Wednesday, January 01
Daily News Stuff 1 January 2020
Finding Sealab Edition
Finding Sealab Edition
Tech News
- Keep your computer cool this summer (well, it's summer here!) by dunking the whole thing in a tank of coolant that costs $18 a litre. (AnandTech)
The kit costs $2450. That does not include the computer. The computer is extra.
- This is not technical itself, but a social psychology study of clustering effects in social networks is certainly of interest, and the clusterfuck that the researchers managed to generate doubly so.
The summary notes that moderate conservative voices on Twitter - the Center Right - are overwhelmed by the Extreme Right. (Medium)
What it does not note is what the definition of the Extreme Right is that is used by this study. And that is because there is no definition used by the study.
What they did was label certain Twitter accounts as Extreme Right, and then those accounts that follow them get tagged as Extreme Right as well.
And the first example - there are only two - the first example of an Extreme Right account they give is The Heritage Foundation which is middle-of-the-road classical liberalism.
Part one and part two are available for download as PDFs. Part two consists entirely of interviews with journalists, if you needed a clearer idea of where this was going.
The only bright spot in this farrago of academic malfeasance is page 22 of part one which notes that everybody hates the New York Times.
- Speaking of Medium, it takes five clicks and a page reload to reply to a comment - starting from the individual post page. This is the competition?
- The Big 5 tech companies are worth $5 trillion. (Tech Crunch)
If you're playing Fantasy Stockmarket, short Google. The company is rotten to the core.
- The old internet died and we did nothing. (BuzzFeed)
Don't know about you, BuzzFeed, but my posts from 2003 are still intact.
And - hah, just thought of something. I have a backup of every tweet I posted before Twitter nuked my account. I'm about to launch my own social network....
- Samsung TVs may upload screenshots for automatic content recognition. (Hacker News)
I'll likely get a 4K TV this year. I have 4K monitors - plural - because I use them all day for work, but my TV is still 720p.
It will be a cheap, no-name device as devoid of intelligence as I can find. If it can't even automatically switch to the active input, I'm okay with that.
Other News
- An interesting who-knew-what-when piece on the FISA abuse scandal. (The Epoch Times)
Is the Epoch Times trustworthy? I don't know. They were implicated in a fake news ring on Facebook recently. (The Verge) But they were implicated by Facebook and I don't trust Facebook either.
But this article links to the PDF of the related court order - on the .gov site, not their own copy - and provides page references for the claims it makes. That is refreshing.
Anime Music Video of the Day
Picture of the Day
Disclaimer: This social network was created in a controlled environment (well, a sweltering dump now that the A/C is dead) by trained (and very grumpy) engineers (one engineer and a Ryo-Ohki plushie). Do not try this at home.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
09:31 PM
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1
ACR: All the smart TV makers do that; the difference is that Vizio, due to a consent decree, has to say so, and the others don't.
I haven't gotten around to looking yet but I expect by now people have domain lists so they can block ACR at the router.
I haven't gotten around to looking yet but I expect by now people have domain lists so they can block ACR at the router.
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 02 2020 04:13 AM (Iwkd4)
2
The comments on the linked Samsung article, by the way, suggest commercial signage displays: "No one wants to pay for smart garbage on those, so they're usually just good panels with ports."
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 02 2020 04:17 AM (Iwkd4)
3
"well, a sweltering dump now that the A/C is dead"
Still?
My last apartment complex, the first really hot day of summer would kill my AC every year, and it always seemed to happen Thursday afternoon, and took until Monday or Tuesday to fix. (It turned out it was partially due to the maintenance guy cheaping the hell out and significantly underpressurizing the system!) The complex loaned me a small window unit, which at least made one room bearable, and eventually the compressor on the apartment's fixed unit died, so they put in a brand new one because they couldn't get parts for the old one any longer. After that, I never had problems.
Still?
My last apartment complex, the first really hot day of summer would kill my AC every year, and it always seemed to happen Thursday afternoon, and took until Monday or Tuesday to fix. (It turned out it was partially due to the maintenance guy cheaping the hell out and significantly underpressurizing the system!) The complex loaned me a small window unit, which at least made one room bearable, and eventually the compressor on the apartment's fixed unit died, so they put in a brand new one because they couldn't get parts for the old one any longer. After that, I never had problems.
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 02 2020 05:01 AM (Iwkd4)
4
Well, the AC is fixed so that it's running without dumping water everywhere or tripping the circuit breaker. But it's not actually noticeably cooling anything down. So they have to come out again, which won't be until next week.
When the first hot days of summer happen right around Christmas getting your AC fixed can be a real pain.
When the first hot days of summer happen right around Christmas getting your AC fixed can be a real pain.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 02 2020 11:09 AM (PiXy!)
5
"When the first hot days of summer happen right around Christmas getting your AC fixed can be a real pain."
When it happens on a Friday afternoon, same. I've had it happen 2-3 times now. Very annoying.
When it happens on a Friday afternoon, same. I've had it happen 2-3 times now. Very annoying.
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 02 2020 01:11 PM (Iwkd4)
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