There is such a thing as obsolescence of human ideas IMHO.
Sure, when we know all there is to know about the physical world, and there's nothing left to learn, science will be obsolete. When we know all there is to know about the abstract world, and there's nothing left to learn, philosophy will be obsolete - but I rather suspect that will come later.
One good example is "ethics", which stubbornly remains a philosophical field, seeming immune to either mathematical proof from first principles (except for those of some strong faith), or to empirical measurement. Without a god to provide the answers in the back of the book, we're stuck with our intuitions and our ability to reason about them. And we're far from any sort of general agreement on the answers.
Unless you are prepared to define "truth", your argument is horseshit.
I made no argument. I asked a simple question. The scientific method is a method for producing more accurate models over time. Does that correspond with "truth" in some way? I'm not sure, but my point is it's a philosophical question, not a scientific one, as you can't measure the answer.
The concepts of true and false have rather specific meanings within scientific context.
Oh? Are you confusing science with mathematics? We don't prove things true in science, we demonstrate the accuracy of a model. But everyone gets that it's a model, that the map is not the territory. It's not obvious that you could ever learn the truth by refining models, as there are an infinity of models consistent with any given set of data. It's not obvious that you couldn't, either.
The "method", or more precisely, methods (plural) of philosophy are ad hoc. Scientific method is anything but that.
Everything starts ad-hoc. After how many centuries or millennia do you accept a method of reasoning to be otherwise? Philosophy is a rather old discipline, you know.
I wouldn't say "more accurate" is the same as "more likely to be true". What is an electron, really? It was once the common scientific belief that an electron has position. Now it's a better model to say that position has electron-ness. It's certainly a better model, but I don't think it's any closer to what an electron is, really. Model improve, and old models remain as accurate as they ever were, but as "truth", each fails to be replaced by another, and I doubt that will ever stop.
Oh, I'm asking about the scientific method here. Is it possible to discover truth using it? Is that an interesting question? I think it's interesting. Bit of a philosophical question, though, isn't it?
You say "knowledge" is a pretty good alternative to "truth"? But most people would agree that truth is a prerequisite for knowledge, that to know a thing you must believe it, it must be true, and you must be justified in your belief. If you want to claim that the scientific method can lead to knowledge without the need for truth, you will need some argument to back that up - a philosophical argument.
I don't believe you could measure he answer to either of these questions. Perhaps questions like this about the scientific method are philosophical questions? Ones you might better ask a philosopher than a scientist?
I hereby award "Science" the Awesome Trophy for being the most awesomest awesome that ever awesomed. Are you satisfied?
But is the scientific method a tool to discover what is true? Is truth the same as "ever more accurate and predictive models"? It's not a scientific question.
As for ignorance, humanity had no idea of how much it did not know until science got going.
Socrates once said that the only wisdom he had was in understanding how little he knew. What do you say today? How much do we not know ? How could you even answer such a question? It's not a scientific question.
Science is about the testable. Math (and logic) is about the provable. Philosophy is about the more fundamental questions.
You may say "I know X to be true". That raises 3 fundamental questions without easy answers: * What does "I" mean - Theory of Identity * What does "know" mean - Theory of Knowledge (epistemology) * What does "true" mean - Meta-Logic
Science is certainly practical. Philosophy rarely is. But philosophy does highlight how little we really know, despite our ever-growing skill at the practical. And it's worth remembering that every field of science started as philosophy, and only with the tools and the mindset did it eventually become practical, become science.
Right - he's targeting the other nerds out there. Remember when this site was "News for Nerds"? I would have loved this when I was you. The Scratch-style stuff I would have long outgrown and dismissed as kids stuff by 12, if the tools had been around.
Which was invented by... Stephen Wolfram. Funny old world. To the trolls: he already has a very successful language for scientific/engineering computation. This is something new.
I used to live in Orlando - by my faulty memory one Shuttle launch in five or so went up on the planned day, so this guy's odds are good I think.
