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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.

http://www.snopes.com/breatharians/

http://www.babwnews.com/2017/06/crazy-couple-says-they-no-longer-need-to-eat/

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.

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'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.

Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, anonymous comment posting has temporarily been disabled. You can still login to post. However, if bad posting continues from your IP or Subnet that privilege could be revoked as well. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner or login and improve your posting. If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email admin@soylentnews.org

Curious, email the very persons who have revoked the first right of free speech, the right of anonymous free speech. And of course, the real question is, who, or what, determines what is "bad posting"? Not much I can do, admins have let stick a foul Spam mod, and now I cannot post Cowardly, and next, oh, the Huge Manatee! Well, I guess my job as a philosopher is going well, attracting the attention of the powers that be enough to get them to try to silence me. But as it has been repeatedly stated on this site, disagreement is no basis for censorship. Unless, of course, it comes to something like the heliocentric theory of the cosmos, or that islamophobia is alt-right propaganda.

  But those are the breaks. It is just that Soylentils should know the breaks, and who is being broken. Remember, bad posts drive out good posts, and banning posts that call out bad posts will allow bad posts to drive out good posts. You should listen to Socrates:

And now, O men who have condemned me, I would fain prophesy to you; for I am about to die, and that is the hour in which men are gifted with prophetic power. And I prophesy to you who are my murderers, that immediately after my death punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will surely await you. Me you have killed because you wanted to escape the accuser, and not to give an account of your lives. But that will not be as you suppose: far otherwise. For I say that there will be more accusers of you than there are now; accusers whom hitherto I have restrained: and as they are younger they will be more severe with you, and you will be more offended at them. For if you think that by killing men you can avoid the accuser censuring your lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honorable; the easiest and noblest way is not to be crushing others, but to be improving yourselves. This is the prophecy which I utter before my departure, to the judges who have condemned me.

Of course, in the case of Soylent News, the result will be further insignificance. Soylent News is not growing to the extent it should be, it has a reputation as a right-wing den of iniquity and a part of the Dark Web, or the Dark Enlightenment. So it will fade away. I will not leave, however, because I am an advocate of free speech. So who among the admins is responsible for these actions? Do they not dare to even reveal their pseudonyms? Soylent News, hypocrisy is thy name.

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?

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.

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 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.