I recall that Atlassian had some kind of scripting console where you could run Groovy and interact with its API / objects. It was useful for exploring when writing plugins for bamboo or Jira ...
Putting the ethical dilemmas aside, I'd like to know how such bioprocessors could possibly have:
>million times greater power efficiency when compared to digital processors
if bioprocessors have to support("run" the metabolism) all their organelles, including parts that are not at all involved in the signal processing, which is I suppose >99% of the cell, compared to digital processors that we literally built with the sole purpose of performing such operations and have logical gates close in size to the single layer of atoms already?
What did we miss in the design?
Much fewer electrons have to move for a detectable chemical reaction than a detectable electric current. Solid state systems are just much less efficient at computations, but they are much easier to organize.
Compare a copy operation on a DNA sequence in a cell with a copy in a memory, the cell does it extremely cheaply since it is a simple chemical reaction while the memory has to flow electrons in a giant network of nodes. You can easily copy exabytes of data using chemistry (DNA) with almost no energy.
It’s interesting that each “processor” needs a camera which is made up of inefficient transistors and other leaky electrical components and there is still a claim to efficiency surplus.
>When we launched Chromecast (...) connecting your TV to your phone, tablet or laptop was clunky and hard
I would argue that this still holds true today. Is there any reliable way to do the screen mirroring/photo sharing from an Android phone to a Samsung smart TV without additional devices? My Pixel works great with Chromecast or a similar dongle(e.g. Xiaomi Box) but I really couldn't make it work without them. I tried a couple of options from plain Android sharing, through Samsung's SmartThings, to some sketchy apps that ask for your CC for trial but none of them worked before I gave up and asked my host for a HDMI cable.
The later part refers to the plus addressing, like "han.solo+github@gmail.com", which people use to so that "If they later start receiving spam to that address, they know the service has leaked or sold their info.". Now the IAB requests that advertisers should normalise such addresses by dropping the part after the plus sign, and therefore effectively stopping users from "tracking" the advertisers.
(Web) developers have gotten lazier and simply don't care anymore. The fact of the matter is that if you don't host your email with one of the big three, some services are probably not working anyway. I'd also like websites to show me things like news and recipes without having them run javascript, but apparently this means I deserve white pages because writing HTML is too much of a hassle for the modern web developer.
It's quite sad to see. It's also the reason I'm using somethingunique@domain.tld;, if cyberstalkers start normalising to a domain, they'll only hurt their own business.
> I'd also like websites to show me things like news and recipes without having them run javascript, but apparently this means I deserve white pages because writing HTML is too much of a hassle for the modern web developer.
Often enough the content is there but just hidden until the JS loads for ... reasons, idk.
nobody cares, email, along the majority of the internet as "computers talking protocols", is dead. The absolute majority of email is handled by gmail or microsoft, accounting for >80% of MX servers in the wild by the data i had five years back. I'd imagine the share of the duopoly is even larger today, considering how difficult it is to get into inbox these days.
>and therefore effectively stopping users from "tracking" the advertisers.
I guess that's the nefarious explanation, but there's a more benign one: if you want to correlate user behavior, you need some sort of normalization, otherwise john.doe+apple@example.com and john.doe+amazon@example.com would show up as different "people" and cause match rates to suffer. Sure, getting tracked isn't great, but it's not exactly the hypocrisy rage-bait that the OP is implying.
In a logical world it would mean that you see fewer ads. If your matches increase, your price per ad goes up so the service needs to show you fewer ads to hit their ad revenue target for you.
But if you think that will happen I have an East River transportation startup in New York that is seeking an angel investor.
> the service needs to show you fewer ads to hit their ad revenue target for you.
In a logical world, yes.
In a capitalist world, that revenue target goes up every year. Apple became the richest company on earth selling hardware, yet here they are now drowning their software with ads.
I've come to the conclusion that we should just ban all advertising, completely. Any possible positives to allowing advertising are entirely dwarfed by the negatives.
I would love it if there were no ads. Seems like a dream though. Has any government tried it? If so, what kind of sneaky ads posing as content emerged? "Native ads" posing as content already exist. At least it's easy to tell the difference when the ad is out in the open and marked clearly.
So would you ban shop signs? What about a shop-sign that simply said "Cafe"? Or "Meals"? That would be the end of chain stores (which I would not regret).
I don't mind shop signs; I do mind posters all over the street-scene.
The Post Office delivers about 4X as much unaddressed junk advertising pizzas and estate agents than real mail, and I object to that. In this country (UK), anyone can stuff whatever junk they like in your mailbox; in the US, I believe only USPS can put anything in your mailbox. Are USPS allowed to deliver unaddressed pizza fliers?
The best argument in favour of advertising is that it makes it possible for a new entrant to a market to make an impression; without it, markets would always be dominated by incumbents, give or take the occasional surprise. I don't know how to capture that benefit, without ending up with the whole world covered in billboards.
We already regulate shop signs - compare e.g. streets in Asia vs. Europe. Completely different what is tolerated. Tolerating informative signage (e.g. non flashy signs telling you what shop you are looking at) is not incompatible with banning advertisements.
