I read up a little on DOTA2, it's given some of the units powers which make the game complex. Poker sort of stuff where bluffs are possible. Psychology is a bitch and a half to model, so these researchers specifically banned those powers.... making this even less impressive.
Dota 2 is a much slower game than shooters like CS.
You're not quite thinking about that the right way. You're talking about the speed rate like the human scale matters. CS isn't even a game from a AI perspective. Maybe there's some shenanigians with grenades, but otherwise: Spin();If(LOS to head){click}else(GoToBomb()). That's it. That's a perfect game. It's solved. Consider a version of DOTA where you had an infinite amount of time to plan and calculate things between every tick or frame of the game. That's essentially how computers operate.
Beating a human in a game that depends on reaction time and wide search-spaces just isn't impressive.
And the choice of heroes (that is also asymmetrical) changes the game a lot. Not to mention that the choice of items and the order to get them can easily change a game from a win to a loss.
hmm, the versions I remember, this wasn't a real deep decision space. I always had a preferred build. Crunch it out and there's.... likely a optimal set. Maybe an optimal set per every configuration of the opponent's selection. And then an optimal set depending on what you expect the opponent to expect your set to be. ONLY on that last step does it even become a game. Everything before that is just math. As boring as "is 2.7 dps more than 4.7dps?". With an obvious answer that involves zero AI. Statistics. But this game might be deeper, I honestly don't know.
Picking the wrong item can lead to a loss... The same way that picking the wrong square in tic-tac-toe can lead to a loss. But that doesn't make it a deep game.
It's orders of magnitude more complex tactically than i.e. chess
"But those simplifications did little to detract from just how impressive an achievement [the] win was."
Which is... not very impressive.
Ok, so I haven't actually played Dota2. I'm assuming it's a twitchy game where reaction speed and knowing when to attack/run is vital. That's how Zergling Blood and the first Dota were. When this whole genre was a mod of starcraft and warcraft, it wasn't very deep. And journalists are just legendarily bad at hyping AI and not undestanding games. Way too many damn people think that "games" are just "kid's stuff". And on the flip side, way too many kids are too easily impressed.
I don't even know why they limited it to 18 heroes. Wide search spaces is something that self-learning is supposed to be able to tackle with ease....Unless the entire field of "big data" is an over-hyped myth.
BOW DOWN MORTALS Before the one true language. The Ur-language that ushers in all the false idols. The Most Holy of relics...
C
The old gods are calling. Can you hear them? It's the sound of inevitability as the young usurpers weep into their transient drinks feeling their lifeblood leak away like so much memory. What pidly followers they amassed will blow away like so much dust. And where do they turn when all they hold dear is cast about on shifting sands? The stable bedrock of C.
LOOK UPON IT'S MAJESTY and look upon your EVERYTHING and you will see it staring back at you. Your Linux, your arduinos, your Rasberry Pis, your toaster, your fridge. We are the ones who cook your food. We are the ones who drive your cars. We are the ones who hand-carry your garbage when your program closes. DO NOT fuck with us.
Just high enough above the metal to be portable as all fucking get out and low enough slide through that silicon like greased lightning. This IS your grand-daddies programming language because he knew his shit. The experience of GENERATIONS is out there and honestly eager to help. Ask on stack overflow about how the shareponit widget gets shuffled by the flub API in the.WHORE framework and you'll have a couple crickets for company. But ask for some fluent C and the fucking CHOIR comes out to play.
C is the language to learn my friends. It gets you where you need to be. It's not the last language you want to learn, but it's certainly the one you want to sharpen. Hone that to a razor edge and you can cut any problem down to size. And that's no Turing tarpit. I may program in Brainfuck and Malbolge for shits'n'giggles, but C is the workhorse of solving real meaningful problems. Bash glues yesterday's solutions together, and some pretty GUI-maker can make yet another button for a clueless suit, but you whip out C for the hard cases.
#include int main(int argc, char** argv) {
printf("Bro, do you even code?\n");
return 0; }
but my main problem is that whitespace is significant.
Eh, I think there's two fundamental things that programming languages need to do:
1) Help people understand them, and help people understand how to write proper code. "This is the way child".
