So, it is my very great pleasure to invite to the microphone Mr. Glema Motlanti, the former president and former deputy president of the Republic of South Africa, including former deputy president of the African National Congress, the ANC. He's currently the chairperson of the Oliver Original Tambo School of Leadership and also the chairperson of the African National Congress Electoral Committee that oversees ANC's provincial and national leadership elections, including the election of the current South African president for a second term, and other leaders who have now ascended into national government and the National Assembly in South Africa. I think, you know, if our closing ceremony is to help us to look into the future, is a boost to go home with. I can't think of a better leader to set that vision than President Motlanti. Thank you very much Naomi for your warm words of welcome. Let me also recognize and greet my fellow panelists, Gabriel Williams, Paul Hunt, and Judy Chan. And good afternoon to all of you. But first off, I would like to thank Ham Reduction International for providing this dynamic forum to share the latest research and discussions on practices in drug use, harm reduction, and human rights, especially at a time when the voices of the people most affected by drug policies around the world are in desperate need for not only policy reform, but a pathway that navigates communities to realizing shared long-term value within a system that abolds compassionate and sustainable outcomes and replaces harmful practices with human-centered science-based development. By mending our political, economic, and social approaches and building a language and understanding of holistic concern, we can create a standard for the entire world. Over the last few days, we have learned so much from each other, confirming that there is strength in solidarity. As people, as a community, and as a global movement, we can rally and unify social forces and ensure that the paradigm does shift with regard to drug policy. Year on year, this conference attracts diverse and wide-ranging individuals and organizations who gather to harness their abilities, develop partnerships, exchange vital science, and chart pathways towards a more humane, equitable, and inclusive society for all. Guided by evidence and the science of what helps to deliver shared health objectives and social goals, we are further able to protect, respect, and fulfill the right to health without prejudice or stigma. This is the true potential of harm reduction practices. Harm reduction improves public health, is cost-effective, may decrease or eliminate risky practices among people who use drugs and significantly reduces disease transmission and fatal overdose. Therefore, supporting and strengthening harm reduction services in all regions around the world is an essential tool in the Delicate Balancing Act of sustaining and transforming human life. With this in mind, could the harm reduction context serve as an inspiration and a platform for us to innovate new ways to organize and coordinate our campaigns? To answer that question we need to dip into history. It was on December 10, 1948, with the birth of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights that UN member states pledged to promote respect for the human rights of all. However, for the purposes of this conference, let us fast forward to 1961 UN single convention on aquatic drugs that listed those substances that required strict legal controls. In an article in Criminology and Criminal Justice by Stuart Taylor, Julian Buchanan and Tami Ayas, entitled Prohibition, Privilege and Drug apartheid, the failure of drug policy reform to address the underlying fallacies of drug prohibition. The authors eloquently explained the following which may shed light on a global pattern of power dynamics and allow me perhaps to paraphrase, quote, policies of drug decriminalization, legalization and regulation are materializing in a number of jurisdictions around the world a phenomena welcomed by critics of prohibition who have long exposed its lack of evidence-based efficacy and legitimacy, close quote. Whilst these reforms have been posited as progressive, Taylor Buchanan and Ayas argue that they represent merely a metamorphosis of prohibition whereby the face of drug policy changes yet the fundamental principles remain unaffected. They go on to illustrate how inadvertently this reform revolution camouflages the underlying contradictions that have lain at the heart of global drug policy since they were enshrined in the United Nations single convention on narcotic drugs in 1961. By exposing how the fundamental inconsistencies of drug prohibition continue to be accommodated in policy reform, the authors identify the untenable flawed assumptions underpinning drug law enforcement and prohibition and that certain fallacies used to legitimize drug prohibition lack an evidence base and instead draw upon myth and reductionist discourse that obscures nuanced drug policy debate. These fallacies arbitrarily frame particular substances as drugs or meeting other substances as legal and socially acceptable and skew the risks of drug use by focusing almost exclusively on specific types of use and users and concentrating attention upon apparent associated negative outcomes. The authors reveal how this process allows certain circumstances to attain an unwarranted position of privilege whilst others are prohibited creating what they term a drug apartheid, a deeply divisive system of segregation and punishment determined by the substance used. With a focus on marginalized minorities, black and indigenous peoples, Taylor, Buchanan and Ayas succinctly go on to give reason for how the central tenets of prohibition remain within liberal reforms that is the ability to criminalize and severely punish those who use drugs. They explain how such processes have been historically steeped in prejudice resulting in a racially motivated war on drugs and despite reform, discrimination and inequality endures. No doubt some, if not many, delegates here today may agree that given the lack of evidence and scientific analysis upholding both prohibition and well-intentioned reforms that a repeal of drug laws is necessary. With history as a teacher, we may witness how the human race certainly waits until it hangs precariously on the precipice before it rallies to organize, to respond and to act. For a change in course away from an abyss of enduring suffering, all indicators point to harm reduction as model for humanity. It was repeated throughout many of our discussions that there is a need to address the challenges faced in the implementation of harm reduction services. In many places, availability, accessibility and quality of services remain important issues to tackle while services are also unevenly distributed in most countries. Since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, it has had the impact of adding extra layers of challenges to communities around the world and particularly for people who use drugs. In countries where harm reduction services exist, they were often forced to close or be reduced and public health was militarized. In Africa, the pandemic has had a debilitating impact on HIV and harm reduction service as limited operating hours, fewer outreach programs and economic challenges resulted in poorer access to services and increased risk taking. However, such crises also demonstrated the resilience of services led by people who use drugs, who adapted the operations to ensure that people in need could still benefit from opioid agonist therapy and other relevant services. By recognizing that prohibition and criminalization have put people at even more risk, further stigmatizing and marginalizing people who use drugs and who are involved in drug trafficking and production, we encourage local and national governments to adopt a public health and human rights approach to drug policies based on scientific evidence. To this end, the Global Commission recommends five pathways to drug policies that work. One, put people's health and safety first. Two, ensure access to essential medicines and pain control. Three, end the criminalization and incarceration of people who use drugs. Four, refocus enforcement responses to drug trafficking and organized crime. And lastly, regulate drug markets to put governments in control. However, even within the harm reduction services, there lies a stuck empathy gap. How do we narrow this gap to ensure that no one falls through the cracks of this divide? Perhaps it is by applying an expanded contextual understanding that stigma already exists for marginalized people and that the negative effects of shame and exclusion doubles down on the stigma of substance use disorder and those who use drugs. However, it takes political will and leadership to implement harm reduction practices. No two countries nor communities are exactly the same and therefore it may be helpful to have customized programs which involve the marginalized and people who use drugs. And tailoring the interventions to suit a community allows us to add to the knowledge pool and advance harm reduction. And so, if we are to interrogate with intentionality, how we can be more helpful and reduce harm, then we are to organize and mobilize for the investment of more resources and dedicate more of ourselves to study and develop, to the study and development of harm reduction services in more communities, more people everywhere. Again, taking history as a shepherd, we may understand more clearly that the future is not a place we are going to, but a place we create through our own actions. And in so doing, we must support and propel more platforms such as the Human Reduction International Conference to further refine the definition of our historical mission. Yes, that is what it is. It is a historical mission. To affect an influence policy and therefore to shape the outcomes we hope for, we must organize ourselves for common benefit. Through solidarity, we must be conscious that our agency as civil society must come to the fore. That these issues are not just for one organization, but for all of civil society, to further unite as an organized movement for the common good. During the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, a global anti-apartheid movement developed. For instance, in the United States of America, an organization called TransAfrica, led by Randall Robinson, tracked down and called out American corporates that were investing in South Africa under the oppressive regime in order to isolate these companies in support for the call to disinvest from apartheid. So what is needed is a global movement which can coordinate and share information so that campaigns can be mounted in each and every country. Generally speaking, people always form organizations for a purpose, and so the point is to find synergies and meeting points in perseverance of a common cause like rivulets which decant into a mainstream. This conference not only serves as an opportunity to reflect but to identify new ways to increase our voice and to coordinate and channel our efforts towards the creation of a fair and just world order. Let today, the last day of the conference, be the first day of our re-energized and more consented effort to improve drug policy at local, to regional, and to global levels. There is strength in solidarity, so let us capitalize on that by matching capital's ability to nestle and settle everywhere in the world. And finally, if we may suggest a watch weight for those who use drugs and marginalize communities, it would be nothing about us without us. Thank you for your kind attention. Thank you so much, President Modlanti. I think I speak for everyone when I pause to reflect how powerful it is to have a former president come forward, guided by logic, guided by science, the sense of compassion and justice, and we can hear that message loud and clear. So thank you again.


Focus on your progress and not on the results. Do you want to know a close friend of most self-made billionaires? Delayed gratification. Take risks. Given two options. Option one forever staying in the comfort zone But you can't grow and resist change. Option two taking risks and making uncomfortable decisions But you become adaptable and flexible despite the hardships. Learn to fail.  All right.


