machine learning is only going to get better and faster, and do it at an accelerating rate. We already know our machine learning techniques can be trained to do all sorts of interesting tasks. From Alpha Go, we learned that an AI can train itself at a breakneck speed. It is pretty scary stuff, put these pieces together in the right away, who knows what it could figure out. I won't go as far as self-awareness, but it is certainly a possibility, with this rate of advancement, who knows what's in the pipeline.
Machine learning, in all its forms is just multidimensional curve fitting. Take some linear algebra with really big matrixes, add some multidimensional minima-finding algorithm, and you've got machine learning.
It doesn't "train itself", except in the most hand-wavy way: it optimizes, gradually improving a large set of constants so as to minimize the result of some function across some training dataset. That's what it does; that's all it does.
China is bigger than America and works on a single time. Does it work well? I have no idea, but I am sure that data is easily available.
Everything works perfectly, exactly well in China! No one complains! Well, there were those millions executed for complaining, but they aren't complaining now, are they? Nope! Perfectly well, exactly well.
There were also 10,000 crackpots who were just wrong. We don't remember those guys, though I expect you can find a couple thousand of them on YouTube these days.
Gravity and the electric force both fall off with distance squared (other forces fall off faster). Dark matter explains galaxy rotation rates, gravitational lensing, and the CMBR. Electric currents don't explain anything really.
Save your reader some time and just rate yourself on the Crackpot Index. Admittedly, you're at least creative, using " on a quest of proving textbook theory right" instead of "hidebound reactionary" or "self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy".
Or, you know, angular momentum from before formation being conserved. From your one scientific link:
When examined as a function of distance from the filament axis, a much stronger correlation is found in outer parts, suggesting that the alignment is driven by the laminar infall of gas from sheets to filaments.
Depends what you mean by that. Sure, there are whopping great plasma jets. Not news. But if you think this "vindicates" crackpot theories like "moon craters are caused by lighting strikes" or that is casts doubt on relativity or dark matter or whatever other post-1800s theory you have trouble accepting, well no.
SO, then it should be really easy to educate him, of he knows nothing. Is your goal to persuade, or to be a smug asshole? Is global warming important to you because of
No, the direct effect off the CO2 increase does not fully explain the observed global warming. But then nobody except maybe some builders of straw men claims that
No. Wrong. It's the most commonly given explanation by dismissive asshole on the internet. And since it's the wrong answer, skeptics go away satisfied that global warming is a myth. So, what's your goal? Do you want to persuade, or be a smug asshole? If the former, don't be dismissive, explain a bit more than "CO2 causes global warming you stupid denier".
Note, not so much talking about your response, but the normal response seen on Slashdot.
CO2 emissions, are indeed the root cause of the observed warming, and our best estimate is that they explain all the warming.
No. Wrong. Wrong order of magnitude. CO2 drives complex feedback mechanisms, positive and negative. It's the result of all the complex systems of atmosphere and ocean and (mostly marine) life that explains all the warming. CO2 by itself does not. I mean, come on, WTF do you think the climate model scientists do all day? You can model CO2 IR absorption in 1 day of coding. Obviously that's just the trivial starting point. Obviously the trivial starting point doesn't explain the observed results.
That's promising. While industrial consumption will no doubt stay "fossil fuels" for quite some time, that's already high (especially in China). It's personal (residential/commuter) consumption that will explode in size as India and China modernize, and if that ends up going solar, so much the better.
Long term, there's little to argue about: only solar (and possibly fission if that ever stops being "20 years away") scales to 10-12 billion people consuming power at US rates. We really need a dense, thermal-primary power source for industrial use (something like 20% of US power consumption is direct-thermal from burning fuel, not electrical at all, in heavy industry), but maybe fusion will happen one day.
Sure, but the guy I was responding too was talking about "the bottom of the food chain". The bottom 4 layers of the aquatic food chain are * plankton * plankton that eats plankton * plankton that eats plankton that eats plankton * Things other than plankton that eat plankton
So, copepods and krill might be interesting here, if they're seriously affected (they compete for the title of largest animal biomass on Earth), though they seem to just trade off as dominant phytoplankton consumers in a given area as the environment changes.
The rise of solar doesn't automatically spell the decline of oil and gas. That will come down to what works cheapest in the shockingly poor rural areas of India and China. Places where today the air quality is so bad that on a bad day you can barely see across the street. Hopefully, there will be some new kind of solar that really is that cheap, and not dependent on any long-logistics-chain maintenance, but that's just hope.
His question is legitimate. CO2 absorption of IR comes no where close to explaining global warming, as is well known. Perhaps you don't know enough to answer his questions, and would be better keeping quiet? Otherwise, you don't persuade people by calling them idiots for asking questions, you persuade them by answering those questions intelligently. But then, I expect you just enjoy feeling smugly superior while in fact being an idiot.
