Here's what I took away from my dive into the intersection of metaphysics and software engineering: taxonomic models are only valid within a specific domain of application. Even if you intend to model objective reality, you end up modeling just the parts you work with.
Usually because you collapse the model in all the directions that don't really matter to you. Like say if you're classifying animals, you like mammals and reptilians and that way... but then you got aquatic creatures like fish and whales, land-based like lizards and humans, flying animals like bats and birds. You got predators and herbivores, nocturnal animals and day-dwellers, bipeds and hexapods and any number of other abstractions which might be useful in a particular context. And you always end up with penguins that can't actually fly(). I've grown more and more in favor of the "object as a collection of interfaces" thought than belonging in some kind of family tree.
But the question I want to ask is whether living longer is a good thing. Once past the age of reproduction, the genes do not benefit from people living on forever - then they become competitors for resources used by the offspring.
If there weren't evolutionary advantages to long lifespans we'd all be mayflies. Raising a child is a huge commitment in time and resources, not just physically but we spend years in school learning all the basic skills. As a society we're probably more productive and thus more evolutionary "fit" the more results we get after spending 20-25 years raising you. Besides, we've pretty much negated all natural selection by trying to save all genes no matter how poor they might be. And a larger resource footprint only means there's room for fewer, but there's always a sustainable size. It's exponential growth that's not sustainable, as long as we don't have more than ~2.1 kids we'll adjust fine. But when the average number of kids was like 5 and like two generation is 5*5 = 25, three generations 5*5*5 = 125... yeah that's not sustainable.
A more realistic weapon for a palm-sized drone would be a wasp-style injection, just ram the target and have a spring released needle to punch through the clothing and skin or shoot from close range like a taser gun. There are plenty toxins you could deliver that would be fatal with even a very tiny dose. But the topic wasn't really if a drone attack is practical, but whether an autonomous drone attack is more practical. I don't really see it, if there's only one target then human RC will do fine. If there's many targets, gathered in a relatively small space like some form of meeting or conference, why wouldn't you just hit that with one big bang? I mean the assumption here is that you're willing to commit mass murder, are you going to care if there's a little collateral?
I'd think the only reason you'd care is because you're trying to be the good guys, like IS is using human shields or they're in a camp with women and children or whatever and you want to make precision kills without harming the rest. In any case there's probably good reasons to build all this technology for non-lethal purposes, swapping out some non-critical function with some kind of trigger/detonator is always going to be easy. It's like trying to build an alarm clock that can't be rigged to blow up a bomb when the alarm goes off. What are you going to do, ban alarm clocks?
How can anyone argue that inheritance isn't income?
How can it be income, if it's not earned? At most it's a gift from my deceased relative to me. And I think gift taxes are crazy, I've paid taxes once when I earned the money, twice when I bought something for it and now you want to tax it a third time when I'm giving it away? I'm generally opposed to all taxes that are applied just when something changes hands, like here in Norway you pay a 2.5% tax to buy a house/apartment, it's usually equal to 6+ months of rent and makes buying one for a short time a dead loss. Re-registering a car is also very expensive based on age and value with no relation to the fact that it's a few pushes of a button. Income tax is okay. Sales tax is okay. Wealth tax is crap. Gift tax is crap. Death tax is crap. Ownership transfer tax is crap.
So what he really means is that the people who control the back doors in the autonomous weapons are taking over.
Assuming you should worry less about the people controlling the front door like Putin, Xi Jinping, Trump, Erdogan and so on. I'm not so worried about Skynet and the "usual suspects" for backdoors are the same people who control massive military resources of their own. That script kiddies or IS could hack into key military systems and launch ICBMs doesn't seem very plausible. What I'm worried about is essentially what technology has done everywhere else, that relatively few people armed with advanced technology can do what used to take many.
Consider this, STASI in East Germany employed ~91k people out of a population of 16 million. They had at least 174k identified informants, but many records were destroyed and estimates including occasional informers go as high as 2 million. That's >1.5% of the population and they mainly did surveillance of themselves. The NSA employs 35k-55k (estimates, number is classified) so like 0.01-0.02% of the US population and has done mass surveillance of the world. How can they do that? Computers, electronic communication, vast databases and algorithms to crawl through the data.
In terms of military tactics and technology it's a very long time ago since the battle of Verdun where you massed huge armies and sent hundreds of thousands of people and sent them running into machine guns and wars were won and lost by headcount. Like in the invasion of Iraq, a modern army wiped out the Iraqi army that was much larger by headcount almost without losses. More autonomy means that takes fewer and fewer people to run a war machine and the easier it gets to find the fanatics and loyal lapdogs to run it.
Also, despite the potential for hacking I think the greater danger is that robots are loyal to a fault. They don't have any concept of war crimes, they don't have an "ethics subroutine" and they don't follow Asimov's laws, they don't refuse to follow orders, they don't retreat, they don't surrender. Saying there's always a human behind the trigger is not very comforting if that person is Hitler or someone who thinks just like him. It might help against rogue soldiers who abuse their power but it does no good under a regime that condones the actions, officially or unofficially.
