My 80" LCD has a composite input. So does my Yamaha receiver. I do not understand the problem.

If you want a utility welding truck, there's no reason to do DC/AC/DC.

Microsoft tracks you too, of course, but they do it at the desktop level, so it's nearly impossible to get around:

https://about.ads.microsoft.co...

Use Microsoft Search for searching for *anything*? All that data is hoovered up and sold to advertisers.

Also, Ed Butt has a long history of praising anything Microsoft does. What he's describing is any random browser except Edge combined with any random ad-blocking software from the last ten years. "Microsoft: We finally woke up after ten years of ignoring the problem, and here's our official mouthpiece at ZDNet to tell you about it...".

Ultimate South African truck.

None of those companies are Microsoft.

You joke, but the flat panels like that would be a great canvas. What would a Banksy Tesla be worth?

Of course not. Why would Microsoft want to block Microsoft from making money? That is as counterproductive as Google blocking Google tracking in Chrome, or blocking malicious Javascript and advertizing.

So of course it will not happen. A Google product will never *block* anything that is makes Google money (though apparently they are just now getting around to ensure that they do not permit the configuration of such a feature), just as no Microsoft product will ever block (or even contemplate a configuration allowing) the blocking of "stuff" (including malicious javascript) that makes them money.

You need to take a Scumbaggery course at your local college -- I think they call it an MBA!

You sure about that torque thing? Everything I've seen says the Cybertruck may have up to 1000 lb-ft or torque. The Ford PowerStroke 6.7L diesel has around 1050 lb-ft of torque.

The Pontiac Aztek showed that you don't have to appeal to everyone, but that you'll sell as well (or better) about people that feel strongly about your design.

Hmmm... At 10 episodes per season, and 40 miles to cross ~3000 miles, that would be about 8 seasons of excitement!

Have you watched any of the reviews? The most common threads is how big, plush, and awesome the interior is.

I can sight-read out loud at around 250 wpm with an error rate of about one mumble or stumble per page, even if the vocabulary is highly specialized, such as neurobiology. This is the speech rate of a plodding guest on some nightly news show cranked up to 1.5x.

Of course, there are also some fairly simplistic texts where the author demonstrates negligible sensitivity to the spoken language, with all kinds of cadences that are weird and unnatural, where I actually have to fixate every darn word, and which slows me down to normal speech rate. If I'm enjoying a book, I often read long passages (up to twenty pages) out loud. This forces me to actually read every word as written. There are a few special words like "only" where the tendency to paraphrase when spoken rapidly is almost irresistible. "only" is one of the special words that can be inserted almost anywhere, as a modifier of almost anything.

Only he read that book once.
He only read that book once.
He read only that book once.
He read that book only once.
He read that book once only.

Even the vaguely equivalent forms convey nuance:
* Stop exaggerating, he read that book once only.
* He read that [difficult] book only once, which is why he flunked his test.

With the best writers, the urge to paraphrase is rare. With pretty good authors, it's mostly smooth sailing, but then you do paraphrase quite a bit, by flipping one of these idiomatic "only"s around. I try hard to read out loud word for word, but beyond a certain speed, you're at the mercy of the author having a good ear. I suspect that the difference between the best writers and the merely very good is whether they actually read their own text out loud themselves.

———

Ursula K. Le Guin is a joy to read orally. She has actually written entire essays about how she use to read LoTR to her own children. What she learned while doing this is that Tolkien invariably gives specific and accurate geometric indications about every major turn in the road, often of the NESW variety.

Likewise, even when I read orally at a pretty fast clip (say 200 wpm) part of my brain is attending to various stylistic choices of the author. Sometimes I detect an innovative word order, and I think to myself "that worked great, but I would have never chosen that word order myself". If I'm actually recording my oral reading (about half the time), then I will pause my reading to make a verbal annotation about my discovery.

———

Another thing you quickly pick up is how well the author handles anaphors.

In a narrower sense, anaphora is the use of an expression that depends specifically upon an antecedent expression and thus is contrasted with cataphora, which is the use of an expression that depends upon a postcedent expression.

Pronouns function as anaphors 90% of the time. ("He who snoozes, loses" is not an anaphor, but a lambda variable.) The illiterate use of "them" and "they" in the genderless singular works fine at close range, in what's almost a bound lexical segment, but then at longer range it's like WTF? and you have to actually pause to survey the recent cast of characters. There's so much anaphor resolution going on in language, that your brain chooses the most direct route wherever possible. Lexical resolution at short range requires barely any extra cognition. Semantic resolution back to the preceding paragraph is almost as automatic, until you find yourself juggling three or four balls at the same time.

