Rabble rabble.

Also available in bah and foofaraw

737 notes &

The Reduction

seinfelt:

George’s coworker begins sending memos wherein every number is accompanied by some parenthetical factoid or statistic. He finds it unusual but informative, and feels as though the references give him a better understanding of the figures involved. Soon, other memos from other coworkers appear with similar definitions, not just for numbers but for words. Eventually, every memo reads like a postmodernist list of encyclopedic associations, and he can’t even discern what the original intents of any of the messages actually are.

Kramer is baffled to find that eggs no longer come in dozens [from the old form of the French word douzaine, meaning “a group of twelve”], but in elevens instead, in strange, trapezoidal [from Greek τραπέζιον (trapézion), literally “a little table”] cartons with staggered rows. He asks one of the store’s employees about it, but they claim that eggs have only ever come in elevens [the 5th smallest prime number]. As he progresses through the store, he finds that other items seem to come in groups of one fewer than expected: five-packs of beer, seven-packs of hot dog buns, nine-packs of hot dogs, three-packs of toilet paper rolls. Alarmed, he drops his eggs and runs out of the store, only to find that it seems later in the day than expected. He checks his watch, but there are only eleven hours on the dial. “But that doesn’t make sense,” he mutters. “That's two less hours in the day!” His realization seems to set off a chain reaction, as groupings of like items begin decreasing before his very eyes. Windows disappear from buildings. Parking meters become rapidly less expensive. Branches disappear from trees. He looks down at his hands to find two fingers and a thumb [from Proto-Indo-European tum, meaning “swelling”, a primary characteristic among primates] on each one. Horrified, he runs as fast as he can to Jerry’s.

A handful of people follow Jerry home from a show. He tries to shake them, ducking into alleyways and shopping centers, but instead of losing them, others seem to join in the pursuit. Eventually he finds himself followed by three thousand people [≈ population of Falkland Islands, nation].

Kramer arrives, stumbling, and grabs Jerry by the collar as best as he can with the sole fingers remaining on each of his hands. "Thank God I found you, Jerry!“ he wails, struggling to speak clearly with only one tooth left in his mouth.

“Thank God I found you,” says Jerry. He turns to gesture at the crowd of people trailing behind him, but there is now only one man left from the original group, standing on the only street left in Manhattan [originally settled in the year 1, it is the only borough of New York City, with a population of 2]. Jerry and Kramer enter the only building, through its only door, and go into the only apartment inside, where they share the only bed. “Goodnight,” sputters Kramer to himself as he shuts off the only light left in the world with his lone remaining arm [the only limb on the human body].

Jesus.

610 notes &

Slashdot headlines written by neural network

lewisandquark:

The news site Slashdot (“news for nerds, stuff that matters”) is celebrating its 20 year anniversary this October. What could be geekier than celebrating with the help of an open-source neural network?

Neural networks are a type of machine learning program that learn by example, rather than by a human programmer feeding them rules. Whatever the headlines contain, whatever common words and rhythms, a neural network will do its best to imitate. I’ve trained an open-source neural network called char-rnn to imitate all kinds of human things, like paint colors, guinea pig names, and craft beer names.

Slashdot sent me a list of all the headlines they’ve ever run, over 162,000 in all, and asked me to train a neural network to try to generate more.

I used a neural network called char-rnn, an open-source neural network by Andrej Karpathy, and trained it separately on the first and second decades of Slashdot headlines. Let’s see what it learned!

Decade 1: 1998 – 2007

Alternuting Your Computer
The Internet Spectrum Violated
Microsoft To Develop Programming Law
Star Trek Creates Free Memory
Launching the Linux Group Socially
Microsoft Releases New Months
More Pong Users for Kernel Project
Nintendo Goes Canadian Edition to Customers
New State of Second Life
Sexual Security To Allow Australia
Programming Supercomputer Library In Star Wars
What are The Final Fantasy
Review of the Wireless Monster?
Portable Mail With Spidey Law
New 5400 GPL Formed into An Internet
Dvorak on Mario Games?
Half-Life 2X Speed Released
Ban Manhunt 2 Better than Linux?
Vista Releases Denial of the Mumble
New Company Revises Super-Things For Problems
The Dead of Managing Moneys?
Judge Releases Sony Practices in Death
Doom’s On Worldwire Networks
Sun Releases Enterprise in Smackware
I Wants To Control of the Net
Nintendo Can Start in the Wild Button?
Secondors Talk Open Source For Super-Bork?
AOL On Beam Doubt