Well it's refreshing to have a CEO that actually dares to have big, bold, idealistic visions. And by that I don't mean someone like Jobs who'd hype their current product but you'd have no idea where Apple was going 3-5 years down the road. In fact, the stretch goals are so high and so far out he doesn't run the risk of running into the Osborne effect but are more like guiding stars than any actual plan or roadmap.
I mean the marketing pamphlet for SpaceX could have read "Providing cost efficient satellite and ISS launch services through refurbished rockets" if it was run by a bean counter. Instead it's like "We want to build a BFR and colonize Mars", that's the vision. Somehow he's made it a success story to make some impossible goal and then coming up short is expected. Like now it's months of turn-around time to relaunch a "flight proven" rocket, he says lets do it in 24 hours. He's relaunched a rocket once, he says we'll make rockets that launch hundreds of times.
I think in terms of getting a team together and solve the engineering difficulties it's great. Why are we doing this, to shave a few bucks of NASA's budget? Nah. And we're not going to design something that's fundamentally unworkable for the long term goal, maybe we need a stopgap solution but we're stretching for that Formula One pit stop. Few things bring out such smug geek/nerd satisfaction as pushing the boundaries and announcing "They said it was impossible, so we did it".
For the customers though, I'd say Musk's companies are notoriously unreliable company with timelines and grand designs and promises that aren't really grounded in reality. If their current products do what you want them to do, by all means go ahead and buy it. But if you're waiting for something that's on the roadmap don't hold your breath. I got suckered into that Model 3 hype and pre-ordered... and then I started thinking WTF I'm waiting years for a car I know hardly anything about on a schedule I can't control, then I canceled. I decided I'd rather pick from the cars that are on the market when I need it.
Well there are two main classes of abuses consumer protection laws are supposed to address:
1. When an entire industry decides to make standard terms that are grossly unfavorable to the consumer and largely rely on the consumer's ignorance or indifference until the issue comes up.. 2. When bad actors try to sell goods and services that are of much lower quality and more harmful than people reasonably could expect. This is a floating scale from sub-standard to outright scams and frauds.
That Apple delivers many years of security updates is an argument against the first one, consumers got choices. It's not an argument against the second, like that the government can shut down restaurants that have unhygienic conditions regardless of how whether the market is buying it. A lot of people simply think that stupid people should be allowed to do stupid things, self-determination trumps all. Like you want to live in this condemned building, your choice. It's tough either way, on the one side it's the essence of being a free man. On the other hand, some genuinely need protection from themselves. Or rather the bad men and women who'd play them like a fiddle.
More like that in every democracy you must to some degree submit to majority opinion, hence the only ethical solution is anarchy or something like that. RMS is saying that to ethically sell someone a product, you must tell that person how to make it so he can modify it, repair it etc. as they want. Go to a shoe store, try to get blueprints, molds and process/work descriptions on how to make those shoes. Would it be nice? Yes. Do you get it? No. Are those shoe sellers unethical? Maybe if you're RMS. He's holding software to a level of transparency we don't expect from any other product. Most people are happy to just buy a pair of shoes.
It's far from being a Silicon Valley thing, and it's targeted towards single people who just graduated and are looking for jobs or just started working, particularly in urban areas where rent is cost prohibitive.
For some it's obviously only about sharing the cost and finding a few people you can share facilities with that don't drive you bonkers. But I think the kind of people that hate it and can't wait to get their own place find one pretty quick, even if it's more shabby and in a worse location. Quite a few people, at least in certain phases of life, seem to like low-threshold socialization where you're not going out like to a pub or a club and you're not on an event like a date but you're just chatting with people in the common area who you may or may not find some common ground with. And that's kinda part of the deal, you want to find the people who'll be social and won't be evasive or displeased when you try making contact.
I think this is particularly true in the big cities because in a community of 100 it's strange not to talk to each other. In a community of 100k like a big city almost everyone are random strangers. Most people find some kind of club or hobby or organization where we end up in a small groups and start talking, if we don't get it through studies or work. But a lot of people don't seem to find the hook or the ice breaker to do that and end up being pretty lonely, even though they live in the middle of a city with lots of people everywhere. The most socially outwards always find social contact everywhere, no matter how they live. But in between some want to have people who go like "Hey, we're going to do/see X, wanna tag along?"
MLB.tv does this. I can watch it on my Kodi TV setup by logging into the account that I pay for. It's not supported by MLB, but it still works (most of the time) and MLB has no incentive to shut it down.
It works *much* better for sports because people want to see the match live, before they see the result in a headline somewhere. You could store and spread the footage but it's yesterday's news. Good series and movies are worth watching years later. And you can't really sell people on the convenience features like Spotify can over managing your own MP3 collection, because it takes like two hours to watch a movie. If I have to spend half a minute to fidget with a three minute song that's inconvenient. Half a minute (+ download time) to get a torrent going for a two hour movie? Totally okay. And it's not like there's so bloody many I need a service to discover new movies, there aren't that many high value productions. Granted, you could say it's always there on torrents so what's the big deal if every subscriber get a file too. But that argument has never seemed to work on those in charge....
If your criterion is raw reproductive potential, no. But because the human species is intensely social, we derives benefit from the knowledge and insight of those who have seen a lot. Just to start with, grandparenting improves parenting.
