You can have strong AI in ~20W, because that's what our brain uses. Each neuron is really, really slow like 100Hz and below, but when you have absurdly many it works. The problem is understanding the programming model, because it's nothing like our one list of instructions.
Yes, but... what users are complaining about isn't really how "fair" it is from a CS perspective. What they really want to know is how they can say my video streaming is a lot more important than my bittorrent client and if there's CPU contention or IO contention or network contention just let the video take priority. Because usually somebody with a server has optimized the IO quite well for the use case with 100 streams and they're all equally important. That's usually not the case on the client, some things matter much, much more than others.
It all depends on how far you are from the nearest central, 3-5 km out on basic ADSL is pretty crap. If you live close to the exchange or they've pulled fiber "close" and you get ADSL2 or VDSL you can get decent 10-50 Mbit. No doubt the growth is fiber though, here in Norway it's now 28% (+6%) fiber, 22% (-5%) DSL since last year.
The only problem is that insurance is based on risk pools. This means that as people switch to self driving cars the risk pool for cars that people drive shrinks and by definition they are the most unsafe drivers compared to the autodrive cars. This will mean insurance will go up and move people will stop driving their cars for money reasons and the insurance will keep going up.
No, insurance goes up as risk goes up. Unless driving a car becomes much riskier due to the interaction with self-driving cars or there's a selection bias where the above average safe drivers switch to self-driving and the below average stay the cost should remain constant. There would be a cheaper alternative and many people would surely prefer it but it's not like a wooden house in the countryside becomes more or less flammable because they build concrete condos in the city. Personally I suspect it would be the opposite, the people who know they probably ought not be driving but need a practical way to get from A to B go self-driving and the people who drive are those who want to, when they want to. And you're driving in a world where most cars actually follow the rules and behave nicely, I believe accident rates will go down on both sides. Whether competition works and the rates come down is another matter.
You guys just can't be satisfied. "This or that feature should be a plugin!" Mozilla removes features and suggests they are better handled by plugins "No! Not that feature!"
There's a huge gap between "You can have the car painted any color you want as long as it's black" and "We've stripped it down to the chassis, pick the parts that are right for you". I always thought extensions were going to cover niche functionality and act as a test bed so you could slowly pull in core shortcomings into the main browser at a leisurely and well structured pace because there's an overhead to extensions when you have many installed and your browser runs like shit because of some bad plug-ins and bad interactions. Depending on what glasses you look at it seems that Mozilla first pushes you to extensions, then blames the extensions, then breaks the extension. The user don't care why it's broken or whose fault it is, they just want it to work. And if you have to turn Firefox into Chrome to do that, well we already have Chrome. And it's a lot better at it...
Google's core business is delivering targeted advertising and marketing data, give it away "free" then monetize the hell out of it. They're only opposed to malware and deceptive ads because it hurts their much bigger business of ordinary ads. What on earth made you think Google likes ad blockers? They're all cloud and web apps and put your data online so we can analyze it. And praise Jeebus they didn't get anywhere with G+, if they had Facebook's data too you'd almost have them shoulder surfing with you. Apple? It's the iSphere and you're paying for it but as long as they get a cut they're happy. And they got all sorts of stores like iTunes to sell things themselves, don't need to remind people of the world outside the iSphere. Maybe you're thinking about the part where Google uses open source, but that's just on the client side to break monopolies and get users hooked up to Google services. It's a tool and sometimes there's a common enemy but they're not your friend.
I hadn't read or heard much about this guy, but since he seems like he'll be the #3 between Cruz and Trump (who are both so unelectable it hurts)
US politics reminds me of the reality shows where everybody is looking to knock out the dangerous contenders, only to have the joke/outsider option run off with the prize in the final. From what I understand, Sanders is fairly far off the US political center too, at least more than Clinton. But from what I can tell Bush senior is the only one to win a third time from the same party after WWII, after eight years the grass usually looks greener on the other side. So if I was a bookkeeper, I wouldn't count any of them out.
Don't forget how many people would pay a handsome sum to take a vacation on the Moon.
Look, NASA is looking to pay something like $20 million/seat for a ride to the ISS with SpaceX. Not only is it much shorter, from there gravity does pretty much all the work of getting home. An Apollo-style mission would take two Falcon Heavys for $200 million launch cost to carry two people to the surface. Considering that you also need the command module, landing module and all that I think $500 million or $250 million/seat would be extremely optimistic. And I'm already projecting into the future about a low cost rocket that hasn't flown yet. But assuming it does and SpaceX works out reusable rockets and you get economics of scale both in rockets and people I'm thinking you'd still have a hard time getting down to $20 million/seat. And no, the market for that is pretty limited. It's easy to lose perspective when Musk says the fuel is 3% of a Falcon 9 launch it costs $60-70 million so like $200,000. I'm guessing Blue Origin will take the tourist market, you get to (barely) be in space and zero-g for the cool effect, a cramped moon base in a rock desert that you can only experience through a space suit sounds like it could get old real quick. Most billionaires are not Musk, if they're not single you can multiply those prices and if they are they're probably going to a place with more babes.
