Controversial ideas like eugenics were openly discussed in America too. Some people even attempted forced sterilization laws in a few states. They were mostly defeated. I can come up with historical anecdotes too! And mine don't invoke Godwin's Law!
If spaces are so great, why not make it more of a default in text editors and IDEs? When I get a new machine or start using a new tool, I might write a whole bunch of code using the default tabs, then realize that my Python interpreter complains about mixing tabs and spaces.
Dune is really a series that you can start and end whenever you want. Ending after book 1 is fine, or after book 2. If you find it rewarding, you can keep going though it's quite understandable why you wouldn't.
But but "Free Speech" can only apply to a specific government limitation, not a general cultural value where ideas can be freely discussed! True free speech means that corporations and mobs can bully people into silence with impunity, shutting down all but only the most mainstream ideas (as long as the government stays on the sidelines)!
Same. My policy on pretty much every commenting system these days (which I unfortunately don't always follow), is only respond to a response if it looks like the person appeared to read and comprehend what I said. I almost never respond, because 99% of responses I read are arguing against words I did not say. Either that or they are simply repeating a point I addressed, as if I did not address it.
It's not just that it's impossible to convince anyone of your position over the Internet. It's impossible to convince them that there might be even the slightest flaw in anything they believe, even casually. I remember arguing with someone once who was very certain (and said so) that he had logic on his side. When I pointed out some fallacies in his arguments, he said those fallacies were justified, because he was wronged (in whatever it was).
It's not even just that. People are just talking over each other, repeating talking points that they believe and trying to shut up the other person. They have no interest in trying to convince the other person. I remember being disturbed 3-4 years ago when discussion got going in many forums about whether shaming and insults were valid rhetorical discourse. After all, "we" know we're "right," and the other side refuses to come around, so why not just shame and insult them until they go away? Then, of course, consensus will be reached.
It could also be that filtering by technical degrees is more fine-grained than filtering by all college degrees, or even all relevant college degrees. If there's 100 applicants that are trained in business analysis, and 10 trained in engineering/CS, that could probably pick up business analysis pretty quickly, you just cut down your choices from 110 to 10 (instead of 110 to 100). I've heard anecdotally of engineers being given preference in patent law and finance. In these cases, there's a glut of people with "relevant" skills that are considered less analytical and valuable than engineers.
Slashdot is the only place I know of that has such a ridiculously restrictive, illogical definition of "AI." To Slashdot, something is only "really" AI if it works exactly like the "AI" in TV and movies. What if it translates speech into words, like a human can? Not AI. What if it can identify objects in an image, and write unique natural language sentences about them, like a human can? Not AI.
The reason I say it's illogical is because it's not even a difference in kind, it's a difference of degree. If we make an android that works just like TV and movies, it is very likely going to be using techniques like these for its vision and language components. It's like saying a model rocket isn't a rocket at all, because it can't go to space like other heavier-duty rockets. The fact that it looks like a rocket or functions similarly to a rocket does not qualify it to be called a model "rocket".
Almost 10 years ago I had an internship in a credit-card processing center. Many transactions were done over computer networks at that point, but there were still a few transactions done with "knucklebusters." This could either be because the store was remote or because it was a backup when the higher-tech point of sale devices were down. These machines made manual impressions of the bezeled credit card numbers. These impressions were then mailed to the office, where secretaries typed in the devices by hand. By the time I came there was a special internal application that extracted individual images of numbers, so that secretaries just had to sit at a desk, look at the number, and type up what number they thought it was.
"AI" (or computer vision techniques, or whatever) would make this task unnecessary, as a neural network could solve this with pretty much 100% accuracy. A couple of extra checks could prevent most mistakes. I know software, databases, and the Internet have swallowed up a lot of printed forms, but there's still a lot of human labor that involves finding boring patterns in reams of paperwork. Seems like "AI" has a lot of opportunities to automate these tasks.
In many (but not all) movies, spoilers aren't a huge deal. Are we really surprised that Captain America beats the bad guy at the end? Seeing two seconds of the final fight in the trailer doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy watching the entire movie. You could make the argument that the issue is that modern movies are shallow or dumb. Maybe, but I think this also applies to classic movies. Citizen Kane's "Rosebud" has been so endlessly parodied that someone sitting down to watch Citizen Kane for the first time is not going to be surprised at that revelation. They'll still enjoy a finely crafted story. Except for mystery stories, I don't think surprise is a primary factor in enjoying most movies.
