Why do you suppose that children with edited genetics would be a result of parents wanting the best for them?
I think it vastly more likely that (lets call them East German) government agents would be impersonally having children edited, so that their country would win more medals at the olympics. These supposed government agents wouldn't care that these adults would burn out and die of terrible diseases in their mid-lives. They wouldn't care that there might only be a 5% success rate, and that the other 95% had terrible lives.
Thats why the option to NOT edit the human race is on the menu, but I am confident that that option won't be taken, except officially by the nations which are bothered by ethics. We as a race will tinker.
I think one of the more realistic fears of this technology is that there won't really be a choice. The option "remain unmodified and live an OK life" simply won't exist.
If that is the case, that it's so successful you pretty much have to do it, that sounds like an absolute success. Sounds like the process pretty much works and is good.
I believe this website is using what the paper calls the geometric fit, which is considered one of the better methods, but the paper develops an even better method.
(I had to use this, strangely, in a physics lab course. I was measuring the Zeeman effect by looking at the diameter of rings of light projected by an interferometer; I took webcam images of the ring and used the algorithm to fit circles to the ring and hence measure its diameter.)
Using a Hough transform to find a circle with an unknown radius is expensive. You have a 3D parameter space, and each point has to "vote" for a 2D subsurface of that space. Discretizing the entire volume at a high resolution is going to require a lot of memory.
I agree it is going to expensive but it's not because of memory. You could probably just try every (x,y) center and have all points vote for the radius, and just keep max before moving on to next point.
A sensible, easy thing to do here seems to be to just find the centroid of the cluster points. Then convert all the points into polar coordinates around that centre, and average the R's. The R's could be weighted rather than taken at face value.
I moved from macbooks to thinkpads for many reasons (including freedom - I want a machine that runs coreboot) but the keyboard was just a big unexpected surprise.
Now, I am a big fan of the pre-X220 "classic" 7 rows keyboards, found on every model before. It's simple, comfortable and standard. I remember how a Thinkpad 600 felt "good" about 15 years ago, and now I just get the same good feeling back. Maybe it's nostalgia, but it feels quite good.
For my desktop computer, I have a SK8845 (same thinkpad keyboard in usb form factor), with a trackpoint + a trackpad + 5 mouse buttons all in one device. Very handy, and no window keys to bother me. You can fetch a new one off ebay for like $30. The SK8855 are expansive - a new one will set you back by $200.
My only question: can you physically have a 512Gb ssd inside that thing? Anything else is irrelevant to me. The previous Chromebook pixel had the mini PCIe port used by the WWAN modem wired with only the USB lines, meaning you couldn't do that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0_u8bjQFzg
I won't buy a chromebook pixel until I can at least get a decent storage. It doesn't have to be sold with this storage. The motherboard just needs the right tracks to the mini PCIe and mSATA support so that I can do it. Google might have saved 2 cents, but won't be getting a dollar from me and other people from this thread who say "this laptop would be absolutely perfect for me if it had more storage"
> * It's likely that it's still soldered to the motherboard which makes replacing or upgrading it impossible. Given that the Pixel can only be disassembled using suction cups and a great deal of force I'm not able to actually look inside to check. *
So it seems this "review" didn't even attempt to open up the laptop to check out the motherboard. Disappointing.
That's how reviews usually work. They evaluate a product to see if it does what it's supposed to do. They don't tear it apart and attempt to to repurpose it for some other use entirely.
I have the same opinion that you do - 64Gigs is just too minimal.
But if I can use that 64-gigs for OS/Apps, and mount my home directory on an SD card, I'm happy with that solution .. assuming that the SD card slot can hold a very fast SD (128Gigs or so) without physically protruding out of the case. Its not clear to me that this is so .. anyone know?
I actually think that the ability to host a larger SD partition is a good feature - it makes for backups and opsec in ways that my current rMBP, with its soldered-in Flash drive, cannot deliver. So that aspect is kind of intriguing to me ..
I'm not the guy you replied to, but come on. Install some big software like MATLAB or MS Office, oh no there goes several GB for each one. Set up a few VMs, oops there goes tens more GBs. Install some modern video games, multiple GB each one. And that's without even getting to the obvious culprits of pictures, music, and video.