Nobody knows if gravity will actually be a significant problem for Mars or even the moon. We know it's an issue for micro-gravity (though we've got people living in it over a year anyway), we don't know about 1/3 or 1/6 gravity.
Well, even 1/6th should have the cardiovascular system working much more normally with fluids flowing in the right direction and things hanging like they normally do. And since you got gravity you could add weight vests/bracelets/anklets to add another 80 + 2x20 (wrist and ankles) lbs = 55 kg, if you're normally say 85 kg you're now effectively (85+55)/3 = 47 kg on Mars and you still got 140 kg of momentum to counteract. Maybe more if NASA designs a special suit for you. When we know the enormous differences between couch potatoes and athletes here at home, a good training regiment should keep the body in pretty okay shape unless some of your internal organs take long term damage from sleeping at 1/3rd gravity.
If it's really at the core of your business, then sure you should know. But for everything else I still haven't seen a single case where a business buying non-trivial software really knew whether or not you could fulfill all your business requirements before committing. In many cases it was even recognized that you're just looking for a tool that's good enough and try to make it work for you. Like I know every component in my computer. I can barely remember the brand of my washing machine. Now obviously I need to wash clothes, but an average machine for average needs should be fine. If they're not mainstream that usually means they have some special capabilities I don't need and don't want to pay for or they have particular limitations that make them useful for particular niches. Neither is good for me.
And very often it's not just a tool for today, but also for tomorrow and shifting needs. Like say I figure the games I play on Steam today run under Linux, but tomorrow there's this super cool game I badly want to play but sorry, Windows only. Okay maybe not such a great example but at least in business you build processes around it and really the worst you can end up with is a tool that just won't do the job and require you to migrate away. You end up spending so much money just getting back to where you were, before you start getting a net return on switching. There's a reason COBOL is still around...
And the competent replacement will need to start off by firing thousands of workers. What competent person is going to want the job?
More people than you realize, on the theory that it's not in clear skies and smooth sailing you need a good captain. Some CEOs more or less specialize in this, join a rotten company and find the parts worth keeping, do the harsh cuts then move on to the next rescue/salvage project. If they can get a reputation for turning things around it could pay off very well. They're not going to win any popularity contests but usually they're just the ones announcing the layoffs. It's much worse for the middle managers that have to lay off the individuals. It's the CEOs that took a successful company and put it in a nosedive that I'm surprised finds new work.
Maybe not. >90% of jobs today didn't exist a hundred years ago. I have great faith in humanity finding stupid ways to busy itself for money. Once we figure out how to cleanly make cheap power and robots are taking care of necessities we can all live like kings and do stupid stuff for cash. If things keep progressing faster our culture won't be recognizable in another hundred years. We simply can't imagine what people will be like or do with their time.
Assuming the reduced costs of living caused by automation exceeds the reduced value of your labor. If you work minimum wage and you're being replaced by a $5/hour robot you lose more than you gain. If you can step up and do something else in demand, great. But if there's an oversupply of burger flippers and taxi drivers who just don't have it in them to become doctors and engineers and automated chefs and self-driving cars are eroding the old jobs you might find yourself cut short.
Maybe it's easier to see this in a global perspective, why don't we give a bunch of illiterate subsistence farmers in Africa food so they can write software for us? Because it doesn't work, that's why. They need an education before they're able to add value to our economy. Like that, only they're your neighbors and it's not an education they lack. People who are not particular smart, creative, attractive or charming but perfectly capable of a routine job except those have all been automated away.
I'm sure you've all experienced it in some limited way like the mythical man-month where the person is in total dragging the total performance down and you're better off not having them on the team. Or that there's something wrong with their skills or personality like coders turning good code into junk, intrigue makers ruining the work environment and so on. But those are the exceptions, the theory is that automation can make it the norm. That the automation is constantly getting better and takes more skill to add value on top of.
The counterargument is essentially that the cheaper it gets, the easier it is to redistribute just enough wealth and spread enough technology to not cause riots or a revolution or anything like that. That they'll spread just enough money on work and welfare programs to keep the population passive, not living like kings at all. Just living well enough that it's not worth doing anything desperate that could disrupt Wall Street and the big money but moderately content wage slaves. The chains are a lot plushier than before.
