Actually it's more basic even than that - from what I've read today the bot would obey requests to parrot incoming content. Most of the crazy things it said were literal repetition of such inputs, though I guess eventually whatever pretraining it had was overwhelmed by the new inputs.
Agreed. This thread has a lot of uninformed comments from folks who've never lived or worked in the Bay Area, making ludicrous claims that eliminating BART to "make space" for "more roads" would solve all our problems.
Ripping out BART and replacing it with roads and buses would be a start. There is plenty more space.
You're shockingly ignorant of the greater SF Bay region if you think that statement makes any sense. It would mean multi-deck city streets, extensive car tunnels under existing roadway, and so forth.
I have a problem with rent seeking, corruption, waste, and forcing people into poverty.
Right...accessible transit is forcing me into poverty...by making it at all possible for me to get to work.
I find this somewhat amusing given my experience when Metro Transit went on strike. I found that when they were on strike traffic improve slightly during my commute times. That may have been better planning on people's part or because of the lack of giant mostly empty buses getting on and off of the highway.
Dunno which MT you're referring to, but the Bay Area sees crippling traffic slowdowns during BART service interruptions such as the strike three years ago.
The argument is that adding a few more outlying stops over the last 10 - 20 years has caused doubled ridership at downtown stops in the past 5 years, which happen to coincide with major economic and population booms in the region. It's pretty clear that the latter, rather than the former, is causative for the increase in system load.
The whole idea that BART ridership increases in the past five years have been caused by limited service expansion over the past two decades is pretty dubious. Public data and statements from BART make it pretty clear that it's the core downtown SF/Oakland stations, and certainly stations between Concord/Fremont and Daly City (that is, original stations from the '71 - '72 openings) that have seen the most ridership growth. That growth in ridership has occurred because of wide spread economic and population growth in the Bay Area, not expanding service to past residents.
BART is about equally priced to driving for a single person, and significantly more expensive for multiple people (i.e. versus carpool). People use it because, despite it's various frustrations, it's genuinely more convenient than driving, not because it's less expensive.
Having a competitive Go engine capable of beating a 9-dan player is huge.
That it is possible at all - yes. However, the Go engine was trained on many more games than a human can play in a lifetime. No doubt a 1000-year-old Go player would also defeat a 33-year-old. It would be interesting to see how AlphaGo compares to a human master when trained on a humanly possible number of games.
correcting faults or errors that lead to downs syndrome
Downs is a bad example, since it involves an entire chromosome (thus "trisomy 21"). Huntington's maybe, since it's just dependent on copy number and you might be able to reduce that even with partially effective editing.
correcting defects doesn't seem like it should be classed as 'designer'
Many people agree, and I'm sure there will be lower regulatory barriers to "gene surgery" with demonstrated need. That said, CRISPR-Cas9 is not very suitable for either use. It has a lots of off-target effects (it interacts both specifically and nonspecifically with DNA), and replacing one allele with another requires that homology-directed repair is activated over other DNA repair mechanisms. In the laboratory, we overcome these limitations by introducing huge amounts of DNA with the desired sequence. People are trying to engineer around these issues, but we're not nearly as close to gene editing human embryos as these articles tend to claim.
So you never, ever turn on JavaScript? Or every time you turn it on you read through every line of it to make sure it hasn't changed and isn't doing anything bad?
Sites load lots of resources from other domains, and script blocking is domain based. Right now Slashdot would like me to load scripts from 10 domains. The site is perfectly functional with just two of them whitelisted.
You can't possibly trust every website you run JavaScript on.
The point is that slashdot.org and wellsfargo.com are a lot more trustworthy than a million random ad networks and tracking services. No, they're not "trusted," but it's great that I can view, say, a random blog with just the blog framework's JS and not twenty other weird third-party scripts.
I switched back to Firefox because vertical tabs, dynamic loading/unloading of tabs from memory, and NoScript. I don't just think that Firefox has these nice features...it really does have them (yes, add-on features count as browser features).
It would be cool to see how Firefox with NoScript does in pwn2own.
There's an infinite number of unknowable facts. I think "fundamentally" is sort of a semantic trick that makes it seems like there's a distinction with a difference even when there might not be one. Exampe: my friend crashed his bike and had retrograde amnesia for a few hours. What caused the crash is unknowable. Although it could have been observed, it just wasn't. There's no way now to go out and capture those photons, long since scattered and reabsorbed, etc. The path he was on has been totally repaved and redesigned. What happened to him is just as unknowable to human beings as esoteric facts about the early universe, the real difference is that bike accidents are mundane and the early universe is interesting.