Once you whack the bottom of the food chain, you are next.
I don't think phytoplankton are affected by minor changes in ocean CO2 levels. There's real debate about whether they're affected significantly by the warming oceans. They, like land plant life, will benefit from rising atmospheric CO2 levels.
Or were you imagining a "bottom" of the food chain several levels up from that?
If you believe sea levels will rise, sell now. Problem solved. But I expect you want someone else to solve the problem for you by imposing tyrannical restrictions on those people.
When solar goes "bad", it doesn't turn an area into an uninhabitable nuclear wasteland for the next century. And that's IF things go fairly well when nuclear decides to shit itself.
Even so, California also shut down a baseline power solar thermal plant over environmental concerns some years back. So the OP's point is still valid. The Hoover Dam can only make so much power California - whatcha gonna do for the rest if you won't build nukes or solar? Heck, PG&E even studied orbital power stations to get around the NIMBYism, but even that was shut down due to the need for some small plot of land to receive the power, and thus back to NIMBY.
You know there are actual charities out there helping people in need, right? And those include good charities that focus on "teach a man to fish" over "give a man a fish"?
I spend quite a bit to help people in need - but not in America, where even the poor live like kings by world standards. I help people not because they deserve it - no one deserves anything they didn't earn - nor because it's convenient, FFS, but because I think compassion is the highest virtue and in my own pathetic way I try to be virtuous.
If I were interested in throwing money at the problem to make it go away, it's much cheaper to just shoot them. Far better for everyone to teach people a sense of responsibility, I think.
Well, voice recognition has moved from "takes a mainframe" to "takes a server", and can at least recognize activation words on a small device. That's real progress thanks to the difference in computing power. As someone else point out, the massive parallelism of GPUs turns out to be useful for AI models.
But all of this is just self-optimizing systems. I don't think there's any real danger of "strong AI" happening any time soon, regardless of computing power. Our neurology evolved from a combination of a powerful social modeling ability, and an extension of visual processing that lets us imagine ourselves doing something hypothetical. Neither of those systems resemble anything being done with machine learning AFAIK.
Slashdot Mirror
machine learning is only going to get better and faster, and do it at an accelerating rate. We already know our machine learning techniques can be trained to do all sorts of interesting tasks. From Alpha Go, we learned that an AI can train itself at a breakneck speed. It is pretty scary stuff, put these pieces together in the right away, who knows what it could figure out. I won't go as far as self-awareness, but it is certainly a possibility, with this rate of advancement, who knows what's in the pipeline.
Machine learning, in all its forms is just multidimensional curve fitting. Take some linear algebra with really big matrixes, add some multidimensional minima-finding algorithm, and you've got machine learning.
It doesn't "train itself", except in the most hand-wavy way: it optimizes, gradually improving a large set of constants so as to minimize the result of some function across some training dataset. That's what it does; that's all it does.
There is simply no evidence that AI with "general intelligence" is possible. It's like regulating SETI because you fear alien invasion.
Standard time sucks - it gets dark too early after work. What's easier, changing the time zone, or changing when everyone starts/stops work?
China is bigger than America and works on a single time. Does it work well? I have no idea, but I am sure that data is easily available.
Everything works perfectly, exactly well in China! No one complains! Well, there were those millions executed for complaining, but they aren't complaining now, are they? Nope! Perfectly well, exactly well.
There were also 10,000 crackpots who were just wrong. We don't remember those guys, though I expect you can find a couple thousand of them on YouTube these days.
Gravity and the electric force both fall off with distance squared (other forces fall off faster). Dark matter explains galaxy rotation rates, gravitational lensing, and the CMBR. Electric currents don't explain anything really.
Save your reader some time and just rate yourself on the Crackpot Index. Admittedly, you're at least creative, using " on a quest of proving textbook theory right" instead of "hidebound reactionary" or "self-appointed defender of the orthodoxy".
Or, you know, angular momentum from before formation being conserved. From your one scientific link:
When examined as a function of distance from the filament axis, a much stronger correlation is found in outer parts, suggesting that the alignment is driven by the laminar infall of gas from sheets to filaments.
Depends what you mean by that. Sure, there are whopping great plasma jets. Not news. But if you think this "vindicates" crackpot theories like "moon craters are caused by lighting strikes" or that is casts doubt on relativity or dark matter or whatever other post-1800s theory you have trouble accepting, well no.
It means the same thing for all in tents, and porpoises.
Wow, /. moderation has become fully scientifically illiterate. Not much value left in this place.
SO, then it should be really easy to educate him, of he knows nothing. Is your goal to persuade, or to be a smug asshole? Is global warming important to you because of
No, the direct effect off the CO2 increase does not fully explain the observed global warming. But then nobody except maybe some builders of straw men claims that
No. Wrong. It's the most commonly given explanation by dismissive asshole on the internet. And since it's the wrong answer, skeptics go away satisfied that global warming is a myth. So, what's your goal? Do you want to persuade, or be a smug asshole? If the former, don't be dismissive, explain a bit more than "CO2 causes global warming you stupid denier".
