Yeah, I've heard this said in a few different ways.

Basically, "What do you do for a living?" can sometimes be an interesting conversation. But usually not. Most people don't really want to spend their social time talking about their job, even if they do kind of like it. And if they work in any kind of technical field, they are definitely not going to start explaining to somebody what it is that they do.

Most doctors will say they're doctors, even if they're specialists. Because there's a lot to explain when you say you're a rheumatologist. Likewise, I "work with computers" or "computer programming", which is about the most accurate job description I can give without getting into domain terminology.

"What do you do for fun outside of work" or similar, can be better. You're getting people talking about things they may want to talk about.

I do odd hours a couple of days a week. I make a point of adding a permanent "Out of Office" block of time in the afternoon on those days.

You always know who doesn't bother checking the free/busy, by the people who send you a meeting request for these times.

Outlook/Exchange has an option for your calendar to "Always decline meeting requests which overlap with others". It annoys me that you can only apply this to the whole calendar and not specfic meetings.

There's a LOT of PR involvement in all of this kind of stuff and images heavily edited or excluded if the PR guys think it might get a bad reaction. Not even masks, even down to the balance of individuals, or how the layout might appear - e.g. imagine a picture where you have an all-white crew standing around giving directions to a black actor who's on his knees.

Absolutely absurd dumb shit that only idiots would make a drama about. But in Hollywood they try to be meticulous about this stuff.

So likewise with maintaining the use of masks and vaccines well beyond the point of necessity. The concern is all about whether pictures and reports of people not wearing masks will reflect badly on the industry, not whether it's necessary.

Fun fact for Americans; the name is basically meaningless in other English-speaking countries.

Outside of the US, "Fillet" is pronounced phonetically, so the "fil-A" in the company name is just nonsense sounds. In some regions, it wouldn't even be "fillay" it would be "fill-ah".

It's fairly common for someone to make a demonstration of a power in order to prove the need to regulate it.

Whether or not he did this deliberately, the fact that the image has gained so much attention has obviously made him realise the danger here and now he's using his brief new platform to try and highlight that danger. I don't see the issue.

It's about a decade ago now that I first recall conversations about this problem.

Back then we knew this was going to happen.

And there are many solutions to this problem which existed back then, including the use of digital signing for images and videos to verify when they were produced and by whom.

We've had at least a decade to prepare for this and nobody in the media or tech sectors have been bothered doing fucking anything.

So now we get a couple of years of pure chaos as fake images get produced which are virtually indistinguishable from reality, and everyone is scrambling to put measures in place to fix this.

If you can at all, get an induction hob. It's actual witchcraft. All the power and accuracy of gas burners, with the cleanliness of an electric one. Nothing ever gets burnt onto an induction hob.

Is it not subject to licence, so if you did actually invent something with it, OpenAI could assert rights over it?

You can't react quicker at this distance. Amazing how much faith people put in their reaction times.

If the truck hits the brakes to stop (say there's a queue of traffic ahead), you will have about 300ms to hit the brakes on your bike after you notice the truck brake lights come on.

Go do a reaction test online to see just how quick 300ms is.

You might manage to react in time for a minor brake check or lapse in concentration from the driver. But for an actual slow down, you're fucked.

1 metre from the back of the vehicle, it doesn't matter how quickly the bike can stop. If the truck reduces speed by just 3.6km/h (approx 2mph), then you have just 1 second to notice and grab your brakes before your front wheel hits the back of the truck. If the truck really jams on, you'll hit the back of the truck before your brain has even registered that the brake lights have come on.

It's fun that you think companies will hold onto replaceable staff members because they "like" them and see more of them.

At most you might manage to keep your job for an extra year or two, but if you're in that firing line, you should be focussing on upskilling yourself rather than putting in appearances.

A secretary is still a viable career because someone still needs to actually answer the phone and use the computer. Senior management don't want to have to manage their own calendars and answer all their own emails.

When ADHD first started being diagnosed, there was certainly a lot of noise in the US about overmedication of it, and how virtually any child who was underachieving in school was being prescribed ritalin. Even some parents chasing down doctors to demand access to it in order to calm down their child.

Whether this was a thing, I don't know. I was young and I live in a different country :D

It may simply have been that there was such a sharp increase in ADD/ADHD diagnoses that there was a typical moral panic/media freakout about it.

"Neurodivergent" and "Neurotypical" are the current ways we use to describe these conditions, and I think that helps people understand the nature of it better. With these words it's clear you're not saying that someone's brain is broken, or that they have a transient illness. They have a fundamental difference in wiring which has always existed, always will exist, and causes them to perceive the world in a different way to most others.

We talk about ADHD and Autism and such being "new". But then you hear about a guy who was so worried about needing six months to write 900 pages that he locked himself in his house.