It's really a Chrome issue, on Firefox LasPass uses an OS dialog. According to TFA there's an outstanding issue report in chromium to make the legit extension URL more clear (the exploit relies on the user not seeing a slight modification to the extension URL).
It would help some if Lastpass switched to only using a native OS window rather than prompting for authentication within the browser
That's already the case in Firefox. The exploit only effects chrome, and even then you can always check to make sure the URL says "chrome-extension" and not something similar.
MATLAB is amazing for general 'data science,' and is very widely used for certain tasks, such as image processing. It provides a huge array of already-implemented algorithms for computer vision, statistics, machine learning, and simulation. Many academic labs use it, and many students receive MATLAB training. On the other hand, MATLAB is proprietary and quite expensive. (It's semi-open source because most of it's functions are MATLAB scripts themselves). The language is very readable, except maybe the native array syntax, and comes with extremely good documentation, but it's clunky for general purpose programming. It has an OK IDE and one of the best debuggers in any language. The runtime is redistributable, so you *can* make portable applications, but again, it's a little clunky. The open-source GNU Octave and Scilab environments are also (mostly) code-compatible with MATLAB. All-in-all, it scores highly in all three aspects you mentioned, but it's very expensive.
Python is also very good, once numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas and ipython/jupyter packages are installed. Like MATLAB, Python is widely used in academia, and lots of students receive training. There are many function/algorithms already available, but somewhat less so than in MATLAB. For example, the statistics capabilities are similar, but MATLAB has more image processing functions. Plotting and visualization also haven't quite caught up to MATLAB yet. Python has the great advantage of being totally free and open-source, and there are a large number of IDEs and debuggers available. Python is also a great general purpose language for self-contained, portable applications that may grow out of data analysis code. The documentation can be lacking in some modules, but there's good free support online via e.g. stackoverflow. Python is readable and easy to learn. It scores about the same as MATLAB, weaker in some areas, stronger in others, and is completely free. There's active development of the analytics modules and going forward Python will probably become more popular for data science.
R is a bit of a special case. It has excellent statistics and machine learning capabilities, and there are a lot of extension packages available with specialized features, but it's really not as general as MATLAB or Python. I'm unaware of anyone using R for image processing, for example. As a language, it's very declarative, and the analyst doesn't need to understand statistics methods or their implementations in order to use them. That's great for beginners and convenient for experts, but can lead beginning/intermediate users astray if they don't appreciate the distinctions between significance and effect size, between different measures of significance/effect size, independence of variables, etc. Plots and visualizations in R tend to look nice when printed as PDF, but they're essentially non-interactive. R isn't general purpose at all, and personally I don't like its language conventions. I had the same experience with Mathematica, some people really like it and it's great for certain things, but I just can't stand the language. Back to R, I think the usefulness is great for statistics, less so for other tasks. Maintainability is OK - IMHO the language is not as intuitive as MATLAB or Python. My impression is that fewer people receive training with R, and it's a little less popular in general. It's the only one of these three languages I didn't see until grad school.
My first choice for any new data analysis task is Python. I think it has the brightest future, and it's available to everyone for free. I'll use MATLAB if one of its built-in functions will save me a ton of time, or if I need to prototype something very rapidly (I guess it's still my strongest language). R I only use if I absolutely need something from one of its third-party modules. Lately, I've been experimenting with Julia, but it's not close to mature enough for my academic projects, let alone commercial ones. Sometimes I use external visualization tools, like LLNL VisIt, if I need to make high-quality, interactive visualizations of very large data sets. Hope that helps, sorry for the wall of text.
Slashdot Mirror
they did a bad thing
Not really, apparently he had permission.
if the bot used Twitter to build its responses
Actually it's more basic even than that - from what I've read today the bot would obey requests to parrot incoming content. Most of the crazy things it said were literal repetition of such inputs, though I guess eventually whatever pretraining it had was overwhelmed by the new inputs.
There is plenty of space for more highways on the peninsula, even apart from replacing BART by roads
You admit that "replacing BART track with roads" was at best a non sequitor, and then refer to subregions not served by BART. OK, then.
the greedy, privileged minority
Right, it's the people who don't own cars that are the rich and privileged. You need to get out more.
half their transportation costs paid for by other tax payers
Does making up arbitrary numbers to suit one's ideology fly in your line of work? Interesting.
