Europe as a whole sat on its ass (except for Germany, Austria, and their allies) for TEN FREAKING MONTHS! It's one thing for a country separated by an entire ocean, but good fuckin lord, practically the only reason a European country would take action during this period was after they were already invaded.
Although I agree more effort should have been made sooner, this is an oversimplification. Europe 'as a whole' did not exist. There was no EU or anything like that. After the (the quite recent) horrors of WW1, the British and French populace weren't exactly jumping to get into another war and subsequently, neither were their representatives. Everybody was in "[Our country] first" and "Don't send our boys to die" mode, so Poland's invasion was troublesome, but not [Our country]'s problem (tm). A very slightly similar example would be the sentiment in the US to pull troops out of Iraq.
The US was isolationist at the time because we wanted nothing to do with your kings, queens, kaisers, and fuhrers because they looked all the same to us
This is trivially false as France was not a monarchy at the time. It was a republic. Like you know, the US. The real reason is below.
But the lesson we took from Pearl Harbor is that even if you don't want a war, you're going to get one anyways.
So.. Let me slightly twist your words into this: "practically the only reason a [...] country would take action during this period was after they were already [attacked]" It's okay, we all did that.
This meant we had to, among other things, assist the fucking USSR that we had to go to proxy wars with while we funded Europe's reconstruction with the Marshall plan, even though it wasn't our fault that they decided to blow themselves up.
Yes, let's describe WW2 as "Europe deciding to blow themselves up". On point, my friend.
Note by the way that, although slightly morbid, WW2 left the US in an exceptional state: It had no destruction on its home soil or significant internal political turmoil as well as an extremely ramped up industrial and commercial sector. Mostly all other world powers had very very significant material, infrastructural and/or political issues to deal with. Speaking strictly in terms of geopolitical power, WW2 was a big win for the US.
Can they, though? It seems to me that a lot of voters hate 'both' parties and the political system in general and thus do not want to identify with them. That doesn't mean that their views aren't decidedly progressive/conservative.
But leftists seem completely oblivious to their own behavior that leads the silent majority to rather want put up with Trump's shit, than theirs
The majority of voters voted for Hillary Clinton, which invalidates your claim. However, I think the point is more that people were fed up with 'traditional' politics (of which Hillary was pretty much the poster child), not 'leftist shit'. Ironically, the result has been that, at least in part, the USA has been subject to a caricature of traditional politics, with cronyism and corruption running wild and campaign promises being worth the air they loudly displaced.
I did only RTFA and not the paper, but upon reinspection of TFA there are (multiple!) mentions of the results concerning biomass. I'm not sure whether they edited it or I just completely misread. In any case: Thanks for the correction!
The key thing here is that we are counting down, not up. We always have been, but a lot of people haven't realized that yet. Going from 3 to 4 to 5 can seem very similar to going from 5 to 4 to 3. The real kicker however is going from 1 to 0.
People perceive the advancement of technology as counting up, as a number that will increase for the foreseeable future. And it will. But the issue at hand is not whether technology will advance. It is whether humans will be able to contribute to the economy in a significant way. That depends on our capacity relative to everything else, which is a declining number. Sure, some technology has boosted our capacity, but in the end we must face the very real limitations of our bodies: signal processing speed, maximum strength, sensor resolution, actuation accuracy, etc. The question is not whether we will be surpassed by more efficient beings, but when.
Yeah, these goddamn investigative journalists with their extensive premeditated research having the fucking gall to publish their findings! I only trust people on Youtube pulling unfounded conspiracy theories out of their ass very very loudly whilst whoring for likes and subscriptions.
According to the following study, fruit, vegetables and fish(!) can be produced at EUR 3.50 to 4.00 per kg in vertical farms, which is surprisingly cheap: http://large.stanford.edu/cour...
I'm pretty sure that the big staple crops (wheat, rIce, etc.) aren't going to be farmed in vertical farms, but I can see the Wholefoods kind of stuff being farmed there.
Add to the above the gratuitous praise for and link to some nVidia technology and this is easily the most dreadful thing that has been on Slashdot in 2018.
Yes, Russia is worse. Somalia worse still. Congratulations, you win the Paralympic gold medal. Now try running your comparison against able-bodied countries.
Asus actually made devices exactly like the OP requested: The Asus Transformer Book Trio I wanted to buy one of those as a best of both worlds mobile device. I still think it makes sense, albeit to a niche of consumers.
