It's hard to say without doing all the implementation work, but the paper does say that the algo is "...general enough to describe both local polynomial and Gaussian process approximations..." and there is a section called "Local Gaussian process surrogates". So, they do in fact incorporate this in the larger framework of their algo.
In fact, they claim "...that the accuracy is nearly identical for all the cases, but the approximate chains use fewer evaluations of the true model, reducing costs by more than an order of magnitude for quadratic or Gaussian process approximations (Figure 10b)."
Indeed, though that quote is simply pointing out that the relative performance of their algorithm is at its best with its mode set to local Gaussian approximations.
It looks to me that the new algorithm offers no real speed advantage over gaussian process optimization. Rather, by making similar local approximations it gains some convergence proofs. Those are nice and all, but not often relevant to real-world applications.
I am a US citizen as frustrated about unauthorized domestic surveillance as anyone. But this summary goes too far. Finding, keeping and using vulnerabilities is exactly what the NSA is supposed to do, and there is nothing questionable about that behavior.
If the submitter wants the government to have a group that finds and discloses vulnerabilities as part of its remit, then make a case for creating such a group. Don't saddle the NSA with the job.
For what it's worth, the open-source crowd has made it pretty easy to strip DRM from the books you buy. Barnes and Noble has gotten slightly tougher of late (as in, you are out of luck if you have no Nook or Android reader), so I just went through the DRM stripping exercise with all the ePubs I had bought from BN, and switched to Amazon.
it has some leaked aspects that I think are truly terrible, such as the intellectual freedom troubles
This is why "trade" agreements are reviled by default these days. They have a couple of chapters regarding trade and a dozen chapters dedicated to screwing country's national laws.
While I agree with you that it's a valid reason to revile trade agreements by default, I perceive the revulsion to be comprised of more protectionist, beggar-thy-neighbor sentiment, mixed with ugly patriotism. See "Squiddie" above, the guy who thinks doubling (!) the daily wages of benighted bastards in a poor country isn't worth the risks to American workers.
Start making trade agreements about trade again and people will start respecting them again.
Not as optimistic on that score as you are. Cheers.
I'm in favor of TPP, and of trade agreements generally. Consider the case of NAFTA, as an example that is less broad in scope and yet similarly reviled. We can now look at it in a bit of an historical perspective.
The populist arguments against NAFTA have generally been that it "enriches corporations, at the expense of American jobs". While it eased Canadian-US trade somewhat, the most visible effect of NAFTA was that US-Mexican trade was eased to the point that hundreds of maquiladoras (manufacturing facilities) sprung up close to the US border. Among other changes, Mexico has now become a top-10 exporter of automobiles.
The maquiladoras have enhanced the lives of many millions of Mexicans. Meanwhile, it had a mixed effect on the USA, in particular pressuring hundreds of thousands of US autoworkers. Benefits to the US were much more diffuse than the lost autoworker jobs, leading many people to conclude those benefits were negligible. That's a common policy-maker's problem, where a special-interest group (here, US autoworkers) holds policy or public opinion hostage to its interests because the incremental advantage of good policy is, while larger in aggregate, thinly spread among a large constituency. It's quite recognizable in, for example, the activities of the sugar lobby on influencing congressional lawmakers.
Such lobbies, by the way, are a big reason trade agreements must be negotiated privately, keeping details hidden from the public. Otherwise, special interest groups end up completely destroying the process while negotiations are underway. Remember, sugar tariffs are very good for the sugar lobby.
While I appreciate patriotism, I personally feel that we should be trying to make life better for humanity in general, rather than greedily holding onto wealth in the USA. Taking at face value the Wharton study quoted above, the USA was able to enrich Mexicans at zero cost to itself. From that point of view, similar trade agreements are nearly a moral imperative!
Coming back to TPP, it has some leaked aspects that I think are truly terrible, such as the intellectual freedom troubles. Those criticisms I consider reasonable, and I can appreciate why that would cause an informed and intelligent person to oppose the TPP. On the other hand, a kind of knee-jerk hatred to trade agreements in general appears to drive much of the opposition, and I think of those anti-trade arguments as having no moral standing, just like the ones put forth by the sugar lobby.
On balance, then, I think the benefits to human happiness worldwide from even an agreement with flawed and overly-broad terms will outweigh the serious problems, but I can see how intellectual freedom considerations might make you feel otherwise.
Once the cracked passwords have been published (presumably by somebody other than Cynosure) they will be analyzed by many of the same people who looked at the LinkedIn passwords and other such databases.
It's going to be interesting to find out
What rules people are using for choosing passwords, 3 years after well-publicized hacks
Whether the Ashley Madison passwords are in general more secure
Which website had the more secure password, for users with accounts on both and differing passwords
Your post reminds me of when someone I know, who was an early staffer on the Obama 2008 campaign, got some tech support with their email. From Chris Hughes.
Some of you may be visiting that Amazon link and wondering how the hell weilawei ended up spending $1,000 on a book ("Ignition!"). The book is too wonderful to be limited to the big spenders. Search for it online and you will find a PDF easily enough. It's an awesome read.
