Posts by Oliver Knill

The iPhone 15 has a Goldilocks issue: Too big or too small. Maybe a case will make it just right

size

I seem to be one of the few who like small phones. I have still an iphone mini and love that I can easily stick it into the

running belt, that it is invisible in the pocket. But the market decided to go for larger phones. The article here seems a bit silly.

The difference between the two size is minimal. My iphone mini has 5.2 inches, the iphone 12 6.1 and the iphone 15plus 6.7

inches. Should apple offers a 6.4 inch version and confuse even more? Apple has known since a long time that too much choice

is a problem ("the paradox of choice").

When it comes to Linux distros, one person's molehill is another's mountain

browser

I'm one of the users who stick to the same distribution since decades.The snap version of firefox definitely did not work for me with too many bugs, like not able to copy paste, not safe files, not starting up correctly. Instead of switching distribution, I indeed just installed an other firefox version. yes, I can forgive canonical many things but a webbrowser not working correctly. I will soon upgrade to ubuntu 23.94 and hope the basics will work.

FTX's crypto villain Sam Bankman-Fried admits 'I made a lot of mistakes'

the scale of things

This is such an interesting case from many perspectives. The most surprising fact is how little this is covered in main media. Somehow, SBF appears like a Robbin Hood who took from the rich and gave to the poor (which of course is not true). We like heists like in the movie "entrapment" or "bandits" or "the score". The funny thing is how unequal the judgement is applied. If somebody steals a pizza, they might end up in jail. Stealing 8 billion. No problem. It really seemed have worked to pay off all these political parties. For me, this is the most disgusting part of the story. It just illustrates how easily politics and politicians can be bought. But it also illustrates the classic Rostand quote about scale in crimes: "Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god."

US border cops harvest info from citizens' phones, build massive database

unconstitutional

Clearly a breach of constitutional rights, at least if the phone breach is done to US citizens.

Using the datacenter as a dining room destroyed the platters that matter

Deep Thought

"The life forms that Humans refer to as Mice (singular: Mouse) are, unbeknownst to mankind, the most intelligent species on Earth, and

not actually native to the planet. They are in fact hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional creatures whose rodent aspect represents merely a

three-dimensional projection of their actual form. Billions of years ago, they have been responsible for creating the supercomputer known as Deep Thought, and also for hiring the Magratheans to build the planet that would become known as Earth - actually an even more impressive and massive supercomputer designed by Deep Thought."

Big Tech bosses call for computer science to be taught in all US schools

computer science and math

The cynics among us always interpret such efforts as a mechanism to bring down the wages in the tech industry. On a more serious side the question is, what should young students be taught? They already know how to use computers or smart phones, many of them are better in basic computer skills, playing games, trouble shooting stuff. Kids are usually much faster and smarter about such things because they treat trouble shooting tasks as a game. The next level of ``computer science" is probably to learn how to make a powerpoint presentation or to build a website or a youtube video. All these things have over the years become easier and easier. There are no real computer science skills needed for such basic things. Computer science really starts with learning about logic, about processes, data structures, geometry, algebra (most programs use variables which can take numerical values like in algebra) etc. Most of it is some sort of math. In order to be able to program effectively, you need to be able to think mathematically. Effective programs are written by minds who have learned how to think analytically. I hope these Tech bosses do not hope that schools over the country teach how to copy paste already written code. A much more reasonable and constructive call is to improve and value more math education. Of course this can and should include elements of computer science.

Meetings in the metaverse: Are your Mikes on?

hilarious but also prophetic

it is fun to read but one will have to learn it the hard way. already zoom is often comic. you see half-heads (camera position off), ghosts (bad lighth), real ghosts (no picture at all), people disappear randomly, people meeting while driving (!). But at least, when meeting on zoom, one still looks like half human to anybody nearby. With a head-set strapped on, doing wild gestures or movements, one will look like a puppet on a string. It was not predicted as such but Google Glass died not because of technological issues but because of social ones. They were dubbed glass-holes and comedy played an important role. There was the famous Saturday night sketch from 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Uz3cwHT0S0). It was somehow comedy which killed the technology.

Google unrolls search features to tackle misinformation

lord of tackling misinformation

The kicker would be if the ``Lord to tackle misinformation"

came to the conclusion that it is itself a source of misinformation ...

Misinformation is subtle. It can be driven by commercial interests.

