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[Reelya]

find my youngest sister holding one of the dead kittens

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Max™]

Yeah, I mean, I've had hundreds of cats, literally, kittens die, that's a fact of life, but the way she was chuckling about it I was like... yanothxbai.

Incidentally, I've been enjoying the entry of more manufacturers into the mechanical keyboard market letting them drop down to the $50 range without being fake or "half-mechanical" where it has like the top part of the switch with a stem and a membrane key underneath. I do wish it was a little less "chK" and more of a "thud" but they didn't really have options for different switch types at that price point.

Back up at the higher end of the scale though, there's a very interesting looking new technology being rolled out by some newer makers.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/what-are-optical-keyboard-switches,32352.html

Was technically last month that they really started getting out and about, but I find myself really liking the idea of linear red switches with analog input, as I use a mousekeys setup on my numpad and have just kinda gotten used to how I have to handle micro adjustments of the mouse, with a trackball over on a side table in case I really need it. Being able to lightly press and have the cursor just barely move or mash it and have it zoom up to full accel sounds glorious.

Since the electronics are all on the pcb it should end up being cheaper to make than individual switches soldered onto a pcb as we have now.

[Max™]

The Redragon I'm using is like a cherry green apparently? A bit of a tactile click and an audible chk, louder than I prefer but it's so much nicer than the squishbutton one I was using, nice and heavy too.

[Reelya]

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/16/09/02/025239/ibm-watson-created-the-first-ever-ai-made-movie-trailer-for-morgan

For a film about the risks of pushing the limits of technology too far, it only makes sense to advertise for it using artificial intelligence. Morgan, staring Kate Mara and Paul Giamatti, is a sci-fi thriller about scientists who've created a synthetic humanoid whose potential has grown dangerously beyond their control. Fitting, then, that they'd employ the help of America's AI sweetheart IBM Watson to build the film's trailer. IBM used machine learning and experimental Watson APIs, parsing out the trailers of 100 horror movies. It did visual, audio, and composition analysis of individual scenes, finding what makes each moment eerie, how the score and actors' tone of voice changed the mood--framing and lighting came together to make a complete trailer. Watson was then fed the full film, and it chose scenes for the trailer. A human -- in this case, the "resident IBM filmmaker" -- still needed to step in to edit for creativity. Even so, a process that would normally take weeks was reduced to hours.

I could imagine Watson becoming a great DM for D&D

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/08/31/2225253/3d-printed-aircraft-tool-sets-guinness-world-record

A 17.5 foot long, 5.5 foot wide and 1.5 foot tall the 3D printed aircraft design tool has earned the title of largest solid 3D printed item by Guinness World Records. The 1,650 lb. apparatus known as a trim-and-drill tool is comparable in length to a large sport utility vehicle and will ultimately be tested for use in building the Boeing 777X passenger jet. Basically the tool will be used to secure the jet's composite wing skin for drilling and machining before assembly, according to researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ONRL) who developed the tool.

Obviously, if you only need one of something complex then 3D printing is the way to go there. Clearly if you're on the bleeding edge this will save months or years in design and development, and reduce headaches with suppliers.

[martinuzz]

Samsung just stopped the sale of Galaxy Note 7, because a design error in the battery makes them explode violently. The error can be fixed by intalling a new battery, for those few million people who already have one.

[Reelya]

Charging cellphone batteries to only 80% massively increases their lifespan. It's the hardware manufacturers that decide what level "100%" is calibrated to. And really, the consumer is only informed of the number of hours that a single charge works for, not how many cycles the battery can cope with that level of charging up. That leads phone manufacturers to push the limits of how much a battery can actually deal with, and might have been a factor in those explodey batteries.

The average amount of time people keep the phone has almost doubled (the average was 18 months, it's now 3 years). Sony for one announced new phones which take that into account: they monitor your charging and usage patterns, and ease off on "100% charging" when it doesn't look like a good idea. Personally I think it would be nice to give the consumer more control over the actual charging limits, give the user an estimate of how many hours that represents (which would be less as the battery ages), and give an estimate of the "half life" of the battery at any particular level of charging. All this would be just software changes.

[alexandertnt]

Ideally, you would just replace the battery, though it can be very hard to find a genuine battery (and you don't want a poor quality aftermarket one).

Would also be nice if the charger cut charging at 100%, otherwise the battery is rapidly charged/discharged at ~100%. I think there are cables that do this.

[Reelya]

Walmart slashing thousands of jobs due to automation. Given the situation in regional places where Walmarts are the only big employer (due to undercutting everyone else) it will be interesting what actually happens in these places over the long haul, as the trend to automation speeds up.

If it ends up with just a roboticized Walmart and most people in these regional towns on unemployment benefits which pays for their Walmart stuff, then that's not far off what Marx said would happen post-capitalism. So it's relevant that A number of places are rolling out trials of a basic income to replace welfare benefits. Finland is starting trials, so are The Netherlands. Go to Oakland California if you want a current American trial of a basic income. Brazil and Iran are other countries which have implemented the basic income concept as a way of dealing with poverty, and India has run trials where they've given a set income to everyone in entire villages, and the effect has been tremendous on the local economy.

