Humans know a lot more about the world. If you are not sure what your eyes are telling you, you can start making educated guesses, using whaever else you know about the world. Nothing is just an object, rather, everything has associations and context.
But does this mean that software is untestable? A documentary about aircraft showed they had to pass a formal test of, will this door open when covered with an inch of ice. But with cars and roads and software, we seem to be saying that formal tests are useless, because the software and environment are both too complex. So it’ll just be a case of, if a self-driving system gets a bad reputation, we’ll know to ban it? Is that the best we can do?
Oh and not chomping nuts whilst typing. That also helped. One gets the sence that the keyboard designers never ate at their desk with their fingers covered in macadamia dust.
The sad truth is... that ALL Android manufacturers AND Apple... are making a mockery and a fool of themselves and their customers... And for what? To please the absolute dumbest people they can find, because they are trying to appeal to as many people as possible...
Technology has ceased to be a tool and has become fashion instead... to hell with actual usefull functions, what matters are milking customers to the extreme AND to put whatever is HIP right here and now in to the next product... a sad state of affairs if you ask me...
It makes me sad and frankly a little bit sick...
Another sad truth is that parents buy breakfast cereal for their kids, ruining their health. But that's how it is, companies make what they can sell, not necessarily what's good for humanity. But I think you are being a bit harsh on Apple. TouchID does go a long way to solving a problem: a way to help people keep their phones more secured whilst not relying on passwords. And likewise, FaceID is better than asking people to type in complex pass phrases. And actually, you can, if you look, find a lot of useful functionality. The trouble is, as you say, they gotta keep selling stuff, and often it is useless crap that sounds fashionable but doesn't do anything much worthwhile. Big energy companies went that route with wind farms, for example. Sounds great, so now people continue to make excuses to try to explain away why, actually, it is terrible in practice. Technology, society, culture, beliefs, fashions. Fortunately, you don't have to be totally depressed about it. I like the argument that innovation is an evolutionary process, in that, you CANNOT truly know in advance whether something will be useful or not. So you just have to let everyone, even greedy companies, experiment. Then wait twenty or fifty years and see how things turn out. Eventually, crap does get dropped. The thing many people forget is that the process of self-correction can take many decades. But it is largely unavoidable. Correction takes a long time.
My layperson notion is that humans have two main modes of doing stuff. There's reason, where we split things into objects and use logic to connect them up, and this is a very powerful intelligence, as it basically sets us apart from other animals. But as those whacky old Greek philosophers knew, there are things which are not thing-enough, so they escape logic. That's the point of Zeno's Paradoxes, I guess.
Meanwhile, there is the rest of the brain, which constructs our perceptions, and it does that in a way which we can only perhaps describe as "intuition". Somehow, without knowing any logical rules about the thing, you interact with your environment. And maybe 99% of what we do is in this way.
And where logic-based programming, lists of statements and rules, sort of mimics our reasoning faculty, or is a subset of it, the rest of the world has to be approached in this other way. So neural nets are impressive for being able to do some of this, but I would imagine there's a huge open question about what other non-linear processes are going on in the brain.
If I had to guess I'd say that the "AI" thing is going to be a hit-and-miss affair, as we discover some problems can be solved using neural nets with lots of data and training, and other problems will just be totally beyond its capabilities.
But where neural nets do succeed, it could be quite revolutionary. Imagine if they can be trained to understand economies. Perhaps it would finally put an end to all the totally-contradictory ideas about economics. Maybe with enough training, neural nets could actually model and predict economies quite well, in ways humans haven't been able to understand.
But there are also a lot of problems where you have to be one to understand one, so for example, predicting whether a new pop song will be a hit, may be forever beyond neural nets, as they cannot understand the subjective zeitgeist of people's evolving tastes.
So I tend to agree with one of the other replies here. The idea that AIs will become uber powerful... is a fantasy, dreamt up for hype and money.
I'm not so sure; from the perspective of an ordinary Chinese (particularly those old enough to remember before the economic boom of the last 20-30 odd years) the party has greatly benefited their country. And when you're winning, you can get away with quite a lot.
