"but then it's also the border agent's right to detain you till you do"
Or get a warrant to say it's necessary. Which would probably be refused.
The fear of "we'll just hold you until you co-operate" is not due process.
You object. You wait. Then you call in the lawyers (in this case JPL's, I imagine). Because - as stated - they have no right to demand the passcode. Hell, I'd be making them sign an NDA. As in YOU PERSONALLY sign the NDA to tell me what you'll do with the information in the phone. They'll refuse, of course they will, but it's not like I'm being uncooperative, I'm asking you to document, receipt and provide data security for that thing you're trying to access, which is a core part of evidence preservation anyway.
But there is a reason that I a) wouldn't enter the US, b) wouldn't try to take any electronic devices even if I did.
This guy worked for JPL. Imagine what that's doing to your foreign workers and people on business trips from other countries. They just aren't going to want to do business with you if their secret patents are being shared willy-nilly around the TSA offices without some kind of guarantee.
Hell, if they asked for my social media, I'd refuse beyond showing them my (locked-down) public Facebook page. If that gets me detained, even theoretically, then I'm not risking going at all.
The US is so anti-foreigner nowadays that they are basically going to cut themselves further off from the world than their own ignorance takes them anyway.
Red Hat gave us RPMs,systemd and NetworkManager. If I was drawing up a kill-list for a Linux distro, those would be at the top.
Outside of their high-end enterprise stuff and the kernel itself, they don't really touch that much. I'm a network manager and have deployed and managed Linux systems, and still do (VMs make this much easier nowadays, alongside the traditional MS setup). I've never once touched Red Hat as a distro for that purpose.
But I've bought any number of Slackware DVDs. Just the fact that Slackware is clean upstream code and simple patches for the most part, rather than highly customised stuff to make it work for The One True Distro gets my money.
I'm sure they do invest and they have a lot of code spread around, but they clearly aren't after my money. They just want huge businesses and not smaller shops at all. The pricing alone tells you that.
But Slackware? I've bought CD's almost every year (that are basically useless as soon as they've published because they are out-of-date and I never use physical media anyway), and the amount of work that goes into making it *my* OS is what I'm rewarding.
Red Hat don't have a penny of my money, in comparison.
Better than "software only" suicide, yes, it removes the value in the device.
But blowing a difficult-to-replace electronic fuse after zapping the memory would be simply and easier for such a purpose, and also be a device that would be allowed on the plane.
We're trying to STOP phones being dangerous, not make them more so.
And properly controlled and encrypted devices have an automatic protection against theft of data - it's called the encryption. Remove the encryption key or store it on a TPM chip if you have to. Better - put it on a TPM chip where the self-destruct features just clears the chip. Cheaper, simpler, safer, and can be done with existing devices.
I'll give you my login to anything, even Facebook. Hell, my Slashdot login is above this very message.
What use is that to use unless it's so open that it's showing everything you said (e.g. my Slashdot). My social media logins get you almost nothing that you wouldn't already have by that point.
Are you suggesting they've stopped at that point, when there are no posts visible because "Homeland Security" isn't in your friend list on Facebook? I don't think so. I think, at minimum, they're asking you to reveal a login and if they're suspicious (which could include "Gosh, he doesn't let us see ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING"), then it will go for passwords too.
And, technically, the email on this account of mine is completely different to the email of other accounts. Hell, I have about 20+ domains all with unlimited aliases I could use on them. There's no help there at all.
No, this is about volunteering information, and then if there's any suspicion (you didn't volunteer) forcing it out of you.
The US has been dead to me since just before 9/11 when all this nonsense started. I literally CANNOT take a laptop or phone which may have any work logins, emails or anything else at all on it into the US. EU law says that's breaking the law.
That ruins a whole load of stuff you might want to do on holiday, and kills business trips stone dead.
And if you demand logins to unrelated things, I'm likely to refuse. It's that likely to get me into trouble, I'm likely not to bother trying to go.
As such, not been to the US in years and have no current intention to go there.
And life expectancy - and overall deaths - nearly halved in most developed countries at the same time.
Cancer is what happens to you when nothing else kills you - it's quite literally a lottery on every cell replication as to whether it mutates badly or not. And over time, you WILL get and die of cancer if nothing else does.
Blaming increasing lifespan, which means more people die of cancer, on the presence or invention of plastic is actually good evidence FOR plastic. Such as - how do you sterilise or clean paper, cloth, etc. to food standards? Much harder than doing the same for plastic.
Additionally, almost every substance known to man is carcinogenic or has carcinogenic variants or cousins. What you're basically saying is "The only thing now left to kill us if the extremely low risk of cancer from an otherwise pretty harmless substance, that up until we started using it had even worse alternatives".
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. And statistics mean nothing if you don't interpret them in context.
United Kingdom-based vegetarians and comparable nonvegetarians have similar all-cause mortality. Differences found for specific causes of death merit further investigation.
60,310 people studied. That's a LOT.
But don't confuse "meat-eating" with "fast-food junky". And don't think that a vegan or vegetarian diet does ANYTHING for you. It doesn't. It's just the same, but you can't eat meat. If you're used to eating meat, that can make you miserable.
And if you go too strict, you can do more damage to your body and have to take an artificial supplement to restore what's missing from your diet (i.e. the stuff normally found in meat!).
And what you think wild-caught salmon is going to do differently to you than a farmed salmon, we can argue about until the cows come home but basically the stats say the same again: It makes NO difference.
Rather than try to argue on the basis of "this sounds good, and I think I'm helping", find some proper, serious, researched literature and narrow down what you're recommending.
Is it a) meat or lack of it, b) fish instead of meat, c) "free-range" fish over farmed fish, d) vegetarian over meat-eating, e) anything over fast-food?
Because confusing the issue in ONE SENTENCE between five different things, and getting most of those wrong in terms of actual science, is not the way to convince people.
You might as well tell me to only use organic pencils as they "draw better".
What's inside the plastic wrapping is going to kill you quicker than whatever the wrapping is made of.
Or, otherwise, we'd pretty much all be dead by now.
Sure, start phasing it out, like thousands of things before it, but it's not an end-of-the-world, evil-fast-food-chain, profiteering-bastards kind of story at all.
Hell, I remember when McDonald's burgers came in a polystyrene box. They changed that and it's now a card-thing with shiny outside. I'm sure those things were always marked as "food-safe" or they'd have been in court a million times by now because of it.
But our idea of food-safe changes as knowledge increases. I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up going back to polystyrene boxes at some point, we're bound to find out that something older and abandoned actually wasn't all that bad or we can now make it without it being bad.
But the tone of the summary/story is quite heavily in the "OH MY GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE" section. When actually the story is more like "Huh, there's a tiny chance this could very slightly statistically be worse for you that paper. Oh well, let's change that, but it's not worth panicking and trying to do that overnight. Let's just phase it out for something slightly better."
