I suspect most Slashdot responses on this topic don't arise from a sample that's uniformly distributed across its readership, much less the larger IT crowd.
For some curious reason, any gun-related discussion, even an indirect and abstract variant like 'the impact of electric guns', seem to elicit a big knee jerk response everywhere in America, no doubt drawing disproportionate interest from the substantial libertarian contingent at Slashdot Central.
Frequent sophomorism like this, I think, is a big reason why Slashdot has lost many readers to other venues like Hacker News, which somehow manages to avoid political minefield topics that quickly devolve into pointless Sturm und Drang. Like this one.
In 1789 "arms" meant a musket or a flint lock pistol that fired a miniball, at most twice a minute. I wonder, how far from that can you go and still claim the 2nd amendment applies?
An semi-auto assault rifle? Generally legal. A fully-auto assault rifle? Generally not legal. A grenade launcher? A guided missile? A booby trap bomb? Not legal in the US, today.
So there are limits to protected "arms", ill defined as they are. But If we finally had to update the 2nd amendment due to rising tech, things could get interesting.
If the 2nd Amendment is a civil right, what purpose do arms serve the citizen? If self defense, and since there are many more ways to defend one's home and family today than in 1789, should we amend the 2nd to emphasize the goal of self defense rather than allow it to advocate arms as a means to an end that's ill served by the tech advance of ever deadlier offensive weapons - pistols and rifles?
Given the huge difference between an 18th century musket and modern light arms, and the indifference of regulators to respond to that difference, it seems likely that the escalation of guns protected by the 2nd amendment is going to cross a line, and soon.
Yep. Or I'd carry a second paper book in case I got tired of reading the first or just wanted a different style or topic from the first. Sometimes I'd even carry three...
Yes, IMHO paper books are usually preferable, but ebooks have advantages since they:
- can be read in the dark (or poor lighting) - can enlarge / change their font - allow dictionary lookup of a word, effortlessly - can share a bookmark across devices - can be bought / downloaded instantly - are usually cheaper than paper - they don't destroy trees - they don't cause my floors to sag under their weight
Apparently we agree that the increased need for web content findability was ill served by hypertext links alone.
My grander point was that the visibility and ubiquity of links served the wild wild west mentality of Web 1.0 and its aesthetic of maximum content visibility and its sense of freedom and "infinite content". That's not unlike the advent of Arts and Crafts as society's attempt to beautify the rise (and counter the dehumanization) of industrialization. Both movements sought to celebrate the winsomeness of tech, but couldn't survive the growth of tech for long.
And yes I used an analogy (a metaphor, actually). But EVERYTHING shared is analogy. Says Plato anyway, and who am I to gainsay an icon like Plato?
The OP is channeling McLuhan. He's resurrected cool vs hot media all over again -- the cool aging hyperlink vs the hot social site or app or vendor supplied smartphone service. Inevitably media evolves.
In architectural terms, hyperlinks were akin to craftsman-style houses and mission-style furniture: the building's infrastructure was left exposed so the mechanisms of its construction were part of the art. But of course that lovely transparency limited the architect's range of artistic expression possible in that medium. When skyscrapers arrived on the scene, it was no longer feasible to expose the inner workings of such a behemoth in an aestheticly pleasing and accessible way. The internet is no different.
With the rise of audio and video and ephemeral mesaging content, the web's infrastructure had to grow up or stultify. None of us wants to dwell online by having to dig our way through the now nearly infinite morass of net content: new, aging, old, long dead, and better-it-had-never-lived. Organization of relevant from irrelevant is now essential.
But who's going to do this? A curated web made of hypertext is not gonna happen. Too expensive and too slow. So we get the next best thing -- a hosted web, where the hypertext disapears into the architecture. Corporations invest in building virtual communities to attract content providers and consumers. Like it or not, the web's architecture grows up, sheds its skin, and moves on.
I think the gist is that MIT has improved SLAM via better use of object recognition, not that they've improved object recognition. And at best this news is evolutionary, not revolutionary.
