Category: General
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In short, current-gen digital assistants have a social IQ of 0. They’re increasingly aware of every detail of our digital and physical lives, able to understand what we’re doing and provide contextual help and relevant information without prompting — but they’re completely blind as to the social context in which our activities occur. They’ll eagerly…
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Back in 2011, I wrote this post on the state of the global economy. Five years have passed, so a quick update on that for 2016: Global population 2016 (just Google it!): 7.4 billion Global Employment (And Sector Breakdown) Workforce: 3,273M people (3.3 billion) 916M / 28.0% in agriculture 718M / 21.9% in industry 1639M…
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So for the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a little project that is basically Imgur for picture-based polls. Head over to picpix.co and click the “make a poll” button to make your own, or browse public polls for fun.
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I have been following Google Glass for a while, and am pretty excited about the technology and the possibility of someday getting my hands on one both as a user and a developer. In the meantime, I’m following the back-and-forth between fans of the tech and people who believe it’s the Apocalypse of Personal Privacy,…
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If you’re trying to do some URL-rewriting with JBoss’s org.jboss.web.rewrite.RewriteValve and finding that the “-f” options don’t work correctly on RewriteCond, it may be because the damned code hasn’t been finished on JBoss’s side, despite what the RewriteValve documentation implies. I dug up the RewriteCond source on GrepCode and every version I looked at (2.1.0.GA…
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Short post:) I’m a language geek and I’ve been re-watching the mytharc episodes from X-Files. I noticed near the end of 4×09 (“Terma”), Peskow says something in Russian when he sneaks up behind Scully that the unofficial transcript (there are no subtitles) hears as “sur posidive” and they translate as “at last”. I speak enough…
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I spent a great part of the last 24 hours trying to chase down a couple of memory leaks in a javascript project I’m working on. After much hair-pulling, a couple of observations (and no more memory leaks) have resulted: 1. jQuery’s element creation guides leave a lot to be desired. On their official site,…
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What fascinates me about the ending of ME3 isn’t so much the fan rage (the ending was a blatant rip-off of the Matrix, Deus Ex, Battlestar Galactica, god knows what else) as the fact that reviewers are so intent on pretending that the ending was some sort of literary or artistic triumph and that the…
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On the weekend, I got a request to post an infographic on my blog related to the “ethics of the wealthy”, supposedly on the strength of one of my recent OWS-related posts: Hi Nathaniel, In searching for blogposts that have used or referenced OccupyWallst.org, I stumbled across your site and wanted to reach out to…
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I’ve been thinking about the whole notion of “protest” lately – specifically the variety where a bunch of people gather together at some physical location to demonstrate their objections to policies or institutions that they disagree with. (I’m deliberately using “protest” to refer to this, not to individual acts or boycotts or other varieties of…
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