If you live in the UK or USA, you need to understand one thing about the coming election:
You need to vote defensively.
Neither of the main parties are appealing. But if you don't vote for the lesser evil you may end up helping a totalitarian horror get elected.
Hold your nose and goddamn vote, dammit. THEN go on protests. Because if you don't vote for the lesser evil, the victor will welcome your protests with bullets.
The prize for political purity this time round is a shallow grave.
In 2021, I was at home, breathing a sigh of relief that the nightmare and the death was finally going to come to an end.
Why, what happened in 2021?
As for protest ethic, you won't say such brave words from the internment camp Trump will have you sent to. There were no protests or effective partisans in Nazi Germany, and they didn't have drones or AI.
This was a fun one, so let's do it again. What is something you've learned that seems unlikely, even though you know it's true? Here's one I think about a lot:
Sight, while being something something many people are born with, is not an innate ability, but something we learn to do. People who were born blind or were blind for a long time, who get sight, have to learn to see.
Truth. Getting a signal from your eyeballs is innate, but recognizing that signal as an image and processing it accordingly is learned.
Fun fact! Your brain does not care which nerve it receives that signal from. A while back, someone made a device that stimulates the (blind) user's tongue according to the image from a camera. The user's brain eventually recognized these stimuli as visual input.
99.9% of jobs do not require urgency of any kind, really they don't. We've all had a boss who acts like someone will die if we don't hit some made up deadline by people who don't even do the job. No one needs their meal 1 minute faster or the paperwork before tomorrow morning. Your time off actually doesn't need to wait. Sometimes I think about how legitimately bad most businesses are at time management and hiring, and I wonder how they manage to exist at all.
Let it never be said that capitalism is rational, and the invisible hand of the free market punishes irrationality. Nothing could be further from the truth.
So it seems that what #Windows#MicrosoftRecall does is take screenshots, sorts windows by application, then runs each window through an image-to-text model and logs its contents, capturing text, web domain information, and the topic of the content. This information is then logged in a searchable local database.
This has to be combined with some way to get back to the content, right? So if I searched for a topic in the future, Windows has to be able to restore the app and the document that you were viewing. So there has to be some URL or file path associated with each window content.
I know people are freaked out about this feature, but I think it’s basically Spotlight on steroids. I’m actually not that freaked out about it if it’s local-only, and I think this can actually be useful for someone with #ADHD like me who loses content all the time.
The real questions: what privacy-protection mechanisms are present, who gets to access to this data, how easily it can be exfiltrated?
Honestly, as far as I'm concerned, this is all just a front for a data-harvesting operation. So no, old apps will not be opted out by Microsoft as appropriate.
Claudia Sheinbaum is exploding some american liberal brains today. but she's a woman! but she's a scientist! but wikipedia says she's a leftist! LOLOLOL
It is the right of the Scottish people to determine our own future. Whether on EU membership, whether or not we want a monarchy, whether we want nukes on Scottish soil, whether we want to retain and expand our publicly owned NHS and more.
Why should we vote to continue London rule and being told what we can and cannot do? #VoteSNP
With all the extreme-right-wing rhetoric south of your border and World War 3 unfolding in the east, you all would be fools to not have nukes on your soil.
Indeed, and it's pretty hard to defend that independence against imperialistic aggression unless you have overwhelming firepower, i.e. nukes.
I wish it were not so. I wish that imperialistic aggression of any kind were met by an overwhelming non-nuclear response from the entire rest of the world. But as Ukraine can attest, that is not the world we live in.
If a #politician tells you that #VoteByMail is a bad idea, that politician is trying to stop you from #voting. #Vote that politician out, with extreme prejudice.
I wonder, why does #VGA use synchronization pulses, and not a pair of sawtooth signals for controlling #CRT deflection directly? Then the display could change modes faster (nothing to resynchronize), and a non-sawtooth signal could be used to implement a vector display if desired.
There must be a reason why #IBM didn't do this. Anyone know why?
Samsung forces repair shops to sign a TERRIBLE contract, that requires technicians to destroy your phone if they find non-Samsung parts in your device! iFixit is dropping their partnership with Samsung.
As a child, the Internet gave me such hope. With the ability to learn anything and talk to anyone at will, I thought that the ignorance of the old world would soon fade away, and hatred of the “other” would be revealed for the absurdity it is.
I had no idea, then, of how callous most people are; that bigotry is born of willful malice, not some tragic misunderstanding. Nor that it infests at least a third of my fellow humans.
Our best sensors can detect terrestrial radio chatter from something like 0.5 light years, tops. The nearest star is 4 light years away. The galaxy is tens of thousands of light years across.
Alpha Centauri could be the seat of a post-warp interstellar empire, and we'd never know unless they pointed a directional transmitter straight at us and said hi.
The progression of #time is generally considered to go from negative (past) to positive (future).
For example, “year -1000” is commonly understood to mean one thousand years before the beginning of the common era. Similarly, “T-minus 30 seconds” means 30 seconds before some event happens.
What if this was inverted, such that the past is considered positive, and the future negative? My first thought is that, although mathematically equivalent, this would seem rather depressing…