Strongly agree! Being of the engineering persuasion, my first instinct is to measure... something. Look into it even a little bit and you see there isn't even agreement on symptoms vs causes. The complexity is far beyond what most people are motivated to understand. Reducing it to sound-bite level summarization just adds to confusion.
You touched on a sadly telling point: right now our track record for detection and action to intervene before suicide or killing spree is abysmally poor.
With respect, mdsolar, your view of Pax Solaris depends on taking an extremely shallow view of solar energy while diving deep into the gritty problems with how nuclear energy has been used in the past.
Solar energy is intrinsically diffuse while nuclear power sources are intrinsically focused. Those characteristics are fixed in reality but little else about them is. We certainly should not do "more of the same old" in nuclear power. We just as certainly need far better ways to collect and focus solar power.
Finding better ways to do things is what technical people should be doing.
The first step requires a significant cultural change, which is always difficult. We collectively need to stop considering mental illness as a failure of character, a visitation by some imaginary deity/demon, or any of the other cruelly fallacious delusions out there. Truth is, the mind is extremely complex, very poorly understood, and probably never quite 'right' in the sense we would want it to be. In other words, we are all nucking futs and we had better learn to be more kind to each other.
After that first step, we most definitely should start talking, openly and kindly, about mental health online and in-person and in all social constructs.
As someone who has followed RasPi since the beginning, I trust Liz Upton. She has always provided plain, unadorned truth to the best of her knowledge.
If she says someone wanted to pay them to put shit in the ice cream, I believe her. That the approach was so bold suggests to me this was not an isolated event. What we old grumpy technologists need to do is hunt these creeps down and make sure no computer is ever loyal to them again.
A mere fragment of the summary tells the important point: Marc Andreessen... is one of the biggest investors in technology.
He was once a technologist but he has been a finance puke ever since. As with all of that kind, his primary interest now is in blowing the biggest bubbles he can bet on. Then he will quietly exit by selling to fools before the bubble bursts.
Why will your parent's retirement funds buy into these bubbles near their end of life? Because the same finance pukes tell them too!
Of the many items and functions I have put under computer control at my houses, exactly none of them were ever visible on any Internet link.
This. What a bare prompt and simple interactive language provide is a nearly-zero experience threshold for initial engagement. Especially for the first touch and the next dozen or so, those environments are far less likely to make a student's early experiences be failures.
I have thought that Python could perform the same role. Like BASIC it is easy to get the first interactions right. It also has the advantage of being durably useful as the student progresses, unlike the "whizzy" environments, Scratch for one example.
Think of all the GUI conventions (that we have internalized by now) needed before doing any interaction. Where is that knowledge supposed to come from the very first time a student is exposed to a computer?
I see this as the proverbial "big stick" to push back against the conglomeration of TLAs and communication oligarchies. "You don't want strong encryption? Then we will do this!"
Maybe to some extent but I appreciate more protection from what some other texting moron might do. You can only control yourself and your own actions. Have you looked around yourself on the road lately?
Is this not hill-climbing on an assumed-flat-ish response surface? There is history and a whole forest of approaches using approximation when the "cost" function is expensive to evaluate. Solving a honking big set of PDEs certainly qualifies for that.
A big part of the history is work to predict whether the degree of assumed flatness is not in conflict with reality. That in itself can become computationally expensive.
I think you are spot-on the crux of the issue. This will determine the future of fully-autonomous vehicles. Even if there are legislative/regulatory decisions in place before the first fatality, the ambulance-chasers will do their best/worst to get around them.
Privately owned vehicles can be covered by existing case law -- if it's yours then you are responsible even if your were sleeping | drunk | makin' whoopie.
Driverless taxis or their taxpaying equivalents are the new issue. One solution would be a broad legislative indemnification for decisions made by approved software. [ Definition of "approved software" is left as an exercise for the reader.]
Since both the automobile and ambulance-chaser lobbyists will oppose this with every fiber of their wallets, I don't see any such legislative action happening anytime soon. Without it, I don't think the autonomous taxi will happen at meaningful size.
This, exactly. Silly Valley and the business press blundered along with the charade that the sad dregs left after Agilent split off were in any way related to the real HP.
Yes Carly made things even worse (and of course she would be disastrous as POTUS) but all she had left to work with was bullshit and hubris.
This was my thought as well. Sleep is when you process all the unresolved bullshit from the day. Paleo times were far more grounded in reality so very little bs to process. Time was better spent looking for food.
Exactly. How much money did schoolkids (and others) send to Haiti? Did the people in the destroyed town get any of it or see any benefit from it?
I have always thought this was the driver behind the political frenzy of anthropocentric climate change (as opposed to both climate science and Ice Age!)
The real mystery is why these few drooling idiots get any attention whatsoever. FFS go cover a high school science fair or even a rural county fair -- they would be more interesting and the people far more appealing.
Slashdot Mirror
Strongly agree! Being of the engineering persuasion, my first instinct is to measure ... something. Look into it even a little bit and you see there isn't even agreement on symptoms vs causes. The complexity is far beyond what most people are motivated to understand. Reducing it to sound-bite level summarization just adds to confusion.
You touched on a sadly telling point: right now our track record for detection and action to intervene before suicide or killing spree is abysmally poor.
Tried to follow your link, was forbidden.
"Patronizing"? Really, you are a fool. I was speaking of myself as well as others.
Wonderfully said! Thank you.
