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Amazon needs to stop with inventory comingling. They know it and refuse to stop, so they are culpable. I'm sure it would hurt their logistics to stop, but it also hurts cigarette companies to not advertise to children and we made that a law.

It is ridiculous that you can order a supplement where it says "sold by Proctor and Gamble, fulfilled by Amazon" on the product listing, and then receive a counterfeit product that was sent in by a different company. If they received it from a different company, then it wasn't "sold by Proctor and Gamble."

At the very least they need to give brand owners the tools to protect their brands- an option to put non-authorized resellers' shipments into a separate comingled bin, and have all the authorized resellers in another.

Right now the only option for a brand with a popular product to protect from counterfeiting is to not sell anything through Amazon and sue everyone that tries to list your products on Amazon- which might not even work and really hurts your market reach.

I can't help you with the why some SD cards are short lived, but if you want a longer lasting SD card, try the "endurance" versions. Most of the big brands have a version. They are a bit more expensive, but promise 25x the write life of a standard SD.

They are typically marketed toward video surveillance systems and dash cams. I'm not sure how the rest of a Raspberry Pi's performance would be effective.

1. Your previous comment only mentioned PlaidML.

2. The parent comment was about translating existing code written in CUDA to be used on an AMD GPU, not about developing new software- if it were about developing new software, they'd be starting from scratch with 01.org tools, which is what everyone wants to avoid. 01.org doesn't have any translation tools for this.

“with only a primitive GPS to indicate the right direction”

... so these kids are more at risk of being kidnapped than they are of getting lost.

I’ll admit that I think it’s a bit weird to make kids walk home in the night, but the author does a terrible job of making it sound suspenseful. This activity has gotten a lot safer since GPS became widespread. I kind of feel bad for anyone that went through this in the 80’s, they might have actually gotten lost and had to knock on a farmer’s door for directions.

PlaidML is not what most people want. PlaidML is pretty much only for neural network based machine learning, plus it's primarily a backend for models written in Keras. But it is an option for the narrow use case of neural networks.

Contrary to what buzzword happy SV types would have you believe, most "real" HPC work isn't machine learning (r/gatekeeping, I know). Particle physics, computational fluid dynamics, network simulations, etc. Lots of it is already written in CUDA. HIP, using hipify, can translate the already written CUDA code to HIP, which is GPU-agnostic.

In this case Iran denies that it lost a drone so it couldn't be an act of war. You have to admit to getting shot before retaliating.

Also, we have seen multiple manned aircraft shot down during the Syrian civil war from multiple countries, and so far neither Syria, Russia, nor Turkey are at war with each other. It would seem that what determines an act of war heavily depends on whether the victimized country wants to go to war in the first place.

Iran wants to speak aggressively, but they do not actually want to fight the US. They have seen neighboring Iraq get steamrolled multiple times by the US Army and are currently sandwiched between thousands of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and most other countries in the region would be more than willing to allow the US to set up logistics paths through their countries. They are in a horrible position to fight the US.

Edit so I don't create another comment: One of the reasons (but not the only one) why it is more appropriate to shoot down a drone instead of a manned aircraft is that a drone is easily turned into a kamikaze attack. Manned aircraft are much less likely to turn a hull run (flying close to a ship) into an attack, and are mostly for intel collection. Manned aircraft typically need to get their tapes back to base before analysis can start, and most pilots won't willingly kill themselves. While it kind of sucks to let the enemy snap pictures of everything on the deck of your ship (and record radar frequencies and waveforms), you aren't in any real danger and probably isn't worth killing them. Most drones could radio back its intel and then fly right into the side of the ship before the crew can react. Because of this, ships need to keep drones further away, and if the drone doesn't respond to radio calls they really have no option but to down it.

Yes, mostly just analytics and standard fare from all websites. For the most part, it's just the regular "Share on Facebook/Twitter/Etc." buttons that you see all over the internet. All of the social media have trackers embedded in those buttons. It's always confused my why anyone would actually share what porn video they were watching with their friends on social media.

The one thing that isn't standard for porn sites is ad serving/tracking. They usually don't use ads served from Google and Facebook, probably because most people don't want their "regular" ads being served on a porn site. So most major porn sites have their own ad system.

Yes. For those not familiar, KyoAni is not a "huge" studio, in that it usually only produces one show per season, and often none at all. They are highly respected due to the shows that they do make are very high quality (the animation is nearly always great, and stories are usually hand selected now as part of a competition). If you want to watch one of their recent series that received lots of acclaim, the show Violet Evergarden is on Netflix. Very hard to understand why anyone would want to attack them.

