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ConfucianNardin

Re:Yes, Amazon Echo Is an Ad Machine on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @11:39AM (#16062457)
It's unfortunate that there aren't any high quality projects for the other way around - text to speech.

By high quality I mean something as good as Tacotron 2 [1]. However, I have no illusions of Google ever releasing code or trained models.

Someone will likely re-implement it from the paper, but it's unlikely to be anywhere near as good as those samples, due to worse tuning and lack of a good training set[2].

This effect can be seen if you compare Baidu's samples [3] for Deep Voice 3 with those from an implementation by a third party [4].

[1]: https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/ind...

[2]: Common voice, for example, will not work well, since you want lots of data from a single speaker for good results. See for example, how samples get progressively worse when increasing the number of speakers in training data[3].

[3]: http://research.baidu.com/deep-voice-3-2000-speaker-neural-t...

[4]: https://r9y9.github.io/deepvoice3_pytorch/

Re:Microsoft Adds an OpenSSH Client to Windows 10 on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @07:22AM (#15905060)
They're also squatting the putty.org domain to advertise their software, which is pretty bad-mannered.
Re:The Big Vitamin D Mistake on Thursday December 07, 2017 @10:49AM (#15871049)
Examine.com does NOT sell vitamins/supplements.

They collect and analyze available research, and the result of that process is their product (in the form of guides etc).

Re:A Classic Extension Reborn: Tree Style Tab on Thursday December 07, 2017 @10:13AM (#15870671)
If you're looking for performance, don't go with Vivaldi, at least if you use many tabs.

With many tabs (>= 100 or so), it becomes really sluggish. For example, opening a link in a new tab can take approximately five seconds. Chrome, which it is based on, does not have this issue. Chrome is however unusable (with many tabs) for other reasons (lack of lazy loaded tabs essentially causing a DoS for many minutes when starting it, at least on Windows).

Re:Deep image prior 'learns' on just one image on Friday December 01, 2017 @11:59AM (#15825166)
I do not find it bizarre to pose that it could be possible to use another set of primitives (than biochemical ones) to create something analogous to the higher level structure in a human brain that produces thoughts.
Re:Deep image prior 'learns' on just one image on Friday December 01, 2017 @10:17AM (#15824240)
No, the issue is with the very premise, then.

It is not clear that consciousness necessarily only emerges from a neurochemical process.

What was basically said was "We do not know for certain that it is this neurochemical process that accounts for consciousness. Isn't it reasonable to suppose that we might encounter things that actually are conscious, but whose consciousness is not accounted for by the same property (neruochemical) of the underlying process."

I'm not sure that stated premise is very useful, since it borders on the tautological.

The dog (or even a human doing some task) is akin to an intricate state machine whose next state depends on the current state and its environment. Just like the spinning top. For each of those we modify the lower level mechanisms to effect a different high level behavior. Changing the thing in the former case (Cocaine/neurosurgery) or its environment (steal the bone). Changing the thing in the latter case (cutting out part of the spinning-top) or its environment (carving the surface it spins on).

The difference in the two cases being the number of intermediate steps (or abstraction layers if you will) between the high level behavior and the low level mechanisms from which it emerges, and the complexity of the emergent behvaior.

Illusion: the low level mechanisms (biochemical or otherwise) that, using the current state and the environment, transition to the next state, and in the process "present" an experience that we interpret as ourselves thinking, making decisions, taking skillful actions and so on.

If we observe the target phenomenon "skillful action" we discover that all known occurrences are biological. This doesn't really preclude the possibility of other mechanisms producing it.

To modify the behavior of a machine, you cannot use cocaine. That's because the machine has no receptors for the comprising molecules - not because it has no thoughts. You could instead modify the logic gates it possesses instead by applying a certain pattern of electromagnetic radiation which would cause interference, just like the cocaine interferes with the normal workings of the brain.

Re:Deep image prior 'learns' on just one image on Friday December 01, 2017 @07:16AM (#15823375)
> Even current ("real") intelligence can do that.

No it can't. A biological creature's output is not deterministic from its input and can be sensitive to conditions not anticipated at-programming-time. That isn't understanding.

A spinning top may spin on many surfaces not anticipated by the designer and acquire all sorts of interesting behaviors by doing so.

[...]

