requerdanos's Friends

3D XPoint aka Optane AMA

Posted by takyon on Tuesday March 12 2019, @02:01PM (#4070)
2 Comments

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?

Communication

Posted by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 12 2019, @01:43PM (#4069)
22 Comments

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.

Power

Posted by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday March 11 2019, @01:55PM (#4067)
38 Comments

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.

George Hotz Attention Seeking

Posted by takyon on Monday March 11 2019, @11:55AM (#4066)
9 Comments

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.

ecommerce package tracking

Posted by Runaway1956 on Monday March 11 2019, @07:06AM (#4065)
6 Comments

I doubt there is anyone at Soylent who doesn't purchase anything online. I do, pretty regularly, because I can find things that aren't available in my local area. Things that might be available, I can find for a fraction of the price online. So, I shop online.

Tracking packages is usually pretty straightforward. The vendor sends you a tracking number, which is often a live link to the carrier's tracking site. If it isn't a live link, well, we probably all recognize a USPS, UPS, or Fedex number, so we go to the appropriate tracking site, and copy/paste the number in. Unless the shipper used not-so-Smartpost, we generally know within a day when our package will arrive.

But, overseas shipping? That isn't so very straightforward. Over time, I've learned to recognize some of those numbers, but new ones pop out of nowhere. How do you keep up with all of them?

You no longer have to keep up with all of them. Or, any of them, if you don't want to.

http://parcelsapp.com/en/tracking/SYBAA52472888

Guy named Pavel Tisunov has done all the work, and created a web page, as well as apps for Android and iPhone to track almost everything, it seems. The list of carriers tracked can be found http://parcelsapp.com/en/carriers

Those of you who are multilingual might be interested in his blog - http://parcelsapp.com/blog/

I wish I had found Pavel a couple years ago! It appears that his earliest blog posts were in April 2017. If I could read his entries, I might have a better idea how long he's been around.

Enjoy!

And, thank God for diversity, and for Russians, huh?

Mainstream media fails again

Posted by Runaway1956 on Sunday March 10 2019, @09:50AM (#4063)
24 Comments

There seems to be a major controversy in Maryland right now. The gun grabbers are attempting to - well - to grab guns. I stumbled over the story on this site: https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2019/03/daniel-zimmerman/maryland-gun-owners-will-not-comply-gun-grabbers-and-legislators-freak-out/

Admittedly, this is a biased site. I happen to agree with the aims of The Truth, but it is biased. So, I did a search for articles on the subject, "We will not comply". I found one "mainstream" media mention of it: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/ac-cn-wicomico-not-comply-20190226-story.html

I've scrolled three pages into my search results, and have not found another mainstream media story. I've found infowars, callmegav, conservativefiringline, rallyforourrights, a related story at investmentwatchblog, dcclothesline, unclesamsmisguidedchildren - in short, hit after hit after hit, page after page of hits. But, mainstream media isn't covering the story at all.

Let me change search terms, and see if MSM is even covering the vote on the bill - - -

Search term used, "Maryland HOUSE BILL 786" Results for MSM stories after scanning two pages of hits = ZERO Are they trying to pass this bill without any publicity at all? Keeping it hidden from voters? WTF?

Several small time news sources located inside of Maryland carry stories. I thought I found a hit at the Washington Post - but that was a false hit, on an entirely different subject.

Odd - if all the rest of MSM is refusing to cover a story, we might expect Fox to carry it. I don't even see a Foxnews hit.

Go ahead, do your own searches. If you can find liberal media stories on the house bill in general, let us know what search terms you used.

If you can find liberal media stories on the We Will Not Comply opposition to HOUSE BILL 786, please, PLEASE let us know how you found them.

It's this sort of apparent coverup that lends credence to the likes of infowars.

Lenovo ThinkStation P520 + P920

Posted by takyon on Thursday March 07 2019, @08:59PM (#4059)
2 Comments

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.

Activating Safari Window Halts VLC Media Player Audio Output

Posted by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday March 07 2019, @05:23AM (#4056)
6 Comments

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.