> Remember when the Turing test was a thing? No one seems to remember it was considered serious in 2020
To be clear, it's only ever been a pop science belief that the Turing test was proposed as a literal benchmark. E.g. Chomsky in 1995 wrote:
The question “Can machines think?” is not a question of fact but one of language, and Turing himself observed that the question is 'too meaningless to deserve discussion'.
The Turing test is a literal benchmark. Its purpose was to replace an ill-posed question (what does it mean to ask if a machine could "think", when we don't know ourselves what this means- and given that the subjective experience of the machine is unknowable in any case) with a question about the product of this process we call "thinking". That is, if a machine can satisfactorily imitate the output of a human brain, then what it does is at least equivalent to thinking.
"I believe that in about fifty years'
time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9, to
make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have
more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of
questioning. The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too
meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century
the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be
able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."
Turing seems to be saying several things. He writes:
>If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a
statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd.
This anticipates the very modern social media discussion where someone has nothing substantive to say on the topic but delights in showing off their preferred definition of a word.
For example someone shows up in a discussion of LLMs to say:
"Humans and machines both use tokens".
This would be true as long as you choose a sufficiently broad definition of "token" but tells us nothing substantive about either Humans or LLMs.
If you're in Europe, you can consider Dacia. A lot of their stuff is old Renault parts that they've bought a license to use/manufacture. Get a pre-2023 model with the 1.6 non-turbo non-hybrid petrol engine - it's actually a Nissan HR16DE, which has been in use since 2004. Very reliable and low complexity.
Is it using that Nissan/Renault CVT? That transmission is notorious junk.
I must say that I've been impressed with Dacia. Even the build quality is excellent - on par or beating VW. I've driven on Romanian roads so I can see why they would prioritize such high build quality.
You can get them with a manual transmission, or a dual-clutch automatic, or CVT. AFAIK, the manuals are all decent, although the 6 speed manual on the 4WD models has quite low ratios (no transfer case) so it doesn't have great fuel economy at highway speeds.
where (x_hat,y_hat) are your basis vectors in the plane, z_l is the local z coordinate (subtract the terrain modifier used to move tiles up/down) , and z_h is the height of a flower.
Or if you want to be more advanced, generate some curl noise and use it as a prefactor instead of x,y inside the sin(). And include the corresponding up-down motion as the stalks are constant length.
ActiveSync will forever be reserved for the technology I used to sync email and calendar on my HP Jornada 430 running Windows CE - just like James Bond did!
FWIW, RCS group chat on Android being horribly broken is actually a feature if you have kids. I've spoken to many parents of girls in the 7 - 13 age group (and have two myself), and the amount of drama and bullying due to iMessage group chats is several orders of magnitude higher than what kids with Android experience.
I actually think iMessage group chats should have a minimum age limit, from a kids perspective they are no different than Snapchat et al.
Not the protocol, the group chat UX. iMessage gives kids easy access to a place where they can create groups, name them, invite and kick out other kids at will, and send messages + audio/video. It's minimally different from Snap or Discord - except that those actually have parental controls, and there is no easy way to disable iMessage group chats.
The equivalent is simply lacking from Android due to RCS group chat being a broken mess.
- create group: send an MMS message to whoever you want in the "group". Now you have a group chat.
- invite people: send a new MMS message including all past participants and the one additional participant.
- kick them out: Send a new MMS message including all past participants except for the person you want to remove.
- send messages + audio/video: MMS supports all of this.
MMS is the worst standard in telco and that's saying something. The spec is impossibly complex, so it's not properly supported by carriers or device manufacturers, and even basic cases like "send this photo" fail alarmingly regularly.
Yeah, I really tried to cover a part of how it's so bad in my post. It's really something from a different time. There's a lot of the old WAP 1.0 kind of thinking where the carrier ran their own proxy to make the content consumable by the end device due to limitations at the time. If you don't fetch the content off the MMSC in time it expires. I know there's lots of RCS spam complaints, but the carriers ran email to MMS gateways that had abuse for years.
Verizon had the wackiest system with their vtext service where it really tried to customize more than the GSM carriers and they ran their own web portal. When they phased that out a few years ago it broke picture scaling for pretty much all non-iphone devices on their network. This is another big reason I wanted working RCS because if I send a picture to Android users on Verizon it ends up scaled down.
