So an app that would probably serve a real need fails because the team is unable to bootstrap the two-sided market. The best dev moves to a bullshit "green habits" app that doesn't suffer from such problems because... it doesn't really do much in the first place. Not the greatest outcome for the world.
Don't you remember before inflation when we were able to focus on climate change!
But you totally got us there, the startup failed because we were a vitamin (and because our on-the-fence seed round was scuppered by Putin cooling some feet)
true, it wouldn't do a 100% job, but it would be another line of defense. the reason I was wondering about it was that the gp cited an example that was easy for humans to miss, but would be caught at once with a spell checker.
there are also statistical methods to detect words that are changed into other, valid words - check out the grammar checker in google docs for instance. again, not 100%, but every bit helps.
It would probably also throw out a lot of false positives which would take time to check. Especially in works of fiction, writers could take liberties with non-standard spelling.
Nope, but this post is such a neat illustration of the richness of "life" that fits into 39 real parameters (each circle can be coordinatized as 3 real numbers: one for its radius and two for its center) that my first thought on seeing it was also "no surprise then that a matrix with a million entries can talk like an erudite person".
Wouldn't you also need a two parameters for the arc starting position and stopping position for each circle, and then a few more to identify the areas that need to be filled, along with the color?
None of these sites is available any more. This looks suspicious, even given the regular bit rot of American college servers. The app is supposedly downloadable at https://apkcombo.com/app-guardian/edu.iub.seclab.appguardian... . Anyone around with a disassembler and too much time?
What if someone in your family has done a crime, and the result of your DNA being online is (1) you are the first suspect and (2) the criminal might well learn/suspect that they have been compromised through you?
“Zoom and enhance” forensics aren’t real right? Isn’t it mostly NSA listens in and then they have to parallel construct something to hide the illegal pervasive surveillance?
Their use as evidence has been challenged by academics, judges and the
media. There are no uniform standards for point-counting methods, and
academics have argued that the error rate in matching fingerprints has
not been adequately studied and that fingerprint evidence has no secure
statistical foundation. Research has been conducted into whether experts
can objectively focus on feature information in fingerprints without
being misled by extraneous information, such as context.
There's a common belief that fingerprint analysis is objective and reliable, but there's a great deal of subjectivity involved. Additionally, there have been several convictions involving fingerprints as evidence which were eventually overturned.
While they may still be useful, they have an image of infallibility that doesn't line up with reality.
There are many instances of people being questioned, harassed, and even framed based on circumstantial evidence. Western judicial systems are specifically engineered to address these problems via the process of discovery and adversarial argument. There has never been any documented instance of a death being caused by quantum tunnelling.
Depends on the crime. They aren't exactly fungible acts. Furthermore the state isn't exactly obligated to manage society, even if this has occurred in various forms throughout history. Many of our laws weren't exactly written with "society's" best interest at heart. Ultimately, the state will look after itself above all else.
I'm just saying I'd like the state to have to work hard to put people away. The law can just as easily be wielded to harm people. I don't see much sign the american public agrees with me, and politicians certainly don't agree. Even mr "it's a witch hunt" trump is only anti-LEO when it comes to his own crimes. But I'd rather have some low background level of crime than the sinking feeling that we're imprisoning a lot of innocent people, as unpopular a sentiment it might be to some in this country.
Besides, if the government doesn't take care of society, higher crime is inevitable.
I think your example highlights why most people don't view these as plausible concerns:
1. If I had a family member who was a serial murderer or rapist a la the Golden State Killer, I would want him apprehended.
2. "the criminal might well learn/suspect that they have been compromised through you?" That doesn't seem reasonably plausible enough to me to care. What, cousin Billy Bob is going to come hold me hostage because he knows I used 23 and me at some point? Really??
Oh my, the titles in those proceedings are hilarious.
> Retracted on February 24, 2022: Innovation Research on College Student Affairs Management Based on Big Data Environment
> Retracted on February 24, 2022: University Students in the Greater Bay Area Conduct Research on the Construction of Big Data Teams for Cross-border E-commerce Startups in the Middle East
> Retracted on February 24, 2022: Discussion on International Trade Governance under the Background of Big Data
> Retracted on February 24, 2022: Application of Incoterms in International Engineering Based on Information Platform
> Retracted on February 24, 2022: The Fixed-point Tracking Model of Volunteer Service for College Students of Traditional Chinese Medicine Based on Information Technology
> Retracted on February 24, 2022: Sichuan Consumers' Mining of Agricultural Product Brand Value Based on Big Data
> Retracted on February 24, 2022: Sports Consumer Behavior Based on Integrated Data in the Context of Big Data
> Retracted on February 24, 2022: Talent Heights Construction from the Perspective of Talent Concentration
There are two kinds of MIT students: those who spend their time at MIT feeling they're not working enough, and those who spend their time after MIT feeling they haven't worked enough back at MIT.