> The best argument in favour of advertising is that it makes it possible for a new entrant to a market to make an impression; without it, markets would always be dominated by incumbents, give or take the occasional surprise. I don't know how to capture that benefit, without ending up with the whole world covered in billboards.
I don't think that argument holds much water as ads require a big capital investment. The main reason new entrants need to advertise is because the incumbents are already advertising so you neeed to compete there just to get back the base level of engagement.
I think this new sort of AI-powered language model assistant search will be interesting once it trickles into end user control. Injecting ads requires the model output to be under central control where the they can inject ads. But when we get to the point that we can just automate our browsers to fetch 1000 pages and generate summaries locally, ads will be toast. There is a massive battle for control over generalized computing brewing because the ad networks need to force us to not build.
GP is exaggerating, but they definitely do seem to be increasing the number of ads in apps. Apple News (even the paid News+) has tons of ads, often after a single sentence in an article. In AppleTV+ (a service I love!) they’ve removed the image cards of shows in your up next queue on the “What to Watch” page and replaced them with a big auto-playing audio and video preview of one of their shows that’s not in your list. There’s no way to get the old functionality back. I’ve stopped using the app other than from the Home Screen where I have it set to show my “Up Next” queue. It’s really disgusting that they’re making these changes and it’s really turning me off of their services which I loved until recently.
While that's true, the questions was specifically about the claim they are "drowning their software with ads". Providing a single example doesn't really support that claim.
You can get ads for their services (mostly Music an Arcade) in iOS settings (and IIRC System Settings on MacOS), unsolicited push notifications from App Store etc.
Of course that's the goal. The IAB isn't an NSA front. The problem with advertising is not the primary goal, but all the secondary things that can happen.
lokedhs said "ostensibly" because the internet advertising industry has long maintained the pretence that tracking users and showing them relevant ads is helpful to the user, when the truth is the advertising industry cares about the opinion of users like the thanksgiving industry cares about the opinion of turkeys - which is to say, not at all.
There's a reason these things are opt-out rather than opt-in.
The answer to marcus0x62's question - why would a person want advertisers to correlate their behavior - is that they wouldn't, and if they want to advocate for their own self-interest they should install an ad blocker.
If it's the goal, you'd expect ads to be actually be more relevant and useful to users.
They don't, which has been shown in studies. What has been shown is that showing the same things people already bought give people regret which increases total amount of purchases.
In other word, the goal is to not to give users a good experiences watching ad's. It is to make them buy more, which is an orthogonal goal.
Let’s say you’re DHS. You contact some person and have a conversation like this
Govt: “I need IP addresses, ideally cellular and known public wifi, of a person using this email address”.
Data broker: “Here’s the list including the most recent cellular IP address associated with that person at this timestamp and their most used public wifi locations.”
Govt: “Hey, cellular provider, where is this subscriber right now?”
Provider: “Here’s the lat/long, last seen 1 second ago. Happy hunting!”
How does that contradict what the parent poster is saying? Even though ad-tech companies make tracking individuals easier, it doesn't change the fact that it's still largely funded by advertising itself, not through some shady government shell company.
I disagree: The main problem with advertising is with its primary goal, which is manipulting people into excess consumption. There are of course other secondary issues as well, but even without them ads are already a net negative for society.
Yeah; that's not benign. I don't want my behavior being "correlated" by a shady group of companies whose sole purpose is learning how to better manipulate me for their own profit.
Recently I also started coding before breakfast, but in my case it's for work. This is the only way to get something done before a deluge of meetings, bug reports and support requests starts. I'll definitely keep using that timeframe for my personal projects once my day job becomes more organized.
BTW. Contrary to you, I've always considered myself a night owl.
Maybe USA is different but in EU their outdoor clothes are made predominantly of nylon and polyester. I don't think rayon have the properties needed for outdoor jackets.
Obviously, this doesn't mean the man from the video is right, but it's for plenty other reasons.
Let's step back from these geopolitical speculations for a while and ask: why would any European country invade Russia in any foreseeable future? It's the 21st century, Western Europe has its own problems, barely any army and Russia has nuclear weapons capable of wiping out humankind from the earth. It's real life, not some Paradox Interactive game. I mean, even in times when such invasion could have made more sense, Napoleon's France and Nazi Germany tried, and they both failed miserably. I simply don't understand Russian concerns and I think about them as cheap excuses for enslaving and killing innocent people.
As a German I do understand cheap excuses for enslaving and killing innocent people quite good.
Especially Russians.
There is good reason for Lord Ismay's saying about NATO:
'Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down'
Actually I'm glad about that Americans thing, because of that Germans thing.
Not because of that Russians thing.
But as I said, I'm a geostrategic determinist.
You just can't be sure, your life and hopes die from one day to the other.
Just ask the Ukrainians, the Afghans or half of the middle east from 2003 onwards.
Oh, just in case you are US-American.