I think the author isn't proposing policy. He's making a point, and I think an increasingly valid one. All media is manipulative. Not just the ads. Broadcast content uses a continuum of malicious devices that suck up our dollars and shape our votes and our opinions. The more we're made aware that we are being manipulated, the better for our autonomy. And our sanity.
Is there a change in policy out there that could address this in a positive way? I don't know. But I'd love to have discussions with other interested motivated intelligent folks to see if anyone can propose a better way, because what we have now really sucks.
Marketing has to be TRUE? Do you really believe this or are you just trolling?
There is no SHOULD in marketing. Nothing in law or theory requires marketing to be true or proper. As in the US judicial system, truth is irrelevant. There is only legal and illegal. Thus by law, marketing must be lawful, or at least not so over the top that it is called out for patently indefensible abuses and lose the case in court, whatever the legal reason.
Making broad assuptions about the presence of principles in a process whose sole objective is to manipulate people -- that isn't just absurd. It's insane.
Much is left unsaid when making this claim. If your cancer is found before age 65, or if the cancer is not localized, you absolutely will want to treat. The "wait and see" approach applies mostly to men who are closer to 80 than 65.
Yes, early prostate cancer (e.g. Gleason 3) does advance slowly relative to other cancers. But we're *not* talking about 10 years here. If you hope to live more than perhaps another 5 years after diagnosis, you definitely will need to address the cancer somehow (surgery, radiation, or hormones).
IMHO, watchful waiting is overrated unless you're in late stage retirement. And PSA screening is badly underrated.
The original IEEE story is about the use of MRI when doing prostate cancer biopsies, not prostate cancer surgery, which is almost always the radical removal of the prostate -- something that would not be aided appreciably by MRI. (The visual field is already outstandingly clearly illuminated during a DaVinci robotic procedure. Seeing *within* the prostate would be unnecessary during removal.) Likewise, prostate surgeries for BPH (enlarged gland) won't warrant MR either, since the procedure is already well served by a simple camera attached to a trochar.
The article also fails to mention how economically feasible the use of MRI would be for biopsy, given the high cost of MR in general (perhaps 10x more than CT, which is perhaps 5X the cost of ultrasound, which is what's used now). In practice, it's more likely that advances in ultrasound (like doppler) will prove more useful and feasible for biopsy than will MR.
In the Pipeline (chemistry and pharma) MathBabe (math and data mining) Schneier on Security (crypto and computer security) My Biased Coin (statistics) Steve on Image Processing (image proc w/ Matlab) Paul Graham (computing and Y Combinator) Lessig Blog (intellectual property and cyber law) The Volokh Conspiracy (politics)
MultiBlogs: Talking Points Memo (political) Google Research Blog KDD Nuggets (datamining) R-Bloggers (R and datamining)
Nice article. I disagree though that most AI researchers are motivated by the good that automation will do. They're not that naive. I think Oppenheimer had it right: scientists want to work on projects that are "technically sweet". AI is definitely that.
But I totally agree that the real world impact of AI will be like evolution -- following a pattern of punctuated equilibria where disruption arises in chuncks as each significant skill area is usurped by automation (like car/truck drivers, then call centers, then retail clerks, then jobs requiring physical skills).
That said, once the first skill area falls that requires substantial linguistic facility (like a call center), I see most white collar jobs tumbling like dominos soon thereafter. Once machines can converse using speech and perform the simple logical deductions/inferences that humans do, would anyone hire a human for an office job ever again?
Are the drone squadron commanding officers burning out too? It seems likely that they share the same high stress and poor prospects for promotion as their pilots. You have to wonder then, how far up the chain of command does this problem extend? And therefore, will we have to auotmate not only the pilots, but the next two higher levels of command as well, perhaps up to base commander?
Of course, if we do, the command to take each kill shot will have to be fully automated, since no colonel-level commander will have enough time to call all the shots across multiple squadrons and dozens of drones.
The best outcome for everyone (but the BBC) is for all three hosts to go to another network and set up shop there. Call the new show anyhthing you like. The magic of Top Gear lies in the hosts, not the network. And Lord Knows, not the BBC.