"Having now exhausted his options, he gave it to her at their request, despite knowing how she felt about their tenuous alliance."

No only is the last "their" semantic, but it's semantic all the way up to major plot elements. Do the star-crossed lovers have an "tenuous alliance" or do the arrayed forces of opposition have an "tenuous alliance"?

It's actually hard to sight-read correctly at pace if you can't resolve the anaphors almost immediately. If you punt, six or ten words later your brain will wind up in a conflicted predictive context.

———

A fair percentage of my flubs at pace are triggered by awkward end-of-line hyphenations. Sometimes these are just unhappy accidents, but other times the hyphenation is truly illiterate.

[*] A truly literate person knows that pro-ject is a verb and proj-ect is a noun.

3 Cases of Complicated Hyphenation

But there's a complication here. "Asia-Pacific" is the label for a region of the world (though its parameters are imprecise). Because the hyphen comes along with the phrase, in this instance, the reference should be hyphenated as shown here: "What made him leave his comfortable, high-paying position as head of an Asia-Pacific-wide sales team?"

So the text contains Asia-Pacific-wide according to this rule, but it formats on the page as:
*yada lo yada rem yada ip yada sum Asia-
Pacific-wide sales team
*yada lo yada rem yada ip yada sum Asia-Pacific-
wide sales team
The first is definitely more unfortunate than the second.

———

Some fairly unpolished writers (you can find plenty of these in the business section) will sometimes write phrases that the human vocal tract simply does not wish to enunciate, wedged haplessly in between the bromides, platitudes, potboilers, shibboleths and the threadbare apple pie.

I think business books assume that the reader is harried for time, and is therefore reading at a purely visual reading pace, which skirts almost all of this small noticing, and therefore every major passage must conclude with a long, shallow paragraph of condensed bromide soup, so that the reader has a fair shot of catching up to what they thought they had already read and comprehended.

———

But since I prefer to read acoustically, skipping over almost nothing, when I arrive at these vapid summaries, what happens is that my eyes lose the ability to focus at the word level. The paragraph swims in front of my, and some circuit in my brain goes "don't dip your toe in that worthless pond". About 10% of the time, I force myself to read it anyway, and in 90% of these cases, it's as vapid as my brain predicted. This is a prediction made almost entirely out of peripheral vision (or foveal saccades so short I can't even notice them).

When I'm not pronouncing out loud, my acoustic reading probably ticks along inside my head at about 400 wpm. At this speed, I'm definitely chunking short phrases, but most of the major words remain phonetically active. I will notice many sound patterns that resonate within and between sentences.

If the subject matter is narrative and familiar and in competent hands (e.g. Tim Wu) I can cruise along around 600 wpm with partial vocalization, and thorough comprehension.

For myself, any reading speed above 600 wpm indicates contempt of the author. Or that entire passages were read in gestalt synopsis (e.g. yet another backgrounder on Leibniz's explorations of binary as a universal representation for all semantic knowledge).

I also have a skim mode in the range of 1200 to 2000 wpm where I pick out just enough from each sentence to establish coarse topicality and tone. I can usually find something I'm looking for with about 80% reliability in one pass. Skim mode is the only reading mode I use which fully bypasses phonetics. The gestalts are not words, but topics and entire phrases.

———

Another mode I use is synopsis dictation. This is where I only speak the key phrases. Sometimes you can speak about 1/3 of the text, and the gist remains entirely clear.

[People annoyed] [scattered conflict] [NIMBY bleatings] [some blowhard moneybag] [money wins].

Once you start doing this, you find yourself surprised at just how many authors dedicate intricate and refined language to filling out those particular blanks, to no real value add (the actual names and places supplied mainly amounting to inline scholarship).

On YouTube, it's not uncommon for me to listen to a relatively fast talker (say 200 wpm) at 1.75x, which is 350 wpm net. I'll often activate CC at the same time, to catch the one word in 20 or 30 which is on the edge of audible comprehension. So my estimate of reading internally on a mostly phonetic basis at 400 wpm is surely not far off track.

If my internal phonetic system was slow, phonetic reading would be a disaster. If my mind wasn't able to notice and process many other channels at the same time (including various channels of small textual details) this would also be a poor approach.

———

When I researched self-publishing, there were always special warnings about proof-reading: you just can't read your own prose accurately enough to do this to book standards. "What?" I would say to myself. "Does most of the writing population lack a thorough word-by-word low-range reading style?" Apparently it does. The hard ones to catch (for any proof-reader) are alterations like form/from where all the expected letters are present, both versions are commonplace, and the word shape is also approximately right. The problem with this case is that it can't be detected without devoting an entire eye sacade to every damn individual word (right down to the two-letter prepositions, which is even slower than slow). But we already have language models (via machine learning) that could easily be adapted to underline these particular problematic cases (with high accuracy), if someone cared enough to do so. Basic economics: Why build a narrow, precision tool to aid the competent when you can build a slipshod, broad tool to aid the sloppy and unskilled?