Besides from the outside looking in; when they think of the West, what do you suppose their opinion is? (Hint: they probably see us as far more chaotic and disorderly -- they might actually prefer the kind of control outlined in the article.)
Yes, there's an argument that culture goes through stages, and what in the West we call "individual freedom" is only possible, it only emerges, once the society is reasonably safe and stable, and that stability was originally built by authoritarian systems. So people do welcome authoritarian control, if it brings stability. Now whether the Chinese - a very large civilisation, so who can generalise - are still in the authoritarian mode, or whether their sense of personal freedom has already grown past it, is the big question, as regards how they take this crap.
Yes, there’s the problem of fallibility, so punishment should err on the side of weak punishment because what if the system made the wrong judgment? and there is the problem of downward spirals, where a few small events are exacerbated.
I don’t mind that they want meticulous discipline - but you don’t get that by ruining people in unfair and cruel ways. You get... you get the opposite. The Chinese system is shooting itself in the foot, as people will conclude that they already live in chaos, not order.
It's a mirror of a lot of things in life.... some people see the problems before they happen, other's don't until it happens to them, some never do because they prefer to live in a fantasy land.
It also basically mirrors the problem of corruption. I mean, forget democracy or religion or any of the other things... the one thing which is most scary for the potential downfall of civilisation is I think, the level of corruption. And I don't mean to imply that a country like, say, USA is more corrupt than a notoriously corrupt country like [insert choice here], but whatever field of human endeavour, be it science or insurance or medicine or dog shows, the human mind seems to have a really hard time acting honestly and free of corruption. And as IQs have gone up, apparently, so has people's ability to hide, and implement, corruption. And who can say they would not act the same if hired by some big company and given opportunity to gain power? Maybe we should be teaching integrity in like, early school, but where would you find the individuals with the integrity to set the example?
Also, re. manually editing a link, how does one know that url isn’t linked to from elsewhere? Ie. it was published for all, and all you did was shortcut straight to it?
I love markets, but so often, clever people try to create markets for their products, rather than solving people's real problems. It turns into yet another, suck the life out of the little guy, for the profit of some new venture. The bottom line in business should be that what you are doing is genuinely worthwhile and creates genuine value for humanity. And people need the integrity to answer for themselves honestly whether what they are doing it of genuine value, or merely profiting off whatever "wonderful world saving" thing is fashionable. It is stuff like this which reminds me we are in The Bad Place.
Why not just post that people should roll back the technology clock by 20 years? Or does that sound like a much harder sell?
Perhaps, given all the risks people have to face in life, the principle of privacy just doesn't matter that much to people. We eat in restaurants (food cooked by strangers), we drive cars (roads crowded by strangers), and go to the hospital (operated on by strangers), so the idea that strangers know something about your personality, social status, and buying habits, etc. is really neither here nor there. So Facebook's mission to connect everyone...... to an advertiser, political party, etc. is not high on people's lists of worries in life.
The difficulty for IT people is that, it is a compromise, and so everyone has to pay lip service to the principle of protecting data, even though in practice, almost nobody cares. At least, not care in the sense of, you can get away with it so long as you don't happen to do something which can be sensationalised in a way that triggers people's emotions, which seems to be what happened here. Consequently, Facebook has to ban those companies, not because they were harvesting data (a feature, not a bug) but because they allowed the public to be spun a story about it in such a way that caused outrage. In other words, they allowed a stink to happen. THAT was their sin.
We might think the problem was that a strict rule or policy was broken, ie. data was harvested, and so tighter controls should be used, like some technology problem, requiring a spec and a solution, but no, the actual problem is that a stink happened.
Much of our modern society is built on trust, and that in itself has brought tremendous benefits -- this is a broad point, that you cannot live in a modern city and society if you do not approach hundreds of strangers you interact with, with a basic form of trust -- so we are not going to give up easily on that, because it has given us so much -- consequently, we will forgive and forget these abuses of trust.
I think the particularly isolated geek mindset can forget this aspect, that humans "stupidly" trust each other... but there's a bunch of very good reasons for that pattern.
