Tag: technology

captainlordauditor:

sindri42:

So I looked this up and the whole story is wild.

Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.

But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.

oh so THAT’S the answer to why you need an ai that can tell croissants from bear claws. That actually makes sense.

Amazing. Beautiful. I need more stories likes these

patrickdiomedes:

queenqueso:

thesongzebrabyonehtrixpointnever:

zerofarad:

vornskr:

tiefling-queer:

vornskr:

vornskr:

vornskr:

tiefling-queer:

it’ll never fail to amaze me that chessex, the game dice company – like if you bought your first dice set from a game store/comic shop/card shop you most certainly bought a chessex set – has such an ugly and poorly designed website. it looks like they went out of business 15 years ago.

i don’t know what’s better, the fact that they only sell five different things and felt like they needed a site map, the single uk location with the giant union jack, or simply the times new roman header which reads:

“The coolest dice on the planet.” 

™

THEY HAVEN’T UPDATED THEIR WEBSITE IN TEN YEARS????

my mistake, literally every single page you click on has a different copyright date. so far I’ve seen 2001, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, and most recently 2012. amazing. well done chessex.

BUT LANA
HAVE YOU SEEN WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY TO ORDER DICE?????

you….you have to email them your order form. oh, gods. you…have to type your credit card information. into an email. so they can charge you seven dollars in shipping or 7% of the total order cost if it’s over $100. fuck. if you have questions about the cost of air shipping, you can fax them anytime. jesus christ. oh gods. fuck. fuck me up. chessex. the coolest dice on the planet. 

™

this is another reason why I let my friendly local store make my chessex orders for me

Me: The Chessex website isn’t real and can’t hurt me:

The Chessex website:

The best part is that this is literally by design

amazing

oh my god

aceofaces20:

desperate-acts-of-capitalism:

800-dick-pics:

afro-freyjan:

desperate-acts-of-capitalism:

:

podencos:

I thought this was a joke but it’s not and I wish it were

Hell world

Whoops I appear to have left my extremely powerful rare earth magnet on top of Amazon alexa

Fear is knowing a new Alexa product is being developed.

Terror is knowing that it’s for landlords to control their units remotely, while being to see and hear everything in the rented space.

Horror is understanding that if a family is a few days late for rent/electricity/gas, this product will most likely cut off the services they may need to survive like WiFi access, stove/oven/microwave/fridge appliances having power, lights, medical devices that require electricity to function, etc.

deep horror is knowing that these devices will probably be set to unlock doors remotely allowing cops and abusers into the homes of marginalized people, these devices will probably have sensors to check how many people live in the home vs on the lease, probably will have some way or reporting that the residents are “breaking the lease” ie: loud music, having overnight guests, parties, or just people doing normal human shit and having it seen as a “violation”

Hope is knowing these things have the network security equivalent of a sign that says “please do not hack me” over an open door.

If your landlord ever tries to force you to use Alexa, and you have little to no technical or programming expertise, it’s time to make your very own Faraday cage.

“What is a Faraday cage?” you might ask. “How will it help me defeat Big Sister Alexa?”

Easy answer: a Faraday cage blocks EM waves. WiFi, the thing Alexa needs to do anything of use at all? That’s a type of EM wave.

I know, I know, “Faraday cage” sounds like it’ll take 47727372 hours with a welder, right? Wrong!

A simple Faraday cage that anyone can make is as easy as a cardboard box with as many layers of heavy-duty aluminum foil as you can stand to coat the box with. I usually do about 5 layers because that number is easy to remember, but if you’re paranoid or simply need more layers you are more than welcome to add as many layers as necessary to keep Alexa at bay. I think the average is about 4-6 layers.

Hilariously, I actually learned this technique from those crazy prepper types. Which, ironically, is why I know it works. (Not to mention I tested it myself by wrapping my phone in foil and seeing if my roommate could call or message me.)

If your landlord notices, they will not receive any warning or notification that you tampered with Alexa- because you didn’t. All they will notice is that they can’t communicate with that particular Alexa device (because it will be “offline”, aka not sending or receiving signals).