It's the same thing. Just like how a "cash discount" is the same thing as a "credit card surcharge", the end result is the same regardless of how you word it. Simply stop using the first group. You can even be explicit by sending a message to the first group of "I'm forming a new group without Becky because she's a loser" or you can start the new group with a message "I started this new group without Becky because she's a loser" which has the added benefit of humiliating Becky as she keeps sending messages to a group that will not respond to her.
I don't know if you are purposefully being pedantic here, but they are very different things. Even as an adult who has been in several of these very active iMessage group chats with "mutual bullying", they are vastly different from any of the RCS/SMS groups I'm in due to some of the features in iMessage.
What are those features? I've never used iMessage but my ultimate point is that iMessage isn't enabling bullying, it just happens to be the platform these kids are currently using. The same bullying tactics have been possible since long before the iPhone existed.
So far semi-extrinsic provided a list of features they think is uniquely enabling bullying in iMessage but I've just established those features are actually commonly available to everyone, so what other features does iMessage have that uniquely makes it enable bullying compared to MMS?
I don't have an iPhone but surely you see how the UX is very different between:
(a) create new group minus Becky and minus all previous messages, plus every participant has to migrate over
(b) "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything and all the history and context is retained
I've been in plenty of MMS group chats where we've had to create a new group to add or remove someone (for non-bullying reasons) and it has always gone smoothly without issue. SMS/MMS apps tend to sort your list of groups by most recently received message, so as soon as people stop using the first group it will naturally decay to the bottom of your list where no one looks.
> "admin" kicks Becky and no one else has to do anything
"admin" creates a new group chat, no one else has to consciously do anything because they're just selecting the group that has the most recent messages and therefore is at the top of their SMS/MMS app.
There is one difference here in that with SMS/MMS there is no "admin" so anyone can create new groups, but if you're going to start evicting people without buy-in from the group then the dissenters are just going to form their own groups anyway regardless of platform.
> all the history and context is retained
That is a fair point, you wouldn't maintain the history/context but how important is that for bullying? My ultimate point here is that fastball is correct in that the iMessage platform isn't enabling bullying, it is just the kids preferred platform. We have all been perfectly capable of the same bullying since long before the iPhone existed, and I don't think losing history/context when forming new groups changes that.
I have owned a mobile phone since 1996-ish IIRC (Nokia 1610).
I have sent exactly zero MMS messages successfully. They've always failed on some stupid carrier setting being wrong. I've also "received" MMS image messages - that were links to a carrier portal because the image could not be delivered.
It's a shit standard that nobody bothered to implement properly =)
It’s more insidious, and “always on”. The bullied have no respite from the bullies. As someone who was horribly bullied at school I can only imagine the horror kids face now. It’s not the technology per se, it’s the fact that society seems to think it’s not only ok but often expected for kids to have smartphones and all the digital footprint that goes along with them.
I was brought up in a household where we had very limited access to TV. As a teenager I thought this was terrible. As an adult I realise what a huge benefit it was to me. I am sure that the same goes for kids and smartphones and group chats. They are not necessary. No one is missing out.
I feel like I am missing something important here.
The great-grandparent comment was talking about things like not being invited/kicked out of group chats, not being spammed/harassed through the messaging protocol in question.
Unless I am genuinely missing something important, I agree with the grandparent comment. How does not being invited to certain group chats is different from not being invited to "cool kids groups" at school/playgrounds? As in, how is it "always on"? Not being invited to a chat or being kicked out of a group chat isn't "always on".
I have experience where my child with a working android phone was socially excluded by the girls with hand-me-down Apple products because she couldn't "text" with them. Most of them didn't even have working cell service, just iMessage over wifi.
You know this is because apple intentionally makes their SMS shitty right?
I was able to send full fat (640x480 at the time) videos to people over SMS in 2008 using a flip phone. I was able to do group chats and share photos and all sorts of nice things.
I could do all that in android land as well over SMS with other android users, before RCS.
It's only when my iPhone having family members attempt to send me multimedia texts that things don't freaking work. My dad's new wife tried to send me pictures of their wedding and Apple reduced them to a hundred pixels because fuck you.