Okay, we can all see how this discussion is going to go. "That isn't real AI, because it doesn't perfectly recreate a human mind!" "AI is just a computer program! Why call it AI?" "So called AI research works exactly the same as rudimentary models made in the 1980s and have made zero progress since then!"
What I don't get is why there's this hate-on for AI on Slashdot. Supposedly this is a community of free (as in speech) software geeks. AI is as free as in speech as you can GET!
All of the popular deep learning toolkits are open-source (Caffe, Tensorflow, Torch, etc).
Almost all of the research is published to ArXiV, a free, open-access website, before being published in a for-pay journal.
Popular models are ported to different toolkits, pretrained, and made available for anyone to use however they want
Most research papers have their code uploaded to Github so that you can pull and reproduce. No reproducibility crisis in AI!
These pretrained, open models can be finetuned to whatever new application you want. You can change as much or as little as you want! Perfect for tinkering and hacking!
Most of the datasets used to train the popular models are free and open (Imagenet, MS-COCO, PASCAL VOC, etc).
Almost all of the software is built for Linux first. Torch doesn't even have a Windows port! It only works on Mac and Linux!
There is plenty of free online education (using MOOCS, Youtube, online tutorials, blogs, etc). You don't need to get an expensive degree to start playing with it!
AI SHOULD be Slashdot's favorite thing ever! This is the new generation of the free software movement!
I'm in the age range and I've never personally requested a Skype interview, but it's common now from what I see. It's a convenience because the company doesn't have to fly me out and pay for my food and hotel.
As for texting, yes I would like to be texted information about the current status of the hiring process. Or emailed. Honestly, 9/10 phone calls I get these days are spam. I regularly communicate with my friends through text messages rather than calling them up on the phone. It's quiet, convenient, and asynchronous. On a phone call I have to find a quiet place or advertise my conversation to everybody around me. Texting is discreet.
Texting or other smartphone messaging does not have to have a brutish, uncouth character. One could use the same technology to discuss Dostoevsky or ancient Greek tragedy, with properly spelled words. Proper spelling is even easier these days because of Swype and autocorrect trying to match your taps to dictionary words.
I don't know about the state per se, but the PE Exam (by which you become a licensed Professional Engineer) has options for electronics/computer/software engineers: http://ncees.org/engineering/p... Every common engineering field (and several uncommon fields) are represented.
I recently listened to a talk by a Dr. Jeremy Pickens talking about this problem (I'm not his student or employee or associated with him). He argued that this is actually a tough problem to solve because there aren't obvious patterns in criminal activity. Sometimes they use code words, but the code words are different for every criminal. Sometimes they have suspicious conversations after hours, but not always. The people involved in the LIBOR scandal talked openly about their cheating, during work hours. There wasn't anything "unusual" about it to a statistical model, but it was brazen to a human investigator!
I did the same for a while. I had a couple of friends who were wonderful people in real life, but posted a steady stream of toxic sludge that I didn't want to block because I wanted to "be open to other viewpoints." At some point, I figured I wasn't becoming more open minded, and was just becoming miserable, so I blocked them. My Facebook wall became so much more pleasant immediately! Even then, so much of Facebook was constant political discussion that I grew exhausted. I was too easily baited into arguments that I didn't even want to have. Quitting Facebook was one of the best choices I've ever made. I read a lot more interesting books and get a lot more work done.
One example of a negative reaction to a suggestion I was surprised by had to do with Diablo III. They have 2-3 month "seasons" where you can create a new character and you get special rewards if you achieve certain things with that character in the timeframe of the season. The timing of the seasons was such though that they tended to end just as students would get out for winter or summer breaks. One person made the suggestion of shifting the seasons so that students could have more of an opportunity to participate. This led to a giant flamewar where people abused these "dumb kids" and "lazy students" for dare wanting to play Diablo III on their winter break. This wouldn't require any code changes, just an adjustment of when Blizzard hit the "start" and "stop" button for the season. People will get angry about anything.
