BC TECH
Saved by @zmbnski

So, today, for the first time in 25 (!) years of Apple, I downgraded. From the 2016 MacBook Pro to my 2013, which I had kept in a drawer...

 It was pretty simple to do—Apple Time Machine backups let me do it with one click.
That first tweet captures, in two pictures, how badly Apple has “lost the plot” (to quote @wylieprof). On the right is the Apple MagSafe adapter, from 2013. On the left, what I had “upgraded” to.
@wylieprof Thanks, Apple! I really was nostalgic for worrying about yanking my computer off the table.
@wylieprof Oh and I really appreciated not knowing if my computer was charging. What was great was the little whoop sound you used, so that the speaker before me could be informed I was charging my laptop.
@wylieprof Just kidding! That was lame. On the plus side I could now plug the charger in either side. (Except I couldn’t quite because one of the ports was faulty, and it wouldn’t charge properly—I was alerted to that by the salience of a non-whoop silence.)
@wylieprof What else? Oh! The mysterious double-space. At some point, your new keyboard started occasionally inserting two spaces when I only hit the spacebar once.
@wylieprof Maybe I was typing too hard? But then I noticed it elsewhere. For example, I’m pretty sure it happened to Mary Beard too, judging by the unexpected in her tweets. Hi Mary!
@wylieprof The new software updates were great, too. For example, at some point AirPlay stopped working. Fortunately I had yet to upgrade my iPhone, so I could still play music on the stereo.
@wylieprof Still, the upgrade was worth it. After four years, I had a hard drive that was... 50% larger, and a processor that was... 25% faster.
@wylieprof This made it easier when I stared losing work (for the first time in a decade) by unexpected application crashes, because I could load up Safari and... hang on... oop
@wylieprof I also had new friends. Like Laurel and Hardy! Hi guys.
@wylieprof These were so advanced that I had to upgrade their firmware when I first plugged them in (!) Also I think they were $60 each.
@wylieprof The computer itself was so skinny that when I carried these around I felt like a photographer’s assistant at a fashion shoot.
@wylieprof Making the trackpad extra large was great because my finger got a concussion running off the edge of the last one? Not really, but now I could randomly fail to click something if I rested my palm wrong.
@wylieprof This was the first time since the late-1990s Jobs reboot that I felt I was working for my computer, not the other way around.
@wylieprof The era of understated perfection is, in my opinion, over. Given the bugs that erupt with each incremental update now, I can’t even imagine the current team rolling out an entire rewrite of the OS, as they did for OS X. https://t.co/2lZn5RQm4w
@wylieprof One last example, a little more technical. Apple rolled out a new file system. It’s called APFS, you’ll get it free if you upgrade to High Sierra.
@wylieprof APFS forbids “hardlinks”. So if you do upgrade, all of your UNIX stuff will probably break. Why? Because screw you, that’s why.
@wylieprof Oh also—APFS is incompatibile with older versions of Time Machine. Apple can’t even not break its own stuff. And you can’t reformat back to the old system.
@wylieprof https://t.co/RD5XpCYTSm if you don’t believe me.
@wylieprof A new update was released today or so—Mojave (motto: Welcome to the Desert of the Real).
@wylieprof I learned this because people already figured out it breaks Mathematica.
@wylieprof A well-built machine is a beautiful thing. You get attached to excellence in them the way people get attached to the old Volkswagen Beatle.
@wylieprof So, support request to @AppleSupport. Please fire Johnny Ive, and take everyone else on a five year retreat to Tibet to meditate on non-being or something.
@wylieprof @AppleSupport We can wait.
@wylieprof @AppleSupport Or, someone start a tweet campaign and get @elonmusk to build a better laptop—something that will last twenty years and be more than a platform for failed AI voice assistants and marketing popups from Software Update.
To cheer everybody up, here is a list of cool people using macs. https://t.co/pToRotyQyX
https://t.co/NloM4XBgIN
https://t.co/JcUr9ZahSZ
https://t.co/NTmT4BC8dA
Here's why Al Gore lost the election
https://t.co/Oi7WM6vmpe
(Compare to Gore)
The Dixie Chicks?
Don't tell Kayne he forgot the adapter.
Unfriend (@SwiftOnSecurity)
I do not enjoy this user experience
"Mr Putin, I can't find our password?"

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So—probability. Do we really need it? This has been on my mind since 2017, when I finally sat down to think through quantum theory. (/n)

One thing that’s always struck me is how *late* probability theory came in intellectual history. We had integral calculus before we had probability. And probability is insanely simple, mathematically!

I’m tempted to say that probability theory is not, in fact, Lindy. Frequentist probability is (for all the usual reasons) best understood as a heuristic. Bayesian interpretations, by contrast, take the remarkable step of tying it to mental states.

You have to work very hard to convince yourself that beliefs really are “degrees of belief in sets of events” (or whatever). It’s not natural—and I won’t rehearse the whole story about rational choice and decision theory...