Hell, they banned fish and chip shops in the UK from using newspaper for wrapping the food in, which they always did in my father's day, because of the ink in the paper being not ideal to wrap a greasy load of fried fish and potato into. But try and point to someone who died or was taken ill as a result and you'd be hard pressed to come up with anything at all.
And then, ironically, they all started using polystyrene and plastics, which we're now telling them are bad for the environment and they should go back to paper, and recycled paper at that...
Poker is an easy game to describe. You can get perfect statistics for chances and what remains in the deck (if applicable).
What you couldn't do up until now was the BETTING on poker. When you have $64k of chips in front of you, the optimal amount to bet is not obvious or easily iterated by brute force. Just sheer size of the potential "game-tree" in that betting was the only obstacle.
Go was the same - the game tree is huge, and we now have heuristics that can cull it earlier and better than before, but it's still uniterable in any reasonable time. However, we now do it well enough to beat top human players.
However, NONE of this is related to image recognition or translation, which are still as flaky as they ever were. Game-theory is almost entirely tree based on a limited set of options. When we conquer the amount of options available, the game-tree is parseable and you win enough of the time that you can't be beat, and you can reproduce the results consistently. Game-theory is a science and a mathematic.
But the other "AI" stuff is still in the realm of guess-and-train, plugging heuristics and millions of examples into an algorithm that tries to categorise and find a limited set of patterns. They are not reliable, reproducible, or even very scientific at all, and most of the AI field is software-engineering and heuristical analysis. Do not trust your car to recognising an image of a child running across the road because it WILL NEVER see any of the training images ever again, even if you perfectly reproduce the circumstances, and so it's always guesswork.
Computers - and "AI" as the movies would let you think it - are not good at that kind of thing. It's why CAPTCHAs exist (yes, you can target and beat a CAPTCHA but by having humans tune heuristics or feeding millions of example images into a simple algorithm and so it becomes non-reliable again, though it may be reliable "enough" to get you into a website, you don't want to be using it in anything important whatsoever).
And translation is still just as laughable as ever. Ask any foreigner to run something through Google Translate, you still end up with completely obvious transcription and understanding errors and get only literal translations or nonsense.
We're nowhere near a point that AI is a risk to humans unless - and this is important - we start thinking that the AI we have now is anything more than it is and start relying on it. Self-driving cars are a prime example.
We do NOT have AI. We have heuristics (human-created and tweaked rules) plugged into statistical systems, trained on a set of data that they will never encounter in real life. Something that's OBVIOUS to a human how it should be categorised is in no way guaranteed to be categorised in the same way by even the best-trained AI on the planet. It's literally never seen it before and it's answer is no better than a guess. And at any point, while it's acting on unseen-before data (which is all the time in such systems) it's actions are unpredictable and - worse - undiagnosable and unfixable. When it makes a mistake, you can't correct it, or even necessarily work out WHY it made that mistake, even with the complete source code and training data. And you can "request" but not instruct that it might want to categorise such things differently next time. And it might still just not understand no matter how many times you do that.
Think of it this way. Are you training the AI on the SHAPE of, say, a cat and an understanding of 3D space and how it transforms with movement and different viewing angles? No. You're training it on a bunch of pictures of a cat (or translated texts, or game positions or whatever) and hoping that it finds some correlation.
But you have ZERO idea what correlation it's finding. It's basically totally unanalysable in that respect. For all you know, it's adding up the number of blue-ish pixels and saying it's a cat if there aren't many. And though you might realise that and then tr
Gigabit to entire towns is a loss-maker not just in terms of decades.
In the UK, the only non-former-government-monopoly provider was NTL. Who, after 20 years of putting in cable, went bust. Literally, they were bought up after being near bankruptcy (by Virgin Media), including all their assets for a cut-down price, and since then any new VM rollouts have had to be built-in to the cost of building a housing estate. The number of places served by VM is pretty pathetic, it's FTTC only, and they've had to re-sell DSL services provided by British Telecom like everyone else to get anywhere near full-reach in the rest of the country.
The only other near-competitor was a project run in the town of Hull that pretty much flopped and never left the town.
Bear in mind that the UK is about HALF the size of California, and has TWICE as many people.
Any infrastructure like that is basically loss-making for DECADES, if it ever recoups its investment. FTTP is even more expensive.
There's a reason that sewage, electricity, gas, water, etc. supplies are utilities often run by government or obliged to provide services to all and paid for at least partly from your taxes.
That kind of infrastructure is a dead investment and we've known about that for centuries.
Cannibalism is quite literally survival of the fittest.
And, not to pour water, but has anyone considered that a cannibalism response is actually sensible and protective? With a nutrient deficiency, the animals change their behaviour to find another source of said nutrient.
How does this differ from pregnancy cravings? Some animals eat their OWN young. Cannibalism may well be what's keeping the few that are left alive.
1) What you propose is a legal grey area. 2) How does it solve the problem or portability? I would have to spend MONTHS of time converting my collection, defeating DRM, and storing it, and then carry around a several-Tb drive everywhere I go. 3) I have the DVD's. I continue to watch them, as normal. What I'm NOT doing it giving the movie industry a penny by doing so - most of those DVDs were second-hand and it won't be long before DVDs don't exist, like VHS before it.
When I'm quite happy - and trying - to pay a sensible price for the convenience of just clicking "watch" on a film I want to watch.
The generation below me - working in schools, and boarding schools, I'm almost uniquely placed to tell you how they operate - they don't care. They YouTube it. They stream it from dozens of free sites. If it's not there when they press the button, they have no interest. On top of that, THEY DO NOT PAY. And it's seen as the norm, to break the rules in preference.
Hell, I have to deal with C&D notices from the school's ISP. Now, what do YOU think I'm doing, trying to do, and where someone could easily get some money from me? And what do you think is wrong if, actually, the alternative is I don't spend any money or bother to watch any movies, at home, on the move, etc.?
(Bear in mind that I pay for everything legitimately. I don't own any music. I buy DVD's or LICENCED online content for everything I watch.
I do this so that I'm rewarding the creators of things I like. I've bought shareware. I've paid for donationware. I've bought some things several times over and bought them for friends.
The point is - I'm one of those rare people who pays for EVERYTHING I use. The vast majority of people I speak to are quite happy not to pay if there's no chance of being caught and will happily use Kodi or downloads or streams or tolerate what their child does, etc.)
I went on Amazon Prime. I didn't fancy anything on the Prime offerings, so I flicked through the "Buy" listings for movies. As there was nothing on Prime, I also loaded up the Google Play Store for movies and did the same on there. I have bought 50% of my online movies on each service, and even rented a couple of times.