Not many free options for devs on a mac or windows box. vmware isn't free
How is vmware not free? They have free products for both baremetal and desktop virtualization. vmware player has been able to create new VMs for six years now.
I think the only feature missing from Player that any significant number of people would care about is snapshots.
You are correct for Windows, but VMWare Player does not exist for OSX. They only publish Fusion.
I noticed this with Little Snitch, which I recently installed on my laptop. It allowed me to prevent the queries, for which I was quite grateful.
I'm not particularly happy with all of Spotlight's newly introduced web search components, either -- I wonder if there's a way to turn that off.
While most "free" apps are spammy or coercive, there are tons that are not.... I've written many such applications myself over the decades, and continue to do so.
Exactly. As hobbies go, it is rather cheap compared to other common first-world hobbies. I would estimate between hardware and developer membership fees it is at most $1000 per year. Contrast with annual costs of about:
Fishing on your motorboat: $1000 in fuel and $3000 in repairs and depreciation
Snowboarding: $500 in lift tickets, $1500 in travel/food/lodging
Interest Clubs (SCA, Poodle Fanciers, whatever): $300 in suppliesand $1500 in travel/food/lodging
I agree with others that there is a problem finding well-made apps that come from dilettantes, but from the creator's point of view the expenses are rather small.
Making a business out of writing apps, well, that's another issue entirely. There's a reason I've never seriously considered it!
The cluster of very blue-white pixels and wire diffraction are clearly stars. If I zoom into a fairly dark region, I see lots of red and yellow pixels as well. Are those sensor noise?
The Mac Mini and Mac Pro are the black sheep fo the product line.... Apple probably wants to drop both but there's a contingent of very loud complainers who would raise the global noise level should Apple actually do so.
You're right. Some of that noise might well be internal. I bet Apple's own developers would be pretty unhappy without those product lines.
And no, the new Mac Mini is not faster than the old
There's a bit of a GPU advantage. It was enough that when when I upgraded my 2009-era Mini-based DVR last month I went with the new Mini rather than a near-equivalent Macmini 6,2.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to say without doing all the implementation work, but the paper does say that the algo is "...general enough to describe both local polynomial and Gaussian process approximations..." and there is a section called "Local Gaussian process surrogates". So, they do in fact incorporate this in the larger framework of their algo.
In fact, they claim "...that the accuracy is nearly identical for all the cases, but the approximate chains use fewer evaluations of the true model, reducing costs by more than an order of magnitude for quadratic or Gaussian process approximations (Figure 10b)."
Indeed, though that quote is simply pointing out that the relative performance of their algorithm is at its best with its mode set to local Gaussian approximations.
Huh. You think they would have realized that more quickly.
I'm sure the authors are well aware of it. It's the press hype that I'm pointing out.
How is this relevant? The algorithm is for speeding up Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analyses
The paper is phrasing it in terms of MCMC but it's more generally applicable if you think of it as an optimizer.
I'm not familiar with it (and I'm a dilettante in the domain), but it sounds interesting. Can you recommend a starting point?
It looks to me that the new algorithm offers no real speed advantage over gaussian process optimization. Rather, by making similar local approximations it gains some convergence proofs. Those are nice and all, but not often relevant to real-world applications.
I am a US citizen as frustrated about unauthorized domestic surveillance as anyone. But this summary goes too far. Finding, keeping and using vulnerabilities is exactly what the NSA is supposed to do, and there is nothing questionable about that behavior.
If the submitter wants the government to have a group that finds and discloses vulnerabilities as part of its remit, then make a case for creating such a group. Don't saddle the NSA with the job.
For what it's worth, the open-source crowd has made it pretty easy to strip DRM from the books you buy. Barnes and Noble has gotten slightly tougher of late (as in, you are out of luck if you have no Nook or Android reader), so I just went through the DRM stripping exercise with all the ePubs I had bought from BN, and switched to Amazon.
it has some leaked aspects that I think are truly terrible, such as the intellectual freedom troubles
This is why "trade" agreements are reviled by default these days. They have a couple of chapters regarding trade and a dozen chapters dedicated to screwing country's national laws.
While I agree with you that it's a valid reason to revile trade agreements by default, I perceive the revulsion to be comprised of more protectionist, beggar-thy-neighbor sentiment, mixed with ugly patriotism. See "Squiddie" above, the guy who thinks doubling (!) the daily wages of benighted bastards in a poor country isn't worth the risks to American workers.
Start making trade agreements about trade again and people will start respecting them again.
Not as optimistic on that score as you are. Cheers.
I'm in favor of TPP, and of trade agreements generally. Consider the case of NAFTA, as an example that is less broad in scope and yet similarly reviled. We can now look at it in a bit of an historical perspective.
The populist arguments against NAFTA have generally been that it "enriches corporations, at the expense of American jobs". While it eased Canadian-US trade somewhat, the most visible effect of NAFTA was that US-Mexican trade was eased to the point that hundreds of maquiladoras (manufacturing facilities) sprung up close to the US border. Among other changes, Mexico has now become a top-10 exporter of automobiles.
