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silashundt
2163 days ago
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fxer
888 days ago
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Hulk’s guitar isn’t plugged in but fuckit, we’re not here to listen to him play rythym
Bend, Oregon
sarcozona
997 days ago
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“We hypothesize that migraine should be considered a neural disorder of brain function, in which alterations in aminergic networks integrating the limbic system with the sensory and homeostatic systems occur early and persist after headache resolution and perhaps interictally. The associations with some of these other disorders may allude to the inherent sensory sensitivity of the migraine brain and shared neurobiology and neurotransmitter systems rather than true co-morbidity.”
Epiphyte City
annecakes
1288 days ago
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Modern Love Season 2: An Interview with Andrew Rannells

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/style/modern-love-episode-7-andrew-rannells.html
Alexjw
1387 days ago
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Watch
Wigan
MenageAquad
1599 days ago
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Google Adds RSS to Chrome for Mobile https://www.phonescoop.com/articles/article.php?a=22642

Long live Google Reader??
sfkendrick
1835 days ago
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this. If a in hi p
PCrapidy
2067 days ago
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Robert Mueller's Corrupt History
https://youtu.be/1kOsl0bEjew
Kekistan, USA
Ferret
2125 days ago
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2rIgsPlJd0
acdha
2194 days ago
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Classy
Washington, DC
jose5465
2203 days ago
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Descarga aquí la app de MARCA.com.
@elmundoes
https://itunes.apple.com/es/app/el-mundo-diario-online/id324300162?mt=8

★ First Impressions of the New iMac Pro

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Apple held a small briefing yesterday in New York City to officially unveil the new iMac Pros, which went on sale today.

It is decidedly more expensive than its non-pro iMac siblings — the iMac Pro starts at $4999, but most configurations will cost significantly more. But make no mistake — if you buy one of these, you’re getting true professional performance for your money. You’re not just getting (admittedly gorgeous) space gray anodized aluminum.

The entire lineup of iMac Pros is based on Intel’s new Xeon W CPUs, and they are exclusively SSD-based. There are no configurations with spinning hard drives or Fusion drives — according to Apple, the system architecture is designed only to work with SSDs for internal storage. These components are all high-end: the RAM is 2666 MHz DDR 4 ECC; the SSD storage has write speeds of 3.3 GB/sec and read speeds of 2.8 GB/sec. They have more Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports than the regular iMacs (including support for attaching up to two 5K external displays), 10-gigabit Ethernet (regular iMacs have plain old gigabit Ethernet), and the iMac Pro even has better-sounding speakers.

Here’s how quickly the price can escalate though: the base model $4999 iMac Pro has an 8-core CPU, 32 GB of RAM, a 1 TB SSD, a Radeon Pro Vega 56 graphics card, and the exclusive space gray Magic Mouse. If you upgrade to 64 GB of RAM, 2 TB SSD, the Vega 64 graphics card, and the space gray Magic Trackpad (instead of, not in addition to, the Magic Mouse), the price goes to $7,249. A 10-core iMac Pro with maxed out RAM (128 GB) and SSD storage (4 TB) and the Vega 64 graphics card is $11,599.

Apple is not fucking around with these machines, and neither are the people who will be buying them.

Apple invited a nice array of third-party developers to demo their software on the iMac Pro. My notes:

  • Adobe Dimension CC: Dimension is a relatively new app from Adobe. It lets designers create photo-realistic 3D renderings from 2D designs — for example, consumer packaging labels. Dimension’s rendering performance scales linearly with the number of CPU cores, which means it renders 2-5 times faster on iMac Pro compared to a regular iMac or MacBook Pro.

  • Gravity Sketch: VR-based 3D sketching. Very cool. I got to try it out, and in a nut, it’s almost more like sculpting than drawing. The iMac Pro is the only Mac capable of supporting Gravity Sketch.

  • Twinmotion: A real-time 3D visualization app. Architects can use Twinmotion to create 3D models from CAD drawings, and turn them into something akin to a 3D video game where you can, effectively, walk around and see what it would look like to be there. It includes features like setting the time of day, and even simulating various weather conditions and seasons of the year, all of which affect the lighting. And it’s all rendered in real time.