This is not accepted practice in the machine learning field. A lot of people split the training set into training and validation , and "test" on validation. When they have their parameters set, then they perform a final test on the test set. For some datasets, they might not even be able to directly access the test set answers, they might have to go through a 3rd party server with limitations on how often they can submit.
Play them on the Virtual Console for Wii, 3DS, and Wii U (and probably Switch eventually). That is, most Nintendo consoles in the past 11 years.
Play them in other repackaged forms on Nintendo consoles that have been coming out since the SuperNES (e.g. Super Mario All-Stars).
Play them on the original hardware that you can find in garage sales or eBay.
I'm trying to read some classic Western literature to see what thought processes led to current Western culture. Currently I'm reading the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Agamemnon specifically). Encyclopedia Brittanica put together a list of the books they thought were most influential throughout Western history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . My goal is to work my way through all of them, eventually. There's a good variety: literature, philosophy, history, theology, math, and science.
At least for a PhD, most people don't pay their own tuition, and even earn a small stipend for the work they do. They either get fellowships, graduate research assistant jobs, or other funding from the professor they do research for. It's not a lot of money, but it's at least "income" rather than "goes out."
This is only state universities (i.e. universities that get funding from a state government). The two biggest universities in my town (University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology) are not in that list, and they are definitely not diploma mills.
A previous slashdot commenter (I don't remember which, sorry) said it best. It's apparently ignorant and backwards to believe that God created the universe, but quite forward-thinking and intellectual to think a computer programmer did.
I've had several engineering co-ops, and none of the co-ops I've done nor any of my fellow engineering students have done were unpaid. Paying engineering students for co-op work is pretty standard in the US at least.
Well I can't upvote this, but I just wanted to say that I'm adding this list to my to-read list. Some of it is already familiar to me but there's a lot of gaps I'd like to fill!
In addition, it's such an ignorant devaluation of AI's incredible achievements. The field of AI, a term everyone except Slashdot naysayers have agreed upon, has performed incredible feats of image and language analysis (among other things) that the average software engineer stringing together API calls could never have come up with.
Honestly, if you told someone to just "write a program" to recognize whether an image has a cat in it or not, what do you think they would come up with? Probably 20,000 lines of messy code that only handles a handful of cases. The insights of learning parameters from data, optimization techniques, and convolutional neural networks were found by groping in the dark for 50 years. For 50 years people couldn't just "write a program" to do that simple task. For a long time people couldn't even write programs that recognized the 10 handwritten numerical digits with competitive accuracy to a human.
Oh my gosh, why does everyone make a big deal about "making cars?" It's called "engineering a solution," and we've been doing it for millenia! Can we just call "cars" what they really are, "engineered solutions?"
Slashdot Mirror
Controversial ideas like eugenics were openly discussed in America too. Some people even attempted forced sterilization laws in a few states. They were mostly defeated. I can come up with historical anecdotes too! And mine don't invoke Godwin's Law!
If spaces are so great, why not make it more of a default in text editors and IDEs? When I get a new machine or start using a new tool, I might write a whole bunch of code using the default tabs, then realize that my Python interpreter complains about mixing tabs and spaces.
Dune is really a series that you can start and end whenever you want. Ending after book 1 is fine, or after book 2. If you find it rewarding, you can keep going though it's quite understandable why you wouldn't.
But but "Free Speech" can only apply to a specific government limitation, not a general cultural value where ideas can be freely discussed! True free speech means that corporations and mobs can bully people into silence with impunity, shutting down all but only the most mainstream ideas (as long as the government stays on the sidelines)!
Same. My policy on pretty much every commenting system these days (which I unfortunately don't always follow), is only respond to a response if it looks like the person appeared to read and comprehend what I said. I almost never respond, because 99% of responses I read are arguing against words I did not say. Either that or they are simply repeating a point I addressed, as if I did not address it.
It's not just that it's impossible to convince anyone of your position over the Internet. It's impossible to convince them that there might be even the slightest flaw in anything they believe, even casually. I remember arguing with someone once who was very certain (and said so) that he had logic on his side. When I pointed out some fallacies in his arguments, he said those fallacies were justified, because he was wronged (in whatever it was).
It's not even just that. People are just talking over each other, repeating talking points that they believe and trying to shut up the other person. They have no interest in trying to convince the other person. I remember being disturbed 3-4 years ago when discussion got going in many forums about whether shaming and insults were valid rhetorical discourse. After all, "we" know we're "right," and the other side refuses to come around, so why not just shame and insult them until they go away? Then, of course, consensus will be reached.