Great for water and energy conservation, and this technology can be moved into places that are difficult to grow produce. But if this really catches on, wonder what this will do to the industry as a whole, and the people put out of work.
Not too much, at least around here only about 2% work in agriculture and they're only in a vague form doing hands-on farm work. Nobody milks a cow or plant seeds by hand or weed the crops anymore, unless it's to sell a specialty product or for tourists and visitors. You have milking machines and feeding machines and huge tractors that you drive around with various tools to plant and spray and harvest. Not to mention what a chicken farm looks like. It's already run as an industry, the product just happens to be alive. Any resemblance to the romantic, simple life is long lost to everyone doing volume production already.
I read the first item ("guard" keyword) a couple of times, and I'm still having trouble figuring out what it does that a simple "if" statement doesn't do. It is just syntactic sugar for the if statement, but used to indicate precondition checks? I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
From what I understand it also unwraps the variable, Swift has int? that can either be an int or nil. If you just use if, you have to force-unwrap it inside the "safe zone" while guard morphs it to a non-nil int type.
The last thing I'd want is for industry to cheapen products further than they already have. All the cheap, fragile plastic in products today seriously shortens lifespan.
Can't really say I agree, most the problems with flimsy plastic crap came from poor assembly, tolerances and quality control. These days I get the impression that it's mostly made by robots inspected by robots, it might still be cheap but usually very consistently so and just solid enough to last for most people. So many things have fallen under the "repair event horizon" where if you have to repair it the expected cost of niche parts/tools/skills and remaining lifetime doesn't add up.
A bike lane is nothing like a 50 ton truck in an emergency stop. Asphalt is extremely simple and can't be damaged in any meaningful way. Texturing and coating wears off, asphalt just wears down and if you're going to provide lots of traction as you must then there will be lots of wear. And you can't just make the wear layer thicker without reducing the optical properties. And if the foundation isn't rock solid these slabs are going to start wobbling and crack up like driving over giant tiles. And you can't rally patch a hole with a bit of cheap asphalt, the whole tile must out and be replaced. Cost is the big killer, it's why we don't use more solar today it's not like we covered everything else in solar panels and roads are our last resort. So they produce 1/3rd less energy, involve a ton of tempered, textured, laminated glass encased in concrete with high maintenance and low robustness. Where can I sign up?
"SpaceX Falcon 9 exploded upon landing on a drone ship" is not quite accurate...
Semantics.... if this was say a passenger plane and it touched down, the landing gear failed to lock and it crashed into the ground and exploded we'd call that "upon landing", even though it was no longer in flight. You've landed when you've come to a complete stop, which the rocket never did. Almost doesn't count when it goes boom.
Having a strong currency is not always entirely in the national good. Sure, it's generally better than a weak currency (which is often a sign of political instability and a lack of international confidence in a country's prospects), but it does cause its own kind of problems. In particular, it can hurt exporters, as it costs overseas customers more to buy their goods.
Obviously a strong currency makes you a high cost country, but a strong currency also indicates you sell products and services that are attractive and can command a high price in the global market. The export industry might complain, but there's usually good reasons for them to stay and right now you don't need them. The danger is more that you drive away key businesses and start chain events which will eventually come to bite you. Like here in Norway we're have been on an oil high with prices of $100/barrel and now it's down to $30, now we want some of those other industries that were driven out by high cost back. Or you outsource development to India and manufacturing to China so there's no entry level jobs and eventually the senior positions disappear abroad too.
It's something of a luxury problem anyway, it's the right time to pull money out of the economy and use it on long term investments in infrastructure, basic research, public education and such that'll pay off in the next 40 years. It's actually quite easy to pour cold water on an overheating economy, the main reason it doesn't happen is political as a strong currency makes people feel richer and they're far more likely to vote for that rather than higher taxes for long term investment for the nation. That it actually leads to huge boom-bust cycles as the downturn comes is best forgotten, at least until the crisis is already here.
The most a computer will ever be is an algorithm with some clever programming. Are you saying that AI is impossible.
It all depends how meta you want to go, I would say that as a minimum an AI should be able to come up with its own algorithms and solution strategy. Like if you hand it a book of chess rules it should be able to work out by itself that an opening book is useful, maybe an end-game database, maybe some brute force search, some positional analysis, monte carlo searches, neural nets, whatever. Not just finding the right parameters/weights or crunching through someone else's algorithm, it has to be able to fundamentally alter the way it plays chess. Just like we don't learn everything from our parents/teachers, sometimes we find new and better ways of doing things of our own creation.
