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Kurt Eichenwald and the dangers of tentacle hentai research
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".
U.S. Escalating Role in Syria
US coalition in first downing of Syrian army plane
U.S. warplane downs Syrian army jet in Raqqa province
I'm a little shocked it took this long.
Hardcore Oxygenarians
Jürgen Schmidhuber Goes Deep
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
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
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)?
SN is not /.
SN is not the green site. It's all good.
However, /. has a hell of a nice feature - specifically in their mobile view. (Yes, yes I just *did* find something to say nice about mobile.)
It's pretty trivial, but I use it far more often than I expected.
The the green site, specifically in mobile, there's a back and forward arrow. I go back to the newest unread thread, read it, and then click the magic button that takes me to the next article. It's pretty sweet. I am also probably the only one who actually uses that feature.
Who do I have to bribe to get something like that added to the bottom of the page? It's in a floating header on /., but I don't think that'd work here. I am fine without the feature, but it's pretty damned handy. Well, handy to me. I'd not be surprised if I were the only one who used it, at the other site. If implemented, I'm thinking it'd be most suitable (perhaps just plain text links) either in the footer or just above it. However, I'm the last person you might want to ask about aesthetics and design.
"Trump" to be bleeped out on Broad City
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
Russia protests: Opposition leader Alexei Navalny sentenced
Russia protests: Kremlin critic Navalny jailed, hundreds arrested
Will Navalny make it into the Kremlin or get shot in the night?
Fourth Kepler and K2 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.
$something_witty
I haven't been here in ages. I was reminded of the site by someone who replied to a comment on another site and decided I'd come visit for a bit.
I've looked around and I'm actually kinda impressed. SN has done much better than I expected them to do. The community even seems, more or less, sane *and* intelligent. Well, for some definition of both. ;-)
In all seriousness, it's nice to see and I am gonna try to make it a point to visit more often. Alas, I'm a creature of habit, but I'll make a legitimate effort. I kinda like that the front page doesn't appear to be inundated with politics. Currently, I see one story that is *also* political in nature - but it's also very related to tech.
So, I'll try to visit and see if there's enough content to convince me to subscribe. As it is now the warm part of the year, at least it should be, I'm not sure how much time I can devote to it. But, it's nice to see how well SN has maintained itself and grown. I am pretty impressed.
