Disqus - Latest Comments for ejp1082

Re: iPad Pro Diary: I can’t put this thing down, but we really need ‘padOS’

Eric — Thu, 08 Nov 2018 14:05:42 -0000

It needs a real file system and access to external storage.

I was watching that demo of Photoshop and it's like... it's great that it can handle a 3 GB psd file, but how are you getting it on and off the device? I can sit around for untold minutes waiting for it to transfer wirelessly, or I can just start working with it immediately on a mac.

Speaking as a photographer it's nuts that I still can't plug in a SD card (or thumb drive, or portable hard drive) and be able to browse and import my photos directly into Lightroom CC, or any other app besides Apple Photos.

If you're a pro and you're working with photos (let alone with video), you likely have terabytes of data. The cloud and internal storage just don't work for you if you have that much. You have it on externals, and you're backing up those externals to other externals. The iPad just plain doesn't support that, so it's ridiculous to say it's for pros.

Re: Codetermination? Why Not Just Powerful Unions Instead?

Eric — Sun, 19 Aug 2018 19:28:23 -0000

I genuinely think this is a better idea than unions?

It creates a de facto union in every company whether they have one or not, without the headache of needing employees to join or pay dues towards one to make them work. A 40% vote isn't a majority but it's still a hell of a negotiating leverage, as it would require a near unanimous shareholder agreement to override.

The thing we know at this point is that unions *don't* work. They're effective when present, but their presence isn't sustainable decade over decade. I give credit to Warren here for thinking creatively and advocating something new.

Re: Gallup: Suicide Immoral Unless Doctor-Assisted

Eric — Mon, 04 Jun 2018 20:22:41 -0000

FFS it's 2018 and we still have 9% who think birth control is immoral, 31% who think pre-marital sex is immoral, 33% who think same-sex relations is immoral, 57% who think porn is immoral...

Re: Voice Assistants Six+ Years In

Eric — Sun, 08 Apr 2018 10:41:30 -0000

I can't recall ever using the one on my phone.

I use the Echo a lot though, though mostly for a few narrow categories - controlling the lights, setting kitchen timers, and playing music, and asking the weather forecast.

There's a niche for is, but I think it'll always be just a niche. It's the most useful when your hands aren't free (like when cooking or driving). It's the least useful when your hands are holding a device anyway, like when you're looking at your phone - you may as well input what you want with your hands, which will often be faster and more accurate (and quieter).

Re: Fermi vs Drake

Eric — Thu, 05 Apr 2018 10:30:28 -0000

If I'm not too mistaken, SETI is looking for any sort of artificial signal. But even they acknowledge that our equipment isn't sensitive enough to pick up radio leakage, so they say they're looking for a deliberate signal since that's the only thing we'd have a shot of picking up. A deliberate one seems even less likely though.

I know it's probably a mistake to extrapolate from a data point of one, but I do believe the most logical starting point for thinking about this is looking at what our own civilization is doing and assume they're basically like us. We're leaking radio signals into space, but to my knowledge we're not yet intentionally broadcasting anything just in case aliens are listening and there aren't any plans to start doing so.

And it just seems unlikely we ever will. To have even the remotest chance of being a worthwhile endeavor, it would take a lot of power and it would have to run constantly for centuries to have any hope of aliens picking it up. And then we wouldn't even know that they had unless we stumbled on a signal they send in reply. Further, according to the estimates I'm finding even a high powered and deliberate signal would still have a pretty limited range - optimistically 100 light years or so. There's a lot of stars in that radius but we're still talking about a tiny, tiny fraction of the galaxy that can be reached by this method.

The best case scenario I can imagine for why we (and by extension, an alien race) would broadcast a signal like this is that once we start getting data on the atmospheric composition of exoplanets, we might find some with oxygen and other signals of life on them. We might decide to send a signal their way on the chance a civilization is there, listening, and can signal back. A focused signal at least could be more powerful and have a better chance of being heard by a civilization at the target star. But that would still be a hard to justify expenditure. There's still little chance of success - there might be no civilization, or a pre-industrial civilization, or a dead civilization, or one not listening, or one that doesn't care to signal back. Our broadcast wouldn't tell us which of those situations is the case - I can't think of any real scientific data that might be gleaned from the effort. And even if we did initiate it, how long would we *really* keep that up for before some penny pincher looking for a way to cut the budget shuts it off? It seems implausible that we'd just keep broadcasting forever hoping a civilization might one day answer us.