Of course you might say that's an algorithm too, but I have no idea how an algorithm-generating algorithm would look like. Like if you tell it to "make money" it might start looking for work or selling drugs or counterfeiting or to become a chess world champion for the prize money and teach itself chess. And unlike chess it has to deal with unclear rules and incomplete information and perhaps even conflicting goals, since you probably don't want it to become a hit man even though that could be lucrative. I do come up with ideas myself but I'd have a very hard time explaining how or why I came up with them, I don't know what creativity is but an AI needs it. I just hope that doesn't extend to goals too, because Skynet.
What makes this especially interesting, is the victory was not achieved with the sort of brute-force approach used by Deep Blue in chess. This used a deep neural net, and algorithms similar to how we believe that humans think.
Mainly due to the different goals of Chess and Go. In Chess you can have as much material and positional advantage as you want but it's worthless if your opponent can mate, which means you have to calculate the ways that could happen. A blunder and a sacrifice might look the same unless you look deep enough. In Go there is from what I've understood just stones, it's not like cornering one king stone turns the game. It seems their key break-through was being able to evaluate the position and find winning patterns and disclose losing ones without actually playing them out, which you can do because unlike chess there's no way throwing away all your stones can lead to victory.
You do not really want to go back to vendor APIs like twenty years ago. It did not save 3DFX then, it may not save AMD GPU division now. You really need to get Vulkan working, and you need to get GNU/Linux drivers performance and numbers of bugs to a reasonable level.
It would be very different this time, today the shader (pixel, vertex, geometry, tessellation, compute) is the core of almost all GPU processing. Twenty years ago it was all fixed-function hardware, the first programmable shader support was in DirectX 8.0 back in 2000. Basically you had high level calls and the hardware/driver could implement it however they want, so how one card did it would be totally different from the other. Today they have to run the same shader code efficiently, sure there's still some abstraction but more like compiling C to assembler.
The open source drivers have already more or less done this internally with Gallium3D, you have a low level shader API and a common graphics library implementation running on top. The difference is that Vulkan will be a client API and implemented by proprietary drivers and on proprietary platforms, which means you get ~100% availability instead of a fraction of the Linux market. But users can still pick CUDA if it works better for them, the same way many pick Windows-only software over cross-platform alternatives. It won't perform miracles for AMD...
That makes no sense. If I opted in to see ads, I opted in. Whether they come direct from Amazon or via Google is immaterial.
No, the question is if there's a valid chain of agreements between the advertiser and the recipient. If Amazon buys ad space on Facebook and I have agreed through their terms of service to receive ads, the chain is valid. Obviously that right doesn't extend to Facebook users in general, if you sign up a spambot of course it's unsolicited because I agreed to receive ads but not from you. So did you in the friend request get explicit permission to send/forward commercial email to me? If not, then you don't have it at least in Germany. And that means Amazon doesn't have it either, you can't get my permission from my friend.
Or the TL;DR version: Amazon <--- permission ---> Facebook <--- permission ---> you = OK Amazon <--- permission ---> Facebook "friend" <--- no permission ---> you = NOT OK
This is wrong. If you have someone's device, you also have the key. The only thing you'd need is the password (hence the device needing your password at boot). Guess what? Most people have a 4 digit password with a total combination of 10,000. Yes, all your devices could be brute forced in a second.
Stop trolling. Six failed attempts = one minute lockout, seven = five minutes, eight = fifteen minutes and nine = one hour. After ten failed attempts, the system will lock you out completely (default) or erase your data. So there's a 0.1% chance to unlock by chance and you can set up more advanced passwords if that's too much. Otherwise you're stuck unless you can reset the counter or read the embedded key that is fused into the chip, which is physically impossible using the chip itself. Maybe if you get a blueprint from Apple and spend ages under an electron microscope mapping it out you could unlock one phone.
They aren't standing up to anyone. They are saying it isn't possible currently. But if the government really insisted they would put a system in place where it was possible. As a bonus they would take some tax money to implement the system.
Well, they can hardly take the "we're above the law" position, but I very much doubt they will. Because if the US government officially forces them to include a backdoor, then everyone else wants to know if it's in the rest of the world's phones. And Apple would have to either say "yes" and watch world sales drop due to US spying concerns or "no" in which case foreign phones become a hot item. And you can't very well stop tourists and businessmen bringing phones to the US, so it'd leak like a sieve. The secret programs didn't affect sales because people didn't know, but an official backdoor would be the Clipper chip II.