I can't find the source, but I remember that both Google and Microsoft were said to have pushed Asus to stop producing such devices. Something about changing the licensing to disallow devices being sold with a second OS.
That short was terrible. It describes a single position in quite an obnoxious and drawn out way. I'll save others the 10 minutes: "If you teleport by copying and destroying the original, you destroy the original. The original doesn't want to be destroyed."
If you disagree with the above, please tell me what other points were made.
Your consciousness ends? Well that happens every time you go to sleep.
Exactly this. Regaining consciousness after being teleported is functionally identical to waking up: A body produces a consciousness that has memories of that body and drives to preserve that body. It's a slightly less spectacular question, but 'do you die every night?' is just as interesting philosophically.
My core take on it is that the concept of (macroscopic) identity isn't inherent to things in the universe. The question whether you die every night is like asking whether the you of yesterday is the you of today (or even between moments, like GP said). That in turn is like asking whether the Eiffel tower of yesterday is the Eiffel tower of today. My answer to that is that it is: if we say it is. As humans we label stuff.
Something isn't inherently the Eiffel tower. We labeled it as such and we decide what attributes make it fit the label. With our neural networks we classify things in the world as being Eiffel towers or not. We do the same for other humans. Taking the teleporter (or physically indistinguishable clone) thought experiment: the thought experiment guarantees that no other human would sense a difference between the original and the clone. We'd all label the clone the same and go on with our lives. We have a hard enough time discerning identical twins, as it stands.
The same labeling (identifying) process applies to ourselves. That labeling of self is complicated because we have information about ourselves of a very weird (and to others unknowable) form, but the process is essentially the same: Define the attributes of the thing you want to label and label it. You could come up with a definition in which you don't die in a teleportation scenario. You could come up with a definition in which you die each time you go to sleep. Whichever you choose won't change anyting physically: A body produces a consciousness that has memories of that body and drives to preserve that body. It only influences your decision making, because in one of those definitions you'd live every day like it was your last ("tough luck, tomorrow consciousness!"). And that is exactly what labels evolved for: to be able to act in the universe more effectively.
There will be no war with "AI" per say. It will be enhanced "evolving" humans verses natural humans (luddies). There is no skynet.
You say "Many smart people are shouting the dangers of AI at the moment when we couldn't be further from it." yet imply that full fledged high bandwidth BCIs are somehow around the corner. They're not. Current BCIs are a joke compared to what current AI can do.
I do think we agree where sentience will end up, but I also believe you overestimate the role organics in general and humans in particular will have in participating in the transition. Let me put it like this: tacking chips onto a human brain is like putting wheels on a horse. It could work, but not as well as just ditching the animal part altogether.
We're already living in a simulation and death already reboots us into a new infant form
No. The death of a human is like a (fairly unique) executable file being deleted. Your consciousness isn't even continuous over multiple days. You just think it is.
Only tangentially related, but Blackberry can go fuck themselves. I bought their flagship Priv phone at launch at a premium price (because I love hardware keyboards) and when the moment passed where they legally did not have to provide security updates any more they said 'go fuck yourselves' to their customers. I received their message clearly and will be steering well away from anything of theirs.
1. It's still obviously a platform game, even at the 'hardest' level. Try it and tell yourself platforming experience doesn't matter. You can even sort of recognize the ladders (which, given the goal of the game, are pretty crucial). 2. The algorithm they are comparing against is designed for exploration, not for getting to a goal as quickly as possible. See: https://pathak22.github.io/nor... Note also that that comparison was not about pitting humans against the best algorithm for this specific game, but to highlight the point that there is information in the specific representation in objects that humans use and NN algorithms don't (yet).
I feel you, buddy. Welcome to the world of people who like hardware keyboards on their mobile devices. Get ready to be mocked for being old-fashioned by everybody.
[The rise of populism and political fragmentation in Western Europe are] entirely unrelated.
Wouldn't you agree that the greater flexibility of the people in their voting decisions is at least in part responsible for the rise in ease with which political parties in Western Europe can gain influence? Look at parties such as the Pirate Party or in the Netherlands the Party for the Animals. I'd say that such parties would not have had any chance in the 50's, but such parties now have seats in parliaments in Western Europe. The same mechanism also allows all kinds of silly populist parties to pop up (and as said, generally crash and burn quickly).