There's an urban legend about how the Cape got picked despite the troublesome weather: someone looked at the average wind velocity there and the daily average was almost zero! (The always-present coastal winds reverse direction in the evening.) Silly, but it would explain a lot.
I hope Chubb thought this out carefully because they will need to self insure...
Oh, there will be fraud at first. but IMO this will end quite well. Many claims of "harassment so bad I had to flee my home" are bogus, often coupled with GoFundMes that bring in considerable funds for the person putting on the show. If done carefully, none of that is obviously illegal, being a very roundabout sort of fraud.
But it's different when you file a police report (and at least one professional victim found out the hard way that filing fake police reports is a crime), and insurance companies depend on police reports as their primary anti-fraud mechanism. I look forward to the professional victims who try this fraud, and discover that adding "insurance fraud" to "filing a fake police report" was a serious mistake.
Hopefully this will end with a lot less fraud among people claiming real harassment.
Well put - was typing the same when I noticed yours.
In a sense it's an unfair question though, as it could be rephrased as "name a situation not created by humans that humans have made better". There are whole categories there, and IMO it's just such places when government is helpful: natural disasters, funding fundamental research, and so on. The rest of law, with few exceptions is "the wrong humans have power - give more power to those humans there, maybe that will be better", but of course it rarely is for long.
How so? Or, rather, what role are you talking about? Naval artillery support for land warfare remains a valuable role, and being able to do that more cheaply than missiles is still needed, and the AGS seems to me like a clever approach. Whether it was going to actually be cheaper in the long run is a different topic, but are you really claiming that artillery support isn't an important role?
The company I work at now just makes the developer do the ops stuff too. No, we don't bring any sysadmin experience to the job, but we're quite good at automating that ignorance. It works exactly as well as you might expect. I'm amazed at how often some team's "lessons learned" after some disaster are stuff that any mid-career sysadmin would do religiously without really needing to think about it. I'm not clear what advantage this was ever supposed to bring, but it wouldn't surprise me if we found out we were doing "DevOpsJanitorial" next year.
Indeed. Oddly enough, there's a patent troll hiding under this bridge. A company I once worked for was sued by this patent troll that has a patent over using spell check to also check/filter offensive words, and specifically not just profanity but culture-specific offensive slang. In this specific case, the patent actually seems to apply as written and intended: extending a spell checker to block sending of offensive material based on a curated list of offensive words and expressions.
It's a stupidly overbroad patent, but in this case I'm all for it.
Those are the x86 "rotate" instructions. They work like SHR and SHL, except the "rotate back in" the bits that were shifted out. They're important for a variety of CRC, RNG, and crypto coding.
I strongly recommend Clang. It's speed is about on par with GCC, but the output and syntax checking is so much better. I tried it a bit a few years back and I have been hooked on Clang since. Using GCC feels like a big step backward now because it's so fussy and its warnings are so cryptic in comparison.
Last time I looked, Clang didn't recognize idiomatic "rotate", e.g.: (x << 3) | (x >> 29) That should compile to a single opcode, dammit. Anyone know if that problem is still there.
To be fair, they didn't spend that 4.4bn all at once. It's been ongoing since at least 2005, and maybe 2001.
It's not like it cost $4.4B to weld the steel together - it's mostly R&D cost. There were 32 ships planned in the class, which would have nicely spread out that R&D cost, but then the program was cut to 3 ships. What nonsense: all the same R&D cost, but we only get 3 ships for it.
That's the military spending problem people should be talking about. The R&D budget was actually quite reasonable for a whole new generation of ships, but we're unable to commit to anything, so it all ends up as pork with no military might. The Littoral Defense Ship went the same way. The CG(X) program was even worse: we got no new cruisers built from it (it was going to use the same hull as the Zumwalt, which I thought was a cool idea, since it's big enough).
It was fairly obvious from context that he meant "I became functional as a C programmer".