An attack with over 20 dead with more injured could mean over half of their employees are dead/hurt.

It might be misleading, but it's not uncommon. Apple MacBook Pros have thermal throttled at high loads for the past several years. It has throttled for so long that reviewers were surprised that the latest version seems to be using a decent thermal paste and throttles much less.

So if Apple got away with it for years on computers that mostly sold for over $2k, then I think the RPi foundation will probably get away with it on a $35 board.

It's not false. You can't send an action potential down a motor neuron connected to a muscle without a reaction from the muscle. Do not confuse the neurons in your brain (which generate new connections all the time) with motor neurons, which is what the CTRL-labs kit is sensing.

The brain does learn to control what is there, and what is there is attached to your muscles. I'll say it again: the CTRL-labs kit works on electromyography, which only works with muscle activity. You will not magically grow new neurons in your arm that are dedicated sole to the control of a computer.

You missed the point. You don't need to live a long life to be happy. That's you trying to impose your worldview on other people.

A lot of people confuse things that are correlated with being happy with things that make you happy. Being fit does not make everyone happy, it makes some people happy. Eating cheesecake makes some people happy, but not everyone.

What if the things that are correlated with happiness change over time? What if instead of idolizing pro athletes the next generation idolizes pro esports players? Will physical fitness start to see less of a correlation with happiness, playing second fiddle to something else?

I agree that you do need unblocked arteries to stay alive. So increasing obesity may lead to more hospitalizations (and unhappy people that way). But could it be offset by increased well-being in other areas of life?

See my reply to dagenix in this thread. You have discovered the point.

I could have easily included myself in my above list of anecdotes. But more importantly, look at all the "harmful" things I listed. My mom interacts with her friends. An old lady slows down a group of people. A kid gets in trouble with his parents. Middle schoolers are socially inept.

None of those things are really that harmful, they are mostly expected and regular parts of life.

A lot of these things are assuming a traditional model of well-being (that being fit and smart and long lived makes you happier). This is stuff that doctors say I need, but I don't actually need them like air and water. What if our model of well-being is wrong?

An obese person can be happy as long as they don't peg their happiness on being able to do a bunch of physical activities. Plus, all the time spent not working out can be spent on pursuing other interests.

A dumb person can be happy. There are billions of us.

A short lived person can be happy- it's more about the quality of life than the quantity.

So if I can live in a world in which I don't have to do a bunch of physical activity, can play with the screens that I want, and can enjoy my life? I don't actually need a lot of the things that a doctor says I need. To be fair, an obese person has a higher chance of being hospitalized, which sucks, so being dumb and obese will probably lead to me being less happy.

It only hurts kids as much as it hurts everyone else.

My 60 y/o mom is on social media for hours per day. That's harmful.

My 80 y/o grandma plays Pokemon Go four hours per day, which we initially thought was good because it got her to go walking. Now we can't take her anywhere without slowing us down. It's become harmful.

My 6 y/o nephew will totally tune out the world if you let him play Angry Birds, ignoring his parents until someone physically removes the screen from his hands. That's harmful.

I hosted a field trip for pre-teen middle schoolers and in our downtime between activities there was zero social interaction because they all buried their heads in their phones (okay, I did observe one student ask another for a charger). That's harmful.

Screen time is hurting everyone and singling out kids is just old people refusing to accept that screens changed humanity at all ages. I don't think that our current old-timers lacking screens when they were kids made them any better at life. It only made them worse at using modern technology. The current crop of youngsters may miss out on face-to-face interaction, or maybe their eyes will be shaped poorly for long distance sight. But they'll be better at navigating the digital world, which seems to be where we spend a lot of our time regardless of age.

Full speed USB-C allows for high-bandwidth and easy to plug in. It's a pretty good connector if you don't need severe weather resistance.

Using off the shelf hardware saves time for the scientists to develop more meaningful parts of the system.

Using off the shelf hardware makes it seem a little less hacky than if they were running a bunch of jumper wires off a DB-25 connector from an old printer.

In the asteriods demo (https://youtu.be/5Z5aZK2C3ew?t=711) the only reason his fingers aren't moving a bunch is because the hand is flat on the table and the table is pushing back. You can see his fingers twitch while he's playing.

