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Month: November 2024

Outer Limits and The Terminator

Outer Limits and The Terminator

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Did you know that Harlan Ellison sued and won both an out of court settlement and now appears in the credits of later prints of the 1984 Schwarzenegger movie The Terminator?

The 1964 Outer Limits episode ‘Soldier’ was written by Harlan Ellison and was loosely adapted from his 1957 short story ‘Soldier from Tomorrow‘. The similarities were so close that a settlement was reached despite James Cameron who disagreed with the ruling.

Give the original a watch and see just how close (and far) they were.

John Deere’s farming technology reaches far

John Deere’s farming technology reaches far

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John Deere seems to be embracing new farming technology at a pace that is putting it’s competitors to shame.

John Deere recently announced a partnership with Corteva Agriscience to combine farm equipment with data-drive seed, fungicides/herbicides/etc recommendations.

They also announced their 2024 startup collaborators – and it gives us a hint as to what other technologies they are looking into. It’s pretty clear they’re looking at everything from farming/agricultural equipment advances, business management, electric charging, freight, and job site management.

  • Constellr – a company measuring land surface temperature and water from its own satellites at unprecedented accuracy levels to enable insights for a more sustainable future. 
  • Geminos – an artificial intelligence company empowering businesses to understand and leverage causality for enhanced decision-making.  
  • SB Quantum – a quantum sensing company focused on navigation based on a novel quantum magnetometer. 
  • Fermata Energy – a leader in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) bidirectional charging platform technology. 
  • goFlux – a Brazil based logistics company focused on digital solutions to connect the ecosystem for freight transactions.  
  • Cloudscape Labs – a production management software company focused on providing job site visibility across the construction team to help meet production, cost, and safety targets. 

Articles:

A reading appropriate for election season

A reading appropriate for election season

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Beloved:
Remind them to be under the control of magistrates and authorities,
to be obedient, to be open to every good enterprise.
They are to slander no one, to be peaceable, considerate,
exercising all graciousness toward everyone.
For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, deluded,
slaves to various desires and pleasures,
living in malice and envy,
hateful ourselves and hating one another.

But when the kindness and generous love
of God our savior appeared,
not because of any righteous deeds we had done
but because of his mercy,
he saved us through the bath of rebirth
and renewal by the Holy Spirit,
whom he richly poured out on us
through Jesus Christ our savior,
so that we might be justified by his grace
and become heirs in hope of eternal life.

–Ti 3:1-7

Life is a journey of learning who God is and building a relationship with Him. One of the most difficult concepts Christians must wrap their minds around, and probably one of the least sought modern virtues, is how God loves obedience. Jesus, God himself, cast all of his powers aside to become a helpless child – and was obedient to his created mother and father.

The election, current public discourse and political climate have been contentious – putting it mildly. The early Christians were often living under political regimes that persecuted, arrested, and killed them. Yet, here we read that Christians were taught to be obedient to authority. Even Jesus, when being falsely tried, convicted, and killed – was still obedient to authority of the chief priests and Roman authorities. Even when He could have used the power of the crowds to have stopped it, walked away from Jerusalem, or talked his way out of a death sentence.

Instead, we are to act with peace and act graciously towards everyone and be open to every good enterprise. Even bad situations have opportunities for good – look for them! We too were (or are) just as full of evil and shackled by our passions so we do not to slander anyone – but speak always at peace and be considerate to all.

Obedience is a difficult thing – but I think it teaches us a lot of powerful lessons. For one, I think it shows God’s power to turn evil into good. It reminds us that it’s not our efforts that are important, but living in the presence of God in our actions that is most important. It’s when we do not seek to change things through our own actions that God can demonstrate His power through us. Even the seemingly pointless death of Jesus, killed like a common criminal, has turned into the means of salvation for the whole world.

So, step away from the toxic social media. Turn off the doom-filled TV and news feeds. Instead, be Christ in the world – and be the light of hope in the midst of the darkness.

Finding hidden cameras is not easy

Finding hidden cameras is not easy

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The author of this article uses various methods to find hidden cameras in a hotel/AirBnB rooms and tests the effectiveness. Methods used:

  • Naked eye: 1 of 27
  • Mobile phone app: 3 of 27
  • RF detector: 0 of 27
  • Cheap $50 lens detector: 2 of 27
  • Advanced $400 lens detector: 11 of 27

In short, they were all not very good and techniques and searching styles mattered.

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McDonald’s quits AI

McDonald’s quits AI

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McDonald’s is ending a test run of AI drive-thrus. It paired with IBM and put it in more than 100 restaurants since 2021. The goal was to simplify voice-activated ordering. It certainly couldn’t have anything to do with replacing workers with automation given the new $20/hour minimum wage for fast food restaurants (CA is considering another 3.5% increase in 2025).

Two sources familiar with the technology told CNBC that among its challenges, it had issues interpreting different accents and dialects, which affected order accuracy. McDonald’s will keep using IBM’s other solutions, but AI ordering seems to be on hold.

Reminds me of some issues iPhone has in Scotland.

Virtual R&D Hardware

Virtual R&D Hardware

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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.

Engineer becomes an influencer

Engineer becomes an influencer

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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?

  1. Feast and famine
    Work and deals are inconsistent. Some months are packed, others are empty.
  2. Brands don’t want to pay for content
    According to an in-depth article by Shopify, influencers with 50,000 to 100,000 followers (such as Graub who has 66,000 followers) may earn between $125 and $1,200 for each post. However, many brands only want to pay by giving the influencer free products or often ask for free work. Without an agency/talent manager, getting paid/respect can be difficult.
  3. The job is controversial
    “Content creation is such a new field most people do not see it as an actual job to pursue. So quitting my full-time job to do something that people did not consider a job, I dealt with a lot of negativity, discouragement and disappointment from everyone. I had to stop considering what other people were saying”
  4. Her engineering skills were beneficial in content creation
    “A lot of brands provide detailed guidelines for their videos so being able to utilize my quality control skills means I’m always able to meet their requirements. My contract negotiation skills have been helpful when it came time to signing deals with brands. Project management has also helped me manage my content and create videos consistently.”
  5. Not always what she expected
    She has been successful and gotten work/collaborations – but admits “it is not enough to live my life like this”. She has toyed with returning back to part-time work.

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Automated driving from big brother

Automated driving from big brother

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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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Ranked choice appears to impact voter engagement

Ranked choice appears to impact voter engagement

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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:

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2024/11/portlands-ranked-choice-debut-causes-voter-engagement-to-crater-1-in-5-who-cast-ballots-chose-no-one-for-city-council.html?gift=b5be0308-e613-4099-ace9-f5de966b4b63