Python has been around for a very long time, and frankly, its popularity is inexplicable.
Not really. When it rose to popularity, its only competitor was Perl. People were rather polarized back then (good thing that we all agree nowadays, isn't it?) and to someone who didn't know Perl, it did look like a far worse clusterfsck than JavaScript does today. Python was the clean, thought-through option.
When Ruby appeared, many Pythonistas saw the beauty of it but Python had already built up a considerable community and echo system. Had Ruby appeared earlier, I guess it could have been different.
Now, JavaScript on the other hand. How that came to be the browser language of the world is a complete mystery to me.
It doesn't do anything that other languages don't, probably better
For each specific purpose, you're probably right. But for general purposes, which language would cover them all and be better? You can't really tell unless you define the purposes and the measurement of "better", can you?
its syntax is weird, and it uses "significant white space", which most programmers I know do not like.
If those factors are important to you, fine. But they are perhaps limiting you in your perspective. I have never heard a customer having any interest in the indentation or syntax of the code. However, they are often very interested in robustness, performance, short delivery times, flexibility, and ease of maintenance. Just to be clear: I'm not saying that Python provides any or all of those, but that my opinion of the syntactical language quirks is rather unimportant.
The US imprisons more people than any other country in the world.
Is this because:
1. The US are better at catching criminals? 2. There are more criminals per capita in the US? (I assume that the careless quote is meant per capita). 3. The US imprisons more innocent people? 4. There are more actions that are deemed illegal in the US than elsewhere? 5. It is profitable to run prisons. 6. ???
That would require Americans to actually give a fuck, which clearly they don't.
It's why climate change is inevitable. Any solution which requires cooperation from Americans is doomed to fail and is simply a waste of effort and money.
FTFY.
There are also a lot of other entities that could be substituted there. You could probably boil it down to just "any solution which requires cooperation".
Yes, but is the exact shape of the curve important?
- If the curve starts bending back the other way very far into the future (or we are at a very low, early heel of it), wouldn't it effectively be the same from the perspective of us humans who would not follow this evolution curve?
- Even when tapered off to zero further evolution, the top limit of the curve would be much higher and would probably not go down to near human level except if there was an extinction of both such AI and the knowledge and/or capability to produce a new one.
Clearly written by somebody who isn't actively involved with things like virtual/augmented/mixed-reality, realtime image-recognition, low-latency high-framerate photorealistic rendering, or realtime ray tracing.
Neither of which has anything to do with AI.
Those tasks are indeed worthy and demanding challenges, but without RTFA I understand the question to be something like "Can the research field of AGI advance without a massive steady increase in transistors-per-CPU?". I would guess that the field is in such an infancy that it is not the transistor count that is the limit. Each software system will just take longer to run, but as opposed to real-time rendering, they can wait (like in non-realtime rendering).
Max Tegmark is musing around exactly that line of reasoning and its consequences in his book "Life 3.0". Not a very good book in itself, but probably a should-read if you are interested in this topic.
Almost, but not quite. There are three different fields and meanings of AI.
One of them is as you say, something that just displays a behaviour that is adapted to the situation. It does not have anything to do with real intelligence, just generally the best rational response to the environment and situation.
The other field is about creating proper intelligence, whatever that is. Some people here seem to think that this should be the only use of the term AI, and if it is used for something else, they feel compelled to rant about how that use is not "proper" AI (which usually was never claimed) and, for good measure, point out that they believe that AGI will never happen.
And the third field is marketing. There all bets are off when it comes to definition.
Btw, would that device be named a "Smart Camera" in the same way that an internet-connected microphone with an attached speaker becomes a "Smart Speaker"?
to ask how much would someone pay? The answer is apparently not a lot, which is why have to use ads and steal our data
That is only part of the equation:
- If FB was entirely ad-less, and everyone had to pay $5/month to use it, it would probably have only a fraction of its user base, thereby limiting its use for the paying users. - If you had the option to pay $5/month to not be tracked and have your privacy invaded, the ad value of the remaining tracked users would be less than linearly scaled.
It seems to me to be a difficult proposition to offer a service that provides the value to the user that FB does but where the users pay with money instead of their souls.
But the trend seems to point in the other direction.
I think that the success of Facebook has two major factors. One is that a lot of people want confirmation and has a FOMO, and FB gives them a feed for that. However, I don't think that this is the major success factor.