The intellectual atmosphere is really something -- I don't know any other place in the world where so many interesting ideas will be whooshing past you, vying for your time. If you get too used to it, wherever you go next will feel like a backwater.
I wish this was explained more thoroughly at the age where "prestige" is a driving factor of applying to institutions. My college experience was devoid of obvious/visible/present intellectual stimulation, as a data point.
The reason why no one noticed is that everyone has been trivially circumnavigating the patents for decades (the usual model being a converter that doesn't come with its own lame.dll but asks you to put one into its folder) and Frauenhofer hasn't been caring much when it was private users as opposed to hardware manufacturers. If not for this, something like Ogg Vorbis would have taken its place.
As to files, I'm sure they start mattering to you when your train goes through a tunnel or your wifi is down. The fileless world is the leakiest abstraction of them all.
I sometimes wonder if the name "ogg vorbis" hampered its uptake. MP3 is admittedly a pretty jargony name too but isn't otherwise "weird", compared to Ogg Vorbis is just Klingon-esque.
As a long time creative worker in addition to my technical work, I’ve tried in vain to explain to the FOSS crowd that names, UIs, user flows, etc a) really matter if they want anyone outside of the technical world to use their tools, and b) what other software developers think of them isn’t a good measure of those things. What Mastodon would need to have done to be a Twitter replacement for general audiences was my most recent losing battle. Lots of haughty, dismissive “federation is not that complicated” and “I think toots is a cute analog to tweet and the people who don’t like it just need to get over it.” Well, the nearly immediate mass exodus after the incredibly energetic mass adoption says everything we need to know about that.
“Well I don’t think it’s too complicated,” doesn’t really say much from someone whose profession is wrangling that complexity. “Well I don’t think it’s unappealing,” doesn’t say much from someone that has no experience wrangling the different nuanced ways different things can be appealing to different people in different contexts and how that affects the way people approach and interact with stuff.
Interface design, copywriting, branding— these are all communication mediums that deal with the emotional intangibles, instincts, and irrational tendencies we all have even when we don’t see them. It’s not about taste and aesthetic preference, they’re tools to solve communication problems. Developers on a whole have a hard enough time dealing with communication in technical documentation for software they wrote, let alone effective visual communication. I’m seeing some progress in developers realizing how much more impact software can have as a problem solving tool when designers are involved… but a whole lot still think designers just add frivolous fluff and that their quirky interfaces more informed by the API implementation than how users solve problems isn’t the problem — users failing to read their wall-o-text documentation is.
I still try, occasionally. I agree that it's very hard to convince the OSS community to think about the user first and foremost. Especially with the fact that choice is not a good thing for the vast majority of the world, and is not valued as much as they think. But suggest that forking or rewriting (in rust!) a project for the Nth time is stupid, and everyone should be focused on making one really good implementation that doesn't have to keep reinventing wheels, and you will be burned at the stake.
I wouldn’t even expect them to understand basic marketing themselves: there’s a lot more to it than many assume. I would hope they could understand the value of someone that does. There’s this kind of “well if I don’t understand it then it’s probably not worth understanding” cockiness in software that I was definitely guilty of in my twenties at the very least. Someone thinking they can dismiss expert knowledge or even entire fields out-of-hand based on a few a priori thought experiments says a lot more about that person than the fields they denigrate.
The name didn't help, but the biggest issue was when I first encountered the format it was very difficult for me to find software that could play it. It's been a while, but IIRC Windows Media player and Realplayer didn't like it, I can't remember if WinAmp the time supported it either, I think it may have gotten it eventually?
Adoption on Windows was definitely an issue for that time frame. Even as someone that was willing to adopt strange software, or compile it on Windows, it just wasn't worth it for the cross-platform use (mostly for mobile devices at the time, including generic players, and iPods).