Top Gear is the most popular TV show in history, with over 350 million viewers worldwide. There is no way in hell the show will fade away. Or the cast. There is no way Clarkson can be replaced, successfully. Fair or not, many viewers would see May and Hammond as traitors. The two will quickly realize they would be insane to stay, especially given their other (much more lucrative) options. So they will go too, probably to rejoin Clarkson at a network of their choosing, where they have *much* better support and artistic freedom. And hot food.
Clarkson was paid a measly $1.5M/year by the BBC. He can make more money per *episode* at a real network. It's plain from his recent shenanigans that Clarkson has been eager to rewrite his contract with the BBC for some time now. The only question is how soon Hammond and May follow Clarkson's example and head for greener pastures.
The 4th and 5th amendments are not enough to assure personal freedom from search in the digital & wireless age. Only an amendment to the constitution that spells out this freedom can prevent it's continued abuse.
We must decide how much freedom we want to give up in order for law enforcement to investigate / prevent terrorism. We could draw a line between the enforcement agencies, preventing trickle down of personal info that is unrelated to terrorism. Or we could outlaw the gathering of this info entirely. But only a definitive constitutional amendment can compel all authorities and future presidential administrations to stay within boundaries that are sufficiently clearly marked to prevent routine abuses.
Both browsers are cheap and will block most ads. I've used Atomic for the past several years as my primary browser on my iPhone 4 and 5s, iPad 3, and iPad Mini retina, and it has worked very well on all. The browser is very configurable and makes much better use of small real estate than Safari. It's very rare that Atomic has let me down or that I have to fall back to using Safari or Chrome (maybe twice a year?).
I've used Mercury less than Atomic, but only because Atomic has worked well. The little I have used Mercury, I've had no complaints.
Alas there's precious little company support or user community for Atomic. If Mercury turns out to be better for this, I might be willing to switch.
Yes, absolutely I'm concerned. The radiologist got it wrong in assessing the tumor to have grown. That's so important to a cancer patient as to be an unpardonable sin.
But given the hodgepodge of modern medical testing, it's not terribly surprising. Clinical CT or MR images often have low resolution or voxels that are anisotropic (usually, longer head-to-toe than side-to-side). When comparing two images with differing resolutions, voxel shapes, or subject poses, two images can be difficult to compare.
That said, recommending surgery based on a mistaken read of an image is something I would *definitely* be concerned about. But that's why we get second opinions.
I haven't seen the article or video. But for 99% of developers, I'd say the only CPU-level changes since the 8086 that matter are caches, support for threading and SIMD, and the rise of external GPUs.
Out-of-order scheduling, branch prediction, VM infrastructure like TLBs, and even multiple cores don't alter the programmer's API significantly. (To the developer/compiler, multicore primitives appear no different than a threading library. The CPU still guarantees microinstruction execution order.)
Some of the compiler optimization switches have become more complex, and perhaps a few coding idioms are now deprecated/encouraged so that compilers better understand what you intend (so you don't make their job unnecessarily harder).
But overall, almost all developer techniques don't benefit from changes to CPU microarchitecture after 1990, aside from caches, SIMD, and GPUs.
And of course, ever since the 80486 (1989), all CPUs support floating point instructions.
If there had been a major outcry from Muslims, how would you know? Are you attuned to their media?
Do you imagine most Muslims belong to sopme sort of large collective whose spokesman appears before media outlets to make official pronouncements? AFAIK, they don't. Aside from Catholics and the Pope, neither do Christians.
What's more, do you imagine that Muslims speak with one voice on most issues? When's the last time Christians agreed on anything?
I know a few muslims in the US. They tend not to be that outspoken about their beliefs, probably out of fear of intolerance. Like yours.
Slashdot Mirror
Until cops take responsibility for their mistakes and misdeeds, they should be given less power, not more.
I foresee many police-driven autocar crashes where the cops say simply, "Oh well", and walk away from responsibility.
I suspect most Slashdot responses on this topic don't arise from a sample that's uniformly distributed across its readership, much less the larger IT crowd.
For some curious reason, any gun-related discussion, even an indirect and abstract variant like 'the impact of electric guns', seem to elicit a big knee jerk response everywhere in America, no doubt drawing disproportionate interest from the substantial libertarian contingent at Slashdot Central.