The second and more important factor, and the reason why FB is for "old folks" while the kids hang out on other, more confirmation-focused media, is that it is a super-accessible platform for information sharing in the daily free-time life. People, interest groups, organizations, the local Karate club,... It is very very easy to share and distribute information to interested parties and to manage those parties. It is also very very easy to consume the information. Just open a browser on any device, or an app if you are of that persuasion. In one place, with one login, one account to remember, one user interface, you have access to a large portion of you connection with these parties.
Everything on Facebook has been done in other forms before - forums used to be prolific and a lot still exist, photo and video sharing, market places, RSS feeds,... dammit, regular web pages for that matter. But just like Slack as another example, it packages the services into a very accessible package and leaves a lot of power users wondering why people don't just use the existing proven technology.
If we want something that can provide the value (to the user) that FB provides, it must be packaged in an equally accessible format.
If we don't want to pay with our souls, we have to find another way to pay - and make people want (and be able) to pay that price. Or find sponsors.
No no, the computers can't be that stupid on their own - yet. They still need humans to tell them how to do really stupid things. That's why I'm a software developer.
Just give it a few years of research and I'll be out of the loop though.
They may have. Perhaps a gazillion years ago they decided - intelligently and rationally, and as their initial response when they faced a new condition - that their best tactic for whatever they would face in the future would be to go completely inert. We don't know their objective criteria.
Thanks for giving some concrete bullets to think and discuss around. I am not convinced that it brings any objective conclusions though (if it had, this topic would be settled way back).
3. A response is effective if meets an objective criteria.
Who selects the criteria?
Does the response have to have a positive effect in order to be intelligent? I would say no, but then, how can you tell an intelligently formulated response from a dumbly formulated one?
4. It is the "initial" response that counts. Success achieved by a long term random process, including evolution over multiple generations, is not intelligence.
Wouldn't human intelligence - whatever meaning we put into that word - itself be such a success achieved by a long term random process including evolution over multiple generations? And thereby recursively disqualify itself as intelligence by this definition?
Poor her! I know that it is not the victim who should make a change, but perhaps she should consider hanging out on another social media platform instead?
The "snoop risk" is nonsense promulgated by dumb people who are trying to sound smart.
That strikes me as an unexpectedly bold (I avoid the word "dumb") statement. I didn't think that anyone denied the snoop risk.
It only records the sentence after the keyword
Even if this is true *now*, it can change at any time by the command of a number of actors, e.g the device/service suppliers, authorities, spy agencies, hackers,...
As with all data collection, the *current* intent may be good but the data can very easily end up in the hands of bad actors. It can be the original actors with a changed agenda, or it can be new actors. And what someone calls "good" may be what you call "bad".
Video can't judge object size or reliably get distance to an object unless it has some references.
It should provide at least the same possibility to judge those as a human does with only visual input, which seems to be enough to drive a car from coast to coast.
However, I find it rather unlikely that this guy has *algorithms* that can make those judgements to the same level as a human.
As I remember it the 520ST was quite a bit more affordable than the A500 in Sweden. Don't know about the sales numbers - perhaps I was just moving in cheap company at the time.:)
And in reality we were mostly friends and had a blast together - it was the same 68k CPU after all, although theirs was a little bit higher clocked. We were solidly united against the 8086 crowd (which I was also a part of but I kept quiet about it).
The Amiga power users would make RAM disks, then load up the image from a floppy. Then a lot of stuff ran super fast, such as compiling and linking [...] two floppies was common, plus a big RAM upgrade.
Exactly this. And there was a device driver that could scan the RAM for RAM drive contents, so when the machine crashed (which it was prone to do quite often when you were programming in assembler and running on a machine without memory protection) it could recover the contents of the RAM disk after the next boot so you wouldn't have to populate it with the development tools etc again.
I actually ran a similar setup a year or two earlier on a PC before getting a HD for it. Ran C development and even Windows 1.0 with two floppy drives and a RAM disk. No recovery after crashing though.
Slashdot Mirror
they are on Angular 6 now.
7
Keep up! :)
Python has been around for a very long time, and frankly, its popularity is inexplicable.
Not really. When it rose to popularity, its only competitor was Perl. People were rather polarized back then (good thing that we all agree nowadays, isn't it?) and to someone who didn't know Perl, it did look like a far worse clusterfsck than JavaScript does today. Python was the clean, thought-through option.
