Professionalism is more about consistency than killing passion, when I deal with one "professional" I should get much the same result and work product as I would if I did with any other "professional" in the same field. That can often result in blandness or lack of passion but it is certainly not the goal. Jokes being subjective are unlikely to ever have a place in a "professional" setting because one person's joke is another's insult.

I'm not too familiar with GNU but if it is indeed a passion project then professionalism really has little place, idiosyncrasy is what makes true passion projects shine and it is a mark of a successful project that it can deliver good product while still remaining weird in its own way.

This is basically what I thought. I really don't want to work with/for an idiot that thinks facial recognition on a bot is a good way to screen for anything. What if the candidate is disfigured or has some other non-normal facial structure, let alone maybe the connection is bad and the visuals get scrambled or any number of other factors.

Sure humans are biased and a "mathematical" way of finding the best new candidate would be nice but even the idea of comparing to an existing workforce is god awful - the best new employee you hire is often the one that is different from your existing team because new ideas and processes tend to promote efficiency.

The problem is that the hand sanitisers people are now using in their home - yourself included - are on par or even the exact same as those that the doctors will use to sanitise you before surgery. If you use hand sanitisers frequently, the only microbes that will survive on your skin are those that are immune to the sanitiser. This means that in a situation where you absolutely must be sterile - say for example when a doctor is cutting you open - there is no way to sterilise your skin because you've nurtured a culture of immune microbes there. It is a developing problem that is similar to antibiotic resistance.

I don't overly agree with the graph because it uses modern fluctuations (which are not smoothed) and compares them to paleo scale fluctuations which can be smoothed over centuries and even millennia however you are incorrect here.

It took blowing the graph out to a pixel level but by my measure, about half of the graphed 61-90 line is below (to the left of) the line showing the average. It isn't a very precise graph but in general XKCD is very effective in using the data that is available to him and he seems to be pretty meticulous when he chooses to present something as "science".

I personally doubt some of the data but have no way to back that doubt up. Even given that I wouldn't claim the XKCD comic is wrong as it presents the data effectively and interestingly.

The paper linked is actually pretty interesting and gives some cool examples, including a floating point overflow that managed to zero out any penalties the AI would receive.

Most interesting is the Tic Tac Toe AI that one by causing OOM errors in it's opponent. All opponents had dynamically expanding boards held in memory so the AI which was encoding moves rather than boards would just fire off a move in the billions of X,Y coordinates and crash its opponent.

I'm a huge fan of evolutionary algorithms - really wish I had the time to dive into them.

http://www.theinvisiblegorilla...

Human perception isn't very good. for a lot of people, focusing on the dark road, staying within the road markings, checking out what is ahead on the road - these things would make it possible to completely miss someone wandering into your field of vision.

A great recent example of this is labor declaring a new tax idea. Decent idea to tax a very narrow type of income differently (dividends). Huge public outcry caused them to back down on it. This all happened (suggest, outcry, retreat) over a couple of days.

Our politicians are too spineless to put real change through, instead they just cruise along while infrastructure goes to shit, wage growth stagnates and housing prices sky rocket. I think the last effective PM we've had was Howard - for good (guns) and bad (work choices) at least he got stuff done.

Not exactly true. The government issued a legal and appropriate fine. There are other recourse to have the fine reversed which either failed or were ignored - given he had the chip in hand he could have disputed the fine by proving he had in fact paid for the trip and it likely would have been reversed.

Instead of having the fine reversed he decided to go to court, effectively he is suing the government at this point - the government has no choice but to respond, the guy has a right to his day in court. Turns out the court decided he was wrong so he pays the price.

The Australian fines system is actually pretty nice - there are a bunch of layers to it so you don't get wrongly charged. This guy, unfortunately, appears to be ahead of the times. He's also an idiot for riding a train without a valid ticket and then claiming he had one.

One of the problems I have with the priority that people put on Global warming is that it can be shot down. If you believe global warming is not an issue then C02 is not a pollutant, in fact a higher concentration of C02 is beneficial. Again, that is if you believe global warming is not a problem.

What is a huge problem is smog and other particulate air pollution. There are areas on the planet where the air is nearly unbreathable due to human pollution but every time I hear about environmentalists pushing for improvement it is to stop Global warming.

It is such an odd thing to target Global warming as the big environmental issue because everyone knows one side will dismiss it completely and even if you have support ot fix it, no one really can come up with a viable long term solution. Why not target the pollution that is actively visible and that can be eliminated in years rather than a looming disaster that will eventuate over centuries (maybe).

I looked this up a decade ago so my recollection or reality might be a bit different now but there are roughly two things that side step the false advertising:
The first is that every plan that deals with speed advertises "up to" that speed and usually make it clear that that is the theoretical maximum.
The second is that most of the connections are referred to as some form of "Broadband". Which is defined as somewhere around faster than dial up.
So if your up to 100mbps line is getting 1mbps you're still "up to" and you're still "Broadband" so the ISP is covered. You can switch if you want but you'll need to pay out your 24 month contract that you're locked into.

You're correct, however consider this also:
- Many people don't have insurance because the up front cost is too high or does not correlate with the risk mitigated.
- Many people choose not to live a healthy life because they prefer the comforts that come with an unhealthy life - even when they are aware of the negative consequences.

When it comes to mitigating "potential undesirable outcomes", people will often choose not to because the personal cost is too high - either in new costs or in reduction of day to day quality of life.
When it comes to the planet, those "potential undesirable outcomes" have been so badly over sensationalized that it is impossible to tell what we should actually be worried about. I mean mercury? Really?

Human communication is more (and in some ways less) nuanced than animal. Looking certain animals in the eye has an approximate human equivalent of drawing a weapon. Animals react appropriately to what THEY perceive as a direct threat, not what YOU perceive as threatening.

Feh, just realized I didn't read far enough, that wikipedia article quotes about 5 different possible values eventually settling on

The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report stated: Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5 ÂC to 4.5 ÂC (high confidence), extremely unlikely less than 1 ÂC (high confidence), and very unlikely greater than 6 ÂC (medium confidence).

So there is uncertainty still but your report is pretty accurate with current thinking. My bad.

Your source:

Doubling carbon dioxide content in the earth's atmosphere raises the temperature of the atmosphere (assuming relative humidity is fixed) by about two degrees Celsius.

Current thinking:

"Without any feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 (which amounts to a forcing of 3.7 W/m2) would result in 1 ÂC global warming, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity#cite_note-rahmstorf2008-14)

Your "spot-on" report predicted TWICE as much warming as current science predicts.

The trouble comes when you only look at the outcome - if 50% of white american people fail a geography test but 100% of Chinese applicants succeed is it because the test was biased against white people or because it was trying to figure out if they had a basic understanding of Chinese geography ?

It's what makes the gender disparity question so very difficult, each case needs to be looked at on its own merits but when people have a conversation at a generalised level, the specifics get lost and only the extremes remain.