I'm guessing chairman Pao would be much happier with the Chinese model. They do after all censor all the social media for "positive impact" and "protecting a small subset of users".
Are those really the only two possibilities, totalitarian censorship or horrifying trollscape? With all the ingenuity of Silicon Valley and the rest of mankind, and that's all we can come up with?
I think we can do better; the biggest obstacle to finding a better solution is the belief that one does not exist.
My commute to my job is about 30 minutes each way, and I've been doing it 5 days a week, for almost 20 years now, so that's ~250 hours of commuting time a year, or ~5000 hours of commuting time total.
So that's ~208 24-hour days of my life wasted, right?
Well, the kicker (and I know this is going to sound obnoxious/pretentious, but it's true so I'll post it anyway) is that I've been commuting by bike, and enjoying all of that commuting time as exercise and a recreational activity. I wouldn't count it as wasted at all.
If your situation allows you to commute by bike, I highly recommend it -- it transforms a tedious daily chore into something you can look forward to both before and after work. It also cuts down on the time you need to spend at the gym, since part of your exercise quota you now get "for free" as part of your commute.
My work laptop is dog slow with a clean load of Windows. Maybe do something about that first please?
Seems to me the company who should be doing something about that is Microsoft. Unless this year's Intel CPUs are actually slower than last year's Intel CPUs (which I doubt), any new slowdowns must be due to changes in the software, not changes in the hardware.
I would encourage Musk to delete his Twitter account. Or at least arrange it so that anything he posts to it doesn't go live for 24 hours, and ideally not until it has been vetted by an attorney.
Yes, companies have at times engaged in "planned obsolescence". In a monopoly scenario (or an oligopoly where all manufacturers are colluding with each other), that can be a nefarious way to increase profits at the expense of consumers and the environment, because in those scenarios consumers have little choice but to buy a bad product more often.
The problem with your analysis is, the LED industry is nothing like a monopoly or a colluding oligopoly. There are hundreds of LED manufacturers competing for the consumer's dollar, and plenty of information online for consumers to read up on regarding which LED manufacturers put out a quality, long-lasting product and which ones do not.
In this scenario, manufacturers that intentionally sabotage their own product will not be able to compete against manufacturers who do not sabotage their own product, and will either go out of business or will be relegated to the very low-end, extremely-price-conscious, lowest-margin parts of the market.
If your ideas about how the manufacturing works were true, consumers would not have access to any high-quality products, since there would never be any economic incentive for any manufacturer to increase product quality -- and yet a quick look around you will demonstrate this is not the case. Compare the quality of automobiles today, versus automobiles in the 1970's. Or computers today versus computers in the 1990's. Or Internet service today versus 10 years ago. It all continually gets better and/or cheaper as technology permits, to the extent that free competition exists between manufacturers that forces them to maximize their quality/cost ratio if they want consumers to buy their own product rather than a competitor's product.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Russian trolls suddenly cried out in terror and were silenced. I fear something constructive has happened.
Not because incandescent bulbs are being phased out but because it does not solve any problems. [...] Sure power will be lower
So, which is it? Or does reducing power usage not count as solving a problem?
Just like incandescent bulbs have always been manufactured to be intentionally limited so will LED lights. Waste will not be cut by any meaningful measurement.
That's exactly what I said when they started selling automobiles -- the change would never help with the nation's horseshit-in-the-streets problem, because auto manufacturers would deliberately add horseshit to their cars so that they could sell more of them. Perfectly logical, no?
Come to think of it, I think I know where all the horseshit has actually gone to -- it's now being used to power incoherent Slashdot posts.
Anyone know how (or if) this malware makes it past the Gatekeeper? (i.e. does it have a valid package and application signature, or does it rely on the user to opt-out of Gatekeeper's validity check, or does it have some other trick it uses?)
You should care, beause it's now been established beyond any reasonable doubt that the President is a crook.
Now that it's established that the President is a crook, America must decide whether it is to remain a country that is governed by the rule of law, or whether it is going to look the other way on Trump's criminality and become another corrupt pseudo-democracy like Russia or Saudi Arabia. Because it's one or the other, we can't have it both ways.
Even a strong passcode isn't much use against a search warrant unless you're willing to go to jail indefinitely to maybe prevent the feds from unlocking your phone.
No doubt -- and what do you do if you set up a very strong passcode, and later forgot what it was? Rot in jail for the rest of your life, because you can't convince the police that you genuinely forgot it and aren't just trying to stonewall them?
An algorithm would be an explicit sequence of steps for a computer to perform, typically designed and written for it by a human programmer.
This system, on the other hand, was never handed a program to run to figure out how to best keep energy costs down -- instead it was given example data and a learning algorithm, and applied the latter to the former to generate a useful neural network.