When Ruby appeared, many Pythonistas saw the beauty of it but Python had already built up a considerable community and echo system. Had Ruby appeared earlier, I guess it could have been different.
Now, JavaScript on the other hand. How that came to be the browser language of the world is a complete mystery to me.
It doesn't do anything that other languages don't, probably better
For each specific purpose, you're probably right. But for general purposes, which language would cover them all and be better? You can't really tell unless you define the purposes and the measurement of "better", can you?
its syntax is weird, and it uses "significant white space", which most programmers I know do not like.
If those factors are important to you, fine. But they are perhaps limiting you in your perspective. I have never heard a customer having any interest in the indentation or syntax of the code. However, they are often very interested in robustness, performance, short delivery times, flexibility, and ease of maintenance. Just to be clear: I'm not saying that Python provides any or all of those, but that my opinion of the syntactical language quirks is rather unimportant.
the only thing that kept Java going was the Java libraries
Don't underestimate the value of those.
The US imprisons more people than any other country in the world.
Is this because:
1. The US are better at catching criminals?
2. There are more criminals per capita in the US? (I assume that the careless quote is meant per capita).
3. The US imprisons more innocent people?
4. There are more actions that are deemed illegal in the US than elsewhere?
5. It is profitable to run prisons.
6. ???
[...] for hacks that execute code on the car's getaway, autopilot, or VCSEC.
I see a potential niche market for this car model.
No, but neither did/do I know what Nest is. At least now I know that they compete in whatever they do.
That would require Americans to actually give a fuck, which clearly they don't.
It's why climate change is inevitable. Any solution which requires cooperation from Americans is doomed to fail and is simply a waste of effort and money.
FTFY.
There are also a lot of other entities that could be substituted there. You could probably boil it down to just "any solution which requires cooperation".
Yes, but is the exact shape of the curve important?
- If the curve starts bending back the other way very far into the future (or we are at a very low, early heel of it), wouldn't it effectively be the same from the perspective of us humans who would not follow this evolution curve?
- Even when tapered off to zero further evolution, the top limit of the curve would be much higher and would probably not go down to near human level except if there was an extinction of both such AI and the knowledge and/or capability to produce a new one.
Clearly written by somebody who isn't actively involved with things like virtual/augmented/mixed-reality, realtime image-recognition, low-latency high-framerate photorealistic rendering, or realtime ray tracing.
Neither of which has anything to do with AI.
Those tasks are indeed worthy and demanding challenges, but without RTFA I understand the question to be something like "Can the research field of AGI advance without a massive steady increase in transistors-per-CPU?". I would guess that the field is in such an infancy that it is not the transistor count that is the limit. Each software system will just take longer to run, but as opposed to real-time rendering, they can wait (like in non-realtime rendering).
Exactly!
Max Tegmark is musing around exactly that line of reasoning and its consequences in his book "Life 3.0". Not a very good book in itself, but probably a should-read if you are interested in this topic.
Almost, but not quite. There are three different fields and meanings of AI.
One of them is as you say, something that just displays a behaviour that is adapted to the situation. It does not have anything to do with real intelligence, just generally the best rational response to the environment and situation.
The other field is about creating proper intelligence, whatever that is. Some people here seem to think that this should be the only use of the term AI, and if it is used for something else, they feel compelled to rant about how that use is not "proper" AI (which usually was never claimed) and, for good measure, point out that they believe that AGI will never happen.
And the third field is marketing. There all bets are off when it comes to definition.
Indeed, but what if the camera kills a rhino?
Btw, would that device be named a "Smart Camera" in the same way that an internet-connected microphone with an attached speaker becomes a "Smart Speaker"?
Why not just "intelligence"?
I never really understood the need for a distinction between biologically evolved intelligence and ones that come into existence by other means.
And I think it would be harder to make a marketing buzzword out of just "intelligence". :)
to ask how much would someone pay? The answer is apparently not a lot, which is why have to use ads and steal our data
That is only part of the equation:
- If FB was entirely ad-less, and everyone had to pay $5/month to use it, it would probably have only a fraction of its user base, thereby limiting its use for the paying users.
- If you had the option to pay $5/month to not be tracked and have your privacy invaded, the ad value of the remaining tracked users would be less than linearly scaled.
It seems to me to be a difficult proposition to offer a service that provides the value to the user that FB does but where the users pay with money instead of their souls.
Very much agree!
But the trend seems to point in the other direction.
