jamesrcole

70 ms·

691.
by jamesrcole 9y ago
pencils are a technology, as are paper, chalkboards. Printing-presses, etc etc. Technology enables all of our ability to educate people. When it comes to more modern technologies, like computers, I think we need to remember that, in histo
692.
by jamesrcole 9y ago
I can't help feeling that you're operating on a very narrow notion of "technology". Without technology we wouldn't have societies where we could have schools, nor writing, paper, printed materials, the free time to
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
I'm pretty sure I remember reading that the effects of sitting were not, they believe, offset by physical activity. I can't remember the source, but I'm sure there's stuff out there in Google.
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
That that's how it's pronounced in Australia? I don't know of any specific reference, it's just what I know from being familiar with Australian pronounciation (it's where I was born and live). BTW, in case there ha
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
> Btw, why is it "pronUnciation", but "pronOUced" In Australian English, it is "pronOUNCiation"
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
> I am not particularly shocked that the original developers did not realize the possible double meaning in another language Most French people seem to know English quite well, so I would expect they'd be aware of it. Not saying I
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
I don't think the parent comment deserves all the downvotes. For programming languages, popularity is crucial. Making them easy to implement, having the compilers as widely available as possible, having the most number of developers p
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
> Most will be sufficiently surrounded by intelligent people in their day-to-day life to be stimulated. Totally independent of the discussion of Mensa, I'm somewhat sceptical of that claim.
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
> Heh I know it's technically possible it's not merely "technically possible". I've had this actually happen to me, and I'm sure others have too.
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
Yes. Not in a car, but in other devices. In at least one of the cases, this was because of stuff (some sort of gunk) getting into the port. Before anyone says that wasn't a problem with the port itself, having a physical port allows
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
That's the nature of change. It's awkward, and never smooth. I'm one of those people who believe that eventually all consumer devices will use wireless headphones. It's not going to happen instantaneously, and the tran
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
> The number of "but AirPods are great" comments on this entire thread is hilarious. Not relevant. The article is about Google's phone, not the iPhone. Except that a lot of the complaints are not specific to the Google p
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
> I spent a good amount of money on decent headphones and if I can't use them with my phone without a dongle that's a no-no. I get that "the future is portless" but the future hasn't arrived yet What's you
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
> It’s really something you don’t recognize how annoying it is until you don’t have to deal with it anymore. I definitely recognised it while still using them! When I'm not wearing the headphones, the wires are always getting tangl
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
There's a danger here in getting too caught up in words (where what they're trying to capture is what matters), but can't "searching for an optional action" accurately be seen as a kind of prediction?
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
This article portrays a very distorted view of the past vs the present. It portrays the push for encyclopedic collation of textual knowledge, in the past, and social media, in the present, as if they were complete, representative pictures o
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
> but in real world any turing machine would be incapable of doing anything outside of its purpose. If what the brain is doing is computational, then it's not doing anything more powerful than a Turing Machine could do. There would
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
In terms of that sense of objective, I agree.
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
Do you think a bird or a flower can be fairly objectively beautiful? I think they can, and I don't see why human design can't be fairly so, too.
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
> And then, almost every tech product became white, silver, gray, black, flat, square, round, and minimalist. Boring. But there are hints that this is changing. And one of the leaders of this change is, somewhat improbably, Google. It
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
As a reply to all the sibling comments: it's right to have concerns, and that is completely compatible with being agnostic about it. Being agnostic means not forming judgements if you don't have adequate information to do so. You
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
They've handled a number of things poorly. But they're not a monolithic entity, and I don't think we can make assumptions about exactly who will be involved with this and how they'll handle it. Why do we need to assume
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
> clueless software engineers I think it's a bit unfair to assume out of hand that they'll be clueless. . The other side of the coin is that new ideas often come from outside of a field. Sometimes expertise can mean expertise
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
> There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless. But there's clearly something important that would be lost with print's demise The argument put forth in the article is fundamentally flawed. They're as
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
I don't think anyone is saying it's impossible for that kind of research to happen within companies. Just that it's difficult to get adequate amounts of it done by companies, because of things like companies needing to be pr
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
> it is evidence against the proposition that basic research can only be done in public institutions. I never made that claim. > If the basic research in question has applications that potentially meet real human needs and thus is
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
> What's the limit of basic vs. applied research? I'm not sure what you mean by limit, could you elaborate? Re AT&T - I don't see how that indicates private companies are good for getting basic research done in general
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
Do you think they're better for basic research? Where would society be without the basic research that was done over the last century?
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
Of course, no one now can know for sure what the consequences will be.... but I'm intrigued by the possibility that this might be a good thing. Could this help make people more savvy about evidence, and less focused on the concrete an
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by jamesrcole 9y ago
I wonder, how many people could actually work through things from first principles, if they were taught how? I don't know, but I suspect a lot more than currently can/do. The education system doesn't currently make any attemp

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