SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Simple proof against Basilisk nonsense
I didn't pay much attention to this so please excuse me but the garbage processor spat this out today:
Despite accepting all the flawed assumptions such "AI" would itself/themselves be committing the same "criminal" acts of postponement by wasting resources on such a scenario instead of better AI.
Hopefully that's not an example of cryptomnesia.
Anything more intelligent than even me (intended as a low reference point) would have far more interesting things to do than retarded human sadism, the same goes for any $deity worth the title :)
Well that's already too much attention wasted on an idiotic distraction (doesn't matter if it's genuine idiocy or staged).
utf-8 regression testing
cf: http://dev.soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=1115&cid=27307
See: http://www.w3.org/2004/04/uri-rel-test.html
All of the following were entered using <a href="...">>...</a>
Test 101: http://www.w%33.org/
Should be: http://www.w3.org/
Test 111: http://r%c3%a4ksm%c3%b6rg%c3%a5s.josefsson.org/
Should be: http://räksmörgås.josefsson.org/
Test 112: http://%e7%b4%8d%e8%b1%86.w3.mag.keio.ac.jp/
Should be: http://�豆.w3.mag.keio.ac.jp/
Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi porta tempus nunc, vel gravida eros. Fusce ac sapien sed elit adipiscing pharetra at vel neque. Cras consequat a nisi vitae interdum. Nulla pulvinar, nisi a varius venenatis, lorem mauris posuere nulla, sit amet venenatis enim mauris quis tellus. Fusce nec ullamcorper lorem. Proin vulputate leo sapien, sollicitudin tincidunt urna eleifend vel. Etiam eleifend nulla id leo egestas interdum. Sed dignissim mauris eget tincidunt fermentum. Sed nec felis et nisl ullamcorper gravida varius in augue. Morbi ac erat quis dolor ultricies pulvinar. Vivamus sagittis viverra leo et sollicitudin. Maecenas at vulputate tortor. Donec ipsum erat, bibendum vel viverra eu, ornare vel sem.
Bug #59 tests
This is fodder for testing https://github.com/SoylentNews/slashcode/issues/59.
Nested "blockquote" and "q" elements:
test1: zero
one two three
four five six
seven eight
nine.
Nested "blockquote" and "em" elements:
test2: zero
one two three
four five six
seven eight
nine.
Blame the sleep deprivation^W^Wexhaustion
"At least he's a loon with balls."
"Does that make him a balloon?"
Found it hilarious when I thought of it, needs sleep badly.
Activity at SN up in recent weeks?
For a few weeks there in May and June I was doubtful that the SN experiment was going to succeed. I saw an awful lot of stories that had single-digit comments and found myself jumping over to /. frequently.
However, lately activity has seemed to pick up and the comments have been great. In fact, just this morning I realized I had not visited /. in over a week.
I, for one, am glad about this development.
Why open source rocks the house (for me, at least)
I'm finishing up a project for a client that does some pretty neat stuff w/ IP cameras. Everything is running on a CentOS 5 box and I needed a newer version of ffmpeg to get everything working as I want it to. I found step-by-step instructions to do this. So I'm sitting here, watching gcc commands fly by on the screen while compiling everything and I start thinking, egad, open source has really come a long, long way from my days in the late 90's using Red Hat 6.2 and Ximian desktop. None of the stuff I'm working on would have been possible back then and I really don't want to think about what it would take to do all of this on a proprietary system like Windows.
When I'm done w/ this project and it's fully debugged and in production I plan on writing a series of journal entries about what I've done, the problems I overcame, etc.
Anyway, I just wanted to give a shout out to all the people who make open source possible. I would be a broke, poor soul w/o much of a life if none of this stuff existed, and it's due to the hard work you've all put into it that makes my career possible. Thanks so much!
"I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
For future reference I'm going to repost my reply here. Feel free to link it whenever somebody whines in favor of Al Gore or against the joke. Instant cluebat.
Here's the reply:
Snopes just doesn't get it, neither do you, even when it's staring them and you right in the face. No, you didn't have to be there, you should be able to understand what happened.
Snopes quotes Al Gore:
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."
Seriously the idiots are those who can not cope with mocking "authority" when it targets someone they feel favorable towards. The idiots are those who take the humble and non-confrontational attitude of their betters (like for example Vint Cerf being extremely diplomatic to the point of upsetting some of his peers) as implicit approval of errors when instead it's simply an act to avoid boring uninteresting drama caused by politicized whores. Because this kind of shit happens all the time, most politicians could not survive without doing it.