Until only two-three centuries ago, most people were illiterate in pretty much every country of the world. In some countries that is still a part of living memory. Oral retelling was the primary means of passing everything and since they were illiterate they also couldn't take notes. Rote memorization was actually an essential skill, casting shadows far into modern education. Live was harsh and short, looking at tables from ancient Rome show mortality was high in all age groups, only a small fraction would make it to old age. Unlike now in modern times where "most people" become 70-75 before it starts dropping like a cliff.
Basically, child birth at a high age was very likely to kill you. Without a strong mother your child was likely to die, in fact one in three died in the first year anyway. That menopause has survived evolution suggests it was a waste of resources, you'd be much more valuable as a village elder, wise woman or whatever because you'd be one of very few people with that accumulated knowledge and depth of experience. Which may also be why evolution hasn't done more to counteract the effects of aging, the value is inside your head. The body just needs to keep you alive with minimal resource drain on the tribe, they don't need a 50yo or 80yo hunter when they got 20yos for that.
Now though it's becoming a challenge, people expect to retire in their 60s yet live well into their 80s and 90s. And with increased needs for education - arguably some inflated, but some real too - work life is getting shorter in the other end as well. Combined that means a lot fewer people have to hold up the rest of society, IMHO the dangers of robots stealing our jobs are overrated. We need more robots or society will crumble under the weight of all those before or after work life or that can't keep up with modern work. Once even the Hodors of the world could do some work, today not so much anymore.
Even when it's not static loss leaders you typically make a sale on one item and full price on all the complementary items, like burgers and buns, hot dogs and ketchup, turkey and cranberry sauce and so on. Particularly in a high end shop where goods are never truly cheap you rarely have people sniping just the specials, that's more for supermarkets. And even that is often due to some market surplus, can we get a ton of eggs cheap? Egg sale. That way it's not actually that big a loss they're leading with, even if it's below normal prices.
The only dishonesty would be trying to apply the scientific method to a question that we know cannot be answered that way.
He's pointing out that because science doesn't prove that horses exist some will claim that believing in unicorns is an equally valid position. Ex facto that might be true, like if you grew up in a Fritzl basement and have only seen western and fantasy movies then horses and unicorns might seem equally real. But if you get out in the real world you'll find a ton of knowledge on horses and none on real unicorns. And if you don't believe in anyone else, you can go meet actual horses. Of course that doesn't disprove that somewhere in the universe there are unicorns or that someone has made an elaborate ruse where they've amputated the unicorn horns to make you believe in horses. But the more evidence there is, the more credible it is as a scientific opinion backed by observation, experimentation and models. A whole lot of hearsay from some guys who said they saw a guy walk on water 2000 years ago? Not so much.
A piece of wood did not displace 90% of the workforce.
Neither will this, it's a load of hyperbole. I bet that in the 80s you'd make the case that 90% of all occupations were somehow affected by PCs. And in the dotcom boom that 90% of the economy was affected by the Internet. Computers are great for solving problems, but a vast numbers of jobs involve a lot of figuring out what the problem actually is. I've no doubt that you can build an electrician-bot to do to the actual wiring, can it talk to the customer and figure out what he wants and needs? Why do people hire interior decorators when they got a zillion choices on Amazon? I'd love to see an AI try to figure out what my business users want, it'd probably short circuit and they'd ask if there's not some cheap Indian outsourcing company we could use instead. Maybe I wouldn't actually be writing code anymore, but I think a human-AI translator is a pretty lasting profession. Pretty sure doctors and nurses will be around in 100 years, even if they got exoskeletons and tele-presence. Yeah if you imagine far enough into the future maybe we'll have an auto-doc or the EMT from Voyager or the cure-all machine from Elysium but... fantasy. There will be jobs for humans and if we really start running short make some draconian anti-overtime laws so they'll have to spread them thin like say +100% bonus pay past 30 hrs/week. That way there'll probably be some work for everyone...
From what I know about the windows kernel it couldn't scale upwards well enough to run in this league. And If I remember correctly one of the key goals of Linux was to make sure it could scale well on big iron systems.
Originally? No, not at all. "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." But it's the sort of thing you can patch a kernel to do so this happened.
Eh, no, not really. You're talking about a KDE 1.0, pre-Gnome desktop... I used it, but I wouldn't have inflicted it on anyone I needed to support. Five years later it was certainly reasonable, at least where the average non-technical user was concerned.
KDE was '96, GNOME '97.. in 1999 you'd already have KDE 2.0, didn't use that but I remember trying RHL 6.2 that came out in April 2000 which looks pretty much like a normal desktop to me. Remember that it was going head to head with Windows ME as the consumer desktop, using either was a major PITA. Granted, XP was a big step up but then you had Vista... you can make a lot of excuses for YotLD not happening but that Microsoft brought their A-game is not one of them.
The cornerstone for Microsoft's dominance is Office and Excel in particular, all those people who had to use Windows at work of course took what little knowledge and training they had and bought a Windows machine for home too. When Outlook kicked Lotus Notes to the curb they locked that market up good.
Something like self driving that doesn't just stop when a truck is backing towards it.