Men over 40 who exhibit this make good life partners. Now, when I think of a life partner, I think about buying a house. And what I mean to say is you're making an investment in another human being potentially for the balance of your life. That's why they call it a home. That's why relationships are oftentimes talked about as going home. And if you've ever bought a house and spoken to a realtor before, they will tell you there's three primary things you need to consider when buying a house. And I'm gonna correlate this to a life partner in a moment. And that is location, location, location. Have you ever heard that before? Well, within the perspective of a life partner, there's three primary things you must consider. And let me just say this upfront. I'm gonna be repeating myself three times, but one of the most important things to consider when choosing a life partner and a life partner who demonstrates this, who exhibits this makes for a potential good life partner. Because I'm assuming you are one of those people out there that prefers to go the distance with someone. You're not looking to date short-term. And I know maybe in your 50s and 60s, you're not thinking long-term, but let's be clear. When you get to 70 or 80, you're gonna be going, are we still dating or is there something more? So the three things they must exhibit is the following, character, character and character. That's right, character, character and character. Now we're gonna dive into character today because I think just saying the word in it of itself can be actually rather vague. And I think for those of us in midlife, we have to think of character in a vastly different perspective, okay? Now oftentimes high-value people, high-quality people are considered to have good character if they're financially successful, if they're in good physical condition, that sort of thing, that seems to be the narrative of the superficial group of people, particularly in the red pill community, but red pill community, but we're not gonna dive into the red pill community. We're gonna talk about the over 40 community and what you need to be considering when it comes to a person's character. So I've listed some things for all of you to pay close attention to.  There is a relative consistency with this person and that doesn't mean a human can't make mistakes, okay? We might say we're going to call and for whatever reason we get distracted and we don't do it, but there's a consistency to their actions matching their words. I think that is one of the things to highly consider in the early stage of dating is paying attention to consistency. Now this becomes radically challenging for those of you that are engaging in long distance relationships and the only reason why I bring up long distance relationships in most every video is probably a good 50% of you who are actively in the dating marketplace are engaging in some sort of long distance connection, whether it's in Los Angeles, it could be 15 miles is a long distance relationship, but certainly if you have to drive hours to go see the person or you have to get on an airplane, it's very difficult to observe consistency other than making that telephone call and there's more to actions matching words than just committing to making those phone calls every evening. Is this sinking in? Is this resonating? Please let me know. Now number two is that they have healed from their past relationships and why I'm putting this in the category of character is people who are unhealed from their past relationships if they still have some hurt, if they have some anguish, if they have some resentment, they have some judgment, it makes it very difficult for this person to lean in to a relationship.  But leaning in because they have a wall up and if you have walls up, it makes it very difficult to lean into a life partnership with another human being. If you've got walls, if you have armor, if you have resentments you have your, and for this is ladies too, if you're jaded, you're bitter. I'm not suggesting you don't have good character but I'm here to suggest that when you've healed from your past, you are capable of leaning into a life partnership relationship. Now the next one I've put together is a person who is generous and kind. Now generous doesn't mean paying for dates but certainly that can be a generous act although it's almost an expectation for men to do that. But what is generosity? Generosity is helping another person. Being kind is recognizing that our words can sometimes cause pain for another. So we do it in a more diplomatic way than an accusatory way. Those are just simple examples of kindness, of generosity. And it's important to pay attention to this early on. Is someone speaking their truth from a kind way or are they coming at you with an accusatory way as one of many examples? Kindness isn't the same as fairness but ultimately kindness just means you operate from a good place, okay? And to me that's a demonstration of good character. Now in the same venue as I just talking about they communicate clearly, clear communication, logical communication, a passionate communication, emotional communication, not from a place of being right, okay? See a lot of times people communicate is I'm right, you're wrong. Do you know most couples go into therapist office, couples therapy and they always do this? It's my partner's fault, okay? See when you communicate, you simply communicate from I statements. You say things like I'm feeling this when this happens. In fact, if you're not familiar with the book, non-violent communication by Marshall Rosenberg, and by the way all the books I recommend are in the link below, I highly recommend reading this book. So you can learn to communicate from the I perspective and not the you perspective. You do this, you make me feel this way. Begin to learn healthy communication, which to me is a sign of for lack of better word, good character. Now when I'm about to share next, I think is absolutely paramount. I even use the word paramount in this descriptor. They believe trust is paramount in their life. They believe trust is paramount in their life. Now what I mean about trust is I'm not talking about fidelity in a relationship. I'm talking about making sure that the other person's needs are commensurate with your own needs. In other words, you care about this other person's needs so much that you put it on equal footing of your own needs. Their best interests are your best interests. What do you think about this for a second? In our current dating environment, people engage in physical connection and emotional connection, physical and emotional connection with another human being before any real trust has been built between two people. And I've always said it takes about 100 hours of face-to-face time, coming back to those long distance dynamics I talk about, face-to-face time just to build the first layer of trust. And trust comes in, is layered. That's why they say trust is earned. I believe trust is built through the consistency, through the actions, through the generosity, through the kindness, through the communicating from a place of we-ness and not from a place of I-ness. And so they believe trust is paramount in a relationship and that doesn't always mean just being able to confide your deepest, darkest secrets to another person, but knowing that this person has your best interest at heart and when you think about it, it seems to me that trust is the weakest link in relationships these days. It's the weakest link in life partnerships or there's a false sense of trust because, okay, so folks, if you're familiar with my relationship iceberg, I'm gonna share this, please forgive the glare, but the vast majority of humans focus on attraction chemistry without really paying attention to shared values, blendable lifestyles and emotional maturity when your relationship is solely predicated on that physical attraction and the illusion of artificial intimacy that comes with attraction, let me reframe that, emotional intimacy and a lot of it is artificial because it's been curated through these devices, this artificial intimacy is communicating the attacks via text via text via text. What happens is very little trust is built through the shared values, the capacity to blend lives together. By the way, for those of us in midlife, this is critically important. This is one of the primary reasons why most relationships don't succeed because they don't know how to integrate their lives together. They partially integrate their lives together, they have occasional companionship, occasional connection, occasional sex, so they feel this occasion, but they're missing the true integration into each other's lives and then the deep roots of trust, please forgive me for spitting. See, this is critically important. I have to harp on this for a second. Integration into each other's lives builds the roots to trust. Now I want you to think of a tree in a hurricane wind. If it doesn't have roots, what will happen to that tree? It'll blow away. So if most of your roots have been built on text communication and telephone communication and it's just incessant communication of how's your day going? Did you have a good day? I hope you had a good day. I'm thinking of you, are you thinking of me? Hey, beautiful, hey, handsome. You might have some conversations about your day, but it is through the integration of each other's lives that you build these deep roots of trust.  