Many of the highest-performing supercomputers (including China's most powerful) run on HPC cards made by video card companies (Nvidia/AMD). Considering the annual gains on performance of GPUs vs CPUs, this makes sense, and the FLOPS comparison makes the decision easy. Besides, Intel's most powerful chips are made in (IIRC) Germany and Malaysia, so I'm unsure how the USA would stop a European subsidiary from selling to China.
3-4 years from now, competitors will already be on 5nm process, so Intel's finished 7nm plant won't be using the latest process. If production starts more on the 3-year side, they might be releasing 7nm chips a few months before AMD releases 5nm chips. Regardless, AMD will be on 7nm in 2 years, and if Ryzen is as competitive as rumors say, then Intel will be 1-2 years late. Assuming of course that this Fab 42 is Intel's first 7nm plant. They may end up using it to produce chipsets rather than 7nm CPUs that're being manufactured at another plant years earlier.
A 'robots do all the work, humanity enjoys life of leisure' future sounds great but those in power have little interest in that happening. What powerful egotists would rather happen is 'capitalists own robot-run economy, unemployed masses lick their boots for scraps'. Of course you'd need a robotic security force to put down the inevitable rioting, although giving human security forces a taste of upper-class life has traditionally worked to instill loyalty; some capitalists would take the risk for the extra ego boost of knowing people died to protect them. Capitalists would set the laws ensuring they retain all economic and political power.
The base idea of capitalists as 'those who own the means of production' has become less relevant in a skill-based service economy, but as those skills are practicable and learnable by robots which can be owned, the idea will become increasingly relevant.
it means that we are closer to the point where AI may pose an existential risk to humans, and that tipping point could occur with very little warning.
Hold your horses, there. If by 'existential risk' you mean 'Cylons nuking the colonies' then this poker AI has little to do with a general intelligence that would be capable of desiring to exterminate humanity. Now if you meant 'industrial revolution that will leave all humans unemployable because AI does everything better' then you'd have a point. However, the thing with specialist systems is that they have to be recoded to be repurposed to other tasks. Eventually we may have AI that is able to learn a variety of tasks with no manual recoding (does Watson do this?) but until that's generally possible, humans will need to to code the AI for each individual task, and there are likely tasks out there arcane/broad/cheap enough that hiring brilliant software engineers to recode an AI to learn them isn't worth the cost.
It has a 1280x720 6.2" capacitive touchscreen, and the battery will last ~3 hours when running typical games. Zelda is coming out on launch, 3/3, and same day on Wii U. It has 32GB internal storage, and the two SKUs differ only by joy-con color scheme. The storage is expandable by microSDXC cards, presumably eshop games can be directly installed onto them like the 3ds (unlike the Wii U.) More detailed hardware specs (RAM?) have yet to be revealed, though. I'm particularly curious if it's more graphically powerful than the Wii U.
Headlines from the future: "Today, Tesla's 'Gigafactory' battery production plant caught fire and then exploded. An initial investigation has traced it to the section of the plant utilized by Samsung to produce its batteries. An engineer has been quoted saying that the sector overheated due to being packed wall-to-wall to capacity; as little as 0.1mm air gap between the equipment and the walls could've prevented this catastrophe, but Samsung allowed 0mm."
There was some question of if it was a fluke against Sedol, now it's confirmed that machine has bested man at Go. First Chess, now Go. I'm wondering where the goalposts will be moved to now.
I can imagine some kind of Turing test where a woman converses with two suitors, and has to choose which to go on a date with; one is a man, the other a machine (cue the jokes). Lines of dialogue used to have to be pre-programmed, but with all the deep learning that modern AI can do, with access to project gutenberg/wikipedia/etc. it can certainly adlib believable and consistent dialogue. Traditional Turing tests tend to be 'won' by machines when the human is too much of a jerk, or when the machine is indistinguishable from a developmentally-challenged human; have a suave man (e.g. amateur standup comedian) competing against a machine that can't get away with pretending to be an idiot, and you'll have a more intriguing competition.
Next step: make an AI that can automatically shut down trolls and fools with citations and deconstructions of illogical statements, and deploy it on every forum and comment section. Please.