Stopping was fine. Honking would have been smart. But if a little old lady had tripped over and couldn't get up instead that truck driver would have backed over her too, clearly he had no control over what was behind him. So if you're asking whose behavior was the stupidest, man or machine I'd go with the truck driver.
Bullshit. Racism is not tolerated in polite society, and nearly all of the racists you can still find are either the handful of nazi wannabes or they're tenured leftards in taxpayer-dependent institutions.
At a professional distance, yes. Who you hang out with or who your son/daughter is dating... eh. Not everyone is so open-minded as they pretend to be.
Equally fallacious is that every weakness is reported immediately, not sure what fantasy writer made this article. There's plenty of black hats that'll sell backdoors to any system, open or closed. Regarding Linus's law, I think it's valid but with limitations. Like if you have a square mile of land, the more people use it the more likely they'll stumble upon something but nearly all will take the natural paths. It's vastly different from a search party where you comb the bushes and look in all the places that are hard to reach for something hidden or buried. Most people are trying to understand or use the code, not see how it can be broken so you catch many edge cases but you don't really catch flaws that you'd only find if you were looking for an exploit.
So, what you're saying is they any person who disagrees with me is a Russian agent. Got it.
Nah, they're just the most obvious ones. Apart from all the cheerleaders and the obvious and not so obvious smear tactics and ad hominems you also have concern trolls and agent provocateurs. Concern trolls are people who pretend to be on your side but brings up lots of issues they have with your tactics and arguments trying to make it seem like you don't really know what you're doing, basically undercover FUD spreaders. Agent provocateurs are plants trying to rile up negative elements so they will hurt the overall cause, like turning a peaceful protest into a riot or get outspoken racists to support your side. There are a lot of old tricks that are new again, now over the Internet.
Maybe this coming out will help the general population adapt actual critical thinking skills.
That would certainly help, yes. But in trying to determine what could get popular support it wouldn't really help that someone is trying to put out a very distorted picture. In the end we don't have the time to research every subject to the bottom, in some form we will rely on other people to tell us about important issues we should care about. And some will try to drown that signal with noise. It doesn't help that mainstream media have their own agendas too, though nobody has gone so far as to call them outright liars before Trump. I'm not so sure it's political leanings but certainly there's a lot of clickbait and spin to create stories and scandals that have a pretty loose relation to reality.
As long as you live in the fantasy that human brains are magical and computers are not there's no point in having an argument, because you've defined the answer "Humans are intelligent and computers are not, hence anything done by computers is not proof of intelligence." rather than the question: "What is intelligence?" and failed to make any measurable definition or criteria. It's like saying humans have souls and rocks don't and expect the debate to be anything other than theology and philosophy.
Even classical conditioning like Pavlov's dogs are proof of learning and reasoning, hear a bell often enough when you're fed and you associate the bell with food. A plant can't be conditioned, snip off the branches stretching towards the sun and they'll just stretch again and again. If you call it AI and it's not learning it's not really intelligence at all really, if you've found a flaw in a game's "AI" and it keeps falling in the same trap over and over it's just blindly executing. The neural nets at least got that part right, walking into a trap will assign that action negative weights. That's above zero intelligence.
Yeah, nobody wanted online matchmaking, MMORPGs or any other functionality tied to global servers. It's all a conspiracy. Okay, so I can't play Overwatch without the central servers but I also wouldn't play Overwatch without the central servers. If there was a standalone/LAN version for tournaments, road warriors, hermits, service disruptions and software archaeologists it wouldn't bother me, but it also wouldn't give me anything. Don't get me wrong, I was angry too at the tying of obviously single player games to online servers on the flimsiest of excuses but as a general principle I think it's nonsense to say that there should be an offline version of every game. Unless using google.com is also DRM, because I don't have the source code to set up my own version. If every service that won't tell you how to deliver the service they do is DRM, then that's a whole lot of DRM...
If you don't plan to look at WTF it's doing, WebAssembly is great. It's compact, fast and enables developers to use different languages to create client functionality. But like the name implies it's a binary blob not a script and you don't get the source code so it's non-trivial to inspect, edit or copy any functionality to use in any other context.
At 65% at the moment, if you look at usage you'll see it's only iPhone 10.3 and Edge that's likely to switch... Opera Mini, UC Browser, Samsung Internet etc. are old phones that occasionally are used for the web and IE11 is also just for compatibility. I think it's to the point where you could have WebAssembly + fallback the same way you should have JavaScript + fallback for NoScript users today. Or if it's dependent on new functionality, just say you need to upgrade. Not every site needs to support 100% of the users.
To the libertarian, the anti-market folks can donate to the charities fighting diseases, the pro-market folks can donate to for-profit organizations fighting diseases, and everyone is happy (well, everyone except those who think they are "right" and feel they should be able to control how the "wrong" people spend their money).
Meh, I'd be happy with people who want to pay no taxes if we could also exclude them from any and all benefits from public services, public education, public roads, emergency services, military and so on. It's a software pirate's mentality taken back into the real world, I didn't really want to pay for it anyway. But you're reaping the benefits every day, it's basically a smug way to freeload. It's more selfishness than ideology, if you're below average let's all pull together. If you're above average, every man for himself. Who needs universal healthcare, I can pay for mine. That's easy when you got a winning ticket in life's lottery...