But the neural network itself is not an algorithm, except in an uninteresting academic sense, because it was not explicitly designed by a human being, and (if successful) it will outperform any known human-designed algorithm by a substantial margin. And that, regardless of what terminology you want to use to describe it, is what is novel and newsworthy about the project.
It's easy to imagine that not even the NIST knows every service and device that could be impacted by this decision.
It's easy to imagine that we'll find out in very short order what was impacted, when they turn off the service; and that the resulting lawsuits will end up costing them well over the amount they hoped to save.
No, I think he's extremely smart -- which is why it's so odd that he would do something so needlessly self-destructive and dumb as sending that tweet.
It's obvious from reading this week's headlines what he stands to lose by doing so; but what (if anything) did he think he stood to gain? A temporary rise in Tesla share prices? (hopefully that wasn't what he was after, because that would be the textbook definition of stock manipulation) The satisfaction of "owning the shorts" and winning a Twitter fight?
To me it looks like Musk's finger hit the "send" button before his brain finished working out the consequences of doing so. IMO if Twitter would implement a 15-minute cooling off period on all tweets, the world would be a better place.
... and if Nvidia is better in 10 years, Tesla will have the option of buying Nvidia hardware at that time. Developing in-house hardware no doesn't mean they can only use in-house hardware for the rest of time.
The dream of something for nothing is not sustainable.
The above is a truism, and has always been true, for the entirety of human existence, which is why so many people take it for granted.
That doesn't mean it will continue to be true in the future.
The simple inescapable point here is that the goods and services that people want to obtain in exchange for money must be produced by someone. And if you're not producing stuff... then where is it coming from? Someone else? Magical fairy land?
Correction: Someone or some thing.
The simple answer: it will be coming from the vast army of cheap and effective robots that can now convert energy plus input materials into (whatever they are ordered to make or do) at the push of a button. Once the automation is in place and working, very few people are actually necessary (or even desirable) for the work to be done, as the system essentially runs itself.
(and to answer the inevitable questions about who will repair and maintain all of those robots -- initially people, but in the long run, there will be repair robots that do that)
So that's going to happen. The only question is what does society do with the vast material profit generated by the automation of all human activity? In the existing system, the owners of the robots keep most of it, and we end up with a world full of unemployable paupers, plus a few dozen trillionaires. Is that a sustainable scenario? History would suggest not. So some other way to organize society's distribution of wealth will need to be devised, because the one we've been using since forever ("trade your skills and labor for cash to make a living") is not going to work when human skills and labor are no longer worth purchasing.
No - everyone can sleep safely, all crime will be a thing of the past
More like, the crime will follow the money. Now instead of getting mugged in an alleyway, you'll have your identity stolen and your bank account drained.
It is the same idea. People get emotionally attached to companies. I don't get it.
It's not so different from the way people get emotionally attached to sports teams. At least with companies there is some chance of monetary rewards if the company does well (or poorly, if you shorted it).
It's neat how you know absolutely everything about the physical properties of this not-yet-invented miracle material.
You totally misunderstood his argument.
To recap: if such a material could be used as a space-elevator tether, then it would necessarily have to have the properties he listed. Otherwise it could not be used as a space-elevator-tether in the first place.
Nowhere did he say that such a material actually exists, or even could exist.
Dude, he was totally being sarcastic, and if you can't see that, you're either brainwashed or part of the problem.
Or he's unable to receive tone-of-voice metadata over plain ASCII text, just like everyone else.
Sarcasm over a text-only medium is notoriously hard to classify reliably, especially when you have to sort out the sarcastic posts from the genuine idiots and the trolls who are genuinely posing as genuine idiots in order to get a rise out of people.
You've got the money part covered but notice the headline includes saving time. This is the real comedy; waiting around for a ride share is supposed to save time somehow?
Dunno how it is where you are, but here in LA I can call up an Uber and have one arrive at my door pretty reliably within 5 minutes.
Or, I can drive my car, and often spend more than 5 minutes trying to find a parking spot.
So yeah; in certain environments, ridesharing is faster than driving.
Yeah, right. Increasing efficiency no longer gets passed on to employee incomes, it just gets captured as profit by the 1%.
I suspect what they meant to say was that once the household no longer had to pay to purchase/insure/maintain/refuel one or more automobiles, that household's net savings would be equivalent to receiving a 5% increase in income.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm guessing chairman Pao would be much happier with the Chinese model. They do after all censor all the social media for "positive impact" and "protecting a small subset of users".
Are those really the only two possibilities, totalitarian censorship or horrifying trollscape? With all the ingenuity of Silicon Valley and the rest of mankind, and that's all we can come up with?
I think we can do better; the biggest obstacle to finding a better solution is the belief that one does not exist.