2) "Get the fuck out of my way, I'm getting shit done". Where the language does it's best to cobble together some productivity from whatever garbage you dump into it.
C has this. Without the -Wall blocking your way, C gets stuff done. (and -Wextra [and -Wpedantic because we make million dollar systems that must not fail]). Crank on all those checks and put your source code in a split (or pclint) and codeing becomes pretty MISRAble. It should probably have a coding style built in and warn on that too, but RSM, coverity, and other tools can fill in the gaps.
I'm positive there must be someone's pet project out there to add a layer on top of C to let you implicitly declare variables. Or automatically insert declarations into your source code. If that's really your thing.
Who couldn't see this coming when they offered a "free upgrade" to windows 10? Little money grubbers don't want to have to have to produce anything of quality every other OS release, they'd rather have their hooks into you every month regardless of how well the product works. It's really expensive to dump money into developers, they'd make a lot more money if they didn't need them.
But of course everyone is going to shit on this idea here on Slashdot. We hate microsoft (for good reason and we remember our history). We lean libertarian (or at least put up with those guys). This is classic rent-seeking. There's virtually no good angle for why anyone would want this OTHER than the bean-counters at Microsoft corporate. But of course that's our stance. Who would think otherwise. No, I've got no meaningful contribution to this discussion other than the obvious shots in the bucket. But some things need to be said and for some things it just matters how big the mob is.
Frankly, it is terrifying... We think that it is important to put a stop to this right away and make it as difficult as humanly possible to access this information
Yeah, I hear ya. But the thing about information is that it's REALLY hard to stop it from spreading. And this isn't super top-notch secret information that only a handful of people have. Anyone with a bit of time and some free software can make their own, and then go one to share it through any avenue available in this modern ultra-connected digital world.
You're simply not going to be able to police this. It's outside the scope of what you can control.
Any attempts to illegalize it will either be laughably unenforceable or boil down to cops raiding places for what amounts to thought-crime (which will run afoul of bigger laws, namely the 1st and 4th amendments to the constitution). So we, collectively, need to get ready for a world where nearly anyone with a bit of cash to spare (like $50), will have access to firearms. Really shitty firearms at the moment, but that's probably going to get better.
You're such a genius, what the fuck am I SUPPOSED to do about it? The only card I have to play is to look for another job
If he wasn't super-clear, he was telling you: "YES, play that card and go get another job". Specifically one where you aren't a contractor. The market is hot for tech workers. Unemployment is down, WAY down.
The problem here appears to be that you're putting up with their bullshit. (And you WORKING like a $20 whore brings down my wage negotiations. So... stop that.)
an average of $135,000 and yet, a survey of 6,000 tech workers conducted by workplace app Blind and reported by Quartz found that over 60 percent feel they aren't being paid enough.
The AVERAGE includes all those rockstars who make millions and the near-retirement specialists who are the last surviving member who knows just WTF is going on and the company cannot survive without them. Also all the millionaires in SanFran who can't afford a lean-to dilapidated shack. You'd be wanting to look at the median, and even then split it out across different cities or different Cost-of-Living rates. And (all?) those old companies have workers across the globe.
Listen, statistics is hard. Sociology even harder. This is a bullshit sub-journalist blip just made to start an argument. It's not science.
Says the anonymous coward. Come on, why don't you use your username? It's like your hiding something....
But everyone in the conversation should be aware that there are PR campaigns by both sides of the debate, and likely shills and pseudo shills polluting the conversation. Along with plenty of idiots that are just plain scared of any new technology and perfectly knowledgable people legitimatly scared of this specific technology.
There's plenty to be skeptic of when it comes to "We want GMO labels on our food". Mostly because those asking for it have zero clue what "GMO" means. You're asking for black and white, when there's about 7 different shades of green. Take the "organic" label for example. What a clusterfuck. There's "organic salt". And there's plenty of reason to dislike organic food (And by association, those who buy it and demanded an organic lable). It's wasteful and can't sustain the world. "Rich people food". Then again, by association, the GMO crowd has a few black marks. Monsanto is a pretty good poster-child for evil dystopian cyberpunk megacorp. There's big money involved, I'd hardly expect anything else.
