Don't attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by incompetence.
As one of the first people (I believe) to ever have my Google account cancelled by them (I'm talking about the days when it meant I lost my newsgroups posts), my repeated questions as to why answered by variously ignoring them, boilerplate emails that I was in violation of my agreement, and an email pointing to somebody else's post replying with a bunch of obscenity and threats to one of mine where I expressed the opinion that there were, in fact, gas chambers at Auschwitz; I must agree, one can most easily explain various features of Google's user interactions as incompetence-based.
You know, the alarmists have been playing the gloom and doom card for 20+ years, so far none of their dire prognostications have been proven true. If they've been so so wrong in the past, why would I believe them now? They confidently made claims in the past which turned out to be false.
Don't you see? They have just kept upping the anti with more and more dire predictions, because that's what it takes to get attention now. It's starting to wear thin if you ask me. I look at their past and it seems like they are just shysters, snake oil sellers who will literally say anything to manipulate folks like you. I suggest you apply a bit more critical thinking when you read stuff like this.
What about the AGW alarmists' warnings that Saddam Hussein was about to WMD the US?
Wait, I might have this a bit confused.
This is a basic tenet of the Church of the Invisible Hand. There's no problem that can't be solved by destroying nature and replacing it dollar-generating industries.
The basic tenet of the Church of the Totalitarian State is that there is no problem that can't be solved by just raising taxes and adding laws. Generally, "destroying nature" and the like can only be accomplished by a corrupt state supporting the big corporations, i.e., campaign donors. Even a corrupt state isn't too big a problem until it grows large. Even the Grant Administration had a limited short term effect because the size and scope of government was vastly smaller. The true Invisible Hand is rarely allowed to operate. Compare that to today where the government can simply force everyone to buy the products of the giant corporations that paid them off.
And just how would we avoid dangerous climate change from CO2 level rise, in the hypothetical condition that conservatives were convinced it was real, and we did not have a large corrupt state supporting big corporations? Stop buying petroleum products and let the free market eventually come up with alternatives?
I don't understand. For the sake of argument. How does an average temperature that's half a degree warmer than it was 40 years ago wipe out the Bummblebee's habitat. Do the flowers stop growing?
What's funny is that this was a source of hysteria in the 70s. Those bees were going to migrate up north and cause mass havoc. Not just ecological disruption mind you but actually bothering people that were nowhere near nature.
Didn't seem to pan out. You have the occasional killer bee attack here and there but nothing too bad in the grand scheme of things.
Indeed, this is the case of the cult science of Climate Change vs. the cult science of Evolution. Considering how many warming periods and ice ages bumblebees have survived, it's ludicrous to suggest that they can't adapt to a changing climate through basic "These bees survived because they moved further North. The further North, the more likely the hive is to split and thrive. Therefore, we can predict that the Bumblebees will, as a species, propagate North" which is the least-disagreeable pillar of evolutionary science.
It is easy to demonstrate that evolution is false. Dodos were made extinct by hunters. If there was any truth to evolution, a bulletproof dodo would have evolved.
Why? It's entirely easy to go your entire life and not feel compelled to educate yourself about bees. Maybe I even knew this at one time. I have no idea.
But in the same way I know almost nothing about flower arranging or weaving... knowing the difference between bees hasn't been something germane to my life experience.
Quick, without googling it, tell me 10 techniques a blacksmith would use. (And, no, I don't know either;-)
Yeah, I don't see a practical application for this. You don't need that high of a ratio for any serious applications that don't also undergo tons of stress.
torque multiplication is not the only purpose of reduction gearing; micromanipulation is the flip side. you can use this thing to bolt together nanites.
"Why waste so many years learning how to code? Why not just pay someone else to build your idea?"
Yeah, I mean why learn a skill yourself when you can just hire someone to do the work for you and then hire someone else to market the product to make you millions, while paying the guys you hired as little as possible? It seems the most important skill is being able to pay people while keeping most of the money for yourself.
And then, when your workers become so expert at their jobs they realize that you're standing in the way of their doing a better job, they leave, start new companies, and become your competitors. See the beginnings of the auto industry, the beginnings of the chip industry, the beginnings of the computer industry, and a lot of Chinese companies that used to make stuff under contract to American companies.