It is the integration that has been built through trust that has the greatest chance for surviving so that tree doesn't blow over. Is this sinking in? I hope so. You know, really quickly, I wanna share a few more things. These are so critically important, I was watching Michael Beckwith earlier today and he's a pastor, a preacher of the Agape Church and he speaks with such verve or such passion that he yells at the top of his lungs and I'm like, folks, I yell because I have that same passion, not because I'm scolding you, although sometimes I do scold you, but I wanted to just get that off my chest. Okay, next. They don't use people. They are very clear about commitments. They are very clear that they want a life partner. People who are broken, people who are in pain, people who just want to fill a void inside of them, they will use people. Not intentionally, I think there are so many broken wounded people that they don't realize that they're using people. They see a person of good character, they are very clear about commitment. They're very clear about life partners. The challenge, oh, by the way, my coffee mug says, swear a little, you'll feel better. My Sunday videos, I don't swear. You know, a significant percentage of people over 40 are divorced. They're gun shy to having a life partner. They don't know what the container of a life partner looks like. So these people have a real challenge having clarity around commitment. This is why so many people might say the words, I'm just looking for something casual. I'm not looking for something serious. I need time. I need to take it slow. Not that taking it slow isn't important, but it's odd to me that men will have sex with you very fast, but the emotional and commitment, they will drag that out. See, if a man is legitimate about taking it slow, then sex is off the table until some level of commitment, some level of monogamy, some level of exclusivity, some level of trust has been built. There's an integration into each other's lives. Now the next one is obvious about good character, but they have their act together. You know, they're not in financial debt. They're not constantly in fear. They're not in pain. And I'm not suggest that we don't, and by the way, let me reframe that. You can own a home and be in debt to a bank. So it's not that, but I'm just saying they're not struggling in their life just for the survival needs. People that are struggling for survival aren't necessarily ready for a fully committed partnership with someone unless there has been some real radical conversations between two people and they're fully aware that a relationship sure is a mutual exchange and whatnot, but they have their act generally together. And that means both in their physical, logistic world, but most importantly in their emotional world. See, we're swimming with the sea of humans that are rather dysfunctional in their lives. And this leads to the next one, which is critically important. They are introspective and work on themselves to grow beyond their limitations, their wounds and their traumas. See, this all demonstrates a person who is capable of being a life partner with someone. And the last one I'm gonna share today, and then there's something I wanna talk about is that they're empathetic. You know, it's one thing to be sympathetic, but it's another thing to genuinely come from the heart and really feel someone else's pain. You know, a lot of people are closed off to their heart. We have a significant percentage of the population, men and women alike that their heart is closed to just even being empathetic to another human being because we are oftentimes in this silo, this bubble of myopic thinking. And it's why, you know, you hear so much about narcissism and whatnot, but really the issue is we are kind of a self-centric society to some degree, at least here in the United States, I can't speak for every part of the world, but there is a lack, a distressing lack of empathy from men and women alike. It's all about what my needs can be met instead of about being of service to give that generosity, that kindness I shared before. So what's the antidote to all this? Well, folks, let me be clear. Coming back to the original, men over 40 exhibit this make good life partners, character, character and character. And how do we determine character? We vet another human being. We vet them. We have the hard conversations earlier in the dating process.  Just have a good time. I recognize if you're meeting a total stranger, it takes a couple of dates to build some level of rapport with one another, but the challenge with that, first off, you can ask some questions about alignment, for example, and I'm gonna have to use people in their 20s and 30s. I want children, I don't want children. If you're in that camp and it probably doesn't make sense to even go out on a first date. So you can get some pre-qualifying things done early. I'm a big proponent of that, but the deeper questions are imperative to determine if someone is right for you. And I wanna read you someone just recently wrote to me. Okay, and this is so critically important. Jonathan, I wanna tell you, I've been watching your channel for a couple of years now.  I asked a new guy questions about his last relationships. This felt a bit uncomfortable. I'm gonna repeat that. This felt a bit uncomfortable for me, but I just kept hearing your voice, cheering me on. He was totally open and vulnerable with me. And now I have information, the information and need to decide, and then I need to decide my next steps. I'm proud of myself and I have you to thank, now looking at men from the angle, is this man a good match for me versus does he like me? This is a big difference. Vetting is an imperative tool to determine someone's character. And just remember, as I said earlier, if we hyper focus on attraction, you're buying that house, not on location, location, location, you're buying that house with a weak foundation. And I'm here to offer some perspective so you can try it differently. Is this sinking in? Is this resonating? Please let me know if it is. Please to post a comment below. I'd like to hear your thoughts. Please like this video. Please share this video. And if you follow me on YouTube, please hit that notification bell so you can be notified of new videos. All right, I'm gonna wrap up this videos. I always do. Oh, one last thing. Since this was posted in my private group called Midlife Love Master, if you wanna have direct access to me on a regular basis, check out my group called Midlife Love Mastery. If you're watching this now, send this video to your friends. Send them to my website, jonathanasley.com. Have them click the group coaching button so they can join our fantastic group. And you can have direct access to me on a regular basis. All right, I'm gonna wrap up this videos. I always do.  I'm gonna reach into the camera and give you a hug of love if that's okay. I'm gonna ask you to turn to someone, a pet, a teddy bear, a pillow and give Iter them a hug of love because hugs are a great source of love. And let's face it, we could all use more love in our lives. Thanks a bunch. Bye-bye now, bye-bye, bye-bye, bye-bye.


In this video, we'll take a look at sun and shadow studies on a building site with inside rivet and wassari. We'll take a look at how to set up the model, how to set up the sun part diagram, and how to read and interpret the result that we get out. And again, you will get an understanding of how we have used sun and shadow studies on this actual design project. I've now opened the conceptual environment with inside wassari. And for this office building that we're going to use as case here from Henning Larsen Architects, we're going to look at how we can do shadow simulations for avoiding any kind of impact on these existing buildings here and how we can work with the massing here to make the right conditions for the interior space here and make sure that we don't create too much impact on the existing buildings. So the first thing I did was just to model a little mass here to really being able to see shadows a bit more effective in the intermediate area around the building. So right now the sun part that I turned on here is really quite big, so that makes it pretty difficult to see it in relation to the intermediate area around the building.  And you'll see that it's now propped to the objects in the model, and then I can go turn on my side photo again. So this is a bit more effective. Just to quickly understand how the sun part is working, it's really working with the celestial system which are taking the foundation in a fundamental horizontal plane from the things that you can see on-site to the horizon. And if we drag the sun, you'll see that the angle from the horizon till seeing it is really determining the height or the position of the sun throughout the different times of year. So here you're able to just see here and go in and click here and go to a specific period you want to look at or a specific time a year, or you can simply just drag the sun. But to do this a bit more easy and get some of the extreme conditions of sun that we want to examine, we can go down and we can go up here to say modify or manage, go to a perspective view. And with inside the perspective view, we are able to go down here and go to sun settings to specify the conditions we want to simulate. So if we want to look at summer solstice, winter solstice and spring and fall or spring, this will because spring and fall will a lot of time be the same in the northern hemisphere. So what we're looking for is the summer solstice, winter solstice and spring echinac. So we're looking at solar summer solstice. This is the time during the year where the sun angle or the sun will have the greatest angle to the earth and that means that we'll have the most daylight to our model. And of course in the winter where the sun is low, this is where we get some very long shadows and then in the even conditions here, spring or fall is where day and the night have the same length. So we're just choosing, okay, we want to have a single day to look at a specific summer study here and we can just choose, okay, let's say maybe from 9 o'clock where people will be at the office till 7 o'clock, something like that. And let's take a 15 minutes interval just to take down the speed of the animation of shadows that we're going to do in here. And we can also choose the level where we want to look at our shadows. So let's just say, okay, and we're now able to turn on the shadows and go here and say preview solar study. And we can now do an animation for the extreme conditions during the summer month. As you'll see here, we're not conflicting with the context, with the environment. So what we did is really just to play around with the environment, making sure that we had the right amount of square meters and then just make the heights here to get in this interior space here to get a lot of sun here and to avoid inflicting with the other buildings here. So what we didn't have to examine is some of the other periods of years. We'll go to sun settings and we say, okay, let's look at spring here, okay, from 10 to 16, okay, and we can now go and make an animation here and we don't have any problems here. So we can check that out. Let's go to sun settings again and go to winter cells. That's a fall. Okay. So this is really just the way that you go about doing these simulations here to make sure that we don't have impact on the existing buildings here, okay.