In most cases, you get quite a few parties that represent certain sections of populace
That is of course largely true, but the one issue parties (as mentioned) are definitely a thing now and they are influencing the political agenda and discourse. I think their existence shows that people approach voting differently now. Instead of generally agreeing with the ideology of a party and choosing representatives, (some) people see voting for parliament as a referendum on the issue they care about the most. Not: "I want to do my part in choosing capable people to run the country in a good way", but "I want to be heard". In a way, it is a more egocentric approach and an extension of increased individualism (Remember when everybody was really worried about that in the 90's?).
In case of states like US, where there are only two parties
This is not true. There are more parties in the US (Jill Steins Greens, for instance), but the winner takes all system stabilizes (in the game theoretic sense) on two large parties. It clearly works very badly. I hope the Americans are going to get around to fixing their politics soon, but I have little hope for that.
You are correct and GP is simply appealing to authority.
Harvard sounds nice and all, but the reality is that political fragmentation in Western Europe is something different than the rise of populism, although they are related a bit. It is also a vastly different situation than the corrupt and insanely polarized red-blue situation in the US legislative branch.
Increased political fragmentation is actually a result of (social) freedom, with fewer people voting 'the way their parents voted', or along religious or other strong cultural group lines; People are far more flexible in which party they vote for. Besides that, civilization has become much more media-oriented and collectively we are all more susceptible to the vastly increased number of bells, whistles and rattles that these rich media offer. Thus newcomers touting attractive soundbites can amass lots of votes before (generally) crashing and burning due to lack of organisation and experience. This includes populist parties.
The 'rise of populism' is something in which 9/11 and the geopolitics around it cannot be ignored. The only troublesome 'populist' parties are pretty much all anti-Muslim or more generally anti-brown-foreigner. Raging wars in the Middle East have increased and are increasing the global cultural divides. It's a pretty big ask for democracies in Western Europe to prevent the populist parties from feeding on that. It's not going great, but it could be much much worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Europe as a whole sat on its ass (except for Germany, Austria, and their allies) for TEN FREAKING MONTHS! It's one thing for a country separated by an entire ocean, but good fuckin lord, practically the only reason a European country would take action during this period was after they were already invaded.
Although I agree more effort should have been made sooner, this is an oversimplification.
Europe 'as a whole' did not exist. There was no EU or anything like that. After the (the quite recent) horrors of WW1, the British and French populace weren't exactly jumping to get into another war and subsequently, neither were their representatives. Everybody was in "[Our country] first" and "Don't send our boys to die" mode, so Poland's invasion was troublesome, but not [Our country]'s problem (tm). A very slightly similar example would be the sentiment in the US to pull troops out of Iraq.
The US was isolationist at the time because we wanted nothing to do with your kings, queens, kaisers, and fuhrers because they looked all the same to us
This is trivially false as France was not a monarchy at the time. It was a republic. Like you know, the US. The real reason is below.
But the lesson we took from Pearl Harbor is that even if you don't want a war, you're going to get one anyways.
So.. Let me slightly twist your words into this: "practically the only reason a [...] country would take action during this period was after they were already [attacked]"
It's okay, we all did that.
This meant we had to, among other things, assist the fucking USSR that we had to go to proxy wars with while we funded Europe's reconstruction with the Marshall plan, even though it wasn't our fault that they decided to blow themselves up.
Yes, let's describe WW2 as "Europe deciding to blow themselves up". On point, my friend.
Note by the way that, although slightly morbid, WW2 left the US in an exceptional state: It had no destruction on its home soil or significant internal political turmoil as well as an extremely ramped up industrial and commercial sector. Mostly all other world powers had very very significant material, infrastructural and/or political issues to deal with. Speaking strictly in terms of geopolitical power, WW2 was a big win for the US.
They can be swayed to one side or the other
Can they, though? It seems to me that a lot of voters hate 'both' parties and the political system in general and thus do not want to identify with them. That doesn't mean that their views aren't decidedly progressive/conservative.
But leftists seem completely oblivious to their own behavior that leads the silent majority to rather want put up with Trump's shit, than theirs
The majority of voters voted for Hillary Clinton, which invalidates your claim. However, I think the point is more that people were fed up with 'traditional' politics (of which Hillary was pretty much the poster child), not 'leftist shit'. Ironically, the result has been that, at least in part, the USA has been subject to a caricature of traditional politics, with cronyism and corruption running wild and campaign promises being worth the air they loudly displaced.
You are correct.
I did only RTFA and not the paper, but upon reinspection of TFA there are (multiple!) mentions of the results concerning biomass. I'm not sure whether they edited it or I just completely misread. In any case: Thanks for the correction!
0.01% of life by weight is currently humans, but we've killed 83% of mammal species... by species count? individuals?