It gets worse when their reasoning is based on falsely hurt pride caused by entrenched political groupthink with no semblance to reality or rational thought and which displays above all a total lack of knowledge of the decades of work and development, the multiple thousands of hours of several dozen people most closely involved and the billions of hours spent by other people in order to build and connect the network.
Then after all that and before a lot more two (Two! Not even only Gore!) politicians write a bill, a fucking bill, to make the inevitable "happen", and one of them shoots his mouth off as he does with everything and you can't handle the ridicule?
Gore was invited to the ARPANET anniversary celebration but wisely declined. If I recall correctly better and incomparably crucial people had already passed away from natural causes. He knows what he did and the good news is that he has a sliver of shame, not because he's better than other politicians but because he goofed so badly as to cause a lasting joke being mentioned every time he tries to speak on a related subject (and sometimes when it's unrelated as well as he deserves).
The joke is his badge of shame, it's good if you're not laughing, it's bad if you don't get it.
It was obvious what Gore was trying to do: take an incredible amount of credit he didn't deserve. Him making such statements is fact but the content of the statements are not at all factual because it would have happened anyway (thus he was not "instrumental" anything or "initiative" anything or "initiative to take initiatives" anything) and it could have been any goddamn politicians and I'll repeat myself: it wasn't just him among the politicians but those other people made no such grandiose claims, the co-sponsor didn't, those voting for the bill didn't, the people who voted the representatives into power didn't, even the people who actually "took the initiative in creating the internet" didn't make any such grandiose claims about themselves, does the point get through your skull and the skull of those who defend Gore? Can it?
Nucleon tidbit and a link to take ownership of an AC comment
Mostly for my own sake: AC comment.
I find NUCLEON interesting in all sorts of ways, one example would be that the resource requirements could be tiny compared to a lot of the other stuff. There's also a sort of a phreak angle to it, phreaking on steroids where it's not "just" about dial tones any more but voices. It feels very tangible (wrong word) or even tactile (even worse word) but then again I really am a weird nut who enjoys listening to my computers sing (relatively new ones, I'm not talking about ancient beasts). If it's warm, humid, and otherwise silent my ears can easily pick up various electrical components chirping etc., I did say weird! XD
I guess that part is a bit similar to the fun that can be had experiencing a beam blast of static electricity from turning on an unused old terminal. Still weird? Okay lol.
The main thing however would be to consider NUCLEON in combination with the digital nature of modern telephone systems. Not even normal landlines are POTS in the original sense of it any more, they might still be called or referenced as POTS but that's mostly just for convenience; the centrals are digital. Although I doubt it I guess the US could still be some weird exception as they often are but in Europe this change happened during the nineties in at least some countries, maybe all. That's roughly twenty years ago and I've gotten the impression that the changes these days are the potential dismantlement of the lines themselves, switching to the competing technologies, however that could be an extreme example: I wouldn't know. Of course in other countries (like in the developing world) it's nearly all mobile infrastructure anyways which was always digital.
What I was getting to is that most people don't know a thing about old telephone systems beyond "cups on a string" and that even with the prevalence of mobile phones (no string) the NUCLEON thing psychologically takes a solid step into "the physical world" in ways that a lot of the other NSA things don't appear to in the same manner. A lot of people still have a different take on telephones than computers and when it comes to actual voices I think it would become even more "real" for many of the ordinary citizens who might have trouble relating to what is going on.
I have no idea why nobody seems to be talking about it. There's a lot of that going around if you ask me, some of it might be information overload.
Generic Journal Entry
This is a generic journal entry posted entirely so that you can tell me I'm awesome, call me a dick, or impart useful information since SN lacks a messaging feature and I'm not giving out my email address.
A $1,499 Supercomputer on a Card?
A $1,499 supercomputer on a card? That's what I thought when reading El Reg's report of AMD's Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card which is rated at 11.5 TFlop/s(*). It is water-cooled, contains 5632 stream processors, has 8 GB of DDR5 RAM, and runs at 1018MHz.
AMD's announcement claims it's "the world's fastest, period". The $1,499 MSRP compares favorably to the $2,999 NVidia GTX Titan Z which is rated at 8 TFlop/s.
From a quick skim of the reviews (at: Hard OCP, Hot Hardware, and Tom's Hardware), it appears AMD has some work to do on its drivers to get the most out of this hardware. The twice-as-expensive NVidia Titan in many cases outperformed it (especially at lower resolutions). At higher resolutions (3840x2160 and 5760x1200) the R9 295x2 really started to shine.
For comparison, consider that this 500 watt, $1,499 card is rated better than the world's fastest supercomputer listed in the top 500 list of June 2001.
(*) Trillion FLoating-point OPerations per Second.