With respect, mdsolar, your view of Pax Solaris depends on taking an extremely shallow view of solar energy while diving deep into the gritty problems with how nuclear energy has been used in the past.
Solar energy is intrinsically diffuse while nuclear power sources are intrinsically focused. Those characteristics are fixed in reality but little else about them is. We certainly should not do "more of the same old" in nuclear power. We just as certainly need far better ways to collect and focus solar power.
Finding better ways to do things is what technical people should be doing.
The first step requires a significant cultural change, which is always difficult. We collectively need to stop considering mental illness as a failure of character, a visitation by some imaginary deity/demon, or any of the other cruelly fallacious delusions out there. Truth is, the mind is extremely complex, very poorly understood, and probably never quite 'right' in the sense we would want it to be. In other words, we are all nucking futs and we had better learn to be more kind to each other.
After that first step, we most definitely should start talking, openly and kindly, about mental health online and in-person and in all social constructs.
As someone who has followed RasPi since the beginning, I trust Liz Upton. She has always provided plain, unadorned truth to the best of her knowledge.
If she says someone wanted to pay them to put shit in the ice cream, I believe her. That the approach was so bold suggests to me this was not an isolated event. What we old grumpy technologists need to do is hunt these creeps down and make sure no computer is ever loyal to them again.
A mere fragment of the summary tells the important point: ... is one of the biggest investors in technology.
Marc Andreessen
He was once a technologist but he has been a finance puke ever since. As with all of that kind, his primary interest now is in blowing the biggest bubbles he can bet on. Then he will quietly exit by selling to fools before the bubble bursts.
Why will your parent's retirement funds buy into these bubbles near their end of life? Because the same finance pukes tell them too!
Of the many items and functions I have put under computer control at my houses, exactly none of them were ever visible on any Internet link.
"... teaching kids how to question statistics, and how to spot when someone is using statistics to spout bullshit"
This is exactly what needs to be taught! Shysters keep spouting BS because it generally works.
This. What a bare prompt and simple interactive language provide is a nearly-zero experience threshold for initial engagement. Especially for the first touch and the next dozen or so, those environments are far less likely to make a student's early experiences be failures.
I have thought that Python could perform the same role. Like BASIC it is easy to get the first interactions right. It also has the advantage of being durably useful as the student progresses, unlike the "whizzy" environments, Scratch for one example.
Think of all the GUI conventions (that we have internalized by now) needed before doing any interaction. Where is that knowledge supposed to come from the very first time a student is exposed to a computer?
and this is the most encouraging comment around!
I see this as the proverbial "big stick" to push back against the conglomeration of TLAs and communication oligarchies.
"You don't want strong encryption? Then we will do this!"
You fail high-school civics.
Maybe to some extent but I appreciate more protection from what some other texting moron might do. You can only control yourself and your own actions. Have you looked around yourself on the road lately?
Is this not hill-climbing on an assumed-flat-ish response surface? There is history and a whole forest of approaches using approximation when the "cost" function is expensive to evaluate. Solving a honking big set of PDEs certainly qualifies for that.
A big part of the history is work to predict whether the degree of assumed flatness is not in conflict with reality. That in itself can become computationally expensive.
Fun stuff though!
I think you are spot-on the crux of the issue. This will determine the future of fully-autonomous vehicles. Even if there are legislative/regulatory decisions in place before the first fatality, the ambulance-chasers will do their best/worst to get around them.
Privately owned vehicles can be covered by existing case law -- if it's yours then you are responsible even if your were sleeping | drunk | makin' whoopie.
Driverless taxis or their taxpaying equivalents are the new issue. One solution would be a broad legislative indemnification for decisions made by approved software. [ Definition of "approved software" is left as an exercise for the reader.]
Since both the automobile and ambulance-chaser lobbyists will oppose this with every fiber of their wallets, I don't see any such legislative action happening anytime soon. Without it, I don't think the autonomous taxi will happen at meaningful size.
Well-played Sir!
This, exactly. Silly Valley and the business press blundered along with the charade that the sad dregs left after Agilent split off were in any way related to the real HP.
Yes Carly made things even worse (and of course she would be disastrous as POTUS) but all she had left to work with was bullshit and hubris.
This is spot-on. Look at political contribution records and reports. Charter school operators have been buying favor at astonishing rates.
This was my thought as well. Sleep is when you process all the unresolved bullshit from the day. Paleo times were far more grounded in reality so very little bs to process. Time was better spent looking for food.
Wine from nose: Snort!
Exactly. How much money did schoolkids (and others) send to Haiti? Did the people in the destroyed town get any of it or see any benefit from it?
I have always thought this was the driver behind the political frenzy of anthropocentric climate change (as opposed to both climate science and Ice Age!)
They tipped their hand a little to early.
Not to be tedious but those are just r/c quadcopters. Many people print them on hobby-class 3D printers.
Printing a customized Predator would be a worthy goal, calling this effort "research" is just pathetic.
The real mystery is why these few drooling idiots get any attention whatsoever. FFS go cover a high school science fair or even a rural county fair -- they would be more interesting and the people far more appealing.
Just call for a carefully planned line of bunker-busters to be dropped. Instant bypass and reservoir.
What could possibly go wrong?
It is pure fiction. As in: has been talked about for years but nobody can actually get it to work.
Patents like this are a travesty and a long lineup of attorneys and examiners should be ashamed of themselves.