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User: mesterha

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  1. Re:Software to limit functionality? on Tesla Ends Online Sales of $35,000 Model 3 (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    I'm not sure how that contradicts my statement, but even focusing on cores, I doubt market demand would match this strategy. In the past many a CPU was sold that had locked potential. With AMD you could even unlock it. https://www.makeuseof.com/answ...

  2. Re:Software to limit functionality? on Tesla Ends Online Sales of $35,000 Model 3 (nytimes.com) · · Score: 1

    Haven't they done this with CPUs. They could make a smaller chip and get better yields, but it would be more expensive. In principle, it is the same with cars. They must have accountants who run the numbers to maximize something that involves profits as a component.

  3. But if you have their tax records and bank statements for the last ten years, the skin colour becomes irrelevant!

    So how much information is enough? It might be more than people realize. A machine learning algorithm is based on correlation, so it will probably give the "bad" information some influence. And what happens for a person that doesn't have many records. I guess it's tough luck since any priors start to have a bigger influence.

  4. Same for almost anything. Skin colour rarely matters, and given enough more direct data on factors that do matter, skin colour will have no predictive value, so the algorithm will ignore it.

    Even if it matters, it might not be fair. Let's say that a group of the population is on average more poor. Given that a person's information is somewhat noisy, a good machine learning algorithm that can determine that a person is a member of a poor group will give that person a bias towards poor. In other words, that person might have identical financial records as someone from another group and receive a different outcome for say a loan approval. This is a rational (improves accuracy) somewhat Bayesian decision by the algorithm, but most would say it is unfair.

  5. The report tells us it was six minutes from takeoff to crash. The manual trim is certainly "strong enough" to deal with the trim system -- that's what it does.

    All they needed to do was make a left turn for Laguardia like they're going to pick up the milk.

  6. Not for long. They move.

  7. More dollars are casing the same amount of goods and EVERYBODY pays more for stuff. The problem here is that although the minimum wage workers do see a pay increase dollar wise, they eventually see a cost of living increase and fall back to their existing standard of living.

    It still works if EVERYBODY pays more for stuff. If people who earn more than $15/hr also pay some of that price increase then the workers still come out ahead. It's one pie and this just gives to poor a bigger slice. That is unless the owners use this as an excuse to increase profits and do some mild collusion. Unfortunately, given the power of large corporations, that is a more likely outcome.

  8. Workers are thrilled to see that minimum wage go from say $13 to $15/hr, right up until they take home their new paycheck and discover the cost of dinner out just went from $13 to $15. Imagine that. And that's how inflation works.

    Fortunately Trump eats fast food. In other words, if people who earn more than $15/hr also pay some of that price increase then the workers still come out ahead. That is unless the owners use this as an excuse to increase profits and do some mild collusion. Unfortunately, given the power of large corporations, that is a more likely outcome.

  9. Re: Who cares? on Anti-Vaccination Conspiracy Theories Thrive on Amazon (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    Hypothetically, if 20% of the deaths are from vaccinated kids and only 1% of the kids are vaccinated then don't take the vaccination because it is increasing the risk of death from the flu. In terms of fruit, if 20 apples are rotten and 80 bananas are rotten, you might assume that bananas are more likely to be rotten. But if I started with 20 apples and 10000 bananas you'd be wrong. The apples are 100% rotten/dead while the bananas are 0.8% rotten. This is probably based on Bayes Rule.

  10. Re:Who cares? on Anti-Vaccination Conspiracy Theories Thrive on Amazon (cnn.com) · · Score: 1

    Going back to my first statistic, around 80% of the deaths in healthy children from the flu each year is in non-vaccinated kids. 4 out of every 5.

    For this to be useful, you need to know what percentage of kids are vaccinated for the flu. According to the CDC 57.9% of children get vaccinated, so roughly half. This means that not getting the vaccine roughly increases the chance of death by a factor of 4. While this is essentially what you said, the number could be very different depending on the number of kids getting vaccinated.