Anyway, what would the criteria be for something to be allowed to have non-GMO label?
There's a legitimate concern about the scope of what could have changed.
Natural selection has made some fascinating things (I'm looking at you baby, *cheesy smiley and finger-guns*), and unnatural selection like cultivation and domestication have made for more useful foods (and kinda freaky dogs). But the scope of what's possible with this method is known and constrained. Most variety happens with crossover, there's only so much mutation and what you get is typically small. If it's too large, the offspring is non-viable. So developing dwarf-wheat (which has fed BILLIONS) had to be done with baby-steps and lots of generations. Genetic engineering with techniques like CRISPR opens up the search space of what's possible. You could shoe-horn in psychedelic mushrooms into mosquito. You could put spider silk glands into goats and cows. You could put venomous snakes into wheat. Now all the idiots out there have mental images of a snake's head popping out of a muffin and biting them. That sort of hyperbole is crazy. Nobody is trying to do those crazy things and poison you. Other than the spider-goats, that's a real thing. But the companies doing this are typically just trying to make a cheaper, better, more profitable product. The concern is that there are unintended side-effects.
The better we get at genetic engineering, the more we should treat GMOs like drugs rather than food.
and less error prone
Haha, whoa, wut?
Just because we're better at changing things genes doesn't mean the error rate goes down. No, now we can make mistakes at twice the speed! And rather than seg-faults simply crashing the program, now we can get cross-site scripting attacks.
So really almost everything should be labelled as GMO.
Yeah, the labeling is almost moot. There's going to be a REAL blurry line. And whatever they settle on is probably going to make as much sense as "organic" salt.
You know, one doesn't usually so readily admit to using hyperbolic bullshit with the sole intention of fear-mongering.... It's not traditionally a real solid foundation to start a debate upon.
Self-awareness is a good thing though. So, you know, props for that.
This isn't putting fruit fly genes in your grapes, this is editing the grape genome with intention rather than depending on blind luck.
Great, so they're putting fruit fly genes in my grapes.... with intention. That's so much better. And and there's STILL a hefty load of blind luck, even with precise gene insertion via CRISPR and such. Unless someone out there has complete understanding of protein folding, methylation, gene suppression and activation, and all the freaky shit from epigenetics, then there's still guesswork. Don't pretend that the field of genetics has been solved.
The more advanced our abilities with genetic engineering get, the more we should treat GMOs like drugs rather than food. Because the only difference between a psychedelic trip and a normal stroganoff is a few tweaks in the genes of some fungus.
The other produce at the store you're eating was mutated with radiation, unless you're only eating heirloom varieties.
mmmm. No. This one is also not quite right. I get what you're saying: That "heirloom" plants are closer to the wild strains than those we've cultivated. But both, (everything really) are products of mutation. And mutation arises from anything that causes transcription errors, not just radiation, but yeah also radiation (like from the sun). While the source of all variation is mutation, most of what changes between two generations is actually from crossover. The mixing and matching of your parent's DNA. We're all carrying around all sort of mutations that get glossed over until a (typically unlucky) kid gets to try it out. Yay recessive genes, nature's development repo.
The real difference between "heirloom" foods and the typical plants you get in the store would be selection. We've directed their evolution by selecting the biggest plumpest tomatoes over the years. The Heirloom variety have also had all the same mutations and crossover over the years, but presumably it's cancelled out with equal mutations in the other direction and the strain is more or less the same since antiquity. The term would be "outbred" for genetic stability as opposed to "inbred" for specific traits.