Dude's job is whatever his boss says it is. He who pays the piper calls the tune, not the entitled and obnoxious freeloaders of the Internet.
My commute to my job is about 30 minutes each way, and I've been doing it 5 days a week, for almost 20 years now, so that's ~250 hours of commuting time a year, or ~5000 hours of commuting time total.
So that's ~208 24-hour days of my life wasted, right?
Well, the kicker (and I know this is going to sound obnoxious/pretentious, but it's true so I'll post it anyway) is that I've been commuting by bike, and enjoying all of that commuting time as exercise and a recreational activity. I wouldn't count it as wasted at all.
If your situation allows you to commute by bike, I highly recommend it -- it transforms a tedious daily chore into something you can look forward to both before and after work. It also cuts down on the time you need to spend at the gym, since part of your exercise quota you now get "for free" as part of your commute.
My work laptop is dog slow with a clean load of Windows. Maybe do something about that first please?
Seems to me the company who should be doing something about that is Microsoft. Unless this year's Intel CPUs are actually slower than last year's Intel CPUs (which I doubt), any new slowdowns must be due to changes in the software, not changes in the hardware.
I would encourage Musk to delete his Twitter account. Or at least arrange it so that anything he posts to it doesn't go live for 24 hours, and ideally not until it has been vetted by an attorney.
You mistake cynicism for wisdom.
Yes, companies have at times engaged in "planned obsolescence". In a monopoly scenario (or an oligopoly where all manufacturers are colluding with each other), that can be a nefarious way to increase profits at the expense of consumers and the environment, because in those scenarios consumers have little choice but to buy a bad product more often.
The problem with your analysis is, the LED industry is nothing like a monopoly or a colluding oligopoly. There are hundreds of LED manufacturers competing for the consumer's dollar, and plenty of information online for consumers to read up on regarding which LED manufacturers put out a quality, long-lasting product and which ones do not.
In this scenario, manufacturers that intentionally sabotage their own product will not be able to compete against manufacturers who do not sabotage their own product, and will either go out of business or will be relegated to the very low-end, extremely-price-conscious, lowest-margin parts of the market.
If your ideas about how the manufacturing works were true, consumers would not have access to any high-quality products, since there would never be any economic incentive for any manufacturer to increase product quality -- and yet a quick look around you will demonstrate this is not the case. Compare the quality of automobiles today, versus automobiles in the 1970's. Or computers today versus computers in the 1990's. Or Internet service today versus 10 years ago. It all continually gets better and/or cheaper as technology permits, to the extent that free competition exists between manufacturers that forces them to maximize their quality/cost ratio if they want consumers to buy their own product rather than a competitor's product.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Russian trolls suddenly cried out in terror and were silenced. I fear something constructive has happened.
-- Obi-Wan Trump
Not because incandescent bulbs are being phased out but because it does not solve any problems. [...] Sure power will be lower
So, which is it? Or does reducing power usage not count as solving a problem?
Just like incandescent bulbs have always been manufactured to be intentionally limited so will LED lights. Waste will not be cut by any meaningful measurement.
That's exactly what I said when they started selling automobiles -- the change would never help with the nation's horseshit-in-the-streets problem, because auto manufacturers would deliberately add horseshit to their cars so that they could sell more of them. Perfectly logical, no?
Come to think of it, I think I know where all the horseshit has actually gone to -- it's now being used to power incoherent Slashdot posts.
Anyone know how (or if) this malware makes it past the Gatekeeper? (i.e. does it have a valid package and application signature, or does it rely on the user to opt-out of Gatekeeper's validity check, or does it have some other trick it uses?)
You should care, beause it's now been established beyond any reasonable doubt that the President is a crook.
Now that it's established that the President is a crook, America must decide whether it is to remain a country that is governed by the rule of law, or whether it is going to look the other way on Trump's criminality and become another corrupt pseudo-democracy like Russia or Saudi Arabia. Because it's one or the other, we can't have it both ways.
Even a strong passcode isn't much use against a search warrant unless you're willing to go to jail indefinitely to maybe prevent the feds from unlocking your phone.
No doubt -- and what do you do if you set up a very strong passcode, and later forgot what it was? Rot in jail for the rest of your life, because you can't convince the police that you genuinely forgot it and aren't just trying to stonewall them?
An algorithm would be an explicit sequence of steps for a computer to perform, typically designed and written for it by a human programmer.
This system, on the other hand, was never handed a program to run to figure out how to best keep energy costs down -- instead it was given example data and a learning algorithm, and applied the latter to the former to generate a useful neural network.