Note, not so much talking about your response, but the normal response seen on Slashdot.
CO2 emissions, are indeed the root cause of the observed warming, and our best estimate is that they explain all the warming.
No. Wrong. Wrong order of magnitude. CO2 drives complex feedback mechanisms, positive and negative. It's the result of all the complex systems of atmosphere and ocean and (mostly marine) life that explains all the warming. CO2 by itself does not. I mean, come on, WTF do you think the climate model scientists do all day? You can model CO2 IR absorption in 1 day of coding. Obviously that's just the trivial starting point. Obviously the trivial starting point doesn't explain the observed results.
That's promising. While industrial consumption will no doubt stay "fossil fuels" for quite some time, that's already high (especially in China). It's personal (residential/commuter) consumption that will explode in size as India and China modernize, and if that ends up going solar, so much the better.
Long term, there's little to argue about: only solar (and possibly fission if that ever stops being "20 years away") scales to 10-12 billion people consuming power at US rates. We really need a dense, thermal-primary power source for industrial use (something like 20% of US power consumption is direct-thermal from burning fuel, not electrical at all, in heavy industry), but maybe fusion will happen one day.
Sure, but the guy I was responding too was talking about "the bottom of the food chain". The bottom 4 layers of the aquatic food chain are
* plankton
* plankton that eats plankton
* plankton that eats plankton that eats plankton
* Things other than plankton that eat plankton
So, copepods and krill might be interesting here, if they're seriously affected (they compete for the title of largest animal biomass on Earth), though they seem to just trade off as dominant phytoplankton consumers in a given area as the environment changes.
The rise of solar doesn't automatically spell the decline of oil and gas. That will come down to what works cheapest in the shockingly poor rural areas of India and China. Places where today the air quality is so bad that on a bad day you can barely see across the street. Hopefully, there will be some new kind of solar that really is that cheap, and not dependent on any long-logistics-chain maintenance, but that's just hope.
His question is legitimate. CO2 absorption of IR comes no where close to explaining global warming, as is well known. Perhaps you don't know enough to answer his questions, and would be better keeping quiet? Otherwise, you don't persuade people by calling them idiots for asking questions, you persuade them by answering those questions intelligently. But then, I expect you just enjoy feeling smugly superior while in fact being an idiot.
Once you whack the bottom of the food chain, you are next.
I don't think phytoplankton are affected by minor changes in ocean CO2 levels. There's real debate about whether they're affected significantly by the warming oceans. They, like land plant life, will benefit from rising atmospheric CO2 levels.
Or were you imagining a "bottom" of the food chain several levels up from that?
If you believe sea levels will rise, sell now. Problem solved. But I expect you want someone else to solve the problem for you by imposing tyrannical restrictions on those people.
When solar goes "bad", it doesn't turn an area into an uninhabitable nuclear wasteland for the next century. And that's IF things go fairly well when nuclear decides to shit itself.
Even so, California also shut down a baseline power solar thermal plant over environmental concerns some years back. So the OP's point is still valid. The Hoover Dam can only make so much power California - whatcha gonna do for the rest if you won't build nukes or solar? Heck, PG&E even studied orbital power stations to get around the NIMBYism, but even that was shut down due to the need for some small plot of land to receive the power, and thus back to NIMBY.
You won't have any of that if you live in SF!
"The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Fransisco" - Mark Twain
You know there are actual charities out there helping people in need, right? And those include good charities that focus on "teach a man to fish" over "give a man a fish"?
It's far cheaper to turn them into Soylent Green.
I spend quite a bit to help people in need - but not in America, where even the poor live like kings by world standards. I help people not because they deserve it - no one deserves anything they didn't earn - nor because it's convenient, FFS, but because I think compassion is the highest virtue and in my own pathetic way I try to be virtuous.
If I were interested in throwing money at the problem to make it go away, it's much cheaper to just shoot them. Far better for everyone to teach people a sense of responsibility, I think.
I can't wait until *everything* is a smart speaker, then the fun really begins..
Oh, just use all the voices from the GLADOS spheres. One per speaker.
Well, voice recognition has moved from "takes a mainframe" to "takes a server", and can at least recognize activation words on a small device. That's real progress thanks to the difference in computing power. As someone else point out, the massive parallelism of GPUs turns out to be useful for AI models.
But all of this is just self-optimizing systems. I don't think there's any real danger of "strong AI" happening any time soon, regardless of computing power. Our neurology evolved from a combination of a powerful social modeling ability, and an extension of visual processing that lets us imagine ourselves doing something hypothetical. Neither of those systems resemble anything being done with machine learning AFAIK.