This is the biggest overselling point from them. The only people that can grow a "virtual hand" are amputees. Everyone else simply has a shadow hand that follows what their real hand does (or would do if there wasn't a restraint). All of their control interfaces are coupled to what the shadow hand does- i.e., if the shadow hand's index finger curls in, the spaceship spins to the right in the game. In reality it's not a shadow hand they are sensing, but the neurons that control the movement in your hand/arm.

It's a fact of biology that if you are reading nerve impulses from the arm, then to control the computer something must be happening in your arm. Every motor neuron is connected to a muscle. The best we can get is a very sensitive system where your arm doesn't move very much. You cannot (without a million years of evolution) send signals to your arm without it moving. If you were to cut the neurons off from the muscle, you could then send activations without your arm moving. However, you would also lose physical movement ability, and nobody is doing that (except for amputees).

The CTRL-kit, which is the "real" product they have, uses electromyography, which needs muscle activation to work, so something must twitch at a minimum to send a signal. A good interface may enable controlling multiple things at once, but they would all require muscle activity.

They may have other things in R&D. At least they are closer to having a real product than Neuralink and they started their presentation on time at Re:MARS.

A key aspect for me will be whether Neuralink can enable brain control interfaces that don't require sending signals to muscles.

A key example that falls short is CRTL-labs' armband. I've seen a few demos that allow you to "control a keyboard with your brain" while wearing the armband. The only problem is that this setup requires you to move your hands as if you were actually typing on a keyboard. If my hands have to move I might as well use a real keyboard. I realize that there are some people that could use CTRL-labs' armband, such as amputees, but it's not compelling to me.

If Neuralink can let me control a computer by visualizing words or something similar instead of physically moving my hand then I'll call it a win.

I haven't tried it, but I would make a somewhat educated guess to say, no. Not that it can't be done, but that it probably isn't as easy to get the reaction going as regular thermite.

Thermite made from aluminum and iron can start with a child's firework sparkler, so it is pretty easy to make and use.

Titanium, while not a noble metal, is more resistant to heat and corrosion than aluminum and is just generally less reactive. You might call it "less un-noble" than aluminum. I expect that you'd have a much harder time getting thermite started using titanium. Just look at how much it took to get the titanium fire going on the Crew Dragon- a chunk of NTO had to slam into a valve at really high speed.

Edit: Since you piqued my curiosity, I decided to see if it had been done before. It has: http://developing-your-web-presence.blogspot.com/2008/10/on-... You replace iron oxide with titanium oxide (since titanium pieces oxidize only on a thin outer layer I expect you would need a very fine mesh), and keep the aluminum. This seems to need a little work but it has been done.

Not GP, but his education in Switzerland clarifies the fact that the leadership does not believe the propaganda they give to their populace. Kim is very aware that the promise of better living conditions is not a "lie manufactured by the West." He knows how bad his people have it compared to the rest of the world and still chooses to run his country the way he does. Food shortages are not a thing in Switzerland and also not a problem in his palace, but they are in other parts of DPRK.

So maybe his Swiss education doesn't make his citizens worse off, but we do know it's not some misled idealist at the helm, but rather a dictator that knows full well what he's doing.

The way you say it kind of understates the difficulty. It is straightforward to image a large enough satellite if you know where it is going to be. I have even snapped a picture of the ISS with a hobby telescope and a cell phone mount. It's gigantic. Catching a shot of MENTOR 4 is cool, but it's up in GEO and doesn't move much, plus it's just a dot.

The picture of an old CRYSTAL bird is probably the closest thing to the OP in terms of difficulty. The satellite is big and in LEO. The difference between what Ralf did then is that CRYSTAL satellites move less often, so once someone finds them you have more time to wait on good weather. With the X-37, Ralf missed his first shot and by the time he was ready for another try it had already moved, and they had to find it again. That is super tough.

If you have no idea where something went, then the sky is very big and your telescope has a very small field of view, especially if you need to discriminate between different satellites that you see. The fact is, there aren't many techniques for finding secret stuff in orbit. You have two methods (but choose a wavelength)- passive and active- and maybe hacking into a space agency and just stealing the information from a computer. Passive means staring at a lattitude long enough until your satellite passes by and hope you spot it (if it doesn't you either missed it or it has a lower inclination than here you were looking). A smart person might get a computer to help them with the watching, but the task is the same. The problem is that the X-37 is real easy to miss. Even if you see something, it might not be the particular satellite you're hoping for, so you have to filter out all the unwanted things you don't want (usually you can match unwanted things up to known orbits). And even when you see the X-37, you've got to jump on it and track it so you can figure out the new orbit. Active methods are pretty much just radar, and that's out of reach for every amateur astronomer. They might be able to scrounge up some giant apertures but they'll never have the tx power. It's pretty incredible that people are able to do this.