The difference between unnatural selection (cultivation, domestication, 1700's-era genetic engineering) and the natural evolution of plants is significant. No joke, we've done some crazy stuff. Helpful and useful too. But all that PALES in comparison to what they can do with current modern genetic engineering. The search space for what you can achieve in a handful of generations of cultivation is only so big. There's a set collection of genetic material to cross over and mutations are rare and limited. The search space for what you can achieve with CRISPR is so wide it includes every living organism on the planet. From venom producing snakes, to spider silk, to psychedelic mushrooms, to brussel sprouts. Give a mad scientist a handful of pea pods and a lifetime of cultivation and tell him to make a weapon and at the end you'll have some bad tasting vegetables. Give a mad scientist a handful of pea pods he can genetically engineer and you might have some scary stuff at the end. Like peas that naturally produce anthrax or explode corrosive acid. But monsanto and the like aren't mad scientists. Most of them. Probably. They just want to make cheaper, better, more profitable crops. The worry is that they'll fuckup and have some unintended consequence.
In the near future, as we know more about how genes work, the bigger that search space gets and the more can be done with genetic engineering. Like faster computers, they'll have bigger fuckups in half the time. There's a LOT of fear-mongering and... frankly unfair criticism of GMOs, Monsanto, and genetic engineering in general. And there has also been a significant PR campaign by Monsanto to control public image. It's a fucking mess.
Also, for anyone interested in this stuff, "Herding Hemingway's Cats" is a heavy but insightful read into the state of genetics.
"If phone makers and mobile network operators couldn't include our apps on their wide range of devices, it would upset the balance of the Android ecosystem," explains Pichai,
Utter fucking bullshit. No user WANTS this junk on their phone. The "ecosystem" he's talking about is the kickbacks they get for dumping a load of garbage onto people's phones. It's anti-competitive and removes power from the people. Fuck your business deals. Let people choose what they want to run.
There's also a history of voter laws being used to block black people from voting. But that was a long time ago and the parties have really mixed it up since then. I'm pretty sure there's plenty of idiots voting both ways, but in the same sense that ANY paperwork or regulation is viewed as harmful to business, people argue that ANY paperwork or registration is harmful to getting people to vote. And yeah, every election people are turned away in some states because they never registered, or failed to update, or their state was being an asshole.
What the fuuuuuuoooookay. Not their voting record, just their "Personal details". IE, whatever they've told these robocallers.
It's phone-book stuff plus party and demographics. meh. I mean, it's a leak, and you know, shame on a lazy corporation and all that. But this isn't real groundbreaking. If you donate to a political candidate, that's public knowledge anyway.
More over he does not have 150 billon to play with. Being that he wants to maintain (rigid) control over his company, he cannot sell most of his stock without risking losing that power. Further, that valuation is all just paper.
Just as a reminder, even if he liquidates, and literally walks around with billion dollar bills in his pocket, that's all just paper. If it's in some bank account, it's just a number. If he buys a bunch of gold bars that's just some metal.
These things have value, all of them, from the stock to the cash to the gold, because other people will trade you stuff for them. That's it.
dumping that much stock will lower the price, so he is going to have to take a long time to sell off, or accept that he isn't going to get 'full value' for his options. He could probably tank the price by himself just by putting all his stock on the market all at once.
Oh there are ways around that. If it does it all at once, then he's literally sold high BEFORE the resulting crash. But that's a lot of money to move in one swoop, he'd have to line up select buyers who want to run Amazon. So you sell your shares to a company you own, who sells them on the low-down. Do it too fast and yeah, the price will go down. But it's big stock, you can move money and no one will notice.
I kinda feel bad for him. He cannot go anywhere without an armed security escort
No, you're still only thinking like a rich person, not an ultra-rich person. He can afford to go places he doesn't NEED an armed security escort. Like, he can buy out the whole island and/or the entire staff doubles as security and/or he goes where he wants and lets the security firm deal with coverage and covert agents. If you're rich enough, even rich people problems go away.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really understand your reasoning. What game is deep for comparison?
Chess is EXPTIME-complete.
Check out Game Complexity or Complexity in general if you want to dive down the rabbit hole.
I read up a little on DOTA2, it's given some of the units powers which make the game complex. Poker sort of stuff where bluffs are possible. Psychology is a bitch and a half to model, so these researchers specifically banned those powers.... making this even less impressive.
Dota 2 is a much slower game than shooters like CS.
