Slashdot Mirror


User: umafuckit

umafuckit's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
1,044
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 1,044

  1. Re: The AI fanatics must be getting really despera on Facebook Open Sources AI Hardware Design (facebook.com) · · Score: 1

    This is not "creating life from scratch".

    Yes, obviously, but it's a big start.

    Anyway... I think if so far we've been able to explain a thing in physical terms then there's no reason to bring anything else into it simply because we don't understand everything. You seem to think the opposite, because in continuing to do that one is falling back on what one already understands: so something unknown is needed and we don't know what it is. So I think we agree to disagree. Cheerio...

  2. Re:so you get no source code? on Gigster Wants To Be the Uber of Software Development (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    You may well be correct.

  3. Re: The AI fanatics must be getting really despera on Facebook Open Sources AI Hardware Design (facebook.com) · · Score: 1

    Actually some incomplete models that people mistakenly believe to complete. Sure, it looks like cells are just chemical machines, but until one has been built from scratch, that is just an idea, not a hard fact.

    We are indeed . I think you're greatly underestimating what we've learned since the 1950s if you think it amounts to "just an idea".

    And with intelligence and consciousness? For the latter there is no physical mechanism in the sense that physics simply does not apply. For the former, it increasingly looks like physics alone cannot do it either.

    If not ultimately physics then what?

  4. so you get no source code? on Gigster Wants To Be the Uber of Software Development (techcrunch.com) · · Score: 1

    Presumably if they "still own the code" you get no source for the product you paid for. No thanks: been burned this way before with commercial software. Ended up having to re-build and re-engineer the shit I paid for in order to get something that doesn't suck.

  5. Re:Proof of God's design! on Rodent Neural Activity Has a Geometric Structure (forbes.com) · · Score: 1

    You laugh, but I reckon the best argument against the bullshit is just to teach and show them how a fertilized egg develops into an organism. This is the same change in complexity that you see over evolutionary time: where single celled organisms eventually turned into amazing macroscopic things like ducks, trees, and elephants. However, with development you can watch the changes happen in real time and the final result is often obtained in a matter of weeks. Best of all, we're learning a heck of a lot about how it actually happens. So it's not some black box, but an explicable phenomenon.

  6. Re: The AI fanatics must be getting really despera on Facebook Open Sources AI Hardware Design (facebook.com) · · Score: 1

    In fact, we do not even know that it is merely a "circuit of brain cells" that produces these results.

    We see no evidence that anything else is involved. I'm not advocating or proposing any fundamental truths, I'm just suggesting that we keep doing experiments and see what we learn. So far what we learn supports what I say. There's no religious conviction in that, just data. If the data suggest something else then I'll change my mind.

    By saying "nothing special" I don't mean that the process isn't amazing, because it is. I just mean that as answers come in we may find what is going to be slightly more prosaic then we currently imagine. A bit like now, since the revolutions in molecular biology, genetics, and developmental biology, most people no longer consider "what is life" to be such a deep question. Nowadays anyone with an education in these fields really knows quite well what "life" is. There's no big shocking mystery there, just an enormous quantity of really complicated stuff.

  7. Re: The AI fanatics must be getting really despera on Facebook Open Sources AI Hardware Design (facebook.com) · · Score: 1

    We don't know that neural nets can't match human performance because we don't know how humans do it. How we describe our classification ability verbally ("recognizing the nature of the thing" or whatever) isn't relevant: it's the wrong level of description to be comparing to a neural network. The correct level of description is a detailed theoretical understanding of how a defined circuit of brain cells does things like generalization, pattern completion, pattern recognition, etc. That is something you can meaningfully compare to what in silico network is or may be capable of. When you do that you may realise that the circuit of brain cells is also not doing anything clever.

  8. Re: The AI fanatics must be getting really despera on Facebook Open Sources AI Hardware Design (facebook.com) · · Score: 1

    Isn't that exactly how our brains work?

    We don't know "exactly how our brains work". Even if two things are outwardly appearing to do the same thing they may in doing very things under the hood. In the specific case you're referring to, there's likely an even bigger difference: I reckon brains are able to generalise much better than machines using much few samples. They are also far better at adapting previous knowledge to novel situations.

  9. Athen has been doing this for years on To Fight Pollution, New Delhi Restricts When Residents Can Drive (thehindu.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't remember when Athens started this, but I think it was about 25 years ago. Other places have too. some suggest it doesn't work in the long term.

  10. Re:How safe? on Linux Mint 17.3 Officially Released (softpedia.com) · · Score: 1

    They guy who sits next to me also did it once. No bid deal, TBH, everything is always backed up. Just annoying.

  11. Re:How safe? on Linux Mint 17.3 Officially Released (softpedia.com) · · Score: 1

    I've never had a problem (apart from the time when I accidentally did an rm -fr on my home partition for some stupid reason). Backup you stuff first.

  12. I teach students who need, but don't like like it on Programming Education: Selling People a Lie? (blogspot.com) · · Score: 2

    I'm in a weird situation: I teach programming to people who need it but wish they didn't. They're PhD students from life and social sciences. They nowadays have so much data that they need to program, but most of them don't really want to. They find it hard and it takes up too much of their time. The biggest mistakes I find is that their code is terribly organized. They don't plan ahead, they don't break down the problem, they don't think about code re-use, they seem to fight the process of coding rather than learn it. It's as though they don't understand what it's for (even though they have access to a lot of good example code. They seem to ignore it). They're making progress, but it's slow. Learning the language isn't their biggest problem: learning how to use it is.