Individuals. RTFA.
what percentage of mammal species does humanity account for? by weight or by head count?
36%, by head count. RTFA.
what about other groups? insects? viruses? reptiles?
They 'measured' marine mammals (80%), plants (50%), fish (15%). RTFA.
Get your shit together, AC. Get it all together and put it in a backpack.
Actually, since we're on Slashdot and all, the instruction should be:
Install your own VPN server and use that on all public networks. It's not that hard.
- https://openvpn.net/index.php/...
- https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/h...
- https://play.google.com/store/...
In numbers:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/an...
The key thing here is that we are counting down, not up. We always have been, but a lot of people haven't realized that yet.
Going from 3 to 4 to 5 can seem very similar to going from 5 to 4 to 3. The real kicker however is going from 1 to 0.
People perceive the advancement of technology as counting up, as a number that will increase for the foreseeable future. And it will. But the issue at hand is not whether technology will advance. It is whether humans will be able to contribute to the economy in a significant way. That depends on our capacity relative to everything else, which is a declining number. Sure, some technology has boosted our capacity, but in the end we must face the very real limitations of our bodies: signal processing speed, maximum strength, sensor resolution, actuation accuracy, etc. The question is not whether we will be surpassed by more efficient beings, but when.
Agreed, which is exactly why routing your malicious traffic through Russian servers is a great idea.
Russian citizens? If you were a hacker (of any nationality), servers in which country would you use to hide your tracks?
Yeah, these goddamn investigative journalists with their extensive premeditated research having the fucking gall to publish their findings!
I only trust people on Youtube pulling unfounded conspiracy theories out of their ass very very loudly whilst whoring for likes and subscriptions.
According to the following study, fruit, vegetables and fish(!) can be produced at EUR 3.50 to 4.00 per kg in vertical farms, which is surprisingly cheap:
http://large.stanford.edu/cour...
I'm pretty sure that the big staple crops (wheat, rIce, etc.) aren't going to be farmed in vertical farms, but I can see the Wholefoods kind of stuff being farmed there.
Exactly. This isn't fucking Quora.
Add to the above the gratuitous praise for and link to some nVidia technology and this is easily the most dreadful thing that has been on Slashdot in 2018.
Yes, Russia is worse. Somalia worse still. Congratulations, you win the Paralympic gold medal.
Now try running your comparison against able-bodied countries.
Asus actually made devices exactly like the OP requested:
The Asus Transformer Book Trio
I wanted to buy one of those as a best of both worlds mobile device. I still think it makes sense, albeit to a niche of consumers.
I can't find the source, but I remember that both Google and Microsoft were said to have pushed Asus to stop producing such devices. Something about changing the licensing to disallow devices being sold with a second OS.
That short was terrible. It describes a single position in quite an obnoxious and drawn out way.
I'll save others the 10 minutes: "If you teleport by copying and destroying the original, you destroy the original. The original doesn't want to be destroyed."
If you disagree with the above, please tell me what other points were made.
Your consciousness ends? Well that happens every time you go to sleep.
Exactly this. Regaining consciousness after being teleported is functionally identical to waking up: A body produces a consciousness that has memories of that body and drives to preserve that body. It's a slightly less spectacular question, but 'do you die every night?' is just as interesting philosophically.
My core take on it is that the concept of (macroscopic) identity isn't inherent to things in the universe. The question whether you die every night is like asking whether the you of yesterday is the you of today (or even between moments, like GP said). That in turn is like asking whether the Eiffel tower of yesterday is the Eiffel tower of today. My answer to that is that it is: if we say it is. As humans we label stuff.
Something isn't inherently the Eiffel tower. We labeled it as such and we decide what attributes make it fit the label. With our neural networks we classify things in the world as being Eiffel towers or not. We do the same for other humans. Taking the teleporter (or physically indistinguishable clone) thought experiment: the thought experiment guarantees that no other human would sense a difference between the original and the clone. We'd all label the clone the same and go on with our lives. We have a hard enough time discerning identical twins, as it stands.
The same labeling (identifying) process applies to ourselves. That labeling of self is complicated because we have information about ourselves of a very weird (and to others unknowable) form, but the process is essentially the same: Define the attributes of the thing you want to label and label it. You could come up with a definition in which you don't die in a teleportation scenario. You could come up with a definition in which you die each time you go to sleep. Whichever you choose won't change anyting physically: A body produces a consciousness that has memories of that body and drives to preserve that body. It only influences your decision making, because in one of those definitions you'd live every day like it was your last ("tough luck, tomorrow consciousness!"). And that is exactly what labels evolved for: to be able to act in the universe more effectively.
