I'm going to give it without context, because, really, it just applies.
I mean, this is like if some asshole starts tearing up your house and, as you're pitching him out the door, he starts naming conditions under which he'd be willing to leave quietly.
-- Roy Edroso
(h/t: #jonswift2018)
Wish I'd had the presence of mind to take a screenshot of this tweet before I clicked the link, which said "Translate this tweet." In any case, this is the result of clicking that link:
I have no idea which machine-learning system (?) thinks any of that tweet needed translating (not counting from English to something else, of course), much less from Portuguese.
And granted I'm running Windows, but why is Microsoft handling trying to perform translation services on Twitter, being viewed through Firefox?
See, this is how conspiracy theories get started.
Also, cattle mutilations are up.
(?)
You know how the pronunciation guide used on Wikipedia, among other sites, is not the one you grew up with (if you're of a certain age)? It features many more characters and some different conventions. It's hard for me to make the effort to learn this new language, as it were, and so I am, from time to time, frustrated when I want to know how to pronounce something.
However, help is here!
I don't know how long this feature has been around on Wikipedia, but I just noticed it today: you can hover over an individual character in the phonetic spelling of a given word or name, and a tooltip will pop up, showing you what that particular character means!
Here's an example screenshot:
My life just got measurably better. Shoutout and many thanks to the Wikipedians who made this happen.
Evidently, the money is being put to good use! ;)
It has long fascinated me that our mouths are simulataneously one of the most horrible sources of infection and about the most rapidly healing part of the body I can name.
Pro tip: just because you blow once or twice on a hunk of potato you just boiled and repeat that for a ladelful of a reheating stew [1] that seemed to need a little extra starch doesn't mean you aren't going to burn the roof of your mouth.
You'd almost think I'd've figured that out by now.
Anyway, let the healing begin! (Dousing with rioja [2] seems to be helping.)
[1] Spiced Chickpea Stew With Coconut and Turmeric
[2] Spanish wine with a South Asian-ish dish? Yeah. I'm a savage. Or a multiculturalist. One of those.
Bumped into my neighbor a short while ago, and he referred me to the Google Maps street view of our mutual address. Screenshot below. Click it to big it.
I often fret about how much the machines know about us. And then I get something like this, a "job for you" from LinkedIn.
Job description
We are a multi-media, global entertainment brand that inspires young men to lead their most stylish and culturally relevant lives by covering news and trends in fashion, sneakers, music, art and entertainment. Reaching 10+ million men each month, Highsnobiety is both an influential AND fast growing, award winning media company.
Short of adding a requirement that prospective candidates should enjoy long-distance running, can you think of a job for which I'd be less suited?
I do like the company name, though.
While scrolling through Deadspin or Gizmodo, I saw a link to a post, titled "Discover the Secrets of the Tape Measure," on one of their sister sites, Lifehacker, that made me pause for a moment. I was pretty sure there wasn't going to be any new information for me -- I've been using tape measures for going on half a century, professionally, even, for many years -- but I thought, eh, don't be a closed-minded old guy, maybe you'll learn something new.
Clicked the link and *sigh*, yep, it was a video. Didn't click play. I like to read. Watching, like a drooling couch potato, makes me antsy as all hell. It never goes fast enough, there's no equivalent to skimming, it always feels like three more minutes of life tossed out the window.
A couple of days later, I thought, okay, one quick look. And all of my gripes about videos were confirmed.
I mean, even going in, I was thinking, this could (should!) have been a text post, that would have taken about a twentieth of the time to read as it did to watch. And worse, 98% of the useful information conveyed was? Yes. Nothing. But. Text. Streamed over video. With each sentence displaying on screen for an excruciatingly long time.
And further, in this age of oligopolistic telecommunications giants, how about the bandwidth considerations? Even if you thought the post would need some visuals, a few line drawings would have done just fine. Say, four PNGs, at about 50Kb each. Instead, who knows how many Mb were spent.
And don't even get me started about the pre-roll ads.
You want an idea for a killer AI app? Make something that "watches" video, distills it down to its essence, and delivers the result in text, the way God intended.
Grumble.
[Update 2019-12-25 18:02] Some more thoughts on the matter, from me, in comments under this Facebook post.
[Update 2018-09-20 12:13] The test has been postponed until 3 October 2018. (via)
Original post appears below.