It could also be that filtering by technical degrees is more fine-grained than filtering by all college degrees, or even all relevant college degrees. If there's 100 applicants that are trained in business analysis, and 10 trained in engineering/CS, that could probably pick up business analysis pretty quickly, you just cut down your choices from 110 to 10 (instead of 110 to 100). I've heard anecdotally of engineers being given preference in patent law and finance. In these cases, there's a glut of people with "relevant" skills that are considered less analytical and valuable than engineers.
Slashdot is the only place I know of that has such a ridiculously restrictive, illogical definition of "AI." To Slashdot, something is only "really" AI if it works exactly like the "AI" in TV and movies. What if it translates speech into words, like a human can? Not AI. What if it can identify objects in an image, and write unique natural language sentences about them, like a human can? Not AI.
The reason I say it's illogical is because it's not even a difference in kind, it's a difference of degree. If we make an android that works just like TV and movies, it is very likely going to be using techniques like these for its vision and language components. It's like saying a model rocket isn't a rocket at all, because it can't go to space like other heavier-duty rockets. The fact that it looks like a rocket or functions similarly to a rocket does not qualify it to be called a model "rocket".
Almost 10 years ago I had an internship in a credit-card processing center. Many transactions were done over computer networks at that point, but there were still a few transactions done with "knucklebusters." This could either be because the store was remote or because it was a backup when the higher-tech point of sale devices were down. These machines made manual impressions of the bezeled credit card numbers. These impressions were then mailed to the office, where secretaries typed in the devices by hand. By the time I came there was a special internal application that extracted individual images of numbers, so that secretaries just had to sit at a desk, look at the number, and type up what number they thought it was.
"AI" (or computer vision techniques, or whatever) would make this task unnecessary, as a neural network could solve this with pretty much 100% accuracy. A couple of extra checks could prevent most mistakes. I know software, databases, and the Internet have swallowed up a lot of printed forms, but there's still a lot of human labor that involves finding boring patterns in reams of paperwork. Seems like "AI" has a lot of opportunities to automate these tasks.
In many (but not all) movies, spoilers aren't a huge deal. Are we really surprised that Captain America beats the bad guy at the end? Seeing two seconds of the final fight in the trailer doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy watching the entire movie. You could make the argument that the issue is that modern movies are shallow or dumb. Maybe, but I think this also applies to classic movies. Citizen Kane's "Rosebud" has been so endlessly parodied that someone sitting down to watch Citizen Kane for the first time is not going to be surprised at that revelation. They'll still enjoy a finely crafted story. Except for mystery stories, I don't think surprise is a primary factor in enjoying most movies.
What I don't get is why there's this hate-on for AI on Slashdot. Supposedly this is a community of free (as in speech) software geeks. AI is as free as in speech as you can GET!
AI SHOULD be Slashdot's favorite thing ever! This is the new generation of the free software movement!
I'm in the age range and I've never personally requested a Skype interview, but it's common now from what I see. It's a convenience because the company doesn't have to fly me out and pay for my food and hotel.
As for texting, yes I would like to be texted information about the current status of the hiring process. Or emailed. Honestly, 9/10 phone calls I get these days are spam. I regularly communicate with my friends through text messages rather than calling them up on the phone. It's quiet, convenient, and asynchronous. On a phone call I have to find a quiet place or advertise my conversation to everybody around me. Texting is discreet.
Texting or other smartphone messaging does not have to have a brutish, uncouth character. One could use the same technology to discuss Dostoevsky or ancient Greek tragedy, with properly spelled words. Proper spelling is even easier these days because of Swype and autocorrect trying to match your taps to dictionary words.
I don't know about the state per se, but the PE Exam (by which you become a licensed Professional Engineer) has options for electronics/computer/software engineers: http://ncees.org/engineering/p... Every common engineering field (and several uncommon fields) are represented.
I recently listened to a talk by a Dr. Jeremy Pickens talking about this problem (I'm not his student or employee or associated with him). He argued that this is actually a tough problem to solve because there aren't obvious patterns in criminal activity. Sometimes they use code words, but the code words are different for every criminal. Sometimes they have suspicious conversations after hours, but not always. The people involved in the LIBOR scandal talked openly about their cheating, during work hours. There wasn't anything "unusual" about it to a statistical model, but it was brazen to a human investigator!