Some familiar personalities of the tech industry make an appearance:

Microsoft Releases Bill Gates Service Start
Steve Jobs To Be Good
Shatner Awards Up Towards A Game Car Challenge

Cell phones appear to be have been weird in the early days:

Stem Cell Phone Standards in Space
Why Are Blow Systems Taking Your Phone?
New Unreal Tournament Phone Reviews Doubts
Forget To Support Flat Spam Phone

And you find companies doing rather unexpected things: 

Microsoft Announces Mac OS X Released
Intel Releasing Linux In A Networks
Sun Upgrades Apple Devices
Corel Launches $100 Laptop
Microsoft Announces Firefox Portal
Mozilla’s Audio Caroffice
Apple Finally Launches Microsoft

I produced the above headlines by allowing the neural network a high creativity setting, so it could range over many different headline topics that it’s seen over and over. But it’s also fun to turn the creativity down near zero, so the neural network can try to generate the most quintessential headlines:

All The Company Programming Software Software?
Some Computer Computer Solution of the New Company Computer
More Anti-Spam For Software Computer
Mac OS X Interview with Linux Computer
Mac OS X Accused of the Business
Sony Plans To Start Patent System For All Time
Security Hole For Security Hole
Security Hole in the Star Trek
Computer Computer Computer Computer Software?

Decade 2: 2007 – 2017

The neural network had a tougher time with decade 2 – it seems the headlines became longer and more complex, as Slashdot experimented with new formats and new topics.  The neural network struggled to create grammatical headlines as a result. But it still did its best to reflect the new topics of the last decade. Compared to the late 1990s and early 2000s, some companies and topics disappeared, while the coverage of Apple in particular exploded. Star Trek and Star Wars, however, remain perennial Slashdot favorites.
Here are some neural network-generated headlines for 2007-2017:

Twitter Discovered In the Pirate Bay
Google Bacon Medal To Contract Computational Lab
Scientists Discover Free Wi-Fi Store In the US
Steve Jobs Sues Death of the Future
Apple Seeks To Be Become Windows 10 Has Been Control the Desktops
Stanford Computer Scientists Develop Super Man Sales For Computer Science
Star Wars Hacked In Life On the iPhone
Computer Finds Court Broke Math For Secret Company
How Do You Design To Stay Them Bomb
Ask Slashdot: How Clinton Uses Display For Android Chips On Netflix Court From the Jobs
People ‘Fork" At a Flaw Refused
The Pirate Bay Tracking Storage Security For Windows 10
German Porn Update To Compete At CNSR Healthy Court Says
Supreme Court Can Be Lingeries
Apple Says the Moon Project To Pay $1.7 Billion For Free Software
Steve Jobs Allowed To Deal With Solar Power
Apple Sues Apple To Get Flash Mathematics
Microsoft Slashdot: How To Build a Bad Privacy For Windows 10
Twitter That We Use Facebook To Receive The Life
Linux Kernel 3.1.0 Launches In Late, Facebook To Sue Star Trek
The One-Department For Alleged For Connectivity: 3-D Printed Baby
Black Hole Proposed

My favorite part, though? The Slashdot headlines that appeared to come from an alternate, much more advanced, somewhat terrifying timeline:

Google Returns To the Space Station
Mac OS X Project Announces Space Station
Sony Announces Mars Rover Release
Google Patents Intelligent Space Telescope
Officials Release Android Apps For New Space Telescope
Star Trek Control of the Wild Start Up
Scientists Army Interviewed
Company Computer Releases Cloning Crime
Building A Nano-Tech Back
Full Life On The Linux
Chernobyl Announces Company And Educators
SGI Launches Space Station
FreeBSD Base Scientific Hits the Moon
Red Hat Releases Linux Games And Moon
Apple’s Moon Review
About New Moons of a Company
Looking For Mars Landers to Linux
Mars Rover Set for Alien China
Congress To Buy Mars Mister
Building a Top 100 Company For Mars
Apple Considering Debut in People Processors
Apple vs. Biology Details
An Android Bans Secret Project For Console Devices
Your Own Portals
U.S. Considering Death of the Solar System
Black Holes from Digital Dell
Black Hole Sension of the Linux
Microsoft’s Lab Changes “Space”
IBM Moves to The Matrix
Super Planet Wars Solved