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Here's what I took away from my dive into the intersection of metaphysics and software engineering: taxonomic models are only valid within a specific domain of application. Even if you intend to model objective reality, you end up modeling just the parts you work with.
Usually because you collapse the model in all the directions that don't really matter to you. Like say if you're classifying animals, you like mammals and reptilians and that way... but then you got aquatic creatures like fish and whales, land-based like lizards and humans, flying animals like bats and birds. You got predators and herbivores, nocturnal animals and day-dwellers, bipeds and hexapods and any number of other abstractions which might be useful in a particular context. And you always end up with penguins that can't actually fly(). I've grown more and more in favor of the "object as a collection of interfaces" thought than belonging in some kind of family tree.
But the question I want to ask is whether living longer is a good thing. Once past the age of reproduction, the genes do not benefit from people living on forever - then they become competitors for resources used by the offspring.
If there weren't evolutionary advantages to long lifespans we'd all be mayflies. Raising a child is a huge commitment in time and resources, not just physically but we spend years in school learning all the basic skills. As a society we're probably more productive and thus more evolutionary "fit" the more results we get after spending 20-25 years raising you. Besides, we've pretty much negated all natural selection by trying to save all genes no matter how poor they might be. And a larger resource footprint only means there's room for fewer, but there's always a sustainable size. It's exponential growth that's not sustainable, as long as we don't have more than ~2.1 kids we'll adjust fine. But when the average number of kids was like 5 and like two generation is 5*5 = 25, three generations 5*5*5 = 125... yeah that's not sustainable.
A more realistic weapon for a palm-sized drone would be a wasp-style injection, just ram the target and have a spring released needle to punch through the clothing and skin or shoot from close range like a taser gun. There are plenty toxins you could deliver that would be fatal with even a very tiny dose. But the topic wasn't really if a drone attack is practical, but whether an autonomous drone attack is more practical. I don't really see it, if there's only one target then human RC will do fine. If there's many targets, gathered in a relatively small space like some form of meeting or conference, why wouldn't you just hit that with one big bang? I mean the assumption here is that you're willing to commit mass murder, are you going to care if there's a little collateral?
I'd think the only reason you'd care is because you're trying to be the good guys, like IS is using human shields or they're in a camp with women and children or whatever and you want to make precision kills without harming the rest. In any case there's probably good reasons to build all this technology for non-lethal purposes, swapping out some non-critical function with some kind of trigger/detonator is always going to be easy. It's like trying to build an alarm clock that can't be rigged to blow up a bomb when the alarm goes off. What are you going to do, ban alarm clocks?
How can anyone argue that inheritance isn't income?
How can it be income, if it's not earned? At most it's a gift from my deceased relative to me. And I think gift taxes are crazy, I've paid taxes once when I earned the money, twice when I bought something for it and now you want to tax it a third time when I'm giving it away? I'm generally opposed to all taxes that are applied just when something changes hands, like here in Norway you pay a 2.5% tax to buy a house/apartment, it's usually equal to 6+ months of rent and makes buying one for a short time a dead loss. Re-registering a car is also very expensive based on age and value with no relation to the fact that it's a few pushes of a button. Income tax is okay. Sales tax is okay. Wealth tax is crap. Gift tax is crap. Death tax is crap. Ownership transfer tax is crap.
So what he really means is that the people who control the back doors in the autonomous weapons are taking over.
Assuming you should worry less about the people controlling the front door like Putin, Xi Jinping, Trump, Erdogan and so on. I'm not so worried about Skynet and the "usual suspects" for backdoors are the same people who control massive military resources of their own. That script kiddies or IS could hack into key military systems and launch ICBMs doesn't seem very plausible. What I'm worried about is essentially what technology has done everywhere else, that relatively few people armed with advanced technology can do what used to take many.
Consider this, STASI in East Germany employed ~91k people out of a population of 16 million. They had at least 174k identified informants, but many records were destroyed and estimates including occasional informers go as high as 2 million. That's >1.5% of the population and they mainly did surveillance of themselves. The NSA employs 35k-55k (estimates, number is classified) so like 0.01-0.02% of the US population and has done mass surveillance of the world. How can they do that? Computers, electronic communication, vast databases and algorithms to crawl through the data.
In terms of military tactics and technology it's a very long time ago since the battle of Verdun where you massed huge armies and sent hundreds of thousands of people and sent them running into machine guns and wars were won and lost by headcount. Like in the invasion of Iraq, a modern army wiped out the Iraqi army that was much larger by headcount almost without losses. More autonomy means that takes fewer and fewer people to run a war machine and the easier it gets to find the fanatics and loyal lapdogs to run it.
Also, despite the potential for hacking I think the greater danger is that robots are loyal to a fault. They don't have any concept of war crimes, they don't have an "ethics subroutine" and they don't follow Asimov's laws, they don't refuse to follow orders, they don't retreat, they don't surrender. Saying there's always a human behind the trigger is not very comforting if that person is Hitler or someone who thinks just like him. It might help against rogue soldiers who abuse their power but it does no good under a regime that condones the actions, officially or unofficially.