Maybe some alien civilization is doing just that with respect to Earth and SETI will detect it. But it just seems doubtful.

I contend the much more likely thing we'll do once we have knowledge of an exoplanet with life is to launch a probe at it to study it more closely. This is already being talked about (The Starshot Project) and it seems fairly reasonable that we might develop and launch something like that in the next few decades. Probes can observe things in detail up close and report back to Earth.

(And as I mentioned in my comment above, von neumann machines would be an even more efficient way of exploring the cosmos should we figure out how to make one.)

I think the most reasonable best guess is any alien civilization interested in studying the cosmos would reach the same conclusions and do the same thing. Which leads me back to my earlier point - if we want to find evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, we should be thinking about how we might detect alien probes in our own solar system. (Which, to be clear, I've no idea how we might do so).

I really, really want to believe in SETI and fully support what they're doing, but seems like they're rooted more in wishful thinking than scientific reasoning. I haven't seen a convincing argument for why we'd expect an alien civilization to be intentionally broadcasting to the cosmos. Thus I think the answer to the fermi paradox is simply that their premise is flawed - this isn't a plausible way to detect other civilizations.

(All that said, I don't see any real harm in listening anyway. Nothing would thrill me like being totally wrong on this topic.)

Re: Fermi vs Drake

Eric — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 09:41:05 -0000

I think our own experience as a civilization validates one of those bullet points with regards to the Fermi paradox and it just seems like no one noticed.

At issue - our radio signals are only powerful enough to be detectable for something like 50-100 light years around us. It's not like a civilization even just 200 light years away would be able to detect our TV broadcasts; so it's unlikely we'd be able to pick up theirs. The part of the universe we can survey for this sort of thing is really small. Secondly it doesn't take a new undiscovered kind of communication to mask them. What signals that are going to space are leakage. They're wasted energy, and no one likes to waste energy. So over time we've been leaking less - we've gotten better at directing signals to where they're meant to go rather than sending them everywhere. Further, we've been encrypting our signals which would make them look like noise even if they were detected.

So even if radio broadcasting civilizations were abundant it just seems unlikely that efforts like SETI would be a reliable way to detect them. We'd only be able to if they were extremely close in space and they're not yet sophisticated enough to cut down on leakage.

I think a better approach is to look much closer at our own solar system, based again on how we're exploring space: we're sending robots.

I contend the most logical way to explore the galaxy is by sending out von neumann probes. The technology isn't all there yet, but there's nothing implausible about it (you'd need some combination of AI and nanotech in a small enough package that it can be solar powered and pick up significant velocity from solar winds) and we'll probably be able to build such a probe in the next century. You'd start by sending some to the closest stars and they'd replicate and continue spreading, sending observations back through the network. The timescale is crazy but it's not *so* crazy - the closest ones would start sending data in about a century, and from then on you'd get data from ever-further stars. You could cover the entire galaxy in a few hundred thousand years.

Critically, you'd only need one civilization to have done this, and the probes would continue to exist even if the civilization that created them doesn't. That suggests we're much likelier to detect these than alien TV stations.

So the question isn't really "Where are the radio signals?" but "Where are the Von Neumann probes"?

Re: Nikon mirrorless camera poll results

Eric — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 18:03:39 -0000

It seems weird to have a strong opinion on whether or not you'd buy something that pretty much nothing is really known about. Price point, specs, features, lens availability, etc.

Personally I'm good with a D850 (if I can ever get my hands on one), which I expect to keep me happy for the next many years. Let them iterate a few generations on the mirrorless, develop a good stable of lenses native to the system, and *then* I might consider buying in as my next upgrade.

Re: Split Up All the Big States? Why Not Just Reform the Senate Instead?

Eric — Sat, 20 Jan 2018 11:15:48 -0000

They wouldn't - it would almost certainly mean +4 Democratic Senate seats and +7ish in the House.

But if Democrats can win control of government again in 2020, they won't need Republican support to grant statehood. Which makes it a heck of a lot more plausible than anything that would require constitutional amendment.

Plus if the dems actually did that, the two more blue-leaning states would make Democrat supported constitutional amendments marginally easier and more likely to pass (though they'd be smaller states so they might suddenly have an interest in preserving their Senate and Electoral College advantage, so who knows).