Partly yes its apples fault. Im too bought into their ecosystem to switch though. Either way my biggest problem with SMS is the 5+ second delay that I always seem to have. Impossible to have a conversation like that.
SMS is shitty because it is unreliable and always has been because the carriers proxy it. It delivers late or not at all at rate beyond what is usable for anything important.
Some of this blame can be placed on carriers but they don’t care.
SMS is terrible because it’s always been terrible, and carriers didn’t care. You can blame Apple for not making iMessage open but it’s just absurd to claim that SMS was ever good to an audience of people who’ve used it. RCS isn’t perfect but it fixed so many problems which SMS had back before the iPhone even launched.
Kids in most european countries use whatsapp even though they are under the minimum age.
Ban an app, another appear. Ban all apps and they would join any of the services that provide a web frontend. Kids in the late 90's/early 2000 were using IRC when ICQ and MSN messenger didn't support group chat, usually from a web client before they were introduced to mirc and other irc clients.
Yes. That's also part of the technical experience that also changes the resulting social landscape. I used to think "what's the point of banning something if people can get it anyway" but after seeing how cannabis became hyper-commercialized in the USA, I see that both the ban and evasion are just part of the game. (Which nobody should get prison for)
There are, but if kids are using iMessage for it and not using other things even though they could, not having iMessage can serve to insulate a kid from it.
Parental controls may prevent some of the kids from installing third-party messaging apps, or maybe they're just unwilling to. There are a weird number of adults in my social circle who I can't convince to do so, though I'd imagine kids to be a little more flexible.
"Missing out because my parents are lame" is a minor social stigma that kids will (should!) experience in many situations anyways. The benefits significantly outweigh the drawbacks.
Friendships are importance for psychological health and development.
When you're excluded from the primary means of communications with potential friends, and can never find out where and when they are meeting to get together, it's not "minor".
Guess what, it's also common to buy kids clothing that lets them fit in, a haircut that lets them fit in, and let them watch the movies and TV shows other kids are watching so they can fit in. Kids want to fit in, in order to make friends, and it's healthy to make that easier than put arbitrary obstacles in their way.
And who's talking about bullies? When most of your kids' potential friends communicate using iMessage, it seems pretty presumptuous of you to say that they're all "not the best potential friends anyways." Actually, they might turn out to be great friends, because people are complex, and their messaging preference isn't determinative of their entire personality, or much of it at all.
Wanting to fit in is normal but unfortunately not everyone can afford to. There are a good amount of people out there who shame others for using Android ("green bubbles") because they treat their iPhone as a status symbol. If anything the arbitrary obstacles are put up by Apple and the people who choose to exclusively use iMessage because every other messaging service works on any device.
Used iPhones are cheap. Kids don't need to be treating their phone as a status symbol. iMessage just genuinely works better. Blame Apple all you want, but don't make your kid suffer socially for it.
> Used iPhones are cheap
Not everyone wants to buy used.
> Kids don't need to be treating their phone as a status symbol.
Nobody needs to treat anything as a status symbol but they do. You see it all the time with different brand names, including Apple. It could even happen with different/older models.
> Blame Apple all you want, but don't make your kid suffer socially for it.
Buying your kid an Android phone should not make them suffer socially. It's just as capable of running quality messaging apps minus the arbitrary exclusivity of iMessage. I wouldn't want my kid using iMessage even if they had an iPhone just because it will exclude other kids for no good reason.
Buying your kid an Android phone shouldn't make them suffer socially, in a just world.
But in the real world, if it does, then buy them the damn phone. Used, if that's the only way to afford it and that's what they want.
Don't make your kid suffer because of your stance on a corporation. That's just being mean to your kid. Go ahead and use Android yourself if you want, but don't do that to your kid if they're having trouble making friends and Android is a reason. That's just cruel.
This kind of thinking is wild to me. Apple is only enabling this behavior. It's the kids themselves who are excluding others by only using iMessage and shaming other kids for their green bubbles.
Nobody wants their kids to be bullied so I understand. But even worse than that I wouldn't want my own kid to be a bully. Kids are going to be a lot more likely to bully others if they befriend others who are bullying.
I think you're exaggerating or misunderstanding this.
