The person who wrote it was trying to avoid using floating point by multiplying everything by 65536
That's what fixed-point is... it happens to be the case multiplication by some 65536 is equivalent to everything being shifted left by 16 bits, and is how the bit pattern similarity between the integer 65536 and a a representation of 1.0 with 16 bits of precision is relevant. Obviously, the optimization is only practical on systems that do not have efficient floating point.
In the early 1990's, I remember working on C code containing a similar concept, although we hid the details of it behind macros and typedefs so that the code was more clear, eg: fixed_t one = FIXED_POINT(1.0). To the best of my knowledge, this kind of thing is not typically done in the industry anymore, except perhaps in embedded programming where no FPU is available, but I wonder if it's only because I had worked on similar code in the past before that I recognized so quickly what they were likely trying to do.
While at first glance, this appears absurd, the bit pattern that corresponds to 65536 is actually the same bit pattern as that needed for the value 1.0, when using fixed point precision with 16 bits to the right of the binary point.
I do not know for sure if that's really what is going on with that line of code... I am unfamiliar with that codebase, and this is just my first impression, but taken by itself, it's actually not really that crazy a thing to see. In C++, one would probably hide that behind a typedef for an int so that it was more obvious that it wasn't just an integer.
It may have also helped somewhat if that is the purpose behind this, for the number to have been expressed in some other base than decimal, so that it was clear that it is the bit pattern and not the value that is significant, and doing that might help prevent the initial absurd sense one might get from seeing a line of code like that.
And again, you resort to referring to his past scientific accomplishments to give credibility to his current claim, or to my own lack of such scientific achievements in an attempt to discredit the veracity of what I am saying.
How can you not see that you are simply appealing to authority?
As I said... the incredible claim is a "simpler, cheaper, and efficient solar collector". This breaks the general rule where you can have fast (simple), cheap, and good but can only pick any two. Getting all three in one package is certainly not physically impossible, but it sure as hell is extraordinary, and on that basis alone is worthy of at least some skepticism.
Maybe he's on to something, but it's not unreasonable to be cautious of simply assuming veracity when it has been pointed out above why there may be legitimate reasons to not simply take this kind of claim on faith, regardless of the man's prior accomplishments.
Of course you are welcome to take the man's claims on faith if you so desire.... some of us prefer to not jump to such conclusions at this point.
If it were simply a better magnifying glass, he would not be claiming to have applied for a patent, but a better magnifying glass is not what is extraordinary, what is extraordinary is a cheaper, simpler, and efficient method of harnessing solar energy.
If you lack the ability to be skeptical of this claim simply by virtue of the fact that he happens to be a Nobel Prize winner, you are simply appealing to authority for your reasoning.
Authority is not always wrong, but it is a very far cry from what scientific integrity demands, which is skepticism.
What makes you think you'd know how to tell who had such tech?
And what makes you think that somebody who happens to be using it is remotely interested in you in the first place? They aren't using it to record *you*, they are using it to record their own experiences, presumably to later catalogue them and store the more interesting events that might have happened, especially those that they don't realize they might have a need to recall with some accuracy until after the event has already occurred.
Yeah, it might get uploaded to a cloud somewhere, but so what? What are you so afraid of somebody seeing (when they aren't even interested in you in the first place, I might add) that you'd be willing to debase yourself to commit gross violence for some sort of perceived violation of your rights that is actually all in your own head?
What's your take on when the technology exists to directly interface to the human brain and just record anything that a person sees or hears?
Would you suggest that a person who is hooked up to such a whole-life recorder should also be treated as somebody who wants to invade on everybody's privacy?
Being able to replace solar panels with something that is both cleaner and simpler is an extraordinary achievement, but extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
Scientific integrity demands skepticism, and using the fact that he has won a Nobel Prize already to give the claim any further merit than it would be due if it came from someone who was unknown is nothing more than an appeal to authority.