I looked through all the recommended, the newly released, etc. and went back as far as I could without hitting anything I liked the look of. Fair enough, personal taste. Then I went through all the cheap movies, all dross and most I'd never heard of. Then I went through categories of movies, Action or Sci-Fi is always a good bet.
About 20 pages in, and a lot of scrolling, on both services the only things that I had any interest in were old 80's action / sci-fi movies. Okay, not a problem. I own a lot of them on DVD, though, but I wanted to watch online. I'm not going to pay a fortune again.
But then the problem hits - once I found a category I was willing to buy from and didn't already own, the prices were a piss-take. GBP10 for a movie from the 80's that's had endless re-runs on TV. 25GBP for a TV series that's on constant loop on multiple TV channels, and that's just the first series. Sorry, but I'm not paying that for an Arnie movie from the 80's, Indiana Jones, James Bond or a series of Friends to flick through. And the stuff I already have on DVD? Same prices. No way am I paying that just to "have it online".
The irony was, I'd have happily laid down the 25GBP for a complete boxset of something, or 10GBP for a new movie, or a few GBP for one of the old dross (Indiana Jones, etc.). But I couldn't justify it to myself to pay those kinds of prices.
In the end, after about an hour of scrolling through both stores, I bought nothing. My entertainment time was gone, my funds weren't going to be spent like that, and that's with me LOOKING to buy.
The other annoying part? You can't buy certain things anywhere. I love an old TV series called The Good Life (Good Neighbours in the US). I have it on DVD. I'd quite like it online too, to watch when I'm out on holiday etc. I bought series 1 & 2 online and - despite being from the 70's - series 3 is nowhere to be seen. Literally, nothing. I've been checking almost every month for years now.
Try and get Aliens:Special Edition. Half the online streaming stores just don't carry it at all, or don't mention if it is SE or not.
And then there are the TV series from years ago that still have never made it to DVD or online at all. The most annoying ones are like above - someone converted one series and then said fuck it and left it at that.
I have no surprise at all when I find out that people pirate or stream or whatever. They just want to watch the fucking movie that they like. But you can't. And even when you can, the price is ludicrous.
Because I won't pirate, this gives me one option. Stop watching. Even the old stuff. Stop buying.
The movie and TV industries are killing themselves. I have no sympathy for them.
Also, we TOLD THEM THIS several decades ago when they started on the pointless crusade against piracy. If they'd listened then, maybe they wouldn't have wasted money on stupid DRM schemes, they'd have not lost public favour, and they might have been able to try things like streaming, downloads,
I never got why we still use tree structures with users, why a user's data isn't just "Data" and then use tags.
That way Data\Documents\Car Insurance is exactly the same as Data\Car Insurance\Documents
Users are more familiar with tags than ever and the LOCATION of something should not be how you find it. That's making the human do the work. The computer should find things that match the given criteria FOR the user.
And the folder layout on Windows is just an abomination. Every company creates a folder inside My Documents, so it's NOT *MY* documents any more, it's "Random Crap", which I have enough folders full of.
I want an OS which separates data from applications. Which holds data like Google Drive does when shared between multiple users - Shared With Me has EVERYTHING in one humungous list, and then I can put it in My Drive in the layout I want, no matter what the originator does with his layout.
And then tags instead of "folders" (little clouds of tags are quite easy to navigate, especially if their size matches the frequency of THAT USER'S usage and you provide a way to directly type in your own or existing tags when you can't see them).
And then a system where an application DOES NOT GET to write or read files outside a "folder". Every application is contained, and has symlink-like links to COPIES OF the data that we want to pass to it. So my word processor can't see my finance files UNLESS I GIVE IT TO THAT PROGRAM.
And when I do give a copy to a program, it's a copy-on-write link so they can't break the original files and I can revert them at any time.
Bam. Ransomware is dead. Office macros with virus code in them are dead. Programs fucking up your organisation is dead. The confusion between "executable" and "data" is distinct, clear and enforceable. When you uninstall a program, you just delete its folder. No data created with it is lost even then, but ALL remnants of the program itself and the shit it wanted to spread everywhere disappear in one fell swoop.
And every person gets their own organisation of their files (fuck, it would take about an hour to mock up an analogue of a traditional filesystem using such a system, if people were really that desperate) but nobody ever has to remember a path. Ever. And your shitty paths and filing don't affect me (think source code developers, #include, mail-merge databases and documents, etc.).
And the computer does the work and - properly done - there's none of this "indexing" shite present, or even necessary. And I can tag files the way I like (Favourite Songs), you tag them the way you like (Boyband Shite), and nobody cares.
And then it's abundantly clear where:
- Applications on a system - Configuration for those applications for a particular user - Data for a user shared between multiple applications
all reside, which ones need to be in a "profile" and which in a basic datastore (database, really) and no more confusion.
Fuck Google Chrome putting bookmarks into a part of the user's profile that they CANNOT FIND, and which gets synced back to the network in a different place to their documents and other user-specific data.
And while we're there, scrap this drive-letter crap. Let users choose what "shortcuts" or tags they want or not in every fucking file window, and lock down programs so they can't just wander and see EVERY FILE a user has access to just because a user ran the program once.
Say "Right, what do YOU think the UI should look like that would follow all your rules?"
And then implement the program exactly as specified.
Then watch it crash and burn under the first rounds of user tests as "impenetrable", "unintuitive", etc.
Honestly, UI designers designed Windows 10 and MacOS. I couldn't fathom a more hideous and confusing set of UI notions if I tried.
But some guy who just wanted a simple menu brought the start menu back with Classic Shell back and made it work. Ever seen Windows 3.1's desktop? The icons were pretty obvious, the screen layout was used, and it wasn't pretending to be anything other than "a program on your computer with an empty screen behind it" rather than a fixed, unchangeable, ever-present interface paradigm that you can't escape.
Don't even get me started on interfaces like the iPad which has a setup routine that I've seen baffle hundreds of people. Swipe to select a date on fake rotatey widget that's not obvious that's what it even is. And then a series of next, ok, yes and no answers required where EVERY ONE is in a different place on the screen, and where there are double- and triple-negatives trying to fool you into signing up with Apple services which you could do at any point later.
And let's not even mention the shit-heap that is a modern browser. Or keyboard navigation (that's gone the way of the dodo). Or actually working out what the fuck some icons are actually supposed to represent.
And that's before you get to swipe, drag, "bonk" (when you hit a window against the side of the screen), etc. gestures.
I'm Cockney (a particular London accent that's fast and loose with silly things like consonants in words - sorted becomes "saw-id").
Google Translate - in any of its forms - is just assuredly hilarious. If they've made ten years progress it might just about not completely comical any more, that's about it.
The only decent feature is the Translate app which can replace words in a video image in real-time.
Scan it over a menu and you can get a vague idea of what food it lists, but good luck relying on it for any kind of accuracy. Normally as you hold the image as still as you can, you get words like lobster changing to words like furniture and all kinds of nonsense.
