I interviewed with GitLab and declined going further once I found out that I'd be getting 63.3% of a San Francisco (their baseline) employee simply because of where I live. My state was one that didn't have any special locales carved out for different COLAs. Sure, my state is vastly cheaper than CA, NY, etc. but companies like GitLab think they should be involved in some type of socioeconomic re-distribution of wealth by adjusting as much as they do for geographic reasons. The quality of my work is the same whether I'm in the middle of Kansas or in downtown San Francisco. GitLab knows if they look long enough a candidate in a remote low cost of living area will look at their salaries and see $$$ and gladly accept but I knew I could get higher because I had previously and did again by applying to other companies. I can understand having some regional differences but I think GitLab takes it too far.

Having recently got into 3D printing, i can get 1kg of filament for $20. Not only is that far more useful than a print out, it turns out it's cheaper too. You see, to 3D print text on your 3D printer at 0.1mm layer height, your spool is far cheaper and last longer and you'll get more sheets than any ink cartridge.

Ink comes in at 2.25 cents per page.
Filament comes in at .75 cents per page.

Staining words on paper is ridiculously expensive compared to giving them physical embodiment. That just seems wrong.

The first time I wrote a an AI system to collect pictures from mobile phones (2014), the *first thing* I did after decrypting it was to apply the EXIF orientation and remove the tag, so there could be no possibility that anywhere down the line it could be displayed wrong. In Node.JS, I used jpeg-autorotate.

This is a no-brainer. But in theory with enough samples, the AI would learn the various rotations of your hotdog in your hotdog/not-hotdog classifier.

Most of the farmland in America is fed by aquifers. My favorite is the Ogallala aquifer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) which runs from south South Dakota to northern Texas. The quiger is being depleted at an alarming rate, current estimates predict that around 2050 the water will run out. When this happens, it will be catastrophic not just for the US, but for the world, as the majority of the heartland crops are fed by water from it. Once that water stops, we can no longer continue feeding the world, probably not even America. As a follow-on the population of DFW, Houston and a few other major US cities will be without water. Dallas is huge how and growing at a staggering rate. BY 2050, the collapse of DFW (the biggest economic center fed by the aquifer) will be felt in a Texas diaspora.

The tale will play out for similar aquifers and their regions. Eventually we'll all be living on the coast line. Which I am fine with, however the amount of starvation around the world will be epic. Now, I am no fan of end-of-the-world scenarios. I didn't agre with past predictions fo peak oil and peak food. We always find a way to increase output. But we've always had as much water we needed to produce whatever we could produce. Shifting the bottleneck of food production to water is unlike any challenge we've had before. And I concede that it is avoidable. We could desalinate water and ship it in from the Gulf coast, but There's so much land that the costs would be substantial. Even if implemented, the price of food would go up substantially, so people would still starve.

It is entirely possible that other regions step up production as a result as well. I think a lot of that will come at the cost of the rainforests though.

Still can't flow the tensors on Apple hardware, like we should.

Or rather just the Philippines, more specifically the banana orchards. Kill the trees, end the infection, let the disease die out, then repopulate.
Confession: I have no idea if this is a good idea or not. But it seems easier than engineering a vaccine. Might take less time too. I can go a few years without bananas. Though I am sure the locals would be devastated. Closer to home, we have an over fishing problem with a particular sea crustacean. I wonder how much better it would be if we could just pay the fishermen to not fish for a few years and let things repopulate rather than grinding away at a dwindling population.

Obligatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I run a VPN on my phone already and I notice that there is substantially more battery usage with it than without. It makes sense: You're taking all that data and encrypting it. I don't know how you could encrypt the data and use LESS battery?

Anyone have an idea?

Why is this propaganda on /.

RT Already does not allow ratings or comments until release. The only number is the percent of people who want to see it.

A similar article was posted yesterday. I would hope that /. and it's readers would be smarter than to fall for this. At this point the MSM is trolling the general public.

The difference between planes and hospitals are large. For instance, one is on the ground and the other is in the sky. The other big difference: There aren't 200 people crammed into a hospital room all with their own electronics, just feet away from the avionics control circuitry.

Pagers don't emit cellphone-level radiation & electrical interference around medical devices.

Pages have a weak acknowledge capability. Meanwhile you can't leave your cellphone by a radio. The interference it causes to the radio is the same interference it may cause in a medical device. And it may not cause a malfunction that gets noticed. What if the morphine drop was increased by a random flipped bit.

Medical devices are not evaluated in cellphone conditions. And given that doctors work in the immediate vicinity of medial equipment it is a risk the hospital is not willing to take.

How long until they name a cinnamon-y spice with psychoactive effects "melange"?

So NN AIs, just reduce predictive error over the data set. It doesn't create anything novel, it just learns to mimic. It can't invent Van Gogh's style, but it can mimic it and apply it to something else.

So if you feed in all the things from the past and feed them the modern version in, you'll get the meta narratives:
1. More use of plastic.
2. Physically smaller, lighter, less material used.
3. More fragility as designs get tuned to minimize in-warranty repairs and maximize out-of-warranty issues.
4. Increased ease of manufacture & higher yield rates

These are things you already expect. Only that last one, "ease", is the one where magic happens. Since future manufacturing techniques limit what we produce today. It's not really predictable though, so it's where the "magic" happens. But that does follow the same meta narratives.

Some of these bastards are using phone numbers in the same exchange YYY of XXX-YYY-ZZZ, so that the number looks familiar... They don't even have to buy a number, they can just spoof the caller ID.

Why, in 2019 can't I trace calls coming to me? (and have it be accurate)

9 tax returns a day