If your project involves code, it's better if you are familiar with code. In the same way that if your project involves wood, it's better if you are familiar with woodworking.
Better architects also know the technical aspect of construction, including manual labor.
I don't understand why you keep poopooing my idea of a steel Zeppelin. I didn't take materials science, you know, or aerodynamics; I'm an Idea Man.
The Middle Ages nobility: Read? Why would I learn that - I have clerks for that. The only proper thing for someone noble is to hunt and fight.
Mid-20th century: managers and execs don't touch a keyboard, that's what the all-woman secretarial pool is for.
Now: learning to actually do work and make things? That's beneath us, we just buy people to do that, they don't do anything useful (i.e., make money for me), it all comes from my Vision!
mark
I remember when the CEO of my then employer first was "now on the internet!" for purposes of email. Each day when he went to lunch, his secretary would log in to his account and print out all the email and put it on his desk. He would scribble answers all over it, then leave it on her desk to reply back to via email.
In the non-cyber world: would a car designer without automotive engineering get anywhere?
I had a roommate who studied automotive design on the West Coast because he loved cars. Four years of college and $25,000 in student debt later, his regular job was logistics in a warehouse. I'm surprised no one told him that an automotive designer was overqualified to work in a warehouse.
A graduate came back to my school to talk about his job designing cars. He had worked on the original Ford Mustang! We were totally stoked to hear what he would say. Turned out he had designed the door handle. I learned a lesson from that.
suggesting that "older" is largely a point of view rather than an absolute)
Anyone without cognitive impairment or severe physical limitations can use most common user interfaces (which is definitely not to say they can't be made more usable and efficient).
That includes many 70 year olds, and a fair number of 90 year olds.
As somebody with a techie mentality, a love for instrumentation, and a success record with interpreting software UIs correctly and using them successfully for several decades, I gotta admit I am baffled by the current generation, something I thought I'd never say. All these apps "kids" (even literally) just pick up and use immediately baffle me. And of course there is no documentation to refer to.
I decided it's something subtle; the people who used to write software were people like me. People I went to school with, in some cases. We thought alike. Our instincts were similar. I would react to the UI as the creator intended, even though the average human didn't. Those days are gone; the creators of software now have grow up with a different set of experiences, have a different set of instincts, and I can't relate. It makes me disappointed. And they won't get off my lawn.
When you mention Godwin, you Godwin yourself. It is the overused Godwin effect.
Given any sufficiently long exchange of comments on the Internet, the probability that someone will refer to Godwin's Law approaches unity.
I call this the Hitler Effect.
If your job can be done from your home, it can be done from India. Why would your employer pay $100/hr when they can pay $10/hr?
that's my idea. have my job outsourced to India; apply to the outsource place to get the job, obviously I'm the right man for the job. demand a pay differential to account for the higher cost of living. work from home, finally.
It isn't a racist outcome. It is the outcome of a flawed algorithm. Might even be able to argue that wider testing (and improvement) is needed for the image sensors for computer-attached video equipment. If I my own photo albums for "seal" or "dog" I get pictures of my kids in both. I don't believe the algorithm is impugning the humanity of my offspring, I just think it is far-from-perfect. The outcomes of my search aren't hateful. The outcomes of the picture labels in this story aren't racist.
Oh sure. It's all fun and games until the President and his family end up in the zoo.
The developers building vision algorithms don't typically create their own datasets. They purchase archives of images, and a lot of these problems stem from how many samples of each type are in those archives. The Google team likely has a giant database of human faces that it works with, and the ethnic frequencies are probably either the result of choices made by whatever origanization compiled it (and for whatever reason they compiled it) or the ethnic breakdown of the userbase of some app they used to grab the data. It's extremely unlikely that either of those will produce the same number of samples of every ethnic type.
It's also one thing if this was a program just designed to distinguish between different people. But it looks like it's trying to recognize objects of all sorts and distinguish between people and just about everything else. That's a hard problem, and the only response to this sort o thing is to take a regular failure case and feed it back into the training data so you can hit the next regular failure case. Hopefully it will be less coincidentally embarrassing, but it will definitely be there. Perhaps confusing bald men with balloons or something like that.
