iClaudiusX

The thing that would get me excited about mobile devices is the ability to run my own programs and access a real file system like a general purpose computer. That would be a real improvement in capability along the lines of the first true smartphone with a touchscreen, browser, and GPS for turn-by-turn navigation.

The first-generation Zune had a leap year bug that caused it to get stuck in an infinite boot loop on December 31, 2008. Not exactly the kind of thing you want happening to traffic infrastructure.

Exactly, it's the same with unshielded microwaves, and it's astonishing that someone would think it's safe to crank the power on these lasers with that justification.

> When injury from exposure to microwaves occurs, it usually results from dielectric heating induced in the body. Exposure to microwave radiation can produce cataracts by this mechanism,[28] because the microwave heating denatures proteins in the crystalline lens of the eye (in the same way that heat turns egg whites white and opaque). The lens and cornea of the eye are especially vulnerable because they contain no blood vessels that can carry away heat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave#Effects_on_health

Is there any evidence the FTC is going after the advertisers and platforms (youtube, twitch, etc) themselves? It seems purposefully ineffective to play whack-a-mole with individuals when the driving force is a multi-billion dollar industry built around avoiding disclosure.

The bigger story is they're getting rid of 44,000 employees (nearly a third of their workforce), with the first 10,000 taking voluntary buyouts right now. That's after a $4.5 Billion tax cut. Rather than invest in those engineers, they're outsourcing to offshore IT.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/12/veriz...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/verizons-severance-offer-goes-t...

Thinking about this, I notice most of the unpleasant changes in technology have come from the mobile side infecting desktop/laptop computing.

touch interfaces

* requires visual focus

* no feedback

* low information density

hardware

* death of repair (everything is hyper-fragile, glued or soldered)

* death of expansion options (battery, storage)

* "de-contenting" or removing features to sell more accessories

* focus on vanity aesthetics over function

* ever-increasing prices for less YoY improvement

software

* death of QA

* death of stable releases (endless hash-barf versions)

* notification spam

abandonment of user control

* os-mandated default applications and services

* lack of security updates (android)

* forced beta testing (apple, windows)

app store model

* no discovery

* no search

* no user privacy

* abusive micro-transactions

Indeed, as noted in the conclusion there is very little middle ground as performance with this particular NUMA structure is bimodal depending on memory access patterns and power consumption of all the supporting hardware.

I suppose it makes the most sense to frame this as an iteration of the original Threadripper with all the design compromises that entails to provide backward compatibility with existing motherboards. I'm definitely more excited for the next generation HEDT chips that hopefully have a more balanced layout like Epyc.

AMD have certainly come out of the Bulldozer era swinging, and we all benefit from their aggressive pricing.

That depends on the clock cycle latency but ceteris paribus yes, a higher frequency at the same timings would have higher bandwidth.

The Switch is portable, so most of its appeal is for people who have a commute but don't drive. The nvidia Tegra chip is powerful and efficient enough to play ports of games that previously would only have been playable on a home console like DOOM (2016) that you will never play on an iPhone unless you're streaming through the new Steam app. Nearly every game worth playing will end up on Switch.

The first party games have the same appeal as they always did -- stellar platforming in Mario, a mainline Zelda, etc. Whether those interest people is more or less a known quantity at this point (they didn't make the WiiU nearly as successful).

The FCC in 2016 voted to require that ISPs and mobile providers must get opt-in consent to share or sell customer data.

Then in 2017 Congress voted to overturn those rules and prevent the FCC from implementing them in the future in a party-line vote in the House and Senate.

Adding further insult to injury, the current FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, represented Securus (the company that sparked this revelation) in 2012 as an attorney.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/for-sale-your-pr...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/verizon-and-att-...

Don't forget they cut battery capacity from 99/75 Wh (15/13") down to 76/50 Wh to save less than 3 mm thickness

The two most frustrating parts about online shopping are 1) the Byzantine pricing model, and 2) the inability to keep anything in stock.

I don't need the silly vanity of thinking I got some amazing "deal" at 40% off when your prices are clearly just inflated by 40+% across the board to start with. It's a tremendous waste of my time to have to figure out which items qualify for which promotions, only to be disappointed at checkout by some technicality.

Even worse is finally picking a few hundred dollars worth of clothing to buy only to find out none of the normal sizes are in stock. I cannot believe how many retailers are still failing the absolute basics like inventory, yet insist on investing billions in tracking everything we do, everywhere we go to hijack our privacy and attention with ads.

You can add "perpetually delayed 10nm" and "Kafka-esque badge engineering" to the long list of intel blunders. Apparently things are so bad now that Anandtech is calling out their press team for announcing products with zero information.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12878/intel-discuss-whiskey-l...

Even more egregious that the governor, Doug Ducey, was happy to issue executive orders to waive any safety oversight to allow Uber to put the public at risk in the first place.[0]

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/emails-show-arizona-...

Often these issues come down to two sides digging in their heels: "just don't make mistakes" vs "just make it foolproof". Somehow accidents continue to happen.

What I have noticed with manuals is that I usually approach them in one of three different modes:

* what is this / how does it work / is it what I need?

* which flag or option that does _?

* what does this flag or option do?

The first requires a bit more introduction and tutorial than a typical manual will provide because they're usually written by someone who is so familiar with what it does that they can't remember life before understanding it. There is either too little explanation or too much detail, eg arcane ISO standards and niche uses like "week number". Most likely you need examples for it to finally sink in.