Looking at the list, half of the Platinum earners are RPGs and strategy games, with 3 shooters. Of the Gold earners, 9/12 are shooters. Of the Silver earners, 6/16 are strategy/simulation games. Throughout, many of the highest earners are zombie-themed, open-world, or survival sandbox games. There are 1, 2, 2, and 3 free-to-play games in the Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze categories respectively. Yes, the highest-earning f2p game is Dota2. This suggests that niche titles (RPGs, simulation/strategy titles) are some of the best-sellers on PC, as these genres have traditionally been under-served on consoles (think Diablo 1 on PSX compared to Baldur's Gate, rather than a consolified RPG like Witcher 3).
A special version of their Mario Maker title could be ported to mobile pretty easily, that creates "Mario Run"-type levels. There are some Kirby spinoff games that are fully stylus-controlled, those could work on mobile ok. I suspect Pikmin would work great with touch controls. A simplified Zelda with "Infinity Blade"-style combat controls could work, although it would probably have watered-down exploration elements; they might be too protective of the IP to risk it. An "Epona Run" or similar minigame, perhaps might come instead.
I wonder, in the end, which will win out: flying drones going from a warehouse to a retail shopper's domicile, or self-driving delivery trucks (eventually manned by unloading robots that can carry your package to your door)?
Sure, they could be combined, with trucks loaded with package-bearing drones that take off from the truck as it nears the package's destination. I wonder how the time/fuel efficiency works out, with the different ways of doing that. I imagine companies are doing simulations on that already. Prediction: direct drone delivery is most efficient for customers within X miles of a distribution center, truck is most efficient in rural areas, drone-laden truck most efficient in suburbs/cities outside of direct drone range.
The invention of the washing machine has actually been credited for the rise of Feminism, so many women would approve of not having to spend half of each day scrubbing clothes on a washboard.
Technically, if a monopoly is forced to sell at a non-optimal point on the price/response curve simply because the cheaper point would be selling at a loss, lowered costs could allow them to sell at that lower point. There would need to be a compelling reason (antitrust laws, marketing etc.) why they cannot sell at the higher point, however.
Luckily all the high-school dropouts flipping burgers can just go to college and get a degree in liberal arts. Problem solved! They've lived so frugally over the years they surely must have enough money saved up to pay for that plus kids/rent while unemployed. Oh wait, no, maybe the solution is raising minimum wage? Oh, that'll accelerate automation you say? Hmm.
Institutional unemployment is best paid for institutionally (free education) or else the problems will be paid institutionally anyway (crime, poverty, social welfare programs.) I knew someone who never went to high school because her broke parents were too poor to afford the $50/year fee; if that fee were waived, that $200 would've paid for itself many times over in reduced social welfare costs.
As an increasing number of people are shuffled into a decreasing number of jobs, it'll lead to wage depression. Higher productivity will lower costs of goods and services to offset this somewhat, but lowered job security and making more people unemployable is a more serious price paid. The only winners here are those who own the means of production. Publicly available replicators or central planning are potential solutions. Nationalized real estate + basic income could work as well.
Flash is a pileup of every problem you mention and more. A vector animation plugin had a scripting language (ActionScript) tacked on top of it, and there are multiple versions of this language, each with its own legacy bugs, and newer versions of the plugin support older versions of ActionScript (so that old Flash files won't break). When I coded in it circa 2003, ActionScript was incredibly buggy, with many functions malfunctioning or being completely broken; it's safe to say that few to no parameters were being sanity-checked or sanitized. It was created in the ActiveX era where "rush it out the door before the competitors can" was at the top of the priority list, and anyone expressing concern for security was handed a pink slip and laughed out the door. New features were being added all the time at top speed and who has time to make it secure? By the time ActiveX got tamped down on in the XP SP2 days, it became more clear how bad Flash (and Java) was in the security department, but I imagine many of the original coders had left, likely with little to no code documentation so it was effectively unmaintainable. Putting out fires of perceived insecurity by fixing publicly found vulnerabilities was the actual security goal then, with little proactive finding of vulnerabilities. Macromedia only made money from their Flash authoring software, not the plugin itself, and there were eventually free/cheaper programs that let you create or at least maintain Flash content, so the money for securing the plugin was never there. Thankfully Chrome is leading the charge in killing it off for good. Nearly everything it does is done better (and more securely) by another technology now.