———

Lately I've been reading and viewing Jeff Hawkins' various promulgations of his toddleresque "1000 brains theory". This has loads of implications for how the reading process actually works, neurologically. I'm also reading Michael Spivey's relatively obscure 2007 book The Continuity of Mind. Almost in the same hour, upon switching from one to the other, I was confronted with a resounding polemic against the modular illusion of language processing. Boxes with arrows are down for the count. Language processing in the human brain simply does not work with phonetics feeding up to lexical feeding up to phrasal feeding up to semantic, like a clean computer science diagram on some chalkboard.

Spivey has done actual experiments which show that the neural system responsible for choosing a parse pathway is not just using lexical data, but has a fairly robust model of semantic associations to call upon, as well. (When certain semantic concepts that go together are found together, it can override the default parse as dictated by lexical considerations before anything has had time to complete semantic processing.)

The brain violates the ODR at every level ten time before breakfast. Hawkins believes that the human neocortex models the world with enormous redundancy, every step of the way. This accounts for our amazing ability to fill in almost any blank. The worst Pascal interpreter I ever used, back in the early 1980s, was especially prone to emit "syntax error near or before end of file". Yeah, thanks. I'd already kind of guessed that my syntax error hadn't fallen behind some sofa cushion in the graduate student lounge. And how many times, due to some minor thing, does a file blurp out on your text console as a hideous array of black diamonds and black rectangles? But then in the human setting, three words are overheard through a wall, over a hedge, and up a balcony, and everyone immediately thinks they've gained a key insight into The Ropers entire sex life? Out of tens of thousands of overlapping models, there's always one model which speaks up with the stamp of surety. Hence astrology. Hence palm reading. Hence batshit suppositions in all human domains.

Douglas R. Hofstadter: on seeing A's and seeing As — 22 July 1995

To show the fearsome complexity of the task of letter recognition, I offer the following display of uppercase "A"s, all designed by professional typeface designers and used in advertising and similar functions. [chessboard diagram of ornate letters "A"] What kind of abstraction could lie behind this crazy diversity? Indeed, I once even proposed that the toughest challenge facing AI workers is to answer the question: "What are the letters 'A' and 'I' ?"

Well, he's shaking the wrong tree here (sorry, Doug). The actual answer seems to be that there's a thousand different micro-abstractions, bound together in a distributed, sparse-representation voting system. ODR is not just best practice concerning our long-ascendant box-and-arrow model, but is actually foundational to the entire approach. (If application of the one-definition-rule is even possible, you aren't doing it as the brain does it in any way whatsoever.)

The great thing about great minds is that even when they shake the wrong tree, they are their own worst enemies. Hofstadter desperately clings to abstraction, and in so doing produces the very best exhibit to its fundamental impossibility (as we once viewed this).

The problem with our lingering box-and-arrow fetish is that it motivates us to construct a mental strawwoman of the reading process. Academic writing and educational writing exist within a highly formalized domain of didactic writing, where in the box-and-arrow semantic component is exaggerated like nowhere else in the human cognitive domain. The idea is that words assemble into phrases and clauses, phrases and clauses assemble into sentences. Sentences assemble into paragraphs. Paragraphs assemble into the DOM of educational attainment. The DOM is not a normal form of human comprehension, but it's optimal for testing via multiple choice tests. Who was the subject of sentence #1 in paragraph #1. The DOM will tell you. The DOM also forms a narrow, stylized inference domain. Which we call book learning. And then we call those who ace this form of learning IROCs (idiots right out of college).

Why did I begin this post by describing my own reading verbal comprehension process at 150, 200, 375, 400, 600, and 1200 wpm? Because ye olde box model has no such transmission. The DOM, by any other means, would signify as readily. Which is only true if you think that human knowledge is readily encoded in semantic HTML.

Reading isn't a single skill, but a collection of highly overlapping skills, each suited for a slightly different context. Very often you do want your phonetic (and musical) brain involved. Other texts don't deserve this level of investment, so you want a visual (or gestalt) alternative.

If the reader hasn't developed some fluency is moving across these overlapping modes, you can sure tell when the direction bit is flipped into composing text from scratch (echo chamber not included). Most difficult of all: a truly original insight, where the insight is subjective rather than formal. (This cannot be graded by any algorithm, either human or machine, and amounts to a credentialism anti-particle.)