There’s been a lot of people off sick at work recently, so I got a bit worried, so I made a habit of, after the commute in on the bus, washing my hands (due to grabbing all the hand rails, and touching seats etc on the bus). Likewise after visiting anyone else’s desk and computers. After about six months of this, seems to have helped, so far. No illness. And thankfully the toilets at work dispence paper towels. Anecdotal, but if I’d caught several colds then that would have kinda disproved it all.
So around a million years. It’s not going to be high on the list. If paleo man survived childhood, and accidents, they probably lived to 70 plus. And older people tend to enjoy bitter tastes more, so burnt meat would likely get consumed.
I ran the numbers a few years ago with very optimistic assumptions, and the land area required for the solar component is about 1/4 the size of New Mexico.
Yes, it's "possible". It's just that no society has ever built anything that big before in the entire history of the planet. That doesn't make it "impossible" but it makes assuming that such a thing could be accomplished a huge leap of faith with nothing to back it up except for hope and wishful thinking. Possibly the Great Wall of China measures up in terms of man-hours and complexity but that took hundreds of years and totally-didn't-use-slave-labor, neither of which are on the table now.
Doing it in a distributed fashion only increases costs (though doing a portion of it in a distributed fashion might be the best odds for success - which is what is already happening now).
Trouble is, math is irrelevant to the continual cultural movement of eco romantics, deep ecologists, post modern anti-capitalists, anti phallo logo centrists, and anti colonialists. Not to mention the religiously inspired vegans and vegetarians, who are often city dwellers. We also have a 3000 year cultural history of being rather obsessed with ideas of sin, and ideas of purity. Now on the one hand, culture has helped build civilisation, but on the other hand, a great deal of of what we have inherited, and which continues to be part of our psychology, whether we notice or not, (and the whole point of post modernism is that we are all culturally constructed, a secret only postmodernists claim to be aware of), and so these dreams of a better world that's clean and sin free, are dominant. And then people like you say, but what about the math!:-D
Time marches on, especially in the tech world.11 years is enough. It isn't a "durable good", like a washer or a refrigerator.
Hah! When my expensive[1] Siemens fridge-freezer started breaking, the cost for the parts was ridiculous, and better to just buy a new one.
And when I talked to appliance techs, they say, yeah, lifespan for these appliances is 7 years, so your Siemens cracking up at 9 is pretty good going.
When I was a kid, a fridge was considered one of the most reliable appliances.
Apple isn't being particularly bad here -- they are a poor example of the problem, which is that manufacturers and customers are stuck in this cycle of making stuff which is not designed to last. My fridge was actually impressive in this design discipline, as it wasn't just the compressor which was going, the plastics were all starting to crack at the same time, with German timing and efficiency.
And why do you write Math in your subject line but talk about analytical skills in the comment? Math != Analytical skills
That's what I was wondering. I imagine there is a reason that development uses the word "architecture". Design is often about understanding where and how to make compromises between contradictory requirements. And didn't IBM originally think that programming was something like music composition? Which is not to say that some problems are not extremely mathematical, just that that is one form of cognition, and there are other intelligences which come up in other problem types. So perhaps the question is a bit too general. A question is, has a developer handled the particular type of problem before and did they manage to produce a pretty good design, having, through trial and error, and insights, explored the possibilities?
Good point about the Arab Spring, but notice, nobody can predict which stresses will occur and whether they will lead to breakdown, strain, or innovation, or some combination of all three. And multiply that by a million for all the possible scenarios.
Whilst care and compassion are very worthy moral developments, this does not mean we can predict the unpredictable. Climate change is unfortunately just one of the many unpredictable things. The “science” has faked its certainty over this, and latches onto tiny trends to pretend it understands the whole system. It is not denialism to point out trumped up claims.
Postmodern thought is party to blame, in that it does not think facts matter, all that matters is the narrative and dismantling the systems of oppression, so in environmental movements there’s often people who don’t care whether carbon is a problem, they only care that everyone be made to believe it is a problem, and use “science” as the narrative.
Meanwhile clouds are still a huge area of uncertainty. They just are.
But yes please let’s encourage humanity towards more care and compassion, regardless of situations. Science is NOT ethics.
At a basic level the right celebrates authority (everyone in the tribe works together) while the left embraces individuality (everybody free to be themselves). This means the right tends to believe their authorities without question, while the left tends to question everything.