Many of these tests you're outlining aren't relevant to the question "does this biological creature have what we are interested in". Ie., "is this piece of lead actually gold". Not "is it shiny with a brass coating" -- but can it participate in all the causal interactions gold can. I'm not concerned with how good the tool is, or how close we are to fooling people, i'm concerned with whether the biological creature can think.

Does the biological creature posses any concept? Any idea? Any understanding?

No, only metaphorically. It seems as-if it does to people who use it to aid in their understanding. It is only a trick, no more than the sun being ascribed agency by ancient human being.

Intelligences which we're targeting do not possess concepts. They are not meaningfully connected to their environment. They don't understand it. The dog's finding its bone is just the same as the spinning top find its grove. The spinning is only much more intricate, and the nature of and interaction with the surface much less easily understandable.

The dog experiences illusions of thoughts, concepts, ideas, imagination (and many other things besides) that are about its environment. Those have been caused by the nature of its environment. The spinning top topples towards its final point as-if it understood, just like the dog.

Biological creatures are rivers of biochemical and electrical currents that topple toward and outcome that it sensitive to their current state, like a top spinning about a board. They have no active, navigating, motivated concernful goal-directed action.

My view is that they never will, since on all the best evidence, skillful concernful action does not exist. It is merely illusions that emerge from chemical and electrical interactions.

It is not obviously clear whether your argument is any more valid than the above (or the other way around).

To expand, if a robot in every imaginable way behaves exactly like another human would, how can you know know that one possesses "intelligence" (or rather, consciousness), while the other doesn't?

Why would it be possible to construct the high level structures from which intelligence emerges on top of one set of primitives (electrical/chemical in biological context), and not the other (electrical-based logic on silicon).

The argument you pose have many signs of being an appeal to the ghost in the machine.

For anyone interested in exploring ideas around (self)consciousness and the mind, The Mind's I by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett is a good read.

It seems there were/are a couple of workarounds for setting third party cookies in Safari.

One was to send a POST request in a hidden iframe using javascript. This was supposedly what Google used to bypass Safari's blocking of third party cookies[1].

Another is (was?) to redirect to the third party domain, and then back again[2]. This would supposedly work since the restriction on third party cookies doesn't apply to already visited domains.

1: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9930671/safari-3rd-party...

2: http://www.mendoweb.be/blog/internet-explorer-safari-third-p...

Re:Extensions in Firefox 58 on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @07:26AM (#15756241)
For anyone else looking, the parent probably meant 'easystroke': https://github.com/thjaeger/easystroke

It's likely available from your package manager.

Re:Extensions in Firefox 58 on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @08:00AM (#15747571)
The problem is that Firefox was the last well supported browser that allowed for power user features.

With this change, Firefox targets the lowest common denominator just like every other major browser (tracing the footsteps of Chrome). In the progress, it too, is becoming just like Chrome.

This whole saga begun back when Opera dropped support for their 12.x browser, and became just another Blink-based browser. At that point, the only way to get a usable browser (with vertical tabs, MRU tab switching, gestures) was Firefox with a number of addons (Tree Style Tab, Tab Mix Plus, Firegestures).

One may argue that users like this should just use a fringe browser with such features built-in, but that's not viable because they're either unstable or lack timely security updates.

You may also argue that you can get all those features, even in Firefox 57, but that's only true with caveats:

Tree Style Tab still exists, but if you use either the history or bookmark sidebars, you better get ready to switch back and forth all the time (since only one sidebar can be active at a time).

The about:config setting browser.ctrlTab.previews (now also exposed in preferences as "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order") is mostly useless, since it is limited to the 6 most recent tabs (probably even fewer on lower resolution screens).

There are several mouse gesture addons for Firefox 57, but none of them currently work on Linux/Mac. Even on Windows (and the others when they're fixed), gestures will work neither on internal pages nor on addons.mozilla.org.

Re:SQL Operations Studio on Friday November 17, 2017 @11:26AM (#15723366)
That looks like opt-out (it's named "telemetry.enableTelemetry" and has "'default': true").
See under the status headline on http://bcachefs.org/ and decide for yourself whether that's good enough for your use case.
Re:Firefox Quantum on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @12:38PM (#15654734)
That setting will not work in the final release.

See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Add-ons/Firefox57#Compat._Table

Re:LightVM – A new virtualization solution based on Xen on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @11:49AM (#15602391)
The Tinyx tool mentioned in the paper doesn't seem to be published anywhere.

