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Incident At Price Chopper

He’s standing in the dead middle of the meat section at Price Chopper screaming “HOW CAN THERE NOT BE ANY FUCKING STEAK?”  Someone comes out bearing chicken from behind the steel clad gates of the backroom where they cut meat and stage the cases. “Hey, you got any steak back there?” “Steak? No sir. None.” […]




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Casual Friday

Started out as Friday but became a Monday and thus the weekend became confusing. I baked a flourless cake and wept over a Sunday dinner  that felt more like Tuesday’s leftovers, like the whole leftover menu from the whole week. Why do we bother naming the days anyway — it reminds us we once had […]




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Again, the Maltese judicial system is proven to have collapsed and now it also seems ridiculous



Today one can read in The Times of a man being sentenced to one month in prison and fined 233€ for illegal gambling. The fantastic and almost unbelievable fact is that the crime was committed in 2001 and the man pleaded guilty in 2002. The man had to wait ten years to be punished for a crime he had admitted almost immediately! To make this even more surprising (well, maybe not so surprising; this is probably typically for the judicial system in Malta) the judge found that the prosecution had failed to prove the allegations against the man, but, since he had admitted the crime the judge had to find him guilty. The Observer sincerely hopes that the latter is not true. In most other countries, with a more sophisticated and functioning judicial system than Malta, an admission is not enough to prove that a person has committed a crime.  When famous murders occur, quite many people come to the police and plead guilty. This is a well-known fact among Alphacriminologists. Probably and hopefully The Times has not published full details about why the judge had to find the man guilty.









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Tensor Considered Harmful

Tensor Considered Harmful, by Alexander Rush

TL;DR: Despite its ubiquity in deep learning, Tensor is broken. It forces bad habits such as exposing private dimensions, broadcasting based on absolute position, and keeping type information in documentation. This post presents a proof-of-concept of an alternative approach, named tensors, with named dimensions. This change eliminates the need for indexing, dim arguments, einsum- style unpacking, and documentation-based coding. The prototype PyTorch library accompanying this blog post is available as namedtensor.

Thanks to Edward Z. Yang for pointing me to this "Considered Harmful" position paper.









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Didn't We Just Do This?

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And the answer is: Yes, we did. Last week. But Open Road Media is putting The Iron Dragon's Daughter on e-sale again. $1.99 on this Wednesday, April 1, only. I don't have to tell you what holiday that is. But apparently they really mean it.

I expect most people who read this blog and wanted an e-copy of that book got one during last week's sale. But I publicize the event for two reasons:

1) Writers should always be as cooperative to their publishers as they can stand being.

2) Maybe the reason for this promotion is that they're putting a lot of books on sale at once.

If you're an ebook reader, you might want to look into the second possibility. Or maybe subscribe to one of the newsletters below.

Here's the e-letter they sent me, with all the boilerplate:
                         
Dear Michael Swanwick,

We are pleased to let you know that the following ebook(s) will be featured in price promotions soon.


ISBN13 Title Author Promo Type Country Start Date End Date Promo Price
9781504025669 The Iron Dragon's Daughter Swanwick, Michael ORM - Portalist NL US 2020-04-01 2020-04-01 $1.99
9781504025669 The Iron Dragon's Daughter Swanwick, Michael ORM - Portalist NL CA 2020-04-01 2020-04-01 $1.99


Open Road will promote the feature via social media. We hope you can share the deal with your network as well. You can subscribe to the newsletters at the links below so that you will get the direct link to the deal on the day that it appears.


Newsletter Link
  Early Bird Books     Subscribe Now  
The Lineup Subscribe Now
The Portalist Subscribe Now
Murder & Mayhem Subscribe Now
A Love So True Subscribe Now
The Archive Subscribe Now
The Reader Subscribe Now


Please let us know if you have any questions. We are thrilled to be part of this promotion; hope you are too!

Best,
The Open Road Editorial Team

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Citywide Blackout: Steampunk Dragons

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I've been podcast! Or at least my words have, podded up into an electronic bundle and cast out into the Noosphere. Over on Citywide Blackout, I discuss The Iron Dragon's Mother, worldbuilding, and the novel I wrote with Gardner Dozois--City Under the Stars.

It is impossible to exaggerate the influence Gardner had on my life. Over the course of a single evening, he and Jack Dann taught me how to write.  He and I and Jack, in various combinations, wrote stories together and routinely sold them to publications like Playboy, Penthouse, and (this always amused Gardner hugely) High Times. Gardner and his wife, Susan Casper, were good friends to me and to Marianne for over forty years.

