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Comment Re:AI without robots will never go platinum (Score 1) 49

It's kind of funny reading this comment from a few days in the future, when Google has just published a blog post describing their work on dextrous manipulators, with great progress in things such as tying shoelaces and hanging clothes on a coat hanger and putting it on a rack, and doing simple repairs to another robot.

https://deepmind.google/discov...

Comment People learn better without grades (Score 1) 346

Here's a happiness lab podcast on the subject of how grades were introduced by Ezra Styles in 1785, and the science of how people both learn better and are happier in an environment without grades: https://www.happinesslab.fm/se... (the episode page has links to related publications).

Comment Re:Still using Windowmaker (Score 1) 205

Fellow windowmaker user here too (since about 0.18). Over the recent years I have tried cinnamon, mate, whatever-ubuntu-used-to-ship-with (and if we go back further, fvwm, afterstep, enlightenment, ratpoison, kde). But windowmaker is fast, lightweight, and gets out of the way. Optionally slap on compiz and a nice launcher like synapse and you are done.

Comment Re:wikipedia: List of mechanical keyboards (Score 1) 363

You might like the VE.A keyboard ( https://www.massdrop.com/buy/v... but at this point you're looking at second hand) or the clone that is readily available (if you're slightly adventurous) on TaoBao ( https://item.taobao.com/item.h... ) -- It was the first mechanical keyboard I moved to after years using MS Natural keyboards. I have since moved on to using a self-made ReDox keyboard https://github.com/mattdibi/re... but that might be a step too far for you at this stage.

Comment Re:pivot language? (Score 3, Informative) 46

I'm not sure to what extent it relates to the specific offline translation modules in the translate app, but a while back the Google Research blog had a post on multi-lingual machine translation models (and that let them do translation between two languages for which they didn't have direct translation training corpus). So at least in that case, there is just a single translation model rather than separate input and output models that go to and from an IR.

https://ai.googleblog.com/2016...

Comment Re:I mean I got this article through RSS (Score 1) 438

Absolutely, RSS is fantastic and it gives you the user control over which news you follow, and makes following sites with infrequent but informative updates easy to manage.

I've never used an RSS reader app -- instead I use rss2email to fire all the RSS feeds at my gmail account, where a swag of standard gmail filters categorize based on source or content into different labels. For more advanced aggregation and filtering I used to use yahoo pipes, but now that I has been shut down I do custom filtering with huginn.

Consuming the RSS via email means I only have to deal an email client for all my regular mail, mailing lists, and rss, with automatic syncing betwee desktop, mobile, etc. It also means you can easily search your archives for older RSS entries.

Comment Re:X also has stuff! (Score 1) 227

We are already losing the benefits of X window managers via the rise of client-side decorations. Where once you had a nice consistent interface to all the windows on your desktop via the window manager of your choosing, now you end up with an inconsistent mess, with some having their decorations and behaviour handled by the window manager, and some directly provided by the app.

For example most of the newer gnome apps draw their own crappy window decorations, and when I drag the windows near the top of the screen they automatically decide to maximize themselves, which is not something my normal window manager (Window Maker) does.

Comment Re:not bashing Kim (Score 1) 90

MEGA have a ton of code on github, including their whole client-side SDK, so (just as with tools like gnupg) as long as you can ensure you are running the same code as is on github, you can have the same level of trust as you would have in other open-source, audited encryption tools. As you note, the website version of MEGA could potentially be updated without you knowing, but with the browser plug-in versions and the mobile apps it's possible to turn off auto-updating.

Submission + - UNDER U.S. PRESSURE, PAYPAL NUKES MEGA FOR ENCRYPTING FILES (torrentfreak.com)

seoras writes: After coming under intense pressure PayPal has closed the account of cloud-storage service Mega. According to the company, SOPA proponent Senator Patrick Leahy personally pressured Visa and Mastercard who in turn called on PayPal to terminate the account. Bizarrely, Mega's encryption is being cited as a key problem.... ... What makes the situation more unusual is that PayPal reportedly apologized to Mega for its withdrawal while acknowledging that company’s business is indeed legitimate.
However, PayPal also advised that Mega’s unique selling point – it’s end-to-end-encryption – was a key concern for the processor."

Comment Re:Google Plus (Score 2) 146

I'm not sure why the parent got modded up as it does not meet the OP needs -- they explicitly said they wanted a local solution. For many people with data caps on their cellular and or home internet connection, syncing videos to your PC via the internet is not viable as you use double the bandwidth.

G+ is also monster for eating your cellular data -- even after telling it to sync photos etc via wifi only it still destroyed my data cap one day, I assume this was in some attempt to download an "autoawesome" video that had been generated but didn't obey the wifi-only preference.

To answer the local sync question, I use FolderSync, as another poster below mentioned already.

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