hello everybody and by everybody I mean none of you cuz nobody's here yet but you will be soon so come on in and join uh-oh what am I getting getting text messages okay good day Wild West Dan good to see you all right let's proofread this rundown 10th your daily tech news show Paul Teesson Alice and Jaby Andrew Bradley lifetime supporter Michael alt I guess that means there's no new play pay patron yet okay that's what that means then okay on this episode of daily tech news show yeah good idea instead of people in some scientific experiments we can explain okay Dr. Nick explains why it might be a good idea to use AI instead of people instead of people in some scientific experiments plus meta open sources its large language model at Microsoft's inspire conference we can explain ah my condom a goremund salamat for showing up and hello SJTR oh the blue font Wild West Dan indicates that that is a quick hit so that visually we know oh we're not in the discussion section yet back in April the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a decision in epics lawsuit against Apple finding that Apple's closed app store did not violate antitrust rules however the ruling also said Apple couldn't maintain its anti-steering rules that prevented developers from telling users about ultimate payment options and circuit court has now granted a motion by Apple to hold off enforcing that rule for 90 days so Apple can file a request with the US Supreme Court to take up the case Microsoft has a July 18th deadline to finish its merger with Activision Blizzard but it's still waiting for UK approval it could ignore that approval and risk a fine in the UK it could try to carve out Activision Blizzard in the UK and acquire everything else which would be very complicated it could give up on the acquisition all together which doesn't seem likely or it could get Activision Blizzard to agree to extend the deadline that may sound easy but deadlines exist for a reason with the deadline passed Activision Blizzard would be free to entertain other offers sounds like a headache for other companies though I could also ask Microsoft to pay the breakup fee or negotiate an extension that increases the price Activision Blizzard shareholders seem to want the merger to close so they could also just agree to an extension right now as of this recording Microsoft is in negotiations with Activision Blizzard on an extension it's also talking to the UK competition and markets authority about a way to get approval UK has extended its deadline to August 29th an outside factor is a looming US FTC evidentiary hearing on the merger set for August 2nd oh hi Zoe the 16 gigabyte variant of the GeForce RTX 4060 Ti is now available from Nvidia's add-in board partners apart from having twice the memory the new model is identical spec wise to the 8 gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti released in May video shared benchmark results at 1080p showing an increase in performance in several games over the 8 gigabyte model but didn't make pre-release review boards available 16 gigabyte RTX 4060 Ti list for $499 $100 more than the 8 gigabyte version White House announced the US cyber trust mark meant to signify a smart home devices and fitness signify that smart home devices and fitness trackers meet security standards set out by the National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST devices with the label should be available in 2024 Federal Communications Commission will administer this voluntary program devices will come this mark on a box as well as a QR code the customers can scan to make sure the device is still certified if CC has not determined how often it will re-certify devices and that bit Instagram head Anna Miserie announced that due to an increase in spam on threads the platform would get tighter on things like rate limits saying it may unintentionally limit active people Miserie also said any legitimate users impacted by rate limits should contact Instagram support retailer as thank you retail like Casey at its Microsoft inspire conference Microsoft announced details and some chatbot features come into Microsoft 365 business users being chatbot is getting support for visual search meaning you can upload an image as a prompt for more questions and discussion with the chatbot this is available on desktop and mobile first coming enterprise later speaking of Bing chat speaking of Bing chat enterprise will give subscribers speaking of enterprise Bing chat enterprise will give subscribers the same GPT 4 powered chatbot you get in Bing search but with protection for commercial data chat data isn't saved Bing chat enterprise chat data isn't saved or used to train the models it's available in preview the public version of Bing it's available in preview now for Microsoft 365 business users at no additional charge and Microsoft says it might sell it as a standalone product in the future for five dollars per user per month Microsoft is not including co-pilot for my Microsoft 365 users for free but you can pay to add it Microsoft 365 co-pilot is powered by GPT 4 and can generate text in office documents create PowerPoint presentations and help create things like pivot tables and spreadsheets Microsoft also announced today that co-pilot is they also make sense there Microsoft announced today that the co-pilot that co-pilot is coming to Microsoft teams it can do real-time summarization of ongoing voice calls including dates names and key points it can also suggest next steps in teams in teams text chat it can pull out key points from chat threads and create lists or tables if you ask it to sounds good how much it's gonna cost me well Microsoft 365 E3 E5 business standard and business premium customers will be able to get Microsoft 365 co-pilot for 30 bucks per user per month that's in addition to the existing costs of Microsoft 365 which ranges from $1250 to $36 per user per month 600 enterprise customers have been testing co-pilot in a paid early access program there's no official release date for widespread availability i'm curious what google zoom and sales force will charge for their chatbot editions it's expensive to run large language models and it shows niki how useful to these kinds of productivity tools sound for your kind of work well we won't have to wait to see meta's price it's free at microsoft inspire meta announced it will open source its large language model llama 2 under a meta created license it'll be free for commercial and research uses qualcomm announced it will bring llama to laptops phones and headsets starting in 2024 so apps can use the llm without having to go to the cloud keeping all your data on device llama 2 will be available through microsoft azure aws hugging face and more providers well that's one way to catch up to the competitors right i actually doubt that wild west dan i wouldn't wouldn't really wouldn't really benefit them if they ever put co-pilot available for public use then i could see them doing that they're really just going to want to market it straight to the admins i think wall street journals and marie alcantara wrote a story called people have begun to love apple's most hated product apple maps launched in 2012 and feists say people weren't thrilled in fact apple CEO tim cook issued an apology to customers in response to the backlash and fired his head of software alcantara mostly uses anecdotal evidence of switching not hard numbers in her story cantala says an overwhelming majority of iphone users have installed google maps for a long time that was the map to use unless you wanted to get lost or be late apple maps isn't awful anymore though it has competitive features with google maps and looks pretty good has a good user design apple's also adopted functionality that google maps has had for years such as street view features apple announced new maps features at w w dc in june including offline maps later this year smartphone maps have been essential for years now what are we using and why let's start with you nicky okay i'm nicky here's what i use join in la conversation in our discord which you can join by linking to a patreon account people worry a lot these oh geez he's deleted the whole thing ah people worry a lot these days about whether ai chatbots can replace people usually that's imagined in a bad way but what if chatbots could replace people in a good way an article about matthew hudson in science.org describes using chatbots as a replacement for human subjects in scientific research nicky you've been following the story can you explain what the heck nicky notes ai is more than just chatbots image generators and maybe even your future replacement it's also being used to help save endangered species chris christensen is here to explain let's check out the mail bank marty wrote in about the concept of chatp gpt getting worse over time i've used it daily since it came out i pay for plus and i've been feeling in the last month it has actually become worse to the point it's making me google things again it seems to have a shorter memory span in the last month i used to be able to tell it i'm working with framework x y n z and carry on a conversation debugging and troubleshooting things for the length of conversation but it keeps happening lately that after two or three messages it will forget one of the three frameworks i mentioned i find about once every three messages or so it ends up apologizing for making a mistake or what that would happen every few conversations a few months ago finally it has started suggesting code that is basically the same thing as i gave it but it thinks that's the solution dr nicky what are you doing well i'm doing lots cool stuff all right hey you yes you the awesome listener of the daily tech news show podcast you know you love this show right you know you can't get enough of the latest and greatest tech news delivered by the most knowledgeable and entertaining host in the biz right well guess what you can make the show even better by becoming a patron patreon is a way for you to show your appreciation and support for the show with a small monthly pledge it's not just a pledge it's an investment in your own happiness and satisfaction because by becoming a patron you will unlock a ton of amazing rewards and perks that will make your listening experience even more enjoyable and rewarding for example you get ad-free episodes bonus segments behind the scenes access and more you will also join a community of fellow tech lovers who share your passion and curiosity for all things tech you can chat with the hosts and other patrons ask questions give feedback and suggest topics for future episodes sounds awesome right well it is and it's super easy to join us just go to patreon.com slash dtns pick a tier that fits your budget and preferences you can cancel or change your pledge at any time no strings attached so don't wait any longer join the daily tech news show patreon today help make this show the best it can be thank you for listening and supporting the daily tech news show the show where you get independent tech news from people who love tech just as much as you do patron stick around the extended show good day internet we're going to talk about cheap way to turn a quest pro into an apple vision pro at least from the outside a developer named adam decided they wanted to recreate the apple vision pros ability to show your eyes on the front of the headset but for cheaper so he made the adam quizion pro adam attached an iphone to the front of a meta quest pro headset he wrote an app on the quest to read its eye tracking data and send it to an ios app that app uses apple's face id sensors to detect someone looking at the phone and orient the images of the eyes correctly if face id senses nobody there it it changes to a colored pattern just like the vision pro even included the ability adam even included the ability to swipe through customized representations of your face well there you go i have squashed 97 percent of the typos in today's show i feel like i've squashed 100 percent but i know i haven't because i've done this before if i were to go back and find more there are always more you can never get rid of all of the typos ever right uh well enough about that winning what did you think of that patreon plug honest answers only thank you me awesome oh there was a face unlock thing in the show hijack interesting clips here can i have to watch it what i know wild west that you're already convinced this probably wasn't that persuasive can we read it again oh it's kind of long that tells me something though thank you zoe it didn't uh it didn't totally sink in when you're multitasking good to know good to know i was reading it super fast too put it on the screen oh yeah i can do that easy there it is yeah and if you're already a patron you're like oh it's a patron thing tune out i totally get that happens to me all the time uh listen to shows on patreon oh thank you cliff singer you didn't have to do that you're awesome meanwhile i read too fast sometimes i'll too vay still on the dl are the i l i should say oh yeah yeah no i get you it doesn't feel like a podcast if that's not how you consume it i haven't gone back and oh my gosh i have so many responses to my os thing this really struck a nerve that's cool i haven't been looking at this thanks wild west dan fun but detailed is a good is a good recommendation okay windows me i gotta start uh logging these so i asked on uh all of the places your favorite failed operating systems bos beloved yeah uh no zoe please retweet uh i do not i'm not worried yes it's time to re-subscribe kc time um i'm not worried about having too many this is this is great t-mobile sidekick wasn't that just um simbian though didn't have its own os bos i figured bos would be beloved mac copeland wow bos forever microsoft bob was not an operating system windows me yeah kc dire i mean um i mean multiple places i did this one on twitter mastodon threads and blue sky blackberry oh yeah cinclair basic rob done with kin oh yeah kin os a lot of hate for windows me bos web os well you can't just say all of the os's it's not terribly helpful and no phone lisa good wine palm is a good one salama os two well that was my own thing but somebody is backbit newton yep all amiga amiga is a good one too digital cpm that wasn't a failure all right me right uh pc dos okay i don't consider that a failure either i think i know i guess what they mean is the the non microsoft firm bos rest in peace gos for the cometer 64 okay windows 8.1 was great copeland got another one wow that's a that's a deep cut i like that i might make the list tallage and bos is going to be number one i have a feeling dos four nice one this is just me saying operating systems out loud i realize that bos forever bos forever thank you zoe all right lots of twitter responses me go os yeah now i'm on mastodon there's less engagement but it's more um it's more substantive that's how i would say twitter gets a lot of like one-off quippy things mastodon is is people who've really thought through their responses so when i get a response it's usually got more thought and substance to it os2 warp uh how i miss you 53 floppy disks i'm gonna note that yeah not as much not as much um take up on mastodon let's see what blue sky blue sky i get almost no engagement at all web os okay so i got one microkin os all right yeah that's that's about it from blue sky now for threads sorry i got distracted with a text message that was populating my sms with a bunch of replications of my niece windows mobile another windows phone one i mean i guess i could write anything about worm gpt yeah yeah i did whistle um i almost put it in gdi well blue sky jack doesn't have anything to do with blue sky and there's no crypto involvement in it um jack started blue sky he spun it out of twitter but and i think he's probably technically still on the board but he has virtually no day-to-day stuff anyway the worm gpt stuff i looked at it it's interesting might wait and see if there's more out of it today uh i almost put it in gdi but sometimes i i i want to customize the gdi conversation to who's on yeah deburr oh you know what i probably could do a tick talk of this hmm uh okay atari gem oh second atari gem mention web os i should probably just do the threads web interface shouldn't i even though you can't post to it all right not not much uh not much take up on threads for that question i bet it comes later i have noticed that threads seems to be a slower burn i'll do that i will do the tick talks where is who posting gauging gadgets i was if you mean me i was posting at blue sky mastered on twitter and threads for this particular question face detect el cars el cars is very successful solemn don't you dare call it a failure don't you dare all right well that was fun got some good top five stuff i have to take out the trash and then get ready for a meeting so oh substack notes i did whistle i did oh next step good one i mean i don't know if it makes the list but it's a good one to consider for sure all right uh thanks y'all i'm going to end the broadcast here and i will talk to you for good day internet slash dtns in um just a little more than an hour bye he has titled this tom reads os names to himself goodbye


Oh, my third noob has appeared. You can't make me shout, man. I swear to God.