Frequent sophomorism like this, I think, is a big reason why Slashdot has lost many readers to other venues like Hacker News, which somehow manages to avoid political minefield topics that quickly devolve into pointless Sturm und Drang. Like this one.
In 1789 "arms" meant a musket or a flint lock pistol that fired a miniball, at most twice a minute. I wonder, how far from that can you go and still claim the 2nd amendment applies?
An semi-auto assault rifle? Generally legal.
A fully-auto assault rifle? Generally not legal.
A grenade launcher? A guided missile? A booby trap bomb? Not legal in the US, today.
So there are limits to protected "arms", ill defined as they are. But If we finally had to update the 2nd amendment due to rising tech, things could get interesting.
If the 2nd Amendment is a civil right, what purpose do arms serve the citizen? If self defense, and since there are many more ways to defend one's home and family today than in 1789, should we amend the 2nd to emphasize the goal of self defense rather than allow it to advocate arms as a means to an end that's ill served by the tech advance of ever deadlier offensive weapons - pistols and rifles?
Given the huge difference between an 18th century musket and modern light arms, and the indifference of regulators to respond to that difference, it seems likely that the escalation of guns protected by the 2nd amendment is going to cross a line, and soon.
Yep. Or I'd carry a second paper book in case I got tired of reading the first or just wanted a different style or topic from the first. Sometimes I'd even carry three...
Yes, IMHO paper books are usually preferable, but ebooks have advantages since they:
- can be read in the dark (or poor lighting)
- can enlarge / change their font
- allow dictionary lookup of a word, effortlessly
- can share a bookmark across devices
- can be bought / downloaded instantly
- are usually cheaper than paper
- they don't destroy trees
- they don't cause my floors to sag under their weight
I expect to buy more of both indefinitely.
Apparently we agree that the increased need for web content findability was ill served by hypertext links alone.
My grander point was that the visibility and ubiquity of links served the wild wild west mentality of Web 1.0 and its aesthetic of maximum content visibility and its sense of freedom and "infinite content". That's not unlike the advent of Arts and Crafts as society's attempt to beautify the rise (and counter the dehumanization) of industrialization. Both movements sought to celebrate the winsomeness of tech, but couldn't survive the growth of tech for long.
And yes I used an analogy (a metaphor, actually). But EVERYTHING shared is analogy. Says Plato anyway, and who am I to gainsay an icon like Plato?
The OP is channeling McLuhan. He's resurrected cool vs hot media all over again -- the cool aging hyperlink vs the hot social site or app or vendor supplied smartphone service. Inevitably media evolves.
In architectural terms, hyperlinks were akin to craftsman-style houses and mission-style furniture: the building's infrastructure was left exposed so the mechanisms of its construction were part of the art. But of course that lovely transparency limited the architect's range of artistic expression possible in that medium. When skyscrapers arrived on the scene, it was no longer feasible to expose the inner workings of such a behemoth in an aestheticly pleasing and accessible way. The internet is no different.
With the rise of audio and video and ephemeral mesaging content, the web's infrastructure had to grow up or stultify. None of us wants to dwell online by having to dig our way through the now nearly infinite morass of net content: new, aging, old, long dead, and better-it-had-never-lived. Organization of relevant from irrelevant is now essential.
But who's going to do this? A curated web made of hypertext is not gonna happen. Too expensive and too slow. So we get the next best thing -- a hosted web, where the hypertext disapears into the architecture. Corporations invest in building virtual communities to attract content providers and consumers. Like it or not, the web's architecture grows up, sheds its skin, and moves on.
I think the gist is that MIT has improved SLAM via better use of object recognition, not that they've improved object recognition. And at best this news is evolutionary, not revolutionary.
A sensible response.
I think the author isn't proposing policy. He's making a point, and I think an increasingly valid one. All media is manipulative. Not just the ads. Broadcast content uses a continuum of malicious devices that suck up our dollars and shape our votes and our opinions. The more we're made aware that we are being manipulated, the better for our autonomy. And our sanity.
Is there a change in policy out there that could address this in a positive way? I don't know. But I'd love to have discussions with other interested motivated intelligent folks to see if anyone can propose a better way, because what we have now really sucks.
