Comment Congratulations! (Score 1) 2
Mine just turned 2 - premature, but dodged NICU by a matter of hours. Also missed my birthday (and my mother-in-law's) by one day!
Comment Re:Moo (Score 1) 5
Also still here, looking forward to hearing your take on it!
Comment Not the first nor the last (Score 2) 34
Until Apple or Samsung put their efforts into AR, I don't see anyone else being able to go to market with a VR solution. Even Google tried and failed with the Google Glass a decade ago. While I love the idea, I don't think the market is there for this yet (and might not be for a long time outside of large cities).
Comment We hear this every year (Score 4, Interesting) 201
There are different and distinct uses for tablets and laptops. Until we get full power-user options for tablets such as shell access and the ability to install arbitrary files, its hard to do all workflows through a tablet. Even being able to ssh into a remote service and do tests, its still not completely viable for many of my workflows. The one advantage the Microsoft Surface has is that its a full Win10 operating system on standard processors, giving me a lot of flexibility without having to root the device.
I'd love to see VSCode or similar programs take this on as a challenge and provide the ability for me to work with my git repos, and provide some remote shells to test my code in. With Azure its all within their ecosystem if they are willing to spend the time / energy.
Comment Re:I told you this was coming... (Score 1) 110
I hate to say I told you so, but....
So the question becomes, will people with these kinds of chips have to also have easily recognizable tatoos on their faces so that people around them will know that everything that people do and say around them may be essentially getting recorded for all time?
Yes, Mike Tyson is one of the fortunate few to have already gotten an implant.
Comment Prime phones (Score 4, Interesting) 34
Amazon already sells Prime phones. They are cheaper than unlocked phones, but with a locked bootloader, and with Amazon ads on the homescreen and lockscreen.
I could imagine their Prime phones now coming with free data.
Comment Moving Circle (Score 1) 3
Still here via post notification - following a few of the old Circle via Twitter, and I did try LJ for a while too. Missing Multiply though.
Comment Re:Wow, someone has a very high opinion of themsel (Score 3, Interesting) 84
You probably don't know this. Epic have had more than just one hit game.
First released game appeared in 1992 as Epic (and one before that in 1991 with another company name) I really dare you to put out a full blown release of a game software product running on just one platform, even with today's free tools and git-ware. It takes a lot more time than you can imagine.
In Those 30 years, the tiny company Epic managed to outsmart Id, Sony, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Valve, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Crytek, Take2, Vivendi, Infinity Ward, Bioware, Capcom, TT, SquareEnix Sierra, Dynamics, Microprose, ActiBliz, Rockstar, Naughty Dog, Mojang, Dice, Treyarch, Bethesda and many more. That's a hell of lot of industry competition to handle. They did not simply manage, they were setting the rules at every step of the way.
Journal Journal: You found here 3
and there you are
Comment Re:Modern UX design (Score 1) 138
How much of this is the vast technical resources Alphabet / Google have accumulated over the years needing something to do. Everyone wants to make their mark and instead of incremental improvements, they rely on massive change to stake out a claim. Youtube's problem is largely chasing dollars and wanting to rebrand themselves as TV instead fo what made Youtube great.
Submission + - Boot to the Head: When You Know that Google Just Doesn't Care Anymore (vortex.com)
Lauren Weinstein writes: If you’ve ever needed more evidence that Google just doesn’t care about users who have become “inconvenient” to their new business models, one need only look at the saga of their ongoing handling of their announced Google+ shutdown.
Submission + - Hack Allows Escape of Play-with-Docker Containers (threatpost.com)
secwatcher writes: Researchers hacked the Docker test platform called Play-with-Docker, allowing them to access data and manipulate any test Docker containers running on the host system. The proof-of-concept hack does not impact production Docker instances, according to CyberArk researchers that developed the proof-of-concept attack.
“The team was able to escape the container and run code remotely right on the host, which has obvious security implications,” wrote researchers in a technical write-up posted Monday.
“The team was able to escape the container and run code remotely right on the host, which has obvious security implications,” wrote researchers in a technical write-up posted Monday.
Submission + - PG&E to file for bankruptcy following devastating California wildfires (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: California’s largest power company intends to file for bankruptcy as it faces tens of billions of dollars in potential liability following massive wildfires that devastated parts of the state over the last two years, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said Monday that declaring insolvency is “ultimately the only viable option to restore PG&E’s financial stability to fund ongoing operations and provide safe service to customers.”
The California wildfires, which have killed dozens of people and destroyed thousands of homes, have led to a surge in insurance claims. PG&E estimates that it could be held liable for more than $30 billion, according to the SEC filing, which does not include potential punitive damages, fines or damages tied to future claims.
Several top officials of the Brown administration previously worked for PG&E and Gov Brown's sister, former California State Treasurer Kathleen Brown, serves on the Sempra Energy board of directors.
Pacific Gas and Electric Co. said Monday that declaring insolvency is “ultimately the only viable option to restore PG&E’s financial stability to fund ongoing operations and provide safe service to customers.”
The California wildfires, which have killed dozens of people and destroyed thousands of homes, have led to a surge in insurance claims. PG&E estimates that it could be held liable for more than $30 billion, according to the SEC filing, which does not include potential punitive damages, fines or damages tied to future claims.
Several top officials of the Brown administration previously worked for PG&E and Gov Brown's sister, former California State Treasurer Kathleen Brown, serves on the Sempra Energy board of directors.
