Sapere Aude
Category: Uncategorized
nice speech demo by my teammate john dimm just tell it a story, or try to bring up a picture of a toaster without actually saying toaster.
here’s a video about how it works:Fun with Speech – John Dimm
with a bit more work to reduce latency, this could be a very fun drinking game 🙂
With instrumented, generational fuzzing, lesser-known features (e.g., progressive, black-and-white, or arithmetic-coded JPEGs) can be discovered and locked onto without requiring a giant, high-quality corpus of diverse test cases to seed the fuzzer with.
This is how we’ll accidentally awaken the elder gods.
those are some good shenanigans
Google Genomics could prove more significant than any of these moonshots. Connecting and comparing genomes by the 1000s, and soon by the millions, is what’s going to propel medical discoveries for the next 10 years.
this will save so many lives it’s not even funny. we’re of course very very early into this. kinda like the internet in 1995 when larry & sergey were fresh-faced students at stanford, and there were 20k web sites.
and yes, obviously doing the right thing privacy wise is a big big big responsibility.
Oh, Christ
Anna, he’s going to start reading poetry at us
what do we do
play dead?
no that’s bears
this is encouraging from a feasibility of basic income point of view:
If you add any actual value to your company today, your career is probably not moving in the right direction. Real work is for people at the bottom who plan to stay there.
i’ve long suspected that people at most companies don’t actually do anything and would not be missed.
I am only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested.
in case you were confused: yes, apple stuff sucks just as much as any other os.
So, Yosemite is out. It has some bugs, and we (Google) couldn’t deploy it on the day it was released.
I followed the instructions in this support article and created a profile that sets the App Store to “Restrict App Store to software updates only” mode, since we don’t want users to self-upgrade to Yosemite until we are ready.
But since Apple has terrible enterprise management tools, this puts the App Store in a confusing state for users.
1) Only the Updates pane is accessible, with no indication that the other panes have been administratively disabled
2) The “OS X Yosemite” advertising banner is still shown in the Updates pane
3) Despite showing the banner, clicking on “Free” to try to download it prompts the user to sign-in, but the sign in button does nothing, confusingly.
4) Third-party software updates are disallowed, even for previously-installed software. This is especially confusing.
Annoying. This is a bit weird but at least it’s not actively prompting users to upgrade.
A Wild Security Update Appears!
A security update for 10.9 is released! Good news, it fixes security issues. We push it out ASAP with munki/simian, with a force-by date because it’s important.
Now our users are getting really confused. We just sent them all a note saying to not install Yosemite! And the App Store is in an odd state! But now they have a prompt to install something! But didn’t they just get an email about not installing something? I guess I’ll just ignore!
This is frustrating, but it seems to have generally died down.
Until this morning, when Apple, via what I presume is the App Store, sends a fucking notification to everyone
Which, of course, just sends them to the App Store where they are disabled from actually doing anything.
So I send another note to everyone – thanks, Apple! – which of course just confuses things.
Christ.
Naturally now our users have no goddamned idea what to do, because why should the have to even care about this? If they get prompted, we’ve taught them to install, because security and bug fixes. But now! They’re getting prompted for something they’re blocked from installing, and we’re telling them to not install something, but how are they supposed to know the difference between a security update and Yosemite? I mean it’s super clear to us, the management team, what’s what, but that’s for us to deal with and the users should not have to worry about.
But, now, thanks to this clusterfuck of App Store banner ads, weird update-only modes, and notifications for things they can’t install, everything is in a terrible confused state.
Thanks, Apple.
PS: I can also rant a while about Yosemite itself.
The goal of the contest is to write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. [..] write surveil() in such a way that the act of surveillance is subtly leaked to the user or to the outside world. The leakage should be subtle enough that it is not easily noticed.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 