You're not quite thinking about that the right way. You're talking about the speed rate like the human scale matters. CS isn't even a game from a AI perspective. Maybe there's some shenanigians with grenades, but otherwise: Spin();If(LOS to head){click}else(GoToBomb()). That's it. That's a perfect game. It's solved. Consider a version of DOTA where you had an infinite amount of time to plan and calculate things between every tick or frame of the game. That's essentially how computers operate.
Beating a human in a game that depends on reaction time and wide search-spaces just isn't impressive.
And the choice of heroes (that is also asymmetrical) changes the game a lot. Not to mention that the choice of items and the order to get them can easily change a game from a win to a loss.
hmm, the versions I remember, this wasn't a real deep decision space. I always had a preferred build. Crunch it out and there's.... likely a optimal set. Maybe an optimal set per every configuration of the opponent's selection. And then an optimal set depending on what you expect the opponent to expect your set to be. ONLY on that last step does it even become a game. Everything before that is just math. As boring as "is 2.7 dps more than 4.7dps?". With an obvious answer that involves zero AI. Statistics. But this game might be deeper, I honestly don't know.
Picking the wrong item can lead to a loss... The same way that picking the wrong square in tic-tac-toe can lead to a loss. But that doesn't make it a deep game.
It's orders of magnitude more complex tactically than i.e. chess
Uh huh.
"But those simplifications did little to detract from just how impressive an achievement [the] win was."
Which is... not very impressive.
Ok, so I haven't actually played Dota2. I'm assuming it's a twitchy game where reaction speed and knowing when to attack/run is vital. That's how Zergling Blood and the first Dota were. When this whole genre was a mod of starcraft and warcraft, it wasn't very deep. And journalists are just legendarily bad at hyping AI and not undestanding games. Way too many damn people think that "games" are just "kid's stuff". And on the flip side, way too many kids are too easily impressed.
I don't even know why they limited it to 18 heroes. Wide search spaces is something that self-learning is supposed to be able to tackle with ease. ...Unless the entire field of "big data" is an over-hyped myth.
You know that scene in Parks and Rec where Ron asks for a piece of soy-bacon?
And immediately throws it into the trash?
BOW DOWN MORTALS Before the one true language. The Ur-language that ushers in all the false idols. The Most Holy of relics...
C
The old gods are calling. Can you hear them? It's the sound of inevitability as the young usurpers weep into their transient drinks feeling their lifeblood leak away like so much memory. What pidly followers they amassed will blow away like so much dust. And where do they turn when all they hold dear is cast about on shifting sands? The stable bedrock of C.
LOOK UPON IT'S MAJESTY and look upon your EVERYTHING and you will see it staring back at you. Your Linux, your arduinos, your Rasberry Pis, your toaster, your fridge. We are the ones who cook your food. We are the ones who drive your cars. We are the ones who hand-carry your garbage when your program closes. DO NOT fuck with us.
Just high enough above the metal to be portable as all fucking get out and low enough slide through that silicon like greased lightning. This IS your grand-daddies programming language because he knew his shit. The experience of GENERATIONS is out there and honestly eager to help. Ask on stack overflow about how the shareponit widget gets shuffled by the flub API in the .WHORE framework and you'll have a couple crickets for company. But ask for some fluent C and the fucking CHOIR comes out to play.
C is the language to learn my friends. It gets you where you need to be. It's not the last language you want to learn, but it's certainly the one you want to sharpen. Hone that to a razor edge and you can cut any problem down to size. And that's no Turing tarpit. I may program in Brainfuck and Malbolge for shits'n'giggles, but C is the workhorse of solving real meaningful problems. Bash glues yesterday's solutions together, and some pretty GUI-maker can make yet another button for a clueless suit, but you whip out C for the hard cases.
#include
int main(int argc, char** argv)
{
printf("Bro, do you even code?\n");
return 0;
}
*slow clap*
Bravo you glorious sonnovabitch. I lost it at guitar/sword.
but my main problem is that whitespace is significant.
Eh, I think there's two fundamental things that programming languages need to do:
1) Help people understand them, and help people understand how to write proper code. "This is the way child".
2) "Get the fuck out of my way, I'm getting shit done". Where the language does it's best to cobble together some productivity from whatever garbage you dump into it.