But I also think people underestimate how much skin color affects machine vision problems. I spent years in the biometrics industry and one consistent fact is that people with darker skin just don't provide as much easy-to-recognize detail as people with lighter skin. There will be more misclassifications as long as the image is taken using the visible spectrum. To a computer extracting features, dark skinned people and gorillas are both human-ish face shapes with a particular color range and somewhat indistinct geometry due to weak contrast and shadows. Distingushing between those two sets just isn't as easy as distinguishing between fair-skinned blondes and gorillas. You can make that decision just by looking at the color histograms and not even bothering with geometry.
Wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of the training data was stuff users uploaded. Leveraging that stuff as a sort of implicit crowdsourcing is Google's biggest trick pony. As in their translation service, for instance.
Richard Dawkins is a biologist. he would never say something so stupid.
I'm curious what you feel is stupid about that straightforward statement. Regardless, Richard Dawkins did, in fact, say exactly that.
Gaps in the Mind, by Richard Dawkins
"We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes."
"In truth, not only are we apes, we are African apes. The category 'African apes', if you don't arbitrarily exclude humans, is a natural one"
"'Great apes', too, is a natural category only so long as it includes humans. We are great apes."
I did a search for the words "dawkins" and "ape" and the first result was a video of Dawkins saying that he is an ape. I challenge you to find any living biologist that claims otherwise.
we are all hominids, and we are certainly not apes.
Gorillas are hominids, and all hominids are apes. Humans are apes and hominids, just like gorillas.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by incompetence.
As one of the first people (I believe) to ever have my Google account cancelled by them (I'm talking about the days when it meant I lost my newsgroups posts), my repeated questions as to why answered by variously ignoring them, boilerplate emails that I was in violation of my agreement, and an email pointing to somebody else's post replying with a bunch of obscenity and threats to one of mine where I expressed the opinion that there were, in fact, gas chambers at Auschwitz; I must agree, one can most easily explain various features of Google's user interactions as incompetence-based.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... =/= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Bumblebees are larger and usually fuzzier. That is like mistaking hornets for bees, they are different.
It's because we have sports teams with Hornet mascots.
You know, the alarmists have been playing the gloom and doom card for 20+ years, so far none of their dire prognostications have been proven true. If they've been so so wrong in the past, why would I believe them now? They confidently made claims in the past which turned out to be false.
Don't you see? They have just kept upping the anti with more and more dire predictions, because that's what it takes to get attention now. It's starting to wear thin if you ask me. I look at their past and it seems like they are just shysters, snake oil sellers who will literally say anything to manipulate folks like you. I suggest you apply a bit more critical thinking when you read stuff like this.
What about the AGW alarmists' warnings that Saddam Hussein was about to WMD the US?
Wait, I might have this a bit confused.
This is a basic tenet of the Church of the Invisible Hand. There's no problem that can't be solved by destroying nature and replacing it dollar-generating industries.
The basic tenet of the Church of the Totalitarian State is that there is no problem that can't be solved by just raising taxes and adding laws. Generally, "destroying nature" and the like can only be accomplished by a corrupt state supporting the big corporations, i.e., campaign donors. Even a corrupt state isn't too big a problem until it grows large. Even the Grant Administration had a limited short term effect because the size and scope of government was vastly smaller. The true Invisible Hand is rarely allowed to operate. Compare that to today where the government can simply force everyone to buy the products of the giant corporations that paid them off.
And just how would we avoid dangerous climate change from CO2 level rise, in the hypothetical condition that conservatives were convinced it was real, and we did not have a large corrupt state supporting big corporations? Stop buying petroleum products and let the free market eventually come up with alternatives?
I don't understand. For the sake of argument. How does an average temperature that's half a degree warmer than it was 40 years ago wipe out the Bummblebee's habitat. Do the flowers stop growing?
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.ph...
Troll...? Really?
GO check out the Time magazine front pages and other article found back then, they WERE saying the threat was global cooling.
Climatologist1: "Did you get your paper published?" Climatologist2: "Yes, in Time Magazine". Climatologist1: "Wow. I am impressed."
What's funny is that this was a source of hysteria in the 70s. Those bees were going to migrate up north and cause mass havoc. Not just ecological disruption mind you but actually bothering people that were nowhere near nature.