And you realise these have been around for millennia.

This. And you know there are people you trust very strongly with secrets, but you never know under what circumstances they might reveal it to someone else.

I learned from a very young age to keep information to myself because my mother is incapable of keeping secrets to the point of defiance. Nothing I or my siblings told her was kept secret, we all knew about each others' business in short order. She has always insisted this is a good thing and secrets are bad (and yes, she has no secrets either...), but I know now in hindsight why this was an awful policy.

So some of us learned to never say anything.

This is an exceptional price no doubt motivated more by sentimentality than potential earnings. Far older and more influential tech in unsealed condition doesn't go for that kind of price.

No judgement, maybe he just really, really wanted this in his collection. But he's never getting that $60k back. Maybe he doesn't want it back.

Also how the whole Ivermectin nonsense started for the most part. Some tests on Covid samples in vitro showed early promise for Ivermectin, but came to nothing when tested in vivo.

Yet 3 years later, some people still don't get the difference.

I mean, I recall having this exact conversation in class with our science teacher at 14. In theory, if you could extract all of someone's blood and subject it to bleach/alcohol/UV/etc then in theory some diseases could be cured.

But extracting all of someone's blood is not a thing. Not if you want them alive anyway.

I wonder was that some kind of malicious compliance. Insurance wouldn't cover it without a secure lock up, building management refused to provide some, so he decided to make his own.

I'd be more concerned about the balcony. Standard ten person elevator is rated for about 1600lbs IIRC.

A balcony is usually..not

He's blocking that door from being opened. Maybe the latch is broken or they've got something valuable in there.

Not at this stage. A malicious firmware in future perhaps, but the hacker would still need 3 devices (I read the article :D) in the room, all with compromised formware.

If this application proves to be useful, then they will likely continue building on it to allow partial imaging with two or even one device, as well as mapping of other objects besides people, and through walls and other objects which are permeable from a WiFi POV.

But what they've done on this pass is fundamentally a form of reverse triangulation; using the data from each of three waypoints to discover data points within their boundaries that can't be seen.

Think of it like 3 people standing each on the top of a hill, looking at an object in front of them. They all relay information to a 4th person about what they can and can't see. The 4th person can then use this information (after a lo-haw-haw-hawt of calculations and line drawing) to draw a reasonably accurate 3D rendering of the object.

Actually, from a WiFi perspective it's like there's a big object made of clear fluid between them, so they're telling the fourth person not only what they can see, but hoew clearly they can see it. Hence the need for insane numbers of calculations that probably weren't even reasonably possible a decade ago.

Nevertheless, I believe GPS devices sold in the US are still required to shut off above a certain speed/altitude, much to the annoyance of amateur rocket/balloon people.

I'm going to guess that the "routers" part in the headline is even a theory.

I didn't read the article, but if I had to guess, this was probably accomplished in a lab environment using multiple custom-built wireless access points and a load of number crunching behind the scenes infrastructure to develop the 3D images.

This means that in theory, using a top-tier wireless mesh system with a special configuration of antennae, the correct firmware and a specific layout of the access points, they could be used to relay information to a central system which could crunch this data to produce 3D layouts.

There is zero chance this is coming to your $50 Netgear home router next week.

It's all software under the hood, they'll figure it out.

Architect draws out the plans on the software, which automatically deconstructs it into a project plan and various individual components which the robots already know how to build.

Then you set them loose and they just build it. "Them" being an army of machines each with their own specialisation.

It will change architecture as much as it will change for architecture. The software will have a menu of different features to insert into the drawing - features which the machines know how to build. Features outside of this will be flagged on the drawing as requiring manual intervention to complete.

Because these manual interventions will slow down the build and will require checking before the machines can come back in, this will influence the decision-making process. Over time, as the software evolves, architects will have more freedom to make embellishments that the machines can figure out on their own. But for a period of time, there'll be a churn of somewhat samey buildings all (over)using the same templates. In some cases you'll have buildings which are architecturally odd or spatially inefficient, but faster and cheaper to build.

Your question about carpenters is kind of moot. How do we train welders if robots are doing all the grunt work?

The answer is that there will virtually always be a requirement for specialist, artisan or one-off pieces. No small contractor is going roll up in their van with a Boston robot to install a TV cabinet or put together your IKEA furniture.

But they might have one that they use to build walls or help them put in a kitchen.

Sure. But somebody still has to put the prefab stuff in place, account for errors and misalignments, to build changes that haven't been done in the prefab stage.

People care about automation often only when it affects them. Factory workers being automated out, happened 50 years ago in reality, and there was a lot of noise at the time.

But work which has always required people onsite, using intelligence - doing work which couldn't fit a strict template - is a new departure for automation that's going to cause a lot of concern for the people in that work now.