And even when you TYPE IN a phrase beyond "Where are the toilets?", the translation is as useless as Facebook's translations on its posts.
Machine learning has a LONG way to go before it can get to properly translate anything. Like understanding me when I say "Cancel Route" in my car, which basically has no fucking idea what I'm saying despite it having a very limited vocabulary at that point, speaking clearly, enunciating as best I can, repeating endlessly and being alone in a soundproof box with a mic stuck above my head (which is crystal-clear on phone calls).
But the UK is under EU law, which means you can fulfill EU data protection regulations (necessary for ANYTHING holding personal data in the UK, which is literally every online service you use).
Under Brexit, the UK won't be sufficient, even if the data protection laws NEVER change. It's literally no longer an EU-DP compliant country. Thus all that investment that could have serviced the entire EU is wasted, you need to be an EU datacenter anyway, and the UK one sits and hold UK data only.
As such, it's not stupid reporting. Microsoft are doing what EVER OTHER DATA PROCESSOR in the country is doing. I work for a school. We use an EU off-site location for backups. When Brexit strikes, that will likely have to stop.
For the same reason we cannot use iCloud as they refuse to give any guarantees that UK data will only ever stay within the EU (unlike Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Dropbox, etc. who ALL guarantee that).
UK and EU data protection laws are much stricter than you might think. Literally, cloud-based services will now have to have an EU datacenter and a UK one, whereas before Brexit just a UK one could have done both jobs.
They may change the laws, but that would require EU co-operation to allow EU data to be sent to a non-EU country, and those kinds of things generate lawsuits (it's why the EU-US aircraft travel data sharing regulations were revoked, for instance)
First part (27 countries) isn't true. Second part (commons / lords) is. Third (chances = nil). Wrong. Only a handful of even opposition are saying they wouldn't follow. Lords would give more problems. Expect literal riots if something blocks it. Fourth. Another referendum is a complete humiliation. They'd rather take a year longer and change the laws involved so it's not necessary (almost nothing stopping them doing that). Fifth. The people were stupid enough the first time round, they're stupid enough for a second time too.
And I'm not pro-Brexit in any way, shape or form. But it's going to happen. Badly, maybe, but it's going to happen. At absolute best you'll have four years of stalemate followed by a new PM and then maybe something will change, but that's a lot of hurt first.
Honestly don't get why everything these days isn't just 64-bit by default.
You can hit 32-bit limits just buying a memory chip, or bog-standard storage. 4 billion is not a big number in those terms.
32-bit times are dead. 32-bit filesizes are dead. 32-bit memory sizes are dead. 32-bit file counters are dead. Hell, it's not inconceivable that in some things 32-bit user counters could die - with account recreation and spam accounts, surely the big people are having to deal with that.
Just stop faffing about and use 64-bit for everything, by default, from the start. 8 bytes isn't a huge amount of overhead nowadays.
But starting with the assumption "4 billion is enough" when some people have more than 4bn in their bank account, some services have more than 4bn users, and people can buy 4bn-whatevers in their local electronics store is stupid.
But 4 billions lots of 4 billion is not a limit that you will hit for a very, very, very long time. Even 128-bit isn't unseen - IPv6, ZFS, GPUs - and that's 4 billion lots of 4 billion 64-bit numbers each of which is capable of holding 4 billion lots of 4 billion.
Supercomputer architectures did this a long time ago, translating and assuming everything is 128-bit so that you never have to worry about a limit.
Why does it take so long for basics like web servers and databases to get there? 64-bit by default, MINIMUM. Anything that incurs a performance hit on that is old, and up to the user to resolve.
We've only just got to the point where Chess is beatable, very recently in computing terms.
We've only just seen a tiny glimpse that Go may be beatable. Google's AI is literally leaps-and-bounds ahead of the game in that respect as the search space is so much unbelievably huger than chess that chess is laughable in comparison.
The search space for poker - the card game - is complete. We know it exactly, down to the probability of everything. What we don't have the search space for is the betting (which, if fine-grained down to the dollar, increases as you win!). This AI is playing the search space for both, for the best result, and winning, for one particular variant of the card game.
When you have many players around the table playing this same game, it becomes orders of magnitude more complex in the betting again. The search space is still just searchable though.
This isn't adapting to human behaviour, it's learning when it loses. It knows when it loses, and it finds other paths and writes off the paths that took it to a loss. If it was playing human behaviour, it would have a webcam and a mic and be analysing stress patterns.
But, strangely, despite all the bollocks that high-end poker players spout, it's winning without all that. It's winning by just knowing what the odds are in a complex search space that humans wouldn't be able to manage.
Humans might win by analysing their opponents. This thing just wins by knowing the odds properly for the betting, and playing them.
You can't bluff probability.
And despite both our uses of the word, it's not AI in the slightest. It's not intelligent. It's just playing lots and recording the results. There's a difference. Underneath, it's still just a dumb machine brute-forcing a game-graph. It's just that the game-graph is much more complex than "how many cards left in the pack", so it can't necessarily get through it all, but it gets further through it than any of its predecessor's attempts.
Poker isn't some magical game that only works when humans try to interpret humans. It's just a game like any other. And any game that you add fine-grained betting in a complex rounds system to, with money going up to hundreds of thousands of units, just has complexity far beyond what a standard computer could brute-force or a human can calculate.
It's at that point that a "sufficiently advanced technology" is miscategorised as "magic" or - in Poker - psychology.
Depends on the variant. Poker is a game which you can graph pretty easily, with probabilities for "unknown" hands.
The problem is not the card game, but the betting. You have many possibilities on how to bet and when to bet and that explodes the game graph. This AI has the betting in hand, not the card game (the latter is easy but in an incomplete-knowledge game like Texas Hold'em isn't enough on it's own).
And there are STILL people, on here and other sites, that give you the "human element" bollocks because no AI has had the complexity to do the betting properly. Looks like they're wrong. All it needed was a sufficiently complex model of the game. This AI isn't looking at player's faces, analysing their voices or any other bollocks. It's just playing the full game to the statistics. And it's winning consistently.
All that "reading their poker face" shite has just been proven bollocks. We knew that, anyway, because no poker player has ever consistently won all tournaments.
Slashdot Mirror
"but then it's also the border agent's right to detain you till you do"
Or get a warrant to say it's necessary.
Which would probably be refused.
The fear of "we'll just hold you until you co-operate" is not due process.
You object.
You wait.
Then you call in the lawyers (in this case JPL's, I imagine).
Because - as stated - they have no right to demand the passcode.
Hell, I'd be making them sign an NDA. As in YOU PERSONALLY sign the NDA to tell me what you'll do with the information in the phone. They'll refuse, of course they will, but it's not like I'm being uncooperative, I'm asking you to document, receipt and provide data security for that thing you're trying to access, which is a core part of evidence preservation anyway.