A box is also easily hideable in case of surprise visits from the landlord or anyone else who might report you to your landlord, accidentally or on purpose. Just pop the bitch out, restart it (or don’t, this just clears any other hitches from the system) and it should behave normally.

Additionally, most landlords have the general tech expertise of an orangutan with a headset, so technical hitches are relatively easy to handwave with a good ol’ “Fire is scary and Edison and Tesla were witches”. Basically, if they question you about why Alexa suddenly is or isn’t working, shrug and say that it must have suddenly either just gone out or come back (depending on the situation), but that you didn’t do anything to it because you don’t know anything about that sort of tech and that you didn’t want to mess with it out of fear you would break it.

Note: Remember, Big Sister is always listening! If you wish to put the bitch in a Faraday cage, remember not to discuss it where Big Sister can hear you!

bdasswarrior:

spiletta42:

This is not an exaggeration.  Your download speed would slow down to the point where Windows would make this kind of absurd estimate, and you’d sigh and leave the room for a while (because you couldn’t use the computer while it was doing this for fear it would crash and lose all your progress) and then you’d come back in 40 minutes and maybe it would now say 52 years or maybe it would say 3 minutes, who knew, not Windows.

I can’t stop laughing, mostly because it’s so true

Source: memescomedy

vaporwavevocap:

jooshcraft:

maths-witch:

jooshcraft:

kasaron:

officialmacgyver:

kasaron:

Guessing it uses ultrasound?

Ultrasonic background noise, yes.

Ye, that’s what I’d use.

The real question is whether they’re gonna hold the patent close to their chest so they can sell it, or if they’ll open the patent so homegamers can take a crack at building their own.

They’ve already put the code and 3D printing models up on github!

God bless ‘em

Heroes.

tsrabbits:

becausedragonage:

freshest-tittymilk:

princealigorna:

And this is why we used to make cars out of STEEL instead of FIBERGLASS! Sure, fiberglass is a lot lighter in weight and hence a hell of a lot better for gas mileage. But you hit anything at more than 20 mph and the entire body explodes off the fucking thing, and now you’re spending more to repair the car than it’s worth because you need a entire front end, read end, or side panel. They can’t just take the damaged section off, beat it out with a hammer, sand it, and repaint it.

Everything is made with the idea of it being easier to replace than to maintain, aka planned obsolescence. Thanks, capitalism

You guys are obscenely, dangerously wrong. 

It’s not planned obsolescence, it’s physics.

Modern cars crumple to absorb and distribute the forces of impact in an accident in an effort to protect the occupants. When cars didn’t have those crumple zones, the occupants, being the soft, squishy things they were, took those forces and were mangled or killed in horrible ways. Also, those older cars took hidden damage that often went unnoticed and made them very dangerous to drive. IT’s really easy to hide a twisted frame when all you need to do to make the car look okay is a bit of sanding and paint.

I recently watched a TV show where a small sedan was run over by the trailer of an eighteen-wheeler. Run. Over. They had to unwrap the crumpled ball of a car from the undercarriage of that trailer. Guess what? The driver suffered only minor injuries because the car collapsed in exactly the way it was designed to so that she, in the very strong frame surrounding the passenger compartment, was protected. 

And no, don’t thank capitalism for these modern cars. Thank Ralph Nader and countless other safety activists who worked tirelessly to make car manufacturers accountable for the safety of the people who drove their cars. 

I’m an estimator for a major insurance company which means I spend all day, every day, around wrecked cars. I’ve been to the NHTSA, I’ve attended a crash test. I have actually seen and put hands on both the vehicles in the .gif above. The idea that old cars are somehow built better or are “tanks” or whatever is not only wrong, it’s dangerous. New cars are built to “crunch” so you don’t have to.

This is the 59 Bel Aire post crash – notice that the area where the driver sits is significantly compromised. The person driving this car would have died in this 35mph crash.

This is the Malibu – crunched? Yes! But the area where the driver sits is not crushed.

I have seen modern cars keep people alive in horrifying accidents. Cars are objectively better and safer in every single way than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago. Anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong. Period.

Also modern passenger cars are definitely not made of fiberglass. What even?

Source: blacktwittercomedy.com