That alone doesn't advantage the left or right with finding the truth. But mainstream religion is a thing that really hates being questioned, so religion and the political right eventually merged. And religions' antipathy to intellectual authorities spread to the right as a whole. You don't even need to be religious, if you're on the right you're taught to accept your authorities without question and reject opposing authorities outright.
And once the right declared intellectually rigorous authorities to be part of the left then the left started to embrace them. Hence the right became prone to conspiracy theories as they rejected intellectual authorities and the left became resistant as they embraced them.
Yes, and there's actually another level to this. It is that there are two axes or variables.
There is the aspect of, individual versus collective. That's one axis. Then there is another axis which runs vertically, called "levels". It is levels (or stages) in that societies develop and each new stage brings certain new things, over hundreds, and thousands of years.
First, levels: pre-modern to modern to post-post-modern. The pre-modern is what you are calling "authoritarian religion" which is true, most of the pre-modern world going back across the ages of empires, was authoritarian hierarchies. That's where much of religion remains today. It brought "order" to the world, by authoritarian force. And in as much as some people today continue to want a stable ordered society, they are looking to these authoritarian values. And in and of itself that's not a bad thing, because the modern world came after conditions were right, ie. stable enough, so modernity is built on top of the previous stage of authoritarian order, and if order in a nation breaks down, well democracy also goes out of the window.
Now what's interesting is that the left in America tends to be more in the modern to post-modern range, whilst the right tends to be more in the pre-modern to modern range. And to many on the left this looks like "low IQ" but that's not quite it. Rather, if you are living in more agrarian conditions, then your morals tend to be more traditional and pre-modern and authoritarian, whereas if you are living in more urban modern conditions, then your values and moral outlook tend to be more liberal and post-modern.
But what few realise is that the post-modern is built on top of the modern and the modern is built on top of the pre-modern, and that's basically what a film like Mad Max illustrates, that the moment you weaken the underlying authoritarian order of a society, all the high ideals collapse and your precious liberal values along with them. Which is why bombing Afghanistan was never going to turn it into a liberal democracy.
If you are liberal, you are affording the luxury to be liberal thanks to the existing wide social order which is the concern of the authoritarian structure, it is just that the authoritarian structure is just not the most prominent anymore, but it is still there, part of the fabric.
And in addition to the pre-modern to modern right, and the modern to post-modern left, there is also the individual/social dimensions. The modern left tends to assume that problems are because society is bad, and so you have to fix society, and for example, level the playing field, and so they favour taxes and redistribution. Whe
You are alive, and are one of the individuals who previous generations predicted could not be alive. You are one of the ones who should already have died a miserable death due to resource depletion. The simple reason why, I would guess, it is so very difficult to calculate the optimum carrying capacity of the planet, is that every human is both an asset and a liability. And every brain is a new opportunity to create new resources out of what previous generations thought was mere waste or previous generations did not know how to use. For example, much of the planet is desert, and we rely on agriculture (a 10,000 year old invention). What if future generations invent better systens which understand nature better than we do? In ways we cannot imagine? Just as previous generations could not imagine how you, you as an individual, could indeed be alive today?
Speaking as someone who merely dabbles in Python, I tried reading about design patterns, as the notion was inspired by Alexander’s A Pattern Language, which was his study of what patterns made Italian piazzas work, and other features of Italian towns, but I soon found the program patterns far too elaborate, and I would guess, that would be because there are so many different situations to try to cover, so I wondered, what is the pattern of patterns? And it seemed to me that one of the starting points was the isolation of different concerns. So I guess I got that right?
Slashdot Mirror
Humans know a lot more about the world. If you are not sure what your eyes are telling you, you can start making educated guesses, using whaever else you know about the world. Nothing is just an object, rather, everything has associations and context.
But does this mean that software is untestable? A documentary about aircraft showed they had to pass a formal test of, will this door open when covered with an inch of ice. But with cars and roads and software, we seem to be saying that formal tests are useless, because the software and environment are both too complex. So it’ll just be a case of, if a self-driving system gets a bad reputation, we’ll know to ban it? Is that the best we can do?