So, yeah, hi, my name is Svain, and this is Christian and Thorsten. They'll be doing the workshop on Sunday, and Thorsten also is going to show us the demo afterwards. So, yeah, I want to tell you about Taller, which uses a lot of crypto, but it's not yet another cryptocurrency. But digital cash, made socially responsible, because it's anonymous for the customer. But the merchant can hand out a normal invoice. Also, it's fast, convenient and free as in freedom. So, another tagline is independent, one-click cash payments. Taller is an acronym that means taxable, anonymous, libre, electronic reserve. So, generally, in every aspect, Taller is just like cash. So, here's an overview of what I'm presenting now. So, I first give an intro, telling a bit about credit cards, cash and Bitcoin, then what is Taller and how does it work. Then, Taller is seen by a customer, a merchant, government and technologist. Then, I briefly scroll through the crypto protocol, and then I have this part, which I call the Taller seen by a future relative, just through a crystal ball. So, there, I'm trying to tell you about possible features. And also, I would like to have you thinking about this, what every technology should be thinking about. And check if there's anything about Taller that could be used against us. So, as usual, we're trying to solve a problem, but maybe we are overlooking something. Because if this works, this is going to change something. So, yeah, first of all, a question. Verand is this American tink tank back in the old days. In 1971, it was asked, suppose you were an advisor to the head of the KGP, the Soviet secret police. Suppose you are given the assignment of designing a system for the surveillance of all citizens and visitors within the boundaries of the USSR. The system is not to be too obtrusive or obvious. What would be your decision? Anyone has a clue? So, the answer was credit card payments. So, credit card payments are way too transparent. Credit card payments only serve an oligopoly of a few big foreign companies. It has high fees and is inconvenient, especially for small and frequent online transactions. Like having this two-factor authentication, typing a number from your mobile phone. And then it also has too many false positives on fraud detection. As some of you might know, I'm traveling around a lot. So, actually, I never possessed any credit card that was expiring. Because at one point it was just not working anymore and I got the message that there was any false positives in the fraud detection. So, they deleted my credit card and gave me a new one. So, I'm very much a person who's getting all these false fraud detections. So, but then I'm also like, I'm barely using my credit card. I use cash anyway, right? So, cash also just has a virtual value. So, it's just there because someone has said so and everyone believes it. That's how the system works. So, in that example, this is Rupees from India. This guy, Mr. Modi, from the Government of India said that this money has that amount. So, and then on November 8th in 2016, the Government of India in form of Mr. Modi announced that the demonetization of the 500 and 1000 rupee notes. So, that was 86% of all Rupees existing in cash. So, that happened in the evening of the Trump election. So, don't wonder if you haven't heard about it because that was very well thought of them. And it was valid from midnight onwards. So, cash can disappear and get invalid even overnight. So, what happened then in India is that all the ATMs were out of cash because there wasn't any cash anymore. Small notes are not really available. To get an idea like 100 rupees is like 1 euro 20. So, 1000 rupees is 12 euros and there wasn't any 1000 or any 500 or any more. So, new notes slowly came out from November 10th onwards. I was in India from November 15th onwards and for quite some time, this new cash was nowhere to be seen in the wild. So, it was quite funny. But still, cash is the best we have. And to make that clear, we should use it wherever we can. And you should really do that because when I was looking for pictures of old and new rupees, by the way, Google showed me a lot of 500 euros. You know why? Because they also get deleted in 2025 or something. So, it's very important that we still use the cash. But we also need a solution online. So, as a technologist, I say, okay, then I just use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is something as crypto-anarchists and hackers. We like it very much because it's an unregulated payment system. We find it as a feature that there is no regulation and it's free software, it's decentralized, it's peer-to-peer. So, very nice. As a decentralized banking system, it requires to solve the Byzantine consensus where everybody agrees about transactions and therefore balances. So, Bitcoin solves that problem, that it ties the distribution of money and the creation of new nodes to solving this consensus problem on a ledger. So, you need to compute this computational puzzle and then make the new transactions. I guess everyone knows about Bitcoin, right? And then the last node who finds the puzzle gets the reward of the mining fee. So, it is very slow and it is very expensive. So, that's screenshots from yesterday, bitcoin.info charts. So, this is the Bitcoin cost per transaction. Since I think it's not really readable, the first part is May 2016, so it's one year. And it goes up to 18 and starts by four. That's dollars. So, here I made a shot, I guess it's also not readable. The lowest amount, like the lowest transaction fee which was there, or transaction costs, it's not the fee. So, the fee is actually really small. If you pay by Bitcoin, you just pay a few cents of fees. But that's the transaction costs for the whole system because of the rewards the miners get. So, that's the lowest amount you have. That's the highest amount, that's $16. And that leads to the result that the average transaction value is around $1,000. And by the way, all the electrician costs and environmental costs are not calculated here. It's only the costs of the rewarding. So, you know that you have to compute a lot, so it's also costing a lot of electricity. So, it cannot really be used for doing groceries or buy your dinner or get a dress or something. So, it also not really solves it. Also, all Bitcoin transactions are public and linkable. There's no privacy guarantee. There's stuff like zero-coin, tryptonoid, node, Monero, zero-cash, just Z-cash who offer anonymity. But then, they are also enhanced with laundering services. So, now what is GNUPE-TALER? TALER is a payment system using existing banking infrastructure. You pay in existing currencies like euro, dollars, rupees or Bitcoin. It is like PASH, so you pay anonymously and you can sell with invoice and taxes. It's convenient and fast. One-click web speed payments are possible. It's free and open source. It's a GNUPE package. It uses established crypto and an open protocol. The crypto is based on blind signatures. It's a research project from academia entering real-world now. There's no black blockchain technology used. It's not based on the proof of work or any other distributed consensus mechanism. So, how does it work? Like cash, I withdraw money from my exchange. I spend the coins and the merchant deposits the coins. Same way as cash. And the same way, the exchanges, which can be a bank, need to be verified by audits. Here's another view. Now you have the triangle at the bottom. To make this happen, you need to have the old banking infrastructure. So, I pay money to my bank, like I have money there. My bank makes a wire transfer to the exchange bank. The exchange bank is the one where I can withdraw coins. So, now I possess coins. Now I can spend the coins at a merchant's place somewhere. And that merchant then deposits the coins at the exchange, where the exchange bank then makes a wire transfer to the merchant's bank. So, that's the main architecture and the main concept. So, how does that work?  And this is something which Torsten is going to show you afterwards. So, this is how it looks at the back end. You have a little script checking if the wallet is installed or is it not installed. If it's installed, the 402 payment required gets triggered and leads to the contract URL. And if not, you have a fallback of saying, oh, you don't have $TOLLE installed, so you can use credit card systems. Then this is the contract where you have all the information you might want, like the currency, and very important, the red part, where it leads you once you've paid the fulfillment of the contract and also stuff like payment deadline, refunds deadline and stuff like that. So, here's a comparison with other systems. So, the credit card is the only one that really serves on and offline. So, all the other systems are either online or offline. As you see, GNU-TOLLE only works online, but that's the idea. We already have cash for offline, so we don't need TOLLE for offline payments. Yeah, so, if you look at the section payer anonymity and payee anonymity, there you can see the major difference. So, of GNU-TOLLE and all the other systems, so that here the payer is anonymous and the payee is not. Yeah, and then I think the last line is also very important, the freedom, I mean, that's why we are here this weekend. Here's another comparison where we grabbed out those four features, privacy, online payment, taxability and licensing, and where TOLLE fulfills all of them. So, now into the views from the different perspectives. So, as a private customer, I find it fast and convenient, and I like that I can send money to friends as well. As a traveler, I appreciate that there is no false positives in the fraud detection anymore and that I can get a proof of payment. As someone who's losing her wallet in meat space occasionally, I'm looking forward to have backups of my wallet. As a citizen of the internet, I know that such thing can only work if it's free and open and third parties can verify all the components. As a hacker, I like that it's private, like cash, there's no personal information required, also no credit card details that need to go to the merchant. As a merchant, I again find it fast and convenient. I appreciate that there's no rejections of limited customers and that there are signed contracts, especially I'm happy that I don't have to store any customer information, which means I don't need security audits in my own infrastructure anymore. It's free and open, so I can integrate it very easy, and I have competitive pricing and support. And Taller is ethical, and it complies with the upcoming data protection regulations. I also didn't know that. There is this regulation starting May 2018, that's like one year from now, where privacy, by design and data minimization are required for all data processing. That's quite interesting. So credit card payments won't work then anymore because they'll be illegal. As a customer and merchant, from both perspectives, it's good that it's cheap, it's an efficient