C has this. Without the -Wall blocking your way, C gets stuff done. (and -Wextra [and -Wpedantic because we make million dollar systems that must not fail]). Crank on all those checks and put your source code in a split (or pclint) and codeing becomes pretty MISRAble. It should probably have a coding style built in and warn on that too, but RSM, coverity, and other tools can fill in the gaps.
I'm positive there must be someone's pet project out there to add a layer on top of C to let you implicitly declare variables. Or automatically insert declarations into your source code. If that's really your thing.
They keep publishing lies about how bad Windows 7 is for gaming
Yeah, I never jumped to win10. Everything on steam runs fine on Win7.
Who couldn't see this coming when they offered a "free upgrade" to windows 10? Little money grubbers don't want to have to have to produce anything of quality every other OS release, they'd rather have their hooks into you every month regardless of how well the product works. It's really expensive to dump money into developers, they'd make a lot more money if they didn't need them.
But of course everyone is going to shit on this idea here on Slashdot. We hate microsoft (for good reason and we remember our history). We lean libertarian (or at least put up with those guys). This is classic rent-seeking. There's virtually no good angle for why anyone would want this OTHER than the bean-counters at Microsoft corporate. But of course that's our stance. Who would think otherwise. No, I've got no meaningful contribution to this discussion other than the obvious shots in the bucket. But some things need to be said and for some things it just matters how big the mob is.
Frankly, it is terrifying... We think that it is important to put a stop to this right away and make it as difficult as humanly possible to access this information
Yeah, I hear ya. But the thing about information is that it's REALLY hard to stop it from spreading. And this isn't super top-notch secret information that only a handful of people have. Anyone with a bit of time and some free software can make their own, and then go one to share it through any avenue available in this modern ultra-connected digital world.
You're simply not going to be able to police this. It's outside the scope of what you can control.
Any attempts to illegalize it will either be laughably unenforceable or boil down to cops raiding places for what amounts to thought-crime (which will run afoul of bigger laws, namely the 1st and 4th amendments to the constitution). So we, collectively, need to get ready for a world where nearly anyone with a bit of cash to spare (like $50), will have access to firearms. Really shitty firearms at the moment, but that's probably going to get better.
You're such a genius, what the fuck am I SUPPOSED to do about it? The only card I have to play is to look for another job
If he wasn't super-clear, he was telling you: "YES, play that card and go get another job". Specifically one where you aren't a contractor. The market is hot for tech workers. Unemployment is down, WAY down.
The problem here appears to be that you're putting up with their bullshit. (And you WORKING like a $20 whore brings down my wage negotiations. So... stop that.)
an average of $135,000 and yet, a survey of 6,000 tech workers conducted by workplace app Blind and reported by Quartz found that over 60 percent feel they aren't being paid enough.
The AVERAGE includes all those rockstars who make millions and the near-retirement specialists who are the last surviving member who knows just WTF is going on and the company cannot survive without them. Also all the millionaires in SanFran who can't afford a lean-to dilapidated shack. You'd be wanting to look at the median, and even then split it out across different cities or different Cost-of-Living rates. And (all?) those old companies have workers across the globe.
Listen, statistics is hard. Sociology even harder. This is a bullshit sub-journalist blip just made to start an argument. It's not science.
Says the anonymous coward. Come on, why don't you use your username? It's like your hiding something....
But everyone in the conversation should be aware that there are PR campaigns by both sides of the debate, and likely shills and pseudo shills polluting the conversation. Along with plenty of idiots that are just plain scared of any new technology and perfectly knowledgable people legitimatly scared of this specific technology.
There's plenty to be skeptic of when it comes to "We want GMO labels on our food". Mostly because those asking for it have zero clue what "GMO" means. You're asking for black and white, when there's about 7 different shades of green. Take the "organic" label for example. What a clusterfuck. There's "organic salt". And there's plenty of reason to dislike organic food (And by association, those who buy it and demanded an organic lable). It's wasteful and can't sustain the world. "Rich people food". Then again, by association, the GMO crowd has a few black marks. Monsanto is a pretty good poster-child for evil dystopian cyberpunk megacorp. There's big money involved, I'd hardly expect anything else.