But there is a reason that I a) wouldn't enter the US, b) wouldn't try to take any electronic devices even if I did.
This guy worked for JPL. Imagine what that's doing to your foreign workers and people on business trips from other countries. They just aren't going to want to do business with you if their secret patents are being shared willy-nilly around the TSA offices without some kind of guarantee.
Hell, if they asked for my social media, I'd refuse beyond showing them my (locked-down) public Facebook page. If that gets me detained, even theoretically, then I'm not risking going at all.
The US is so anti-foreigner nowadays that they are basically going to cut themselves further off from the world than their own ignorance takes them anyway.
Red Hat gave us RPMs,systemd and NetworkManager. If I was drawing up a kill-list for a Linux distro, those would be at the top.
Outside of their high-end enterprise stuff and the kernel itself, they don't really touch that much. I'm a network manager and have deployed and managed Linux systems, and still do (VMs make this much easier nowadays, alongside the traditional MS setup). I've never once touched Red Hat as a distro for that purpose.
But I've bought any number of Slackware DVDs. Just the fact that Slackware is clean upstream code and simple patches for the most part, rather than highly customised stuff to make it work for The One True Distro gets my money.
I'm sure they do invest and they have a lot of code spread around, but they clearly aren't after my money. They just want huge businesses and not smaller shops at all. The pricing alone tells you that.
But Slackware? I've bought CD's almost every year (that are basically useless as soon as they've published because they are out-of-date and I never use physical media anyway), and the amount of work that goes into making it *my* OS is what I'm rewarding.
Red Hat don't have a penny of my money, in comparison.
Better than "software only" suicide, yes, it removes the value in the device.
But blowing a difficult-to-replace electronic fuse after zapping the memory would be simply and easier for such a purpose, and also be a device that would be allowed on the plane.
We're trying to STOP phones being dangerous, not make them more so.
And properly controlled and encrypted devices have an automatic protection against theft of data - it's called the encryption. Remove the encryption key or store it on a TPM chip if you have to. Better - put it on a TPM chip where the self-destruct features just clears the chip. Cheaper, simpler, safer, and can be done with existing devices.
I'll give you my login to anything, even Facebook. Hell, my Slashdot login is above this very message.
What use is that to use unless it's so open that it's showing everything you said (e.g. my Slashdot). My social media logins get you almost nothing that you wouldn't already have by that point.
Are you suggesting they've stopped at that point, when there are no posts visible because "Homeland Security" isn't in your friend list on Facebook? I don't think so. I think, at minimum, they're asking you to reveal a login and if they're suspicious (which could include "Gosh, he doesn't let us see ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING"), then it will go for passwords too.
And, technically, the email on this account of mine is completely different to the email of other accounts. Hell, I have about 20+ domains all with unlimited aliases I could use on them. There's no help there at all.
No, this is about volunteering information, and then if there's any suspicion (you didn't volunteer) forcing it out of you.
The US has been dead to me since just before 9/11 when all this nonsense started. I literally CANNOT take a laptop or phone which may have any work logins, emails or anything else at all on it into the US. EU law says that's breaking the law.
That ruins a whole load of stuff you might want to do on holiday, and kills business trips stone dead.
And if you demand logins to unrelated things, I'm likely to refuse. It's that likely to get me into trouble, I'm likely not to bother trying to go.
As such, not been to the US in years and have no current intention to go there.
Life expectancy DOUBLED and overall deaths HALVED. Sorry, I mis-edited that line.
And life expectancy - and overall deaths - nearly halved in most developed countries at the same time.
Cancer is what happens to you when nothing else kills you - it's quite literally a lottery on every cell replication as to whether it mutates badly or not. And over time, you WILL get and die of cancer if nothing else does.
Blaming increasing lifespan, which means more people die of cancer, on the presence or invention of plastic is actually good evidence FOR plastic. Such as - how do you sterilise or clean paper, cloth, etc. to food standards? Much harder than doing the same for plastic.
Additionally, almost every substance known to man is carcinogenic or has carcinogenic variants or cousins. What you're basically saying is "The only thing now left to kill us if the extremely low risk of cancer from an otherwise pretty harmless substance, that up until we started using it had even worse alternatives".
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. And statistics mean nothing if you don't interpret them in context.
You're confusing fast food with meat.
Meat isn't bad for you, in any way shape or form. There are no conclusive, unchallenged papers saying so.
In fact, very nearly the opposite:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
CONCLUSIONS:
United Kingdom-based vegetarians and comparable nonvegetarians have similar all-cause mortality. Differences found for specific causes of death merit further investigation.
60,310 people studied. That's a LOT.
But don't confuse "meat-eating" with "fast-food junky". And don't think that a vegan or vegetarian diet does ANYTHING for you. It doesn't. It's just the same, but you can't eat meat. If you're used to eating meat, that can make you miserable.
And if you go too strict, you can do more damage to your body and have to take an artificial supplement to restore what's missing from your diet (i.e. the stuff normally found in meat!).
And what you think wild-caught salmon is going to do differently to you than a farmed salmon, we can argue about until the cows come home but basically the stats say the same again: It makes NO difference.
Rather than try to argue on the basis of "this sounds good, and I think I'm helping", find some proper, serious, researched literature and narrow down what you're recommending.
Is it a) meat or lack of it, b) fish instead of meat, c) "free-range" fish over farmed fish, d) vegetarian over meat-eating, e) anything over fast-food?
Because confusing the issue in ONE SENTENCE between five different things, and getting most of those wrong in terms of actual science, is not the way to convince people.
You might as well tell me to only use organic pencils as they "draw better".
What's inside the plastic wrapping is going to kill you quicker than whatever the wrapping is made of.
Or, otherwise, we'd pretty much all be dead by now.
Sure, start phasing it out, like thousands of things before it, but it's not an end-of-the-world, evil-fast-food-chain, profiteering-bastards kind of story at all.
Hell, I remember when McDonald's burgers came in a polystyrene box. They changed that and it's now a card-thing with shiny outside. I'm sure those things were always marked as "food-safe" or they'd have been in court a million times by now because of it.
But our idea of food-safe changes as knowledge increases. I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up going back to polystyrene boxes at some point, we're bound to find out that something older and abandoned actually wasn't all that bad or we can now make it without it being bad.
But the tone of the summary/story is quite heavily in the "OH MY GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE" section. When actually the story is more like "Huh, there's a tiny chance this could very slightly statistically be worse for you that paper. Oh well, let's change that, but it's not worth panicking and trying to do that overnight. Let's just phase it out for something slightly better."