Agreed. This thread has a lot of uninformed comments from folks who've never lived or worked in the Bay Area, making ludicrous claims that eliminating BART to "make space" for "more roads" would solve all our problems.
Ripping out BART and replacing it with roads and buses would be a start. There is plenty more space.
You're shockingly ignorant of the greater SF Bay region if you think that statement makes any sense. It would mean multi-deck city streets, extensive car tunnels under existing roadway, and so forth.
I have a problem with rent seeking, corruption, waste, and forcing people into poverty.
Right...accessible transit is forcing me into poverty...by making it at all possible for me to get to work.
I find this somewhat amusing given my experience when Metro Transit went on strike. I found that when they were on strike traffic improve slightly during my commute times. That may have been better planning on people's part or because of the lack of giant mostly empty buses getting on and off of the highway.
Dunno which MT you're referring to, but the Bay Area sees crippling traffic slowdowns during BART service interruptions such as the strike three years ago.
The argument is that adding a few more outlying stops over the last 10 - 20 years has caused doubled ridership at downtown stops in the past 5 years, which happen to coincide with major economic and population booms in the region. It's pretty clear that the latter, rather than the former, is causative for the increase in system load.
The whole idea that BART ridership increases in the past five years have been caused by limited service expansion over the past two decades is pretty dubious. Public data and statements from BART make it pretty clear that it's the core downtown SF/Oakland stations, and certainly stations between Concord/Fremont and Daly City (that is, original stations from the '71 - '72 openings) that have seen the most ridership growth. That growth in ridership has occurred because of wide spread economic and population growth in the Bay Area, not expanding service to past residents.
BART is about equally priced to driving for a single person, and significantly more expensive for multiple people (i.e. versus carpool). People use it because, despite it's various frustrations, it's genuinely more convenient than driving, not because it's less expensive.
They look great when you ignore externalities, sure.
But by continually expanding
The number of people a transit system serves is determined by the choices of those people, not the administrators of the system.
Having a competitive Go engine capable of beating a 9-dan player is huge.
That it is possible at all - yes. However, the Go engine was trained on many more games than a human can play in a lifetime. No doubt a 1000-year-old Go player would also defeat a 33-year-old. It would be interesting to see how AlphaGo compares to a human master when trained on a humanly possible number of games.
correcting faults or errors that lead to downs syndrome
Downs is a bad example, since it involves an entire chromosome (thus "trisomy 21"). Huntington's maybe, since it's just dependent on copy number and you might be able to reduce that even with partially effective editing.
correcting defects doesn't seem like it should be classed as 'designer'
Many people agree, and I'm sure there will be lower regulatory barriers to "gene surgery" with demonstrated need. That said, CRISPR-Cas9 is not very suitable for either use. It has a lots of off-target effects (it interacts both specifically and nonspecifically with DNA), and replacing one allele with another requires that homology-directed repair is activated over other DNA repair mechanisms. In the laboratory, we overcome these limitations by introducing huge amounts of DNA with the desired sequence. People are trying to engineer around these issues, but we're not nearly as close to gene editing human embryos as these articles tend to claim.
This will kill NoScript functionality and the functionality of many other extensions as well.
This is just false, maybe it's an honest mistake but the FUD spreading has to stop. The developer of NoScript is categorical on the topic.
So you never, ever turn on JavaScript? Or every time you turn it on you read through every line of it to make sure it hasn't changed and isn't doing anything bad?
Sites load lots of resources from other domains, and script blocking is domain based. Right now Slashdot would like me to load scripts from 10 domains. The site is perfectly functional with just two of them whitelisted.
You can't possibly trust every website you run JavaScript on.
The point is that slashdot.org and wellsfargo.com are a lot more trustworthy than a million random ad networks and tracking services. No, they're not "trusted," but it's great that I can view, say, a random blog with just the blog framework's JS and not twenty other weird third-party scripts.
and most likely changed, by anyone
Great story, but then where are my commit privileges for Firefox or the Linux kernel?
think they know something other people don't.
I switched back to Firefox because vertical tabs, dynamic loading/unloading of tabs from memory, and NoScript. I don't just think that Firefox has these nice features...it really does have them (yes, add-on features count as browser features).
It would be cool to see how Firefox with NoScript does in pwn2own.