The second is probably the most frequent use of a manual, when you're still testing things out. You know the behavior you want and are scanning through the descriptions to find the right match. It's like reading a dictionary by value to find the right key. This is where the infamous "which tar options do I want?" meme comes from.

The third is what most manuals are optimized for. It's a reference for quickly looking up someone else's code to figure out what it does.

Each of these uses requires a different format. In the first case you need a lot more text and instruction that would be unnecessary noise for the other two situations. In the second case you want things organized by function, and preferably with context about the most commonly used options. The third is where alphabetical order makes sense.

This article never really addresses SciPy or NumPy despite the title and much of the discussion. Rather, the author is ranting about the change from python 2 to 3.

And even then his only supporting anecdote is that matplotlib made a breaking change to the way it handles legends. Meanwhile he was perfectly capable of reproducing his scientific results 4 years after publication despite the update from python 2.7 to 3.5 and minor updates to the rest of the cited libraries.

In light of that paucity of evidence I find it hard to support the many hyperbolic statements that the situation is a "big mistake", "calamity", or "earthquake" for the scientific community.

I do agree with the more general point that scientific code requires funding consideration for long term maintenance. Many aspects of research have adopted provisions for equipment like reagents and computing hardware. These are considered core infrastructure and are often shared among labs. I could see a future where software development is supported in a similar way.

I think he's saying you're overfitting for first-date success, which may not be indicative of a fulfilling long term relationship.

Not to pick on you or the parent comment, but this is a such a common mistake that it's worth correcting.

"Clang" is a thing not a person, therefore it's appropriate to use et cetera, not et alii. The former is for things, the latter for people (usually limited to authors of academic papers).

What you described sounds exactly like the arc of Facebook, only forced to its natural conclusion at a much faster pace.

FB started as a network for college students. Then once it expanded to the general public it turned into a gold rush of businesses trying to grab attention. FB slowly turned into the AOL of its day--a captive portal where people largely ignored the rest of the web. Why check the news on a publisher's site when I can just scan headlines while waiting for my friends' updates?

I remember a time before every website decided they needed a Twitter/Facebook button, before coffee cups were plastered with those app icons next to the store's brand. The whole thing seemed strange and desperate as it was happening.

Now the lag between "cool new social medium" to "spam/meme repository" is fast enough that I don't even have to bother. Anything fun and user-focused on the web ends up getting bought and repurposed to serve ads.

SMS has the advantage of being accessible from a cell tower without a separate data connection. RCS does not. It's like they took all the worst parts of other messaging protocols and put it into one product.

The text of Joint Resolution 34 when it passed in the Senate last year https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-joint-re...

The role call vote breakdown https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_...

Ars Technica's coverage of the bill (now law) with context https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/senate-votes-to-...

That assumes Uber had a reasonable chance at advancing self-driving tech. Everything demonstrated to date makes them seem more like Theranos, and it would be difficult to find someone willing to argue they were advancing medical progress.

I get the feeling based on comments here that there is a severe lack of ethical and critical thinking among engineers and developers. I recognize that this is only a vocal minority but the constant mantra of "move fast and break things", where getting rich at any cost is seen as a virtue, has made me extremely disillusioned with this brand of startup culture. Doubly so when people are trading stock tips on how to profit from tragedy by supporting the worst actors in the field.

I remember the nightmare of downloading random codec packages trying to get video to work in the late 90s, early 2000s before I found VLC.

More than ever it's a shining example of high quality software driven by a desire to simply make things work.

It stands in stark contrast at a time when the tech industry seems hyper focused on business models that lock users into crippled platforms and extremely invasive tracking.

For one, motorsport have actual spec series with nearly identical cars that highlight driver skill. They're used as feeder series to test and promote talented drivers.

More to the point of Fomula E, the degree of standardization is changing as the series progresses, with increasingly more aspects of the chassis and powertrain open to development.

Having a standard platform at the start made sense to minimize cost and bring in new competitors who don't want to spend the $200+ million a year like Formula 1 or WEC, where only 2 or 3 factory teams dominate and make for boring racing. Even a big company with a racing pedigree like Honda hasn't been able to field a competitive engine in F1.

As the formula matures they can start focusing on more areas of technical innovation.

See also Tupper's Self-Referential Formula [0] and the Numberphile explanation [1] for generating bitmap plots of itself.

[0]: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TuppersSelf-ReferentialFormula....

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s5RFgd59ao

You skipped the turn signal, which seems accurate to most of the drivers I see on the road.

History is full of examples where a developer/publisher decided to port or remaster a game from its back catalog only to realize they have lost the source code and need to rely on an emulator ROM. Sega, Nintendo, and Capcom I think are the most infamous examples.

Of course the hypocrisy is lost on these same companies who for decades have used piracy as the boogeyman to vilify archival work and fair use.

The iphone 6+ was not rigid enough to withstand bending during normal use.

The iphone 6s battery could not last more than 18 months of daily use. After that it would not provide a stable voltage, causing the phone to randomly shutdown. The "fix" was sneaking in a permanent throttle at 20, 40, 60% of normal performance to hide the problem.

The new keyboards in the recent Macbook Pro redesign are hyper-fragile to the point that Apple's own service technicians have trouble fixing keys and end up having to replace the entire thing.

The Mac line has a history of graphics card failures due to excessive heat from poor thermal design.

They seem to have no problem autocorrecting brand names and trademarks. Why wouldn't they do this for something as important as medication?