Notices tagged with 8

https://mastodon.social/media/-isW4FsT9gdNBgcnBhg so jervis tetch is wearing this outfit in batman allstars #8 and I had to draw it it's too dapper

Spaceship Landing - 8tel Ride...

off of Spaceship Landing 12”x2 (red translucent vinyl) on World In Sound (2005)

#spaceshiplanding #spaceship #landing #8 #ride #worldinsound #2012 #audio #animatedgif #psychedelicrock

@aldersprig Cal Story #8

Don Marti: Predictions for 2018

Bitcoin to the moooon: The futures market is starting up, so here
comes a bunch more day trader action. More important, think about all
the bucket shops (I even saw an "invest in Bitcoin without owning
Bitcoin" ad on public transit in London), legit financial firms,
Libertarian true believers, and coins lost forever because of human
error. Central bankers had better keep an eye on Bitcoin, though. Last
recession we saw that printing money doesn't work as well as it used to,
because it ends up in the hands of rich people who, instead of priming
economic pumps with it, just drive up the prices of assets. I would
predict "Entire Round of Quantitative Easing Gets Invested in Bitcoin
Without Creating a Single New Job" but I'm saving that one for 2019.
Central banks will need to innovate. Federal Reserve car crushers?
Relieve medical deby by letting the UK operate NHS clinics at their
consulates in the USA, and we trade them US green cards for visas that
allow US citizens to get treated there? And—this is a brilliant quality
of Bitcoin that I recognized too late—there is no bad news that could
credibly hurt the value of a purely speculative asset.

The lesson for regular people here is not so much what to do with
Bitcoin, but remember to keep putting some well-considered time into
actions that you predict have unlikely but large and favorable outcomes.
Must remember to do more of this.

High-profile Bitcoin kidnapping in the USA ends in tragedy:
Kidnappers underestimate the amount of Bitcoin actually available to
change hands, ask for more than the victim's family (or fans? a
crowdsourced kidnapping of a celebrity is now a possibility) can raise
in time. Huge news but not big enough to slow down something that the
finance scene has already committed to.

Tech industry reputation problems hit open source. California
Internet douchebags talk like a positive social movement but act like
East Coast vampire squid—and people are finally not so much letting
them define the terms of the
conversation.
The real Internet economy is moving to a three-class system: plutocrats,
well-paid brogrammers with Aeron chairs, free snacks and good health
insurance, and everyone else in the algorithmically-managed precariat.
So far, people are more concerned about the big social and surveillance
marketing companies, but open source has some of the same issues. Just
as it was widely considered silly for people to call Facebook users "the
Facebook community" in 2017, some of the "community" talk about open
source will be questioned in 2018. Who's working for who, and who's
vulnerable to the risks of doing work that someone else extracts the
value of? College athletes are ahead of the open source scene on this
one.

Adfraud becomes a significant problem for end users: Powerful
botnets in data centers drove the pivot to
video. Now
that video adfraud is well-known, more of the fraud hackers will move to
attribution fraud. This ties in to adtech consolidation, too. Google is
better at beating simple to midrange fraud than the rest of the
Lumascape, so the steady progress towards a two-logo Lumascape means
fewer opportunities for bots in data centers.

Attribution fraud is nastier than servers-talking-to-servers fraud,
since it usually depends on having fraudulent and legit client software
on the same system—legit to be used for a human purchase, fraudulent to
"serve the ad" that takes credit for it. Unlike botnets that can run in
data centers, attribution fraud comes home with you. Yeech. Browsers and
privacy tools will need to level up from blocking relatively simple
Lumascape trackers to blocking cleverer, more aggressive attribution
fraud scripts.

Wannabe fascists keep control of the US Congress, because your
Marketing budget: "Dark" social campaigns (both ads and fake "organic"
activity) are still a thing. In the USA, voter suppression and
gerrymandering have been cleverly enough done that social manipulation
can still make a difference, and it will.

In the long run, dark social will get filtered out by habits,
technology, norms, and regulation—like junk fax and email spam before
it—but we don't have a "long run" between now and November 2018. The
only people who could make an impact on dark social now are the legit
advertisers who don't want their brands associated with this stuff. And
right now the expectations to advertise on the major social sites are
stronger than anybody's ability to get an edgy, controversial "let's not
SPONSOR ACTUAL F-----G NAZIS" plan through the 2018 marketing budget
process.

Yes, the idea of not spending marketing money on supporting
nationalist extremist forums is new and different now. What a year.

Bonus links

These Publishers Bought Millions Of Website Visits They Later Found Out
Were
Fraudulent

No boundaries for user identities: Web trackers exploit browser login
managers

Best of 2017 #8: The World's Most Expensive Clown
Show

My Internet Mea
Culpa

2017 Was the Year I Learned About My White
Privilege

With the people, not just of the
people

When Will Facebook Take Hate
Seriously?

Using Headless Mode in Firefox – Mozilla Hacks : the Web developer
blog

Why Chuck E. Cheese’s Has a Corporate Policy About Destroying Its
Mascot’s
Head

Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From
Job
Ads

How Facebook’s Political Unit Enables the Dark Art of Digital
Propaganda

https://blog.zgp.org/predictions-for-2018/

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Dirk Eddelbuettel: #8: Customizing Spell Checks for R CMD check

Welcome to the eight post in the ramblingly random R rants series, or
R^4^ for short. We took a short break over the last few weeks due to
some
conferencing
followed by some
vacationing
and general chill.

But we're back now, and this post gets us back to initial spirit of
(hopefully) quick and useful posts. Perusing yesterday's batch of
CRANberries
posts, I noticed a peculiar new directory shown the in the
diffstat output we use to
compare two subsequent source tarballs. It was entitled .aspell/, in
the top-level directory, and in two new packages by R Core member Kurt
Hornik
himself.

The context is, of course, the not infrequently-expressed desire to
customize the spell checking done on CRAN incoming packages, see e.g.
this r-package-devel
thread.

And now we can as I verified with (the upcoming next release of)
RcppArmadillo, along with a recent-enough (i.e. last few days) version
of r-devel. Just copying what Kurt did, i.e. adding a file
.aspell/defaults.R, and in it pointing to rds file (named as the
package) containing a character vector with words added to the spell
checker's universe is all it takes. For my package, see
here
for the peculiars.

And now R(-devel) CMD check --as-cran ... is silent about spelling.
Yay!

But take this with a grain of salt as this does not yet seem to be
"announced" as e.g. yesterday's change in the CRAN
Policy
did not mention it. So things may well change -- but hey, it worked for
me.

And this all is about aspell, here is something topical about a
spell to close the post:

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel
originated on his Thinking inside the
box blog. Please report excessive
re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/blog/2017/08/10#008_aspell_cran_incoming

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