There's an infinite number of unknowable facts. I think "fundamentally" is sort of a semantic trick that makes it seems like there's a distinction with a difference even when there might not be one. Exampe: my friend crashed his bike and had retrograde amnesia for a few hours. What caused the crash is unknowable. Although it could have been observed, it just wasn't. There's no way now to go out and capture those photons, long since scattered and reabsorbed, etc. The path he was on has been totally repaved and redesigned. What happened to him is just as unknowable to human beings as esoteric facts about the early universe, the real difference is that bike accidents are mundane and the early universe is interesting.
It's really a Chrome issue, on Firefox LasPass uses an OS dialog. According to TFA there's an outstanding issue report in chromium to make the legit extension URL more clear (the exploit relies on the user not seeing a slight modification to the extension URL).
It would help some if Lastpass switched to only using a native OS window rather than prompting for authentication within the browser
That's already the case in Firefox. The exploit only effects chrome, and even then you can always check to make sure the URL says "chrome-extension" and not something similar.
MATLAB is amazing for general 'data science,' and is very widely used for certain tasks, such as image processing. It provides a huge array of already-implemented algorithms for computer vision, statistics, machine learning, and simulation. Many academic labs use it, and many students receive MATLAB training. On the other hand, MATLAB is proprietary and quite expensive. (It's semi-open source because most of it's functions are MATLAB scripts themselves). The language is very readable, except maybe the native array syntax, and comes with extremely good documentation, but it's clunky for general purpose programming. It has an OK IDE and one of the best debuggers in any language. The runtime is redistributable, so you *can* make portable applications, but again, it's a little clunky. The open-source GNU Octave and Scilab environments are also (mostly) code-compatible with MATLAB. All-in-all, it scores highly in all three aspects you mentioned, but it's very expensive.
Python is also very good, once numpy, scipy, matplotlib, pandas and ipython/jupyter packages are installed. Like MATLAB, Python is widely used in academia, and lots of students receive training. There are many function/algorithms already available, but somewhat less so than in MATLAB. For example, the statistics capabilities are similar, but MATLAB has more image processing functions. Plotting and visualization also haven't quite caught up to MATLAB yet. Python has the great advantage of being totally free and open-source, and there are a large number of IDEs and debuggers available. Python is also a great general purpose language for self-contained, portable applications that may grow out of data analysis code. The documentation can be lacking in some modules, but there's good free support online via e.g. stackoverflow. Python is readable and easy to learn. It scores about the same as MATLAB, weaker in some areas, stronger in others, and is completely free. There's active development of the analytics modules and going forward Python will probably become more popular for data science.
R is a bit of a special case. It has excellent statistics and machine learning capabilities, and there are a lot of extension packages available with specialized features, but it's really not as general as MATLAB or Python. I'm unaware of anyone using R for image processing, for example. As a language, it's very declarative, and the analyst doesn't need to understand statistics methods or their implementations in order to use them. That's great for beginners and convenient for experts, but can lead beginning/intermediate users astray if they don't appreciate the distinctions between significance and effect size, between different measures of significance/effect size, independence of variables, etc. Plots and visualizations in R tend to look nice when printed as PDF, but they're essentially non-interactive. R isn't general purpose at all, and personally I don't like its language conventions. I had the same experience with Mathematica, some people really like it and it's great for certain things, but I just can't stand the language. Back to R, I think the usefulness is great for statistics, less so for other tasks. Maintainability is OK - IMHO the language is not as intuitive as MATLAB or Python. My impression is that fewer people receive training with R, and it's a little less popular in general. It's the only one of these three languages I didn't see until grad school.
My first choice for any new data analysis task is Python. I think it has the brightest future, and it's available to everyone for free. I'll use MATLAB if one of its built-in functions will save me a ton of time, or if I need to prototype something very rapidly (I guess it's still my strongest language). R I only use if I absolutely need something from one of its third-party modules. Lately, I've been experimenting with Julia, but it's not close to mature enough for my academic projects, let alone commercial ones. Sometimes I use external visualization tools, like LLNL VisIt, if I need to make high-quality, interactive visualizations of very large data sets. Hope that helps, sorry for the wall of text.
The one where last year they had 8 cores and 3 GB RAM, obviously.
these were guestimates, not hard statistics.
I do feel like it says a lot about his mindset as an Apollo astronaut.
there was plenty of money being spent on military interests
Including in the space program itself. Rockets are rockets, and you can aim them however you like.
Needing use license from an artist to commercially reproduce their work is stupid?
It certainly is, if there aren't a bunch of critical exceptions worked into the law. Exceptions for insurance inventories, used sales, etc.