For computational linguistics (translation, analysis, etc), machine learning is not a net gain. What ML proponents forget to factor in is the vast time spent on gathering and hand-annotating large quantities of text (gold corpora).

Even worse, for many many languages, these gold corpora simply do not exist and there are no plans on making them, or they are too small to be used for ML.

And even when the gold corpora do exist, models trained on them become tightly coupled with the data. They become domain specific. In order to escape domains, you need an order of magnitude more data.

Instead, one can make a domain-independent rule-based system in a fraction of the total time spent on machine-learning models. But rule-based has become this weird anathema - people will even write papers that use rule-based methods, while hiding it behind machine-learning terms.

I'm sure this also holds for other fields.

I definitely disagree. The Orville is neither spoof, satire, nor parody. The science is solid and the characters are all highly competent at their jobs. They don't make fun of technobabble, or races, or maritime ranks, or code of ethics, or anything else I can think of that's inherent to Star Trek.

The Orville doesn't make fun of any aspect of Star Trek. It merely adds a few jokes on top. And yes, some of those jokes are not fitting in the otherwise competent execution, but it seems they are dialing it to something that's tolerable for everyone.

They should fire the writers of Discovery and hire the Orville team instead. Marry the solid writing of a real Star Trek show (The Orville) with the high production values of the knock-off (Discovery).

The Orville is a true to form Star Trek show disguised as generic sci-fi.
Discovery is generic sci-fi disguised as Star Trek.

Strong container deposit legislation pretty much solves this. E.g. "90% of all PET bottles, 63% of all aluminium cans and 86% of all glass bottles sold in Estonia were returned". Finland says "aluminium cans have a recycling rate of about 94% and PET bottles 92%".

Make the containers worth something, and amazingly they stop being thrown about.

The new design is beyond awful. I have been using Google News as my browser home page for years because it was a quick way to get an overview of headlines and blurbs I cared about, and this update completely ruins the usability.

Before, I could see 10+ stories, with a snippet for a few of them. Now, I can see at most 1.5 due to the bigger pictures and irrelevant "Related Coverage" and "More About" parts. Sometimes I can't even see the whole article card because Related and More take up so much space.

I just want a small picture or icon, headline, and 1-2 sentences from the article. That way I can get a rather complete 10+ article overview in a single page without clicking or scrolling, and even from multiple sections. Before, I could see Sci/Tech and World headlines on the same page as Top Stories. Now, I have to hit Page Down twice to get to just the first such story.

So yeah, they've lost a user who had Google News as default home page for a decade. Maybe if they add serious streamlining and compact modes, I'll return. But for now, https://www.bing.com/news is oddly enough a clean replacement. Google pushed me to use Bing ...

And yet, still no option to sort an album by filename, despite many people requesting it for years. Picasa could do it.

They killed off Picasa, promised feature parity within a year, did not deliver, and isn't even close to delivering.

There's so many low hanging fruit features that Google could trivially add to their products to make them massively more useful, but they don't.

Absolutely agreed. Significant whitespace is an abomination. The semantics of the code shouldn't change depending on whether it was copy/pasted between codebases, emails, or even office documents.

Skype used to be end-to-end encrypted and it caused police a lot of problems. Maybe criminal groups are just slow to move to a new service since everyone got established on Skype when it was secure, and the removal of encryption isn't exactly something Microsoft has put in a press release.

They are actively working on full C++ language support. But, 2017 doesn't mean C++17 - the release year has nothing to do with what it supports. The actual version is VS15 (VS 2015 was version 14).

MS is working on language support in two ways. First, they're trying to get two-phase lookup into their own frontend, but this has been very slow work because it doesn't even have an AST. Secondly, they're working on an Clang based frontend, which already has all the goodies. You can already install the Clang preview right from VS itself.

(And, what's with C++x17? You either say C++1z or C++17 - you do not say C++x17 - the letters are only for unofficial versions. The versions go: C++0x, C++11, C++1y, C++14, C++1z, C++17 ... C++2x, C++20)

You're in luck: https://twitter.com/StephanTLa... - "We’re planning to ship most C++17 features in VS 2017 updates. No ETAs yet, but we’re working on them as a top priority."

Here in Denmark, emails are considered legal documents. Doubly so if you digitally sign them with your government provided citizen key.

But from another comment, it seems US does also recognize emails - it's just the FBI that doesn't.

Nintendo seriously underestimated the demand for this thing. I was quite looking forward to getting one for my 5-year-old daughter, but here in Denmark they've been sold out since launch.

So, they're slowly moving towards a version of rsync that's aware of zip files. Hell, zip files are compressed per-file, so it doesn't even need to be aware of the compression.

And Microsoft is also looking at differential updates. Seems everyone is busy reinventing rsync or zsync.

I think I see your problem. Why have a phone attached but then not use MFA on the same device?

Fix your culture?

Here in Denmark, nobody talks during the movie, nobody is using their cellphone, people are just there to watch the movie. The theater is cleaned after each screening. Oh, and we have assigned seats. When you order your ticket, you also pick what seats you want. We have both still and motion ads and 1-3 trailers for other movies before the feature.

Been this way for at least 30 years, and works great. If it doesn't work in whatever country you're in, fix it.