Oh and not chomping nuts whilst typing. That also helped. One gets the sence that the keyboard designers never ate at their desk with their fingers covered in macadamia dust.
I’ve had the return key go dull. Blasting canned air along its edges brought it back.
The sad truth is... that ALL Android manufacturers AND Apple... are making a mockery and a fool of themselves and their customers...
And for what? To please the absolute dumbest people they can find, because they are trying to appeal to as many people as possible...
Technology has ceased to be a tool and has become fashion instead... to hell with actual usefull functions, what matters are milking customers to the extreme AND to put whatever is HIP right here and now in to the next product ... a sad state of affairs if you ask me...
It makes me sad and frankly a little bit sick...
Another sad truth is that parents buy breakfast cereal for their kids, ruining their health. But that's how it is, companies make what they can sell, not necessarily what's good for humanity. But I think you are being a bit harsh on Apple. TouchID does go a long way to solving a problem: a way to help people keep their phones more secured whilst not relying on passwords. And likewise, FaceID is better than asking people to type in complex pass phrases. And actually, you can, if you look, find a lot of useful functionality. The trouble is, as you say, they gotta keep selling stuff, and often it is useless crap that sounds fashionable but doesn't do anything much worthwhile. Big energy companies went that route with wind farms, for example. Sounds great, so now people continue to make excuses to try to explain away why, actually, it is terrible in practice. Technology, society, culture, beliefs, fashions. Fortunately, you don't have to be totally depressed about it. I like the argument that innovation is an evolutionary process, in that, you CANNOT truly know in advance whether something will be useful or not. So you just have to let everyone, even greedy companies, experiment. Then wait twenty or fifty years and see how things turn out. Eventually, crap does get dropped. The thing many people forget is that the process of self-correction can take many decades. But it is largely unavoidable. Correction takes a long time.
My layperson notion is that humans have two main modes of doing stuff. There's reason, where we split things into objects and use logic to connect them up, and this is a very powerful intelligence, as it basically sets us apart from other animals. But as those whacky old Greek philosophers knew, there are things which are not thing-enough, so they escape logic. That's the point of Zeno's Paradoxes, I guess.
Meanwhile, there is the rest of the brain, which constructs our perceptions, and it does that in a way which we can only perhaps describe as "intuition". Somehow, without knowing any logical rules about the thing, you interact with your environment. And maybe 99% of what we do is in this way.
And where logic-based programming, lists of statements and rules, sort of mimics our reasoning faculty, or is a subset of it, the rest of the world has to be approached in this other way. So neural nets are impressive for being able to do some of this, but I would imagine there's a huge open question about what other non-linear processes are going on in the brain.
If I had to guess I'd say that the "AI" thing is going to be a hit-and-miss affair, as we discover some problems can be solved using neural nets with lots of data and training, and other problems will just be totally beyond its capabilities.
But where neural nets do succeed, it could be quite revolutionary. Imagine if they can be trained to understand economies. Perhaps it would finally put an end to all the totally-contradictory ideas about economics. Maybe with enough training, neural nets could actually model and predict economies quite well, in ways humans haven't been able to understand.
But there are also a lot of problems where you have to be one to understand one, so for example, predicting whether a new pop song will be a hit, may be forever beyond neural nets, as they cannot understand the subjective zeitgeist of people's evolving tastes.
So I tend to agree with one of the other replies here. The idea that AIs will become uber powerful... is a fantasy, dreamt up for hype and money.
I'm not so sure; from the perspective of an ordinary Chinese (particularly those old enough to remember before the economic boom of the last 20-30 odd years) the party has greatly benefited their country. And when you're winning, you can get away with quite a lot.
Besides from the outside looking in; when they think of the West, what do you suppose their opinion is? (Hint: they probably see us as far more chaotic and disorderly -- they might actually prefer the kind of control outlined in the article.)
Yes, there's an argument that culture goes through stages, and what in the West we call "individual freedom" is only possible, it only emerges, once the society is reasonably safe and stable, and that stability was originally built by authoritarian systems. So people do welcome authoritarian control, if it brings stability. Now whether the Chinese - a very large civilisation, so who can generalise - are still in the authoritarian mode, or whether their sense of personal freedom has already grown past it, is the big question, as regards how they take this crap.