But the neural network itself is not an algorithm, except in an uninteresting academic sense, because it was not explicitly designed by a human being, and (if successful) it will outperform any known human-designed algorithm by a substantial margin. And that, regardless of what terminology you want to use to describe it, is what is novel and newsworthy about the project.
It's easy to imagine that not even the NIST knows every service and device that could be impacted by this decision.
It's easy to imagine that we'll find out in very short order what was impacted, when they turn off the service; and that the resulting lawsuits will end up costing them well over the amount they hoped to save.
Ready, fire, aim!
Do you think he is that stupid?
No, I think he's extremely smart -- which is why it's so odd that he would do something so needlessly self-destructive and dumb as sending that tweet.
It's obvious from reading this week's headlines what he stands to lose by doing so; but what (if anything) did he think he stood to gain? A temporary rise in Tesla share prices? (hopefully that wasn't what he was after, because that would be the textbook definition of stock manipulation) The satisfaction of "owning the shorts" and winning a Twitter fight?
To me it looks like Musk's finger hit the "send" button before his brain finished working out the consequences of doing so. IMO if Twitter would implement a 15-minute cooling off period on all tweets, the world would be a better place.
... and if Nvidia is better in 10 years, Tesla will have the option of buying Nvidia hardware at that time. Developing in-house hardware no doesn't mean they can only use in-house hardware for the rest of time.
The dream of something for nothing is not sustainable.
The above is a truism, and has always been true, for the entirety of human existence, which is why so many people take it for granted.
That doesn't mean it will continue to be true in the future.
The simple inescapable point here is that the goods and services that people want to obtain in exchange for money must be produced by someone. And if you're not producing stuff... then where is it coming from? Someone else? Magical fairy land?
Correction: Someone or some thing.
The simple answer: it will be coming from the vast army of cheap and effective robots that can now convert energy plus input materials into (whatever they are ordered to make or do) at the push of a button. Once the automation is in place and working, very few people are actually necessary (or even desirable) for the work to be done, as the system essentially runs itself.
(and to answer the inevitable questions about who will repair and maintain all of those robots -- initially people, but in the long run, there will be repair robots that do that)
So that's going to happen. The only question is what does society do with the vast material profit generated by the automation of all human activity? In the existing system, the owners of the robots keep most of it, and we end up with a world full of unemployable paupers, plus a few dozen trillionaires. Is that a sustainable scenario? History would suggest not. So some other way to organize society's distribution of wealth will need to be devised, because the one we've been using since forever ("trade your skills and labor for cash to make a living") is not going to work when human skills and labor are no longer worth purchasing.
No - everyone can sleep safely, all crime will be a thing of the past
More like, the crime will follow the money. Now instead of getting mugged in an alleyway, you'll have your identity stolen and your bank account drained.
I think that's an improvement?
But wouldn't it be more reliable to design a fairing that floats and can tolerate a few minutes/hours of contact with seawater?
Then instead of having to catch it in the air, the boat could just go to where it touched down and collect it.
It is the same idea. People get emotionally attached to companies. I don't get it.
It's not so different from the way people get emotionally attached to sports teams. At least with companies there is some chance of monetary rewards if the company does well (or poorly, if you shorted it).
It's neat how you know absolutely everything about the physical properties of this not-yet-invented miracle material.
You totally misunderstood his argument.
To recap: if such a material could be used as a space-elevator tether, then it would necessarily have to have the properties he listed. Otherwise it could not be used as a space-elevator-tether in the first place.
Nowhere did he say that such a material actually exists, or even could exist.
... too many cockroach-robots stuck inside the engine
Dude, he was totally being sarcastic, and if you can't see that, you're either brainwashed or part of the problem.
Or he's unable to receive tone-of-voice metadata over plain ASCII text, just like everyone else.
Sarcasm over a text-only medium is notoriously hard to classify reliably, especially when you have to sort out the sarcastic posts from the genuine idiots and the trolls who are genuinely posing as genuine idiots in order to get a rise out of people.
Hence Poe's Law.
In the real world (cities that aren't on either coast), it's the opposite.
39% of Americans live in coastal cities. It's unclear why their world should be considered any less "real" than the world you're referring to.
You've got the money part covered but notice the headline includes saving time. This is the real comedy; waiting around for a ride share is supposed to save time somehow?
Dunno how it is where you are, but here in LA I can call up an Uber and have one arrive at my door pretty reliably within 5 minutes.
Or, I can drive my car, and often spend more than 5 minutes trying to find a parking spot.
So yeah; in certain environments, ridesharing is faster than driving.
Yeah, right. Increasing efficiency no longer gets passed on to employee incomes, it just gets captured as profit by the 1%.
I suspect what they meant to say was that once the household no longer had to pay to purchase/insure/maintain/refuel one or more automobiles, that household's net savings would be equivalent to receiving a 5% increase in income.