I often end up with an unwieldy number of tabs and I've recently been looking at ways of managing them. The situation does not look good though. Tab Groups was removed from Firefox and the impending Webextensions crippling of Firefox is apparently going to make it almost impossible to port over existing addons that allow for tab management.

There have been plenty of real advances in the last few years, not just speed improvements. For me, the most impressive thing was Generative Adversarial Networks in 2014, but there have been plenty of advances. The most recent article I read was on Relational Reasoning https://www.technologyreview.c... .

Here as some more recent advances
Turing Learning - https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ne...
Evolution Strategies - https://www.technologyreview.c...
Bayesian Program Synthesis - https://techxplore.com/news/20...
Gaussian Processes - https://www.wired.com/2017/02/...
AI Passes Standard Intelligence Test - https://phys.org/news/2017-01-...
Semi-Supervised Learning For Handwriting Recognition - https://phys.org/news/2016-12-...
Lipreading - https://www.technologyreview.c...
One-Shot Learning - https://www.technologyreview.c...
Differentiable Neural Computer - http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...
Bayesian Program Learning - http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech...

With Venezuela it was more of a case of them being too reliant on oil than anything else. A number of oil reliant capitalist countries in the middle east were also getting to the point of being seriously in trouble, ultimately they had enough cash reserves to ride it out though.

As for Greece, they were going crazy with their money, even wasting a huge amount on the Olympics. It was more stupidity than socialism. The fact they were part of the euro severely curtailed their options though, e.g. being unable to devalue their currency.

You can't really just say Socialism. It all depends on the figures. You can tax enough so that you can keep the poor healthy and at least keep a roof over their heads or you can go crazy and tax so much that their is little to be gained from anyone putting the effort in to anything. Then again you can tax so little that only the rich can afford health care and shelter and let the poor rot. The argument is all about where you fall on that axis.

Also, the idea of socialist countries being crazy borrowers (like Greece) isn't always the case. In the UK the conservatives (capitalists) have spent more than Labour, it's just that they like to spend it on big stupid projects where their corporate friends get rich rather than helping out the poor.

It certainly highlights the need for people to be able to give their voice-activated devices completely custom names. I would even suggest that Google, Amazon and others should recommend that people change from the default name straight away.

I really got the feeling that Hololens was just being used to create excitement around Windows 10, rather than being a serious product in itself. In their demos they just show you a composite video image rather than what is seen optically through the device, which is a highly misleading thing to do. The actual field of view is apparently terrible.

If the vote was about not taking any kind of economic risk whatsoever, then yes, Brexiter's have been stupid. However, the issues went far beyond economics. You mention the "Iron boot heel of EU tyranny", and while you may feel that comically exaggerating people's concerns may make then look stupid, sovereignty has long been an issue. It was the issue of sovereignty that largely factored into Labour's policy of leaving the EEC (Precursor to the EU) in the early 80s. They were concerned that the EU might impose corporatist policies on the UK amongst other things. Jacques Delors managed to convince them that the EU would only impose socialist policies on the UK and they were soundly fooled by this and dropped their EEC objections. Some prominent Labour MP's like Tony Benn never believed him and never dropped their objections.

I personally have objections to the EU over it's neo-liberal policies (they approved CETA for one!), it's destructive austerity-pushing and anti-democratic activities. Many people in the UK feel we should never have had a referendum, although that is mainly because they lost. Referendums are an important part of any democracy and are in fact an act of true democracy, rather than the representative democracy we are usually lumbered with. The EU has a history of bullying countries into refraining from holding referendums, ignoring the results (e.g. the EU constitution becomes the Lisbon Treaty) and even harassing countries into holding them again when the "wrong" result occurs (Ireland and the Lisbon Treaty).

