Corellium helps developers ditch managing expensive and time consuming labs of physical devices/OS combinations by creating a platform that can present you with fully virtualized smart devices (iOS, Android, and Arm) at almost native performance.
This kind of virtualization lets you develop and test apps on a wide variety of hardware, run a number of their security analysis tools, perform malware analysis is safe sandboxes, and do training.
23 year old Nimilolu Graub made the bold decision to leave a career in mechanical engineering to pursue being a social media influencer. What did she learn?
Article:
The end of speeding as we know it?
The NTSB is calling on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to mandate the use of speed control technology in every new car. It uses a mechanism called ISA (intelligent speed-assist).
ISA technology uses the car’s GPS location and matches it to a database of posted speed limits and onboard cameras to come up with the legal speed limit. Passive ISA systems warn a driver when the vehicle exceeds the speed limit through sound, visuals or haptic alerts. Active systems might make it more difficult to increase the speed of a vehicle, or even fully limit it from going, above a posted speed limit.
Europe already mandated such systems in all new vehicles starting in 2022.
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Hailed as a way to break up the 2 party system, encourage more moderate candidates, and improve voter engagement – Portland embraced ranked-choice voting. Despite it having been tried in numerous locals since the early 1900’s – it has often been later repealed. So how did it work for Portland?
There were 2 ranked choice selections this year: your district city council member and mayor. Each had nearly 20 candidates. An entire front and back page of the ballot were just those 2 races. Unfortunately, it appears the exact opposite happened with regards to engagement.
Despite getting up to 6 total rank votes and having 19 candidates, 1 in 5 voters who cast ballots chose no one for Portland city council which was far more than in the previous two city council election cycles. For mayor, 11% of returned ballots didn’t vote for any of the 19 mayoral candidates compared to 6% in the previous 2020 election. In short, voters almost doubled the rate of leaving a position blank.
What was interesting is that Portland had between 50-85% voter participation, with many districts in the 80% range – which is very encouraging.
However, I do think Ellen Seljan summed up my own experience.
“My overall conclusion is that the voters were overwhelmed, found the system and number of candidates too hard and didn’t feel confident in their vote choice,” said Ellen Seljan, a political science professor at Lewis & Clark College. “The easier thing to do is to skip those races entirely.”
I can confirm it required a TON more work sifting through the nearly 40 candidates for the 2 offices. I didn’t skip any races, and did rank all the folks I was interested in. It exhausted me enough I did it in chunks over a few days.
Sadly, many of the candidates were clearly fodder: single issue candidates, extreme candidates, completely inexperienced candidates, and unknown candidates. Too many didn’t submit statements or have a website. We had one candidate that wanted to tear down/convert city infrastructure to bring back horses and let homeless help manage them. Another guy was an unemployed legal student living in his parents basement (his own words).
I think the big failure is the lack of information – critical information. With no other info, I found myself looking some of the people up in LinkedIn or checking if they have a criminal record. You have to do all that vetting yourself – a dangerous lack of information as many voters likely don’t have that time.
Oregon Live has more interesting charts and data:
Interested in looking up how much your retro video game system, pc game, comic books, lego sets, or other toys are worth? Check it out here:
“There is one girl here who they are trying to get her out of here. She has tried to stab me twice and I filed reports on that”
“The problems with this building happen to be TPI moving in drug addicts who are not rehabilitated, and need to be rehabilitated, but they are not.”
In the past month, there have been two homicides in front of the the Home Forward Louisa Flowers building in the Pearl – and an egregious animal abuse case caught on camera in their elevator. The building has graffiti on walls and windows. Residents report apartments that smell of fentanyl, unwanted guests are often found in the building, and residents shared multiple photos from inside of trash piling up in the hallways and stairwells.
The response?
On Thursday the building leadership had a pizza party for all residents where they invited case workers and other community resources to connect with the residents. Home Forward workers said they hope to ‘foster strong, supportive networks among the residents,’
Sounds like exactly like the kind of comically ineffective plans we’ve come to expect when dealing with homicidal residents, serious drug addiction, and a quickly deteriorating living environments in Portland. Instead of experts coming in to deal with serious drug addiction and violence – we’ll have a pizza party and talk about it. Meanwhile, animals are being abused openly, fentanyl is wafting around the building, and other residents are having their lives threatened on a daily basis.