Well it's refreshing to have a CEO that actually dares to have big, bold, idealistic visions. And by that I don't mean someone like Jobs who'd hype their current product but you'd have no idea where Apple was going 3-5 years down the road. In fact, the stretch goals are so high and so far out he doesn't run the risk of running into the Osborne effect but are more like guiding stars than any actual plan or roadmap.
I mean the marketing pamphlet for SpaceX could have read "Providing cost efficient satellite and ISS launch services through refurbished rockets" if it was run by a bean counter. Instead it's like "We want to build a BFR and colonize Mars", that's the vision. Somehow he's made it a success story to make some impossible goal and then coming up short is expected. Like now it's months of turn-around time to relaunch a "flight proven" rocket, he says lets do it in 24 hours. He's relaunched a rocket once, he says we'll make rockets that launch hundreds of times.
I think in terms of getting a team together and solve the engineering difficulties it's great. Why are we doing this, to shave a few bucks of NASA's budget? Nah. And we're not going to design something that's fundamentally unworkable for the long term goal, maybe we need a stopgap solution but we're stretching for that Formula One pit stop. Few things bring out such smug geek/nerd satisfaction as pushing the boundaries and announcing "They said it was impossible, so we did it".
For the customers though, I'd say Musk's companies are notoriously unreliable company with timelines and grand designs and promises that aren't really grounded in reality. If their current products do what you want them to do, by all means go ahead and buy it. But if you're waiting for something that's on the roadmap don't hold your breath. I got suckered into that Model 3 hype and pre-ordered... and then I started thinking WTF I'm waiting years for a car I know hardly anything about on a schedule I can't control, then I canceled. I decided I'd rather pick from the cars that are on the market when I need it.
Well there are two main classes of abuses consumer protection laws are supposed to address:
1. When an entire industry decides to make standard terms that are grossly unfavorable to the consumer and largely rely on the consumer's ignorance or indifference until the issue comes up..
2. When bad actors try to sell goods and services that are of much lower quality and more harmful than people reasonably could expect. This is a floating scale from sub-standard to outright scams and frauds.
That Apple delivers many years of security updates is an argument against the first one, consumers got choices. It's not an argument against the second, like that the government can shut down restaurants that have unhygienic conditions regardless of how whether the market is buying it. A lot of people simply think that stupid people should be allowed to do stupid things, self-determination trumps all. Like you want to live in this condemned building, your choice. It's tough either way, on the one side it's the essence of being a free man. On the other hand, some genuinely need protection from themselves. Or rather the bad men and women who'd play them like a fiddle.
More like that in every democracy you must to some degree submit to majority opinion, hence the only ethical solution is anarchy or something like that. RMS is saying that to ethically sell someone a product, you must tell that person how to make it so he can modify it, repair it etc. as they want. Go to a shoe store, try to get blueprints, molds and process/work descriptions on how to make those shoes. Would it be nice? Yes. Do you get it? No. Are those shoe sellers unethical? Maybe if you're RMS. He's holding software to a level of transparency we don't expect from any other product. Most people are happy to just buy a pair of shoes.
It's far from being a Silicon Valley thing, and it's targeted towards single people who just graduated and are looking for jobs or just started working, particularly in urban areas where rent is cost prohibitive.
For some it's obviously only about sharing the cost and finding a few people you can share facilities with that don't drive you bonkers. But I think the kind of people that hate it and can't wait to get their own place find one pretty quick, even if it's more shabby and in a worse location. Quite a few people, at least in certain phases of life, seem to like low-threshold socialization where you're not going out like to a pub or a club and you're not on an event like a date but you're just chatting with people in the common area who you may or may not find some common ground with. And that's kinda part of the deal, you want to find the people who'll be social and won't be evasive or displeased when you try making contact.
I think this is particularly true in the big cities because in a community of 100 it's strange not to talk to each other. In a community of 100k like a big city almost everyone are random strangers. Most people find some kind of club or hobby or organization where we end up in a small groups and start talking, if we don't get it through studies or work. But a lot of people don't seem to find the hook or the ice breaker to do that and end up being pretty lonely, even though they live in the middle of a city with lots of people everywhere. The most socially outwards always find social contact everywhere, no matter how they live. But in between some want to have people who go like "Hey, we're going to do/see X, wanna tag along?"
MLB.tv does this. I can watch it on my Kodi TV setup by logging into the account that I pay for. It's not supported by MLB, but it still works (most of the time) and MLB has no incentive to shut it down.
It works *much* better for sports because people want to see the match live, before they see the result in a headline somewhere. You could store and spread the footage but it's yesterday's news. Good series and movies are worth watching years later. And you can't really sell people on the convenience features like Spotify can over managing your own MP3 collection, because it takes like two hours to watch a movie. If I have to spend half a minute to fidget with a three minute song that's inconvenient. Half a minute (+ download time) to get a torrent going for a two hour movie? Totally okay. And it's not like there's so bloody many I need a service to discover new movies, there aren't that many high value productions. Granted, you could say it's always there on torrents so what's the big deal if every subscriber get a file too. But that argument has never seemed to work on those in charge....
If your criterion is raw reproductive potential, no. But because the human species is intensely social, we derives benefit from the knowledge and insight of those who have seen a lot. Just to start with, grandparenting improves parenting.