protocol, there's no fraud, so they are competitive providers, so they are barely any costs. That it's flexible, so I can use it for small amounts and I can use it for any currency. That it's stable, that means I don't have any fluctuation risks, like in Bitcoin heavily, as in just as traditional currencies with the usual government protections for financial services. So if the rupee falls and I have rupee in cash with me, which I have right now, then it's like a general risk, but not any different. And it's very nice that it is efficient, so there's no waste of energy in bandwidth, no inflationary costs for the whole economic system, like the mining costs. And then it's good for all both fast and convenient, safe and secure flaws, which I already had in the slides before. If I would be a government, I would like that it's common, so it preserves my independence, there's no monopoly. I like that it's taxable, and I like that it's efficient for the economy. Then I'm happy that it is secure and that it serves signed contracts and proof of payments, so in case of court stuff, there is proof, and there is no counterfeit. Also, I'm happy that it's audited and that there are no bad banks and no fraud and stuff like that, and then it's very nice for me as a government that I'll be protected against foreign espionage. So fortunately, I'm not a government but a techie, so I'm happy that it's coming in GPL. That's a fair GPL for the exchange, LGPL, which is now for the reference code, demonstrating the integration with the merchant platforms, and then there are licenses like Apache, Mozilla, GPL for wallets and related customer-facing software, which can be anything, any license. Then it's a restful protocol and the security does not depend on the use of HTTPS, unless we're hoping that HTTPS will be there anyhow, and it's written in C-TypeScript and Python and uses Postgres as a database. So now the more interesting part, the crypto. So Tali uses proven, established crypto constructions like cryptographic hash functions, blind signatures, schnoir signature, Diffie-Hellman key exchange, cut and choose zero knowledge proof, and, of course, modern instanations are used. So here I'll be just briefly going through it. You're very invited to ask questions, which Christian can reply then. So the first step to do this is to set up the whole thing, so we need to pick an elliptic curve. Then the exchange creates a domination key with ERISA. The merchant creates a signing key, ED, DSA, and the customer creates a planchette. A planchette is a rolling. This is very close to the concept Chalm was creating. That's this guy who started to do digital cash in the early 90s. So the second part is to withdraw. So this is very much like Chalm. So the customer blinds the blank gauge, the exchange blinds the sign, and the customer unblinds to get the coin. So now the planchette gets a coin. So this is the WC3, W3C standard from the payment interest group. So I'm already way out of time, so I just skip that. But that's the standard scheme. So now the third part, the payment. So the customer builds the shopping cart, like clicks items. The merchant proposes the contract. The customer spends the coin, the merchant verifies the coin, and the exchange verifies the coin. So again, here's the whole process of the payment. So and now the fourth part of this crypto protocol is about giving change. This is very heavy. So I think we all agree that it's unreasonable to have like hundreds of one cent coins to solve that problem. So we want to like have the merchant being able to give out change. Which is unlinkable and which still gives the taxability of transaction. So the method is that the contract can specify only to only pay partial value of a coin. So the exchange allows wallets to obtain unlinkable change for remaining coin value. So this is how it works. So the customer asks the exchange to convert an old coin to a new coin, like the rest coin, right? So the protocol ensures that new coins can be recovered from old coins, but new coins are owned by the same entity. So it needs to be refreshed. And this refresh protocol allows to give unlinkable change, to give refunds to an anonymous customer, and to expire old keys and migrate coins to the new ones. Also transactions via refresh are equivalent to sharing a wallet. So I told you before you can share your money. So anyhow, let's go through this very briefly. This is the protocol again. So the owner of a new coin may differ from the owner of the old coin. That's the problem, so we need a straw man solution. So Diffie Hellman is used here. Then the like transfer key setup starts. Then there is this cut and choose used. So the customer commits the exchange chooses. The customer reveals, and the exchange verifies. And then you blind the change and unblind. So, and that's another brief view on the OPSEC. So the two browsers communicate with each other, and they communicate then with the TALA backend and the wallet. And this is very much disconnected from each other. So that's the important part. So if the browser is somehow stupid, then the wallet isn't affected. So, but now for the last minutes, this few as the footerologist. So this is just a rough selection now of things that could be possible. And I'm very happy to discuss this as well. So when it comes to donation, sharing coins is always possible. So it's impossible to stop donations, same way like cash. So any legal recipient will get the money. So it's impossible to create situations like PayPal was not paying to NGOs or WikiLeaks. And as a side note, if it's not legal, there's also no way around it. Then it's also much easier for handicapped persons because they can use their own devices. So the whole thing like captures on websites and the physical terminal thing is not an issue anymore. Then I find it very interesting that the coins expire. I haven't mentioned that before, but the coins will expire after a while. So then there's a fee for refreshing and that creates a negative interest rate. So people might stop sitting on like plenty of money. Then there's a transfer and structure of fees. So freeze fees created by a particular payment system doesn't have to be paid by all customers like we have right now. So usually if there is no fee when you pay with credit card, that means that everyone has to pay those fees because they're distributed among everyone. Then also small merchants don't have the hassle with the credit cards. I don't know if anyone is here who was with us when we started to do credit card payments for the Congress. This was quite a hassle and we actually wanted to drop it in between very often because we just said, okay, let's screw it. This is just too much hassle. So we made it then through the process. Once you have set it up, it's okay, but setting it up is very, very hard. And also customers don't have to think about if they can trust small merchants. I think everyone knows this. You'd rather choose than another merchant if that one, which you just wanted to enter your credit card details, somehow looks scary. Then you have machine-readable contracts, which makes easier tax filings and might make flat tax obsolete. It also makes the Swedish model of transparency of income tax statements possible much easier. Then the next point is multi-currencies and open standards, giving a way for regional currencies and other alternative economies. Then it is very transparent. It's open source, so anyone can understand it if he or she wants to. Then, as I said, I'm losing my wallet in Meatspace sometimes. So I am responsible for my wallet, be it on or offline. And if it's online, I can back it up. If I lose my credit card, I always have a problem. If someone steals my wallet, I can trace the coins the moment they are spent with the help of the exchange. Then you have stuff like restrictive coins, so I can give coins to my kids and make them in a way that they can only be spent for stuff, which is like for non-adults. And it's possible to have micro payments. So that could be an alternative for captures, that you just pay like 0.0001 euro for visiting a website or for emailing someone. Then it's very nice for donations, like the whole micro payment like we have with Flatter and everything. And we could even get rid of web apps that way. And that's the last one, it's a reserve-based system, so you can only spend cash you actually have, like with your wallet. And there are different wallets possible because it's open source. So there's an open question, which we are also a bit in discussion. The goal of or one goal of credit cards is to push customers to spend more money. Cash in the opposite gives a better feeling about how much money is left. We all know this, I guess. Commercial wallets might follow the idea of credit cards, but floss wallets could serve the opposite. But we have no clue how we could serve the opposite. I mean, how can you make an online payment system looking like a wallet where you see, oh, I only have 20 euros left. So, yeah, to go on, you can check out the demo, you can check the docs and the API and the code. You can subscribe to the mailing list, you can join the IRC channel on Freenote, you can follow Taller on Twitter, and you can help us in any other way by just telling around. You can give us feedback, and you can implement Taller into your applications, which you can do on Sunday, 2 p.m., here in this house, not in this room, I believe. And establishing exchanges, that's the big thing for this year. So, yeah, exactly 30 minutes. Thank you. All right, any questions? Yeah. First of all, can you do something like that you can put a certain transaction hold? So, for example, assume that I want to buy a new smartphone with the system, and then I'm agreeing to a certain price and I'm waiting for the shipment, and when the shipment doesn't arrive, is there any way for me to put the transaction hold or open a dispute or something like that, or would that go like through a third party so that we agree on a third party? I'd give some money to a third party, I wait for the shipment, and when it arrives, I release the funds, when it does not arrive, I open this dispute or something like that. Yeah, maybe Christian directly replies. Yeah, can quickly answer. You would want probably a third party escrow service, it's not built into the protocol at this point. What is built is possible to getting refunds, so if the escrow service agrees that, well, you didn't get your thing, you should get your money back, the system can be used to give you your money back even though you have not necessarily identified yourself. So, the giving money back is there, but the escrow, somebody has to be trusted to evaluate is eligible for getting the money back or not, and that has to be somebody else, it's not the payments of the provider. So, if I were to implement this on my web shop, and my typical customer is somebody who is not tech savvy at all, would this be feasible at this point? You want to answer? You will see later how a non-tech