Marketing has to be TRUE? Do you really believe this or are you just trolling?
There is no SHOULD in marketing. Nothing in law or theory requires marketing to be true or proper. As in the US judicial system, truth is irrelevant. There is only legal and illegal. Thus by law, marketing must be lawful, or at least not so over the top that it is called out for patently indefensible abuses and lose the case in court, whatever the legal reason.
Making broad assuptions about the presence of principles in a process whose sole objective is to manipulate people -- that isn't just absurd. It's insane.
Much is left unsaid when making this claim. If your cancer is found before age 65, or if the cancer is not localized, you absolutely will want to treat. The "wait and see" approach applies mostly to men who are closer to 80 than 65.
Yes, early prostate cancer (e.g. Gleason 3) does advance slowly relative to other cancers. But we're *not* talking about 10 years here. If you hope to live more than perhaps another 5 years after diagnosis, you definitely will need to address the cancer somehow (surgery, radiation, or hormones).
IMHO, watchful waiting is overrated unless you're in late stage retirement. And PSA screening is badly underrated.
The original IEEE story is about the use of MRI when doing prostate cancer biopsies, not prostate cancer surgery, which is almost always the radical removal of the prostate -- something that would not be aided appreciably by MRI. (The visual field is already outstandingly clearly illuminated during a DaVinci robotic procedure. Seeing *within* the prostate would be unnecessary during removal.) Likewise, prostate surgeries for BPH (enlarged gland) won't warrant MR either, since the procedure is already well served by a simple camera attached to a trochar.
The article also fails to mention how economically feasible the use of MRI would be for biopsy, given the high cost of MR in general (perhaps 10x more than CT, which is perhaps 5X the cost of ultrasound, which is what's used now). In practice, it's more likely that advances in ultrasound (like doppler) will prove more useful and feasible for biopsy than will MR.
In the Pipeline (chemistry and pharma)
MathBabe (math and data mining)
Schneier on Security (crypto and computer security)
My Biased Coin (statistics)
Steve on Image Processing (image proc w/ Matlab)
Paul Graham (computing and Y Combinator)
Lessig Blog (intellectual property and cyber law)
The Volokh Conspiracy (politics)
MultiBlogs:
Talking Points Memo (political)
Google Research Blog
KDD Nuggets (datamining)
R-Bloggers (R and datamining)
Nice article. I disagree though that most AI researchers are motivated by the good that automation will do. They're not that naive. I think Oppenheimer had it right: scientists want to work on projects that are "technically sweet". AI is definitely that.
But I totally agree that the real world impact of AI will be like evolution -- following a pattern of punctuated equilibria where disruption arises in chuncks as each significant skill area is usurped by automation (like car/truck drivers, then call centers, then retail clerks, then jobs requiring physical skills).
That said, once the first skill area falls that requires substantial linguistic facility (like a call center), I see most white collar jobs tumbling like dominos soon thereafter. Once machines can converse using speech and perform the simple logical deductions/inferences that humans do, would anyone hire a human for an office job ever again?
Are the drone squadron commanding officers burning out too? It seems likely that they share the same high stress and poor prospects for promotion as their pilots. You have to wonder then, how far up the chain of command does this problem extend? And therefore, will we have to auotmate not only the pilots, but the next two higher levels of command as well, perhaps up to base commander?
Of course, if we do, the command to take each kill shot will have to be fully automated, since no colonel-level commander will have enough time to call all the shots across multiple squadrons and dozens of drones.
How far up the chain will robots go?
The best outcome for everyone (but the BBC) is for all three hosts to go to another network and set up shop there. Call the new show anyhthing you like. The magic of Top Gear lies in the hosts, not the network. And Lord Knows, not the BBC.
Top Gear is the most popular TV show in history, with over 350 million viewers worldwide. There is no way in hell the show will fade away. Or the cast. There is no way Clarkson can be replaced, successfully. Fair or not, many viewers would see May and Hammond as traitors. The two will quickly realize they would be insane to stay, especially given their other (much more lucrative) options. So they will go too, probably to rejoin Clarkson at a network of their choosing, where they have *much* better support and artistic freedom. And hot food.