Until only two-three centuries ago, most people were illiterate in pretty much every country of the world. In some countries that is still a part of living memory. Oral retelling was the primary means of passing everything and since they were illiterate they also couldn't take notes. Rote memorization was actually an essential skill, casting shadows far into modern education. Live was harsh and short, looking at tables from ancient Rome show mortality was high in all age groups, only a small fraction would make it to old age. Unlike now in modern times where "most people" become 70-75 before it starts dropping like a cliff.
Basically, child birth at a high age was very likely to kill you. Without a strong mother your child was likely to die, in fact one in three died in the first year anyway. That menopause has survived evolution suggests it was a waste of resources, you'd be much more valuable as a village elder, wise woman or whatever because you'd be one of very few people with that accumulated knowledge and depth of experience. Which may also be why evolution hasn't done more to counteract the effects of aging, the value is inside your head. The body just needs to keep you alive with minimal resource drain on the tribe, they don't need a 50yo or 80yo hunter when they got 20yos for that.
Now though it's becoming a challenge, people expect to retire in their 60s yet live well into their 80s and 90s. And with increased needs for education - arguably some inflated, but some real too - work life is getting shorter in the other end as well. Combined that means a lot fewer people have to hold up the rest of society, IMHO the dangers of robots stealing our jobs are overrated. We need more robots or society will crumble under the weight of all those before or after work life or that can't keep up with modern work. Once even the Hodors of the world could do some work, today not so much anymore.
Even when it's not static loss leaders you typically make a sale on one item and full price on all the complementary items, like burgers and buns, hot dogs and ketchup, turkey and cranberry sauce and so on. Particularly in a high end shop where goods are never truly cheap you rarely have people sniping just the specials, that's more for supermarkets. And even that is often due to some market surplus, can we get a ton of eggs cheap? Egg sale. That way it's not actually that big a loss they're leading with, even if it's below normal prices.
The only dishonesty would be trying to apply the scientific method to a question that we know cannot be answered that way.
He's pointing out that because science doesn't prove that horses exist some will claim that believing in unicorns is an equally valid position. Ex facto that might be true, like if you grew up in a Fritzl basement and have only seen western and fantasy movies then horses and unicorns might seem equally real. But if you get out in the real world you'll find a ton of knowledge on horses and none on real unicorns. And if you don't believe in anyone else, you can go meet actual horses. Of course that doesn't disprove that somewhere in the universe there are unicorns or that someone has made an elaborate ruse where they've amputated the unicorn horns to make you believe in horses. But the more evidence there is, the more credible it is as a scientific opinion backed by observation, experimentation and models. A whole lot of hearsay from some guys who said they saw a guy walk on water 2000 years ago? Not so much.
A piece of wood did not displace 90% of the workforce.
Neither will this, it's a load of hyperbole. I bet that in the 80s you'd make the case that 90% of all occupations were somehow affected by PCs. And in the dotcom boom that 90% of the economy was affected by the Internet. Computers are great for solving problems, but a vast numbers of jobs involve a lot of figuring out what the problem actually is. I've no doubt that you can build an electrician-bot to do to the actual wiring, can it talk to the customer and figure out what he wants and needs? Why do people hire interior decorators when they got a zillion choices on Amazon? I'd love to see an AI try to figure out what my business users want, it'd probably short circuit and they'd ask if there's not some cheap Indian outsourcing company we could use instead. Maybe I wouldn't actually be writing code anymore, but I think a human-AI translator is a pretty lasting profession. Pretty sure doctors and nurses will be around in 100 years, even if they got exoskeletons and tele-presence. Yeah if you imagine far enough into the future maybe we'll have an auto-doc or the EMT from Voyager or the cure-all machine from Elysium but... fantasy. There will be jobs for humans and if we really start running short make some draconian anti-overtime laws so they'll have to spread them thin like say +100% bonus pay past 30 hrs/week. That way there'll probably be some work for everyone...
From what I know about the windows kernel it couldn't scale upwards well enough to run in this league. And If I remember correctly one of the key goals of Linux was to make sure it could scale well on big iron systems.
Originally? No, not at all. "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." But it's the sort of thing you can patch a kernel to do so this happened.
Eh, no, not really. You're talking about a KDE 1.0, pre-Gnome desktop... I used it, but I wouldn't have inflicted it on anyone I needed to support. Five years later it was certainly reasonable, at least where the average non-technical user was concerned.
KDE was '96, GNOME '97.. in 1999 you'd already have KDE 2.0, didn't use that but I remember trying RHL 6.2 that came out in April 2000 which looks pretty much like a normal desktop to me. Remember that it was going head to head with Windows ME as the consumer desktop, using either was a major PITA. Granted, XP was a big step up but then you had Vista... you can make a lot of excuses for YotLD not happening but that Microsoft brought their A-game is not one of them.
The cornerstone for Microsoft's dominance is Office and Excel in particular, all those people who had to use Windows at work of course took what little knowledge and training they had and bought a Windows machine for home too. When Outlook kicked Lotus Notes to the curb they locked that market up good.
Something like self driving that doesn't just stop when a truck is backing towards it.
