A year ago I uninstalled Facebook and Twitter from my phone in an effort to slim down my social media fake news diet. The idea was I'd occasionally check in from my laptop. Which I didn't. So this week I've finally taken the plunge and deleted both accounts. Or rather, deactivated, you have to wait 30 days before they actually delete anything. I also nuked Quora, because of the hack rather than any particular tendency to undermine the foundations of democracy.
This leaves me with a potential problem. As a person with a rapidly decreasing social media footprint I might be asked to host the Oscars. It would be nice to be tapped, but I really don't want to and so I've published a complete archive of all my tweets. I'm pretty sure some of them would be disqualifying. Whew.
A genetic algorithm learns to draw a hummingbird:
The video is an animation of three thousand generations of evolution. It starts with a random mix of line segments which are then mutated by adding or removing lines and by changing the start, end and color of existing lines. Each generation has 32 individuals. The best individual is mutated to create the next generation.
For this implementation the best or fittest individual is the one with the least error on a pixel by pixel comparison to a stock art drawing of a hummingbird. Because I care more about the shape than completely filling in the drawing an error outside the figure is penalized three times more than a gap inside the figure.
Color is mutated each generation but not selected for, so it's just changing randomly.
For the service of telling UPS that I'm not in today and so they can save a whole bunch of time and money by not failing to deliver a package they want to charge me $5? This is UPS My Choice.
910 days ago I vented my frustration at Windows 10 notifications.
Well someone in Redmond must be listening. They 'fixed' it.
The problem was that dismissing a notification did not actually get rid of it. Clicking the little x in the corner just sent it to the Action Center where you could enjoy reading it and dismissing it again.
Like some kind of cargo cult Toyota, Microsoft asked the one why, and changed the little x to an arrow. Now it's more obvious that you're just shuffling the notification around the desktop. Ticket closed. But I still have to handle every fucking notification twice.
Which makes the announcement of the April 2018 Update especially ironic:
"With this update, available as a free download today, you get new experiences that help minimize distractions and make the most of every moment by saving you time. Our hope is that you’ll have more time to do what matters most to you whether that’s to create, play, work, or simply do what you love."
I'm guessing they're all on Macs?
Not only does it know when you're home but the Nest Learning Thermostat also knows when you're nearby. Here's how it works.
You crank up the heat to 70 and walk away. Nest then immediately returns to 62 degrees.
Thinking there must be something screwy with the algorithm you turn it back up to 70. Nest knows that it's in trouble so it displays a comforting message like 'Heat set until 10pm', waits for you to leave and then sets the temperature back to 62 degrees.
Giving up on the learning part you use the app to manually program it to keep the heat on. Nest now uses its WiFi connection to phone the gas company and disconnect your service.
The ITHCWY privacy policy has been updated to reflect changes in the blog comment system. Previously email addresses submitted with comments were only used to display a Gravatar. Starting today they will also be used for notifications and newsletter signup.
The first notification is when a comment is approved. You'll always be notified in this case if you enter an email address.
When you leave a comment you can opt in to receiving notifications when another comment is added to the same post.
Finally, you can also subscribe to the monthly newsletter when leaving a comment.
At BGR Chris Smith writes about Google's prodigious data collection:
"But that doesn’t change the fact that Google collects an incredible amount of data about you, especially from that device you use most, your Android phone"
And so I was amused as a Google Fi subscriber on a Pixel XL running Google Chrome and signed into my Google Account that the ad in the middle of the article was for Project Fi. If Google can't help paying BGR under these set of circumstances then we're some way off from the adtech singularity.
Facebook defends its simple 2 question survey on the trustworthiness of news publishers
What if everyone recognizes a news source and say half of them trust it but it isn't true?
I'm hoping that a chat banner notification is for really great chats only and not some subtle distinction between chat notification types that I can't figure out even after some moderate to heavy googling. If anyone knows seriously please tell me.
Four Painted Lady butterflies eclose (emerge) from their chrysalises. The video has a timelapse and then realtime video of each butterfly in turn.