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CommentI did the math, and it's absurd (Score 2)84

Having recently got into 3D printing, i can get 1kg of filament for $20. Not only is that far more useful than a print out, it turns out it's cheaper too. You see, to 3D print text on your 3D printer at 0.1mm layer height, your spool is far cheaper and last longer and you'll get more sheets than any ink cartridge.

Ink comes in at 2.25 cents per page.
Filament comes in at.75 cents per page.

Staining words on paper is ridiculously expensive compared to giving them physical embodiment. That just seems wrong.

CommentThis is pretty basic stuff (Score 2)64

The first time I wrote a an AI system to collect pictures from mobile phones (2014), the *first thing* I did after decrypting it was to apply the EXIF orientation and remove the tag, so there could be no possibility that anywhere down the line it could be displayed wrong. In Node.JS, I used jpeg-autorotate.

This is a no-brainer. But in theory with enough samples, the AI would learn the various rotations of your hotdog in your hotdog/not-hotdog classifier.

CommentThe coming Crop Collapse of the US Mid West... (Score 1)271

Most of the farmland in America is fed by aquifers. My favorite is the Ogallala aquifer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) which runs from south South Dakota to northern Texas. The quiger is being depleted at an alarming rate, current estimates predict that around 2050 the water will run out. When this happens, it will be catastrophic not just for the US, but for the world, as the majority of the heartland crops are fed by water from it. Once that water stops, we can no longer continue feeding the world, probably not even America. As a follow-on the population of DFW, Houston and a few other major US cities will be without water. Dallas is huge how and growing at a staggering rate. BY 2050, the collapse of DFW (the biggest economic center fed by the aquifer) will be felt in a Texas diaspora.

The tale will play out for similar aquifers and their regions. Eventually we'll all be living on the coast line. Which I am fine with, however the amount of starvation around the world will be epic. Now, I am no fan of end-of-the-world scenarios. I didn't agre with past predictions fo peak oil and peak food. We always find a way to increase output. But we've always had as much water we needed to produce whatever we could produce. Shifting the bottleneck of food production to water is unlike any challenge we've had before. And I concede that it is avoidable. We could desalinate water and ship it in from the Gulf coast, but There's so much land that the costs would be substantial. Even if implemented, the price of food would go up substantially, so people would still starve.

It is entirely possible that other regions step up production as a result as well. I think a lot of that will come at the cost of the rainforests though.

CommentNuke it from orbit (Score 1)224

Or rather just the Philippines, more specifically the banana orchards. Kill the trees, end the infection, let the disease die out, then repopulate.
Confession: I have no idea if this is a good idea or not. But it seems easier than engineering a vaccine. Might take less time too. I can go a few years without bananas. Though I am sure the locals would be devastated. Closer to home, we have an over fishing problem with a particular sea crustacean. I wonder how much better it would be if we could just pay the fishermen to not fish for a few years and let things repopulate rather than grinding away at a dwindling population.

CommentFake news, Day 2. (Score 1, Redundant)443

Why is this propaganda on/.

RT Already does not allow ratings or comments until release. The only number is the percent of people who want to see it.

A similar article was posted yesterday. I would hope that/. and it's readers would be smarter than to fall for this. At this point the MSM is trolling the general public.

CommentThe reason pagers are still alive (Score 2, Insightful)111

Pagers don't emit cellphone-level radiation & electrical interference around medical devices.

Pages have a weak acknowledge capability. Meanwhile you can't leave your cellphone by a radio. The interference it causes to the radio is the same interference it may cause in a medical device. And it may not cause a malfunction that gets noticed. What if the morphine drop was increased by a random flipped bit.

Medical devices are not evaluated in cellphone conditions. And given that doctors work in the immediate vicinity of medial equipment it is a risk the hospital is not willing to take.

CommentBasically, 'Yes', but an uninteresting 'Yes' (Score 1)163

So NN AIs, just reduce predictive error over the data set. It doesn't create anything novel, it just learns to mimic. It can't invent Van Gogh's style, but it can mimic it and apply it to something else.

So if you feed in all the things from the past and feed them the modern version in, you'll get the meta narratives:
1. More use of plastic.
2. Physically smaller, lighter, less material used.
3. More fragility as designs get tuned to minimize in-warranty repairs and maximize out-of-warranty issues.
4. Increased ease of manufacture & higher yield rates

These are things you already expect. Only that last one, "ease", is the one where magic happens. Since future manufacturing techniques limit what we produce today. It's not really predictable though, so it's where the "magic" happens. But that does follow the same meta narratives.

CommentEnter Modern C++ (Score 3, Interesting)663

So I'm a long time C++ Dev, but have been trying to wrap my head around modern C++ (2011 to current) and it seems that there are a lot of improvements that would avoid those kinds of errors.

Unfortunately I observed that C++ is becoming less about writing your program and more about telling the compiler how to build it. It's also filled will all kinds of new acronyms, like SFINAE and CTAD, and new concepts like costexpr.

But I think it's all too little too late. Check out this "simple" map():
std::vector originals { 1,2,3};
std::vector triples;
std::transform(originals.begin(), originals.end(), std::back_inserter(triples), [](int item){ return item*3; });

Who wants to write that code? How does that code convey the intent to the user? You know it's doing a map because I told you. But that code was written for a compiler, not a human to understand.

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