  11. Re:The State of Homeless on Finland Basic Income Trial Left People 'Happier But Jobless' (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    The difference between gambling, insurance, and investing in stocks

    I'll play.

    Gambling is bad because of negative expectation. Investing is good because of positive expectation. Insurance is negative expectation but it can still be good because any reasonable monetary utility function is going to decrease the value of more money.

  12. Margarine on There's No Such Thing as a Safe Tan (theconversation.com) · · Score: 2

    Maybe vitamin D is not the only reason the sun is good for you. https://www.outsideonline.com/...

  13. Yes, that is exactly what I did when I started my post. Lately, Slashdot AI articles have been steeped in people implying that there is something special about organic brains, something that ANNs don't have yet.

    I don't think it's so much that there is something special about organic as it is that there might be something lacking in ANNs. Real brains have neurotransmitters and electrical impulses. They change their physical structure over time. They have lots of innate complex structure. They have cells besides neurons such as glial cells that might have cognitive function. We don't know how even simple neural systems work. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)

    In defense of my definition: yes, neurons do pattern matching. It fires for a certain subset, i.e. a pattern of its input space. Take the original claim I was responding to and apply it to the simplest insect brain you can think of. Does the system as a whole really do much more than pattern matching?

    If the claim is that a neural structure is sufficient, I would just say that. Saying it is just pattern matching is a loaded statement since it makes one think of simple iid function induction which doesn't capture lots of machine learning let alone what a brain can do. However, while I'd be OK with the claim that neural structure is sufficient, that's not really a strong statement. I'm sure one could model a Turing machine with neural structure, so it's really just saying a computer is sufficient.

    Anyway I do agree with your goal to remove any metaphysicism which does have a history in AI. I also think it's good research to better understand the success of deep learning in many contexts including GANs and LSTM. I apologize if I gave the impression I was attacking you.

  14. That is a good point. To me, what a single neuron or collection of neurons does is pattern matching, in the sense that the output of a neuron or collection thereof can be regarded as identifying a certain (abstracted, meaningful) pattern within the universe.

    I assume you mean artificial neuron, because we don't really know what a neuron does in this context.

    Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to me are definitely showing signs of that. Just look at Nvidia's latest stuff:

    I'm not up on this research, but it seems GANs are just exploiting the success of deep learning in a predator/prey relationship to create some interesting data. It's probably useful for a range of applications, but I'm not sure it does much for general AI.

    The difference between us and apes in intelligence is huge, but in terms of biological evolution and makeup we're not that far apart. Finding the differences between the brain of a bonobo and a human is pretty hard. If there is a 'special sauce' to intelligence, it must be a fairly small (yet very significant) variation on the theme of the chimp biological neural network.

    We don't really understand any of this so it's hard to make any solid conclusions. Also chimps are pretty smart and their brain network is very complex with a lot of innate structure. I assume most people would agree adding convolution was an important step for image classification with deep learning. We are probably going to have to add a lot more structure.

    Consider advances in science like this:

    These references are consistent with my claims. They are trying to understand the structure of these neural systems. I suppose you could claim that anything that has a neural structure is some type of pattern matching, but I would say that's a pretty non-standard definition.

  15. Whatever it is, it's more than just matching patterns.

    How do you know that?

    I guess it depends on how you define pattern matching. A lot of machine learning is just labeling examples. This is what many people mean by pattern matching. In many ways this is more scientific theory formation, which is a skill which takes intelligence to do well. In other words, find a function to fit the data.

    A more sophisticated intelligent system is probably going to need more structure for both the problem and the solution. It needs to build in complexity over time not just compress data into a concise function. It needs to reason and plan to accomplish goals. It needs to interact with others including adversaries. In many ways adding these constraints to the problem is what makes it solvable since it adds assumptions that can be exploited. General mathematical pattern induction is impossible.