  • Electronauts: A VR music production app from a company called Survios, heretofore known for creating VR games. Electronauts was only officially announced today. It’s primarily a DJ app — creating, recording, and performing live electronic music, but it’s mixed with a game-like atmosphere akin to something like Guitar Hero. The interface is entirely VR-based — there is no non-VR UI, and the iMac Pro (a) runs Electronauts wonderfully — perfectly smooth at a high frame rate, and (b) is the only Mac capable of running it at all.

  • Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro X: Logic now allows massively multi-tracked projects to play in real-time. On any other Mac, sufficently complex projects would require either pre-rendering or real-time playback with compressed fidelity. Today’s new release of Final Cut Pro X adds editing features for VR experiences. Again, only on iMac Pro.

The bottom line is that for some tasks, the iMac Pros now handle full-fidelity playback in real-time that on any other Mac — MacBook Pro or Mac Pro — would require rendering or lower-fidelity playback. For other tasks, notably VR, the iMac Pro supports software that simply cannot run on any other Mac today.1

Apple has been effectively out of the professional desktop hardware game for a few years. The “trash can” Mac Pro design of 2013 languished, unchanged technically, in Apple’s product line for reasons unexplained until last April, when Apple took the unprecedented step of holding a small media summit to announce (a) that they were working on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro, and (b) had a pro-targeted iMac in the works that would ship by the end of 2017.

The new iMac Pros that started shipping today deliver on half of that promise. These are serious, undeniably professional machines. The Mac has gone from being a non-player in the burgeoning world of VR to a credible contender in one fell swoop. Two questions remain in my mind:

First, when is the “completely rethought” Mac Pro going to ship, and what is it going to offer above and beyond the iMac Pro besides separating the computer hardware from the display? Apple had nothing to say regarding the new Mac Pro other than that it is still forthcoming. If I needed the performance of modern professional desktop hardware, I would order an iMac Pro today. I wouldn’t wait.

Second, and to me far more importantly: how committed is Apple to keeping the iMac Pro up to date? It’s an impressive piece of engineering — do not let the appearance fool you into thinking that the iMac Pro is just an iMac with a dark finish and speed-bumped processors. Internally, it’s a completely different architecture. But the 2013 Mac Pro was an impressive piece of engineering and design that Apple put a lot of effort into, too.

My hope is that the iMac Pro has been designed with the future in mind. VR is moving fast. Even on today’s leading hardware, the best VR experience is still insufficient — resolution is low (individual pixels are visible, clearly) and latency is still a huge problem. The end game for VR is an experience equivalent to our real-world vision. Every year’s worth of CPU and GPU improvements will be needed to get from here to there, so the iMac Pro will need to be updated on a roughly annual basis to remain relevant.


Some excellent reports from other writers who attended yesterday’s briefing:


  1. All of the VR demos at Apple’s briefing yesterday used the HTC Vive VR headset and controllers. None of them used the Oculus Rift. ↩︎

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silashundt
2503 days ago
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@mcormier http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550616681055
mcormier
2502 days ago
@silashundt Interesting read. Usually when Gruber swears it is out of anger (i.e. Fuck this guy) and in those cases he comes off as angry and honest. I never considered the connection between swearing and honesty but this case is different then when he usually swears. Here we have 3 well written paragraphs and then a profane sentence. It comes off as unprofessional.
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mcormier
2521 days ago
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“Apple is not fucking around with these machines” - I find it hard to take Gruber seriously when he swears.
gdvillarreal
2521 days ago
He is not fucking around when he swears...

Merriam-Webster on ‘Padawan’ Entering the Lexicon

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Merriam-Webster:

Just as we see Jedi being used in a generic way today, padawan is beginning to be found in contexts far removed from galaxies far, far away. (Indeed, Padawan is the name of a municipality in Malaysia, though it’s not known how Lucas chose the name.) It usually refers to a younger follower or student of some kind, and usually in fields that require special ability or skill. In sports, for example, we find examples from both professional baseball and football.