Russian propaganda is an excuse and diversion to prevent people from realizing that this is a new effort of the US government to create and disseminate propaganda to the American public, fully backed by the law. The line "2017 intelligence authorization bill calling for new executive branch efforts" sounds a lot to me like "President Trump will have this new propaganda tool at his disposal to hoodwink US residents even further than they already have been by every source already." It also smacks of a return to the Cold War anti-USSR propaganda spouted by every source. I can't help but feel a "wag the dog" situation is unfolding, with a growing Russian bogeyman to distract us from our growing domestic problems.
I walk away from my desktop for FIVE minutes, and my 5 year old has ordered a $100 million rocket launch to crash a load of honey ham into the Moon, because the moon-men apparently want a ham-and-cheese sandwich. Can I contest this with Visa?
Sure, those three viruses may currently account for 80% of colds (although I suspect it's regional, and the culprits vary from place to place, like the Flu viruses) but if they're eliminated, people not staying home sick with one of those three will instead be exposed to one of the other hundreds of cold viruses until they get sick. Now a different set of 3 viruses will account for most colds, but there will be just as many colds. Anyone who works with the airline industry is still going to get sick frequently.
Additionally, saying there's an $11 billion+ 'cost' of colds is disingenuous, as that money trades hands. From the point of view of the medical industry, they'd be losing $billions every year if the common cold were to be cured. Salaried positions tend to have X amount of paid sick days, which are redeemed by the employee no matter what, so employers pay that money whether or not the employee actually gets sick; you could say 'lost productivity costs' but if those sick days are taken as de facto vacation, the effect is the same. A large proportion of sick days are actually "my bipolar is kicking in and I'm too depressed to come into work" or "my child is sick" or "I need to do something today and you didn't give me off the day I asked for" etc. and those problems won't go away easily.
Sure, these fake news stories exist, and are sometimes highly visible, and apparently get enough clicks to make a profit for the bullshitters... But does anyone actually believe these stories? Could people just be Liking/retweeting them because they're amusing, in a "ha ha, look at this tabloid article about Bigfoot having Prince Harry's baby!" kind of way? Surely a lot of readers WILL realize that what they're reading is bullshit, or do fact-checking on their own.
'Fake' news is ubiquitous and always has been, in any news source. Look at how many peer-reviewed scientific journal articles are later redacted or found faulty, and what portion of published research is later found to be fabricated, or is disproved later on or unreproduceable. Now think about how many news articles are written for laypersons summarizing scientific developments, that are misleading or dead wrong. Now think about how many PR department press releases are copied verbatim into 'news stories' without any critical thinking or fact checking. Ok, maybe your news department was downsized and you don't have an editor anymore, and noone will tell you "you can't put that shit in our publication", but critical thinking doesn't take a dedicated salaried position, any writer can exercise it.
Binkowski gives a free pass to the news industry, going with an 'incompetence/insufficient budget' excuse, completely ignoring intentional malevolence/profit motive reasons.
Pollster: "Sir, you own a Tesla car according to our records. You are aware, of course, that the Autopilot feature requires a human to be fully alert and ready to take control of the vehicle at all times, aren't you, sir?"
Consumer: "Umm.... why YES... yes, of course. I knew that. Yeah, that's the ticket..."
Pollster: "Ok, just confirming that." *ticks off 'consumer was properly-informed' checkbox*
it would be so much nicer if some disgruntled colleague of Podesta's was providing information to reporters, rather than Vladimir Putin using them as stooges to undermine our democracy.
The American elite has done more to undermine our democracy than Russia ever could. If a colleague of Podesta's dumped the same files onto Wikileaks the effect would be the same. If Podesta's files contained some secret dirt on Trump that he was going to reveal at a later date, I wonder who would be accused of the 'leak' if that were to happen. The leaker withholding such dirt might be considered slant, but that's improbable (and the dirt would be revealed by Podesta eventually anyway.)
Slashdot Mirror
Many of the highest-performing supercomputers (including China's most powerful) run on HPC cards made by video card companies (Nvidia/AMD). Considering the annual gains on performance of GPUs vs CPUs, this makes sense, and the FLOPS comparison makes the decision easy. Besides, Intel's most powerful chips are made in (IIRC) Germany and Malaysia, so I'm unsure how the USA would stop a European subsidiary from selling to China.