Relevant reading material:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There will be no war with "AI" per say. It will be enhanced "evolving" humans verses natural humans (luddies). There is no skynet.
You say "Many smart people are shouting the dangers of AI at the moment when we couldn't be further from it." yet imply that full fledged high bandwidth BCIs are somehow around the corner. They're not. Current BCIs are a joke compared to what current AI can do.
I do think we agree where sentience will end up, but I also believe you overestimate the role organics in general and humans in particular will have in participating in the transition. Let me put it like this: tacking chips onto a human brain is like putting wheels on a horse. It could work, but not as well as just ditching the animal part altogether.
Melissa Mayers
Just as famous as tech CEOs Bob Gates, Steven Jabs and Marco Zurkberg.
We're already living in a simulation and death already reboots us into a new infant form
No. The death of a human is like a (fairly unique) executable file being deleted.
Your consciousness isn't even continuous over multiple days. You just think it is.
Only tangentially related, but Blackberry can go fuck themselves. I bought their flagship Priv phone at launch at a premium price (because I love hardware keyboards) and when the moment passed where they legally did not have to provide security updates any more they said 'go fuck yourselves' to their customers. I received their message clearly and will be steering well away from anything of theirs.
Excellent trolling, sir!
1. It's still obviously a platform game, even at the 'hardest' level. Try it and tell yourself platforming experience doesn't matter. You can even sort of recognize the ladders (which, given the goal of the game, are pretty crucial).
2. The algorithm they are comparing against is designed for exploration, not for getting to a goal as quickly as possible. See: https://pathak22.github.io/nor...
Note also that that comparison was not about pitting humans against the best algorithm for this specific game, but to highlight the point that there is information in the specific representation in objects that humans use and NN algorithms don't (yet).
I feel you, buddy. Welcome to the world of people who like hardware keyboards on their mobile devices. Get ready to be mocked for being old-fashioned by everybody.
[The rise of populism and political fragmentation in Western Europe are] entirely unrelated.
Wouldn't you agree that the greater flexibility of the people in their voting decisions is at least in part responsible for the rise in ease with which political parties in Western Europe can gain influence? Look at parties such as the Pirate Party or in the Netherlands the Party for the Animals. I'd say that such parties would not have had any chance in the 50's, but such parties now have seats in parliaments in Western Europe. The same mechanism also allows all kinds of silly populist parties to pop up (and as said, generally crash and burn quickly).
In most cases, you get quite a few parties that represent certain sections of populace
That is of course largely true, but the one issue parties (as mentioned) are definitely a thing now and they are influencing the political agenda and discourse. I think their existence shows that people approach voting differently now. Instead of generally agreeing with the ideology of a party and choosing representatives, (some) people see voting for parliament as a referendum on the issue they care about the most. Not: "I want to do my part in choosing capable people to run the country in a good way", but "I want to be heard". In a way, it is a more egocentric approach and an extension of increased individualism (Remember when everybody was really worried about that in the 90's?).
In case of states like US, where there are only two parties
This is not true. There are more parties in the US (Jill Steins Greens, for instance), but the winner takes all system stabilizes (in the game theoretic sense) on two large parties. It clearly works very badly. I hope the Americans are going to get around to fixing their politics soon, but I have little hope for that.
You are correct and GP is simply appealing to authority.
Harvard sounds nice and all, but the reality is that political fragmentation in Western Europe is something different than the rise of populism, although they are related a bit. It is also a vastly different situation than the corrupt and insanely polarized red-blue situation in the US legislative branch.
Increased political fragmentation is actually a result of (social) freedom, with fewer people voting 'the way their parents voted', or along religious or other strong cultural group lines; People are far more flexible in which party they vote for. Besides that, civilization has become much more media-oriented and collectively we are all more susceptible to the vastly increased number of bells, whistles and rattles that these rich media offer. Thus newcomers touting attractive soundbites can amass lots of votes before (generally) crashing and burning due to lack of organisation and experience. This includes populist parties.
The 'rise of populism' is something in which 9/11 and the geopolitics around it cannot be ignored. The only troublesome 'populist' parties are pretty much all anti-Muslim or more generally anti-brown-foreigner. Raging wars in the Middle East have increased and are increasing the global cultural divides. It's a pretty big ask for democracies in Western Europe to prevent the populist parties from feeding on that. It's not going great, but it could be much much worse.