Slashdot Mirror
You can have strong AI in ~20W, because that's what our brain uses. Each neuron is really, really slow like 100Hz and below, but when you have absurdly many it works. The problem is understanding the programming model, because it's nothing like our one list of instructions.
Yes, but... what users are complaining about isn't really how "fair" it is from a CS perspective. What they really want to know is how they can say my video streaming is a lot more important than my bittorrent client and if there's CPU contention or IO contention or network contention just let the video take priority. Because usually somebody with a server has optimized the IO quite well for the use case with 100 streams and they're all equally important. That's usually not the case on the client, some things matter much, much more than others.
It all depends on how far you are from the nearest central, 3-5 km out on basic ADSL is pretty crap. If you live close to the exchange or they've pulled fiber "close" and you get ADSL2 or VDSL you can get decent 10-50 Mbit. No doubt the growth is fiber though, here in Norway it's now 28% (+6%) fiber, 22% (-5%) DSL since last year.
The only problem is that insurance is based on risk pools. This means that as people switch to self driving cars the risk pool for cars that people drive shrinks and by definition they are the most unsafe drivers compared to the autodrive cars. This will mean insurance will go up and move people will stop driving their cars for money reasons and the insurance will keep going up.
No, insurance goes up as risk goes up. Unless driving a car becomes much riskier due to the interaction with self-driving cars or there's a selection bias where the above average safe drivers switch to self-driving and the below average stay the cost should remain constant. There would be a cheaper alternative and many people would surely prefer it but it's not like a wooden house in the countryside becomes more or less flammable because they build concrete condos in the city. Personally I suspect it would be the opposite, the people who know they probably ought not be driving but need a practical way to get from A to B go self-driving and the people who drive are those who want to, when they want to. And you're driving in a world where most cars actually follow the rules and behave nicely, I believe accident rates will go down on both sides. Whether competition works and the rates come down is another matter.
You guys just can't be satisfied. "This or that feature should be a plugin!" Mozilla removes features and suggests they are better handled by plugins "No! Not that feature!"
There's a huge gap between "You can have the car painted any color you want as long as it's black" and "We've stripped it down to the chassis, pick the parts that are right for you". I always thought extensions were going to cover niche functionality and act as a test bed so you could slowly pull in core shortcomings into the main browser at a leisurely and well structured pace because there's an overhead to extensions when you have many installed and your browser runs like shit because of some bad plug-ins and bad interactions. Depending on what glasses you look at it seems that Mozilla first pushes you to extensions, then blames the extensions, then breaks the extension. The user don't care why it's broken or whose fault it is, they just want it to work. And if you have to turn Firefox into Chrome to do that, well we already have Chrome. And it's a lot better at it...
Google's core business is delivering targeted advertising and marketing data, give it away "free" then monetize the hell out of it. They're only opposed to malware and deceptive ads because it hurts their much bigger business of ordinary ads. What on earth made you think Google likes ad blockers? They're all cloud and web apps and put your data online so we can analyze it. And praise Jeebus they didn't get anywhere with G+, if they had Facebook's data too you'd almost have them shoulder surfing with you. Apple? It's the iSphere and you're paying for it but as long as they get a cut they're happy. And they got all sorts of stores like iTunes to sell things themselves, don't need to remind people of the world outside the iSphere. Maybe you're thinking about the part where Google uses open source, but that's just on the client side to break monopolies and get users hooked up to Google services. It's a tool and sometimes there's a common enemy but they're not your friend.
I hadn't read or heard much about this guy, but since he seems like he'll be the #3 between Cruz and Trump (who are both so unelectable it hurts)
US politics reminds me of the reality shows where everybody is looking to knock out the dangerous contenders, only to have the joke/outsider option run off with the prize in the final. From what I understand, Sanders is fairly far off the US political center too, at least more than Clinton. But from what I can tell Bush senior is the only one to win a third time from the same party after WWII, after eight years the grass usually looks greener on the other side. So if I was a bookkeeper, I wouldn't count any of them out.
Don't forget how many people would pay a handsome sum to take a vacation on the Moon.
Look, NASA is looking to pay something like $20 million/seat for a ride to the ISS with SpaceX. Not only is it much shorter, from there gravity does pretty much all the work of getting home. An Apollo-style mission would take two Falcon Heavys for $200 million launch cost to carry two people to the surface. Considering that you also need the command module, landing module and all that I think $500 million or $250 million/seat would be extremely optimistic. And I'm already projecting into the future about a low cost rocket that hasn't flown yet. But assuming it does and SpaceX works out reusable rockets and you get economics of scale both in rockets and people I'm thinking you'd still have a hard time getting down to $20 million/seat. And no, the market for that is pretty limited. It's easy to lose perspective when Musk says the fuel is 3% of a Falcon 9 launch it costs $60-70 million so like $200,000. I'm guessing Blue Origin will take the tourist market, you get to (barely) be in space and zero-g for the cool effect, a cramped moon base in a rock desert that you can only experience through a space suit sounds like it could get old real quick. Most billionaires are not Musk, if they're not single you can multiply those prices and if they are they're probably going to a place with more babes.
