Following this blog

You can use any combination of the below options to follow this blog. If you’re not sure, subscribe via email! (each email has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, so that’s easy) Subscribe via email If you would like to receive an email whenever a new post has been published on this blog (mostly about one email per week), enter your email address in the box below, click the subscribe button, and then follow the instructions:

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Google’s 0-shot neural machine translation system shows intriguing evidence of an interlingua

In recent research (full paper also available), researchers from the Google Brain and Google Translate teams have shown intriguing evidence of a so-called interlingua, that is, a language-agnostic common representation of sentences with the same meaning from different languages. What I also found interesting about this work (and related to the above finding), is that they’re able to perform translations between language pairs that the system has never trained on.

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Samsung’s 960 Pro M.2 NVME SSD is lightning fast in synthetic benchmarks, not so much in real-world.

Samsung’s 960 Pro M.2 NVME SSD is lust-worthy: Two Samsung 960 Pro M.2 NVME SSDs. Photo by Edward Chester at Ars Technica. In Ars Technica’s benchmarks, the 512 GB model clocked in at over 3500 megabytes per second sequential read and 2000 megabytes per second sequential write. Those are jaw-dropping performance numbers. What I find really interesting however, is that the 960 Pro does not perform much better than the previous generation 850 Pro SATA SSD in PCMark 7 and 8 real-world benchmarks.

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Microblog posts will NOT email subscribers anymore

One of my three subscribers was understandably less than happy about receiving email for every microblog-style post here. Using the Code Snippets plugin and the jetpack subscriptions exclude categories filter, I have now configured the blog so that in theory it should not mail subscribers when I post in the microblog category. In short: Email subscribers won’t receive any microblog post emails. I hope this helps!

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Let’s replace Twitter with something much better.

(There is also a Russian language version of this post available, translated and published by SoftDroid on 2017-04-12.) I love Twitter. I love that by following certain people, my timeline has become a stream of interesting and entertaining information. I love that sometimes I am able to fit my little publication just so into the 140 characters given to me. I found The Trumpocalypse truly depressing, but the joke tweets were golden:

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The Bluedio Ci3 bluetooth earphones will probably not fit your ears either.

This is just a quick warning to anyone else considering buying the Bluedio Ci3 bluetooth in-ear earphones: Due to their size and design, the Bluedio Ci3 bluetooth in-ear earphones will probably not fit your ears. If you’re considering to buy them, make sure that you are either able to return them if they don’t fit, or that you’re able to test them out beforehand. To illustrate the problem, here is a photo of the the right earphone, along with the supplied silicone cover and t-light tip (the large version), with a Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic keyboard as the background so that you can get a feeling for the size of the earphone: The Bluedio Ci3 earphones are quite big.

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Weekly Head Voices #112: Emergency Smörgåsbord.

(This blog post documents snippets of time taken from the period starting on Monday August 15 and ending on Tuesday November 8, 2016.) My longing simply became too great. For an epic few days in August, I found myself in The Netherlands (my other home) mixing business and pleasure like a boss. Thank you besties, my cup has not stopped running over. Photo by Bestie DJ Fiasco. Shortly after returning from NL, my year counter ticked over one more time.

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Why it’s healthy that Microsoft and Google are eating Apple’s lunch

Last week Apple announced their new Macbook Pro laptops. Their great innovation (a “game-changer” in their words) was a sliver of a touch screen above the keyboard which is able to show touchable context-specific buttons. They’ve dubbed this the TouchBar. Although the OLED technology is certainly pretty, one could almost hear the enormously disappointed collective “MEH” uttered by millions of users and suddenly erstwhile Apple fans world-wide. Was Apple, in the form of the Phil Schiller really trying to sell this?

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