Didn't seem to pan out. You have the occasional killer bee attack here and there but nothing too bad in the grand scheme of things.
And now, we have even elected one as president.
Indeed, this is the case of the cult science of Climate Change vs. the cult science of Evolution. Considering how many warming periods and ice ages bumblebees have survived, it's ludicrous to suggest that they can't adapt to a changing climate through basic "These bees survived because they moved further North. The further North, the more likely the hive is to split and thrive. Therefore, we can predict that the Bumblebees will, as a species, propagate North" which is the least-disagreeable pillar of evolutionary science .
It is easy to demonstrate that evolution is false. Dodos were made extinct by hunters. If there was any truth to evolution, a bulletproof dodo would have evolved.
If this is a trend that predates you then there's a strong chance it's not the current trendy thing people are fixating on NOW.
Or have you run out of things to blame on climate change in the here and now and have to start with historical events.
The bees are consuming too much gluten.
Seriously? This ought to be common knowledge.
"She's as sweet, as Tupelo bumble"
Why? It's entirely easy to go your entire life and not feel compelled to educate yourself about bees. Maybe I even knew this at one time. I have no idea.
But in the same way I know almost nothing about flower arranging or weaving ... knowing the difference between bees hasn't been something germane to my life experience.
Quick, without googling it, tell me 10 techniques a blacksmith would use. (And, no, I don't know either ;-)
do you ever go outside in the summer?
I think I will use this.
you have my blessings. go forth and spread the word.
Yeah, I don't see a practical application for this. You don't need that high of a ratio for any serious applications that don't also undergo tons of stress.
torque multiplication is not the only purpose of reduction gearing; micromanipulation is the flip side. you can use this thing to bolt together nanites.
"Why waste so many years learning how to code? Why not just pay someone else to build your idea?"
Yeah, I mean why learn a skill yourself when you can just hire someone to do the work for you and then hire someone else to market the product to make you millions, while paying the guys you hired as little as possible? It seems the most important skill is being able to pay people while keeping most of the money for yourself.
And then, when your workers become so expert at their jobs they realize that you're standing in the way of their doing a better job, they leave, start new companies, and become your competitors. See the beginnings of the auto industry, the beginnings of the chip industry, the beginnings of the computer industry, and a lot of Chinese companies that used to make stuff under contract to American companies.
If your project involves code, it's better if you are familiar with code. In the same way that if your project involves wood, it's better if you are familiar with woodworking. Better architects also know the technical aspect of construction, including manual labor.
I don't understand why you keep poopooing my idea of a steel Zeppelin. I didn't take materials science, you know, or aerodynamics; I'm an Idea Man.
The Middle Ages nobility: Read? Why would I learn that - I have clerks for that. The only proper thing for someone noble is to hunt and fight.
Mid-20th century: managers and execs don't touch a keyboard, that's what the all-woman secretarial pool is for.
Now: learning to actually do work and make things? That's beneath us, we just buy people to do that, they don't do anything useful (i.e., make money for me), it all comes from my Vision!
mark
I remember when the CEO of my then employer first was "now on the internet!" for purposes of email. Each day when he went to lunch, his secretary would log in to his account and print out all the email and put it on his desk. He would scribble answers all over it, then leave it on her desk to reply back to via email.
In the non-cyber world: would a car designer without automotive engineering get anywhere?
I had a roommate who studied automotive design on the West Coast because he loved cars. Four years of college and $25,000 in student debt later, his regular job was logistics in a warehouse. I'm surprised no one told him that an automotive designer was overqualified to work in a warehouse.
A graduate came back to my school to talk about his job designing cars. He had worked on the original Ford Mustang! We were totally stoked to hear what he would say. Turned out he had designed the door handle. I learned a lesson from that.
Get famous and rich and respected, then go on TV and tell people to stop fighting.
suggesting that "older" is largely a point of view rather than an absolute)
Anyone without cognitive impairment or severe physical limitations can use most common user interfaces (which is definitely not to say they can't be made more usable and efficient).
That includes many 70 year olds, and a fair number of 90 year olds.