Hell, they banned fish and chip shops in the UK from using newspaper for wrapping the food in, which they always did in my father's day, because of the ink in the paper being not ideal to wrap a greasy load of fried fish and potato into. But try and point to someone who died or was taken ill as a result and you'd be hard pressed to come up with anything at all.
And then, ironically, they all started using polystyrene and plastics, which we're now telling them are bad for the environment and they should go back to paper, and recycled paper at that...
No, it's not.
Poker is an easy game to describe. You can get perfect statistics for chances and what remains in the deck (if applicable).
What you couldn't do up until now was the BETTING on poker. When you have $64k of chips in front of you, the optimal amount to bet is not obvious or easily iterated by brute force. Just sheer size of the potential "game-tree" in that betting was the only obstacle.
Go was the same - the game tree is huge, and we now have heuristics that can cull it earlier and better than before, but it's still uniterable in any reasonable time. However, we now do it well enough to beat top human players.
However, NONE of this is related to image recognition or translation, which are still as flaky as they ever were. Game-theory is almost entirely tree based on a limited set of options. When we conquer the amount of options available, the game-tree is parseable and you win enough of the time that you can't be beat, and you can reproduce the results consistently. Game-theory is a science and a mathematic.
But the other "AI" stuff is still in the realm of guess-and-train, plugging heuristics and millions of examples into an algorithm that tries to categorise and find a limited set of patterns. They are not reliable, reproducible, or even very scientific at all, and most of the AI field is software-engineering and heuristical analysis. Do not trust your car to recognising an image of a child running across the road because it WILL NEVER see any of the training images ever again, even if you perfectly reproduce the circumstances, and so it's always guesswork.
Computers - and "AI" as the movies would let you think it - are not good at that kind of thing. It's why CAPTCHAs exist (yes, you can target and beat a CAPTCHA but by having humans tune heuristics or feeding millions of example images into a simple algorithm and so it becomes non-reliable again, though it may be reliable "enough" to get you into a website, you don't want to be using it in anything important whatsoever).
And translation is still just as laughable as ever. Ask any foreigner to run something through Google Translate, you still end up with completely obvious transcription and understanding errors and get only literal translations or nonsense.
We're nowhere near a point that AI is a risk to humans unless - and this is important - we start thinking that the AI we have now is anything more than it is and start relying on it. Self-driving cars are a prime example.
We do NOT have AI. We have heuristics (human-created and tweaked rules) plugged into statistical systems, trained on a set of data that they will never encounter in real life. Something that's OBVIOUS to a human how it should be categorised is in no way guaranteed to be categorised in the same way by even the best-trained AI on the planet. It's literally never seen it before and it's answer is no better than a guess. And at any point, while it's acting on unseen-before data (which is all the time in such systems) it's actions are unpredictable and - worse - undiagnosable and unfixable. When it makes a mistake, you can't correct it, or even necessarily work out WHY it made that mistake, even with the complete source code and training data. And you can "request" but not instruct that it might want to categorise such things differently next time. And it might still just not understand no matter how many times you do that.
Think of it this way. Are you training the AI on the SHAPE of, say, a cat and an understanding of 3D space and how it transforms with movement and different viewing angles? No. You're training it on a bunch of pictures of a cat (or translated texts, or game positions or whatever) and hoping that it finds some correlation.
But you have ZERO idea what correlation it's finding. It's basically totally unanalysable in that respect. For all you know, it's adding up the number of blue-ish pixels and saying it's a cat if there aren't many. And though you might realise that and then tr
Gigabit to entire towns is a loss-maker not just in terms of decades.
In the UK, the only non-former-government-monopoly provider was NTL. Who, after 20 years of putting in cable, went bust. Literally, they were bought up after being near bankruptcy (by Virgin Media), including all their assets for a cut-down price, and since then any new VM rollouts have had to be built-in to the cost of building a housing estate. The number of places served by VM is pretty pathetic, it's FTTC only, and they've had to re-sell DSL services provided by British Telecom like everyone else to get anywhere near full-reach in the rest of the country.
The only other near-competitor was a project run in the town of Hull that pretty much flopped and never left the town.
Bear in mind that the UK is about HALF the size of California, and has TWICE as many people.
Any infrastructure like that is basically loss-making for DECADES, if it ever recoups its investment. FTTP is even more expensive.
There's a reason that sewage, electricity, gas, water, etc. supplies are utilities often run by government or obliged to provide services to all and paid for at least partly from your taxes.
That kind of infrastructure is a dead investment and we've known about that for centuries.
Cannibalism is quite literally survival of the fittest.
And, not to pour water, but has anyone considered that a cannibalism response is actually sensible and protective? With a nutrient deficiency, the animals change their behaviour to find another source of said nutrient.
How does this differ from pregnancy cravings? Some animals eat their OWN young. Cannibalism may well be what's keeping the few that are left alive.
1) What you propose is a legal grey area.
2) How does it solve the problem or portability? I would have to spend MONTHS of time converting my collection, defeating DRM, and storing it, and then carry around a several-Tb drive everywhere I go.
3) I have the DVD's. I continue to watch them, as normal. What I'm NOT doing it giving the movie industry a penny by doing so - most of those DVDs were second-hand and it won't be long before DVDs don't exist, like VHS before it.
When I'm quite happy - and trying - to pay a sensible price for the convenience of just clicking "watch" on a film I want to watch.
The generation below me - working in schools, and boarding schools, I'm almost uniquely placed to tell you how they operate - they don't care. They YouTube it. They stream it from dozens of free sites. If it's not there when they press the button, they have no interest. On top of that, THEY DO NOT PAY. And it's seen as the norm, to break the rules in preference.
Hell, I have to deal with C&D notices from the school's ISP. Now, what do YOU think I'm doing, trying to do, and where someone could easily get some money from me? And what do you think is wrong if, actually, the alternative is I don't spend any money or bother to watch any movies, at home, on the move, etc.?
Nope. I have the technical capability.
I refuse to do so, just to watch a movie. That's hours of pissing about just to watch a movie at some point in the future.
It's easier to just stop watching movies, which will also be a lot cheaper in the long run.
Was looking for a film to watch last night.
(Bear in mind that I pay for everything legitimately. I don't own any music. I buy DVD's or LICENCED online content for everything I watch.
I do this so that I'm rewarding the creators of things I like. I've bought shareware. I've paid for donationware. I've bought some things several times over and bought them for friends.
The point is - I'm one of those rare people who pays for EVERYTHING I use. The vast majority of people I speak to are quite happy not to pay if there's no chance of being caught and will happily use Kodi or downloads or streams or tolerate what their child does, etc.)
I went on Amazon Prime. I didn't fancy anything on the Prime offerings, so I flicked through the "Buy" listings for movies. As there was nothing on Prime, I also loaded up the Google Play Store for movies and did the same on there. I have bought 50% of my online movies on each service, and even rented a couple of times.
