SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Gift That Keeps On Taking
Brexit is the gift that keeps on taking, and we haven't even left (the EU) yet. That happens at midnight on 29th March.
The thorny issue of the Irish border has yet to be solved as this Channel 4 News report explains despite Nigel Farage's blatant stupid signalling on Irish TV.
This was in a week where Gerard Batten, UKIP leader, formally wrote to the Queen asking her to suspend Parliament (i.e. British sovereign democracy) to prevent Remainer MPs sabotaging Brexit. It is worth noting that the last time a monarch interfered with Parliament England became a Republic.
Meanwhile in Sunderland, which overwhelmingly voted Leave, the local Nissan car factory will not be making the new X-Trail model due to Brexit uncertainty.
And, of course, there are plans to evacuate the Queen "if Brexit turns ugly."
Why would Brexit possibly turn ugly when there will be no downsides. only upsides?
Who made this speech?
Trying to figure out where this speech came from. It was quoted on my favorite talk show. I may not have it exactly verbatim, but I can get really close. I really want to know who made this speech, and I'm having no luck on the world wide spiderweb.
I'm not going to Washington to represent Black Americans! (pause) (subdued applause)
I'm not going to Washington to represent Latinos! (pause) (another spattering of subdued applause)
I'm not going to Washington to represent illegal aliens! (pause) (another spattering, perhaps slightly more enthusiastic)
I'm not going to Washington to represent women! (ditto) (and ditto the subdued applause)
I'm not going to Washington to represent the banking industry! (ditto) (and the applause might have a bit of enthusiasm this time)
I'm not going to Washington to represent the insurance industry! (ditto again - he spends a lot of time cuing the applause) (this time, we might actually call the applause enthusiastic, but it's pretty iffy)
I'm not going to Washington to represent Corporate America, or the military industrial complex! (ditto) (this time, the enthusiasm comes through pretty clearly)
I'm going to Washington to represent AMERICANS!!! (ditto) (the enthusiasm explodes!)
If I'm to represent any special interest groups, those will be small business owners, factory workers, truck drivers, teachers, mothers and fathers, and small business employees! (ditto) (and the crowd goes wild)
There's more, but they cut it around this point, so I didn't hear any more.
Dredging up old predictions
I'm looking at Abengoa SA, for example. They got almost $3 billion in guaranteed loans through this program to build infrastructure worth a fraction of that. I don't see that ending pretty, especially with their likely exposure (being the largest Spanish sustainable energy business) to the Spanish solar power industry, which completely lost its government subsidies over the past few years.
While I didn't discuss it at the time, I also was taking into account the company's behavior of what I'll call "chain-smoking loans", borrowing money to buy businesses that became collateral for another loan (for those old enough to remember that behavior burned World.com badly).
Well, turns out their US branch declared bankruptcy (Chapter 15) in January 2016 (though I gather it's now out of bankruptcy - at least for now). The Abengoa projects do appear to have survived with a functional revenue stream, so that implied part of the prediction apparently hasn't yet become a problem.
Nice to see a prediction bear fruit though of course, I probably wouldn't have noticed, if it hadn't. As an aside, neither Standard & Poor or the auditing firm Deloitte noticed anything supposedly until right before the insolvency protection filing (a common prelude to bankruptcy, though apparently Abengoa's main corporation in Spain was able to avoid bankruptcy through a 400 million Euro contribution from the Spanish government). The bank, Citigroup organized a stock sale a few months earlier despite their access to the books too.
A bunch of the usual suspects failing like they've failed before. Good to know that we're patching up all these financial failure modes.
Reddit is too ban happy, keeps too much in the dark
Think I got a taste of why people disdain Reddit.
Yesterday, a moderator for r/programminglanguages took offense to my message and banned me from that particular subreddit. Claimed that a private message I sent was insulting to the entire community, I had a bad attitude, blah, blah. No warning, no 3 strikes, no consensus with other moderators or anyone else, just that moderator's sole judgment, and apparently it's a permanent ban, not timed. Reddit's new interface does a poor job of informing banned users that they are banned. To check, have to try to post and see if it is rejected.
It occurred to me that I could simply make another account. But Reddit threatens extreme reprisal for doing that, as in, they will delete all your accounts if they detect that you are working around a ban in that fashion.