Yes, there’s the problem of fallibility, so punishment should err on the side of weak punishment because what if the system made the wrong judgment? and there is the problem of downward spirals, where a few small events are exacerbated.
I don’t mind that they want meticulous discipline - but you don’t get that by ruining people in unfair and cruel ways. You get... you get the opposite. The Chinese system is shooting itself in the foot, as people will conclude that they already live in chaos, not order.
I believe rkhunter made an appearance in Mr. Robot.
It's a mirror of a lot of things in life.... some people see the problems before they happen, other's don't until it happens to them, some never do because they prefer to live in a fantasy land.
It also basically mirrors the problem of corruption. I mean, forget democracy or religion or any of the other things... the one thing which is most scary for the potential downfall of civilisation is I think, the level of corruption. And I don't mean to imply that a country like, say, USA is more corrupt than a notoriously corrupt country like [insert choice here], but whatever field of human endeavour, be it science or insurance or medicine or dog shows, the human mind seems to have a really hard time acting honestly and free of corruption. And as IQs have gone up, apparently, so has people's ability to hide, and implement, corruption. And who can say they would not act the same if hired by some big company and given opportunity to gain power? Maybe we should be teaching integrity in like, early school, but where would you find the individuals with the integrity to set the example?
Also, re. manually editing a link, how does one know that url isn’t linked to from elsewhere? Ie. it was published for all, and all you did was shortcut straight to it?
I love markets, but so often, clever people try to create markets for their products, rather than solving people's real problems.
It turns into yet another, suck the life out of the little guy, for the profit of some new venture.
The bottom line in business should be that what you are doing is genuinely worthwhile and creates genuine value for humanity.
And people need the integrity to answer for themselves honestly whether what they are doing it of genuine value, or merely profiting off whatever "wonderful world saving" thing is fashionable.
It is stuff like this which reminds me we are in The Bad Place.
Why not just post that people should roll back the technology clock by 20 years? Or does that sound like a much harder sell?
Perhaps, given all the risks people have to face in life, the principle of privacy just doesn't matter that much to people. We eat in restaurants (food cooked by strangers), we drive cars (roads crowded by strangers), and go to the hospital (operated on by strangers), so the idea that strangers know something about your personality, social status, and buying habits, etc. is really neither here nor there. So Facebook's mission to connect everyone... ... to an advertiser, political party, etc. is not high on people's lists of worries in life.
The difficulty for IT people is that, it is a compromise, and so everyone has to pay lip service to the principle of protecting data, even though in practice, almost nobody cares. At least, not care in the sense of, you can get away with it so long as you don't happen to do something which can be sensationalised in a way that triggers people's emotions, which seems to be what happened here. Consequently, Facebook has to ban those companies, not because they were harvesting data (a feature, not a bug) but because they allowed the public to be spun a story about it in such a way that caused outrage. In other words, they allowed a stink to happen. THAT was their sin.
We might think the problem was that a strict rule or policy was broken, ie. data was harvested, and so tighter controls should be used, like some technology problem, requiring a spec and a solution, but no, the actual problem is that a stink happened.
Much of our modern society is built on trust, and that in itself has brought tremendous benefits -- this is a broad point, that you cannot live in a modern city and society if you do not approach hundreds of strangers you interact with, with a basic form of trust -- so we are not going to give up easily on that, because it has given us so much -- consequently, we will forgive and forget these abuses of trust.
I think the particularly isolated geek mindset can forget this aspect, that humans "stupidly" trust each other... but there's a bunch of very good reasons for that pattern.
There’s been a lot of people off sick at work recently, so I got a bit worried, so I made a habit of, after the commute in on the bus, washing my hands (due to grabbing all the hand rails, and touching seats etc on the bus). Likewise after visiting anyone else’s desk and computers.
After about six months of this, seems to have helped, so far. No illness.
And thankfully the toilets at work dispence paper towels.
Anecdotal, but if I’d caught several colds then that would have kinda disproved it all.
