Google doesn't innovate? The software on the new Pixel 3 is nothing short of amazing from spam call answering to night mode photography. And it is all getting backported to earlier Pixel models as well.
There's a Youtube channel called something like 'AI Channel' that has relevant talks. LeCun did a big one a few months ago. Hinton has had at least one Google Talk.
A ton. I was involved in the successful opposition against a wind farm project in Canada that was proposed for just north of a major internationally protected migratory bird habitat[1]. Habitat destruction is just a big an environmental problem, and actually probably bigger, than climate change in North America. We are down to less than ten percent of native grasslands remaining in our continent which is the biggest slow-motion environmental disaster that doesn't get talked about much.
What's the point of renewable energy if not to help protect natural areas like the ones being proposed for development?
These huge renewable projects do have major ecological impact, why lie about it? Due to low power generation density they take up a lot of space compared to fossil fuel/nuclear plants and that's not including the large amount of power lines that have to be run to all these new facilities. There are well known negative ecological impacts from the solar farms in this area that others have pointed out.
Just because a desert or prairie ecosystem isn't as obvious a conservation target as a forest doesn't mean they are not valuable ecosystems that shouldn't be protected from development.
There's no free lunch in energy generation, every form of it has some ecological drawback. Look at this virgin forest that Georgetown University wants to cut down to put a solar facility up. How is this a net positive for the environment?
For sure, you may have very well got a good mattress at a good price. However, things you did like price-matching don't work in mattress-land because all the companies release the same mattress under different models, brands and SKU's, precisely to defeat those tools.
Online mattress sales became popular precisely because of those scummy tactics, as well as very generous return policies, where you can actually use your bed for a significant amount of time before you make a decision on it.
Online mattresses became popular because of the multi-naming, multi-branded, high-margin existing world of mattress sales which was, and is, way scummier than online mattress sales are. Plus, how are you really going to judge a mattress by lying on it for a few minutes?
Wirecutter is owned by the NY Times and does very good reviews. You can also spend a few bucks to buy a Consumer Reports subscription for a month and access their huge testing database and years of experience.
How did 'skilled' programmers recover when a daemon crashed in Sys5 init-based systems? The init script ends after startup so you are stuck with a third party monitoring service that will often clash with startup functions making controlling system state really hard. systemd was worth it for that feature alone.
Linux userspace was a bunch of crufty, unmaintained tools from xinetd to logind (literally had no maintainer until system came along) to update-rc.d that additionally were not taking advantage of a lot of new kernel features like cgroups. systemd has done a great job moving the base layer of linux userspace forward.
The old world of cobbling together bash, sed and shell metacharacters was always hacky, insecure and broken as shit and we are way better off now with systemd.
Yes, systemd makes being an application developer on Linux so much easier. You can declaratively control state of your daemons, recover from crashes, add process limits, control startup order correctly and on and on.. Much more readable and usable than bash scripts pulling in random libraries and using endless greps to find out system state.
Large parts of the U.S., Japan and Canada all have good nuclear. Gates' has always been about pushing research in the area to get better nuclear, which he outlines clearly in this note.
I agree. Tipping is now approaching 20-25% in my Canadian city, it's adding on so much cost to going out. It's about time to rationalize this space and get some better models.
I like business news in general. You make money in finance by being right and people in the industry will gravitate towards accurate sources by definition. In general, business news tends to have the best qualified hosts as well, who can actually understand macroeconomic concepts.