I once read about some evidence that teaching the shades and nuances of "synonyms" (which in practice are only ever near synonyms) is one of the most time-effective practices in the classroom. The shades and nuances of vocabulary link across sentences and passages, to convey authorial sentiment and intent that the semantic box-and-arrow DOM often completely fails to incorporate. The best authors are tremendously careful about this, whereas the worst authors barely even realize this exists. Unfortunately, this is greatly amplified these days, and the prevailing spirit of tribalism will get you voted off the team if you display any capacity to detect nuance from the other side.

———

Russell conjugation: I am firm. You are obstinate. He is a pig-headed fool.

Partisan Russell-conjugation: My position is concrete and nuanced. Your position is riddled with inconsistencies. Her position is a tissue of lies and evasions.

The underlying dynamics of partisan politics is the pursuit of group conjugal bliss.

———

Forbes: Do You Read Fast Enough To Be Successful? — July 2012

* Third-grade students = 150 wpm
* Eight grade students = 250
* Average college student = 450
* Average "high level exec" = 575
* Average college professor = 675

The average college professor can write grant proposals at 300 wpm, so the ability to read them back again at 675 wpm is hardly that impressive. Above 600 wpm I hazard that even an advanced reader is not detecting new forms of Russell conjugation not previously identified.

———

From Wikipedia:

Harvard's alumni include eight U.S. presidents, more than thirty foreign heads of state, 188 living billionaires, 364 Rhodes Scholars, and 252 Marshall Scholars. As of October 2019, 160 Nobel laureates, 18 Fields Medalists, and 14 Turing Award winners have been affiliated as students, faculty, or researchers. In addition, Harvard students and alumni have won 10 Academy Awards, 48 Pulitzer Prizes, and 108 Olympic medals (46 gold, 41 silver, and 21 bronze), as well as founded many notable companies worldwide.

Every fancy university has such a paragraph in Wikipedia.

What is the appropriate reading speed for "as well as founded many notable companies worldwide"? 10,000 wpm? What does 85% comprehension even mean against such a paragraph?

I consider myself to be at 99% comprehension in a single glance: alumni blowjob blowjob blowjob, faculty blowjob blowjob, student blowjob blowjob, athletics blowjob blowjob blowjob blowjob (athletics being the only category that really matters, which is why it's the only category necessitating its own private pivot table).

A far more interesting statistic would be how often they turned away entrance applications from students who went on to win these awards somewhere else, but alas this statistic is far less rigorously pursued. Then you could divide one into the other to obtain an admittance ratio, which would demonstrate actual skill in the sorting hat, rather than mere blind luck (and institutional endurance) in managing an elitist horn of plenty.

———

Long ago I actually studied Mandarin for a year. Ideographs tend to bypass verbal processing and go directly to visual-semantic association. But then you spend an extra three years learning how to draw all the characters correctly. And I suspect you sacrifice imagination on both sides. (A favourite form of Chinese word play at the phonetic level is to apply regional accents to chosen phrases to hilarious effect. I'm not sure how much punning plays a role in texts consumed at Western reading speeds. On my own experience, I suspect there's probably not much scope, as the visual is far more primary. But you still teach the characters at an analytic level, via their internal radicals.)

———

Here's a passage I found myself wading through, just the other day.

Scholarpedia on grid cells

Current experimental data are not conclusive as to whether and to what extent plasticity is required for grid to place transformations. While synaptic plasticity is necessary for shaping and stabilizing the hippocampal spatial representation in a novel environment, modifications in the connectivity matrix may not be required for manifestation of place-specific firing as such. Spatially confined firing fields can still be seen in CA1 pyramidal neurons after deletion of NMDA receptors in CA3 or CA, suggesting that, at short time scales, place fields can be generated and maintained by pre-existing connections or by non-NMDA-receptor-dependent plasticity, at least in some hippocampal areas.

Are you reading that phonologically? By the "whole word" method? Or is there yet a third regime which one must somehow master, bootstrapping from a bit of both? For that kind of text, I don't think reading speed is even a defined quantity. You read the entire article once, hope a few things sink in. Then you read it again, and hope a few more things sink in. Then you read an entire paper devoted to "deletion of NMDA receptors in CA3 or CA" then you come back and read it again. Then you read an entire paper devoted to the "hippocampal spatial representation connectivity matrix" and you come back and read this again. Eventually you're not actually reading this, but referencing this against a large body of highly internalized knowledge (or perhaps bootstrapping the same as it begins to fade from top of mind).

———

Digital Minimalism (2019) by Cal Newport, associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University.

