alwaysanagenda's comments

how large can you scale electric airplanes with hyper-dense battery cells?

I would imagine hitting the weight limit of traditional aircraft very quickly to get the same output of power.

oil's energy per square inch still can't be beat.

I recommend citizen journalists Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak who produce a twice-weekly media deconstruction on their podcast NoAgendaShow.com

There are no ads or corporate sponsors or outside influences -- and never will be. The podcast has run nearly 12 years strong and it has been 100% listener supported.

It's pretty easy to "secure" the election.

1. Voter ID 2. Paper ballot electronically counted, paper stored as backup for any disputes or recounts. 3. No digital / computerized voting machines.

Generally speaking, there is a lack of vision at Apple that has slowly deflated since Jobs has passed.

Jony Ive's departure to start a private design firm is confirmation of such, despite Apple being his 'primary' client.

One has to wonder what Apple would be like if Forstall was still there. People should remember it was his team that won the internal contest for the iPhone interface. And it was Jobs' willingness to create internal competition that brought the best out in his employees and the company.

Tim's runs Apple with the same kind of unchallenged vision that allowed George Lucas to produce Episodes 1, 2 and 3 without any kind of creative push-back.

It will stagnate until new hands take control.

It's a cycle. All life is.

How soon Apple's cycle turns upwards towards innovation remains to be seen.

A very smart question, and a legitimate concern as well.

This is precisely why I am generally against ML / AI in use to make important decisions, from what your insurance rate "should" be to how many taxes "need" to be collected.

For what it's worth, I think ML / AI will fall by the wayside when -- and only when -- companies realize it's human learning and natural intelligence, when grouped together -- run in parallel -- that is ultimately a more effective pattern-finder that will produce more meaningful data.

Ever notice how fast a group of internet vigilantes can 'doxx' someone? What if that was turned on other problems? That's real human intelligence in action.

Sample size is 998 and is only women.

The study: https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article-abstract/doi/...

>"Evidence suggests exposure to particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter <2.5 μm (PM2.5) may increase the risk for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Whether PM2.5 alters brain structure and accelerates the preclinical neuropsychological processes remains unknown. "

I'm sure air pollution is pretty bad for you but this seems statistically insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Great headline for New Yorkers who need something else to be afraid of.

For a laymen like myself, I fail to see how this is anything more than additional evidence for Pavlovian response. Are you an "expert" when you learn that a specific pattern of actions results in a reward? That's all that's going on here -- lick the correct water spout according to the pattern of flashing lights, get a reward.

How about an MRI of a newbie in flight school and an MRI of a seasoned pilot. What does that show in terms of neural development and associated pathways? What does the newbie's brain look like after extensive training? Can you measure neural pathways over many years and see how they grow or change?

I read this as:

"The answer to the opioid epidemic is just some meditation and reducing your dosage. Everything is OK, guys. Really."

Effectively, a native ad to prop up big pharma.

the hubris of man is that we have enough data to understand the earth at any given moment.

https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

The digital version of prep-er style hoarding for the not-far-off-inevitable apocalypse.

Love the idea to make it run on simple 8-bit CPUs that will be scavenged Fallout-style, but seems to presume that no 'newer' technology would survive and be functional.

Wonderful to see, none the less.

A little research on the author shows she is:

> an "American sociomedical scientist whose research focuses on sex, gender and sexuality, as well as the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS"

and her own profile says: https://womensstudies.barnard.edu/profiles/rebecca-jordan-yo...

> "I am an interdisciplinary feminist scientist and science studies scholar whose work explores the reciprocal relations between science and the social hierarchies of gender, sexuality, class, and race."

This author is less of a scientist and more of a sociologist that is using data points to leverage an agenda about gender, sexuality and sports. Putting 'feminist' before 'scientist' implies a host of biases.

This is politically expedient propaganda that can be used to leverage the idea that trans-women (biological men) should continue to compete in women's sports because "it's not all about testosterone."

And then there's this lovely disclaimer by SA, as if to say 'we know...':

>"The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American."

Are there ANY medical doctors, chemists or biologists who want to weigh in on this, not just "feminist scientists" who have made a career in "science studies" via identity politics?

Now that we've got SURE for economics, let's do one for climate change.

After all, "publication bias affects every research field out there."

Vox is basically explaining fake news without any sense of irony about how this plays out in every other industry and field.

> "Let’s say hundreds of scientists are studying a topic. The ones who find counterintuitive, surprising results in their data will publish those surprising results as papers.

>The ones who find extremely standard, unsurprising results — say, “This intervention does not have any effects,” or, “There doesn’t seem to be a strong relationship between any of these variables” — will usually get rejected from journals, if they bother turning their disappointing results into a paper at all.