Info on the emergency alert test:
— FEMA (@fema) September 15, 2018
🔹It’s a nationwide test of the same system that pushes public emergency messages like AMBER alerts
🔹Presidential Alerts are only for national emergencies
🔹FEMA & @FCC are testing to ensure it will work when needed
FAQ: https://t.co/Op8T9AEpiF pic.twitter.com/FBC1AF7oHY
(h/t: Tom McKay)
Here's a simple and clever authentication mechanism that's new to me:
Authorities watched as the truck arrived at about 1:55pm on October 23 to 3055 Dulles Drive in Mira Loma, California, a location near the airport in Ontario, California.
"This location is less than a mile away from where KARAC had received duffle bags containing cocaine form CHS1 a few months earlier," Monroe wrote.
She watched as Ignjatov and Hristovski got out of the truck to meet an "unknown man." Hristovski handed the man "an item, which looked like neither paper or money."
"I know, based on my training, experience, and knowledge of this investigation, that drug traffickers often use serial numbers on dollar bills as a method of identification when conducting drug transactions," Monroe added. "Accordingly, I believe that the item HRISTOVSKI handed to the unknown man may have been a dollar bill so that the unknown man could confirm the identity of IGNJATOV and HRISTOVSKI by the serial number on the bill."
(source)
My first thought upon reading this was: Wow! Gotta pass that along!
De la Pava himself can seem like an avenging angel, at least for those with a certain view of what ails contemporary American literature. He exists off the literary grid, which is to say that he lives in the real world and has a real job—as a public defender in the criminal courts of Manhattan. He has no M.F.A., no teaching post. The academy hasn’t laid a finger on him. He self-published his first novel, “A Naked Singularity,” in 2008, after eighty-eight agents turned it down. Against all odds, it found a literary audience, and when the University of Chicago Press republished it, in 2012, it received the PEN/Bingham Prize as the best début fiction of the year.
My second thoughts, however ... How many other aspiring novelists have been rejected time and time again, simply because their novels weren't any good? Is passing the above along akin to rejoicing because someone won the lottery, while neglecting to reflect upon the millions of people who, week after week, blow tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars, seeking that lucky ticket?
I don't mean to disparage Sergio De la Pava at all -- the review in which the above appeared certainly makes me want to read all three of his books. Just ... it's complicated.
The Cardinal Way isn’t playing the right way, it’s making a big fucking deal out of playing the right way ...
Way back, when I was a kid and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I loved me some Bob Gibson and Lou Brock, to the point where my maternal grandfather banished me from the house during the 1967 World Series.
Not sure when it began, but I did at some point, some years later, start becoming sick of the sanctimony of the St. Louis Cardinals. Or, at least, clowns like Joe Buck (of Fox Sports, of course) intoning about them.
And then, one day, Tony LaRussa and Albert Pujols were prominently on display at a Glenn Beck rally. (This is back when that slob was big -- kind of the Donald Trump of his day.) I've never forgiven either for that, and will not, until they publicly apologize.
I do, however, love me some Yadier Molina. So, since they're apparently rebuilding ...
First step, IMNSHO? Make Dexter Fowler happy.
Valerio will not be permanently put to sleep as he "was doing what jaguars do."
Good call, whoever decided.
Yeah, yeah. I clicked on a "Twitter Moment" link.
If Trump has one single accomplishment as President, it is how thoroughly he’s revealed extremely rich people as being not somehow braver or smarter or more disciplined than the rest of us but somehow exactly the opposite—consumed by pettiness, enslaved by vanity, and perfectly willing to fuck important things up in order to make some point to themselves and their rancid peers.
-- David Roth
(via an ongoing story that has me OD'ing on schadenfreude)
While refreshing my memory of what a Schwarzschild radius is, I came across this rather startling claim:
... the average density of a supermassive black hole can be less than the density of water.
Thanks for the link, John Timmer!
You’ll miss out on 80 percent of life if you’re afraid to get messy, or look dumb, or get sweaty.
- -- Drew Magary
Found at the bottom of a box that was being repacked for shipping, yet another spare pair:
You have to love the amount of black tape.
Also:
Shiny!
I'll be sending out details when my new Internet connection is established.
I'm now deep in the bowels of my layers of old boxes -- pruning, in preparation from moving from a place with practically infinite storage space to a place where I assume there will be none -- and among the gobs of stuff I've found are about thirteen DSL modems. Or forty-seven. I've lost count.
I'm responsibly bringing them to the town's e-waste disposal center, so don't worry about that. But, sheesh, I am starting to wonder how many phone companies have me on some obsolete shitlist for never returning their once-precious gear.
(And fantasizing about how annoying it would be to them, were I actually now to return these things, as once COMMANDED, in the accompanying paperwork, received lo those many years ago.)
