Pfft who needs an ultrasonic beacon when the biggest providers of SSO (Facebook and Google) are also the biggest advertising companies on the planet. They know who you are and what you do on a striking depth of sites. Ultrasonic beacons are only needed if you're playing catch up.
Ultrasonic beacons (previously, previously) let advertisers build an idea of when and where you use your devices: the sound plays in an ad on one device, and is heard by other devices. This way, they can associate two gadgets with a single user, precisely geolocate devices without aGPS, or even build graphs of real-world social networks. The threat was considered more academic than some, but more than 200 Android apps were found in the wild using the technique.
These are great. My working theory on evolution is that the earth is slowly turning animals back into dinosaurs. Spikes and protective plates are the ideal setup, so mammals are slowly being pushed in that direction. These dudes support my case.
There are 34 species of tenrec, a small omnivorous animal endemic to Madagascar and parts of mainland Africa. The tenrec female has 29 teats and can give birth to up to 32 young per litter, more than any other mammal. Pictured above: lowland streaked tenrec.
Driverless judiciary? It’s not scfi, it’s here today according to the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court:
When Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. visited Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute last month, he was asked a startling question, one with overtones of science fiction.
“Can you foresee a day,” asked Shirley Ann Jackson, president of the college in upstate New York, “when smart machines, driven with artificial intelligences, will assist with courtroom fact-finding or, more controversially even, judicial decision-making?”
The chief justice’s answer was more surprising than the question. “It’s a day that’s here,” he said, “and it’s putting a significant strain on how the judiciary goes about doing things.”
He may have been thinking about the case of a Wisconsin man, Eric L. Loomis, who was sentenced to six years in prison based in part on a private company’s proprietary software. Mr. Loomis says his right to due process was violated by a judge’s consideration of a report generated by the software’s secret algorithm, one Mr. Loomis was unable to inspect or challenge.
In March, in a signal that the justices were intrigued by Mr. Loomis’s case, they asked the federal government to file a friend-of-the-court brief offering its views on whether the court should hear his appeal.
The report in Mr. Loomis’s case was produced by a product called Compas, sold by Northpointe Inc. It included a series of bar charts that assessed the risk that Mr. Loomis would commit more crimes.
The Compas report, a prosecutor told the trial judge, showed “a high risk of violence, high risk of recidivism, high pretrial risk.” The judge agreed, telling Mr. Loomis that “you’re identified, through the Compas assessment, as an individual who is a high risk to the community.”
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Loomis. The report added valuable information, it said, and Mr. Loomis would have gotten the same sentence based solely on the usual factors, including his crime — fleeing the police in a car — and his criminal history.
At the same time, the court seemed uneasy with using a secret algorithm to send a man to prison. Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, writing for the court, discussed, for instance, a report from ProPublica about Compas that concluded that black defendants in Broward County, Fla., “were far more likely than white defendants to be incorrectly judged to be at a higher rate of recidivism.”
Justice Bradley noted that Northpointe had disputed the analysis. Still, she wrote, “this study and others raise concerns regarding how a Compas assessment’s risk factors correlate with race.”
In the end, though, Justice Bradley allowed sentencing judges to use Compas. They must take account of the algorithm’s limitations and the secrecy surrounding it, she wrote, but said the software could be helpful “in providing the sentencing court with as much information as possible in order to arrive at an individualized sentence.”
[…]
He added that Mr. Loomis “was free to question the assessment and explain its possible flaws.” But it is a little hard to see how he could do that without access to the algorithm itself.
The company that markets Compas says its formula is a trade secret.
“The key to our product is the algorithms, and they’re proprietary,” one of its executives said last year. “We’ve created them, and we don’t release them because it’s certainly a core piece of our business.”
And what if there is no ‘algorithm’ to review? Deep learning techniques are not based on code written by humans, they are based on neural networks that learn, like human beings do. In that case, what could Loomis have asked for?
Brilliant. Those commercials were always strangely compelling but I had no idea the amount of effort involved. Nor that they had to name each layer of each scene.
This is true for every single item piece of technology. Plumbing. Refrigerators. Electricity. Even modern farming is surprisingly opaque to most people - do you know where that comes from? Humans are hardwired to be extremely interested in other humans, sex, and food. They are a huge disappointment about their minimal interest in everything else.
it boggles my mind that there exists an incredibly expensive item that 90% of people in america own and use every day and our entire society is built around their use and several multi-million dollar industries exist due to its omnipresence
but people will go their entire lives without knowing even the most basic things about how they work or how to perform basic maintenance on them, or even how to recognize that they need maintenance at all. there’s nothing else I can think of that’s like that except for computers
housing and phones (unless you’re counting them as computers)
Yeah, I think this is what bothers me most about "appropriation" talk. The liberal of 20 years ago was like the neighbor, Wilson, from Home Improvement: constantly impressed by what every other culture has to offer and excited to dabble in each of them. The liberal from today looks more like Tim's sidekick Al. He's not offensive, but he's not different from Tim either. Wilson is a much better model for how to interact and learn from lots of different people.
I am 100% certain that a lot of tryhard whites get *really* into appropriation discourse because it lets them feel progressive about not liking non-western cultures
I will go ahead and say I really like Elon Musk. But I just don't think the hyperloop is going to work out. It's going to be humbling for Elon and ultimately a teachable moment.
So the last time I reblogged this, someone reblogged from me with a comment along the lines of “wait till you see them with swords”. So I went to search it up, and… guys. GUYS.
today i received an unsolicited georgia o’keefe postcard from a pseudonymous stranger who would like me to DM them on their protected Twitter account with 7 followers re: them embedding with me to learn about technology stuff.
This is not a very thoughtful reaction. 1) Breast milk is unequivocally good for babies. 2) Some babies can't drink formula. 3) Not all mothers can produce enough breast milk for their babies. 4) Some mothers produce too much - you have to milk yourself or your breasts start hurting.
Since milk banks are rare in the US and can't support the demand, the options are 1) let your baby skip breast milk, 2) give jobs to poor women in another country donating the milk they will produce no matter what.
It's so easy to get butthurt about how capitalism is evil. It's extremely hard to distribute breast milk. If you want to pay Americans a living wage for their breast milk, poor and middle class people won't be able to afford it.
Ambrosia usually employs around 20 mothers, says American co-founder Bronzson Woods. He and business partner Ryan Newell started the company in July 2015, tapping into a network Woods had built while serving as a Mormon missionary in Cambodia a few years earlier. But Woods devised the idea for a breast milk business while he was back in the US; his sister-in-law had given birth to twins, and couldn’t produce enough milk to feed them. Woods discovered that demand for human milk was high, but supply was pinched. Breast milk is only available commercially through milk banks or on a growing online market, which remains unregulated.
American women aren’t incentivized to donate their milk, Woods says. “That’s where we thought we could kind of fit in,” he explains. He also references the country’s high rates of breastfeeding: “Cambodia’s in a sort of developmental sweet spot, right?”
One of my all time favorite facts. So hard to believe I had a coworker call shenanigans on this until I (successfully) found a link to the original study.
TL;DR: Someone should make a probiotic that is just the flu virus vaccine so you can stay on top of your social game.
Came home last night and I immediately smelled something weird and heard the "click click click click" sound of the stove trying to light. I went in the kitchen and one of the burners on the stove was on high, all the way to "light". There was an empty pan above that burner.
Somehow Boycat managed to turn on the stove and heat up an empty pan for unknown hours yesterday. My apartment has a weird burnt plastic smell now. Not sure if it's the pan that was burned or what but it doesn't smell good.