Stopping was fine. Honking would have been smart. But if a little old lady had tripped over and couldn't get up instead that truck driver would have backed over her too, clearly he had no control over what was behind him. So if you're asking whose behavior was the stupidest, man or machine I'd go with the truck driver.
Bullshit. Racism is not tolerated in polite society, and nearly all of the racists you can still find are either the handful of nazi wannabes or they're tenured leftards in taxpayer-dependent institutions.
At a professional distance, yes. Who you hang out with or who your son/daughter is dating... eh. Not everyone is so open-minded as they pretend to be.
Equally fallacious is that every weakness is reported immediately, not sure what fantasy writer made this article. There's plenty of black hats that'll sell backdoors to any system, open or closed. Regarding Linus's law, I think it's valid but with limitations. Like if you have a square mile of land, the more people use it the more likely they'll stumble upon something but nearly all will take the natural paths. It's vastly different from a search party where you comb the bushes and look in all the places that are hard to reach for something hidden or buried. Most people are trying to understand or use the code, not see how it can be broken so you catch many edge cases but you don't really catch flaws that you'd only find if you were looking for an exploit.
So, what you're saying is they any person who disagrees with me is a Russian agent. Got it.
Nah, they're just the most obvious ones. Apart from all the cheerleaders and the obvious and not so obvious smear tactics and ad hominems you also have concern trolls and agent provocateurs. Concern trolls are people who pretend to be on your side but brings up lots of issues they have with your tactics and arguments trying to make it seem like you don't really know what you're doing, basically undercover FUD spreaders. Agent provocateurs are plants trying to rile up negative elements so they will hurt the overall cause, like turning a peaceful protest into a riot or get outspoken racists to support your side. There are a lot of old tricks that are new again, now over the Internet.
Maybe this coming out will help the general population adapt actual critical thinking skills.
That would certainly help, yes. But in trying to determine what could get popular support it wouldn't really help that someone is trying to put out a very distorted picture. In the end we don't have the time to research every subject to the bottom, in some form we will rely on other people to tell us about important issues we should care about. And some will try to drown that signal with noise. It doesn't help that mainstream media have their own agendas too, though nobody has gone so far as to call them outright liars before Trump. I'm not so sure it's political leanings but certainly there's a lot of clickbait and spin to create stories and scandals that have a pretty loose relation to reality.
As long as you live in the fantasy that human brains are magical and computers are not there's no point in having an argument, because you've defined the answer "Humans are intelligent and computers are not, hence anything done by computers is not proof of intelligence." rather than the question: "What is intelligence?" and failed to make any measurable definition or criteria. It's like saying humans have souls and rocks don't and expect the debate to be anything other than theology and philosophy.
Even classical conditioning like Pavlov's dogs are proof of learning and reasoning, hear a bell often enough when you're fed and you associate the bell with food. A plant can't be conditioned, snip off the branches stretching towards the sun and they'll just stretch again and again. If you call it AI and it's not learning it's not really intelligence at all really, if you've found a flaw in a game's "AI" and it keeps falling in the same trap over and over it's just blindly executing. The neural nets at least got that part right, walking into a trap will assign that action negative weights. That's above zero intelligence.
Yeah, nobody wanted online matchmaking, MMORPGs or any other functionality tied to global servers. It's all a conspiracy. Okay, so I can't play Overwatch without the central servers but I also wouldn't play Overwatch without the central servers. If there was a standalone/LAN version for tournaments, road warriors, hermits, service disruptions and software archaeologists it wouldn't bother me, but it also wouldn't give me anything. Don't get me wrong, I was angry too at the tying of obviously single player games to online servers on the flimsiest of excuses but as a general principle I think it's nonsense to say that there should be an offline version of every game. Unless using google.com is also DRM, because I don't have the source code to set up my own version. If every service that won't tell you how to deliver the service they do is DRM, then that's a whole lot of DRM...
If you don't plan to look at WTF it's doing, WebAssembly is great. It's compact, fast and enables developers to use different languages to create client functionality. But like the name implies it's a binary blob not a script and you don't get the source code so it's non-trivial to inspect, edit or copy any functionality to use in any other context.
At 65% at the moment, if you look at usage you'll see it's only iPhone 10.3 and Edge that's likely to switch... Opera Mini, UC Browser, Samsung Internet etc. are old phones that occasionally are used for the web and IE11 is also just for compatibility. I think it's to the point where you could have WebAssembly + fallback the same way you should have JavaScript + fallback for NoScript users today. Or if it's dependent on new functionality, just say you need to upgrade. Not every site needs to support 100% of the users.
To the libertarian, the anti-market folks can donate to the charities fighting diseases, the pro-market folks can donate to for-profit organizations fighting diseases, and everyone is happy (well, everyone except those who think they are "right" and feel they should be able to control how the "wrong" people spend their money).
Meh, I'd be happy with people who want to pay no taxes if we could also exclude them from any and all benefits from public services, public education, public roads, emergency services, military and so on. It's a software pirate's mentality taken back into the real world, I didn't really want to pay for it anyway. But you're reaping the benefits every day, it's basically a smug way to freeload. It's more selfishness than ideology, if you're below average let's all pull together. If you're above average, every man for himself. Who needs universal healthcare, I can pay for mine. That's easy when you got a winning ticket in life's lottery...