I have never been more than a very occasional user of Reddit. I don't know the ropes there too well. From what I read, bans happen all the time, and it is a bit random. Eh, Reddit is too harsh and absolute. Lousy system. One mistake and ZAP! Account gone. (Say it like "Caribou gone.") I suspect the harshness is one factor that results in all around lower quality discussions, and I have heard complaints along those lines about Reddit. Much, much rather hang out here on SoylentNews than chance the whims of such all powerful, capricious individuals.
Who knew?
At this point, I had this hypothesis that I could find a good answer via looking for minimum entropy (that is, first scale the matrix so that the absolute value of its coefficients add up to one and then calculate a standard entropy measure using the function x*log(x), where x is the absolute value of each coefficient and summed over all coefficients. For most matrices, one can change the coordinates of the matrix by a unitary transform (unitary means the transformation leaves the vector dot product unchanged). The idea is to find a minimal entropy transform of the original matrix and then gawk at it to see what sort of patter n it has. It turns out, through no fault of my own, that the minimum entropy answer is a diagonalization of the matrix with eigenvalues along the diagonal.
As mentioned in the beginning, I wanted to do the same with tensors more elaborate than linear maps, so I thought I'd try some approaches with the linear map case first to see how hard they'd be. My first attempt was to randomly generate a unitary matrix, transform the original matrix, and compute the entropy of the result. If it was lower than my last attempt, I'd keep it. Then go back to step 1 and generate another random one. This is a classic Monte Carlo method (named after the gambling place) where one generates huge numbers of random potential answers and keeps the best.
Alas, when I tried it for 4 by 4 matrices (which incidentally is not a hard problem), I found that even with 100 million Monte Carlo guesses (which on my laptop take an hour to run), I couldn't get within a factor of two of the minimum entropy for a given matrix (again said diagonal form). It turns out that the dimensionality of the problem (4 dimensional unitary matrices have 10 complex dimensions to vary in) and the fact that the x*log(x) function creates a sharp notch around the optimal solution means it is extraordinarily rare to get answers that fall within the notch.
Even when I dropped the dimension to 3 by 3 matrices, I was barely able to get within 50% of the optimal answer (though I could finally see the diagonal structure in the answers). I could also see that increasing the number of iterations by an order of magnitude has modest improvement in the answer. Who knew this wasn't going to work? Guess I'll just have to optimize via the usual tools.
Java 11 - what a mess!
So there's a new semester starting, Java 11 (the next LTS version) has been released, so - for the sake of my students - I wanted to update all of my Java installations and examples to Java 11. They were previously at Java 8, or in some cases 9 (to show the new module system).
Java 11 - what a fricking mess.
First, let's talk about the API documentation. For as long as I can remember, the Java documentation has offered a hierarchical frame-view that shows packages in the top-left, classes in the bottom left, and details on a particular class on the right. This provides a convenient overview, and allows you to move around within the hierarchy. With the advent of the module system, the top-left was adapted to show modules - same idea, works just as well. This has been eliminated in Java 11. Instead of a hierarchy of views, you have a search field. While it is a very intelligent search field, it hardly replaces the overview one had with the three hierarchical frames. Why remove something that has worked so well, for so long, and is so ingrained in the way people work?
Second, JavaFX has been removed. As someone who spent too many years fighting with Swing bugs in desktop GUIs, JavaFX has been nothing but a huge relief. Simple concepts like focus-change work in JavaFX, whereas they never did in Swing. I won't pretend it doesn't have problems, but it is massively better than Swing ever was - and deserves to be part of standard Java. According to Oracle, removing JavaFX from Java "makes JavaFX easier to adopt". Um...because people now have to hunt down and install external libraries?
Third - I'm working on behalf of my students here - so I'm updating various kinds of installations, to create a walkthrough. It turns out that, as of Java 11, Oracle says that non-commercial users should use OpenJDK. But OpenJDK on Windows does not come with an installer - you are supposed to unpack the files in the right place, and set environment variables and (if you need them) registry entries manually. Seriously?
Meanwhile, Ubuntu has seen fit to lie about what version of OpenJDK they have in their repositories. In a post from February 2018, they document the fact that they have an SRU called "OpenJDK-11" that actually delivers Java 10. As of today (9 Jan 2019, four months after Java 11 was released), installing OpenJDK-11 still gives you Java 10.