It's not bullying or shaming by most kids. It's just, including SMS in an iMessage group chat is a terrible user experience. It's genuinely super annoying and breaks all the time. To the kids, the Android kid basically just has a broken phone. The kid won't get added to group chats because it doesn't really work.
If you give your kid an iPhone it's not going to turn him into a bully. That's absurd. It's just going to let him be included in the group chats where friendships grow and plans get made.
Don't make a poor kid suffer when there's no reason for it. Their suffering is not going to make Apple disable iMessage.
Look up green bubble bullying - it's a real thing.
> The kid won't get added to group chats because it doesn't really work.
Yes, but exclusion is a form of bullying. Apple is enabling it by making iMessage only work on Apple devices. There are many other messaging apps that are far better than SMS and are inclusive. It's better to encourage everyone to use one of those.
> Don't make a poor kid suffer when there's no reason for it.
It's quite literally the poor kids who suffer from things like this. It's not just fancy phones that they miss out on. Could be clothing brands, games, toys, etc. being used by kids to exclude others. Buying into everything is not a solution.
I didn't say bullying doesn't exist -- I'm saying it's not the case with most kids.
> It's better to encourage everyone to use one of those.
But if you can't succeed at this (and you won't), then don't make your poor kid suffer. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
> Buying into everything is not a solution.
No, but buying a few important things goes a long way. A cool pair of shoes isn't functional, but sharing the same communications platform is. And you can buy a lower-end used iPhone on eBay for next to nothing.
I have a parent who thought they were fighting a lot of these battles and on the "right side", and I was miserable because of it. Don't do this to your kid. Making friends is hard enough without a parent putting even more obstacles in the way.
This seems to be a disingenuous comparison. With RCS it’s supposed to work but it’s broken, which is your “parental control.”
But I don’t think either platform lets you control messaging group chat functionality this way. They just offer approved contacts and complete disable as your options to control messaging.
I also think your “amount of drama” might be badly measured simply because the majority of kids in the US use iOS.
The only solution is to fit a 300W LED bar and consistently flash those guys until they are bothered enough to go into the menu of their computer-on-wheels and turn off this "feature".
...or piss those guys enough that they will call police on you for blinding them and creating a road hazard, or someone unhinged enough gets pissed off and will follow you, after which your behind will dearly regret buying such a long LED bar.
This is the same kind of useful advice as the one to brake check those whose driving style you don't like very much, fight (real or perceived) road hazard with deliberately creating more hazard.
As long as the small PCB is $40 it's fine. I had a central vacuum fail like that a couple of years ago, and the small PCB would have cost $350.
The PCB had already been replaced twice during the warranty period. Googled the major components and they were $3 - $5 a piece, just a couple of half bridge rectifiers, resistors and diodes.
Didn't want to risk a fire from a DIY job, which would have definitely voided my insurance, so I spent $400 on a new central vacuum unit (from a different brand).
Not a lawyer but I don't think home repairs void most home insurances in common law countries unless you are working with parts that are particularly dangerous, part of a safety system to protect others, and/or absolutely require a skilled professional.
I'm pretty sure that if a fire starts in my central vacuum unit, and my insurance company does an investigation that finds a DIY swap of power electronics components in that unit, I would at the very least be in a lengthy legal battle to get any money back.
In Norway people are extremely weather-focused, and the national weather service delivers quite advanced graphics for people to understand what is going on.
The live weather radar which shows where it is raining right now and prediction/history for rain +/- 90 minutes. This is accurate enough that you can use it to time your walk from the office to the subway and avoid getting wet:
https://www.yr.no/en/map/radar/1-72837/Norway/Oslo/Oslo/Oslo
Then you have more specialised forecasts of course. Dew point, feels like temperature, UV, pollution, avalanche risks, statistics, sea conditions, tides, ... People tend to geek out quite heavily on these.
In my experience, these forecasts are really good 5-7 days out, and then degrade in reliability (as you would expect from predictions of chaotic systems). The apps that show you a rain cloud and a percentage number are always terrible in my experience for some reason, even if the origin of the data is the same. I'm not sure why that might be.
To be clear, it's only ever been a pop science belief that the Turing test was proposed as a literal benchmark. E.g. Chomsky in 1995 wrote:
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