> So, what's the alternative? Automated bottom-up design.
I'm hesitant to call that process design - it's being grown like a plant, not constructed like a house.
Such a synthesis is a good form of empirical study. Ultimately it won't be a replacement for design, but it will give many clues as to how design must take place.
> have a GA or somesuch start trying to put together a "brain" out of these neurons, which is fit for a specific purpose.
Don't do that. Doing that will produce an animal brain (of a particularly dumb animal). Instead, fit simultaneously for a wide variety of specific purposes, including competitive interaction. Humans have many mental abilities which seem to be selected for naturally.
This kind of bottom-up synthesis could work as a means of creating intelligence, but the prerequisites for this approach are as hairy as for classical design, it's just that the design has been taken care of by a GA. It has to be able to interact with people. This is required to make sure that the program forms mental patterns connected to behaviors we can understand, so that when we have the Turing test for the final test of fitness, we have some way of telling whether or not it worked. And you obviously can't have a computer do it for you.
> Note that this alternative doesn't require one to understand in excrutiating detail (or at all) the high-level abstractions which we consider as "intelligence"
That's fine as far as creating disposable intelligence goes (once we're finally through with all that brute-force testing), but as far as science goes, it puts us right back where we started. The mind, though suddenly inexpensive, remains the mystery it was before.
Also keep in mind that the mind may not really be the inseperable gestalt we tend to think of it as. It may be possible to replicate the various mental abilities separately, and gradually integrate them as we come to understand them more fully. There's really no reason to expect that we will get it all in one shot. Infinite improbability drives aside, no other technology has worked that way. Rather, AI will continue to be approached in incremental steps, building on each other. Probably for a very long time, and perhaps forever (though by then the AI will be doing the AI research;).
I think the long view advocates extensive research (including bottom-up synthesis), practical implementations, more specific domains, and perhaps most importantly, patience.
Bottom-up (of this kind, and the ALife kind) has been a big deal for a while now, but the check is still in the mail as far as implementation goes. Chances are good that there will be at least one more reframing of the question, and probably several, before we lick the Turing test.
I think the long view advocates research (including bottom-up synthesis), practical implementations which make incremental steps, focus on more specific domains, and patience.
> Amazon has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to protect its corporate assets.
At first I thought you were just another rmsophobe, but you have a point there.
> If they didn't, Bezos and the rest of the Amazon board could and probably would have been sued by their shareholders.
This, though, is absurd. All kinds of companies have patents, which are only used defensively. Their shareholders don't sue them. You could ask me for an example, but I think the burden of proof will lie with you once I point out this fact: legal battles are expensive. And, there's little chance that Amazon will ultimately win. They probably will come out of this worse off than they went in, or if the mind-shattering horror of having to click a second time drives enough of B&N's customers into the arms of Amazon, maybe they'll break even.
The corpse comment was an (apparently failed) attempt at irony. Sorry for the confusion.:)
I think religion works because it gives one the opportunity to know what it's like to be a nice person surrounded by other nice people. If you have that, and time, then it's easy to decipher the rules behind the rules, or you aren't so bright, just to learn to trust your smarter friends. This thing isn't important for its own sake, but for what it does to people. Some achieve it through love or compassion, but after many conversations with (the smart variety of) religious people, it turns out that successful logic leads to the same place.:)
Whatever you call it, it's an incredibly valuable meme that wraps itself up in different guises. Everyone wants it instinctively, but few know how to tell it apart from the things that merely bear its marks. People who got it from family become fanatics for family, people who got it from religion become fanatics for religion, but they're all chasing shadows - words, really, instead of the meanings of the words. There are bad families and bad religions, too. Perhaps such people are afraid to admit that taking the short, non-questioning route, has drawbacks (exploitability) as well as advantages (availability).
Blame lies with the individuals in the institution, and not the institution itself. You may be able to get rid of lots of baggage by building a new institution, I don't really know. Anyway, focus on people, and I think everything else should fall in place...
You misspelt corpse. An atheist is something different, not believing in an all-powerful god isn't incompatible with having desires and feelings. The situation is far more complex. The only real difference between an atheist and a... er, a theist, I suppose, is that an atheist reasons through situations with logic and, barring that, intuition, rather than relying on a static matrix of verbally ambiguated sin acts to guide behavior.
There's a great incentive for following these rules, irrespective of the existence of God (and of Jean-Paul Sartre). To wit: people who act altruistically have aligned themselves with the species as a whole. Such creatures recognize each other instintively, work together, do better than individuals. This isn't religion, it's common sense. The rewards and punishment are obvious with the merest reflection.
The rules are 'optional' to anyone with free will. Religion has nothing to do with it.
What? It is relevant. Did you even read the post I replied to? Poster directly implied that Amazon wanted to hurt 'innovation'. If they wanted to hurt innovation, they would go after an innovator, not B&N.
As for your other comment, or lack thereof, feel free to bite me.
OTOH, the other reply to my comment actually makes a good point, that legal battles are expensive. But then the question becomes, when is it more profitable to litigate than not to? Clearly Amazon thinks that action against B&N must be the smartest move of all, but who's to say what they'll do afterwards.
