space over one year), then all of the heat that we release in the generation of the global energy supply, has a negligible impact on the temperature of the planet.

That's pretty dwarfy! But, can they pump magma to the surface, to defend their rocky fortress?

I just hope that they are being careful not to drill through any adamantine formations. http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Raw_adamantine

Yes, the author mentioned Idris shortly afterwards, but I get the impression that this is just the tip of an iceberg. Idris was presented as the one example that is most likely to evolve from a research-only language, to a production language.

> Types / Type-driven development Rating: Best in class

> Haskell definitely does not have the most advanced type system (not even close if you count research languages) but out of all languages that are actually used in production Haskell is probably at the top.

What are these other research languages, that have such incredible type systems? Do they usually have implemented compilers, or would they only be described in an abstract form? Can I explore them for fun and curiosity?

So, we can hand-roll an SVG image in CSS, eh? Cool trick, I'll have to remember that one.

  background: url('data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg ...

Crazy brute force idea for analyzing a neural net, from someone who has little experience with neural nets:

Graph the response of the neural network, over the range of the stimuli that you care about. This is going to be a ridiculously huge dataset, but bear with me. Then, use a genetic algorithm to evolve equations that have reasonably similar behavior, perhaps over a much smaller domain.

This collection of equations and their valid input ranges, are the raw material for your program. You would simplify them using algebraic solvers, when possible, and attempt to hand-optimize them for readability. Then, when you are done, the whole thing gets compiled down to big switch-case statement in, say, C. From here on, the process looks sort of like yacc.

So, by adding a whole new layer of magic, we get the system to explain itself in a way that a programmer could understand. Come to think of it, this feels sort of like how I do personal introspection. In fact, I'm doing it right now.