As somebody with a techie mentality, a love for instrumentation, and a success record with interpreting software UIs correctly and using them successfully for several decades, I gotta admit I am baffled by the current generation, something I thought I'd never say. All these apps "kids" (even literally) just pick up and use immediately baffle me. And of course there is no documentation to refer to.
I decided it's something subtle; the people who used to write software were people like me. People I went to school with, in some cases. We thought alike. Our instincts were similar. I would react to the UI as the creator intended, even though the average human didn't. Those days are gone; the creators of software now have grow up with a different set of experiences, have a different set of instincts, and I can't relate. It makes me disappointed. And they won't get off my lawn.
When you mention Godwin, you Godwin yourself. It is the overused Godwin effect.
Given any sufficiently long exchange of comments on the Internet, the probability that someone will refer to Godwin's Law approaches unity.
I call this the Hitler Effect.
If your job can be done from your home, it can be done from India. Why would your employer pay $100/hr when they can pay $10/hr?
that's my idea. have my job outsourced to India; apply to the outsource place to get the job, obviously I'm the right man for the job. demand a pay differential to account for the higher cost of living. work from home, finally.
Your inability to make a coherent argument is noted... that leads to an automatic concession by default.
Your concession is accepted.
Take fewer drugs the next time you post and you'll likely do better.
Good day, sir.
We leave you to your own devices, for nothing properly suits you except hypocrisy, flattery, and lies. Thou reeky rump-fed malt-worm!
It isn't a racist outcome. It is the outcome of a flawed algorithm. Might even be able to argue that wider testing (and improvement) is needed for the image sensors for computer-attached video equipment. If I my own photo albums for "seal" or "dog" I get pictures of my kids in both. I don't believe the algorithm is impugning the humanity of my offspring, I just think it is far-from-perfect. The outcomes of my search aren't hateful. The outcomes of the picture labels in this story aren't racist.
Oh sure. It's all fun and games until the President and his family end up in the zoo.
The developers building vision algorithms don't typically create their own datasets. They purchase archives of images, and a lot of these problems stem from how many samples of each type are in those archives. The Google team likely has a giant database of human faces that it works with, and the ethnic frequencies are probably either the result of choices made by whatever origanization compiled it (and for whatever reason they compiled it) or the ethnic breakdown of the userbase of some app they used to grab the data. It's extremely unlikely that either of those will produce the same number of samples of every ethnic type. It's also one thing if this was a program just designed to distinguish between different people. But it looks like it's trying to recognize objects of all sorts and distinguish between people and just about everything else. That's a hard problem, and the only response to this sort o thing is to take a regular failure case and feed it back into the training data so you can hit the next regular failure case. Hopefully it will be less coincidentally embarrassing, but it will definitely be there. Perhaps confusing bald men with balloons or something like that. But I also think people underestimate how much skin color affects machine vision problems. I spent years in the biometrics industry and one consistent fact is that people with darker skin just don't provide as much easy-to-recognize detail as people with lighter skin. There will be more misclassifications as long as the image is taken using the visible spectrum. To a computer extracting features, dark skinned people and gorillas are both human-ish face shapes with a particular color range and somewhat indistinct geometry due to weak contrast and shadows. Distingushing between those two sets just isn't as easy as distinguishing between fair-skinned blondes and gorillas. You can make that decision just by looking at the color histograms and not even bothering with geometry.
Wouldn't be surprised if the bulk of the training data was stuff users uploaded. Leveraging that stuff as a sort of implicit crowdsourcing is Google's biggest trick pony. As in their translation service, for instance.
Richard Dawkins is a biologist. he would never say something so stupid.
I'm curious what you feel is stupid about that straightforward statement. Regardless, Richard Dawkins did, in fact, say exactly that. Gaps in the Mind, by Richard Dawkins "We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes." "In truth, not only are we apes, we are African apes. The category 'African apes', if you don't arbitrarily exclude humans, is a natural one" "'Great apes', too, is a natural category only so long as it includes humans. We are great apes."
I did a search for the words "dawkins" and "ape" and the first result was a video of Dawkins saying that he is an ape. I challenge you to find any living biologist that claims otherwise.
we are all hominids, and we are certainly not apes.
Gorillas are hominids, and all hominids are apes. Humans are apes and hominids, just like gorillas.
Great apes, or the greatest apes? discuss.