But enough about the US. Tell me about China now.

I don't see how this article is refuting the core value proposition of `alpha', especially that of the `alpha male'.

One of the fundamental axioms of western culture (and regrettably, more and more eastern cultures as well) is that the over-riding quality of a man is the ability to make women want to have sex with him. A man who scores low on the `sexual desirability' scale is delegitimized in society... even if he has incredible intellectual achievements to his credit. Anyone who does not recognize this is being wilfully obtuse or completely clueless.

Such `alpha' men are typically physically attractive, have much greater tolerance for risk, have in general poorer impulse control, make decisions quickly and are the best sort to have around in a fight. They make great soldiers and athletes. And these are the sort whom women throw themselves at without any reservations to a degree that would be incomprehensible to the average man.

This is why insults such as `incel' are extremely powerful... because they put the finger on the fact that the targets of such insults are `genetic failures' who are unlikely to pass along their genes.

So when you quote an article that says Alpha wolves are the most likely to breed... well duh, that is re-inforcing the stereotype isn't it?

The question is not whether this is really the best choice for some employees. Obviously there are some individuals, especially who think of work as just a paycheck and have limited professional ambition would love to work from home, and want the flexibility to pick their home independent of their work location.

The question is how all this works out for organizations, and the individuals within these organizations who are tasked with making everything work fare.

In my company (mid-size to large, 100% software), here is what I have observed:

1) Over the first 2-3 months, overall productivity actually went up. This is because everyone was on their best behavior and were on what I call an `exam footing'. Projects that had been planned before executed a bit faster.

2) After the excitement wore off, things started flattening out. Productivity dropped back to pre-pandemic levels. Planning new projects however started taking longer. New designs and architectures started taking far more review iterations to converge. This was directly due to people not being able to do quick brainstorms/sync/ask impromptu questions. Everything is a zoom meeting now, and there is a LOT lost in translation in slack.

3) Misunderstandings/miscommunications are WAY up... even within a single office, let alone across geographic locations.

4) E-mail as a mechanism of mass information dissemination has now proved to be useless. Nobody has time to read large emails. Furthermore, there is a tremendous amount of unwitting misinformation that is disseminated because people interpret the same email in different ways. Managers and other engineers have become information clearing houses, who have to ensure that everyone in their team has the information they need to get the job done. Stress and frustration among this class of employees is way up.

5) Parents and folks who have young children at home are under severe stress. Their productivity has noticeably dropped (there are exceptions of course).

6) Employees who were not really motivated in the first place are actually less.

Look, I understand that things may never go back to the old normal. However, let us not fool ourselves thinking there are only positives in this new situation.

Most of the software in routers and cellular equipment provided by Alcatel/Lucent/Nokia/Siemens/Nortel (or whatever they are calling themselves these days) is written in India, or at least by dev teams that have a ton of Indians. Don't know about Ericcson... I believe they mostly keep it home.

Panasonic still makes good micro-four-thirds cameras

Care to explain why the armed militia that showed up to storm the legislature in several states that have Democratic governors, protesting the wearing of masks and demanding that the states reopen, are being treated with so much sympathy and consideration by the police, all the way up to the President?

After all, brandishing a weapon in front of police officers is a crime that justifies immediate execution, right?

What do you think would have happened if the race of the protestors would have been different? Do you think Trump would have asked the Governor for a `dialog with these very fine folks'? Even Colin Kirkpatrick, who `took a knee' during the national anthem at a football game, did not get so much consideration. Why is that?

I see the republican astroturfers are out in force.... and what a coincidence, the are following the exact playbook sent out by the republican senate re-election strategist.

The larger point is that Trump is a sleazy, out-of-control, incompetent and narcisistic individual who is willing to say anything and everything to get elected, and to hell with the consequences. He has made the US the laughing stock of the world, and has set back the future of our children by generations.

Excellent question. It would be really interesting to see the reaction to this if this guy had been a black gang member in his teens.