Not surprisingly, I'm not the only person to discover this particular solitude hack. As Kethledge and Erwin report in their book, Dwight Eisenhower leveraged a "practice of thinking by writing" throughout his career to make sense of complicated decisions and to tame intense emotions. ... This practice asks you to embrace this well-validated strategy by making time to write a letter to yourself when faced with demanding or uncertain circumstances. You can follow my lead and keep a special notebook for the purpose, or, like Abraham Lincoln, you can grab a scrap of paper when the need arises. The key is the act of writing itself.

What I discovered about my own voluminous reading practice is that if I don't force my fresh knowledge back out of my fingers again, it never takes deep root.

Trite comprehension: regurgitating the box-and-arrow DOM via multiple choice.

Fully owned comprehension: deep creative synthesis and cross-pollination, expressed as written text.

There's a lot more involved in reading—done right—than merely becoming the next Jeopardy! contestant. I wager that very few of Harvard's 18 living-and-dead Fields medalists can cite the number of Olympic bronze medals won by Harvard's living-and-dead alumni.

(Oh, you didn't notice all the august dead bodies? Well, maybe you should read slower than my suggested 10,000 wpm blowjob blow off after all.)

Do you realize you can get pretty powerful generators (900W continuous) with a 42 dBA SPL rating (about the quietest dishwasher you can find)? Essentially inaudible from more than 10 meters away...

Since Edge has less than 5% market share despite Microsoft actively pushing it for years now, I'm sure that Google will survive this just fine.

Get a small Honda generator. 900W continuous, half a gallon of gas will give you 6 hours, and it's about as loud as a quiet dishwasher. If you can hear it from 30 feet away - it's got something broken in it.

Thank goodness private corporations are making laws now!
They will be so much more efficient than the stupid old government, and we won't have to worry about those pointless "elections" anymore.

If he invented SMTP, I'm going to skip the memorial. That man was a monster.

WTF? Have you done the slightest bit of research? I can answer! No you've not.

But the Volvo was capable of full, unattended stopping when
encountering an obstacle, and came that way from the factory.
But the geniuses at Uber decided to turn that off for no particular reason.

Yup. Incompetent, entitled, and neither willing nor able to properly discuss or argue. Dreadful people.

I flipped because it is utilitarian smart and cheap to use that design. There is literally no bigger douche on the roads than the person who drives a truck for looks. Sports cars are for playboys, trucks are for getting things done. The strong replaceable flat panels bring the price down to levels blue collar folks can afford it, which means a Tesla has their eye on the ball of doing things.

...and I just sold it. now I can stop talking about it. Right after this: It does that by using an alusil block and synthetic oil. Alusil blocks are the business, although if you have them bored out you have to do special stuff to the cylinder to refinish it. Basically you have to run a special hone through it that removes the aluminum from the surface, but not the silica.

"I can sell you an old crt tv. "

I still have an EGA monitor lying around.

So many ideas about using laws to protect criminals and the publication of images of criminals...
Let the world see who is doing crime.
Show the police who did crime.
The police can then use the images/video to find the criminal/s. Just like with CCTV after the report of a crime.
Criminals walk onto private property and take property with the intent to permanently deprive? Thats a crime.
What is it about the modern world seeing who is doing crime?

What is it about who is doing the crime that has this need to comment so much about privacy protections when doing crime?
To demand laws, an end to press freedom, the end to CCTV, the end to showing police CCTV images, the end to uploading the resulting video for the world to see?

Who are the criminals that need and expect so much privacy?
Why no care and support for the poor, working poor, middle class and wealthy people who are the victims of crime?

Why should a poor person not get to show the world who stole their property and ask the police why their local crime rate is so ignored by decades of city politcs?
As a poor person on a low wage then have to work for hours to make back the money to "buy"/"replace" what is stolen by criminals, could have to expect more insurance costs?

But no, its all about who is seeing the criminal and reporting the crime...

A lot of people, including me, are willing to put appearance way down on the list of priorities. The problem here is that a lot of people also aren't willing to drive something so different looking that is attracts attention, including me. I don't want to have everyone's eyes on me in town and on the highway. Call it silly human behaviour, sure, but such a offbeat style will need to hit some level of critical mass before a large portion of the population will accept looking so different. This has been proven time and time again, regardless of the rational benefits.

Sorry, monkey. Ability to improvise is a sign of intelligence that trained monkeys lack. Do go back to your pre-trained "in production" code in PHP.

And it's not even like string reversal is a super-complicated task.

Linux and FreeBSD as too.

https://constantin.glez.de/201...

https://constantin.glez.de/201...