I started using RockBox around 2005/2006, but it still wasn't worth converting my entire music collection to Ogg Vorbis from MP3. Right around that time, my vehicle stereo could suddenly support MP3/WMA files, and I could burn multiple albums to a CD for my truck stereo. MP3 had the broadest support across devices, and basically become an industry standard, even with the licensing.
Another thing to consider, and especially on a mobile device with a limited battery is hardware decoding.
MP3 was popular enough that most mobile devices were able to decode them via hardware, while OGG and FLAC where playable though software decoding but at the cost of using more battery.
Uh? Isn't that a reference to Nanny Ogg of Terry Pratchett's Discworld fame? Just like Vorbis is a head inquisitor (Exquisitor actually, of the Quisition IIRC) in Terry Pratchett's Small Gods (Also part of Discworld) ?
Colloquially they were always just referred to as Oggs, which wasn't too weird to my ears.
To my recollection what hampered uptake was simply that most software and especially most hardware did not support Oggs. So no-one encoding for distribution (i.e., P2P filesharing) used it. And once commercial streaming services came into being, they all used proprietary DRM-backed formats (WMA, and whatever iTunes used at the time, AAC?).
By the time digital music services gave up on DRM, MP3 patents were coming up on expiry, and MP3 encoder technology had advanced closing most of the gap between it and Ogg, especially when run at higher bitrates which cheaper storage and bandwidth made acceptable to use.
But now with many streaming services using Opus, all is right in the world again.
Fully agreed on the hw support though. I had an mp3 player discman knock off, later cheap mp3 players and none of them played Ogg Vorbis, I want to say one of my Nokia dumbphones in the mid 00s could do mp3 but not Ogg Vorbis as well.
A lot of the widely popular s1mp3s could play Ogg, FLAC, APE, WMA, and a few other obscure formats (as well as plain uncompressed WAV) but I think the real reason was a lack of availability - except for the anti-patent/FOSS purists, and some MS fans using WMA, everyone else was using MP3.
Are patents in general even useful in tech anymore? I remember older mentors almost keeping score with how many patents they authored, now I almost never hear the word patent mentioned unless it's a patent troll going after up and coming startups with vague yet somehow legally enforceable bs that costs millions to defend
When it comes to negotiating a new job, they are absolutely not something you want to underplay. Bring it up and talk about it, and the challenges you faced creating it. I feel like being able to talk about why you created something, and the challenges you faced, along with what you learned is a huge plus. Maybe I'm more old-school with this thinking, but when it comes to someone that is more senior and can provide useful knowledge to your team, I'd want this person over someone that was talking about the latest tech, but didn't have real experience to discuss in depth. To any recruiters, am I out of touch with this thinking?
I am at the beginning stages of looking elsewhere, because of some very poor choices made that disregarded my advice. I have extreme impostor syndrome because I have only helped juniors, but have never worked in a professional capacity with anyone that had more knowledge than myself. That isn't a flex, I wish I had mentors in a professional environment, but I never did. I have learned a ton on my own, and have worked with others that moved on to better careers. I was around at the beginning stages of the company, and have gained a lot of freedom like taking time off to watch my son when he's sick, or if I need to see a doctor. I have built on top of CMS software (Umbraco/.NET) and have figured out how to keep resources below what is recommended, and love what I do, but am being given the "opportunity" and direction from the President to leave the company because my salary can't be covered any longer. Not meant to tell a sob story, just genuinely looking for advice on finding something that will strike my interest and I can contribute to. I have been with this company for almost 18 years, and built it from nothing with a weird technology, into something that a lot of medical, insurance, banking, and law firms depend on.
Any advice is truly appreciated, as I was taken by surprise, but also know that I can achieve far more than what I currently practice. I spend late nights learning for fun, even at 45 years old.
I missed this earlier, not sure if you’ll even see it, but just know that your story hit home for me. I got a job out of college at #BigTech and gained a lot of momentum quickly, they were gonna promote me and threw money at me, but I realized what I was starting to specialize in was utterly useless outside this particular company. With the advice of a mentor I left money on the table and jumped ship to work at a start up, in part because I wanted to learn skills I could use at any company. I’m lucky I got this advice, but no question you’ll find another opportunity if need be
For large companies (Google, Apple, ...), other patents are useful defensively and as part of a war chest/patent portfolio.
For startups and inventors, they're probably OK but unlikely to prevent someone with deep pockets from eating your lunch and/or suing you to oblivion. The important defensive strategy is to be aware of related patents, though some are absurdly broad.