Nobody knows if gravity will actually be a significant problem for Mars or even the moon. We know it's an issue for micro-gravity (though we've got people living in it over a year anyway), we don't know about 1/3 or 1/6 gravity.
Well, even 1/6th should have the cardiovascular system working much more normally with fluids flowing in the right direction and things hanging like they normally do. And since you got gravity you could add weight vests/bracelets/anklets to add another 80 + 2x20 (wrist and ankles) lbs = 55 kg, if you're normally say 85 kg you're now effectively (85+55)/3 = 47 kg on Mars and you still got 140 kg of momentum to counteract. Maybe more if NASA designs a special suit for you. When we know the enormous differences between couch potatoes and athletes here at home, a good training regiment should keep the body in pretty okay shape unless some of your internal organs take long term damage from sleeping at 1/3rd gravity.
If it's really at the core of your business, then sure you should know. But for everything else I still haven't seen a single case where a business buying non-trivial software really knew whether or not you could fulfill all your business requirements before committing. In many cases it was even recognized that you're just looking for a tool that's good enough and try to make it work for you. Like I know every component in my computer. I can barely remember the brand of my washing machine. Now obviously I need to wash clothes, but an average machine for average needs should be fine. If they're not mainstream that usually means they have some special capabilities I don't need and don't want to pay for or they have particular limitations that make them useful for particular niches. Neither is good for me.
And very often it's not just a tool for today, but also for tomorrow and shifting needs. Like say I figure the games I play on Steam today run under Linux, but tomorrow there's this super cool game I badly want to play but sorry, Windows only. Okay maybe not such a great example but at least in business you build processes around it and really the worst you can end up with is a tool that just won't do the job and require you to migrate away. You end up spending so much money just getting back to where you were, before you start getting a net return on switching. There's a reason COBOL is still around...
And the competent replacement will need to start off by firing thousands of workers. What competent person is going to want the job?
More people than you realize, on the theory that it's not in clear skies and smooth sailing you need a good captain. Some CEOs more or less specialize in this, join a rotten company and find the parts worth keeping, do the harsh cuts then move on to the next rescue/salvage project. If they can get a reputation for turning things around it could pay off very well. They're not going to win any popularity contests but usually they're just the ones announcing the layoffs. It's much worse for the middle managers that have to lay off the individuals. It's the CEOs that took a successful company and put it in a nosedive that I'm surprised finds new work.
Maybe not. >90% of jobs today didn't exist a hundred years ago. I have great faith in humanity finding stupid ways to busy itself for money. Once we figure out how to cleanly make cheap power and robots are taking care of necessities we can all live like kings and do stupid stuff for cash. If things keep progressing faster our culture won't be recognizable in another hundred years. We simply can't imagine what people will be like or do with their time.
Assuming the reduced costs of living caused by automation exceeds the reduced value of your labor. If you work minimum wage and you're being replaced by a $5/hour robot you lose more than you gain. If you can step up and do something else in demand, great. But if there's an oversupply of burger flippers and taxi drivers who just don't have it in them to become doctors and engineers and automated chefs and self-driving cars are eroding the old jobs you might find yourself cut short.
Maybe it's easier to see this in a global perspective, why don't we give a bunch of illiterate subsistence farmers in Africa food so they can write software for us? Because it doesn't work, that's why. They need an education before they're able to add value to our economy. Like that, only they're your neighbors and it's not an education they lack. People who are not particular smart, creative, attractive or charming but perfectly capable of a routine job except those have all been automated away.
I'm sure you've all experienced it in some limited way like the mythical man-month where the person is in total dragging the total performance down and you're better off not having them on the team. Or that there's something wrong with their skills or personality like coders turning good code into junk, intrigue makers ruining the work environment and so on. But those are the exceptions, the theory is that automation can make it the norm. That the automation is constantly getting better and takes more skill to add value on top of.
The counterargument is essentially that the cheaper it gets, the easier it is to redistribute just enough wealth and spread enough technology to not cause riots or a revolution or anything like that. That they'll spread just enough money on work and welfare programs to keep the population passive, not living like kings at all. Just living well enough that it's not worth doing anything desperate that could disrupt Wall Street and the big money but moderately content wage slaves. The chains are a lot plushier than before.