savvy nine-year-old, no tech savvy nine-year-old, sorry, can use the system. So, I think usability-wise, yes, once we actually have a user base that can use it, which means having this exchange. And it's only for online transaction anyhow. So, it's not for this little shop owner who's selling beer and who would never touch a smartphone or something, it's for the one who already has a website. So, and the integration is very easy. If I have a website that sells something that's absolutely not for a tech community, like Amazon or selling whiskey or an airline ticket or something. So, could an average citizen use the system today? Yeah, yeah. If they only have a credit card or a bank account. So, ideally, it will be showing up. So, if you click something on Amazon, then you also have the choice of using a credit card or using PayPal or using whatever, so-called überweisung or something. So, then you can also just use taller if you have it installed. And, yeah, the installation and the usage then is quite easy. Anything else, Dan? Do you have a list of acceptance points where I can pay with taller? And the second question is, are there any regulatory issues like money laundering, law or something? So, for the first question, no taller is still this academic research project entering real world, like, about to. So, at the moment, we're looking for exchanges. So, what we need is at least one bank who can serve as the exchange point. And then we can have people actually using it. So, the answer for the first question is no, there is no list because there is nothing yet. And the second question, you, Christian? For the regulatory question, we talked to several bankers and risk management experts and anti-manage learning experts, and they have all told us that, yes, this is not the system they would expect financial fraud to happen in. Yes, it should be compatible with AML and know your customer regulations. So, they do not see that there are problems fundamental with the system. There may be things like you have to, under existing EU regulation limits, the maximum amount that people can buy with it. So, you can't buy a house with it. You may be limited to that. There may be jurisdictions where you have to impose daily withdrawal limits. So, you can't withdraw 10,000 euros in cash in a day, just like there are these kind of restrictions on ATMs these days. But short of these monetary limitations of what the maximum amounts, are you allowed to use the system for? There seems to be no problem. Any other questions? Regarding the idea that the credit card encourages you to spend more money since you have no idea how much is left. So, I think that's probably true for like 10 years ago. But nowadays you can have the card directly linked to your smartphone. So, you could immediately see how much is left at the moment when you spend something. So, do you think that's... And of course, I think there's a second thing. So, people are now talking about standardizing online banking again. And when you have standardized access to your bank account, you could easily have an open source up on your phone that tells you exactly how many euros and how many cents are left on your bank account. It's more about the feeling, right? So, even if my phone tells me how much balance is left on my credit card, it's still a different feeling if my wallet is just empty, right? I mean, I don't know, like for me at least it is. Any other questions? Or comments? Maybe a comment. I don't know if you follow the Flutter thing. They just recently got bought, I think, by this company who does Adblock Plus. And maybe this is a nice window of time now to introduce another system because this Adblock Plus company, I think there is some distrust in the community. So, maybe some people who used Flutter since now are looking for alternatives. So, if you can offer some, maybe it's a good time now. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Otherwise, I would say we go for the demo now. Do you wanna maybe add your, like, plug your computer? Any other question or something? No, okay. Any questions? Okay. So, first step, I go to demo.tour.net. Yeah. You have it orange. Also, it's not a plug-in, right? Everyone knows how to install a plug-in, probably. Now, to withdraw coins into my wallet, I click on this bank thing. Then I select the amount of kudos to withdraw. Let's say 20. You should say that's your bank page where you have your bank account with your balance, right? Yeah, and then I click on select exchange provider. And then I click accept fees and withdraw. And then I have to answer a math question. Okay. And then, voilà. Easy to withdraw kudos. And now I go back to the... Show your wallet balance. To the starting page. As you can see, here they are in my wallet. Now, I'm going to go to the easy store where you can pay kudos for individual interpreters of Richard Stallman's book, Free Software, Cover Free Society, which is also available for free at the FSF. So, here I'm welcome by a chapter of the book. But just clicking on it, if you already have it, you don't have to pay for it again. Just click confirm payment. And then here it is, the chapter that you paid for. Oopsie. Okay. Thank you, Torsten. You want to buy another one? No, wait. Can you show the wallet again? He wants to... Just click on the toddler icon. And you can also go to the project donation website where you can show respect to a software project choice by giving them kudos. You can see the current money that the current currency that toddler uses. Well, then one can choose for what phone. Then one can choose how many kudos and to which project you want to donate it to. I've just got to pick genutaro. Donate, then just leave it as toddler. Confirm payment. Okay, done. Okay. Any questions, Torsten? I hope that answers any questions about can non-technical people use this? If not, sorry. All right. Thank you very much and see you around the next couple of days.


What's up everybody? Ricky Krooth here. Welcome back to my channel. So today's video I want to give you an idea of my thoughts on first two weeks as a father. First two weeks of fatherhood has been so amazing. It really has. A lot of people say, you know, you just don't know how it's gonna feel until it happens and that's absolutely true. So many emotions so many just it's just an amazing feeling to be honest with you. Those of you don't know a couple weeks ago I had my first child, which was a little girl Whitley she is a very very special beautiful child and she sleeps. A lot of people say, you know You're getting sleep getting sleep. Yes. She is sleeping. She has slept since she was born She actually was born and made zero noise when she was born You know, you know, we gave her birth, you know She was on my wife's chest for a second They took her and and started, you know, cleaning her up and everything she didn't make a sound and Me and my wife were both after a couple after, you know, 30 seconds or so.  You know, I looked over there I could see she was breathing and everything she she looked like she was fine and she was fine She's just a very quiet child. She she hasn't made hardly any sounds and She she cries. She's crying a little bit when she's hungry, but then she sleeps and through the night She sleeps and so we have to wake her up to feed her My wife has an alarm set every two or three hours. Whatever the schedule is she wakes up She has to wake Whitley up to feed her. So, you know, that part of it I think we've been extremely lucky to have To have a baby that, you know, doesn't have colic Is it crying and keeping us up all night and all that good stuff? So that's been a complete blessing right there As far as my schedule It's affected me a little but everybody before, you know, leading up to the birth Everybody was trying to scare me into thinking that, oh god And I knew the whole time it wasn't gonna really affect me at all. I'm still getting up at 430 I'm still answering the DMs. I'm still going to the gym. I'm still working normal hours All that good stuff. So I'm gonna spend a lot of time with the baby as well I'll come home on lunch, spend time with her then All evening after work. I'm spending time with her then. So we're getting a lot of time Spent together and the cool thing is is anytime I want to spend time with her I can just drop what I'm doing and go spend time with her, you know My business and the way my life is I do what I want to do When I want to do it.  I just want you guys to know how lucky I've been with you know My wife and my child so far super blessed, but when I the one thing I wanted to talk about That has really hit me hard and I've really realized You know, of course This is secondary to the unconditional love and that I have for her and my wife at this point Just keeps growing more and more and more but under that Okay, and just thinking about it in more of a success level business level motivation level so on and so forth The one thing that I realized really hardcore was how completely helpless Babies are when they're born You know, they are completely 100% dependent on someone to take care of them And it really made me think about how every single here made me realize this how every single human out there Every single one of them started From that they started from a baby who could not do anything for their self They couldn't talk. They couldn't you know focus. They couldn't change their own diaper.  We're only here for so long We start out not being able to take care of ourself We all start from zero and we work our way from there and we create the life that we want to create From nothing. I don't care how rich your family was or what kind of family you came from or if you came from nothing Whatever wherever your circumstances are we all start from not being able to take care of ourself And I think that is just simply amazing And it give it should give you so much motivation to know that you can create The success that you want if anybody else in the world has done it then you can do it Anything you put your mind to it's all up here Anything that you put your mind to you can do it.  I'm just overjoyed with how everything has went You know in terms of my life so far. I'm just super happy. This is the happiest I've ever been To be honest with you as well, and I'm just looking forward to 2020. It's going to be a really big year I'm really more focused on the work that I'm going to put into 2020 that's going to put me in position to have a breakout year 2024 like I'm focused on 2020 But I'm only focused on it because I know it's a stepping stone to build the momentum and pour gasoline on that fire For the business that I'm building For 2024. I just feel like 2024 is going to be my real breakout year. I think 2020 is going to be a breakout year But I think 2024 is going to be the breakout year. I don't know why I just feel that way for some reason It's just in my gut. So anyway, I hope you guys have an incredible day Thanks for watching. Of course, let me know if there's anything in the world I can do for you. Just shoot me a comment or DM me on Instagram Be sure to subscribe to my channel here. Hit that like button. We'll see you guys on the next video. Let's go