It doesn't help that the name was already in use (by a minimal X11 server).

Re:Writing a 9P server from scratch (2016) on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @08:14AM (#15600443)
According to Wikipedia, Plan 9 has been using fossil as the default file system since 2003.
Alright then:

> Step 1: work crazy hard. Step 2: be better than anyone else. Step 3: work crazy hard.

FTFY.

Re:The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @11:00AM (#15550666)
And the reasoning behind this sentiment usually is that the jokes in the show are made at the characters' expense - people watching the show laugh at them, not with them.

Here's an example of a post that explores that topic: http://butmyopinionisright.tumblr.com/post/31079561065/the-p...

Re:Documenting the Web together on Thursday October 19, 2017 @08:02AM (#15507143)
VS2017 opens the correct documentation most of the time, and in the default web browser.

For C++, cppreference provides archives of all their docs: http://en.cppreference.com/w/Cppreference:Archives.

Of course, that won't help you for Win32 or .NET.

There's also https://zealdocs.org/

Re:URG on Thursday October 19, 2017 @07:44AM (#15507042)
The fault for this really lies with Python 2's handling of strings/unicode/character sets, and not UTF-8 itself.
Re:The Transaction Costs of Tokenizing Everything on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @09:31AM (#15490713)
And this is why many trackers have departed from purely ratio-based requirements.

A couple examples:

"Required ratio" based on percentage of "snatched" (i.e. downloaded) torrents you are seeded. For example, if you're seeding all torrents you have ever downloaded, your required can be 0 (instead of initially common values of 1 or 0.9).

Ratioless: no ratio requirements, but you must instead seed all torrents for a specified time.

Among people involved in private torrent communities it's fairly well-known that a purely ratio-based system does not provide the best incitements (which would be a library of content that is as diverse and well-seeded as possible).

Anyway, the main reason many prefer private trackers to public is not only because of enforcement of contributing back, but because of rules that ensure that the available content has high quality (i.e. curation).

Re:The Transaction Costs of Tokenizing Everything on Tuesday October 17, 2017 @08:47AM (#15490446)
Redacted (like the late What.CD, which it aims to replace) has interviews (https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html).

Most private trackers requires an invite (from someone who is already a member and has invite privileges) though.

Re:Smarter half tiling in Gnome Shell/Mutter on Wednesday October 04, 2017 @07:30AM (#15399718)
Windows already has the feature covered in the blog post (in 10 it supports quarters).

There are also a number of third party tiling window managers.

Re:Simple note taking from the command line on Tuesday October 03, 2017 @12:41PM (#15393752)
A flag for cat won't help you - it's your shell that does the redirection. You're looking for `set -o noclobber` (same as `set -C`).
Re:Simple note taking from the command line on Monday October 02, 2017 @09:29AM (#15383634)
This will work fine until the day when you mistype >> into >, and all your notes are gone.
It also significantly changes how you experience them.
Re:Linux PIE/stack corruption on Friday September 29, 2017 @06:08AM (#15364028)
Here's the actual advisory: https://www.qualys.com/2017/09/26/cve-2017-1000253/cve-2017-...

Most (all?) major distributions (that were affected) have already released patched kernel packages.

It's mainly meant for communication between your microservices.

Envoy is a self contained process that is designed to run alongside every application server. All of the Envoys form a transparent communication mesh in which each application sends and receives messages to and from localhost and is unaware of the network topology.

and

Although Envoy is primarily designed as a service to service communication system, there is benefit in using the same software at the edge (observability, management, identical service discovery and load balancing algorithms, etc.). Envoy includes enough features to make it usable as an edge proxy for most modern web application use cases.

both from https://envoyproxy.github.io/envoy/intro/what_is_envoy.html

Re:Tree Style Tabs Extension Ported to Firefox 57 on Wednesday September 27, 2017 @07:58AM (#15346876)
Sadly, not much seems to be happening on that front:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1226546

At the very least I'd want something to override ctrl+tab tab switching order (by most recently used instead of tab order in tab bar), and a popup showing the tabs in that order.

Edit: Apparently the about:config setting browser.ctrlTab.previews gives you MRU and a popup. Unfortunately it shows large thumbnails of the tabs instead of just a list of the titles.

Re:The tale of aux.c on Tuesday September 26, 2017 @06:33AM (#15337515)
This will not work with all rm implementations, in which case you can fall back to: rm ./-

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