The other issue with the EU is that it is not content to simply remain a loose coalition of countries engaging in economic cooperation. There is an inexorable march towards something much more like a superstate, and the UK is far from the only member to have concerns about it. This process has only accelerated under Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. For example, there are moves toward having an EU army and countries like Sweden have strong objections to this. In 1975 the people of the UK voted to approve membership of the ECC, a fairly loose nine member organisation. They did not vote for a 28 member EU with far tighter integration. Whether you like the EU or not, this clearly demonstrates that it is an organisation than can change quite dramatically over time, and it's not always for the better. Many people are unhappy with that level of change and the associated unpredictability. Furthermore, you cannot rely on national democratic forces to bring a halt to superstate ambitions. The EU has demonstrated time and time again that it is willing to ignore, subvert and do end runs around national objections to its future plans. We've seen this most clearly over the EU Constitution and Lisbon treaties.

Before the referendum, I talked at length with other socialist friends about the EU, and they agreed there were serious issues over democracy, neo-liberalism, austerity etc . Yet as soon as the result came out, they became completely polarized. Suddenly the EU never did anything wrong, everyone was racist (because of course, that is the only possible reason anyone would want to leave the EU) and they even seemed to want Britain to fail as a result, presumably to teach Brexiters some kind of lesson. Both sides have acted reprehensibly since the referendum with childish attempts at marginalizing each other, name calling etc. We've had older people calling the younger generation "snowflakes" and the younger generation even calling for the disenfranchisement of the elderly because they are old and won't have to live with their decision (presumably this would also have to apply to young people who are terminally ill or have chronic life-threatening conditions).

People need to take a step back, calm down and accept that there were both good and bad sides to the EU and move on. There will certainly be economic challenges ahead, but outside of the EU we will be able to make international deals more quickly, so there certainly is a chance of success. Regardless of the way people voted, they should be hoping that we make a success of it.

As AI and automation improve, a large population is going to be a burden, not an asset. China is largely rich because they have become the world's manufacturing hub and this is largely because of low labour costs. Increasing automation will negate that advantage and manufacturing will start moving closer to the market. Their never-ending rise may come to an abrupt halt and even start reversing.

HoloLens has almost exclusively used fake demos from the very beginning. People who have actually used HoloLens report poor field of view and semi-transparent graphics, yet the demos all show perfect wide-angle non-transparent graphics that have clearly just been composited over the video signal. Magic leap tried a similar trick for their first demo (with the steam punk ray guns) but all the subsequent videos did appear to be shot directly through their device. Of course, we never actually saw the device, so it could have just been their unwieldy and unwearable prototype. The only new information here seems to be that Magic Leap are struggling with miniaturising their scanned fibre display, but that is quite a serious issue.

It doesn't seem to matter how low you set it, they always try to avoid paying it. Companies who moved to Ireland for their low corporate tax immediately started avoiding that too.

https://www.theguardian.com/te...

There are already AI programs that can create using Deep Learning Though. For example, they are some that can create paintings in the style of famous artists. It's true that there are more pattern recognition programs than creation programs, but they are there.

The more oppressive the state becomes, the more you need to remember. I used to work with a Kurdish man who told me that they never used to write down anyone's telephone number, since if you were arrested, they might round up your phone contacts too.

They also need to understand that people were crying out for something different, but instead they stubbornly served up Hilary. I just hope the US doesn't go the way of the UK with half the population foaming at the mouth, stamping their feet and accusing the other half of being racist morons.

That is the nonsensical narrative that has been successfully been pushed on Brexit Britain.

Leaving an economic union that we were always highly sceptical of was inevitably going to be on the cards at some point. The idea that leaving the EU is a far right and therefore dumb decision is very reductive and ignores history. People seem to forget that Labour was opposed to the EU (then the EEC) in the early 80s and left-wingers like Tony Benn never gave up their opposition. There is a whole left-wing argument against the EU that was never really heard during the Brexit debates, but nonetheless, many socialists did vote out. That the left would support the EU seems almost perverse given the EU's neo-liberalism, austerity-pushing and anti-democratic practices.