And, yes, the Gang of Four book was the worst-written technical book I've ever read. Never was something so simple explained so badly. Fortunately, it was mostly about coping with deficiencies in C++ and the world has moved on (even C++ has moved on, though some of those design patterns are still needed).
I think it's quite ugly myself, mostly because I hate the UI for "app store apps", and a lot of stuff I used moved there, at least by default. Also, the new start menu blows goats (but I can fix that). Matter of taste, really, but having the UI change forced on me pisses me off, and Windows used to at least give you the option to live in the past, UI-wise.
If your auto dealer installed a camera in your car to snoop on you, an when you complain they say "we updated the EULA", are you going to just accept it?
It is not acceptable to do that in other industries. Why give Microsoft a pass?
GM customers seemed happy to keep doing business with GM after they did just that (well, audio, not video) for OnStar - there were several incidents, from police snooping to bored operators.
I'm OK with laws to enforce privacy, but it's a democracy and if most people don't care, well, we get the government we deserve. In the meantime, consumers also have a duty to stop doing business with assholes. Legal or not, when a company makes an asshole move like this, and you decide to keep doing business with them, well, decisions have consequences.
Those "others" could make billions if they were actually better than guessing. But there are no such experts. Lots of "peak oil" predictors though, and Malthus never seems to rest.
While the FBI has made a bad habit of convincing homeless people to plan terrorist attacks and then arresting them, to keep the FBI's stats looking good, non-corrupt police don't arrest people until they take some clear act to further the plan. For terrorist attacks, that usually involves acquiring some explosives or other weapon, and at least for the ones that make the news, the people arrested had done many such acts. Of course, corrupt police value "taking action" over personal liberty, and so you occasionally get things like game companies being raided by the FBI. It's an imperfect world, but we should expect better.
Slashdot Mirror
There is such a thing as obsolescence of human ideas IMHO.
Sure, when we know all there is to know about the physical world, and there's nothing left to learn, science will be obsolete. When we know all there is to know about the abstract world, and there's nothing left to learn, philosophy will be obsolete - but I rather suspect that will come later.
One good example is "ethics", which stubbornly remains a philosophical field, seeming immune to either mathematical proof from first principles (except for those of some strong faith), or to empirical measurement. Without a god to provide the answers in the back of the book, we're stuck with our intuitions and our ability to reason about them. And we're far from any sort of general agreement on the answers.
Unless you are prepared to define "truth", your argument is horseshit.
I made no argument. I asked a simple question. The scientific method is a method for producing more accurate models over time. Does that correspond with "truth" in some way? I'm not sure, but my point is it's a philosophical question, not a scientific one, as you can't measure the answer.
The concepts of true and false have rather specific meanings within scientific context.
Oh? Are you confusing science with mathematics? We don't prove things true in science, we demonstrate the accuracy of a model. But everyone gets that it's a model, that the map is not the territory. It's not obvious that you could ever learn the truth by refining models, as there are an infinity of models consistent with any given set of data. It's not obvious that you couldn't, either.
The "method", or more precisely, methods (plural) of philosophy are ad hoc. Scientific method is anything but that.
Everything starts ad-hoc. After how many centuries or millennia do you accept a method of reasoning to be otherwise? Philosophy is a rather old discipline, you know.
I wouldn't say "more accurate" is the same as "more likely to be true". What is an electron, really? It was once the common scientific belief that an electron has position. Now it's a better model to say that position has electron-ness. It's certainly a better model, but I don't think it's any closer to what an electron is, really. Model improve, and old models remain as accurate as they ever were, but as "truth", each fails to be replaced by another, and I doubt that will ever stop.
Oh, I'm asking about the scientific method here. Is it possible to discover truth using it? Is that an interesting question? I think it's interesting. Bit of a philosophical question, though, isn't it?
You say "knowledge" is a pretty good alternative to "truth"? But most people would agree that truth is a prerequisite for knowledge, that to know a thing you must believe it, it must be true, and you must be justified in your belief. If you want to claim that the scientific method can lead to knowledge without the need for truth, you will need some argument to back that up - a philosophical argument.