Right. Without work, there isn't any market. By the same token, without employees there is no corporation, without taxpayers there is no government. But the people that analyze the market also go and report things to the people that run it, so whenever a pattern emerges, everyone immediately rushes to change everything to take advantage of it. Usually the pattern goes away, and everyone is back where they started. Or, perhaps, even worse off.
Big IPOs for small companies with unproven business plans frighten me almost as much as the megacorps do.
Do you really think you could organize a boycott against anything with a market as large as Amazon has? It strikes me as rather like trying to kill a bull elephant with spitballs...
If squashing competition and discouraging innovation is Bezos' plan, then he's not doing a very good job of it, is he? If he were, you'd think he'd sue someone besides BN.com.
Anyway, what new ideas has B&N come up with lately? Please, tell me what unique and ingenius marvels of engineering they have on their site, for I am too lazy to go find out myself.
Anyway, I'm not going to cry for Barnes and Noble, given that they have tons of material assets in the form of successful bookstores all over the place, and Amazon has nothing but their name and CGI scripts.
If Red Hat pulled this kind of shit on Microsoft, only Microsoft, and no one else, I have a feeling that there would be fewer complaints than there are.
X isn't the place to look for information on why a program crashed, it's just another program, after all. The core, or, if there isn't one, the source, is. I've used Windows 95 and 98, and various incarnations of the MacOS and they, at least, don't provide core files, though that doesn't surprise anyone, as they don't provide dev tools, either. If you're lucky, they might give you an error message, but even then it's usually not useful information. A core is sometimes useful, with working dev tools.
Even if you won't recommend a compiler, will you at least tell us which ones you use? How do you decide which compiler is right for a specific purpose? What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of the various compilers?
Which operating systems did you compile under, and which did you compile for? GCC for Win32 isn't nearly as mature or developed as GCC for Linux.
Given that, it follows that GCC should whip BCC on Linux much like BCC whips GCC on Win32, the X-factor here being the fact that Borland can take optimization techniques from GCC, but not vice-versa. Of course doing so may put them in violation of the GPL, but copyright law never made sense wrt software to begin with.
In Debian, an easy way to find out what's installed is to examine/var/lib/dpkg/status. That file contains a comprehensive list of all the packages installed via apt. Don't edit it unless you know what you're doing, though.
You say that as if having dummified and geek-friendly interfaces are mutually exclusive. Linux as Linux doesn't have an interface (except for the API, obviously). IIRC, all interfaces are run in user space, even the CLI shell. This means that the interface can be replaced more easily than in any other desktoppy OS.
Modern linux dists only have one windowing system but they have, about two `desktop environments,' four or five CLI shells, and even more window managers than that. The idea that there is only one interface allowed per operating system is an artifact from the MacOS. Even in Windows, there are things like LiteStep to allow virtual desktops, etc, and the DOS shell if you feel like you deserve some abuse.
Linux advocacy cliche #17: Choice, control, malleability - slack, if you will - is an advantage of Linux.
Anyway, I see KDE moving in the direction of dummification, and things like NextStep tending toward what you want. GNOME is kind of schitzophrenic in the sense of who it's targeted towards. But I suppose I use it because I'm not sure whether I want to be a dummy all the time, or a geek all the time, and GNOME caters to all the voices in my head.
It being "voiced multiple times" doesn't make it any more valid.
Q*Bert said, in effect, "we're smarter than you, so you have nothing to say." Saying that the sum readership of/. is smarter than some given person is absurd, not because it's wrong, but because it's redundant. There will always be someone more knowledgable in a given domain. If being smarter than everyone else is a prerequisite for writing articles, then there would never be any.
The 10 commandments aren't just ethical, they are part of a specific religion. You can't post the 10 Commandments without posting corresponding material from every other represented religion. IIRC, the 10 Commandments are not exclusively, or even originally Christian - they are Hebrew. So your suggestion that there are "people now who aren't Christian" suggesting such postings should impress exactly no one.
If you're referring to the USA, as I assume you are, please note also that it is a country founded on the bones of slaughtered American Indians and the sweat of enslaved Africans, and now we will pay, and pay, and pay for it. Some of us would like to rise above what our country was founded on.
And thank god, you know, because it would be, as you say, crap. But complaining about it in advance isn't the solution - you've only replaced regular crap with pre-emptive crap. Now we don't even need an actual troll/ignorant person to give us our crap. We can think ahead and magically create our crap out of the mere possibility that someone else might eventually create some real crap. "Wah wah wah. MSFT sucks. RMS sucks. Linux sucks. BSD sucks. GNOME sucks. KDE sucks. People saying stuff sucks, suck. Wah wah wah."
It's the same old crap, and we still hate it. Did you have to peep?
Pardon my off-topicness, and sorry for not practicing what I preach, and other apologies about bad stuff I've done.
I guess you forgot that the killer-kids issue was incedental to the Hellmouth issue. The killers were also big fans of Adolf Hitler, a trait which is rather looked down upon by much of our "moral[sic] relativistic modern culture." Many consider it a sign of immorality, if not immorality itself, and either way it misses the point.
