It’s Time for [the US] to Have an Unapologetic Atheist in the Oval Office.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2019-mar-jun.html#8_June_2019_%28Atheist_in_the_Oval_Office%29
Should you happen to have an HP7440A or similar plotter hanging around, you could have a quick game of Flappy Bird — or Plotty Bird as [WesleyAC] calls it. Just be sure you have some blank paper. The whole thing fits in about 200 lines of Rust code and — according to the author — gets to about 20 frames per second. Watching the thing go, it appears that it draws a random set of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2019/06/08/1980s-plotter-plays-flappy-bird/
As you may have heard by now, news began to break Friday night that Maker Media, home to Make: magazine, Maker Faire, and Maker Shed, was folding up their big top and calling it quits (though founder Dale Dougherty has vowed to attempt a resurrection in some form). As the sad news began to thread its way through social media, the sense of shock, grief, and confusion was palpable. As when a beloved artist, entertainer,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/08/thinking-back-on-the-special-m.html
A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander. The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization” and sets out a plausible scenario of where business-as-usual could lead over the next 30…
A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander. The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization” and sets out a plausible scenario of where business-as-usual could lead over the next 30…
The reason Google Assistant (that’s the product you invoke when you say “OK Google” to your device) works reasonably well is that the Pygmalion team — a small army of linguists — work long hours handcrafting variations on common phrases (“set a timer for five minutes,” “remind me in five minutes,” “in five minutes, remind me…”) and grammars that allow the system to correctly respond to your queries. These linguists (who have to have at…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/03/wage-theft-2.html
[Editor’s note: Whenever governments review their copyright, one of two things happens: either they only listen to industry reps and then come to the “conclusion” that more copyright is always better; or they listen to stakeholders and experts and conclude that a little goes a long way. Normally, when the latter happens, the government that commissioned the report buries it out of terror of powerful Big Content lobbyists. This time, miraculously, an eminently sensible Canadian…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/03/peace-order-good-govt.html
On November 4, 1979 Marion Stokes began systematically video taping television news and continued for more than 33 years, until the day she died. The Internet Archive is now home to the unique 71k+ video cassette collection and is endeavoring to help make sure it is digitized and made available online to everyone, forever, for free. Ms. Stokes was a fiercely private African American social justice champion, librarian, political radical, TV producer, feminist, Apple Computer…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2019/05/24/71716-video-tapes-in-12094-days/
Enlarge / Does he look happy or sad to you? (credit: US Fish and Wildlife) As social creatures, we subconsciously match moods with those around us—and not just when a cranky supervisor darkens your day (Editor’s Note: Is it something I said?). The scientific term for the spread of feelings is “emotional contagion,” a term that may feel particularly appropriate when it comes to grumpiness. But as is so often the case with human psychology,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1509993
The Senate Armed Services Committee advanced a major defense spending bill in a closed session this week, agreeing to the Trump administration’s $750 billion request and raising U.S. defense spending to levels not seen since the height of the Iraq War. If it passes the House and Senate, the bill would authorize the second major defense spending increase in two years. Last year, despite initial objections to President Donald Trump’s proposed budget hikes, the House…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/05/23/defense-spending-bill-senate/
Machine learning brings old paintings and photos to lifeMachine learning researchers have produced a system that can recreate lifelike motion from just a single frame of a person’s face, opening up the possibility of animating not just photos but also paintings. It’s not perfect, but when it works, it is — like much AI work these days — eerie and fascinating.Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/05/deep-time-fakes/
On May 22, the New York State Democratic Party endorsed the idea of easing the time limits on voters who want to switch parties. The current law requires voters to have been a member of a party for 190 days before a primary, if they want to vote in that party’s primary (unless the voter wasn’t registered to vote). The party recommends that the legislature change the law so that voters can switch parties up…
I have completed the draft version of the Postgres 12 release notes. Consisting of 186 items, this release makes big advances in partitioning, query optimization, and index performance. Many long-awaited features, like REINDEX CONCURRENTLY, multi-variate most-frequent-value statistics, and common table expression inlining, are included in this release. The release notes will be continually updated until the final release, which is expected in September or October of this year.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/4sa
We create, develop, document and collaborate as users of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) from around the globe, usually by working remotely on the Internet. However, human beings have many millennia of evolution that makes us predisposed to communicate most effectively via in-person interaction. We don’t just rely on the content of communication, but its manner of expression, the body language of the communicator, and thousands of different non-verbal cues and subtle communication mechanisms.…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/05/10/delta-union-busting.html
The simultaneous release of the final season of Game of Thrones and Avengers: Endgame has wrought upon this. . .
ST. LOUIS—Their meals disrupted by protestors who stormed the restaurant with buckets full of viscous red liquid, diners eating plant-based Impossible Whoppers at a local Burger King were reportedly horrified Friday when meat-rights activists splashed beet juice all over them. “Shame! Shame on them—look at these…Read more…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/diners-eating-impossible-burgers-doused-with-beet-juice-1834512845
What is ‘Human Centered Design’ and Why Should Engineers Care?… Not long ago my friend and I had a chuckle at the expensive of a coworker who liked to use fancy words like ‘affordance’ and ‘signifiers’ in conversation to describe what we would just call a handle. I later realized the joke was on us after […]
External feed Read More at the Source: https://engineerdog.com/2019/05/03/seven-fundamental-principles-of-design-every-engineer-should-know/
Did you just open Firefox only to find all of your extensions disabled and/or otherwise not working? You’re not alone, and it’s nothing you did. Reports are pouring in of a glitch that has spontaneously disabled effectively all Firefox extensions. Each extension is now being listed as a “legacy” extension, alongside a warning that it “could not be verified for use in Firefox and has been disabled”. A ticket submitted to Mozilla’s Bugzilla bug tracker…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/03/a-glitch-is-breaking-all-firefox-extensions/
People who run their own mail servers are increasingly finding that the mail they send to Gmail users is being rejected, because the company’s anti-spam algorithm treats small, independently managed mail-servers as high-risk mail sources. And since Gmail users never receive the blocked messages, it can be impossible to convey to them that they’re missing some messages. This happened to me last month and Ken Snider, our awesome sysadmin, was somehow able to fix it,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/01/algorithmic-discrimination.html