I looked through all the recommended, the newly released, etc. and went back as far as I could without hitting anything I liked the look of. Fair enough, personal taste. Then I went through all the cheap movies, all dross and most I'd never heard of. Then I went through categories of movies, Action or Sci-Fi is always a good bet.
About 20 pages in, and a lot of scrolling, on both services the only things that I had any interest in were old 80's action / sci-fi movies. Okay, not a problem. I own a lot of them on DVD, though, but I wanted to watch online. I'm not going to pay a fortune again.
But then the problem hits - once I found a category I was willing to buy from and didn't already own, the prices were a piss-take. GBP10 for a movie from the 80's that's had endless re-runs on TV. 25GBP for a TV series that's on constant loop on multiple TV channels, and that's just the first series. Sorry, but I'm not paying that for an Arnie movie from the 80's, Indiana Jones, James Bond or a series of Friends to flick through. And the stuff I already have on DVD? Same prices. No way am I paying that just to "have it online".
The irony was, I'd have happily laid down the 25GBP for a complete boxset of something, or 10GBP for a new movie, or a few GBP for one of the old dross (Indiana Jones, etc.). But I couldn't justify it to myself to pay those kinds of prices.
In the end, after about an hour of scrolling through both stores, I bought nothing. My entertainment time was gone, my funds weren't going to be spent like that, and that's with me LOOKING to buy.
The other annoying part? You can't buy certain things anywhere. I love an old TV series called The Good Life (Good Neighbours in the US). I have it on DVD. I'd quite like it online too, to watch when I'm out on holiday etc. I bought series 1 & 2 online and - despite being from the 70's - series 3 is nowhere to be seen. Literally, nothing. I've been checking almost every month for years now.
Try and get Aliens:Special Edition. Half the online streaming stores just don't carry it at all, or don't mention if it is SE or not.
And then there are the TV series from years ago that still have never made it to DVD or online at all. The most annoying ones are like above - someone converted one series and then said fuck it and left it at that.
I have no surprise at all when I find out that people pirate or stream or whatever. They just want to watch the fucking movie that they like. But you can't. And even when you can, the price is ludicrous.
Because I won't pirate, this gives me one option. Stop watching. Even the old stuff. Stop buying.
The movie and TV industries are killing themselves. I have no sympathy for them.
Also, we TOLD THEM THIS several decades ago when they started on the pointless crusade against piracy. If they'd listened then, maybe they wouldn't have wasted money on stupid DRM schemes, they'd have not lost public favour, and they might have been able to try things like streaming, downloads,
I never got why we still use tree structures with users, why a user's data isn't just "Data" and then use tags.
That way Data\Documents\Car Insurance is exactly the same as Data\Car Insurance\Documents
Users are more familiar with tags than ever and the LOCATION of something should not be how you find it. That's making the human do the work. The computer should find things that match the given criteria FOR the user.
And the folder layout on Windows is just an abomination. Every company creates a folder inside My Documents, so it's NOT *MY* documents any more, it's "Random Crap", which I have enough folders full of.
I want an OS which separates data from applications. Which holds data like Google Drive does when shared between multiple users - Shared With Me has EVERYTHING in one humungous list, and then I can put it in My Drive in the layout I want, no matter what the originator does with his layout.
And then tags instead of "folders" (little clouds of tags are quite easy to navigate, especially if their size matches the frequency of THAT USER'S usage and you provide a way to directly type in your own or existing tags when you can't see them).
And then a system where an application DOES NOT GET to write or read files outside a "folder". Every application is contained, and has symlink-like links to COPIES OF the data that we want to pass to it. So my word processor can't see my finance files UNLESS I GIVE IT TO THAT PROGRAM.
And when I do give a copy to a program, it's a copy-on-write link so they can't break the original files and I can revert them at any time.
Bam. Ransomware is dead. Office macros with virus code in them are dead. Programs fucking up your organisation is dead. The confusion between "executable" and "data" is distinct, clear and enforceable. When you uninstall a program, you just delete its folder. No data created with it is lost even then, but ALL remnants of the program itself and the shit it wanted to spread everywhere disappear in one fell swoop.
And every person gets their own organisation of their files (fuck, it would take about an hour to mock up an analogue of a traditional filesystem using such a system, if people were really that desperate) but nobody ever has to remember a path. Ever. And your shitty paths and filing don't affect me (think source code developers, #include, mail-merge databases and documents, etc.).
And the computer does the work and - properly done - there's none of this "indexing" shite present, or even necessary. And I can tag files the way I like (Favourite Songs), you tag them the way you like (Boyband Shite), and nobody cares.
And then it's abundantly clear where:
- Applications on a system
- Configuration for those applications for a particular user
- Data for a user shared between multiple applications
all reside, which ones need to be in a "profile" and which in a basic datastore (database, really) and no more confusion.
Fuck Google Chrome putting bookmarks into a part of the user's profile that they CANNOT FIND, and which gets synced back to the network in a different place to their documents and other user-specific data.
And while we're there, scrap this drive-letter crap. Let users choose what "shortcuts" or tags they want or not in every fucking file window, and lock down programs so they can't just wander and see EVERY FILE a user has access to just because a user ran the program once.
Read the post.
IF THEY IMPROVED TEN TIMES OVER, it would still be crap.
I just asked it to translate a boring paragraph on the back of a bank statement to Italian and its translation included a type of fruitcake.
I'd go to a UI designer.
Hand him the software.
Say "Right, what do YOU think the UI should look like that would follow all your rules?"
And then implement the program exactly as specified.
Then watch it crash and burn under the first rounds of user tests as "impenetrable", "unintuitive", etc.
Honestly, UI designers designed Windows 10 and MacOS. I couldn't fathom a more hideous and confusing set of UI notions if I tried.
But some guy who just wanted a simple menu brought the start menu back with Classic Shell back and made it work. Ever seen Windows 3.1's desktop? The icons were pretty obvious, the screen layout was used, and it wasn't pretending to be anything other than "a program on your computer with an empty screen behind it" rather than a fixed, unchangeable, ever-present interface paradigm that you can't escape.
Don't even get me started on interfaces like the iPad which has a setup routine that I've seen baffle hundreds of people. Swipe to select a date on fake rotatey widget that's not obvious that's what it even is. And then a series of next, ok, yes and no answers required where EVERY ONE is in a different place on the screen, and where there are double- and triple-negatives trying to fool you into signing up with Apple services which you could do at any point later.
And let's not even mention the shit-heap that is a modern browser. Or keyboard navigation (that's gone the way of the dodo). Or actually working out what the fuck some icons are actually supposed to represent.
And that's before you get to swipe, drag, "bonk" (when you hit a window against the side of the screen), etc. gestures.
My girlfriend is Italian.
I'm Cockney (a particular London accent that's fast and loose with silly things like consonants in words - sorted becomes "saw-id").