A good patent challenge starts at around 500k and can easily climb past tens of millions USD in fees you keep needing to pay up front.
Why would he have to pay up front? If he would be in the right, a lawyer would probably jump at the chance to be paid on commission, as long as the payoff was big enough.
If a big company makes millions trying to use his patent pending system, once the patent comes in, he can sue them for all of that. Yeah, probably nearly half would have to go to his lawyers but he'd still be ahead of the game in the end.
Plus, that big company would have done all of the hard work of getting his product out there and recognized for him, so he wouldn't have to be starting from scratch once he got the patent approved.
He is working out of his basement, a simple picture, could mean a large corporation can get the idea and mass produce them without completed paperwork.
Perhaps, but could he not then turn around and sue them (that is, not simply try and sue, but have a just case to *win* such a suit) once the patent was actually granted?
Where did you see that they wanted to move it elsewhere in space?
It's for a lunar base.
That said, even if they did move it elsewhere, the rate at which we could ever possibly mine it is so insignificant compared to the mass of the moon that the sun would have long since burned out before we could have possibly moved enough of its mass elsewhere to create any kind of perceptible orbit difference.
300 year problem? Try far more than even a trillion years.
I'm not sure that "shortsighted" is the term you are looking for.
In all honesty, I don't even mind the unskippable ones in theory because they are usually very short (or at least can be skipped after a few seconds).
What I truly hate is when they are inserted into the middle of a stream where someone is right in the middle of speaking or what have you. While such breaks are, thankfully, very short, they still completely interrupt the flow of whatever one was watching, to such an extent that I sometimes have to skip back a few seconds right after the commercial and rewatch that part of the video (which doesn't replay the commercial, thankfully).
To be honest, I believe that if Youtube really wants to insist on ads like this being in a video, they should ask the uploader to ensure that there are scene cuts or otherwise suitable places in the video to insert commercials, and youtube can ask where the timing of such spots are when the video is uploaded. If an uploader cannot provide satisfactory locations for commercials to youtube, then the entire video should be blocked from being able to be watched for free until the uploader has modified it to be amenable to this process. Of course, the uploader should be advised that this is the case, as well.
Yes, I'm quite aware of how user-hostile this solution is... that is a design feature, not a bug... because IMV, it is still less hostile than inserting commercials right smack dab in the middle of people saying a sentence.... almost EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME.
I employ the reasoning that drugs are bad because they do harm to yourself, at least... and whether or not someone else might be harmed by this is irrelevant.
But I can see we will have to agree to disagree...
Or not, if you are still going to pedantically reply and try to say that I'm just making more shit up, but whatever.
It's significant if one considers the DOJ credible... you don't, apparently, but that's probably a minority opinion.
And we were, after all, talking about something that is damaging to society as a whole, so whether something is a minority opinion is actually probably pretty relevant.
Many argue that if no tangible harm arises from a deception or other unethical act, it cannot be "wrong:" "No harm, no foul." This is truly an insidious fallacy, because it can lead an individual to disregard the unethical nature of an action, and look only to the results of the action. Before too long, one has embraced "the ends justify the means" as an ethical system, otherwise known as "the terrorism standard."
My point is only that according to the DOJ, drug abuse isn't victimless, and that even if nobody else did get harmed (it is baffling to me why you would think that is the case, but you're entitled to your opinion), the other point remains using that the standard of whether or not it hurts anyone else as the sole basis for whether something ought to be permitted can potentially lead one down a very dark and dangerous path.
I didn' t pull that number from my backside, which you would realize if you bothered to read the references I cited, in particular that one was from a website for the US department of Justice.
But of course, *I* must be the one just making all of this shit up... nope, there's no chance at all that drug abuse can possibly harm anyone but the abuser.
Since anything that somebody doesn't like can be removed from visibility, if for some reason it is found to be politically incorrect or offensive to somebody.
If history can be revised by a court whose decision is based entirely on moral values at the time and not upon what *actually* occured, there is absolutely no point to teaching it to anyone.