Great for water and energy conservation, and this technology can be moved into places that are difficult to grow produce. But if this really catches on, wonder what this will do to the industry as a whole, and the people put out of work.
Not too much, at least around here only about 2% work in agriculture and they're only in a vague form doing hands-on farm work. Nobody milks a cow or plant seeds by hand or weed the crops anymore, unless it's to sell a specialty product or for tourists and visitors. You have milking machines and feeding machines and huge tractors that you drive around with various tools to plant and spray and harvest. Not to mention what a chicken farm looks like. It's already run as an industry, the product just happens to be alive. Any resemblance to the romantic, simple life is long lost to everyone doing volume production already.
I read the first item ("guard" keyword) a couple of times, and I'm still having trouble figuring out what it does that a simple "if" statement doesn't do. It is just syntactic sugar for the if statement, but used to indicate precondition checks? I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
From what I understand it also unwraps the variable, Swift has int? that can either be an int or nil. If you just use if, you have to force-unwrap it inside the "safe zone" while guard morphs it to a non-nil int type.
The last thing I'd want is for industry to cheapen products further than they already have. All the cheap, fragile plastic in products today seriously shortens lifespan.
Can't really say I agree, most the problems with flimsy plastic crap came from poor assembly, tolerances and quality control. These days I get the impression that it's mostly made by robots inspected by robots, it might still be cheap but usually very consistently so and just solid enough to last for most people. So many things have fallen under the "repair event horizon" where if you have to repair it the expected cost of niche parts/tools/skills and remaining lifetime doesn't add up.
You come then it negates your income for the next 18 years.
A bike lane is nothing like a 50 ton truck in an emergency stop. Asphalt is extremely simple and can't be damaged in any meaningful way. Texturing and coating wears off, asphalt just wears down and if you're going to provide lots of traction as you must then there will be lots of wear. And you can't just make the wear layer thicker without reducing the optical properties. And if the foundation isn't rock solid these slabs are going to start wobbling and crack up like driving over giant tiles. And you can't rally patch a hole with a bit of cheap asphalt, the whole tile must out and be replaced. Cost is the big killer, it's why we don't use more solar today it's not like we covered everything else in solar panels and roads are our last resort. So they produce 1/3rd less energy, involve a ton of tempered, textured, laminated glass encased in concrete with high maintenance and low robustness. Where can I sign up?
"SpaceX Falcon 9 exploded upon landing on a drone ship" is not quite accurate...
Semantics.... if this was say a passenger plane and it touched down, the landing gear failed to lock and it crashed into the ground and exploded we'd call that "upon landing", even though it was no longer in flight. You've landed when you've come to a complete stop, which the rocket never did. Almost doesn't count when it goes boom.
Having a strong currency is not always entirely in the national good. Sure, it's generally better than a weak currency (which is often a sign of political instability and a lack of international confidence in a country's prospects), but it does cause its own kind of problems. In particular, it can hurt exporters, as it costs overseas customers more to buy their goods.
Obviously a strong currency makes you a high cost country, but a strong currency also indicates you sell products and services that are attractive and can command a high price in the global market. The export industry might complain, but there's usually good reasons for them to stay and right now you don't need them. The danger is more that you drive away key businesses and start chain events which will eventually come to bite you. Like here in Norway we're have been on an oil high with prices of $100/barrel and now it's down to $30, now we want some of those other industries that were driven out by high cost back. Or you outsource development to India and manufacturing to China so there's no entry level jobs and eventually the senior positions disappear abroad too.
It's something of a luxury problem anyway, it's the right time to pull money out of the economy and use it on long term investments in infrastructure, basic research, public education and such that'll pay off in the next 40 years. It's actually quite easy to pour cold water on an overheating economy, the main reason it doesn't happen is political as a strong currency makes people feel richer and they're far more likely to vote for that rather than higher taxes for long term investment for the nation. That it actually leads to huge boom-bust cycles as the downturn comes is best forgotten, at least until the crisis is already here.
The most a computer will ever be is an algorithm with some clever programming. Are you saying that AI is impossible.
It all depends how meta you want to go, I would say that as a minimum an AI should be able to come up with its own algorithms and solution strategy. Like if you hand it a book of chess rules it should be able to work out by itself that an opening book is useful, maybe an end-game database, maybe some brute force search, some positional analysis, monte carlo searches, neural nets, whatever. Not just finding the right parameters/weights or crunching through someone else's algorithm, it has to be able to fundamentally alter the way it plays chess. Just like we don't learn everything from our parents/teachers, sometimes we find new and better ways of doing things of our own creation.