Then we have tooling. Because JavaFX is no longer part of Java, you have to do a lot more fiddling with module-paths and command line parameters. This is not fun - and for students just learning, it is frankly a catastrophy. In Eclipse, of course, there is e(fx)clipse, which is supposed to handle all this for you. Sadly, Eclipse 2018-12 (the current version as of this writing) is delivered with e(fx)clipse 3.3.0. Which - this has been known since September - borks your Eclipse installation to the point that it no longer starts. To fix this, you have to re-install Eclipse and specifically fetch a patched version (4.3.1) of e(fx)clipse.
And this patched version? It does nice things like define JavaFX as an external library, but as far as I can tell, selecting this library does absolutely nothing. You still have tie JavaFX via a self-defined user library, you still have to pass module parameters to the VM - the plug-in seems to actually do nothing at all.
All in all, is seems that many different parties have conspired to make Java 11 a total disaster. I'm just trying to imagine how I am supposed to walk fresh, never-programmed-before students through an installation process with the kinds of problems described above. What an utter mess!
Stupidity Before Coffee
This morning, as I'm having my first morning cigarette and getting my first sips of coffee in me, The Roomie joins me outside and starts telling me about how this highly educated youtuber has declared war on IQ tests. Which goes to show two things:
- The Roomie is a bastard.
- Education offers no warranty against idiocy.
IQ tests are quite good at testing what they actually test. They're also astoundingly bad at testing what they don't actually test. Unless you're talking about the extreme ends of the scale and you think they aren't very good tests, you don't understand what they really test and need to shut up now before you look like an even bigger dumbass. You're basically saying that screwdrivers are shitty tools because they make lousy hammers. That a high school dropout understands this while a guy with a PhD by his name doesn't demonstrates my second point quite nicely.
What is an ideologue?
This was during an interview with a particularly hostile host.
She said "so you're basically a Hobbesian."
(I was actually impressed she appeared to know what that means and come up with it herself on the fly. Good job!)
He replied thus;
"No, I'm half and half. Half Hobbes, half Rousseau; that's why I'm not an ideologue. Because I don't think that people are good /or/ evil; I think they're both. I don't think that culture is security /or/ tyranny; I think they're both. And I don't think that nature is benevolence /or/ catastrophe; I think it's both."
2018: The Final Chapter
It's that time of year again. The time of year when everyone and their dog waxes nostalgic about all the shit nobody cares about from the year past, and stupidly predicts the next year in the grim knowledge that when the next New Year comes along, nobody will remember
that the dumbass predicted a bunch of foolish shit that turned out to be complete and utter balderdash. I might as well, too. Just like I did last year (yes, a lot of this was pasted from last year's final chapter).
There are even fewer articles this year than last year, as most of what I was doing was feverishly getting my cookbook ready to publish.
Some of these links go to /., S/N, mcgrewbooks.com, or mcgrew.info.
As usual, first: the yearly index:
Journals:
Articles:
Scince Fiction:
Last years' stupid predictions (and more):
Last year I said I'd publish Voyage to Earth and Other Stories, and I was right,
I predicted that Trump wouldn't be worse than Bush, this is still undetermined. He hasn't started any shooting wars (yet; if he doesn't he'll be the first Republican President since Ford not to start one) and he hasn't gotten our country attacked (yet, he's trying awful hard). He hasn't ruined the economy... yet. I do predict a stock market bubble that will crash the economy when it pops. I hope I'm wrong; so far I am.
I'm also predicting that I won't have a book ready in 2019. I haven't even got a start on one.
I'll also hang on to most of last year's predictions;
Someone will die. Maybe you, maybe me. Not necessarily anybody I know... we can only hope.
SETI will find no sign of intelligent life. Not even on Earth.
The Pirate Party won't make inroads in the US. I hope I'm wrong about that one.
US politicians will continue to be wholly owned by the corporations.
I'll still be a nerd.
Technophobic fashionista jocks will troll slashdot (but not S/N).
Slashdot will be rife with dupes.
Many Slashdot FPs will be poorly edited.
Slashdot still won't have fixed its patented text mangler (I haven't been there for a while, did they fix it?).
Microsoft will continue sucking
Happy New Year! Ready for another trip around the sun?
Vacation Musings
On my way back from some morning fishing, a question occurred to me and I thought I'd see if any of you know. Does the government shutdown mean the game wardens are off work? Wondering strictly out of concern for the wellbeing of those fine, upstanding individuals.