And who gets to decide what is "history worthy" and what is not?
Let future generations decide what is important for them to remember and what is not... we have an obligation to that generation, however, to record what has *ACTUALLY* happened, and to preserve that information for them, not just what happens to feel good or fair at the time.
"Right to be forgotten" is just revisionist history with a PC agenda.
Perhaps.... my point is only that the suggestion that it does not harm anyone else is not entirely accurate. Even people who do not engage in what you apparently term sociopathic behavior as a result can still induce a drain on a social medical system through sickness, general poor health, and perhaps ultimately an ill-timed death. And this does not even consider how such abuse impacts the lives of people who may be close to the person.
Whether or not drugs should or should not be legal is entirely orthogonal to this. The idea that people who do such harm to themselves through drug abuse are not really harming others is at best an illusion.
I wasn't suggesting otherwise.... I was specifically addressing the allegation only that it is the biological aspect of being a man or woman that somehow influences a person's tendency towards choosing a technical career. This is an entirely unproven concept.... I do not allege that there is no validity to the claimed correlation between gender and occupation, but there are numerous sociological factors at play which are going to be far more of a consequence of living in a particular society as a particular gender than what chromosomes a person happens to be born with... to such an extent, in fact, that any apparent observed biological influence in that regard ultimately falls well below the levels of statistical significance, and is more likely attributable to apophenia.
People using algorithms and bad statistics in idiotic ways is also not ai.
Obviously, since people are not (generally speaking) artificial, the "A" part of A.I.
However, if a person who is using statistics happens to make a decision that is wrong, even if a person is using a specific and detailed process by which to arrive at the decision, that does not mean that the decision was made without any application of intelligence. And therefore the process by which that decision is made is offloaded to some artificial entity, then by definition it would be an application of AI.
There is nothing mystical or enigmatic about AI.... AI is just intelligence that happens to be artificial, as opposed to natural. It is nothing more, and nothing less.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what fixed-point is... it happens to be the case multiplication by some 65536 is equivalent to everything being shifted left by 16 bits, and is how the bit pattern similarity between the integer 65536 and a a representation of 1.0 with 16 bits of precision is relevant. Obviously, the optimization is only practical on systems that do not have efficient floating point.
In the early 1990's, I remember working on C code containing a similar concept, although we hid the details of it behind macros and typedefs so that the code was more clear, eg: fixed_t one = FIXED_POINT(1.0). To the best of my knowledge, this kind of thing is not typically done in the industry anymore, except perhaps in embedded programming where no FPU is available, but I wonder if it's only because I had worked on similar code in the past before that I recognized so quickly what they were likely trying to do.
While at first glance, this appears absurd, the bit pattern that corresponds to 65536 is actually the same bit pattern as that needed for the value 1.0, when using fixed point precision with 16 bits to the right of the binary point.
I do not know for sure if that's really what is going on with that line of code... I am unfamiliar with that codebase, and this is just my first impression, but taken by itself, it's actually not really that crazy a thing to see. In C++, one would probably hide that behind a typedef for an int so that it was more obvious that it wasn't just an integer.
It may have also helped somewhat if that is the purpose behind this, for the number to have been expressed in some other base than decimal, so that it was clear that it is the bit pattern and not the value that is significant, and doing that might help prevent the initial absurd sense one might get from seeing a line of code like that.
And again, you resort to referring to his past scientific accomplishments to give credibility to his current claim, or to my own lack of such scientific achievements in an attempt to discredit the veracity of what I am saying.
How can you not see that you are simply appealing to authority?
As I said... the incredible claim is a "simpler, cheaper, and efficient solar collector". This breaks the general rule where you can have fast (simple), cheap, and good but can only pick any two. Getting all three in one package is certainly not physically impossible, but it sure as hell is extraordinary, and on that basis alone is worthy of at least some skepticism.