So with those critiques in the back of my mind, when I read David Wallace’s decision-theoretic account of the Born Rule I was rather primed to say, hey, so what? Meaning...
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Donna Strickland, one of this year's Nobel Laureates, was not considered "notable enough" for Wikipedia as late as this May—reported by a number of sites, including the Independent. I dug into this a little. Here's the data—


This is the first deletion, back in 2014. A bit hard to read between the lines, but the basic story that an admin had Stickland's page "speedy deleted"—i.e., deleted without debate. The method was something called Copyright Jujitsu.

In particular, the admin had the page deleted not because of notability, but because it included a photograph of Strickland that had ambiguous copyright status. This is a method that people developed to get rid of content they didn't want, but also didn't want to debate.

"Copyright Jujitsu" because it is usually used against spam from companies; a PR officer uploads promotional material to Wikipedia. Instead of debating whether it's neutral, the admin can say "we'd love to have it, but the material appears to violate your company's copyright".

Usually the PR office and the IP office are separate in a company, and the idea of releasing promotional material under public domain is such a legal nightmare that the PR person goes away.
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Simon DeDeo
@SimonDeDeo
This is a pretty valiant attempt to defend the "Feminist Glaciology" article, which says conventional wisdom is wrong, and this is a solid piece of scholarship. I'll beg to differ, because I think Jeffery, here, is confusing scholarship with "saying things that seem right".


The article is, at heart, deeply weird, even essentialist. Here, for example, is the claim that proposing climate engineering is a "man" thing. Also a "man" thing: attempting to get distance from a topic, approaching it in a disinterested fashion.


Also a "man" thing—physical courage. (I guess, not quite: physical courage "co-constitutes" masculinist glaciology along with nationalism and colonialism.)


There's criticism of a New York Times article that talks about glaciology adventures, which makes a similar point.


At the heart of this chunk is the claim that glaciology excludes women because of a narrative of scientific objectivity and physical adventure. This is a strong claim! It's not enough to say, hey, sure, sounds good. Is it true?
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Simon DeDeo
Simon DeDeo
@SimonDeDeo
Someone tosses a coin ten times; it comes up heads every time. What's the probability it comes up heads on the next toss? (Pretty darn high—part of @nntaleb's work is unprogramming you from your high-school rules of thumb.) Now consider the (related) Gambler's fallacy...

In this case, it's a theory about compensation: the worse one's luck is, the more likely it is to see a reversal. On the surface, it's irrational. The more bad luck you have, the more you accumulate evidence that the system is rigged.

But there's also an anthropic component. If the luck is bad enough, it starts to become inconsistent with your survival. You've accumulated evidence for correlations in the environment, but these correlations (may be) inconsistent with (people like you) being in this environment.

An example. You're in a city where everyone takes public transport. You encounter a string of bad delays. It's reasonable to conclude they'll end—otherwise people wouldn't take public transport. It's unlikely that you happened to show up right when the network collapses.

Of course, that's a bad heuristic in a casino, which relies on a constant influx of losers. But in other environments, particularly with persistent populations and no evidence for sudden changes in the underlying laws, it makes sense.
CRYPTO
Simon DeDeo
Simon DeDeo
@SimonDeDeo
On Bayesianism, the Many Worlds Interpretation, and personal identity.

Some thoughts worked out in a letter to a friend, which is the kind of thing you do when off Twitter for a glorious week. (🧵)

“Chance is ignorance”—the Bayesian story; all probabilities represent states of mind, not states of the world. One *could* put (some) chances “in the world”, but let’s take Occam’s Razor seriously...

That the probability of a fair coin coming up heads is 50% simply means that marginalizing (tracing, as the physicists say) over the hidden facts leaves you, nearly, maximally ignorant of the outcome.

Quantum uncertainty (access below!) poses an apparent challenge to this story. There seems to be nothing to be ignorant about when it comes to (say) electron spin—there is nothing “inside” the

The electron is a simple object, in other words. So where does the uncertainty come from? One could follow David Wallace’s wonderful interpretation in terms of chaotic dynamics and decoherence, but let’s see if we can take another route...
DATA SCIENCE

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I want to explain what happened to tumblr overnight. And why Twitter as reached it's dream (or have come ever so close to it)

Yahoo, who bought Tumblr years ago, used to have a huge adult presence on the early net. They allowed adult groups and what not.

However, people and bots (just like now) misused the service, and Yahoo were forced to make a choice. They made private the groups (and later closed them down and sold some of it to other companies) and then ended their chatrooms on yahoo messenger...

after a incident with one of the chatrooms vid cams. The damage was done, Yahoo Messenger lost a lot of people - and with the closing of the groups - backpage and Craigslist came more important.

Now backpage is no more and Craigslist is slowly passing away. Tumblr had a semi strong community, but once 2014 came around and both porn, and political bots exploded the quality started to go down,
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On press call, Zuckerberg says FB users "naturally engage more with sensational content" that comes close to violating its rules. Compares it to cable TV and tabloids, and says, "This seems to be true regardless of where we set our policy lines."

