TIL: Today I Learned

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Synsensa said:
Gotta side with Kyr on this one. While I completely believe Trump would be on par or worse than Erdogan if he were allowed to be, the US hasn't devolved to that point quite yet (and won't, barring catastrophe).
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Well, key word in your post being "yet." The Republicans are bent on subverting or destroying every single control meant to prevent an Erdogan-type situation.
 
Apparently "peas" refers to beans in the Caribbean.
 
The_J said:
And beans refers to...?
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Spoiler :
5765y-jb3.jpg
 
TIL that Civilization VI is spyware.

Civilization VI is the latest big game to remove controversial advert analytics software
By Darren Allan a day ago PC

Red Shell is dumped from the strategy behemoth in latest patch


The latest patch for Civilization VI has stripped out the game’s Red Shell software, a controversial product that tracks the ads which the user has viewed outside of the game.

Red Shell has previously been branded as ‘spyware’ in some quarters, and it works by taking a fingerprint of the user’s PC when they view an advert, and when they subsequently install a game carrying the software, it similarly takes a fingerprint, trying to match those up.

In other words, it’s hoovering up this data to try and determine whether players have been persuaded to make their game purchase by viewing an advert, in order to determine a marketing campaign’s success (or lack of it).

The spotlight was shone on the system last month, and since then, a number of games carrying Red Shell have had it removed, including the Total War franchise, Conan Exiles, and The Elder Scrolls Online, among others. Civilization VI is the latest big-name title to ditch the software.

Part of the controversial nature, and accusations of the software being spyware, revolve around users being unaware of this monitoring going on, and failing to be given a choice as to whether it occurs.

Shelling out
For its part, the makers of Red Shell insist that a minimum amount of data is required to perform their ‘marketing attribution’ (tracking) – specifically the device’s “operating system, installed browsers, screen resolution, available fonts, IP address, timezone, and system language” – and that data is encrypted and stored with an in-game user ID (which is anonymized; i.e. it carries no personal or identifying details).

The company has a full FAQ explaining its activities to gamers, which you can view here.

However, it’s not surprising that the software has provoked the reaction we’ve seen, and the fact that game publishers are swiftly dropping Red Shell tells its own story.

As Rock Paper Shotgun, which spotted this development, points out, you can opt out of Red Shell tracking on the developer’s website here.

Meanwhile, the more positive news for the latest Civilization VI patch is that it enables cross-platform multiplayer for PC and Mac.
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ttps://www.techradar.com/news/civilization-vi-is-the-latest-big-game-to-remove-controversial-advert-analytics-software
 
When I posted about that software being included with the latest Total War titles I got a ‘meh’ reaction.
 
The last station in a travel route is called slutstation in Swedish. And kiss is swedish for pee is 'kiss'. Gross.
 
Today I had to resigned my lease, and one section details the conditions under why a tenancy may be terminated early- the property is being sold, the landlord intends to take up residence, and so on.

But I noticed that tucked among these was the provision that I can be evicted if the property is intended for the residence of a "minister or full-time lay missionary".

So that's what TIL. What I hope to learn in future is, is this normal, or is this a product of my country's outsize reverence for the Kirk?
 
TIL that Google Translate is that crazy religious dude standing on the street corner shouting Revelation's verses at you.

upload_2018-7-23_17-57-42.png


Here is some explanation about what is going on

There are several possible explanations for the strange outputs. It’s possible that the sinister messages are the result of disgruntled Google employees, for instance, or that mischievous users are abusing the “Suggest an edit” button, which accepts suggestions for better translations of a given text.

Alexander Rush, an assistant professor at Harvard who studies natural language processing and computer translation, said that internal quality filters would probably catch that type of manipulation, however. It’s more likely, Rush said, that the strange translations are related to a change Google Translate made several years ago, when it started using a technique known as “neural machine translation.”

In neural machine translation, the system is trained with large numbers of texts in one language and corresponding translations in another, to create a model for moving between the two. But when it’s fed nonsense inputs, Rush said, the system can “hallucinate” bizarre outputs—not unlike the way Google’s DeepDream identifies and accentuates patterns in images.

“The models are black-boxes, that are learned from as many training instances that you can find,” Rush said. “The vast majority of these will look like human language, and when you give it a new one it is trained to produce something, at all costs, that also looks like human language. However if you give it something very different, the best translation will be something still fluent, but not at all connected to the input.”

Sean Colbath, a senior scientist at BBN Technologies who works on machine translation, agreed that strange outputs are probably due to Google Translate’s algorithm looking for order in chaos. He also pointed out that the languages that generate the strangest results—Somali, Hawaiian and Maori—have smaller bodies of translated text than more widely spoken languages like English or Chinese. As a result, he said, it’s possible that Google used religious texts like the Bible, which has been translated into many languages, to train its model in those languages, resulting in the religious content.
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Traitorfish said:
Today I had to resigned my lease, and one section details the conditions under why a tenancy may be terminated early- the property is being sold, the landlord intends to take up residence, and so on.

But I noticed that tucked among these was the provision that I can be evicted if the property is intended for the residence of a "minister or full-time lay missionary".

So that's what TIL. What I hope to learn in future is, is this normal, or is this a product of my country's outsize reverence for the Kirk?
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Contracts can be whatever the person writing them thinks that the person signing them doesn't know isn't allowed.
 
The property sold aspect is not that abnormal. The taking up residence is probably rare(never seen it). And the last one is outright bat crazy.
 
Traitorfish said:
Thing is, I looked it up, and it's all standard Scottish lease law. Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016, apparently. So it might just be those wacky Presbyterians up to their old tricks.
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Just stick a rood up in the rafters. It's like garlic for Presbyters.
 
TIL that the most expensive AirBnB prices are not altogether what I expected them to be (prices are per night, in USD).

Bloomberg, 24 July 2018 - These are the world's most expensive Airbnb cities

1. Miami - $205
2. Boston - $195
3. Reykjavik - $194
4. Tel Aviv - $188
5. Dubai - $185
6. Los Angeles - $180
7. Amsterdam and San Francisco - $178
9. Jerusalem and Sydney - $173
 
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