  16. Re:Algos != intelligence, artificial or otherwise. on Artificial General Intelligence is Nowhere Close To Being a Reality (venturebeat.com) · · Score: 1

    Here is the proper definition of intelligence:

    Intelligence: The ability to formulate an effective initial response to a novel situation.

    While this is a definition, I'm sure there many others that are just as interesting. Once we have a decent understanding of a mechanism then we can have a proper definition that matches many of the characteristics of these folk definitions. This is typical of science.

  17. Re:Cite the part with the estimate you claimed. on Scientists Identify Vast Underground Ecosystem Containing Billions of Micro-organisms (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Haters gotta hate.

  18. Re:Sorry, not possible on Recent Quasar Observations Support Lots of Mini-Bangs Instead of One Big Bang (wired.com) · · Score: 1

    I would imagine that consensus breeds its own form of self-reinforcement. That doesn't make it wrong - it just makes it likely that when it is wrong, the evidence will be shocking, and possibly dismissed or actively fought. I guess that's baked into the scientific process of peer review to some extent.

    I agree. It probably happens more today than in the past. Little research bubbles are created. Since things are so specialized, when you need someone to review a paper, you want someone with that specialization. Once you have a critical mass of researchers, it's self-sufficient and self-reinforcing.

    In order to accept generally accepted scientific theories without any more than a lay-person's understanding of an over-simplified explanation (say, the kind offered in an article in the NYTimes Science Tuesday section), you have to assume some obvious questions that pop up have been dealt with and dismissed for good reason. So for example, when I hear the lay-person's explanation of carbon dating (that the relative abundance of radioactive isotopes in a sample indicates how long ago that carbon was incorporated from the atmosphere when the sample was a living organism), I always ask myself "doesn't that assume that the relative abundance of those isotopes in the atmosphere is constant - or at least, that scientists have some way of knowing how that ratio has changed over time?"

    Yes, you need to assume the scientists know what they are doing. Unfortunately, I don't think all science is created equal (or equally easy.) The softer (really harder) sciences undermine people's opinion of all science. Think health or economics. (Please ignore science/engineering distinction.) They need to be studied and exploited but their results are often suspect...

    I guess all this talk about red-shift brought that up, because I've always had a similar question about red-shift as a measure of distance. Again, there's a buried assumption there that we know the rate of expansion of the universe - or at least if it's not constant, we know the rate of acceleration. Do we? And if we don't, is it just the accuracy of measurements like carbon dating and red-shift distance measurements that's thrown into question - not the concepts?

    By all means study it if you think it's fun. However, in some contexts, you will need to appeal the experts. There is too much knowledge for one person to digest, and to truly be an expert does require lots of time. I think an important but often ignored question is how to pick "experts". Some people are clearly doing it wrong.

  19. Re:Sorry, not possible on Recent Quasar Observations Support Lots of Mini-Bangs Instead of One Big Bang (wired.com) · · Score: 1

    Cherry-picking scientific opinions favorable to your own is what science denialism *is*. The denialism in science denialism isn't a denial of truth; it's a denial of burden of proof. Science isn't about truth, it's about evidence. It doesn't care what you believe, it cares how you back up your claims.

    I'm not sure I agree that is the definition of scientific denialism, but I think you have a point. I'm not a fan of debate where the goal is not to understand a problem but to win. You can often see this is action where someone rebuts and the adversary quickly concedes the point. He clearly knew he was wrong, but was just hoping the other side was not prepared to address the issue.

    A fundamentalist biologists who don't believe in evolution, or Earth Scientists who believe in a Young Earth aren't automatically bad scientists, as long as they don't make unsubstantiated claims. In fact more conventional scientists aren't in much of a different position; every scientist has *some* heterodox positions, otherwise there'd be no point. Every scientist wants to be the one that shakes things up, but they know other scientists are watching them. That's why scientists sound so equivocal; a good scientist knows others are watching, eager to pounce on any overstep.