But then Susan died and, a little later, Gardner did too, leaving our last collaboration unfinished. But he'd told me how it would end and so I finished it so all the world could discover that he'd finished on a high note. I wanted one last novel, to stand as a monument to him.

You can hear the entire story by clicking here.


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Civic Tech: We tried to get a copy of the Sidewalk Toronto agreement

Why all the secrecy?

If you follow the news in Toronto or if you’re interested in technology, you’ve probably heard of Sidewalk Toronto by now. It’s a joint project of Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, and Waterfront Toronto. This is the tech giant’s first foray into urban development and infrastructure, with Toronto hosting the pilot project. In […]

The post Civic Tech: We tried to get a copy of the Sidewalk Toronto agreement appeared first on Torontoist.




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Top 10 Friday Night SmackDown moments: WWE Top 10, May 8, 2020

Top 10 Friday Night SmackDown moments: WWE Top 10, May 8, 2020




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Analysis: Tennis pros' US return amid pandemic no true model

Analysis: Tennis pros' US return amid pandemic no true model




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Great Party Ideas – How to Fight the Clouds

You guys must give a lot of parties because you all have really good ideas!  I can hardly wait to see what Spec and Skeeter choose to do for the celebration party! Tra and Skeeter and I hung out on Friday with some of you.  It was so great to see everyone. I was expecting Spec would show up […]




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You Did It! We Got Back Our Planet!

My friends, you did it.  You worked hard and chased the Darkness away.  Special thanks to my friend Denver and Toki who wrote a really good poem/cheer.   He is right, we have to stop the hacking – no more stealing passwords. I will be calling a Celebration Party.  Everyone is welcome.  Watch the What’s New […]




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Greedy Cloud’s Hidden Spring Furniture and Garden Décor Items Discovered!

Dear Idea Seeker or Ally of the Idea Seekers, I have great news!  Greedy Cloud has been chased away and Spec and Tra discovered some new spring time house and garden items that he was hiding from everyone. Check them out in my house and garden, or go see Spec, Tra and Skeeter’s houses. Here […]





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Ride and Shop






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Sally Forth Sunday: Did Ted Already Know? (No.)

Note: Written and illustrated months before, well, everything happened.




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First post and a new video

First off welcome to my site The Razors Edge. If you've been to this site before you were probably expecting to find my old website which delt with post apocalyptic survival. I've decided to do a complete overhaul including the content. Now this site deals with topics such as basic SEO tips ( Search Engine Optimization ) for those new to creating websites and blogs, movie reviews, general tips and advice, videos, and anything and everything in-between. Basically same name completly different taste




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How to get your youtube videos more hits

YouTube and other video sharing sites like Vimeo for example are great places to get traffic to your website or blog. But there only as effective as the traffic those video receive, makes sense right. Obviously if your vides are getting next to no hits, your website will see little to no increase in traffic, which in a word sucks. So for this post I'm going to go over some simple steps you can use if your new to YouTube to help get your videos noticed. In the next post I'll cover some ways you can take those videos and use them to get traffic back to your site.




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What to consider to get listed on dmoz

When you submit a website to search engines, most search engines automatically crawl websites looking for links and popularity of the sites they crawl to determine how they list on search engine results, one site that doesn’t is DMOZ. Also known as the Open Directory Project or ODP, this directory is entirely monitored by people (volunteer editors), this means that you have to submit your site and wait for somebody to physically look at your site. This process can take weeks, months, or even in a few cases years, so why bother with this site at all?




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12 Things Your First Aid Kit Should Have

When it comes to making a bug out bag, or having an emergency bag for long road trips, or camping, and hiking trips. One of if not the most important items you need for your emergency gear is a first aid kit. And while they can be bought almost anywhere, there contents can vary depending on there size or price range. Regardless of your budget there are some items you should always have present in your first aid kit. Here is a list of 12 things I recommend everyone have that aren’t always included in an off the shelf first aid kit.




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How To Autoplay Videos And Why You Don't Want To

How to get your YouTube videos to auto play on your website Depending on your site having your videos auto play can help your site stand out. When it comes to embedding your videos from YouTube however there’s no feature to set up your video to auto play. It’s important to remember before you enable auto play on your videos that doing so can actually harm your site. Many people don’t like videos or music playing as soon as they open a page, especially if there’s no way to turn it off that’s easy to spot. Look at your site to see if this is something that you want to do.




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Robocop So Cold (Video)

For this video I chose the song So Cold by Breaking Benjamin which was inspired by the movie 28 Days Later. I thought this would be a good match since the Robocop movies take place in the not to distant future where cooperate greed and decay are running rampant.




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Star Wars Map Of The Problematique (fan video)

This is a Star Wars tribute video to the original movies using the song map of the problematique by Muse.