Maybe he's on to something, but it's not unreasonable to be cautious of simply assuming veracity when it has been pointed out above why there may be legitimate reasons to not simply take this kind of claim on faith, regardless of the man's prior accomplishments.
Of course you are welcome to take the man's claims on faith if you so desire.... some of us prefer to not jump to such conclusions at this point.
If it were simply a better magnifying glass, he would not be claiming to have applied for a patent, but a better magnifying glass is not what is extraordinary, what is extraordinary is a cheaper, simpler, and efficient method of harnessing solar energy.
If you lack the ability to be skeptical of this claim simply by virtue of the fact that he happens to be a Nobel Prize winner, you are simply appealing to authority for your reasoning.
Authority is not always wrong, but it is a very far cry from what scientific integrity demands, which is skepticism.
What makes you think you'd know how to tell who had such tech?
And what makes you think that somebody who happens to be using it is remotely interested in you in the first place? They aren't using it to record *you*, they are using it to record their own experiences, presumably to later catalogue them and store the more interesting events that might have happened, especially those that they don't realize they might have a need to recall with some accuracy until after the event has already occurred.
Yeah, it might get uploaded to a cloud somewhere, but so what? What are you so afraid of somebody seeing (when they aren't even interested in you in the first place, I might add) that you'd be willing to debase yourself to commit gross violence for some sort of perceived violation of your rights that is actually all in your own head?
What's your take on when the technology exists to directly interface to the human brain and just record anything that a person sees or hears?
Would you suggest that a person who is hooked up to such a whole-life recorder should also be treated as somebody who wants to invade on everybody's privacy?
Being able to replace solar panels with something that is both cleaner and simpler is an extraordinary achievement, but extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
Scientific integrity demands skepticism, and using the fact that he has won a Nobel Prize already to give the claim any further merit than it would be due if it came from someone who was unknown is nothing more than an appeal to authority.
Why would he have to pay up front? If he would be in the right, a lawyer would probably jump at the chance to be paid on commission, as long as the payoff was big enough.
If a big company makes millions trying to use his patent pending system, once the patent comes in, he can sue them for all of that. Yeah, probably nearly half would have to go to his lawyers but he'd still be ahead of the game in the end.
Plus, that big company would have done all of the hard work of getting his product out there and recognized for him, so he wouldn't have to be starting from scratch once he got the patent approved.
Perhaps, but could he not then turn around and sue them (that is, not simply try and sue, but have a just case to *win* such a suit) once the patent was actually granted?
Just goes to show how far ahead of its time that movie was.
Ah, 1985 - good times.
I think the character's name was "Bodie", by the way....
Had China's social credit system even been publicly announced yet when that episode was being made?
On first seeing this headline, my brain immediately jumped to recollecting "Majority Rule", episode 7 of season 1 of the Orville.
Where did you see that they wanted to move it elsewhere in space?
It's for a lunar base.
That said, even if they did move it elsewhere, the rate at which we could ever possibly mine it is so insignificant compared to the mass of the moon that the sun would have long since burned out before we could have possibly moved enough of its mass elsewhere to create any kind of perceptible orbit difference.
300 year problem? Try far more than even a trillion years.
I'm not sure that "shortsighted" is the term you are looking for.
In all honesty, I don't even mind the unskippable ones in theory because they are usually very short (or at least can be skipped after a few seconds).
What I truly hate is when they are inserted into the middle of a stream where someone is right in the middle of speaking or what have you. While such breaks are, thankfully, very short, they still completely interrupt the flow of whatever one was watching, to such an extent that I sometimes have to skip back a few seconds right after the commercial and rewatch that part of the video (which doesn't replay the commercial, thankfully).
To be honest, I believe that if Youtube really wants to insist on ads like this being in a video, they should ask the uploader to ensure that there are scene cuts or otherwise suitable places in the video to insert commercials, and youtube can ask where the timing of such spots are when the video is uploaded. If an uploader cannot provide satisfactory locations for commercials to youtube, then the entire video should be blocked from being able to be watched for free until the uploader has modified it to be amenable to this process. Of course, the uploader should be advised that this is the case, as well.