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silashundt
2503 days ago
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mcormier
2505 days ago
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Star Wars is a plague and people over 30 should stop promoting it for free. Can’t adults separate their childhood memories and fanaticism with reality any longer?
the7roy
2505 days ago
No
silashundt
2504 days ago
What should the adults who are paid to promote it do?
mcormier
2504 days ago
Gruber isn’t being paid to mention Star Wars in his blog here. Getting paid to promote something is a different story entirely. Star Wars fandom has gotten so bad that people are marking Jedi as their religion on a census now. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_census_phenomenon
codepope
2504 days ago
No. Because this wasn’t promoting it and it’s not a plague, it’s a series of movies. Can’t adults separate works of fiction from the range of people who appreciate it any longer?
mcormier
2503 days ago
@codepope. Let me make explicit what I thought was easily implicit. Gruber posting this is not the issue or plague symptom. That so many people use the word padawan that it has been included in the dictionary is. Star Wars is fine family entertainment and better than most movies from the space cowboy genre that it was birthed from in the late 70’s. But the original Star Wars trilogy was the most merchandised franchise in history at the time. Those bed sheets and shampoo bottles from the 80’s created a sustained love and obsession for the original trilogy greater than how good the movies actually are. They are movies for adolescents and forgetting this created the large disappointment of the second trilogy for adults because it was geared towards adolescents. Now forty years later we have a third trilogy that preys on the disappointment of the second trilogy, appears to entertain well both adults and children and will definitely sell lots of bed sheets and shampoo bottles. The movies are entertaining, the score is great and the effects are impressive. But don’t get sucked into the black hole of what has become intergenerational mega marketing. That’s my short argument that Star Wars is a plague.
silashundt
2503 days ago
@mcormier – I was making a joke.
mcormier
2502 days ago
@silashundt - Oops my bad.

Scripting News: The Engelbart Award?

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A picture named engelbart.gifDoug Engelbart will be remembered for a lifetime of achievement in the technology arts. He will not be remembered for the fortune he amassed (pretty sure didn't make one). His list of his creations is long, but that misses the whole of it. He needed pointing devices and windows and outlining to achieve his vision of augmenting human intellect. That is the potential that got me excited about creating in this medium. Engelbart serves as a powerful role model of what one person can accomplish.

There aren't many prizes or awards in tech, certainly not compared to other arts, such as film, theater, dining, architecture, painting. To the extent there are awards, they honor the huge enterprises. The ones that make the most money for investors. It's as if the only reviews that were written were for Applebee's or McDonald's.

Doug Engelbart will be remembered for a lifetime of achievement in the art of technology. He will not be remembered for the fortune he amassed (pretty sure didn't make one). The list of his creations is long, but that misses the whole of it. He needed pointing devices and windowing user interface and outlining to achieve his vision of augmenting human intellect. That is the potential that got me excited about creating in this medium, and Engelbart served as a powerful role model of what one person can accomplish.

I suggested the idea of an award in Engelbart's name in a tweet, and it got forwarded more than most. There were some objections. One was that there aren't enough new ideas that are generously shared to make an annual award possible. To that I have two responses:

  • 1. No one said the ideas have to be huge. Sometimes small ideas turn out to be important. Personally, I'm not interested in huge single steps, rather new ideas that take us in a good direction deserve recognition.
  • 2. If there were incentives to create beyond wealth and some incentive to create other than the personal satisfaction, maybe more people would create new original ideas that advance technology for its own sake. do it.

Anyway, I just wanted to put the idea out there. Doug Engelbart was a model for one kind of technologist that we should hope to see more of, for the tradition to continue. Perhaps there's some way for that to coalesce into something tangible and long-lived.

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silashundt
4143 days ago
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Announcing the 2012-2013 Driftless Folk School Internship

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Application Deadline: August 20, 2012

The Driftless Folk School is seeking an enthusiastic, versatile intern to help us grow and develop during 2012 and 2013. The core responsibilities would include assuming the duties of the Folk School Registrar and working on the creation of the next two DFS catalogues of classes. In addition, the prospective intern would work with the Board of Trustees to develop and deepen the offerings and infrastructure of the organization. While working in collaboration with and under the supervision of the DFS Board, the prospective intern would have considerable scope for personal initiative and self-management in this position. This would be a paid internship of $300 per month and free access to all DFS classes, with the possibility of an increase at mid-year. Housing with a local DFS affiliated family in exchange for farm help may also be a possibility.

Application deadline: August 20, 2012

Position Starts: As early as possible in September 2012

Duration: 1 year.

To Apply: Download full position description and application instructions here.

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silashundt
4480 days ago
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This is a test.
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