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How To Protect Your YouTube Videos

Recently a friend of mine who creates fan videos like me had one of his videos copied and re uploaded onto YouTube. The copied version was almost 100 percent identical except for a 2 second picture of a movie poster at the beginning, and a short video about Christian persecution attached to the end. Apart from that it was the same video, music and everything. The reality is this is a very common problem amongst people who upload videos on or other video sharing sites and it’s extremely easy to do. There are countless numbers of sites where you can download videos and easily upload them onto your channel and claim them as your own. So how do you protect your YouTube videos from being copied?




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Handsum36a Is A Video Thief (blog post)

Recently I stumbled across a Youtube channel that was filled with nothing but videos that had been taken from other YouTubers, uploaded onto his site and claimed for his own. There were no descriptions as to where these videos came from, no link pointing back to their original creators. And to top it off at the end of each video was a quick blurb about religion.




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14 Black Hat SEO Tricks To Avoid

Black hat SEO, if you’re not familiar with it, it’s a general term that covers everything that’s considered unethical or “cheating” to get your site ranked in the number one spots in the search engines. In the short term many of these tricks do work at getting your site the number 1 spot, in the long term however your site will be penalized, pushed down in search engine rankings, or your domain may be completely abandoned by them. And if your website is about trying to make money, or is part of a business this can have a serious impact. So how do you know what’s considered black hat seo if you’re brand new to the whole website or blogging game? Here is a list of 14 black hat seo tricks to avoid.............




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How To Link To The Middle Of A YouTube Video (blog post)

Let say you found a video you want to share with some friends. Or perhaps you want to post it to your website. The problem is that it’s long and the stuff you want people to see is in the last half of it.




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SEO Scams To Avoid

There are literally countless companies promising you top ranking for your niche, thousands of hits, and the ability to make you lots of money quickly. Sound too good to be true, chances are it is. There are thousands of SEO scammers out there peddling B.S and false promises in order to do one thing PART YOU WITH YOUR MONEY. These companies don’t care if it hurts your website and how well it could rank in the search engines. They don’t care if their hurting your business, they just want your cash and are willing to lie to get it............................... The reality is that SEO is not a get quick rich scheme; it takes hard work, lots of good content, patience, link building, and time to see results. This isn’t to say that all SEO companies are con artists out to rip you off; there are plenty of good ones.




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Stupid Questions On Yahoo Answers (Blog Post)

I like using Yahoo Answers, it’s an easy way to get the word out about your site and build some good back links in the process. I’ve noticed in increase in really stupid questions in the last little while though. And while there have always been people who ask the obvious, or ask questions that make you want to reach through your computer screen and strangle them. Lately it seems to be ever second question. Perhaps it’s because it’s summer, maybe it’s something in the water who knows..........




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11 Places To Get Content Ideas For Your Website

It’s no secret that having great content on your site is the corner stone to getting visitors and keeping them interested. But what happens when you can’t come up with any ideas? It can be frustrating trying to come up with something you hope your visitors will like on a regular schedule if your mind is blank. Fortunate there are lots of places to find content ideas for your website. Here is a list of 11 places to look for website content ideas..................




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A Typical Email Scam To Avoid (Blog Post)

I get scam emails all the time, all claiming that I have untold riches waiting for me. All I need to do is fill out a simple form with either my credit card or social security information or simply send them a cheque to “release my money” It’s hard to imagine that anyone would buy into these scams, but they wouldn’t keep doing them if there wasn’t some poor sucker out there buying into it.




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Falling Down Coming Undone (Fan Video

Falling down is the tale of Bill Foster (played by Michael Douglas) a.k.a D-FENS which is his license plate. A guy who isn’t having a very good time. He lost his wife, his home, his daughter, and his job at a defence plant.............




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Optimizing Your YouTube Channel And Videos For Traffic

YouTube is one of the most important marketing tools out there when it comes to getting the message out about your business or your website. It’s currently the second most used search engine behind Google (which owns YouTube by the way) and is the biggest video sharing site in the world. Like it or hate it having videos on YouTube is a good way to promote what you have. But just having videos isn’t enough to get a tonne of traffic; you need to know how to optimize your YouTube channel and videos to get more traffic......................




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4 Things To Avoid When Making Videos (Blog Post)

Go onto any site like Yahoo Answers and your going to see a lot of questions about YouTube. Questions like how to get more views, how to get your videos to the top of search results, how to be a YouTube partner, etc etc. However one of the most common is people asking others what they think of their videos. While some of these videos are good (I’m no video expert myself) most are well for lack of a better term crap. So here is a list of 4 things to avoid when making videos..........