So, after AlexNet came a time of many different architecture innovation. So let's go through a few of them. In 2014, the next outstanding network was VGG. It was developed by the Visual Geometry Group in Oxford. And their problem was beat AlexNet on ImageNet. And it uses smaller filters and deeper networks. Let's look a little at the architecture. What we have is, instead of having an immediate layer with very large filters and big stripes, it has small filters here. So we go through two convolution layers here at the full image size 224. Then comes the max pool layer. We go through another two convolution layers, another max pool, three convolution layers, another max pool. We see how the numbers of parameters goes up as we go through the networks. Another three layers, another max pool, another three layers, another max pool. And then a full three layer fully connected before having the output with the self-max. Okay, so in a way, it's similar to AlexNet, but it has smaller filters and it's considerably deeper. So why all the fully connected layers? Then MLP, they're basically able to do interesting non-linear calculations on that. And the architecture, of course, as you saw it changes. It jumps from the eight layers of AlexNet to like 16 to 19 layers, depending on how you count. It uses only three by three convolution. So with stride one padding one and only two by two max pool stride twos. And effectively it therefore has fewer parameters or like at certain places it has fewer parameters. Now, like instead of going from a large say 11 by 11 filter, which takes 121 parameters, it has just three by three, which gives us nine locally. And that's, and having fewer parameters in a way often makes performance better for these. We remember because fewer parameters means better generalization performance. But of course it's still an incredibly big network with a lot, a lot of parameters. And it achieved 8% top five error and therefore it was considerably better. And it has certain drawbacks. It was incredibly slow to train. The weights themselves are quite large in terms of discs and bandwidth. And the size of a VGG is over 530 megabytes, which makes deploying it kind of tiresome suddenly at that time. So next came Google net. So Google net uses the so-called inception modules and it basically replaced individual layers where we say, okay, we do a three by three convolution with a two by two max pool with these little so-called inception modules. And here the architecture is we have the inception modules, a grid size reduction with some tracks, another set of inception modules, another grid size reduction and another set of inception modules. And then finally, again, a big readout. So in the first version of inception, you can say, kernel size tuning is hard. Now, like should we use a five by five kernel or should we use a three by three kernel or should we use no kernels at all? It's hard to know it. And also if you're Google, then why decide if you can have all of them? So that's what they did. They first have a one by one layer here that just allows you to make more feature dimensions if you want, followed by a five by five. And then they also have a one by one followed by a three by three. And then they have a pooling layer followed by a one by one, and they have a direct one by one. And then they're all, they concatenate all of these together that produces an inception module. So the idea is that therefore, instead of having to choose one, you can have all of them at the same time. And like often in machine learning, when we build ensemble methods, we get better in this case by giving these different possibilities, the system will be doing somewhat better. And now there's, there's of course, certain representational bottlenecks. You can have, it's often the case that you have worse learning properties when the dimensions of the data drastically changed all at once, which happened in the original version. And so they then replaced it with this slide version, where you see the five by five has been replaced by three, by two subsequent three by three layers. Okay, but it's still the general idea. We basically want these different, want to not choose one of these architectures, but have all of them concatenate them, and then basically allow the gradient descent to choose how important each of these channels should be. So what were the results? They get to 6.7% top five error rate. Now that wasn't quite as good as humans because Kapathy tried it and was able to do 5.1%, which is actually quite interesting. It requires considerable training of humans to get good at ImageNet. So you need to train humans on ImageNet so that they get that ImageNet, which is quite interesting. So that's a problem if you want to really go deep. And, and that's the following. If you, if you say take a data set like CIFA 10 that we have here, and your plot error is a function of the iteration, what we can see, no, like you always have these jumps, which is places where the, where the, where the speed of SGD is, is, is made slower. No, like you get better performance, but, but slower when you do that. And so what, what, what can be seen here is that if you make the networks very deep, then they don't converge to good values anymore. No, so 20 layers is actually better than 30 layers, which is better than 40, which is better than 50. So the idea that going deeper helps doesn't seem to be right at least when we have a fixed period of training. And so, so it doesn't seem that simply adding more and more layers is actually the solution to the problem that we're looking for after all. So now here comes, here comes the idea of RAS NATS. Now, like, look at here, what we have on the left-hand side. We have VGG, it starts with convolution, max pulls, convolution, max pulls, convolutions, max pulls, and so forth. You can have a 34 layer plane network that basically goes through this, just like VGG just makes it really deep, where each, where each, where you have lots of layers in each of them. But here comes the cool idea of RAS NATS. What you do is you model basically the differences. So what you do is you take the output here and you add that, keep in mind that in this whole stack, we always have the same dimensions. So you add what goes in here to this one and you add it to this one and you add it to this one. And by having these, these, these connections that go through it, these effective skip connections, what it allows the network is to model basically changes through that. Through what we'd have if we had the identity transformation from here to here. And this is actually quite interesting because, because now there's a shortest path, you know, like we can go from here through these skips to here, to here, through these skips to here, through these skips to here, and so forth. So the network is at the same time a relatively shallow network and a very, very deep network. And you can immediately see why this seems like a good idea. So how does the RAS network? We have an input. We have a weight layer with a real or another weight layer. But now here we take the output of this and we add the input of everything x to it and then we apply the real or to it. So thereby there is this shortcut path. Whereas what these do is they basically model how we should change the input of x so that this is as good as possible. And so age what we have here is the desired mapping. And we hope that we can fit this with a small local network. And if the optimal mapping is closer to the identity, it's easier to find those relevant small fluctuations. Now if you have a very deep network, you can say each layer doesn't need to do all that much to its input. It might be sufficient to do relatively small changes. And therefore it's intuitively desirable to use something like RASnets. And indeed, if they use RASnets, the performance looks very, very different. They find that basically RASnet 20 does a good job. But if you go from 20 to 30, you're doing better. The deeper you go, the better it gets. And so same thing on ImageNet, they really get mileage by going from 18 layers to 34 layers here. Why do you find in neural network papers that there's so much on these small data sets like CIFAR 10? Well, you can run this very, very quickly. Whereas ImageNet, as you may remember, is a very large data set. And that just means that it costs you a lot of compute to calculate anything with it. So why do they work? If we look at the paths, if we remove a layer, let's say we remove layer F1, there's still two paths so we can get from the output to the input. Now imagine this layer for some reason totally cuts out. No gradients, no forward propagation. But we can still get gradients to this path and this path. And therefore we will have much less worry about vanishing gradients. And in fact, you can model the last landscape. We will at some point of time talk about how we make these. Without skip connections, the last landscape looks really bizarre. Whereas with the skip connections, it has a much smoother, much more meaningful landscape where we can hope that optimization will work much better. Now, the next innovation here is ResNext. Where you could take that same basic idea that we have in ResNet. And we can basically have multiple channels in parallel that have uniform multi-branch structure. And in some cases it really helps. And now let's briefly ask ourselves, how does the ResNet implement the identity function? No, what if we needed that through a bunch of layers it's the same at the output as it's in the input? Well, that's actually very simple. We set all weights to zero. Now like if it does nothing in the network, it will stay an identity function. Now, here's another network that came a little later, DansNet. In the case of DansNet, what we do is we take every layer and take the output. And not only give it to the next layer, but allow it to skip the next layer and skip the next layer and skip the next layer. And thereby, of course, it gets to be longer and longer because it's all concatenated with one another. But it shares a lot of the desirable properties of the ResNet. Namely that there are short paths that connect the transition layer where the MaxPool happens. To all to the previous layers and basically they exist in a way the network is at the same time a shallow network and a deep network. And that, of course, helps massively to deal with vanishing gradient prompts. Strengthens feature propagation, encourages feature reuse. Now, if there's something useful in these features that can be used by many of these future layers, it will reuse it. And it also can substantially reduce the number of parameters relative to the ResNet. Now, let's think a little bit about the usefulness of skip connections. Take ResNet, uplaid it and understand the role of skip connections in this context.