I don't believe you could measure he answer to either of these questions. Perhaps questions like this about the scientific method are philosophical questions? Ones you might better ask a philosopher than a scientist?
I hereby award "Science" the Awesome Trophy for being the most awesomest awesome that ever awesomed. Are you satisfied?
But is the scientific method a tool to discover what is true? Is truth the same as "ever more accurate and predictive models"? It's not a scientific question.
As for ignorance, humanity had no idea of how much it did not know until science got going.
Socrates once said that the only wisdom he had was in understanding how little he knew. What do you say today? How much do we not know ? How could you even answer such a question? It's not a scientific question.
Do you think it's a dick-measuring contest?
Science is about the testable. Math (and logic) is about the provable. Philosophy is about the more fundamental questions.
You may say "I know X to be true". That raises 3 fundamental questions without easy answers:
* What does "I" mean - Theory of Identity
* What does "know" mean - Theory of Knowledge (epistemology)
* What does "true" mean - Meta-Logic
Science is certainly practical. Philosophy rarely is. But philosophy does highlight how little we really know, despite our ever-growing skill at the practical. And it's worth remembering that every field of science started as philosophy, and only with the tools and the mindset did it eventually become practical, become science.
Right - he's targeting the other nerds out there. Remember when this site was "News for Nerds"? I would have loved this when I was you. The Scratch-style stuff I would have long outgrown and dismissed as kids stuff by 12, if the tools had been around.
All my university classes used Mathematica.
Which was invented by ... Stephen Wolfram. Funny old world. To the trolls: he already has a very successful language for scientific/engineering computation. This is something new.
I used to live in Orlando - by my faulty memory one Shuttle launch in five or so went up on the planned day, so this guy's odds are good I think.
There's an urban legend about how the Cape got picked despite the troublesome weather: someone looked at the average wind velocity there and the daily average was almost zero! (The always-present coastal winds reverse direction in the evening.) Silly, but it would explain a lot.
I hope Chubb thought this out carefully because they will need to self insure...
Oh, there will be fraud at first. but IMO this will end quite well. Many claims of "harassment so bad I had to flee my home" are bogus, often coupled with GoFundMes that bring in considerable funds for the person putting on the show. If done carefully, none of that is obviously illegal, being a very roundabout sort of fraud.
But it's different when you file a police report (and at least one professional victim found out the hard way that filing fake police reports is a crime), and insurance companies depend on police reports as their primary anti-fraud mechanism. I look forward to the professional victims who try this fraud, and discover that adding "insurance fraud" to "filing a fake police report" was a serious mistake.
Hopefully this will end with a lot less fraud among people claiming real harassment.
Well put - was typing the same when I noticed yours.
In a sense it's an unfair question though, as it could be rephrased as "name a situation not created by humans that humans have made better". There are whole categories there, and IMO it's just such places when government is helpful: natural disasters, funding fundamental research, and so on. The rest of law, with few exceptions is "the wrong humans have power - give more power to those humans there, maybe that will be better", but of course it rarely is for long.
How so? Or, rather, what role are you talking about? Naval artillery support for land warfare remains a valuable role, and being able to do that more cheaply than missiles is still needed, and the AGS seems to me like a clever approach. Whether it was going to actually be cheaper in the long run is a different topic, but are you really claiming that artillery support isn't an important role?
I've started to prefer the term "crybully". It emphasizes the infantile nature of these people more than "SJW" does.
The company I work at now just makes the developer do the ops stuff too. No, we don't bring any sysadmin experience to the job, but we're quite good at automating that ignorance. It works exactly as well as you might expect. I'm amazed at how often some team's "lessons learned" after some disaster are stuff that any mid-career sysadmin would do religiously without really needing to think about it. I'm not clear what advantage this was ever supposed to bring, but it wouldn't surprise me if we found out we were doing "DevOpsJanitorial" next year.