3-4 years from now, competitors will already be on 5nm process, so Intel's finished 7nm plant won't be using the latest process. If production starts more on the 3-year side, they might be releasing 7nm chips a few months before AMD releases 5nm chips. Regardless, AMD will be on 7nm in 2 years, and if Ryzen is as competitive as rumors say, then Intel will be 1-2 years late. Assuming of course that this Fab 42 is Intel's first 7nm plant. They may end up using it to produce chipsets rather than 7nm CPUs that're being manufactured at another plant years earlier.
A 'robots do all the work, humanity enjoys life of leisure' future sounds great but those in power have little interest in that happening. What powerful egotists would rather happen is 'capitalists own robot-run economy, unemployed masses lick their boots for scraps'. Of course you'd need a robotic security force to put down the inevitable rioting, although giving human security forces a taste of upper-class life has traditionally worked to instill loyalty; some capitalists would take the risk for the extra ego boost of knowing people died to protect them. Capitalists would set the laws ensuring they retain all economic and political power.
The base idea of capitalists as 'those who own the means of production' has become less relevant in a skill-based service economy, but as those skills are practicable and learnable by robots which can be owned, the idea will become increasingly relevant.
Once he's in prison, the state will pay his medical bills. Is that irony or has it reached the level of farce?
This comic is a more in-depth yet accessible explanation of quantum computers than anything I'd ever read on Slashdot.
it means that we are closer to the point where AI may pose an existential risk to humans, and that tipping point could occur with very little warning.
Hold your horses, there. If by 'existential risk' you mean 'Cylons nuking the colonies' then this poker AI has little to do with a general intelligence that would be capable of desiring to exterminate humanity.
Now if you meant 'industrial revolution that will leave all humans unemployable because AI does everything better' then you'd have a point. However, the thing with specialist systems is that they have to be recoded to be repurposed to other tasks. Eventually we may have AI that is able to learn a variety of tasks with no manual recoding (does Watson do this?) but until that's generally possible, humans will need to to code the AI for each individual task, and there are likely tasks out there arcane/broad/cheap enough that hiring brilliant software engineers to recode an AI to learn them isn't worth the cost.
It has a 1280x720 6.2" capacitive touchscreen, and the battery will last ~3 hours when running typical games. Zelda is coming out on launch, 3/3, and same day on Wii U. It has 32GB internal storage, and the two SKUs differ only by joy-con color scheme. The storage is expandable by microSDXC cards, presumably eshop games can be directly installed onto them like the 3ds (unlike the Wii U.)
More detailed hardware specs (RAM?) have yet to be revealed, though. I'm particularly curious if it's more graphically powerful than the Wii U.
Headlines from the future:
"Today, Tesla's 'Gigafactory' battery production plant caught fire and then exploded. An initial investigation has traced it to the section of the plant utilized by Samsung to produce its batteries. An engineer has been quoted saying that the sector overheated due to being packed wall-to-wall to capacity; as little as 0.1mm air gap between the equipment and the walls could've prevented this catastrophe, but Samsung allowed 0mm."
There was some question of if it was a fluke against Sedol, now it's confirmed that machine has bested man at Go. First Chess, now Go. I'm wondering where the goalposts will be moved to now.
I can imagine some kind of Turing test where a woman converses with two suitors, and has to choose which to go on a date with; one is a man, the other a machine (cue the jokes). Lines of dialogue used to have to be pre-programmed, but with all the deep learning that modern AI can do, with access to project gutenberg/wikipedia/etc. it can certainly adlib believable and consistent dialogue. Traditional Turing tests tend to be 'won' by machines when the human is too much of a jerk, or when the machine is indistinguishable from a developmentally-challenged human; have a suave man (e.g. amateur standup comedian) competing against a machine that can't get away with pretending to be an idiot, and you'll have a more intriguing competition.
Next step: make an AI that can automatically shut down trolls and fools with citations and deconstructions of illogical statements, and deploy it on every forum and comment section. Please.