Re: Split Up All the Big States? Why Not Just Reform the Senate Instead?

Eric — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 17:00:26 -0000

I'm all for constitutional amendments that reform or outright abolish the Senate, but since those are all filed under "not gonna happen", how about we just work on DC and Puerto Rican statehood? You know, things which have a shot in hell of actually happening.

Re: Doug Jones Victory: Trump is Vulnerable

Eric — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 10:15:02 -0000

I had thought the last hurrah was Bush. The country recoiled at Sarah Palin and it seemed Obama represented a turning of the page in American history. Then the tea party happened. And I thought, well okay *that's* the last hurrah. Mitt Romney ultimately prevailed in the GOP primary, Obama won re-election; it seemed this was a receding force in politics. But then Trump happened.

My point is, I'm not making this mistake anymore. It's not the last anything. There are vile, retrograde forces in the country and there are enough of them to win power should the rest of us not be vigilant. 2016 we were caught asleep at the wheel and we'll be suffering the consequences for generations. We need to be thinking "this shit can win any election if we don't stop it".

The outcome last night was a good one. But had Roy Moore not been a pedophile, but merely a theocrat pining for the days of slavery who thought the Bible supercedes the constitution and homosexuality should be a crime.... he'd have won by a healthy margin. Even being a pedophile, over half a million people voted for him.

This is not the kind of thing that should make us think anything is over. We're in a long fight, one that will not be totally won in our lifetimes, or perhaps ever.

Re: 401(k) Plans Are Back on the Chopping Block

Eric — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 18:27:22 -0000

I've been maxing out my 401k contribution since my late 20's. Not because I was particularly rich or anything (well off though by most metrics, for which I'm grateful), but because it's good sense. When I started doing that, the contribution was 23% of my salary.

Anyway when the Republicans took power, I thought to myself "Well we're in for a lot of shit, but at least I'll get a tax break". Shows what a fool I was; I'm clearly not rich enough to deserve one.

(Though I'd actually have no objection if they just roth-ified them. I'll take the hit now but in the end I'd probably get to retire sooner if I don't have to pay taxes on the withdrawals).

(I also don't think any of this is going to happen. Way too many people will be a lot more pissed off than I am about this change.)

Re: Redshirting Your Kindergartner Probably Isn't Worth It

Eric — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 16:43:09 -0000

That echoes my experience. I was right near the cutoff and consequently the youngest kid in my class growing up. Academically it was fine, and probably necessary. As it was I was one of those smart kids who got it in five minutes and got bored quickly after; I was always at the top of the class despite being almost a year younger than some of the kids. I can't imagine how much more dull I'd have found it having to wait an extra year.

But socially? Ick. I was always the smallest kid so the worst at any sports. And mere months make a huge difference when it comes to growing up. I was constantly lagging behind my peers when it came to growing out of kid stuff and developing older-kid interests, which doomed me to being a nerd and outcast. And since my birthday was after the summer, that means I was never eligible for age cut-off summer activities when most of my classmates were, and missed out on those too.

(I genuinely think that school cutoff dates are a chief driver of personality development, as I don't think I'm alone in that experience).

Re: Redshirting Your Kindergartner Probably Isn't Worth It

Eric — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 16:25:23 -0000

My school year (in New Jersey FWIW) was broken up into quarters (referred to as "Marking Periods" officially but most teachers said "semester"), at the end of which we'd get our report cards. So over the course of the year there'd be four of them, with the last one also including the final grades for the year. I've heard of some private schools doing three, but they have shorter school years anyway. I've never heard of one that only does two.

In any case I thought four was a pretty common way of divvying up the year, but I guess that's what I get for generalizing from anecdote.

Re: Redshirting Your Kindergartner Probably Isn't Worth It

Eric — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 15:41:30 -0000

Why not just split up classes by semester rather than year? Most school districts have the school year broken down into four semesters anyway, it would only involve reshuffling the kids. That way the biggest age gap in a given classroom would be 3 months rather than 12, and everyone would be more or less learning the same things at the same biological ages. As a bonus it's also easier for a kid to either repeat or skip a semester than it is for a whole grade, so everyone can wind up in the right place for them.