As far as I can tell, "devops" means "fire all that sysadmin baggage, and just pile that work on developers with no ops experience - it will be fine".
Kindly go fuck yourself.
Indeed. Oddly enough, there's a patent troll hiding under this bridge. A company I once worked for was sued by this patent troll that has a patent over using spell check to also check/filter offensive words, and specifically not just profanity but culture-specific offensive slang. In this specific case, the patent actually seems to apply as written and intended: extending a spell checker to block sending of offensive material based on a curated list of offensive words and expressions.
It's a stupidly overbroad patent, but in this case I'm all for it.
Awesome, please mod up. That's a great, detailed answer.
ROR ROL
Those are the x86 "rotate" instructions. They work like SHR and SHL, except the "rotate back in" the bits that were shifted out. They're important for a variety of CRC, RNG, and crypto coding.
I strongly recommend Clang. It's speed is about on par with GCC, but the output and syntax checking is so much better. I tried it a bit a few years back and I have been hooked on Clang since. Using GCC feels like a big step backward now because it's so fussy and its warnings are so cryptic in comparison.
Last time I looked, Clang didn't recognize idiomatic "rotate", e.g.:
(x << 3) | (x >> 29)
That should compile to a single opcode, dammit. Anyone know if that problem is still there.
To be fair, they didn't spend that 4.4bn all at once. It's been ongoing since at least 2005, and maybe 2001.
It's not like it cost $4.4B to weld the steel together - it's mostly R&D cost. There were 32 ships planned in the class, which would have nicely spread out that R&D cost, but then the program was cut to 3 ships. What nonsense: all the same R&D cost, but we only get 3 ships for it.
That's the military spending problem people should be talking about. The R&D budget was actually quite reasonable for a whole new generation of ships, but we're unable to commit to anything, so it all ends up as pork with no military might. The Littoral Defense Ship went the same way. The CG(X) program was even worse: we got no new cruisers built from it (it was going to use the same hull as the Zumwalt, which I thought was a cool idea, since it's big enough).
It was fairly obvious from context that he meant "I became functional as a C programmer".
And, yes, the Gang of Four book was the worst-written technical book I've ever read. Never was something so simple explained so badly. Fortunately, it was mostly about coping with deficiencies in C++ and the world has moved on (even C++ has moved on, though some of those design patterns are still needed).
I think it's quite ugly myself, mostly because I hate the UI for "app store apps", and a lot of stuff I used moved there, at least by default. Also, the new start menu blows goats (but I can fix that). Matter of taste, really, but having the UI change forced on me pisses me off, and Windows used to at least give you the option to live in the past, UI-wise.
If your auto dealer installed a camera in your car to snoop on you, an when you complain they say "we updated the EULA", are you going to just accept it?
It is not acceptable to do that in other industries. Why give Microsoft a pass?
GM customers seemed happy to keep doing business with GM after they did just that (well, audio, not video) for OnStar - there were several incidents, from police snooping to bored operators.
I'm OK with laws to enforce privacy, but it's a democracy and if most people don't care, well, we get the government we deserve. In the meantime, consumers also have a duty to stop doing business with assholes. Legal or not, when a company makes an asshole move like this, and you decide to keep doing business with them, well, decisions have consequences.
Those "others" could make billions if they were actually better than guessing. But there are no such experts. Lots of "peak oil" predictors though, and Malthus never seems to rest.
While the FBI has made a bad habit of convincing homeless people to plan terrorist attacks and then arresting them, to keep the FBI's stats looking good, non-corrupt police don't arrest people until they take some clear act to further the plan. For terrorist attacks, that usually involves acquiring some explosives or other weapon, and at least for the ones that make the news, the people arrested had done many such acts. Of course, corrupt police value "taking action" over personal liberty, and so you occasionally get things like game companies being raided by the FBI. It's an imperfect world, but we should expect better.