Looking at the list, half of the Platinum earners are RPGs and strategy games, with 3 shooters. Of the Gold earners, 9/12 are shooters. Of the Silver earners, 6/16 are strategy/simulation games. Throughout, many of the highest earners are zombie-themed, open-world, or survival sandbox games. There are 1, 2, 2, and 3 free-to-play games in the Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze categories respectively. Yes, the highest-earning f2p game is Dota2.
This suggests that niche titles (RPGs, simulation/strategy titles) are some of the best-sellers on PC, as these genres have traditionally been under-served on consoles (think Diablo 1 on PSX compared to Baldur's Gate, rather than a consolified RPG like Witcher 3).
Remember LibreOffice? Someone will pick this up and keep developing it.
Remember Apple's new slogan:
"There's a dongle for that."
A special version of their Mario Maker title could be ported to mobile pretty easily, that creates "Mario Run"-type levels. There are some Kirby spinoff games that are fully stylus-controlled, those could work on mobile ok. I suspect Pikmin would work great with touch controls. A simplified Zelda with "Infinity Blade"-style combat controls could work, although it would probably have watered-down exploration elements; they might be too protective of the IP to risk it. An "Epona Run" or similar minigame, perhaps might come instead.
I wonder, in the end, which will win out: flying drones going from a warehouse to a retail shopper's domicile, or self-driving delivery trucks (eventually manned by unloading robots that can carry your package to your door)?
Sure, they could be combined, with trucks loaded with package-bearing drones that take off from the truck as it nears the package's destination. I wonder how the time/fuel efficiency works out, with the different ways of doing that. I imagine companies are doing simulations on that already. Prediction: direct drone delivery is most efficient for customers within X miles of a distribution center, truck is most efficient in rural areas, drone-laden truck most efficient in suburbs/cities outside of direct drone range.
The invention of the washing machine has actually been credited for the rise of Feminism, so many women would approve of not having to spend half of each day scrubbing clothes on a washboard.
Technically, if a monopoly is forced to sell at a non-optimal point on the price/response curve simply because the cheaper point would be selling at a loss, lowered costs could allow them to sell at that lower point. There would need to be a compelling reason (antitrust laws, marketing etc.) why they cannot sell at the higher point, however.
Luckily all the high-school dropouts flipping burgers can just go to college and get a degree in liberal arts. Problem solved! They've lived so frugally over the years they surely must have enough money saved up to pay for that plus kids/rent while unemployed.
Oh wait, no, maybe the solution is raising minimum wage? Oh, that'll accelerate automation you say? Hmm.
Institutional unemployment is best paid for institutionally (free education) or else the problems will be paid institutionally anyway (crime, poverty, social welfare programs.) I knew someone who never went to high school because her broke parents were too poor to afford the $50/year fee; if that fee were waived, that $200 would've paid for itself many times over in reduced social welfare costs.
As an increasing number of people are shuffled into a decreasing number of jobs, it'll lead to wage depression. Higher productivity will lower costs of goods and services to offset this somewhat, but lowered job security and making more people unemployable is a more serious price paid. The only winners here are those who own the means of production. Publicly available replicators or central planning are potential solutions. Nationalized real estate + basic income could work as well.
Two, you don't form plural's with an apostrophe.
FTFY
Flash is a pileup of every problem you mention and more. A vector animation plugin had a scripting language (ActionScript) tacked on top of it, and there are multiple versions of this language, each with its own legacy bugs, and newer versions of the plugin support older versions of ActionScript (so that old Flash files won't break). When I coded in it circa 2003, ActionScript was incredibly buggy, with many functions malfunctioning or being completely broken; it's safe to say that few to no parameters were being sanity-checked or sanitized. It was created in the ActiveX era where "rush it out the door before the competitors can" was at the top of the priority list, and anyone expressing concern for security was handed a pink slip and laughed out the door. New features were being added all the time at top speed and who has time to make it secure?
By the time ActiveX got tamped down on in the XP SP2 days, it became more clear how bad Flash (and Java) was in the security department, but I imagine many of the original coders had left, likely with little to no code documentation so it was effectively unmaintainable. Putting out fires of perceived insecurity by fixing publicly found vulnerabilities was the actual security goal then, with little proactive finding of vulnerabilities. Macromedia only made money from their Flash authoring software, not the plugin itself, and there were eventually free/cheaper programs that let you create or at least maintain Flash content, so the money for securing the plugin was never there.
