Google could be the overall winner but its reviews content is limited and very often quite weak. However its maps are clearly superior to the others (Yelp doesn’t have its own maps of course). For its part, Yelp could be a very strong player and ultimately take TripAdvisor’s position other than for hotel-related planning. Yelp’s filters were very helpful in, for example, determining whether a business accepted credit cards (totally missing from Google and TripAdvisor).
Category: Uncategorized
GOP Candidates
Ronnie Feldspar
In 2011, the former Tennessee senator boldly vowed that he would stop anyone from declaring Sharia law over the Dollywood theme park, in Pigeon Forge. It wasn’t a popular position at the time, but, in the intervening years, no one has declared Sharia law over Dollywood. (No one has even thought about it.) Feldspar is also known for successfully defending all 12 Tennessee Olive Garden locations against ISIS.Leland Vanderbilt-Koch
Vanderbilt-Koch’s is a true American success story. As an aspiring entrepreneur, he managed to scrimp and save and inherit the $3.7B needed to start his own small business. Today that business is worth almost $3.8B. Vanderbilt-Koch will “run America like a corporation, or perhaps even a very large duchy.” He enjoys eating “McDonald’s hot dog” and shaking hands with peasants of all varieties.
Contactless Fares
Transport for London riders can now cover their fares on trains and buses with a tap of their smartphone. That’s a nice step forward for merry old England, but the truth is it’s just the latest development in a bigger push toward contactless fare payment on transit systems around the world. Fare cards are on the outs. It’s not just busy travelers who stand to gain from the convenience—transit agencies and even city mobility networks at large are expected to benefit, too.
AI Ethics
I looked a bit at ethics in neural network science/engineering. As I see it, there are 3 categories of ethical issues specific to the topic rather than being general professional ethics issues:
- Issues surrounding applications such as privacy, big data, surveillance, killer robots etc.
- Machine learning allows machines to learn the wrong things.
- Machines as moral agents or patients.
The first category is important, but I leave that for others to discuss. It is not necessarily linked to neural networks per se, anyway. It is about responsibility for technology and what one works on.
Where are the space probes?
Spaceprob.es catalogs the active human-made machines that freckle our solar system and dot our galaxy.
2019-06-12:
That baby is stealing
pretty much how our copyright maximalism works.
New Horizons
After traveling ~5b km over the past 9.5 years, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is within hours of its rendezvous with Pluto. Back in 2006, when the space probe was launched, Pluto was classified as the 9th planet in the solar system, and was known to have 3 moons. During the long journey to this distant icy world, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, 1 of many smaller bodies orbiting the sun, and another 2 moons were discovered. In 2007, New Horizons flew past Jupiter and its moons on the way to Pluto, capturing many spectacular images. On the morning of July 14, 2015, New Horizons will speed past the Pluto system at ~14 kilometers per second, making as many observations as possible. In the hours and days following, it will be sending the data to Earth, on its way to the Kuiper belt, with plans to target another smaller body sometime around 2018.
Hearing restoration
Patients with hearing loss will one day have their genome sequenced and their hearing restored by gene therapy. A proof-of-principle study takes a step in that direction, restoring hearing in deaf mice. Clinical trials of gene therapy for humans could be started within 5 to 10 years
Content Farms
Dumb people are ruining everything
The highbrow internet is based upon the misguided idea that there is a certain consumer who turns to the internet for well-written, informative content in the form of thinkpieces, #longform, podcasts and ‘well thought out glorified blog posts.’ Eventually, an authority in the niche provides a website with the ability to perform sustainable day to day farming. Based on an audience of ‘educated’ people who ‘spend money,’ you would think that the relative scale of these niche content farms with ‘an interesting take’ on culture + niche would be sustainable. They aren’t. They’re all going to die because of the toxic byproducts of viral supernova sites.
Britain slaveholder bailout
The compensation of Britain’s 46K slave owners was the largest bailout in British history until the bailout of the banks in 2009. Not only did the slaves receive nothing, under another clause of the act they were compelled to provide 45 hours of unpaid labour each week for their former masters, for a further 4 years after their supposed liberation. In effect, the enslaved paid part of the bill for their own manumission.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 