64 GB would only work for a computer used almost exclusively for doing things on remote systems (browsing internet, working on remote servers, storing things on external HDs, etc).
VM's, mostly. Compilers, secondary. Blender, Inkscape. And then there's the big builds I do: the Linux kernel, rootfs, MOAI .. this all adds up and is quite space-filling.
If all I was doing is produce Word .docs and a few spreadsheets, I'm sure it'd be fine. But if you're a modern developer in the F/OSS world, 128gigs is barely enough to get rolling ..
Having inspiration, whether from any ideal or from God, is what makes one burn the midnight oil, and design something out of the ordinary.
It increases not just efficiency but something else harder to define, something that could be said to be beauty. It makes the result stand out as a something special, where all the parts have a purpose and are arranged in just the right way. Read http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/djb to get a better idea of this something:
djb’s programs are some of the greatest works of beauty to be comprehended by the human mind. As with great art, the outline of the code is somehow visually pleasing — there is balance and rhythm and meter that rivals even the best typography. As with great poetry, every character counts — every single one is there because it needs to be. But these programs are not just for being seen or read — like a graceful dancer, they move! And not just as a single dancer either, but a whole choreographed number — processes splitting and moving and recombining at great speeds, around and around again.
But, unlike a dance, this movement has a purpose. They accomplish things that need accomplishing — they find your websites, they ferry your email from place to place. In the most fantastic movies, the routing and sorting of the post office is imagined as a giant endless choreographed dance number.
TempleOS is impressive. The only thing I could say after watching the youtube presentations was "wow". I see great value in it, at least as a teaching tool - a bit like Minix.
But there's more to it. Another potential use would be for hardware intensive tasks, when you want to squeeze the last bit of juice you have. Maybe for nodes doing distributed computation where GPU are not the solution, to remove the cruft of a full OS. The compiler would have to be quite optimized too, and some network features would be needed. Then there are some scaling issues, but still, if TempleOS could be say 10 to 20% more efficient than a standard Linux, there could be a usecase. Even for a smaller percentage, I believe some guys in finance would like that advantage for high-frequency trading.
I will follow your progress with great interest. Best of luck!
That's correct; I don't use the mouse for everyday computing, just for occasional game playing. The last time I used it nontrivially for work was when I did the PCB design for the Atreus.
Some other poster is talking about "hubris", "neopotism", or "tales from the aristocracy."
Are we so focused the 99% / 1% difference that we are too blind to see we're all in the same team, team Humanity?
Nothing is sadder that a live going away, knowledge, experience, etc all going to waste. Sentient creatures have a moral duty to live.
Extending our lifespan is also a necessary first step for serious large scale projects. I don't think we are ready with a 70 years lifespan to care about the consequences of our present days actions in 500 years, or to tackle serious projects such as building a Dyson sphere.
To all those who talk about how some people won't have access to that technology - yes, just like how they don't have access to antibiotics, cellphones or the internet in Africa.
When a certain portion of the 1% seems intent on seeing the populace as cannon fodder (Kissinger's ideology), or as idiots to be manipulated into submission (Bernays's ideology), or as any of the other indsidious descriptions that the 1% use for the rest (welfare queens, leeches, etc.), we are certainly not all on team humanity.
Great article. After using AZERTY in France, I remember experimenting with alternative layouts, then preferring the Canadian CSA layout (standard on Macs, PC picture on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACNOR) for 2 reasons:
- it had the accents I needed for french
- it was QWERTY, which mean no more problems in the BIOS or anything else like grub, lilo etc.
- it was easy to get - in any Applestore, and also for Thinkpads - even as a replacement part!. Now try to order a mainstream laptop with a Dvorak keyboard.
Everybody else around me was still using AZERTY, but it just made sense to switch. I haven't looked bad ever since, except I'm now using the US QWERTY as the accents in the 3rd level (using the control keys for the 3rd level, and caps as a control key) are even easier.
Is QWERTY perfectible? Yes. It QWERTY good enough? Yes too, even for French.
So with the network effects, bothering with anything else is a waste of time and money.
Maybe very intelligent deaf humans would outcompete the rest of mankind in a few generations? You may not like that, but why exactly should I care?
Parents do have the best interest of their children in mind. Let them be free of making the best choices instead of government imposed ones.