Thankfully Chrome is leading the charge in killing it off for good. Nearly everything it does is done better (and more securely) by another technology now.
Russian propaganda is an excuse and diversion to prevent people from realizing that this is a new effort of the US government to create and disseminate propaganda to the American public, fully backed by the law. The line "2017 intelligence authorization bill calling for new executive branch efforts" sounds a lot to me like "President Trump will have this new propaganda tool at his disposal to hoodwink US residents even further than they already have been by every source already."
It also smacks of a return to the Cold War anti-USSR propaganda spouted by every source. I can't help but feel a "wag the dog" situation is unfolding, with a growing Russian bogeyman to distract us from our growing domestic problems.
I walk away from my desktop for FIVE minutes, and my 5 year old has ordered a $100 million rocket launch to crash a load of honey ham into the Moon, because the moon-men apparently want a ham-and-cheese sandwich. Can I contest this with Visa?
Sure, those three viruses may currently account for 80% of colds (although I suspect it's regional, and the culprits vary from place to place, like the Flu viruses) but if they're eliminated, people not staying home sick with one of those three will instead be exposed to one of the other hundreds of cold viruses until they get sick. Now a different set of 3 viruses will account for most colds, but there will be just as many colds. Anyone who works with the airline industry is still going to get sick frequently.
Additionally, saying there's an $11 billion+ 'cost' of colds is disingenuous, as that money trades hands. From the point of view of the medical industry, they'd be losing $billions every year if the common cold were to be cured. Salaried positions tend to have X amount of paid sick days, which are redeemed by the employee no matter what, so employers pay that money whether or not the employee actually gets sick; you could say 'lost productivity costs' but if those sick days are taken as de facto vacation, the effect is the same. A large proportion of sick days are actually "my bipolar is kicking in and I'm too depressed to come into work" or "my child is sick" or "I need to do something today and you didn't give me off the day I asked for" etc. and those problems won't go away easily.
Sure, these fake news stories exist, and are sometimes highly visible, and apparently get enough clicks to make a profit for the bullshitters...
But does anyone actually believe these stories? Could people just be Liking/retweeting them because they're amusing, in a "ha ha, look at this tabloid article about Bigfoot having Prince Harry's baby!" kind of way? Surely a lot of readers WILL realize that what they're reading is bullshit, or do fact-checking on their own.
'Fake' news is ubiquitous and always has been, in any news source. Look at how many peer-reviewed scientific journal articles are later redacted or found faulty, and what portion of published research is later found to be fabricated, or is disproved later on or unreproduceable. Now think about how many news articles are written for laypersons summarizing scientific developments, that are misleading or dead wrong. Now think about how many PR department press releases are copied verbatim into 'news stories' without any critical thinking or fact checking. Ok, maybe your news department was downsized and you don't have an editor anymore, and noone will tell you "you can't put that shit in our publication", but critical thinking doesn't take a dedicated salaried position, any writer can exercise it.
Binkowski gives a free pass to the news industry, going with an 'incompetence/insufficient budget' excuse, completely ignoring intentional malevolence/profit motive reasons.
Pollster: "Sir, you own a Tesla car according to our records. You are aware, of course, that the Autopilot feature requires a human to be fully alert and ready to take control of the vehicle at all times, aren't you, sir?"
Consumer: "Umm.... why YES... yes, of course. I knew that. Yeah, that's the ticket..."
Pollster: "Ok, just confirming that." *ticks off 'consumer was properly-informed' checkbox*
it would be so much nicer if some disgruntled colleague of Podesta's was providing information to reporters, rather than Vladimir Putin using them as stooges to undermine our democracy.
The American elite has done more to undermine our democracy than Russia ever could. If a colleague of Podesta's dumped the same files onto Wikileaks the effect would be the same. If Podesta's files contained some secret dirt on Trump that he was going to reveal at a later date, I wonder who would be accused of the 'leak' if that were to happen. The leaker withholding such dirt might be considered slant, but that's improbable (and the dirt would be revealed by Podesta eventually anyway.)