Zuckerberg says FB is in the process of setting up a "new independent body" that users will be able to appeal content takedowns to. Sort of like the "Facebook Supreme Court" idea he previewed earlier this year.

Zuckerberg: "One of my biggest lessons from this year is that when you connect more than 2 billion people, you’re going to see the good and bad of humanity."

This is how Facebook says it's trying to change the engagement pattern on its services. https://t.co/3p0PGc912o


.@RebeccaJarvis asks Zuckerberg if anyone is going to lose their job over the revelations in the NYT story. He dodges, says that personnel issues aren't a public matter, and that employee performance is evaluated all the time.
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Guillaume Chaslot
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@gchaslot
The YouTube algorithm that I helped build in 2011 still recommends the flat earth theory by the *hundreds of millions*. This investigation by @RawStory shows some of the real-life consequences of this badly designed AI.


This spring at SxSW, @SusanWojcicki promised "Wikipedia snippets" on debated videos. But they didn't put them on flat earth videos, and instead @YouTube is promoting merchandising such as "NASA lies - Never Trust a Snake". 2/


A few example of flat earth videos that were promoted by YouTube #today:
https://t.co/TumQiX2tlj 3/

https://t.co/uAORIJ5BYX 4/

https://t.co/yOGZ0pLfHG 5/
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YouTube’s ad business is officially bigger than Netflix.

YouTube ads at ~$35B run-rate vs Netflix at ~$31B run-rate
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One of the best decisions I made during a very turbulent 2020 was to leave conventional coding behind and embrace the #nocode movement. @bubble made this a reality. Although my own journey thus far is premature, I’ve learned a lot so here’s a power thread on....


‘How I created @buildcamp sales funnel landing page in under 2hours’.

Preview here 👇

https://t.co/s9P5JodSHe

Power thread here 👇

1. Started with a vanilla bubble app ensuring that all styles and UI elements were removed. Created a new page called funnel and set the page size to 960px as this allows the page to render proportionately on both web and mobile when hitting responsive breakpoints.


2. Began dropping elements onto the page to ‘find the style’. These had to be closely aligned to our @buildcamp branding so included text, buttons and groups - nothing too heavy. Played around with a few fonts, colors and gradients and thus pinned down the following style guide.


3. Started to map out sections using groups as my ‘containers’ to hold the relevant information and imagery needed to pad out the sales pitch. At this point, they were merely blocks of color #ff6600 with reduced opacity set to 5% to ease page flair.
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You can’t see the Sun as it is now, but you can see it as it was about 8 minutes ago. You can’t see Alpha Centauri now, but you can see it 4.4 years ago. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy as it was 2.5 million years in the past. And so on.

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Sam is my middle child & he’s a terror. A “boy’s boy” as so many (not me) would say. He’s rough and tumble, he’s loud, he’s always dirty, loves trucks, plays sports and knee drops me from the couch. But he also loves a lot of “girl” things.

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The Church of the East traces its origins to the christological position of the School of Antioch, which held that the human and divine and human essences (ουσία) of Christ were united in a single prosopon (πρόσωπον). ~ahc #jingjiao 2/


This ran against the position of the School of Alexandria, which held that the two essences of Christ were united in a single hypostasis (ὑπόστασις). In general terms, hypostasis is more inherent than prosopon. ~ahc #jingjiao 3/


One implication of the Antiochene rejection of the hypostatic union is that Mary could not accurately be called the Theotokos, or God-bearer. Instead, she is the Christotokos, the Christ-bearer. ~ahc #jingjiao 4/


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Udaybhan rathore was the head of Bhinai thikana (84 villages) in Ajmer. He was the direct descendant of the famous Rao Chandrasen, Raja of Marwar (4th generation) who resisted Akbar all his life and never made any alliance with mughals like Maharana Pratap. (2/n)

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campaign against Bijapur. Jai Singh personally took over a couple of important forts like Kondhana (Sinhgarh), Purandar etc. Others were given to some mughals or their fortification walls destroyed. Jai Singh died in 1667 near Burhanpur while enroute to the north. (5/n)
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Bhu Varaha Swamy Temple

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the temple is dedicated to Varaha (Bhu Varaha Swamy), the boar-avatar of the god Vishnu and his consort Lakshmi as Ambujavalli Thayar.

The temple had contributions from Medieval Cholas of the 10th century with later expansions by Thanjavur Nayak king Achuthappa Nayak.


A granite wall surrounds the temple, enclosing all the shrines and the temple tanks. There is a seven-tieredrajagopuram, the temple’s gateway tower.

Six daily rituals and three yearly festivals are held at the temple, of which the Chariot festival....


celebrated during the Tamil month of Vaikasi (April–May), being the most prominent. The festival also symbolises Hindu-Muslim unity in the region – the flag of the chariot is provided by Muslims; they take offerings from the temple and present to Allah in the mosques.


Source & Pic credit : Anusri
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