The quintessential headline, though? When I trained the neural network with all 20 years of Slashdot headlines, then turned down the creativity level to near zero, I reveal the following essential Slashdot headlines, distilled from 20 years of technology news:

Sun Sues Open Source Project Content
Sun Sues Anti-Spam Computers
Sun Sues Security Flaw Contest
Sun Sues New Star Trek To Stop The Math
Sun Sues Anti-Spam Standards And The Star Wars To Stop Computers
Star Wars Companies Are Streaming the Star Wars
Star Wars To Support Linux Development
Apple Settles The Future of Star Wars
Apple Releases Secure State of the World
Apple Sues Apple To Start The Solar Power Project
Sony Sues Apple Server For Seconds Off From SpaceX Project
Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?
The Desist of the Planet

Want 4 more pages of Slashdot headlines from the neural network? Sign up here and I’ll email you a pdf.

Also: POLL! I’m collecting names of Halloween costumes for training a future neural network. Enter as many as you like (no email address required).

(via lewisandquark)

914 notes &

liartownusa:
“Brand New Thoughts Series: What if we’re all living in a giant simulation within some enormous computer or something? how would we even know??
”
Oh this is such a bullseye.

liartownusa:

Brand New Thoughts Series: What if we’re all living in a giant simulation within some enormous computer or something? how would we even know??

Oh this is such a bullseye.

0 notes &

Dear Electronic Eye Stuck To My Head: Don’t Spy On Me, K?

See on Scoop.it - Security Sausage Spectacular
image

His team’s video recognition software can spot passcodes even when the screen is unreadable, based on its understanding of an iPad’s geometry and the position of the user’s fingers. It maps its image of the angled iPad onto a “reference” image of the device, then looks for the abrupt down and up movements of the dark crescents that represent the fingers’ shadows.


Aaron Gilliland’s insight:

Not really a shocker: a video camera strapped to your head can watch you (and anyone nearby) entering passwords. The camera doesn’t even need to record the actual characters on the screen; the characters and sequence can be inferred from bumps, slides, speed of movement, etc. Google Glass isn’t unique in making this attack possible, but it does have an excellent vantage point. 

Two-factor authentication provides some protection against this, especially for the people who aren’t wearing the Glass.


See on schneier.com

0 notes &

Google’s Oculus-defying VR headset is made of CARDBOARD – no joke

See on Scoop.it - UX Wins, Fails, and WTFs
image

DIY virtual reality for the masses (if you don’t mind headaches)

Aaron Gilliland’s insight:

Oh snap! From paper prototypes to paper products. This is actually less of a product than a tool for developers; a cheap prototyping tool for Virtual Reality or otherwise immersive environment projects. The folding cardboard frame holds a pair of lenses while some velcro holds a smartphone up to the lenses. There’s even a button that can interface with the phone. 

Oculus Rift it ain’t, but this would be like Christmas morning to the starving developer.


See on theregister.co.uk

0 notes &

Business Insider "ZOMG OH NOSE! FRIDGE HACK ATTACK"

If by “attack businesses” you mean “send some spam email”. Business Insider, substance-free spawn of Blodget, regurgitates a press release about this amazing “attack”. 100K devices compromised - 750K spam emails sent (most of which wouldn’t make it past spam filters, anyway). 

All in all, a piss-poor performance.

Spam email seems like a curious way to use your botnet, even one made of (some) low-power embedded devices. Regular PCs and servers have more lucrative uses in a botnet; they’re more likely to contain valuable information (bank account info, for example) that can be sold, used directly, or ransomed, and they can also mine cryptocurrencies. Embedded devices - the fridge, say - don’t have the resources for mining and wouldn’t be storing interesting stuff. Their value is really in their Internet connectivity, their inconspicuous nature, and the persistence of their vulnerabilities.

At the very least, you’d expect them to be used for clickfraud, DDoS, proxying, and as a platform for auditing and attacking their local network.

Email spam is just… well… stupid.