The lure of virtual fencing has been on some ranchers’ minds as more and more offerings become available in the U.S. This is driven by the rising cost of physical fencing and an increased interest in precision grazing practices.
Companies offering virtual fencing have primarily relied on base towers or cell signal to manage cattle grazing, but one company has taken away the need for these towers. According to a recent announcement, Halter has launched direct-to-satellite smart collars, which allow ranchers to manage cattle anywhere they can see the sky.?
Like many people I’ve been following closely both the hype and reality of ChatGPT. At the same time, I’ve been learning a lot about different forms of machine learning, and how they can be used to enhance computing, especially as computers grow in power. I also have been using computers for more then a quarter century, so I have some ideas on where machine learning could be useful for every day uses, while other cases were not so useful.
Things I Don’t Think We’ll See in the Future
ChatGPT is not going to replace writers, artists, or secretaries except for the most basic tasks
ChatGPT will not ever write quality news articles, press releases, or publications.
Natural language searches will not become the norm, as it’s a lot of typing or speaking and prone to mistakes, however machine learning will continue to be applied to both search terms and results to get more useful results
Things I Think We’ll See in the Future
Machine learning will be applied to people’s personal computer file system to better flag mistakes in documents, like in Microsoft Word. If for example, you regularly type out a press release or a report a certain way in Word, and something is different format-wise or stylistically in your current version, your Word processor would flag if not automatically fix it.
Machine learning could automatically generate templates based on previously saved documents on your computer, allowing you just to update and fill in the details of the document.
Machine learning would be used for resizing and colorizing photos in Gimp and Adobe Photoshop, automatically tracing edges, vectorizing and detecting words.
Machine learning would make the creation of graphics more automated, by creating sensible styles, and anticipating your next move.
Command line code would be far better automated, with much better tab competition both based on the commands others have used, and what you have previously run
Basically, any process you run on your computer would have much more tab completion, with the computer automatically predicting your likely next move, helping to speed up processing, as the computer could start working on the likely next step
I don’t anticipate the centralized machine learning model, with vast databases getting that much play. Internet access can be funky, and people are often hesitant to share data. It’s risky to be too reliant on other people’s servers. But I do think machine learning is going to only grow in importance on desktop computers, with more and more predictions made locally to assist users in getting tasks done quicker on their computers.
As Republicans, we were excited when the Catholic Church elected an American pope. America is the greatest country in the history of the world, and it was absurd that it took 250 years for one of our own to finally be put in charge of the Holy See. Unfortunately, it turns out that Pope Leo XIV is the wrong kind of American—a woke liberal who denounces things like “violence” and “wiping out entire civilizations.” There’s no better evidence of Pope Leo’s liberal failings than Vatican City. Like all Blue cities, it’s overrun with crime. Looking for the perfect Graduation gift? Perhaps you’d enjoy this gorgeous deluxe boxed set of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Shockingly affordable!
The Vatican is in desperate need of criminal justice reform. As of today, any criminal can walk into the Vatican, confess to any crime, immediately be forgiven, and walk out with zero consequences. Any punitive measures are extremely lenient and amount to verbal commitments to pray a few “Hail Marys” or “Our Fathers,” or, at best, the Rosary. In what can only be described as leftist wish fulfillment, there appear to be no prisons in the Vatican, and the only law enforcement agency is the Swiss Guard, who look more like court jesters than a police force.
President Trump, on the other hand, understands that criminals should have to pay for their crimes. That is why he has established a process that forces criminals to pay upwards of $1 million to receive a presidential pardon.
It should come as no surprise that the Vatican’s soft-on-crime policies have resulted in a massive immigration problem. Thanks to its porous border with Italy, millions of migrants from around the world flock to the Vatican every year. In fact, even the year-round population of the Vatican seems to be entirely made up of immigrants, as its birth rate is virtually zero. With the entire city-state being run by immigrants, it’s no wonder the Vatican is a sanctuary city home to St. Peter’s Basilica—one of the largest sanctuaries on Earth.
In the years leading up to its 7 April 1964 launch, however, the 360 was one of the scariest dramas in American business. It took a nearly fanatical commitment at all levels of IBM to bring forth this remarkable collection of machines and software. While the technological innovations that went into the S/360 were important, how they were created and deployed bordered on disaster. The company experienced what science policy expert Keith Pavitt called “tribal warfare”: people clashing and collaborating in a rapidly growing company with unstable, and in some instances unknown, technologies, as uncertainty and ambiguity dogged all the protagonists.
Ultimately, IBM was big and diverse enough in talent, staffing, financing, and materiel to succeed. In an almost entrepreneurial fashion, it took advantage of emerging technologies, no matter where they were located within the enterprise. In hindsight, it seemed a sloppy and ill-advised endeavor, chaotic in execution and yet brilliantly successful. We live in an age that celebrates innovation, so examining cases of how innovation is done can only illuminate our understanding of the process.
This is a rather fascinating story about the history of the technology.
In the modern era, it’s important that everybody know how to do a little computer programming. Not an expert on every langauge, but basic profinency on the concepts behind computing coding can make individuals much more productive. It’s hard to describe how many times before, I’ve used little bits of code to make my life better, to automate processes, to find solutions to problems that nobody else has addressed.
Invited presentation at a meeting of the Old Guard of Summit NJ on January 5, 2021. Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and one of the original Unix pioneers at Bell Labs. Brian described his experiences teaching "Computers in Our World," a first year course designed to inform non-technical students how modern hardware, software and communications systems operate, and their ubiquitous role in today's world. It was a 45-minute version of his one-semester talk!