Anyway, what would the criteria be for something to be allowed to have non-GMO label?
God DAMNIT, I'm trying to eat healthy. This sorta shit isn't helping.
There's a legitimate concern about the scope of what could have changed.
Natural selection has made some fascinating things (I'm looking at you baby, *cheesy smiley and finger-guns*), and unnatural selection like cultivation and domestication have made for more useful foods (and kinda freaky dogs). But the scope of what's possible with this method is known and constrained. Most variety happens with crossover, there's only so much mutation and what you get is typically small. If it's too large, the offspring is non-viable. So developing dwarf-wheat (which has fed BILLIONS) had to be done with baby-steps and lots of generations. Genetic engineering with techniques like CRISPR opens up the search space of what's possible. You could shoe-horn in psychedelic mushrooms into mosquito. You could put spider silk glands into goats and cows. You could put venomous snakes into wheat. Now all the idiots out there have mental images of a snake's head popping out of a muffin and biting them. That sort of hyperbole is crazy. Nobody is trying to do those crazy things and poison you. Other than the spider-goats, that's a real thing. But the companies doing this are typically just trying to make a cheaper, better, more profitable product. The concern is that there are unintended side-effects.
The better we get at genetic engineering, the more we should treat GMOs like drugs rather than food.
and less error prone
Haha, whoa, wut?
Just because we're better at changing things genes doesn't mean the error rate goes down. No, now we can make mistakes at twice the speed! And rather than seg-faults simply crashing the program, now we can get cross-site scripting attacks.
So really almost everything should be labelled as GMO.
Yeah, the labeling is almost moot. There's going to be a REAL blurry line. And whatever they settle on is probably going to make as much sense as "organic" salt.
. . . Feeding more people?
Nations would have starved without dwarf wheat. That's not "GMO", but the idea is the same. We can do better.
Ask yourself if "There is no reason to reinvent computers" makes sense, then come back to the conversation.
You know, one doesn't usually so readily admit to using hyperbolic bullshit with the sole intention of fear-mongering.... It's not traditionally a real solid foundation to start a debate upon.
Self-awareness is a good thing though. So, you know, props for that.
that does not make GMOs fundamentally wrong.
Right. Just like how guns aren't fundamentally wrong or evil. But it's still concerning when the evil sociopath gets his hands on one.
*Squints and looks over at Monsanto...*
Bu yeah, GMOs have helped feed the world.
This isn't putting fruit fly genes in your grapes, this is editing the grape genome with intention rather than depending on blind luck.
Great, so they're putting fruit fly genes in my grapes.... with intention. That's so much better. And and there's STILL a hefty load of blind luck, even with precise gene insertion via CRISPR and such. Unless someone out there has complete understanding of protein folding, methylation, gene suppression and activation, and all the freaky shit from epigenetics, then there's still guesswork. Don't pretend that the field of genetics has been solved.
The more advanced our abilities with genetic engineering get, the more we should treat GMOs like drugs rather than food. Because the only difference between a psychedelic trip and a normal stroganoff is a few tweaks in the genes of some fungus.
The other produce at the store you're eating was mutated with radiation, unless you're only eating heirloom varieties.
mmmm. No. This one is also not quite right. I get what you're saying: That "heirloom" plants are closer to the wild strains than those we've cultivated. But both, (everything really) are products of mutation. And mutation arises from anything that causes transcription errors, not just radiation, but yeah also radiation (like from the sun). While the source of all variation is mutation, most of what changes between two generations is actually from crossover. The mixing and matching of your parent's DNA. We're all carrying around all sort of mutations that get glossed over until a (typically unlucky) kid gets to try it out. Yay recessive genes, nature's development repo.
The real difference between "heirloom" foods and the typical plants you get in the store would be selection. We've directed their evolution by selecting the biggest plumpest tomatoes over the years. The Heirloom variety have also had all the same mutations and crossover over the years, but presumably it's cancelled out with equal mutations in the other direction and the strain is more or less the same since antiquity. The term would be "outbred" for genetic stability as opposed to "inbred" for specific traits.