Every advertisement is misinformation if the product

is not good. It can be driven by government interest who want to

trigger some behavior. It can be driven by health concerns or can be

motivated by moral or religious feelings.

It can be triggered sponsors or lobbyists and PR departments. It can

also come simply from personal interests or interests of close friends

or alliances which need to be satisfied.

What is needed is transparency about the network of connections. Who

owns and sponsors a specific medium or politician. What is also needed

is analysis of the past. We have many examples in the past where we were

misled badly and where the misinformation only came to light after years.

Maybe the best is not to trust any source by itself and also monitor

what information is filtered or censored.

114 billion transistors, one big meh. Apple's M1 Ultra wake-up call

appreciation!

While I agree that the appreciation for newer and better machines has decreased (I was in awe already when having a tandy clone PC attached to a TV which was so much better than a programmable TI 59), then came atari, the first macs, the next and nice affordable workstations running linux. Still, I like to buy the most powerful machine I can afford. The reason is productivity. Not only the micro lag, the search for files, the syncing of files, LaTeXing files, the conversion of files, not to speak what happens when editing large pictures with the gimp or handle larger video projects where having to wait a few seconds until the machine has rendered some stuff. I'm not a gamer but want to see high performance when flying round in google earth, I like to work on 49 inch monitors with lots of different parts open at the same time (documents, books, computer algebra systems, etc). By the way, just the reading of high resolution PDF files on linux on a high end workstation can have lag. We need more computing power and this is only going to become more urgent. can understand the article, but it confirms that we all have become spoiled brats who do trash new innovation as not fast enough. I sometimes have to fire up one of these old machines and wonder: how the heck could I have ever worked n such a crappy technology. Take a machine from 10 years ago and try to do anything decent. My small Raspi is faster and that fits into a matchbox. I would love that new M1 Ultra. Unfortunately have not the cash right now.

50 lines of Bash to bring a Wordle fan out of their shell

bash version has a much smaller voacbulary

It is great to have this programmed so effectively. It uses the /usr/share/dict/words

database of words. I just tried it out. It did not recognize words

like Maser or Aleph. The simplicity of the game will make it hard to

protect from copying as it is essentially the mastermind game with

a different alphabet and a restricted set of 370 thousand words. Which gets

me back to /usr/share/dict/words. On my linux machine, that file contains 102

thousand words and these are also shorter and longer ones. So, the Bash

game is much more restricted than the actual wordle game.

The robots are coming! 12 million jobs lost to automation in Europe by 2040 – analyst

If one looks at the data in https://data.oecd.org/unemp/unemployment-rate.htm and changes to from 1955 to 2021, one can notice a trend, similarly as in global warming: in the last 60 years global unemployment had a tendency to increase. The argument "we have been here before and just replace unskilled workers" already today does not apply any more. Engineers already program programs which write computer programs (like building programs which build translation software). Once you are in the range that the highest qualified tasks are replaced, like also in research or teaching, the 12 million number appear to me highly optimistic. And then there is the trend that work is being centralized by big tech companies, especially in IT.

Developer creates ‘Quite OK Image Format’ – but it performs better than just OK

public domain

Very nice is that the project is in the public domain https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ It might eventually take over. But only if the extension name changes to something simple like .ok. By the way, my favorite image format is PPM. Below is a 5x4 pixel picture: first mage format, second dimension, third range, then triples of numbers giving RGB (red-green-blue) values at each point. Might look like nonsense, but it is useful when wanting to write pictures for which one has control over each individual pixel and can not afford to have any artefacts. I have used this format to export pictures from a simple program and then use Imagemagic to convert it into any of the dirty formats.The following picture ok.ppm shows two letters o.k. By the way, the corresponding jpg file has about the same size (lots of overhead). gif is about 10 times smaller. You can copy paste the following lines into an editor, save as ok.ppm, then run convert ok.ppm ok.jpg to get the jpg version.

P3 7 5 255 0 0 255 0 0 255 0 0 255 255 255 255 255 0 0 255 255 255 255 0 0 0 0 255 255 255 255 0 0 255 255 255 255 255 0 0 255 0 0 255 255 255 0 0 255 255 255 255 0 0 255 255 255 255 255 0 0 255 0 0 255 255 255 0 0 255 255 255 255 0 0 255 255 255 255 255 0 0 255 0 0 255 255 255 0 0 255 0 0 255 0 0 255 255 255 255 255 0 0 255 255 255 255 0 0