Of course you might say that's an algorithm too, but I have no idea how an algorithm-generating algorithm would look like. Like if you tell it to "make money" it might start looking for work or selling drugs or counterfeiting or to become a chess world champion for the prize money and teach itself chess. And unlike chess it has to deal with unclear rules and incomplete information and perhaps even conflicting goals, since you probably don't want it to become a hit man even though that could be lucrative. I do come up with ideas myself but I'd have a very hard time explaining how or why I came up with them, I don't know what creativity is but an AI needs it. I just hope that doesn't extend to goals too, because Skynet.
What makes this especially interesting, is the victory was not achieved with the sort of brute-force approach used by Deep Blue in chess. This used a deep neural net, and algorithms similar to how we believe that humans think.
Mainly due to the different goals of Chess and Go. In Chess you can have as much material and positional advantage as you want but it's worthless if your opponent can mate, which means you have to calculate the ways that could happen. A blunder and a sacrifice might look the same unless you look deep enough. In Go there is from what I've understood just stones, it's not like cornering one king stone turns the game. It seems their key break-through was being able to evaluate the position and find winning patterns and disclose losing ones without actually playing them out, which you can do because unlike chess there's no way throwing away all your stones can lead to victory.
You do not really want to go back to vendor APIs like twenty years ago. It did not save 3DFX then, it may not save AMD GPU division now. You really need to get Vulkan working, and you need to get GNU/Linux drivers performance and numbers of bugs to a reasonable level.
It would be very different this time, today the shader (pixel, vertex, geometry, tessellation, compute) is the core of almost all GPU processing. Twenty years ago it was all fixed-function hardware, the first programmable shader support was in DirectX 8.0 back in 2000. Basically you had high level calls and the hardware/driver could implement it however they want, so how one card did it would be totally different from the other. Today they have to run the same shader code efficiently, sure there's still some abstraction but more like compiling C to assembler.
The open source drivers have already more or less done this internally with Gallium3D, you have a low level shader API and a common graphics library implementation running on top. The difference is that Vulkan will be a client API and implemented by proprietary drivers and on proprietary platforms, which means you get ~100% availability instead of a fraction of the Linux market. But users can still pick CUDA if it works better for them, the same way many pick Windows-only software over cross-platform alternatives. It won't perform miracles for AMD...
That makes no sense. If I opted in to see ads, I opted in. Whether they come direct from Amazon or via Google is immaterial.
No, the question is if there's a valid chain of agreements between the advertiser and the recipient. If Amazon buys ad space on Facebook and I have agreed through their terms of service to receive ads, the chain is valid. Obviously that right doesn't extend to Facebook users in general, if you sign up a spambot of course it's unsolicited because I agreed to receive ads but not from you. So did you in the friend request get explicit permission to send/forward commercial email to me? If not, then you don't have it at least in Germany. And that means Amazon doesn't have it either, you can't get my permission from my friend.
Or the TL;DR version:
Amazon <--- permission ---> Facebook <--- permission ---> you = OK
Amazon <--- permission ---> Facebook "friend" <--- no permission ---> you = NOT OK
This is wrong. If you have someone's device, you also have the key. The only thing you'd need is the password (hence the device needing your password at boot). Guess what? Most people have a 4 digit password with a total combination of 10,000. Yes, all your devices could be brute forced in a second.
Stop trolling. Six failed attempts = one minute lockout, seven = five minutes, eight = fifteen minutes and nine = one hour. After ten failed attempts, the system will lock you out completely (default) or erase your data. So there's a 0.1% chance to unlock by chance and you can set up more advanced passwords if that's too much. Otherwise you're stuck unless you can reset the counter or read the embedded key that is fused into the chip, which is physically impossible using the chip itself. Maybe if you get a blueprint from Apple and spend ages under an electron microscope mapping it out you could unlock one phone.
They aren't standing up to anyone. They are saying it isn't possible currently. But if the government really insisted they would put a system in place where it was possible. As a bonus they would take some tax money to implement the system.
Well, they can hardly take the "we're above the law" position, but I very much doubt they will. Because if the US government officially forces them to include a backdoor, then everyone else wants to know if it's in the rest of the world's phones. And Apple would have to either say "yes" and watch world sales drop due to US spying concerns or "no" in which case foreign phones become a hot item. And you can't very well stop tourists and businessmen bringing phones to the US, so it'd leak like a sieve. The secret programs didn't affect sales because people didn't know, but an official backdoor would be the Clipper chip II.