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Kurt Eichenwald and the dangers of tentacle hentai research

Posted by takyon on Wednesday June 21 2017, @12:10PM (#2432)
2 Comments
/dev/random

Video (warning: contains deplorable content) and text description:

On June 7th, 2017, Eichenwald claimed he had been sent an anti-semitic flyer as a result of Tucker Carlson mentioning him on his show. In an effort to prove the veracity of his claim, Eichenwald tweeted an image of him holding the flyer he was sent (shown below).

It was soon noticed that in the image, Eichenwald had a tab on his computer opened to B-Chiku, or Hentai. This led many to joke about the idea that Eichenwald masturbates to hentai pornography. These jokes were covered in Mediaite[9] (examples shown below).

The following day, Eichenwald defended himself by saying the tab was open because he was “trying to convince his wife that tentacle porn existed.”[10] Eichenwald went so far as to include a screenshot of a conversation with his wife where she verified his story.

Rather than tentacles, the tabbed hentai contained "traditional gender roles and values, with a submissive stay-at-home wife and a working husband".

Wikipedia profile.

U.S. Escalating Role in Syria

Posted by takyon on Monday June 19 2017, @09:06AM (#2429)
3 Comments

Hardcore Oxygenarians

Posted by takyon on Sunday June 18 2017, @01:36AM (#2424)
4 Comments

Jürgen Schmidhuber Goes Deep

Posted by takyon on Saturday June 17 2017, @01:10PM (#2422)
1 Comment
/dev/random

Some predictions from "the father of deep learning", Jürgen Schmidhuber:

He predicts trillions of AI in the 2050s will mine and develop [asteroids].

He has a long list of “truths” that many disagree with.

1. Many think that intelligence is this awesome, infinitely complex thing. Juergen think it is just the product of a few principles that will be considered very simple in hindsight, so simple that even kids will be able to understand and build intelligent, continually learning, more and more general problem solvers.
Partial justification of this belief:
(a) there already exist blueprints of universal problem solvers developed in my lab, in the new millennium, which are theoretically optimal in some abstract sense although they consist of just a few formulas (http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/unilearn.html, http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html).

(b) The principles of our less universal, but still rather general, very practical, program-learning recurrent neural networks can also be described by just a few lines of pseudo-code, e.g., http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/rnn.html, http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/compressednetworksearch.html

2. General purpose quantum computation won’t work (Juergen’s prediction of 15 years ago is still standing). Related: The universe is deterministic, and the most efficient program that computes its entire history is short and fast, which means there is little room for true randomness, which is very expensive to compute. What looks random must be pseudorandom, like the decimal expansion of Pi, which is computable by a short program. Many physicists disagree, but Einstein was right: no dice. There is no physical evidence to the contrary http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/randomness.html. For example, Bell’s theorem does not contradict this. And any efficient search in program space for the solution to a sufficiently complex problem will create many deterministic universes like ours as a by-product. Think about this. More here http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/computeruniverse.html and here http://www.kurzweilai.net/in-the-beginning-was-the-code

[...] Juergen won’t be surprised if Moore’s Law holds for another century. If so, computers will approach the Bremermann limit of 10^51 ops/s per kg of matter in the mid 2100s

Femtocomputing, please.

Interesting Wikipedia talk page.

AOMedia Video 1 Codec

Posted by takyon on Saturday June 17 2017, @12:19PM (#2421)
4 Comments
Software

This is from last month but there's no newer article about AV1:

Google’s Royalty-Free Answer to HEVC: A Look at AV1 and the Future of Video Codecs

AOMedia Video 1:

AV1 can be used together with the audio format Opus in a future version of the WebM format for HTML5 web video and WebRTC.

What kind of features are you looking for in AV1 (other than the obvious: better compression efficiency than H.265/HEVC)?

Apple is adding HEVC support to its products.

"Trump" to be bleeped out on Broad City

Posted by takyon on Tuesday June 13 2017, @11:19PM (#2408)
2 Comments
/dev/random

Trump's Name Will Be Bleeped Out In The Next "Broad City" Season

Would I have seen this important news if I hadn't accidentally opened BuzzFeed? I'm not so sure.

June 2017 Russia Protests

Posted by takyon on Tuesday June 13 2017, @03:42AM (#2405)
1 Comment

Fourth Kepler and K2 Science Conference

Posted by takyon on Sunday June 11 2017, @05:29PM (#2403)
0 Comments
Science

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/ames/kepler/media-invited-to-nasa-s-kepler-and-k2-mission-science-conference

NASA invites members of the media to attend the fourth Kepler and K2 Science Conference to be held June 19-23. The weeklong science conference will take place at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

Probably a good time to look for exoplanet-related announcements.

U.S. Special Forces Fighting IS in the Philippines

Posted by takyon on Saturday June 10 2017, @05:39AM (#2400)
1 Comment
News

Exclusive: U.S. special forces helping Philippines troops to end city siege

U.S. special forces are helping the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to end a siege of the southern town of Marawi by militants allied to Islamic State, a U.S. embassy spokesperson in Manila told Reuters.

From one "strong man" to another.

UK Conservatives Lose Majority

Posted by takyon on Friday June 09 2017, @04:54AM (#2396)
0 Comments
News

UK election 2017: Conservatives 'to fall short of majority'

The Conservatives are set to be the largest party in the UK parliament, but without an overall majority, says the latest BBC forecast. It shows gains for the Labour Party after Thursday's general election.

[...] Prime Minister Theresa May - who had a small majority in the previous parliament - called an early election to try to improve her negotiation positions on Brexit. But analysts say it now appears the PM made a serious miscalculation. The BBC's political editor Laura Kuenssberg says Mrs May's decision may prove to have been one of the biggest political mistakes of modern times.