Yes, I'm quite aware of how user-hostile this solution is... that is a design feature, not a bug... because IMV, it is still less hostile than inserting commercials right smack dab in the middle of people saying a sentence.... almost EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME.
I employ the reasoning that drugs are bad because they do harm to yourself, at least... and whether or not someone else might be harmed by this is irrelevant.
But I can see we will have to agree to disagree...
Or not, if you are still going to pedantically reply and try to say that I'm just making more shit up, but whatever.
It's significant if one considers the DOJ credible... you don't, apparently, but that's probably a minority opinion.
And we were, after all, talking about something that is damaging to society as a whole, so whether something is a minority opinion is actually probably pretty relevant.
But even if you doubt the DOJ's report, the ethical misconception remains:
My point is only that according to the DOJ, drug abuse isn't victimless, and that even if nobody else did get harmed (it is baffling to me why you would think that is the case, but you're entitled to your opinion), the other point remains using that the standard of whether or not it hurts anyone else as the sole basis for whether something ought to be permitted can potentially lead one down a very dark and dangerous path.
It was in 2002. Says so right on the citation.
I didn' t pull that number from my backside, which you would realize if you bothered to read the references I cited, in particular that one was from a website for the US department of Justice.
But of course, *I* must be the one just making all of this shit up... nope, there's no chance at all that drug abuse can possibly harm anyone but the abuser.
Since anything that somebody doesn't like can be removed from visibility, if for some reason it is found to be politically incorrect or offensive to somebody.
If history can be revised by a court whose decision is based entirely on moral values at the time and not upon what *actually* occured, there is absolutely no point to teaching it to anyone.
And who gets to decide what is "history worthy" and what is not?
Let future generations decide what is important for them to remember and what is not... we have an obligation to that generation, however, to record what has *ACTUALLY* happened, and to preserve that information for them, not just what happens to feel good or fair at the time.
"Right to be forgotten" is just revisionist history with a PC agenda.
Objective references and citations aren't really handwaving...
But hey, if you think $200B is handwaving, well, I guess you don't have very many real problems in life, do you?
If you want to petition to outlaw lawnmowing because of how it harms innocent bystanders, I'm not going to stand in your way.
Of course, you may have to provide a few more facts and figures than strictly anecdotal evidence of a one-time occurrence to support your position.
Whether or not drugs should or should not be legal is entirely orthogonal to this. The idea that people who do such harm to themselves through drug abuse are not really harming others is at best an illusion.
Except drugs are not an entirely victimless crime.
Also, see Rationalization #8, The Trivial Trap (scroll about 10% of the way down, regretfully that page has no direct links to particular paragraphs).
I wasn't suggesting otherwise.... I was specifically addressing the allegation only that it is the biological aspect of being a man or woman that somehow influences a person's tendency towards choosing a technical career. This is an entirely unproven concept.... I do not allege that there is no validity to the claimed correlation between gender and occupation, but there are numerous sociological factors at play which are going to be far more of a consequence of living in a particular society as a particular gender than what chromosomes a person happens to be born with... to such an extent, in fact, that any apparent observed biological influence in that regard ultimately falls well below the levels of statistical significance, and is more likely attributable to apophenia.
Obviously, since people are not (generally speaking) artificial, the "A" part of A.I.
However, if a person who is using statistics happens to make a decision that is wrong, even if a person is using a specific and detailed process by which to arrive at the decision, that does not mean that the decision was made without any application of intelligence. And therefore the process by which that decision is made is offloaded to some artificial entity, then by definition it would be an application of AI.
There is nothing mystical or enigmatic about AI.... AI is just intelligence that happens to be artificial, as opposed to natural. It is nothing more, and nothing less.