The maquiladoras have enhanced the lives of many millions of Mexicans. Meanwhile, it had a mixed effect on the USA, in particular pressuring hundreds of thousands of US autoworkers. Benefits to the US were much more diffuse than the lost autoworker jobs, leading many people to conclude those benefits were negligible. That's a common policy-maker's problem, where a special-interest group (here, US autoworkers) holds policy or public opinion hostage to its interests because the incremental advantage of good policy is, while larger in aggregate, thinly spread among a large constituency. It's quite recognizable in, for example, the activities of the sugar lobby on influencing congressional lawmakers.
Such lobbies, by the way, are a big reason trade agreements must be negotiated privately, keeping details hidden from the public. Otherwise, special interest groups end up completely destroying the process while negotiations are underway. Remember, sugar tariffs are very good for the sugar lobby.
While I appreciate patriotism, I personally feel that we should be trying to make life better for humanity in general, rather than greedily holding onto wealth in the USA. Taking at face value the Wharton study quoted above, the USA was able to enrich Mexicans at zero cost to itself. From that point of view, similar trade agreements are nearly a moral imperative!
Coming back to TPP, it has some leaked aspects that I think are truly terrible, such as the intellectual freedom troubles. Those criticisms I consider reasonable, and I can appreciate why that would cause an informed and intelligent person to oppose the TPP. On the other hand, a kind of knee-jerk hatred to trade agreements in general appears to drive much of the opposition, and I think of those anti-trade arguments as having no moral standing, just like the ones put forth by the sugar lobby.
On balance, then, I think the benefits to human happiness worldwide from even an agreement with flawed and overly-broad terms will outweigh the serious problems, but I can see how intellectual freedom considerations might make you feel otherwise.
Once the cracked passwords have been published (presumably by somebody other than Cynosure) they will be analyzed by many of the same people who looked at the LinkedIn passwords and other such databases.
It's going to be interesting to find out
Your post reminds me of when someone I know, who was an early staffer on the Obama 2008 campaign, got some tech support with their email. From Chris Hughes.
Just-in-time optimized code goes faster than c.
:-)
Some of you may be visiting that Amazon link and wondering how the hell weilawei ended up spending $1,000 on a book ("Ignition!"). The book is too wonderful to be limited to the big spenders. Search for it online and you will find a PDF easily enough. It's an awesome read.
a lot of the software that the NSA (or more likely, NSA subcontractors) develop are developed for a very limited and specialized audience
...and they give it to the users free of charge, with complimentary installation and tech support. ;-)
(I agree completely with your post, BTW)
Thank you for that....I was wondering if the port design allowed that kind of bidirectionality.
Mod parent up! Thank you for the informative post, my friend.
Kudos to the dev team! This is one of open source's great success examples. Now, since I am posting anyway...
Why does VLC use an orange traffic cone for its icon? It has always seemed misplaced to me.
Not many free options for devs on a mac or windows box. vmware isn't free
How is vmware not free? They have free products for both baremetal and desktop virtualization. vmware player has been able to create new VMs for six years now.
I think the only feature missing from Player that any significant number of people would care about is snapshots.
You are correct for Windows, but VMWare Player does not exist for OSX. They only publish Fusion.
a given OSS component typically ossifying
Clever turn of phrase! (slow golf clap)
So if(x==2) would lose you marks because it wasn't if( x==2 ) which would be considered better by that teacher than if( x == 2)
Keep those constants on the left, my friend.
I noticed this with Little Snitch, which I recently installed on my laptop. It allowed me to prevent the queries, for which I was quite grateful. I'm not particularly happy with all of Spotlight's newly introduced web search components, either -- I wonder if there's a way to turn that off.
While most "free" apps are spammy or coercive, there are tons that are not.... I've written many such applications myself over the decades, and continue to do so.
Exactly. As hobbies go, it is rather cheap compared to other common first-world hobbies. I would estimate between hardware and developer membership fees it is at most $1000 per year. Contrast with annual costs of about:
Fishing on your motorboat: $1000 in fuel and $3000 in repairs and depreciation
Snowboarding: $500 in lift tickets, $1500 in travel/food/lodging
Interest Clubs (SCA, Poodle Fanciers, whatever): $300 in suppliesand $1500 in travel/food/lodging
I agree with others that there is a problem finding well-made apps that come from dilettantes, but from the creator's point of view the expenses are rather small.
Making a business out of writing apps, well, that's another issue entirely. There's a reason I've never seriously considered it!
The cluster of very blue-white pixels and wire diffraction are clearly stars. If I zoom into a fairly dark region, I see lots of red and yellow pixels as well. Are those sensor noise?
You're right. Some of that noise might well be internal. I bet Apple's own developers would be pretty unhappy without those product lines.
There's a bit of a GPU advantage. It was enough that when when I upgraded my 2009-era Mini-based DVR last month I went with the new Mini rather than a near-equivalent Macmini 6,2.
I simply multiplied my monitor by -i.
Now when I pretend to be working on it, the imaginary work becomes real.