Submission + - A Neural Network Can Learn To Recognize the World It Sees Into Concepts (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader writes: As good as they are at causing mischief, researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab realized GANs, or generative adversarial networks, are also a powerful tool: because they paint what they’re “thinking,” they could give humans insight into how neural networks learn and reason. This has been something the broader research community has sought for a long time—and it’s become more important with our increasing reliance on algorithms. So the researchers began probing a GAN’s learning mechanics by feeding it various photos of scenery—trees, grass, buildings, and sky. They wanted to see whether it would learn to organize the pixels into sensible groups without being explicitly told how. Stunningly, over time, it did. By turning “on” and “off” various “neurons” and asking the GAN to paint what it thought, the researchers found distinct neuron clusters that had learned to represent a tree, for example. Other clusters represented grass, while still others represented walls or doors. In other words, it had managed to group tree pixels with tree pixels and door pixels with door pixels regardless of how these objects changed color from photo to photo in the training set.
Not only that, but the GAN seemed to know what kind of door to paint depending on the type of wall pictured in an image. It would paint a Georgian-style door on a brick building with Georgian architecture, or a stone door on a Gothic building. It also refused to paint any doors on a piece of sky. Without being told, the GAN had somehow grasped certain unspoken truths about the world. Being able to identify which clusters correspond to which concepts makes it possible to control the neural network’s output. The researchers can turn on just the tree neurons, for example, to make the GAN paint trees, or turn on just the door neurons to make it paint doors. Language networks, similarly, can be manipulated to change their output — say, to swap the gender of the pronouns while translating from one language to another. “We’re starting to enable the ability for a person to do interventions to cause different outputs,” Bau says. The team has now released an app called GANpaint that turns this newfound ability into an artistic tool. It allows you to turn on specific neuron clusters to paint scenes of buildings in grassy fields with lots of doors. Beyond its silliness as a playful outlet, it also speaks to the greater potential of this research.
Not only that, but the GAN seemed to know what kind of door to paint depending on the type of wall pictured in an image. It would paint a Georgian-style door on a brick building with Georgian architecture, or a stone door on a Gothic building. It also refused to paint any doors on a piece of sky. Without being told, the GAN had somehow grasped certain unspoken truths about the world. Being able to identify which clusters correspond to which concepts makes it possible to control the neural network’s output. The researchers can turn on just the tree neurons, for example, to make the GAN paint trees, or turn on just the door neurons to make it paint doors. Language networks, similarly, can be manipulated to change their output — say, to swap the gender of the pronouns while translating from one language to another. “We’re starting to enable the ability for a person to do interventions to cause different outputs,” Bau says. The team has now released an app called GANpaint that turns this newfound ability into an artistic tool. It allows you to turn on specific neuron clusters to paint scenes of buildings in grassy fields with lots of doors. Beyond its silliness as a playful outlet, it also speaks to the greater potential of this research.
Submission + - Plants Can Hear Animals Using Their Flowers (theatlantic.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The latest experiments in this niche but increasingly vocal field come from Lilach Hadany and Yossi Yovel at Tel Aviv University. In one set, they showed that some plants can hear the sounds of animal pollinators and react by rapidly sweetening their nectar. In a second set, they found that other plants make high-pitched noises that lie beyond the scope of human hearing but can nonetheless be detected some distance away. After the team released early copies of two papers describing their work, not yet published in a scientific journal, I ran them past several independent researchers. Some of these researchers have argued that plants are surprisingly communicative; others have doubted the idea. Their views on the new studies, however, didn’t fall along obvious partisan lines. Almost unanimously, they loved the paper asserting that plants can hear and were skeptical about the one reporting that plants make noise. Those opposite responses to work done by the same team underscore how controversial this line of research still is, and how hard it is to study the sensory worlds of organisms that are so different from us.
First, two team members, Marine Veits and Itzhak Khait, checked whether beach evening primroses could hear. In both lab experiments and outdoor trials, they found that the plants would react to recordings of a bee’s wingbeats by increasing the concentration of sugar in their nectar by about 20 percent. They did so in response only to the wingbeats and low frequency, pollinator-like sounds, not to those of higher pitch. And they reacted very quickly, sweetening their nectar in less than three minutes. That’s probably fast enough to affect a visiting bee, but even if that insect flies away too quickly, the plant is ready to better entice the next visitor. After all, the presence of one pollinator almost always means that there are more around. But if plants can hear, what are their ears? The team’s answer is surprising, yet tidy: It’s the flowers themselves. They used lasers to show that the primrose’s petals vibrate when hit by the sounds of a bee’s wingbeats. If they covered the blooms with glass jars, those vibrations never happened, and the nectar never sweetened. The flower, then, could act like the fleshy folds of our outer ears, channeling sound further into the plant. (Where? No one knows yet!)
First, two team members, Marine Veits and Itzhak Khait, checked whether beach evening primroses could hear. In both lab experiments and outdoor trials, they found that the plants would react to recordings of a bee’s wingbeats by increasing the concentration of sugar in their nectar by about 20 percent. They did so in response only to the wingbeats and low frequency, pollinator-like sounds, not to those of higher pitch. And they reacted very quickly, sweetening their nectar in less than three minutes. That’s probably fast enough to affect a visiting bee, but even if that insect flies away too quickly, the plant is ready to better entice the next visitor. After all, the presence of one pollinator almost always means that there are more around. But if plants can hear, what are their ears? The team’s answer is surprising, yet tidy: It’s the flowers themselves. They used lasers to show that the primrose’s petals vibrate when hit by the sounds of a bee’s wingbeats. If they covered the blooms with glass jars, those vibrations never happened, and the nectar never sweetened. The flower, then, could act like the fleshy folds of our outer ears, channeling sound further into the plant. (Where? No one knows yet!)
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