Congratulation, everything you need and could wish for you have on your continent, including nukes and cheap labour from the south.
You don't need anybody else, they need you at most.
And there weren't many Invasions on the US, were there?
Of course they're maniacally obsessed with their paltry Civil War.
Ridiculous.
Must be something they really fear.There you have your kitchen sink psychology.
Which brings me back to the mess with Russia.
This is their last attempt for a long, long time.
Their demographics works against them.Their population is shrinking and ageing.
So is the German one.
But the Germans were pampered by the US after WWII because of the Soviet Union.
Supervised and pampererd.
The Russians were just left aside as losers and geostrategical bystanders after Soviet collapse.
Now it's their endgame.
And I, as a Polish person, should be especially aware of the importance of geopolitics. Personally, I've been lucky enough to live in a fully sovereign Poland for my whole life but that is something that was a pipe dream for all my ancestors for the last 200 years mostly due to our geographic position between major European powers - so well, geopolitics.
The thing is, I thought these dark times when people are sent to kill each other to redraw some arbitrary lines on the map are long gone, together with its apologists.
Sorry to say that, but welcome back to Hotel California.
Ah, and I'm just a messenger, and would prefer not to be shot.
I don't defend anything, I'm looking for an exit.
I have also been reading about the American civil war. Even I initially thought it was a small war that barely killed anyone. But losing 2% of your population seems significant, especially given that it was a local affair.
The American Civil War was in some ways the prelude to WWI in terms of introducing the kind of mass-slaughter battles enabled by increasingly industrialized firepower. There were some very brutal engagements, Gettysburg being the most famous.
Imagine if Gatling had invented his multi-barreled, rotary rifle a few years earlier.
Too bad his sales reps couldn't demonstrate its usefullness and superiority sooner.
Say, used by the National Guard against striking miners in Pittsburgh or something.
Enough of them in Unionist hands and Ghettysburg would have been over in a few hours instead of three days.
And so would the ACW.
Dixie's young and upright wheat mowed down in hours.
A grand metapher for the Union victory.
And industrialism, of course.
Now perhaps you understand why the Russians are a little bit obsessed about their losses at our last tour to Moscow.
I already said, their history breeds and select paranoia.
So to say, they lived Grove's Motto long ago, only the paranoid survive.
This, very much this. The centrists here in this situation are really making idiots of themselves. Russia is under no threat from NATO or anyone else on the planet with respect to its integrity or even its foreign interests.
NATO is historically and inherently an anti-Russian alliance. It has been since it's inception. In 90's and 00's Russia has made multiple advancements towards joining NATO, but was dismissed, reassuring the worst fears among Russian military branch of government, that they wouldn't be seen as allies.
You should bear in mind that countries are not persons. And their alliances are not mere "friendships". They are slowly moving clumsy structures and the alliances are constraints.
All that is happening today has been predicted long ago and now we are simply "enjoying" the consequences of a long trail of politicians' failures. Politicians that favored short-term populism over long-term global stability, failing to set a vector for these structures that would result in mutual benefit, rather than an expected confrontation.
It's meaning seems to vary with the country, which could be an indication of geostrategic determinism and I highly suspect it's a dirty word among extremists.
I'm no geopolitical expert, but the economic concerns are there. Ukraine is a 'breadbasket', if they were to join the EU's common market (with export tarrifs) then presumably Russians would face rising food costs.
The motivation to keep Ukraine in Russia's military sphere probably has as much to do with economics as anything else.
It's an interesting question but it also show something about international relationships now. Russia seems to get stuck in military control of resources while other countries are more fluid and want threat-free negotiations.
Now I could be wrong and maybe there are a lot of strings being pulled in disguise.
Yes, because we all know what happens when the most competent nations try to topple regimes the cheap way with the help of The Company and its friends like say '53 in Teheran.
In the end you have paranoid rulers that try to secure their position under all circumstances with secret police and else fun stuff.
Which then causes riots and revolutions as a reaction.
And the trouble you have then for decades, which is again advantageous for others, of course.
I'm not saying the economic motivations justify the invasion. I'm saying the economic motivations make more sense to me as the root cause of the invasion compared to military reasons.
Exactly. But this is because many Russians don't understand the concept of agency when it comes to nations. Plus, they think their motherland is the best place on earth. This even applies to the highly-educated individuals e.g. during the war in Donbas in 2014, I had some Russian-born expats coworkers who were genuinely convinced that a) both NATO and EU enlargements in Eastern Europe were CIA's ploys, against "common people will" and b) Russia had nothing to do with that war, it was just people rioting against Ukraine's pro-western politics.
Hi Dang, I think this is the best thread to ask you about that: didn't you have a quote from Bruno Schultz in your 'about' section some time ago? How did you come across him?
It was most likely from the great and idiosyncratic Martin Seymour Smith. I used to spend hours combing through his masterpiece, which was an encyclopedia of 20th century literature which he produced single-handedly.
Thanks, I'll add "The Guide to Modern World Literature" to my reading list (and I guess it will transitively keep this list filled for the next decade or so)