What amazes me more than the eventual proof is how these guys come up with these conjectures... for example, Fermat. Guy lives in the 1600s, no electricity or running water, and just theorizes that x^n +y^n = z^n has no integral solutions for n>2. How? Did he compute a bunch of values by hand? Did he have a legion of assistants who would `crunch the numbers' to ensure that the proof is checked for at least small values of n?

First of, the article was not the opinion of some Politically Correct SJW. It was based on the opinions of actual researchers and engineers who work on voice recognition. The basic point was that if these companies really wanted to make the voice recognition work better, they could have chosen to train the algorithms on a larger sample of blacks, but for whatever reason (time, expense), consciously chose to do so. Consequently they (knowingly or unknowingly) chose to provide a poorer experience to those populations... despite the fact that they pay as much for their phones/technology as anyone else.

I've worked on voice recognition in a past life, and am familiar with the math, algorithms and practical implementation considerations. If they can be made to work with high accuracy on a thick South Indian or Chinese accent (and they can, and do), it can be made to work on `Ebonics' or whatever the currently favorable pejorative is.

The inability of a technology to serve the needs of a population is not the fault of the population. As engineers, we of all people should understand this.

I love the syntax and power of python. I hate the whitespace based delineation. It is not a theoretical hate. I have been bitten multiple times because code logic changes while copying and pasting across editors/websites etc.

How great it would be if someone developed a version of python where the delineation is based on curly brackets, but everything else stays the same!

Whenever I see people being generous in their interpretations of the motives of miscreants caught in some shady act, I play a mental exercise: what would the reaction have been if the perpetrators were blacks dissing whites, or Muslims dissing the west? I suspect the reaction would have been far less accepting/forgiving.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that you, MR. sjames (1099) would have reacted any differently, just society as a whole.

I'm a long time user of VLC and I have a love-hate relationship with it. On the one hand, I have a lot of loyalty and personal affection to the software, having used it to play back videos that could not be played by anything else. During the past couple of years, I feel that VLC has been falling back and feels harder to use compared to the other software I routinely use.

First of all, the interface is clunky and awkward, still looking like it was written for CDE using X primitives instead of modern toolkits. This is jarringly off-putting, especially for new users. My wife and daughter refuse to use VLC and stick to other windows-based players as it `looks ugly'. Furthermore:

1) The configuration menus are very non-intuitive.

2) Simple functions like zoom, rotate, brightness controls etc are hard to access and buggy.

3) The `variable zoom' interface is particularly awful, seriously who came up with that one? It is hard to imagine something more awkward to use.

4) The configuration options may make sense to VLC programmers, but is REALLY hard for non-experts to use. For example, I want to map the `short step forward' to a non-default value, say 3 seconds. This took me nearly 30 minutes of experimentation to find out. There is no help for any of the options.

5) VLC is missing a number of key functions that are absolutely must haves in 2019. For example, the ability to hold the mouse over the slider bar and see the frame corresponding to that position. I know this is possible because ExMplayer has had that feature for multiple years. Unfortunately that software seems to be dead, having not had an update for years.

6) I don't want VLC to be another Kodi, but it should support some basic `media manager' features. Tagging, integrated searching, thumbnail management, ability to hover over a thumbnail and see video summaries etc are critically important when you are dealing with hundreds of videos. Ideally I would like something like Geeqie for videos.

7) VLC should support `basic' video editiing. It does not have to compete with full-fledged non-linear video editors like Kdenlive or Openshot, but I should be able to (say) increase the brightness of a video, perform basic cropping etc and save the output to disk with reasonable quality. VLC can use ffmpeg to do the hard work, it just needs to provide an easy to use interface.

I can go on and on, but you get the idea. My feeling is that the VLC developers are more focused on backend features like supporting the latest codecs and less on interface functionality. It would be great if someone could take the VLC core and wrap a better interface around it.

Magnus.

Bullets, Bombs and Boobs... the 3 B's of cinematic excellence.

I have not used Outlook for a few years, but even then automatic email deletions were standard. Gmail is actually late to the party with this feature.