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.
Samsung’s 960 Pro M.2 NVME SSD is lust-worthy:
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. (Random IOPS performance of the drive is also really good.)
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!
(In my previous post, I promised I was going to micro-blog from here. That post is now on the HN frontpage, which makes for a perfect first micro-blog!)
(There is also a Russian language version of this post available, translated and published by SoftDroid on 2017-04-12.)
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:
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. They rely on the t-light tips to stay in your ears.
(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.
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? By the way, if you represent Apple, a company traditionally known for its great design sensibilities, should you not spend just a little more money to dress a little better than the couture equivalent of an old Lada? Suit up man!
Phil Schiller not suiting up.
Summary: RFC 3676 format=flowed is an elegant and backwards-compatible method to have plaintext emails reflowed on (mobile) devices that support this feature. Although this standard has been around for more than 10 years, and Thunderbird 45.3.0 reports supporting it, it only does so on non-quoted text. Most unfortunately, it wraps quoted text incorrectly, disabling reflowing on receiving devices, resulting in embarrassingly ugly email rendering.
Half of the people on the internet are of less than average intelligence. This is especially evident in discussions around format=flowed. To exacerbate matters, participants in most cases have not taken the time to actually read through RFC 3676 (go on, click the link!) and instead prefer to argue on the basis of their very strong emotions and opinions around text wrapping.
Well hello friends! In this here,the one hundred and eleventh edition of the Weekly Head Voices, I present a personal view of selected events that took place in the time between Monday, July 25 and Sunday, August 14 of 2016.
Post summary: HackerNews FastMail to Gmail retrospective (WARNING NERD CONTENT), Craft Beer tips, Swift Playgrounds (teach your kids to code!) and a tiny bit of backyard philosophy at the end.