lopmotr

That verb "target" used to sound ominous but it turns out it's used for perfectly OK things like a boss reminding their staff not to share confidential information with the media. That's described here as "The administration has also targeted journalist sources". I guess I've been targeted as a journalistic source too because I've signed employment contracts agreeing not to talk about my work to the press.

That's a problem for lots of technologies. The native language in my country hardly has any literature published in it because it's so obscure. How should the printing press solve this unfairness? The internet in general also doesn't use it much at all, neither do all the popular movies and TV series. They don't even get subtitled. Apple Maps can't pronounce the street names correctly for navigation either. It's pretty hopeless but does it really matter?

Maybe if you have an unpopular language, that's just unfortunate and please encourage your kids to learn English (which they probably do at school just about everywhere anyway) so you don't perpetuate the same problem to the next generation.

Not sure the details of her employment arrangement, but usually work you do for your company belongs to the company and you don't have any right to freely publish it. Seems she was able to publish it anyway, so that's pretty good, isn't it? She's got more than the usual helping of free speech. Where's the censorship or suppression?

Does that really matter though? Isn't the proper way to evaluate what data is being shared to assume each app exploits its permissions up to the level of trust you have in the company that provided it? Eg. if you worry Facebook is stealing your contact list, then if their app has that permission, you should assume they are stealing it. No need to bother checking if they actually are. They might do it when you're not looking anyway.

As for data being sent from your device to 3rd parties, again, if you don't trust the app's developer not do to that, you also won't trust them not to be sharing it from their end where you have no way to look at the traffic.

I wish we used different words for domain and range. Like "input range" and "output range" or something. It's an endless source of confusion, especially since range can legitimately be used for the domain if you phrase it like "the range of values we can use for the input of the inverse tangent function is -infinity to infinity."

I once taught in a physics curriculum that went a step beyond calculators. Students never had to do numerical calculations in the exams. For example, a question asking you to find a force, could have an answer like "F=ma where m=3 kg and a=2m/s". There were higher grades for showing insight into the physics that you could get by looking at the form of the symbolic equations you'd derived but would have trouble noticing if you'd substituted numbers early on.

I wish I had learned times tables properly as a kid though. I struggle with things like 6*7 on a near daily basis for my work and general life. Not really for number sense but for not having to shift my attention to a basic math problem while I'm working on something else.

What kind of exam requires you to memorize trig identities? Were they trying to prepare you for a world without paper or computers to look them up on? Or to be a smidgen faster at hand calculations?

How can a math teacher make such an obvious mistake? She's right it's picked less often than all other sequences combined, but that's not the same as being picked less often than every other sequence individually.

Best lottery advice I heard from a math teacher was only make bets that have a chance at a retire-early sized prize and preferably no chance of small winnings. The idea being that when he loses, he's donating to charity, which he would have done anyway.

I face that Google search risk for my business but all businesses have risks. If not from Google, from regulation changes, Covid-19 lockdowns, competitors, disruption of the market like Uber/AirBnB, etc. If you don't want risk, don't be a businessman. Get a normal job like everyone else.

You know that you will have to sign a contract. And even if you don't, they're in an "at will" state so they can fire you whenever they want (eg. on your first day) without giving a reason. You know all that going in and can choose to work in a state or country with stronger labor laws if you don't like it.

It's usually other people voluntarily give it to them, not that they take it.

First to market isn't just luck. It's often the result of work harder and faster and taking more risk than others. It's not as if Bill Gates just sat around and told people to make software.

People often want symbolic things whose main purpose is to remind you of that person, like ornaments, a card or a personalized home-made thing. I know someone who embroidered a Thor's hammer picture for a friend who was a fan of those comics. It wouldn't have mattered if it was somehow inaccurate - it showed they were important enough to spend time on - proof of work maybe?

I keep little trinkets that people have given me. It's nice to see them every now and then.

How do you judge that number to be a lot? Are you comparing it to something else you're already familiar with?

But does it matter? The odd organism dying here and there doesn't matter. If the effect isn't quantified, then it could easily be "effectively nothing".

Surely you'd have heard about it from friends or family if it was common for pregnant women to have cravings for nails and bottle caps and that their bodies need the nutrition from them?

Yes. After removing "3D Objects" and other stupid useless folders from File Explorer too many times and having the re-appear randomly some time later, it's easier to just give up and just try to tune out all the rubbish they shove at you.

It's horrible when a familiar respectable blogger suddenly dumps a pile of partisan talking points all seriously as if it's just as valid as their regular content. Suddenly, it shakes your confidence in their ability to think rationally when they're copying the exact beliefs of a major political group. He's just put a bit of "security" spin on it but still with the exact same conclusions.

He doesn't bother to show evidence of how this "undermining of democracy" would actually be a problem. Where do people stop voting because they don't trust the counting even when it's actually being done honestly? Where do people vote for the "wrong" candidates because they don't know what they want and need his benevolent intelligence to shield them from "bad" ideas? I guess those things have happened in the middle east depending on how you judge "bad" and "wrong", and to what extent you respect people's personal and religious beliefs.

Just like homeless shelters, somebody's going to want to impose rules on their use and that will immediately exclude people.

Can you quote where it says this is a different functionality? The statement from Amazon says it's none of their business.

What a ridiculous title and claim. It obviously means nothing so what are people suppose to think of it? Just be impressed and stupefied at the same time? The important missing detail that took 6 paragraphs to get to is "1 million fluid cells".

Why hubristic? Because he did it? What would a non-hubristic attempt to estimate the prevalence of life in the universe look like, short of actually finding aliens?

I tend to agree. However it's not hopeless - we already have a system to serve them. It's the culture of monogamous relationships and marriage. That removes the most attractive men from the dating pool, leaving the remaining women available for the less attractive men. If we didn't have that, we'd probably instead have a lot of polygamy with most men missing out entirely and most women sharing a partner. That's effectively what it's like for short term relationships - women don't get exclusive access to the attractive men - they have to take turns.

Sure but it's going to be 10x harder and still not be as successful as people who were just born with attractive genes and did nothing.

If an argument is bad faith but right, doesn't that still make it right?

Perhaps what you object to is being dragged into some messy going-in-circles argument. Those are frustrating but they happen because the good-faith participant tolerates some of the logical fallacies and false information presented by the bad-faith one.

People have a powerful force driving them to argue for the thing they believe in so it makes sense to tap into that force to generate high quality arguments. If everyone was kind of passive and willing to accept whatever seems obviously right, we wouldn't push any boundaries. Being kind of passive can happen if you're not emotionally invested in your argument.

But isn't that an important part of the value of neural networks? Mathematicians are expensive so we'd like a computer to make a model for us, just like drivers are expensive so we want self-driving cars.

Everything in your comment is an insult. That's probably why it's downvoted.

> and those directly added to the app

The article says this is just owners allowing access to the company that manages it for the police. How can Ring stop that?

"Ring customers have control and ownership of their devices and videos, and can choose to allow access as they wish."

How would you propose Ring stops it? Change the T&Cs to disallow sharing your video with the police while still allowing sharing with your friends? What if a private company says it's your friend and collects it on behalf of the police? What if a group of vigilant neighbors want to pool all their videos together so their own volunteers or staff can monitor them? It's kind of hard to allow something for normal people while disallowing it for the police.

I would call these bodges, not architecture. They're all tacked on modifications independent of the rest of the building's design and some of them obviously conflict with the actual architecture.