  13. Ah, alcohol... What concentration?

    The thing is that everyone seems to say different things about stability. this page suggests that when not in solution it's more stable. There's a guy here saying that storage in ethanol causes loss of potency. Here it's recommended to keep it dry and same here, but they're clearly having blotter in mind. This one says it's very unstable as blotter but can be kept in aqueous with preservatives.

    Haven't really tried the 1P yet. Did a 50 mic test dose about 6 weeks ago and not much happened. Last week was a very intense mushroom trip, so I'm going to stay sober for at least 4 weeks or so before going for the 1P.

  14. Thanks for the info. You can buy 1p LSD in both a dropper bottle and as power so I am interested in knowing which is going to be the most stable, should I choose to make the investment in a larger purchase. The issue with the Sandoz story you cite is that Sandoz made their vials in an inert atmosphere, so it could be that it isn't dissolving the LSD that leads to the improved preservation but the lack of oxygen. Blotter has a high surface area, so maybe that's what drive a higher degradation rate.

  15. Re:LSD does have benefits on LSD Microdosing Gaining Popularity For Silicon Valley Professionals (rollingstone.com) · · Score: 1

    I could definitely see this working. The goal would be to integrate a positive/illuminating experience into your life. Without that it will fade. I had a very powerful experience only last weekend on mushrooms. I was very shaken (in a good way) at the time and felt that my life would be forever changed afterwards. Even the next day that feeling was totally gone. Like it never happened.

  16. Re:Important to note on LSD Microdosing Gaining Popularity For Silicon Valley Professionals (rollingstone.com) · · Score: 1

    That's a law enforcement spread myth. while potency can very greatly due to the dipping process so you never really know how much is there, there has been no evidence of "quality" issues otherwise. I usually ask about the mic count on the tabs.

    The concern is people being sold shit like Bromo-DragonFLY and being told it's LSD. Unless you test your drugs or your really know your source then you'll never be certain.

  17. Of course, it's in the freezer in a small air-tight sachet. IIRC, once you've ruled out light it's exposure to oxygen that's the main issue. The gas in the original vials from Sandoz was pure nitrogen and were supposed to have a very long shelf life. Anecdotally, I've heard that blotter can last for years in the freezer. I'm curious if this is true, because if so I may stock up on the 1p LSD before it gets banned.

  18. Re:Francis Crick may have done the same thing on LSD Microdosing Gaining Popularity For Silicon Valley Professionals (rollingstone.com) · · Score: 1

    So, the illicit LCD use explains why he broke into Rosalind Franklin's lab and stole her research results that were critical for his insights?

    You clearly don't know your history, nor have you read the article you link to. Crick and Watson didn't "break into her lab." She was working in Maurice Wilkins' lab. She had a bad relationship with Wilkins and Wilkins showed some of her results to Crick and Watson without her permission. Crick and Watson made their first model based on a talk she gave, but the model was incorrect because Watson misremembered the water content of the sample from the talk. Also, Franklin was resistant to the idea of a helix and so was barking up the wrong tree.

  19. Re:Increase productivity?? on LSD Microdosing Gaining Popularity For Silicon Valley Professionals (rollingstone.com) · · Score: 1

    Or look at Oliver Sacks: they nearly killed him.

  20. I've seen no evidence so far that these claims of positive effects (which are notable by their suspiciously wide variety) aren't just placebo. I like experimenting occasionally with psychedelics and have 10 blotters of 1p LSD waiting for the right moment, but I think it's not helpful to anyone when people make unsubstantiated claims of positive effects about psychedelic substances (and weed). It just makes the community appear eccentric and non-critical.

  21. Re:What a coincidence on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Ship With Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS · · Score: 2

    This is what I did for my desktop. Back to mint 17.x (which is 14.04). I do image registration with elastix and my registration times jumped from about 10 to 15 minutes with 14.04 to about 45 to 50 minutes with 15.10. I also work with the MATLAB parallel computing toolbox. Connecting to parallel workers normally takes a few seconds. With 15.10 it took over five minutes or never happened at all. Also the desktop (KDE) would lock up for many seconds at a time when the workers were running. Total train-wreck. Same symptoms running off a freshly downloaded 15.10 USB stick.

  22. Re:What a coincidence on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Ship With Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS · · Score: 1

    Ah, so you're experiencing this sort of shit too, then?

  23. Re:LTS? on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Will Ship With Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS · · Score: 2

    No, thankfully 15.10 is not LTS. I don't know if the problem is widespread, but on my i7 X99 system I saw a big performance nosedive on some CPU-intensive tasks. Desktop locking up, computations becoming 3 to 4 times slower, etc. This happened both with an in-place upgrade from 15.04 and when running from the 15.010 USB stick. Downgrading to 14.04 fixed everything.

  24. radioshack? on Raspberry Pi Unveils New $5 Mini-computer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Dude, go to Radio Shack.

    Or not. Mostly you can only buy consumer electronics there now.

  25. Cricket is intended for humans? on How Sports Commentaries Can Speed Up AI Development (thestack.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't understand the cricket commentary intended for human viewers. How the fuck is a machine going to do it? See? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...