I think that the success of Facebook has two major factors. One is that a lot of people want confirmation and has a FOMO, and FB gives them a feed for that. However, I don't think that this is the major success factor.
The second and more important factor, and the reason why FB is for "old folks" while the kids hang out on other, more confirmation-focused media, is that it is a super-accessible platform for information sharing in the daily free-time life. People, interest groups, organizations, the local Karate club, ... It is very very easy to share and distribute information to interested parties and to manage those parties. It is also very very easy to consume the information. Just open a browser on any device, or an app if you are of that persuasion. In one place, with one login, one account to remember, one user interface, you have access to a large portion of you connection with these parties.
Everything on Facebook has been done in other forms before - forums used to be prolific and a lot still exist, photo and video sharing, market places, RSS feeds, ... dammit, regular web pages for that matter. But just like Slack as another example, it packages the services into a very accessible package and leaves a lot of power users wondering why people don't just use the existing proven technology.
If we want something that can provide the value (to the user) that FB provides, it must be packaged in an equally accessible format.
If we don't want to pay with our souls, we have to find another way to pay - and make people want (and be able) to pay that price. Or find sponsors.
No no, the computers can't be that stupid on their own - yet. They still need humans to tell them how to do really stupid things. That's why I'm a software developer.
Just give it a few years of research and I'll be out of the loop though.
They may have. Perhaps a gazillion years ago they decided - intelligently and rationally, and as their initial response when they faced a new condition - that their best tactic for whatever they would face in the future would be to go completely inert. We don't know their objective criteria.
Thanks for giving some concrete bullets to think and discuss around. I am not convinced that it brings any objective conclusions though (if it had, this topic would be settled way back).
3. A response is effective if meets an objective criteria.
Who selects the criteria?
Does the response have to have a positive effect in order to be intelligent? I would say no, but then, how can you tell an intelligently formulated response from a dumbly formulated one?
4. It is the "initial" response that counts. Success achieved by a long term random process, including evolution over multiple generations, is not intelligence.
Wouldn't human intelligence - whatever meaning we put into that word - itself be such a success achieved by a long term random process including evolution over multiple generations? And thereby recursively disqualify itself as intelligence by this definition?
A Woman on Twitter is Abused Every 30 Seconds
Poor her! I know that it is not the victim who should make a change, but perhaps she should consider hanging out on another social media platform instead?
So perhaps it would be more effective to downmod Amazon by not giving them your money'?
Someone crying that they can't spend their hard-earned money fast enough?
Hope of humanity: Low and declining.
The "snoop risk" is nonsense promulgated by dumb people who are trying to sound smart.
That strikes me as an unexpectedly bold (I avoid the word "dumb") statement. I didn't think that anyone denied the snoop risk.
It only records the sentence after the keyword
Even if this is true *now*, it can change at any time by the command of a number of actors, e.g the device/service suppliers, authorities, spy agencies, hackers, ...
As with all data collection, the *current* intent may be good but the data can very easily end up in the hands of bad actors. It can be the original actors with a changed agenda, or it can be new actors. And what someone calls "good" may be what you call "bad".
Video can't judge object size or reliably get distance to an object unless it has some references.
It should provide at least the same possibility to judge those as a human does with only visual input, which seems to be enough to drive a car from coast to coast.
However, I find it rather unlikely that this guy has *algorithms* that can make those judgements to the same level as a human.
As I remember it the 520ST was quite a bit more affordable than the A500 in Sweden. Don't know about the sales numbers - perhaps I was just moving in cheap company at the time. :)
And in reality we were mostly friends and had a blast together - it was the same 68k CPU after all, although theirs was a little bit higher clocked. We were solidly united against the 8086 crowd (which I was also a part of but I kept quiet about it).
The Amiga power users would make RAM disks, then load up the image from a floppy. Then a lot of stuff ran super fast, such as compiling and linking [...] two floppies was common, plus a big RAM upgrade.
Exactly this. And there was a device driver that could scan the RAM for RAM drive contents, so when the machine crashed (which it was prone to do quite often when you were programming in assembler and running on a machine without memory protection) it could recover the contents of the RAM disk after the next boot so you wouldn't have to populate it with the development tools etc again.
I actually ran a similar setup a year or two earlier on a PC before getting a HD for it. Ran C development and even Windows 1.0 with two floppy drives and a RAM disk. No recovery after crashing though.