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In his book Asimov On Numbers there is an essay titled “A Piece of Pi”, explaining what pi is, its history, and workings. It’s an excellent book, as are all of his books. Carl Sagan called him “the greatest explainer of the age”. He had books in nine of the ten Dewey decimal categories and is one of my favorite authors.
        The atheist Asimov takes a poke at his parents’ religion in that chapter, correctly pointing out that the ancient Hebrews weren't very good at math or building, and needed the Phoenicians to build the Temple of Solomon for them. Their plans, Chronicled in Chronicles 2:4, states that the diameter must be thirty cubits and the radius ten cubits. He correctly points out that this would result not in a circle, but a hexagon.
        But Dr. Asimov was thinking like a mathematician, not an engineer or architect. There is no such thing as a circle; a circle is a two dimensional construct, and no physical object exists in only two dimensions... not in this universe, anyway. The vat had an inside diameter of 30 cubits and an outside diameter of 31.4 cubits, So the walls of the vat would be .7 cubits thick.
        The good doctor mentions that the Hebrews held certain numbers, like the number three, in holy respect. In fact, seven is also one of those numbers, and the Star of David has six points. Draw straight lines from the star’s points and you have... a hexagon!
        So even not understanding math, they got it right. Now, how could they have possibly done that?

Join Us for a Tom's Hardware AMA with Intel Optane

1. What even is it?
2. Why does it suck?
3. Can I have some for free?

Something I've been thinking about a bit lately is the ability to communicate your message well. I'm not the best at it but it's not difficult to spot those who really are. Their number sure as fuck doesn't include Jordan Peterson. Or most any intellectual, especially with an academia background, for that matter.

You know who the best are? Really good standup comedians. They have to be. If you need to explain a joke, it's no longer funny. If you're consistently not funny, you have to get a dreaded day job.

If you want to take up public speaking in any sort of persuasive capacity, you could do a lot worse than to learn from them.

It's important to know what power actually is if you want to take the power back, fight the power, feel the power of love, or just to know when you've got the power and if it's OVER 9000. It's recently come to my attention that some folks don't, so I thought about it a bit and I'll lay the most basic fundamentals out for you all.

Power in the human context is the ability to exert your will on a situation. Nothing more, nothing less.

Direct, personal power (your ability to do something relevant and influential) is the only real power. The primary varieties of this are the ability to create and to destroy. Most other varieties are eventually rooted back in one of these if you follow them back far enough, though they may be notable enough to warrant their own name. Yes, complex interplays of multiple power sources are quite common but we're talking fundamentals today.

The most important of these is probably proxied power. You know, like governments wield. Be it power granted them by their citizens or by force of arms, they only hold this power by the consent of those from which it ultimately originates.

Now, that's not to say there aren't force multipliers, like say having a gun. They absolutely exist but they're not power in and of themselves; they require human agency to mean anything.

I'm also not discounting that non-human or even non-living things can exert influence in the world - the sun does this every day - that's just not what we're discussing here.

One last bit before I save this entry. Money is not power. It can rent power. It can buy power. But it is not itself anything but paper, ones and zeroes, or whatever. Why do I say this? Because the person with the direct power, proxied power, or some sort of force multiplier must first be willing to rent or sell it. Granted, this is so often the case that it's an extremely useful thing to have but don't make the mistake confusing what something can be exchanged for and the thing to be exchanged.

There, hope that's cleared up for you now if you hadn't thought it through yourselves yet. Hopefully it'll make getting to the heart of the matter a little easier in discussions down the road.

Comma.ai founder George Hotz wants to free humanity from the AI simulation

What keeps George Hotz, the enigmatic hacker and founder of self-driving startup Comma.ai, up at night is not whether his autonomous car company will be successful or what other entrepreneurial venture he might embark on next. No, instead, Hotz says he’s tortured by the possibility that all of us are in an advanced simulation observed by either an omnipotent extraterrestrial or supernatural being, or an artificial intelligence far beyond the realm of human conception and understanding.

