Robotics & ISS docking simulator (Spam Mail #38)

💩 Cool shit

ISS Docking Simulator - Try and dock the SpaceX Dragon2 to the ISS using this simulator with the actual interface used by NASA.

Tweet2Doom - Doom literally plays on everything. This bot lets you play it on Twitter.

Just the punctuation - Paste in some text and, as the name suggests, see just the punctuation.

Sell! Sell! Sell! - A fun visualization of capitalism. That was a weird sentence to write. See how many shoes, pizzas and more are sold every second.

Neocities - A website designer inspired to bring back the Geocities and Angelfire era of the web.

Stripe Press - This interface gives you the tactility of picking up a physical object.

Abduction - I’m not really sure what this is. Other than an odd little game where you fly a UFO to abduct masses of people. If nothing else, it’s an impressive rendering of the number of people you select.

💎 Word gems

Facebook's Fall From Grace Looks a Lot Like Ford's (Wired / Mar Hicks)

Facebook has often attempted to skirt responsibility by comparing itself to established industries, including the car. What they always exclude in that comparison is regulation. This article makes a great point of comparison with Ford. It took 8 years after the Model-T was introduced for the first stop sign, and decades before traffic lights were fully rolled out across the US. It feels like we’re in a similar inflection point with social media companies today.

Ford instead cut corners on safety, producing cars like the Ford Pinto that removed key safety features in order to get to market quickly and hold down manufacturing costs to reap maximum profit. In 1977, the infamous Ford Pinto “memo,” which was uncovered by Mother Jones investigative reporters, detailed the company’s horrifying cost analysis of past and future accidents. According to the memo, the gruesome deaths and full-body burns suffered by Pinto occupants in rear-end collisions amounted to an acceptable loss because, once lawsuits or other settlements were paid out, they would amount to less than the cost of fixing the Pinto design to prevent the gas tank from exploding. The cost of fixing the design was $11 per car. After public and governmental pressure, it was eventually implemented through a recall demanded by the recently created National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

How DeepMind is Reinventing the Robot (IEEE Spectrum / Tom Chivers)

I’ve often heard how the leap between using AI for specific tasks, like playing Go, and general AI is vast. I never understood why that is until reading this explanation. In exploring the limitations of neural networks it also looks at why robotics is still years away.

But imagine you take your dog-and-cat-classifying neural network, and now start training it to distinguish a bus from a car. All its previous training will be useless. Its outputs in response to vehicle images will be random at first. But as it is trained, it will reweight its connections and gradually become effective. It will eventually be able to classify buses and cars with great accuracy. At this point, though, if you show it a picture of a dog, all the nodes will have been reweighted, and it will have "forgotten" everything it learned previously.

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