    They are "bad" scientists if they don't accept fundamental results in their area of research. I assume most scientists who are denialists are doing so in areas outside their expertise. Of course, good scientists might have some controversial ideas or require abnormal levels of confirmation, but they do not believe things that contradict the available evidence without some strong arguments.

    Same goes for anthropogenic climate change. Believing in global cooling, steady state climate (even through divine intervention), or warming mostly driven through natural climate cycles doesn't make you a science denier.

    I guess it's semantics, but those examples sure sounds like scientific denialism. If you want to do good science, you need an good scientific argument to support your position. Divine intervention does not cut it.

    Demanding that those views be treated as equally well-established as AGW does.

    I guess this implies some type of political decision. If one wants them treated equally then one is probably concerned about action based on that information. I think, to ground this rationally, one should use utility theory. What's the probability of the outcomes associated with the actions? I think many of the "deniers" are often just skeptics. For them an 1% chance that global warming is wrong is enough to argue the point. However, in this context, 1% is not terribly relevant for policy. Just look at how often they accept bets on global warming. Clearly they don't have high confidence.

  20. It looks like you forgot to convert from m^3 to liters. Isn't the right number around 31 MJ/L? So about the same as gas, which is not bad.

  21. Re:So Dems don't care I guess on Senators Demand Google Hand Over Internal Memo Urging Google+ Cover-up (zdnet.com) · · Score: 1

    I use "the left" in a broad term in this case, but you can round it out from environmentalism shifting to hyper-environmentalism that humans need to die.

    While I think there is some truth to what you say, I do think the right often resorts to a false equivalence. It might be easy to find some hyper-environmentalists and trot them out, but it doesn't mean they own the mind share of the left. It's also easy to find a group of crazy teachers and students at various universities, but again, this is only a small fraction of the left. However, if you look at the surveys, large portions of the right wing believe crazy/bad/wrong things. For example, InfoWars gets lots of viewers and was even endorsed by Trump. I'm sure some people just watch for entertainment value, but they are very profitable selling their snake oil, so there are probably a lot of true believers.

  22. Re:What does it do if you remove all gender? on Amazon Scraps Secret AI Recruiting Tool That Showed Bias Against Women (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    no, you just don't do machine learning in this application. you use a clear audit-able rules based system.

    There used to be something called expert systems where experts were questioned to create rules. This failed as the expert systems never did nearly as well as the experts. Turns out experts can't articulate how they are experts. As a relatable if somewhat misleading example, you could ask me for instructions on how to ride a bike, but I could never give you a set of instructions that would allow you to get on the bike and just ride.

  23. Re:That's right you ungrateful SOBs on Half the World Is Now Middle Class Or Wealthier, Says Brookings Institution (brookings.edu) · · Score: 1

    Thanks for the link. I think power laws are interesting for the scale invariance and that might be significant for physics. It would be interesting if this was important for wealth, but it's not the real problem. Any economic system with strong inequality is probably bad; however, it seems hard to avoid with a "free" market. A simple random model with Gaussian returns will give large (exponential tail) inequality. This is a model with no intelligence, just random guessing and unsurprisingly some people get lucky and dominate. I'm sure things get worse when factoring the investment advantages of being rich. This might also explain the heavy tails. As random variables get correlated, the central limit theorem no longer applies and the tails get heavy. Intuitively, I would think an exponential tail is worse, but I'm not sure...

  24. Re:That's right you ungrateful SOBs on Half the World Is Now Middle Class Or Wealthier, Says Brookings Institution (brookings.edu) · · Score: 1

    If people in the long tail don't have enough resources to have at least an acceptable standard of living, unrest appears, and they will revolt and coordinate long enough to remove those at the peak; a position which then will be occupied by a new batch of privileged.

    It could be worse; it could be exponential. Also I'm not sure what you're graphing here. I assume the rich would be on the long tail.

    I'm also curious as to claims that power laws are inevitable. Do you have a reasonable theory/model to back that up?

  25. While the US does well compared to China that's a pretty low bar. The real competition is Vatican City. That country is a model for the world.