“There’s no evidence this is not true,” an animated Hotz told a crowd at his SXSW talk on Friday, aptly titled “Jailbrealing the Simulation” and billed on the festival’s website as an exploration of whether breaking out of a simulated universe means we can “meet God” and kill him. “It’s easy to imagine things that are so much smarter than you and they could build a cage you wouldn’t even recognize.”

[...] It’s hard to know seriously to take Hotz sometimes; he strikes me as someone who often says something to get a reaction or to verbalize his inner monologue as a way of making sense of it. And he said as much onstage. “Do I actually believe it? Some days yes,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t know how I feel about something until I say it out loud.”

The crowd didn’t much care either way. During the Q&A, an audience member asked Hotz if he would consider partnering with transhumanists — people who believe in humanity’s eventual evolution by way of merging the body and mind with robotics and AI — to found his church. Hotz was rather ambivalent to the idea; perhaps he didn’t think people would take him at his word. But if he does a start a church, the sermon he gave at SXSW yesterday was delivered to a room of would-be believers.

Smoke weed everyday.

Related: George Hotz's Comma.Ai Cancels Comma One

I found the recent hipster story great: Hipster Whines at Tech Mag for Using His Pic to Imply Hipsters Look the Same; Wasn't His Pic. It made me think a bit about the broader implications today.

Hipsters get a bad rap, but they're really very similar to any number of "alternative" movements of yesteryear. As long as there has been human society, there have been "rebels" and "non-conformists." But being truly individual is a very a difficult thing. It's difficult to make friends, because you can't be fit into any box. You're unpredictable. You may agree with people on a number of things, and then you have logic that leads you off to a completely different path that those same people find confusing or even offensive.

Thus, most self-identified "individuals" paradoxically found communities of like-minded individuals. It's easier to adopt a pre-packaged aesthetic and set of values than it is to come up with a system on your own. Of course most hipsters have qualities that make them look somewhat "alike," even as they eschew mainstream fashion or whatever -- because it's easier to adopt someone else's brand of "non-conformity" than it is to try to be an individual yourself, which is scary and bold and where you have little guidance. Most people are sheep: they just gravitate toward different flocks.

In terms of my clothing choices and outward appearance most of the time, I'm somewhat of a conformist, in that I feel like standing out is generally counterproductive. I just want to be left alone to do my own thing, so I mostly dress conservatively, though I certainly don't place any value in "fashion." I get the cheapest functional clothes I can that still look professional, often drawing on castaways at thrift stores -- which are frequently even name-brand clothes from a couple years ago, but maybe the color or style is no longer trendy. I don't care... they're clothes, and I generally buy them for 1/5th or even 1/10th of the original price. They get the job done.

But when it comes to beliefs and ideologies, I truly don't accept anyone else's views unless they make sense to me and there's good evidence. Over the years, I've cultivated good friends who seem convinced I'm a diehard conservative, and other friends who are convinced I'm a diehard liberal. I don't lie. I just find it counterproductive to alienate people a lot of the time, so I listen a lot. I'm genuinely curious about other views. And I can often find threads of things I agree with or at least basic concepts I might go along with in any ideology, so I'll find ways of carrying a discussion forward along points of agreement... or often I just find myself playing a sort of "devil's advocate" with nobody on the other side. Some conservative person is ranting about something, and I'll toss in a few facts that would support their argument, even if I don't believe in their argument -- just to be social. And then I'll toss in a nuance they haven't thought of, just to stir things very slightly and see what happens.

With most people, it's very hard to change minds. The only way to do so is to gain their trust, and then maybe throw in some ideas they haven't considered and let them come to a new realization on their own. I'm rarely trying to change anyone myself -- I accept pluralism as a fundamental philosophy. But I do think it's important to inform, to take into account a broad perspective on facts, to know stuff and derive your opinions from knowledge rather than bullet points spouted from someone else.

If you really want to be a "non-conformist," the strongest thing you can do is be a skeptic in a Socratic fashion. Accept that there are always things you don't know, and be willing to listen. That's truly disruptive to ideologies, whether mainstream or "alternative" or whatever.