It might not work for low population district where there's just not enough kids to break up a grade into four classes, but it would be a pretty trivial change for most cities and suburbs. I can't think of why that wouldn't work?

Re: Mobile Matures and Consolidates

Eric — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 10:08:26 -0000

I'm curious what happened with the desktop in 2015?

Re: Another Dose of Liberal Heresy: Government Transparency Can Be Taken Too Far

Eric — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 17:56:54 -0000

> The first argument is all bound up in the weird Gen X/Millennial dislike of talking on the phone, and it doesn't really do much for me.

His point was pretty straightforward I think. We don't record phone conversations and preserve them for FOIA requests. Email is like phone conversations. So we should either treat email like phone conversations, or we should be treating phone conversations like email. Treating them differently makes no sense.

Also, talking on the phone is inefficient and intrusive. My generation wisely realized this and defaulted to superior communications media. What's weird is that boomers still cling to randomly ringing an alarm in other peoples homes as if there's no better way...

Re: We'd Be Better Off If Every Human Were As Good As the Top 10 Percent of Humans

Eric — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 12:20:47 -0000

There's always going to be a bottom 10% and a top 10%. What we should concern ourselves with is the *minimum acceptable quality*.

There's a huge difference between the best doctors and the typical doctors, but we can say (because of licensing, med school, etc) that the typical doctor is *good enough* - and there's mechanisms to remove Doctors who turn out to not be good enough. The same needs to be the case for teachers.

Re: <i>Game Of Thrones </i>explores the paradox of “No One” (experts)

Eric — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 15:57:50 -0000

So I guess I'm a LSH truther. Because if I were writing the show:

1. I'd use the reveal it as the season ender climax. It makes zero sense to introduce her before that moment, so her absence at this point is unsurprising.
2. Chekhov's Gun has been hanging on the wall for most of the season. Frequent callbacks to the Freys, Red Wedding, and Catelyn herself? Check. Callback to the character who was resurrected before Jon Snow, and one who can do resurrecting? Check. Putting roughly the right characters in roughly the right places? Check and check.

Clearly there's differences between the show and books and it's not going to go down exactly the same way. But in any case I'm holding out for her to show up in the finale.

Re: The Tech Biz Is Not Much Different Today Than It Was In the 70s

Eric — Wed, 08 Jun 2016 17:35:33 -0000

Tech sucks until it doesn't.

Blackberries had their fans, but smartphones sucked until the iPhone. Something that only a few power users needed and wanted became something everyone wanted as soon as it didn't suck.

Voice recognition sucked until it didn't, and now "virtual assistants" are everywhere.

Electric cars: See everything before Tesla, and then Tesla.

Home automation kinda sucks. But eventually something will become a standard API for home automation devices and then they won't suck. Devices like Alexa are already a huge step forward. And to anyone who thinks they don't want it - have you *seen* Star Trek TNG?

Google Glass sucked and still sucks. But one day someone is going to sell a true reality augmenting heads up display that doesn't suck, and we're all going to want one.

3D printers are going to follow the same trajectory. Right now they're just sorta toys. But it's not hard to imagine how they might be genuinely useful.

And stuff like Roomba's are going to get better for the same reason self driving cars are going to get better. Advances in computer vision will make them a lot better at being aware of the physical world and solving problems the real world presents.

Re: UBI Continues To Be Wildly Unpopular

Eric — Mon, 06 Jun 2016 09:59:09 -0000

It's having a moment because there's a number of experiments that are starting up now-ish. Finland is doing one - testing whether a UBI can work out better than piecemeal welfare, the charity GiveDirectly is trying it out in Kenya to study its impact on the poorest of the poor, and the VC firm Y Combinator is doing a pilot study in Oakland, IIRC.

It's still very politically infeasible, but it's moved from "fringe idea" to one being taken seriously by smart people.

Though of interest on the political front, the Democrats have lately been moving to the left on social security. And in the very long run, that's how I see UBI getting done in the US. You start with the very popular social security program and you expand it to cover more and more people as time goes on. That firmly moves the argument from "should we do this?" to "can we afford this?", the latter of which is a much easier fight to win.

Re: Why Are So Many Millennials Still Living at Home?

Eric — Mon, 30 May 2016 17:07:25 -0000

Something about this just doesn't feel right to me.