Basic income is sound social policy and cash in people’s hands stimulates the economy, but opponents of cash transfers tend to highlight the popular images of poor men beating their wives and drinking away their earnings.

However, studies show a different picture. The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) conducted three experiments to understand how cash transfers would impact poor people. The first was conducted in Delhi by substituting PDS entitlements with cash on a voluntary basis. The second was carried out in rural Madhya Pradesh in 20 villages. The third was simultaneously carried out in two nearby tribal villages. These experiments covered over 15,000 people.

The central design premise of the pilot was that the basic income was paid every month to all individuals within a village. The transfers were given to all residents of a village to avoid distortions due to means-testing and to enable evaluation of the impact of basic income on households with different income levels. Crucially, the experiment did not impose any conditionality. The targeted recipients were informed in advance that they could use the money as they wished.

The results for the poorest villages was transformational for families as well as for the local economy. People used the cash mainly for small self-employment, and there was a spurt of growth in livestock, seeds, water pumps and sewing machines. In addition, they spent on living needs such as mattresses and fans. Food sufficiency increased. In families who were poor, but above the poverty line, there was a considerable improvement in schooling and health outcomes. In particular, girls’ enrolment in secondary school was significant. Women’s healthcare improved and, in general, the number of illnesses decreased.

[SalmonGod]

Wanted to post a random aimless comment and had to look for the proper thread for it.  Looks like this is the one.

One of the suppliers that ships to my customer at work is suffering severe production delays that's fucking up a lot of shit right now.  It's because they're in the middle of upgrading their factory.  To fully automated production.  Delays right now, but their output will be increased when it's done.  When I read the e-mail chain explaining this, I couldn't help but get political in my head. 

Just fucking die already, economy, so we can move on.  I feel like the economy is a decrepit old person who's been lying on their deathbed for years, but won't fucking die because the entire world is putting their own lives on hold to stay by their side and keep them barely clinging to life.  Please just acknowledge your end and release us all.  This can't go on forever, but the longer it does, the more the living are fucking up their own lives for you.

I'm sure it won't be long before my industry (logistics) starts losing shitloads of jobs to fleets of self-driving cargo trucks, and automated reporting functions.  Please be dead before then.

[RedKing]

The problem is whether the economy dying drags you screaming into the grave with it.

We're getting larger and larger job fields that are being rendered obsolete or which someone figured a way to outsource to a location where human bodies are cheaper than machines. It does bring up a good question of what is the tipping point? How large a chunk of our labor force has to be obsolete before we begin seriously talking about reorganizing our economy at a fundamental level?

There's also a lot of abstract mumbo-jumbo about the coming "purpose economy", but I have yet to see anyone describe what that looks like.

[Levi]

All my retirement money is in the economy, so I'm hoping it doesn't die or else I'll have to work forever.   

I really can't wait for basic income to be a thing though.  I'll probably be retired before it happens, but it sure would be nice for people. 

I think another thing that might completely fuck with the economy is if 3d printers(or maker machines or whatever) get more advanced and more generalized.  If you can just make most things you need at home, suddenly there isn't a huge need for a lot of advertising or shops.

[MrRoboto75]

Until you can break the conservation of matter laws, there will still be some flavor of economy.

[TempAcc]

Even when the fabled "tabletop factories" become a thing with the advent of more advanced 3d printing and nanotechnology, commerce will still be a thing. People will still buy and sell, its just a lot of things will shift heavily in price (computers and cellphones for starters) and blue collar jobs will become a thing of the past given enough time, while other fields of work will open up. There's still a huge problem though, even with those new fields opening as blue collar jobs get buried, a lot of people will require new training to be able to handle those new fields. Working without using a computer will be seen in the same light as we see medieval book production today (IE having people manually copy entire books being the only way of making copies).

The problem is: how will those people get the training needed to remain useful to the job market? Nowadays, the american (and western) higher education system is really absurd and student loans fuck up a lot of people, because people's choices in training are often disconnected to what the market demands. Didn't get a decent job after your education? Too bad, your student loan wont pay for itself.

If that problem can be solved, then things will be a lot smoother, if not, well, a lot of people won't escape Mr. Bones Wild Ride.

[Starver]

Until you can break the conservation of matter laws, there will still be some flavor of economy.

Can it be strawberry? I like strawberry flavour. (But not strawberries themselves, strangely. Whilst I don't like 'chocolate flavour' anything like as much as actual chocolate. Go figure!)

[Max™]

Like I said before, we need to kill the idea that it is immoral to do something besides work a menial job for your whole life, was that those puritan bastards or another one of the "uptight jerkasses we idolize for stupid reasons" groups who haven't existed for hundreds of years? I feel like it was a puritan type thing but that might just be a subset of it.

Ultimately we move away from "work menial tasks to earn a living" model or we end up with everyone employed in meaningless make-work tasks like pushing buttons that do nothing.