In my life, I've spent a lot of time going down rabbitholes and questioning my beliefs. For example, when "Intelligent Design" became popular in the late 90s, I spent a few months reading literature by Michael Behe and others, as well as textbooks on evolutionary biology, trying to understand what was going on. I never subscribed the the Creationist ideology, but for a while I was convinced -- and to some extent still am -- that questions of how we could evaluate "design" as distinct from randomness were interesting questions. But ultimately I realized the Intelligent Design people were mostly dishonest hucksters using disingenuous arguments to try to sneak religion into science classrooms, even if they had raised a few minor interesting points.

Heck, even in the past week or two, some post on this site got me curious about measles vaccines, and it led me down a 20-minute dive into research where I seriously started to question my blanket vaccine-positive stance. Could researchers and vaccine manufacturers seriously not be considering the cost-benefit analysis of the measles vaccine in terms of its effects vs. the disease itself? There were a few reputable citations, which I duly followed. And then ultimately I realized it was more anti-vaxxer propaganda and distortion of facts. But for about 10 minutes, I was seriously questioning a core scientific conclusion I had come to over the years. I even contacted a friend who knows more about immunology, though her immediate reply was she didn't know much about the measles vaccine. Soon, though, I realized the opponents (some of them with serious credentials) were calculating ideologues who weren't interested in truth.

If you bring me reputable evidence and links, I will consider the information. I will listen. I am willing to question my beliefs. That's what a true "non-conformist" should go with. It's not about standing out from the crowd. It's not about bucking the mainstream -- because sometimes the mainstream is right. That's something quite a few people on this site might sometimes consider. Is there really a reason to question the mainstream view -- which is founded on good science -- or are you just being a stubborn hipster-like person, feeling like there must be something wrong with the "mainstream," so you need to assert your individuality in a kind of aesthetic performance. (Even if that makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist.)

And often the mainstream IS wrong, or at least lacking nuance to the point that it's basically wrong if superficially correct. Yes, challenge the status quo. Dig into the details. You need to legitimately find your own way. More importantly, you need to find your own path to self-consistency... and sometimes accept that's hard and often not going to be like the pre-packaged ideologies most people live with.

Most conservatives love rules, until they have a personal situation where they really need to break one. Most liberals claim to be open-minded and to accept anyone, unless those people happen to hold conservative beliefs. Most libertarians like to believe in some militant individualistic philosophy, although they often subscribe to the same newsletters and are rarely very diverse.

Most people follow flocks. The hipsters are the same. Why should we be surprised? It's easy to make fun of the hipsters because they are so staunchly "non-conformist" while seeming to conform to stereotypes. But try practicing real non-conformity yourself. It can be surprisingly difficult. Many people here seem to self-identify as social misfits or people who don't care about the mainstream -- but that's just like hipster propaganda. It's easy to be "alternative" when you have your own flock of misfits to join. Try digging deeper sometimes when confronted with someone who thinks differently from yourself. Listen. Seek out more information and nuance. Draw your own conclusions.

I'll just leave you all with one quotation that I try to think about regularly, some wisdom from Charles Peirce:

“It is the man of science, eager to have his every opinion regenerated, his every idea rationalized, by drinking at the fountain of fact, and devoting all the energies of his life to the cult of truth, not as he understands it, but as he does not yet understand it, that ought properly to be called a philosopher.”

If I had to choose a Credo for myself, that'd be a pretty good one. I don't always live up to it, but I aspire to.

Lenovo Unveils ThinkStation P520 & P920 ‘AI Workstations’: Xeon Plus Quadro RTX 6000

Ubuntu Linux based systems shipping with 10 or 24 cores, 128 GB or 384 GB of RAM.

Maybe that will be the new minimum in 15 years.

rdar://48664498
^--- This link works in Cupertino.

Preamble:

VLC 3.0.6 has been out for quite a long time; others complain of it online, but the VLC Devs must not yet know about it themselves, suggesting that it is uncommon configurations that give VLC such grief.

In my own case, I play YouTube Videos with _each_ of Safari, Chrome and Tor Browser, I watch local videos with _each_ of VLC and QuickTime Player, and I listen to music with _each_ of iTunes and VLC on my Mid 2015 MacBook Pro.