First of all, let's just accept the premise that more kids are living at home longer because they're getting married and having kids later. Why are people today getting married and having kids later? Could it be because the economics dictate they can't afford a wedding and young kids at the same ages that their parents did those same things? Seems like this is just saying "It's not their economic situation, if you look at it more closely, it's actually their economic situation."

Secondly, to the best of my knowledge the following facts are uncontested: Tuition is sky high and people are graduating with more debt than ever, rent is sky high, and entry level jobs don't pay what they used to. If you just take those three facts wouldn't you *assume* that more people would opt to live at home longer as long as they were able? Which is what we see.

Sometimes the simple straightforward answer is really the right one, and statistical analysis obfuscates more than it illuminates.

Re: Vacation Policy

Eric — Wed, 25 May 2016 21:32:13 -0000

Seriously. If it was truly "unlimited" I could declare I was on vacation from day one and never show up to work while the company still pays me. Clearly that's absurd, but it just means that unlimited vacation plainly isn't. There's obviously limitations, the company just doesn't bother to let you know what they are. Cross some invisible threshold and you're "abusing" the policy.

If these companies were offering were serious about making sure employees got needed R&R rather than taking advantage of them, they wouldn't offer "unlimited vacation", they'd pay overtime. It's morbidly hilarious how differently employers will act when extra labor costs them real money rather than getting it for free.

Re: Hillary Clinton Wants All Millennials to Feel Free to Use Her Lawn

Eric — Wed, 27 Apr 2016 12:27:16 -0000

> Do older folks really hate millennials with a white hot passion?

I certainly read and here a lot of ire directed at millennials and I don't understand where it's coming from exactly. Part of it is explainable - millennials evolved a different set of social norms around technology that are perceived as "rude" by the people who didn't grow up with it. It's amusing, but I can imagine there was the same sort of disconnect between boomers and their parents, and gen x'ers and their parents.

But it does seem like there's more to it than just "Kids today!" - again at least in what I read. On the ground what I see are 20-somethings who are struggling to get by with a lot less then their parents did at the same age. The jobs don't pay as much, the housing costs are higher, they've got scary amounts of student loan debt. Most of them compensate by delaying the big expensive markers of adulthood. Moving out, getting married, buying a house (if they do that at all).

The older generation reacts to this not with the sympathy you might expect - I never hear anything from a boomer to the effect of "Wow you kids have it tougher than I did". It's always "Why aren't you doing what I did? You must be lazy entitled spoiled brats!"

Part of it, I suspect, is that if the older generation ever acknowledged how hard it is for the younger generation, it would mean admitting they're responsible for making the world as hard as it is. It's easier to get angry and blame your kids than it is to accept responsibility and help them out.

Then again maybe I'm just not old enough to have experienced these same kind of comments directed at Generation X. I do remember the usual indictments of what the kids are doing back in the 80's and early 90's (I was a young kid at the time, but a lot of it seeped down to me). But did Generation X really get attacked the way Millennials are?

Re: Watches, Wrists, and Wearables

Eric — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 11:22:58 -0000

If that's the most "compelling" use case anyone can come up with then that just supports my point. Everything in that list fits under my point 2 - "marginally more convenient way to do a subset of the things your phone can do".

To summarize: For hundreds of dollars you can buy a device that will let you see who's calling without taking your phone out of your pocket (as long as it's within bluetooth range). I guess to some people that's a good value proposition, given the number of people who've bought them when that's pretty much all they offer.

But my phone already shows me who's calling and I can talk on it hands free. So call me crazy for not being in the market for a device that costs half as much (or more) as the phone itself, which I'd have to buy *in addition* to the phone, that just lets me do what the phone itself already does.

The convenience of bringing those features to my wrist is a use case. It's just not compelling by any reasonable definition of the word.

Re: Watches, Wrists, and Wearables

Eric — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 10:05:54 -0000

They lack a compelling use case, and I don't think that's going to change. The universe of things that a wrist wearable can do that a smartphone *cannot* do is pretty much limited to activity tracking. So the market is limited to:

1. People who are into personal fitness
2. People who want a marginally more convenient way to do a subset of the things they do with their phone.

Neither of these are ever going to be smartphone-sized markets.

It's also not surprising to me that Apple didn't kill Fitbit. Fitbit is really focused on the "stuff a phone can't do", and appealing to that audience with a decent price point. Apple Watch on the other hand is a solution in search of a problem.