So around a million years. It’s not going to be high on the list. If paleo man survived childhood, and accidents, they probably lived to 70 plus. And older people tend to enjoy bitter tastes more, so burnt meat would likely get consumed.
Given coffee came via Ethiopia, Sufis, and Italians, why do Americans call it “Joe”
?
I ran the numbers a few years ago with very optimistic assumptions, and the land area required for the solar component is about 1/4 the size of New Mexico.
Yes, it's "possible". It's just that no society has ever built anything that big before in the entire history of the planet. That doesn't make it "impossible" but it makes assuming that such a thing could be accomplished a huge leap of faith with nothing to back it up except for hope and wishful thinking. Possibly the Great Wall of China measures up in terms of man-hours and complexity but that took hundreds of years and totally-didn't-use-slave-labor, neither of which are on the table now.
Doing it in a distributed fashion only increases costs (though doing a portion of it in a distributed fashion might be the best odds for success - which is what is already happening now).
Trouble is, math is irrelevant to the continual cultural movement of eco romantics, deep ecologists, post modern anti-capitalists, anti phallo logo centrists, and anti colonialists. Not to mention the religiously inspired vegans and vegetarians, who are often city dwellers. We also have a 3000 year cultural history of being rather obsessed with ideas of sin, and ideas of purity. Now on the one hand, culture has helped build civilisation, but on the other hand, a great deal of of what we have inherited, and which continues to be part of our psychology, whether we notice or not, (and the whole point of post modernism is that we are all culturally constructed, a secret only postmodernists claim to be aware of), and so these dreams of a better world that's clean and sin free, are dominant. And then people like you say, but what about the math! :-D
Time marches on, especially in the tech world.11 years is enough. It isn't a "durable good", like a washer or a refrigerator.
Hah! When my expensive[1] Siemens fridge-freezer started breaking, the cost for the parts was ridiculous, and better to just buy a new one.
And when I talked to appliance techs, they say, yeah, lifespan for these appliances is 7 years, so your Siemens cracking up at 9 is pretty good going.
When I was a kid, a fridge was considered one of the most reliable appliances.
Apple isn't being particularly bad here -- they are a poor example of the problem, which is that manufacturers and customers are stuck in this cycle of making stuff which is not designed to last. My fridge was actually impressive in this design discipline, as it wasn't just the compressor which was going, the plastics were all starting to crack at the same time, with German timing and efficiency.
[1] Expensive to me.
I'll have to get myself a man-purse to carry it in.
The 50 lbs IBM 5100 is light enough for anyone.
And why do you write Math in your subject line but talk about analytical skills in the comment?
Math != Analytical skills
That's what I was wondering. I imagine there is a reason that development uses the word "architecture". Design is often about understanding where and how to make compromises between contradictory requirements. And didn't IBM originally think that programming was something like music composition? Which is not to say that some problems are not extremely mathematical, just that that is one form of cognition, and there are other intelligences which come up in other problem types. So perhaps the question is a bit too general. A question is, has a developer handled the particular type of problem before and did they manage to produce a pretty good design, having, through trial and error, and insights, explored the possibilities?
Good point about the Arab Spring, but notice, nobody can predict which stresses will occur and whether they will lead to breakdown, strain, or innovation, or some combination of all three. And multiply that by a million for all the possible scenarios.
Whilst care and compassion are very worthy moral developments, this does not mean we can predict the unpredictable. Climate change is unfortunately just one of the many unpredictable things. The “science” has faked its certainty over this, and latches onto tiny trends to pretend it understands the whole system. It is not denialism to point out trumped up claims.
Postmodern thought is party to blame, in that it does not think facts matter, all that matters is the narrative and dismantling the systems of oppression, so in environmental movements there’s often people who don’t care whether carbon is a problem, they only care that everyone be made to believe it is a problem, and use “science” as the narrative.
Meanwhile clouds are still a huge area of uncertainty. They just are.
But yes please let’s encourage humanity towards more care and compassion, regardless of situations. Science is NOT ethics.
Yes. Redundancy is always good.
Yes. Redundancy is always good.
Yes. Redundancy is always good.
Yes. Redundancy is always good.
(Let's see how much levels Slashdot can take before crashing :^))
Yes. Redundancy is always good.