>That’s because journals like to publish novel results that change our understanding of the field. Null results (where the researchers didn’t find anything) or boring results (where they confirm something we already know) are much less likely to be published. And efforts to replicate other people’s papers often aren’t published, either, because journals want something new and different."

Very similar to my complaint on this issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19432720

Oh, and look, it's sponsored by The Rockefeller Foundation, the definition of globalism writ large:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation#Beginni...

Global sea-level rise, according to previous predictions, which are now certainly incorrect, could be twice as severe, according to our new predictions, which may also be incorrect.

https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0

He's the only one who could testify about the truth behind the DNC leak (Seth Rich) and the Podesta e-mails (phished). Neither were 'hacked' by the Russians.

With the Mueller investigation effectively over, it's time to turn the tables. Assange is a valuable asset in this endeavor.

hair slug

From Wikipedia:

>"More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to have died out. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described. In 2016, scientists reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one percent described."

Life is a cycle. Glaciers are a cycle.

Bengio is asked: What will be the next big thing in AI?

> "Deep learning, as it is now, has made huge progress in perception, but it hasn’t delivered yet on systems that can discover high-level representations — the kind of concepts we use in language. Humans are able to use those high-level concepts to generalize in powerful ways. That’s something that even babies can do, but machine learning is very bad at."

I read this as: "We have super-advanced skip-logic software that can produce specific results when provided a large enough data set, but "intelligence" as it is defined, does not exist."

AI is really just sophisticated software algorithms.

In my opinion, there is no true artificial intelligence, and it will be unlikely that we will ever create such a thing for quite some time, if at all. AI is being used as a buzzword to garner attention.

It seems much more likely that we will build a brain-computer interface before true AI, and it will prove more efficient than what we have today, which is effectively many computers churning through a super-long list of "if-then" statements.

A summary:

Let's protect people from the ideas and content we think is bad to provide a better platform for our advertisers, then blame our focus on revenue as the reason for why we didn't focus more on censoring the content our advertisers and corporate leadership find offensive, so that we can continue to generate ad revenue, which we call "responsible growth."

This article is littered with fascist ideation. Like this line:

> “YouTube should never have allowed dangerous conspiracy theories to become such a dominant part of the platform’s culture.”

So, this "dangerous" information needs to be removed, since it's apparently harming the public who are assumed to be unable to think for themselves. The same public, who, apparently, likes conspiracy theories.

>“The primary goal of our recommendation systems today is to create a trusted and positive experience for our users,”

But what if you had a positive experience and were enjoying the way the algorithm populated new and unusual conspiracy videos? Sorry, you're out of luck. But hey, Google is making sure you get "trusted" information now. What a relief!

>The company’s lackluster response to explicit videos aimed at kids has drawn criticism from the tech industry itself.

The lackluster responsibility in parenting has resulted in explicit videos being aimed at kids by an algorithm that is incapable of discretion.

An algo that, apparently, works so well that humans need to modify it so we don't popularize popular content we find offensive.

It doesn't matter if information is true or false. YouTube's stance on "objectionable" content with a holier-than-thou-you-can-trust-us-to-filter-content-so-your-toddler-can-mainline-garbage-without-your-input is outrageously disgusting.

Agreed. The entire article rests upon the assumption that once the cap is reached, and the government may not spend anymore money on subsidizing broadband, all those reliant on those subsidies are now in peril.

It shows a narrow way of thinking, and also assumes quite a few things about the US Govt / FCC.

After just glossing over the fact of fiscal responsibility, it assumes budget constraints in this regard are bad, as if a single penny of government money (taxpayer's money) is never wasted or poorly allocated.

Second, the article's attitude seems to take the position (and certainly the comments do) that the government is one of the few (if any?) entities capable of improving access to broadband in these affected areas. I doubt this.

I would also be interested to know if wireless telcos do a better job serving these apparently under-served communities versus their broadband providers. For example, what is the ratio of people who have slow broadband but smartphones with LTE service?

A distant third is that somehow the issue of a budget cap cannot be readjusted at a later date. Or that there are no programs outside of Universal Service that can also augment and support rolling out broadband. Or that you cannot create a new program targeting specific needs, etc...

This is a false dilemma.

It also makes the assumption that broadband equals improved economic development. I don't discount the idea, but I question just how much of an impact it has, in order to use this as leverage against the idea of the budget cap.

Ultimately, we're seeing a lack of imagination to problem solving unless it includes a blank check from Uncle Sam.

Oh, and we can slam Ajit Pai while we're at it -- let's not pass on that.

You can't monetize the network.