FWIW, I did the QA for MacTCP 1.0.1 and 1.1, and the plan and test tool for 1.2. Thus I know from Stress Testing as well as Corner Cases.

Summary:

Play a music video in VLC Media Player, then launch Safari. VLC's audio output halts though the video persists.

To activate VLC's window, to pause or resume then restart the music video are all of no avail. One must quit then relaunch.

Thus it is not possible to use VLC to listen to music videos while at the same time browsing with Desktop Safari.

Steps To Reproduce:

Drag any video file onto VLC Media Player's icon.

Launch Desktop Safari.

Expected Results:

One will continue to enjoy one's listening pleasure with VLC's window in the background while browsing with Safari in the foreground.

Actual Results:

VLC's audio output abruptly halts.

Upon activating VLC's window again, you will find that while the video continues playing, it is not possible to restore the sound. One must quit VLC then re-launch it.

Under certain conditions which I have not yet identified, one must reset VLC's Preferences to restore audio output. That is, it's not always sufficient to quit then relaunch it.

Regression:

Safari does not stimulate this behavior in QuickTime Player 10.4 (894.12).

To run two instances of VLC, one for video and one for audio will exhibit a similar bug but not reproducibly so. In this case - with two running binaries - one must always reset VLC Media Player's Preferences.

Configuration:

In addition to your sysdiagnose log I have attached a System Information Document; that's more convenient for most configuration reproduction than is the far-more verbose sysdiagnose.

Also attached is the VLC Media Player 3.0.6 Source Code.

Note that my day-to-day system is Sierra, as I'm a driver developer. Late tonight I'll regress with Mojave.

• macOS Sierra - 10.12.6 (16G29)
• Mid 2015 MacBook Pro with Retina Display
• Model Identifier - MacBookPro11,5
• 16 GB RAM
• 4-Core 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7
• Boot Rom Version - MBP114.0172.B25
• SMC Version (system) - 2.30f2

• AMD Radeon R9 M370X
• Vendor ID - ATI (0x1002)
• Device ID - 0x6821
• Revision ID - 0x0083
• ROM Revision - 113-C5670E-777
• gMux Version - 4.0.20 [3.2.8]
• EFI Driver Version - 01.00.777

• Intel Iris Pro
• Max Dynamic VRAM - 1536 MB
• Vendor ID - Intel (0x8086)
• Device ID - 0x0d26
• Revision ID - 0x0008
• gMux Version ID - 4.0.20 [3.2.8]

• Safari - 10.1.2 (12603.3.8)

• VLC Media Player - 3.0.6 Vetinari (Intel 64bit)
• VLC Media Player - 3.0.2 Vetinari (Intel 64bit)

I regressed with:

• QuickTime Player - 10.4 (894.12)

R. Kelly

R. Kelly denies sexual abuse allegations in explosive interview

R. Kelly was "unhinged" in interview with Gayle King, columnist says (12m36s)

Gayle King talks about her explosive R. Kelly interview on CBSN (7m18s)

Full interview is apparently around 80 minutes and has not been released in its entirety yet. Even Oprah wants the full video.

Turmoil or manipulation?

Previously: R. Kelly Contracts Ligma
R. Kelly Exposes Himself

The U.S. trade deficit surged to a 10-year high in 2018, with the politically sensitive shortfall with China hitting a record peak, despite the Trump administration slapping tariffs on a range of imported goods in an effort to shrink the gap.

The Commerce Department said on Wednesday that an 18.8 percent jump in the trade deficit in December had contributed to the $621.0 billion shortfall last year. The 2018 deficit was the largest since 2008 and followed a $552.3 billion gap in 2017.

It's a rather idiotic metric to set in the first place. But, if you can't even excel at the metrics you set for yourself then you are failing.

Despite Trump's Promises, The Trade Deficit Is Only Getting Wider
U.S. trade deficit jumps to 10-year high in 2018
In a Blow to Trump, America’s Trade Deficit Hit Record $891 Billion