What I find most amazing about this isn't the image (although it's pretty cool), it's the fact that a bunch of amateur astronomers[1] can locate a satellite in space with no help- even after the satellite makes an unannounced move. The US government literally spends billions of dollars to track things in outer space, and a bunch of amateurs can do basically the same thing. Granted, Space Fence tracks more and smaller objects, but the amateurs are winning on the price/performance ratio.

To clear things up- ephemeris (orbit parameters) are published for many satellites, but not for the X-37B. It had to be found by some educated guesses and a lot of staring at the sky.

[1] To be fair, some "amateur" astronomers use very high end equipment.

80C is warm, but not life-threatening to the chip. I'm not sure, but it may start to throttle at this temperature, as previous versions did throttle at 80C. So cooling is helpful, but not required (Apple ran inadequate cooling in their MacBook Pros for years). Also, I think that hitting 80 is only under heavy load. Regular use should be cooler than that.

You will certainly need to cool the chip to get any meaningful overclock. In that case it is different from previous versions of the Pi, when you could overclock a bit with no extra cooling at all.

Both the USA and UK provide legal aid for poor people even if the procedures are different. If you cannot afford a solicitor, the government will help you pay for one, but they probably won't be the best. In both countries rich people get better legal representation than poor people.

Don't make the UK out to be some paradise (legal or otherwise), it struggles with plenty of its own problems.

You can use it at stock speeds with passive cooling, but you can also use it at below stock speeds (just change the numbers in the tutorial). The main benefit not being cooling, but lower power consumption. Lowering speeds is fine, but under volting often causes boot errors, so I'd stay away from that.

Sure, he puts the required disclaimers about respect in the beginning so that way he doesn't get accused of being hateful. But then he accuses RStudio of doing "an end run around the core R leadership team," and that what they are doing is "bad for the health of the project," which are pretty strong words.

RStudio isn't on the leadership team. If the language ends up dying (which it won't, R is dug into it's place like a tick), it would be due to the leadership team's refusal to adapt to good ideas coming in from the community.

It’s right on this issue, but the Tidyverse is a collection of packages, and most are speedy. Discussing the rare case that supports an argument but neglecting the numerous others that do not support it is the definition of cherry picking.

And I don’t expect RStudio to say, “we have this collection, which works fine for most users, except in this case you should replace package x with y, or in this corner case you might like package z.”

RStudio doesn’t need to promote a fragmented ecosystem if they don’t want to, it won’t cause the death of R.

I think he’s exaggerating the effect of some of these claims. People who “grew up” learning R+Tidyverse will discriminate against non-Tidyverse users? Give me a break. You are either an advanced or competent or novice R user. You either understand how pipes (%>%) work or you don’t.

I doubt that anyone is going to be denied a job because they are an amazing R programmer but they just don’t have the experience with a particular set of packages, especially those that are as well implemented and easy to learn as the Tidyverse.

I can totally imagine someone not getting a job because they are a crap programmer, and then blaming it on something else. Or I can also imagine someone saying that the Tidyverse packages suck, and then be denied a job because of their attitude.

I could make a similar argument for most of the substantive claims in his post.

Some of these examples (dplyr vs. data.table) are cherry picked. I have several of my own examples where read_csv is way faster than read.csv, so maybe, like all good programmers, we should be testing and profiling our code and implementing the parts that make the most sense for our needs.

The bottom line is that the Tidyverse is a good set of packages and you are free to use them or not. There isn’t some blood feud (like vi vs. emacs) between users and non-users, we all get along just fine.

There are dozens of great tutorials on how to learn R that don’t use the Tidyverse, and RStudio is under no obligation to offer a full course on every possible way to learn R. Any R user is also a competent Google user.

It’s fine to be opinionated. But, a professor as respected as Norm Matloff should be careful of how they say things, or they risk souring their students on a set of packages that might be very useful in the future.

In your original comment you never mention bank bailouts. A far more appropriate comparison would be the more recent bailouts of US automakers in which the TARP loans were all repaid. Granted, the partial ownership of the companies that the government took on during the bailout resulted in a loss- but I'm not sure if it would have been more appropriate for the government to hold the stock until it recovered.

https://www.thebalance.com/auto-industry-bailout-gm-ford-chr...