I did the same for a while. I had a couple of friends who were wonderful people in real life, but posted a steady stream of toxic sludge that I didn't want to block because I wanted to "be open to other viewpoints." At some point, I figured I wasn't becoming more open minded, and was just becoming miserable, so I blocked them. My Facebook wall became so much more pleasant immediately! Even then, so much of Facebook was constant political discussion that I grew exhausted. I was too easily baited into arguments that I didn't even want to have. Quitting Facebook was one of the best choices I've ever made. I read a lot more interesting books and get a lot more work done.
One example of a negative reaction to a suggestion I was surprised by had to do with Diablo III. They have 2-3 month "seasons" where you can create a new character and you get special rewards if you achieve certain things with that character in the timeframe of the season. The timing of the seasons was such though that they tended to end just as students would get out for winter or summer breaks. One person made the suggestion of shifting the seasons so that students could have more of an opportunity to participate. This led to a giant flamewar where people abused these "dumb kids" and "lazy students" for dare wanting to play Diablo III on their winter break. This wouldn't require any code changes, just an adjustment of when Blizzard hit the "start" and "stop" button for the season. People will get angry about anything.
This is not accepted practice in the machine learning field. A lot of people split the training set into training and validation , and "test" on validation. When they have their parameters set, then they perform a final test on the test set. For some datasets, they might not even be able to directly access the test set answers, they might have to go through a 3rd party server with limitations on how often they can submit.
http://www.osnews.com/story/24... A quick Google shows that "app" in reference to "application" has been around in some form since at least 1981.
Other legal alternatives:
Play them on the Virtual Console for Wii, 3DS, and Wii U (and probably Switch eventually). That is, most Nintendo consoles in the past 11 years.
Play them in other repackaged forms on Nintendo consoles that have been coming out since the SuperNES (e.g. Super Mario All-Stars).
Play them on the original hardware that you can find in garage sales or eBay.
I'm trying to read some classic Western literature to see what thought processes led to current Western culture. Currently I'm reading the Tragedies of Aeschylus (Agamemnon specifically). Encyclopedia Brittanica put together a list of the books they thought were most influential throughout Western history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . My goal is to work my way through all of them, eventually. There's a good variety: literature, philosophy, history, theology, math, and science.
At least for a PhD, most people don't pay their own tuition, and even earn a small stipend for the work they do. They either get fellowships, graduate research assistant jobs, or other funding from the professor they do research for. It's not a lot of money, but it's at least "income" rather than "goes out."
This is only state universities (i.e. universities that get funding from a state government). The two biggest universities in my town (University of Rochester and Rochester Institute of Technology) are not in that list, and they are definitely not diploma mills.
A previous slashdot commenter (I don't remember which, sorry) said it best. It's apparently ignorant and backwards to believe that God created the universe, but quite forward-thinking and intellectual to think a computer programmer did.
I've had several engineering co-ops, and none of the co-ops I've done nor any of my fellow engineering students have done were unpaid. Paying engineering students for co-op work is pretty standard in the US at least.
Well I can't upvote this, but I just wanted to say that I'm adding this list to my to-read list. Some of it is already familiar to me but there's a lot of gaps I'd like to fill!
In addition, it's such an ignorant devaluation of AI's incredible achievements. The field of AI, a term everyone except Slashdot naysayers have agreed upon, has performed incredible feats of image and language analysis (among other things) that the average software engineer stringing together API calls could never have come up with.
Honestly, if you told someone to just "write a program" to recognize whether an image has a cat in it or not, what do you think they would come up with? Probably 20,000 lines of messy code that only handles a handful of cases. The insights of learning parameters from data, optimization techniques, and convolutional neural networks were found by groping in the dark for 50 years. For 50 years people couldn't just "write a program" to do that simple task. For a long time people couldn't even write programs that recognized the 10 handwritten numerical digits with competitive accuracy to a human.
Oh my gosh, why does everyone make a big deal about "making cars?" It's called "engineering a solution," and we've been doing it for millenia! Can we just call "cars" what they really are, "engineered solutions?"