Google Translate - in any of its forms - is just assuredly hilarious. If they've made ten years progress it might just about not completely comical any more, that's about it.
The only decent feature is the Translate app which can replace words in a video image in real-time.
Scan it over a menu and you can get a vague idea of what food it lists, but good luck relying on it for any kind of accuracy. Normally as you hold the image as still as you can, you get words like lobster changing to words like furniture and all kinds of nonsense.
And even when you TYPE IN a phrase beyond "Where are the toilets?", the translation is as useless as Facebook's translations on its posts.
Machine learning has a LONG way to go before it can get to properly translate anything. Like understanding me when I say "Cancel Route" in my car, which basically has no fucking idea what I'm saying despite it having a very limited vocabulary at that point, speaking clearly, enunciating as best I can, repeating endlessly and being alone in a soundproof box with a mic stuck above my head (which is crystal-clear on phone calls).
But the UK is under EU law, which means you can fulfill EU data protection regulations (necessary for ANYTHING holding personal data in the UK, which is literally every online service you use).
Under Brexit, the UK won't be sufficient, even if the data protection laws NEVER change. It's literally no longer an EU-DP compliant country. Thus all that investment that could have serviced the entire EU is wasted, you need to be an EU datacenter anyway, and the UK one sits and hold UK data only.
As such, it's not stupid reporting. Microsoft are doing what EVER OTHER DATA PROCESSOR in the country is doing. I work for a school. We use an EU off-site location for backups. When Brexit strikes, that will likely have to stop.
For the same reason we cannot use iCloud as they refuse to give any guarantees that UK data will only ever stay within the EU (unlike Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Dropbox, etc. who ALL guarantee that).
UK and EU data protection laws are much stricter than you might think. Literally, cloud-based services will now have to have an EU datacenter and a UK one, whereas before Brexit just a UK one could have done both jobs.
They may change the laws, but that would require EU co-operation to allow EU data to be sent to a non-EU country, and those kinds of things generate lawsuits (it's why the EU-US aircraft travel data sharing regulations were revoked, for instance)
First part (27 countries) isn't true.
Second part (commons / lords) is.
Third (chances = nil). Wrong. Only a handful of even opposition are saying they wouldn't follow. Lords would give more problems. Expect literal riots if something blocks it.
Fourth. Another referendum is a complete humiliation. They'd rather take a year longer and change the laws involved so it's not necessary (almost nothing stopping them doing that).
Fifth. The people were stupid enough the first time round, they're stupid enough for a second time too.
And I'm not pro-Brexit in any way, shape or form. But it's going to happen. Badly, maybe, but it's going to happen. At absolute best you'll have four years of stalemate followed by a new PM and then maybe something will change, but that's a lot of hurt first.
Honestly don't get why everything these days isn't just 64-bit by default.
You can hit 32-bit limits just buying a memory chip, or bog-standard storage. 4 billion is not a big number in those terms.
32-bit times are dead.
32-bit filesizes are dead.
32-bit memory sizes are dead.
32-bit file counters are dead.
Hell, it's not inconceivable that in some things 32-bit user counters could die - with account recreation and spam accounts, surely the big people are having to deal with that.
Just stop faffing about and use 64-bit for everything, by default, from the start. 8 bytes isn't a huge amount of overhead nowadays.
But starting with the assumption "4 billion is enough" when some people have more than 4bn in their bank account, some services have more than 4bn users, and people can buy 4bn-whatevers in their local electronics store is stupid.
But 4 billions lots of 4 billion is not a limit that you will hit for a very, very, very long time. Even 128-bit isn't unseen - IPv6, ZFS, GPUs - and that's 4 billion lots of 4 billion 64-bit numbers each of which is capable of holding 4 billion lots of 4 billion.
Supercomputer architectures did this a long time ago, translating and assuming everything is 128-bit so that you never have to worry about a limit.
Why does it take so long for basics like web servers and databases to get there? 64-bit by default, MINIMUM. Anything that incurs a performance hit on that is old, and up to the user to resolve.
https://www.twitch.tv/libratus...
It's in the damn article if you read it.
Poker doesn't.
It just has a larger search space.
We've only just got to the point where Chess is beatable, very recently in computing terms.
We've only just seen a tiny glimpse that Go may be beatable. Google's AI is literally leaps-and-bounds ahead of the game in that respect as the search space is so much unbelievably huger than chess that chess is laughable in comparison.
The search space for poker - the card game - is complete. We know it exactly, down to the probability of everything. What we don't have the search space for is the betting (which, if fine-grained down to the dollar, increases as you win!). This AI is playing the search space for both, for the best result, and winning, for one particular variant of the card game.
When you have many players around the table playing this same game, it becomes orders of magnitude more complex in the betting again. The search space is still just searchable though.
This isn't adapting to human behaviour, it's learning when it loses. It knows when it loses, and it finds other paths and writes off the paths that took it to a loss. If it was playing human behaviour, it would have a webcam and a mic and be analysing stress patterns.
But, strangely, despite all the bollocks that high-end poker players spout, it's winning without all that. It's winning by just knowing what the odds are in a complex search space that humans wouldn't be able to manage.
Humans might win by analysing their opponents. This thing just wins by knowing the odds properly for the betting, and playing them.
You can't bluff probability.
And despite both our uses of the word, it's not AI in the slightest. It's not intelligent. It's just playing lots and recording the results. There's a difference. Underneath, it's still just a dumb machine brute-forcing a game-graph. It's just that the game-graph is much more complex than "how many cards left in the pack", so it can't necessarily get through it all, but it gets further through it than any of its predecessor's attempts.
Poker isn't some magical game that only works when humans try to interpret humans. It's just a game like any other. And any game that you add fine-grained betting in a complex rounds system to, with money going up to hundreds of thousands of units, just has complexity far beyond what a standard computer could brute-force or a human can calculate.
It's at that point that a "sufficiently advanced technology" is miscategorised as "magic" or - in Poker - psychology.
How do you know there aren't already thousands of these things out there doing just that?
Depends on the variant. Poker is a game which you can graph pretty easily, with probabilities for "unknown" hands.
The problem is not the card game, but the betting. You have many possibilities on how to bet and when to bet and that explodes the game graph. This AI has the betting in hand, not the card game (the latter is easy but in an incomplete-knowledge game like Texas Hold'em isn't enough on it's own).
And there are STILL people, on here and other sites, that give you the "human element" bollocks because no AI has had the complexity to do the betting properly. Looks like they're wrong. All it needed was a sufficiently complex model of the game. This AI isn't looking at player's faces, analysing their voices or any other bollocks. It's just playing the full game to the statistics. And it's winning consistently.
All that "reading their poker face" shite has just been proven bollocks. We knew that, anyway, because no poker player has ever consistently won all tournaments.