Sadly, this is what happens time and again when largely untrained non-profit employees (non-profits who are switched out every time the money runs out) try to deal with very serious criminal and drug abuse issues in Portland.
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Portland just tried ranked choice voting. It was an interesting experience. I’m not sure if I’m 100% sold just yet, but it seems to have worked reasonably well. If nothing else – it’s a fascinating dive into the data.
On the plus side: I did like having the ability to pick 2nd and 3rd choice candidates. In one case, my 2nd choice candidate won.
On the down side: it required a LOT more work. There were almost 20 candidates for mayor alone, and a decent number of them didn’t submit any information about themselves, were odd-ball one-issue candidates, or were borderline quacks. This easily took me 2-4x the time I would have normally spent. Doing this for a dozen candidates at state and local levels would be exhausting.
As with all things, the unintended consequences are likely what is most interesting. I suspect it’s going encourage candidates to start overlapping on stances in order to steal/appeal each other’s 2nd and 3rd votes – especially if they are not a front runner. This could make the voter’s work even more tough as it’s more like splitting hairs than decisive differences. I think it’s also going to encourage candidates to be more homogenous. Outliers and more extreme ends – on both the left and right – were very soundly defeated. This is probably a good thing in such a far left state like Oregon that’s had some pretty extreme candidates in previous elections. It’s definitely going to make campaign strategy much more interesting, and likely break up the entrenched homogenous political structure of Portland.
Anyway, if you’re curious how to see how each round of voting went, the Multnomah website has a neat visualization how each of the rounds worked out:
Alternatively, a local forum user put together a Sankey diagram of the way the votes flowed from one candidate to the next as candidates were eliminated:
The district 4 councilor race was even more crazy:
Here was district 2 with Kanal starting out a resounding 3rd and ending up bubbling to the top, while Guiney started first and ended 2nd:
Bonus:
KGW8 did a great mayoral candidate interview. I liked the format a LOT. They had some pre-canned questions, but I loved the fact they asked audience submitted ‘raise your hand’ questions that made the candidates actually state their opinions in a yes/no fashion instead of just waffling around like the career candidates usually do.
Back in the day, I worked on this little project called Larrabee – which later turned into the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor. It was an ambitious and exciting platform. It consisted of a ton of 512 bit wide instructions to operate like a lot of streaming GPU architectures, yet was fully general purpose x86.
It turned out that getting performance out of this hardware was difficult. In order to get the full potential of the hardware, you simply had to utilize the vector units. Without that, it is like writing a single threaded app on a 8 core system. Single SIMD lane operation just wasn’t going to cut it as was written about in 2017 International Journal of Parallel Programming article:
“Our results show that, although the Xeon Phi delivers a relatively good speedup in comparison with a shared-memory architecture in terms of scalability, the relatively low computing power of its computational units when specific vectorization and SIMD instructions are not fully exploited makes this first generation of Xeon Phi architectures not competitive”
Using the Xeon Phi Platform to Run Speculatively Parallelized Codes
The paper, and the host of others linked on the page as references, are a good read and gives some hints why fixed-function GPUs have an advantage when it comes to raw streaming throughput. Hint: cache and data flow behavior is as, if not more, important as utilizing vectorization in such architectures.
I loved the Twilight Zone as a kid. Every year one of the local stations would put on a Twilight Zone marathon and play episodes back to back, 24×7, for the entire memorial day weekend. I used to try staying up all night to watch every episode. I usually made it about 18-20 hours before finally drifting off on the couch.
The Outer Limits was also known for tales of the strange and unusual, but I found they weren’t nearly as compelling (If I’m honest, half of the Twilight Zone episodes weren’t really compelling either). But recently I ran across this episode titled ‘It Crawled Out Of The Woodwork‘ and I have to say that it’s incredible. The story could easily be made into a full-length movie and be pretty terrifying. The antagonist was frightening – and even for it’s era.
The story is based on a great question – likely based on the strange and frightening discoveries occurring during the nuclear age. Namely, while delving into the secret depths of the universe, we may find or unleash terrifying things. Even more, those things might just ‘crawl out of the woodwork’ of our experiments in unexpected and uncontrollable ways.
Definitely worth a watch.
I loved the Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace series. It’s one of the best comedy/mock-u-series shows to come out in the last few years.
But now there is a theory that Garth Marenghi was based on Shaun Hutson. What do you think?