The difference between unnatural selection (cultivation, domestication, 1700's-era genetic engineering) and the natural evolution of plants is significant. No joke, we've done some crazy stuff. Helpful and useful too. But all that PALES in comparison to what they can do with current modern genetic engineering. The search space for what you can achieve in a handful of generations of cultivation is only so big. There's a set collection of genetic material to cross over and mutations are rare and limited. The search space for what you can achieve with CRISPR is so wide it includes every living organism on the planet. From venom producing snakes, to spider silk, to psychedelic mushrooms, to brussel sprouts. Give a mad scientist a handful of pea pods and a lifetime of cultivation and tell him to make a weapon and at the end you'll have some bad tasting vegetables. Give a mad scientist a handful of pea pods he can genetically engineer and you might have some scary stuff at the end. Like peas that naturally produce anthrax or explode corrosive acid. But monsanto and the like aren't mad scientists. Most of them. Probably. They just want to make cheaper, better, more profitable crops. The worry is that they'll fuckup and have some unintended consequence.
In the near future, as we know more about how genes work, the bigger that search space gets and the more can be done with genetic engineering. Like faster computers, they'll have bigger fuckups in half the time. There's a LOT of fear-mongering and... frankly unfair criticism of GMOs, Monsanto, and genetic engineering in general. And there has also been a significant PR campaign by Monsanto to control public image. It's a fucking mess.
Also, for anyone interested in this stuff, "Herding Hemingway's Cats" is a heavy but insightful read into the state of genetics.
Who wants to have to look at their phone to use it?
People who don't want to have to shout at it?
What part of "shame on a lazy corporation" didn't you read?
"If phone makers and mobile network operators couldn't include our apps on their wide range of devices, it would upset the balance of the Android ecosystem," explains Pichai,
Utter fucking bullshit. No user WANTS this junk on their phone. The "ecosystem" he's talking about is the kickbacks they get for dumping a load of garbage onto people's phones. It's anti-competitive and removes power from the people. Fuck your business deals. Let people choose what they want to run.
There's also a history of voter laws being used to block black people from voting. But that was a long time ago and the parties have really mixed it up since then. I'm pretty sure there's plenty of idiots voting both ways, but in the same sense that ANY paperwork or regulation is viewed as harmful to business, people argue that ANY paperwork or registration is harmful to getting people to vote. And yeah, every election people are turned away in some states because they never registered, or failed to update, or their state was being an asshole.
What the fuuuuuuoooookay. Not their voting record, just their "Personal details". IE, whatever they've told these robocallers.
It's phone-book stuff plus party and demographics. meh. I mean, it's a leak, and you know, shame on a lazy corporation and all that. But this isn't real groundbreaking. If you donate to a political candidate, that's public knowledge anyway.
holy shit, you're real?
More over he does not have 150 billon to play with. Being that he wants to maintain (rigid) control over his company, he cannot sell most of his stock without risking losing that power. Further, that valuation is all just paper.
Just as a reminder, even if he liquidates, and literally walks around with billion dollar bills in his pocket, that's all just paper. If it's in some bank account, it's just a number. If he buys a bunch of gold bars that's just some metal.
These things have value, all of them, from the stock to the cash to the gold, because other people will trade you stuff for them. That's it.
dumping that much stock will lower the price, so he is going to have to take a long time to sell off, or accept that he isn't going to get 'full value' for his options. He could probably tank the price by himself just by putting all his stock on the market all at once.
Oh there are ways around that. If it does it all at once, then he's literally sold high BEFORE the resulting crash. But that's a lot of money to move in one swoop, he'd have to line up select buyers who want to run Amazon. So you sell your shares to a company you own, who sells them on the low-down. Do it too fast and yeah, the price will go down. But it's big stock, you can move money and no one will notice.
I kinda feel bad for him. He cannot go anywhere without an armed security escort
No, you're still only thinking like a rich person, not an ultra-rich person. He can afford to go places he doesn't NEED an armed security escort. Like, he can buy out the whole island and/or the entire staff doubles as security and/or he goes where he wants and lets the security firm deal with coverage and covert agents. If you're rich enough, even rich people problems go away.