Clarkson was paid a measly $1.5M/year by the BBC. He can make more money per *episode* at a real network. It's plain from his recent shenanigans that Clarkson has been eager to rewrite his contract with the BBC for some time now. The only question is how soon Hammond and May follow Clarkson's example and head for greener pastures.
Bet on it.
A good list. For Firefox I'd add:
Ant Video Downloader
Cookies Manager+
Flashblock
Web Of Trust
Zoom Page
On Windows 7 where gadgets are broken, I also like Weather Forecast.
The 4th and 5th amendments are not enough to assure personal freedom from search in the digital & wireless age. Only an amendment to the constitution that spells out this freedom can prevent it's continued abuse.
We must decide how much freedom we want to give up in order for law enforcement to investigate / prevent terrorism. We could draw a line between the enforcement agencies, preventing trickle down of personal info that is unrelated to terrorism. Or we could outlaw the gathering of this info entirely. But only a definitive constitutional amendment can compel all authorities and future presidential administrations to stay within boundaries that are sufficiently clearly marked to prevent routine abuses.
That's great to know. On my iPads I'd love to suppress the mobile versions of all sites.
And spoofing the agent string to pretend you're a bot can be an efective way to access paywalled sites.
But of course I'd never do that...
Both browsers are cheap and will block most ads. I've used Atomic for the past several years as my primary browser on my iPhone 4 and 5s, iPad 3, and iPad Mini retina, and it has worked very well on all. The browser is very configurable and makes much better use of small real estate than Safari. It's very rare that Atomic has let me down or that I have to fall back to using Safari or Chrome (maybe twice a year?).
I've used Mercury less than Atomic, but only because Atomic has worked well. The little I have used Mercury, I've had no complaints.
Alas there's precious little company support or user community for Atomic. If Mercury turns out to be better for this, I might be willing to switch.
19% makes sense only if "IoT developer" includes everyone whose job title includes the words INTERNET, OF, or THINGS.
Of course you could anonymize source code using an obfuscator.
But maybe the simpler way is to compile Java to bytecode, then decompile it back to Java. I suspect that's as effective as most obfuscators.
Yes, absolutely I'm concerned. The radiologist got it wrong in assessing the tumor to have grown. That's so important to a cancer patient as to be an unpardonable sin.
But given the hodgepodge of modern medical testing, it's not terribly surprising. Clinical CT or MR images often have low resolution or voxels that are anisotropic (usually, longer head-to-toe than side-to-side). When comparing two images with differing resolutions, voxel shapes, or subject poses, two images can be difficult to compare.
That said, recommending surgery based on a mistaken read of an image is something I would *definitely* be concerned about. But that's why we get second opinions.
I haven't seen the article or video. But for 99% of developers, I'd say the only CPU-level changes since the 8086 that matter are caches, support for threading and SIMD, and the rise of external GPUs.
Out-of-order scheduling, branch prediction, VM infrastructure like TLBs, and even multiple cores don't alter the programmer's API significantly. (To the developer/compiler, multicore primitives appear no different than a threading library. The CPU still guarantees microinstruction execution order.)
Some of the compiler optimization switches have become more complex, and perhaps a few coding idioms are now deprecated/encouraged so that compilers better understand what you intend (so you don't make their job unnecessarily harder).
But overall, almost all developer techniques don't benefit from changes to CPU microarchitecture after 1990, aside from caches, SIMD, and GPUs.
And of course, ever since the 80486 (1989), all CPUs support floating point instructions.
If there had been a major outcry from Muslims, how would you know? Are you attuned to their media?
Do you imagine most Muslims belong to sopme sort of large collective whose spokesman appears before media outlets to make official pronouncements? AFAIK, they don't. Aside from Catholics and the Pope, neither do Christians.
What's more, do you imagine that Muslims speak with one voice on most issues? When's the last time Christians agreed on anything?
I know a few muslims in the US. They tend not to be that outspoken about their beliefs, probably out of fear of intolerance. Like yours.
('Archangel Michael'? Really? How old are you?)