(Let's see how much levels Slashdot can take before crashing :^))
Yes. Redundancy is always good. (Let's see how much levels Slashdot can take before crashing :^))
Yes. Redundancy is always good. (Let's see how many levels Slashdot can take before crashing :^))
At a basic level the right celebrates authority (everyone in the tribe works together) while the left embraces individuality (everybody free to be themselves). This means the right tends to believe their authorities without question, while the left tends to question everything.
That alone doesn't advantage the left or right with finding the truth. But mainstream religion is a thing that really hates being questioned, so religion and the political right eventually merged. And religions' antipathy to intellectual authorities spread to the right as a whole. You don't even need to be religious, if you're on the right you're taught to accept your authorities without question and reject opposing authorities outright.
And once the right declared intellectually rigorous authorities to be part of the left then the left started to embrace them. Hence the right became prone to conspiracy theories as they rejected intellectual authorities and the left became resistant as they embraced them.
Of course, one can easily imagine an alternate universe where the right embraces the authority of serious scholars while the left embraces crackpot skepticism.
Yes, and there's actually another level to this. It is that there are two axes or variables.
There is the aspect of, individual versus collective. That's one axis. Then there is another axis which runs vertically, called "levels". It is levels (or stages) in that societies develop and each new stage brings certain new things, over hundreds, and thousands of years.
First, levels: pre-modern to modern to post-post-modern. The pre-modern is what you are calling "authoritarian religion" which is true, most of the pre-modern world going back across the ages of empires, was authoritarian hierarchies. That's where much of religion remains today. It brought "order" to the world, by authoritarian force. And in as much as some people today continue to want a stable ordered society, they are looking to these authoritarian values. And in and of itself that's not a bad thing, because the modern world came after conditions were right, ie. stable enough, so modernity is built on top of the previous stage of authoritarian order, and if order in a nation breaks down, well democracy also goes out of the window.
Now what's interesting is that the left in America tends to be more in the modern to post-modern range, whilst the right tends to be more in the pre-modern to modern range. And to many on the left this looks like "low IQ" but that's not quite it. Rather, if you are living in more agrarian conditions, then your morals tend to be more traditional and pre-modern and authoritarian, whereas if you are living in more urban modern conditions, then your values and moral outlook tend to be more liberal and post-modern.
But what few realise is that the post-modern is built on top of the modern and the modern is built on top of the pre-modern, and that's basically what a film like Mad Max illustrates, that the moment you weaken the underlying authoritarian order of a society, all the high ideals collapse and your precious liberal values along with them. Which is why bombing Afghanistan was never going to turn it into a liberal democracy.
If you are liberal, you are affording the luxury to be liberal thanks to the existing wide social order which is the concern of the authoritarian structure, it is just that the authoritarian structure is just not the most prominent anymore, but it is still there, part of the fabric.
And in addition to the pre-modern to modern right, and the modern to post-modern left, there is also the individual/social dimensions. The modern left tends to assume that problems are because society is bad, and so you have to fix society, and for example, level the playing field, and so they favour taxes and redistribution. Whe
You are alive, and are one of the individuals who previous generations predicted could not be alive. You are one of the ones who should already have died a miserable death due to resource depletion. The simple reason why, I would guess, it is so very difficult to calculate the optimum carrying capacity of the planet, is that every human is both an asset and a liability. And every brain is a new opportunity to create new resources out of what previous generations thought was mere waste or previous generations did not know how to use. For example, much of the planet is desert, and we rely on agriculture (a 10,000 year old invention). What if future generations invent better systens which understand nature better than we do? In ways we cannot imagine? Just as previous generations could not imagine how you, you as an individual, could indeed be alive today?
Speaking as someone who merely dabbles in Python, I tried reading about design patterns, as the notion was inspired by Alexander’s A Pattern Language, which was his study of what patterns made Italian piazzas work, and other features of Italian towns, but I soon found the program patterns far too elaborate, and I would guess, that would be because there are so many different situations to try to cover, so I wondered, what is the pattern of patterns? And it seemed to me that one of the starting points was the isolation of different concerns. So I guess I got that right?