What made the hellmouth an interesting article is that people are, everyone is, abused by institutions and societies - because of their geekiness. Because they are interested in arcane or unpopular subjects, and maybe aren't nice or sexy or scary enough to talk people into doing what they want. And that's backwards. The extent to which I am a geek is the extent to which I am a useful and indispensable (rather than interesting or well-liked) member of society.
Should we feel bad for the killers, no. Are people unfairly persecuted because they dressed a certain way or liked video games, probably. Do socially destructive instiutions need to be broken down or reworked, almost certainly.
Dismissing the issue as hysteria and hype only shows that you've given up on the world as a place to live.
Though that does give me an idea for a question:
Jon Katz, now that you've written a number of articles on "geeks" and a book, actually titled "Geeks", do you think that you've started to break down the value of the term through overuse? Is there a clear distinction between a geek and, say, a programmer or engineer, or any skilled person, who is coincidentially odd or antisocial?
In twenty words or less, what is your definition of a geek?
According to his user page, he posts quite a bit. I think the real issue is that he doesn't post until after his articles get shoved back into the "older stuff" box, and that his posts aren't as meaty as the articles themselves, contrary to most of Slashdot. Consider this a vote for "less article, more comment."
There's a lot of undeserved hostility directed toward Jon Katz. I think it's childish. Sometimes he's wrong. Sometimes he says things that are just stupid. But if you let him experiment long enough, eventually he'll hit a vein. Remember the hellmouth?
He's not particularly aloof, despite saying so much in the root articles. Compared to the other authors, he's positively gregarious - look at his user page.
Debian packages are much easier than the alternatives. apt-get does all the work - even finding and downloading the package file. RPM's are only slightly easier to work with than tarballs, and as more of the "easy-to-use" distributions realize this (Corel, Stormix), more packages will be available for Debian.
Slashdot Mirror
preview first, preview first, preview first ...
> So, what's the alternative? Automated bottom-up design.
;).
I'm hesitant to call that process design - it's being grown like a plant, not constructed like a house.
Such a synthesis is a good form of empirical study. Ultimately it won't be a replacement for design, but it will give many clues as to how design must take place.
> have a GA or somesuch start trying to put together a "brain" out of these neurons, which is fit for a specific purpose.
Don't do that. Doing that will produce an animal brain (of a particularly dumb animal). Instead, fit simultaneously for a wide variety of specific purposes, including competitive interaction. Humans have many mental abilities which seem to be selected for naturally.
This kind of bottom-up synthesis could work as a means of creating intelligence, but the prerequisites for this approach are as hairy as for classical design, it's just that the design has been taken care of by a GA. It has to be able to interact with people. This is required to make sure that the program forms mental patterns connected to behaviors we can understand, so that when we have the Turing test for the final test of fitness, we have some way of telling whether or not it worked. And you obviously can't have a computer do it for you.
> Note that this alternative doesn't require one to understand in excrutiating detail (or at all) the high-level abstractions which we consider as "intelligence"
That's fine as far as creating disposable intelligence goes (once we're finally through with all that brute-force testing), but as far as science goes, it puts us right back where we started. The mind, though suddenly inexpensive, remains the mystery it was before.
Also keep in mind that the mind may not really be the inseperable gestalt we tend to think of it as. It may be possible to replicate the various mental abilities separately, and gradually integrate them as we come to understand them more fully. There's really no reason to expect that we will get it all in one shot. Infinite improbability drives aside, no other technology has worked that way. Rather, AI will continue to be approached in incremental steps, building on each other. Probably for a very long time, and perhaps forever (though by then the AI will be doing the AI research
I think the long view advocates extensive research (including bottom-up synthesis), practical implementations, more specific domains, and perhaps most importantly, patience.
Bottom-up (of this kind, and the ALife kind) has been a big deal for a while now, but the check is still in the mail as far as implementation goes. Chances are good that there will be at least one more reframing of the question, and probably several, before we lick the Turing test.
I think the long view advocates research (including bottom-up synthesis), practical implementations which make incremental steps, focus on more specific domains, and patience.
> Amazon has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to protect its corporate assets.
At first I thought you were just another rmsophobe, but you have a point there.
> If they didn't, Bezos and the rest of the Amazon board could and probably would have been sued by their shareholders.
This, though, is absurd. All kinds of companies have patents, which are only used defensively. Their shareholders don't sue them. You could ask me for an example, but I think the burden of proof will lie with you once I point out this fact: legal battles are expensive. And, there's little chance that Amazon will ultimately win. They probably will come out of this worse off than they went in, or if the mind-shattering horror of having to click a second time drives enough of B&N's customers into the arms of Amazon, maybe they'll break even.
The corpse comment was an (apparently failed) attempt at irony. Sorry for the confusion. :)
:)
...
I think religion works because it gives one the opportunity to know what it's like to be a nice person surrounded by other nice people. If you have that, and time, then it's easy to decipher the rules behind the rules, or you aren't so bright, just to learn to trust your smarter friends. This thing isn't important for its own sake, but for what it does to people. Some achieve it through love or compassion, but after many conversations with (the smart variety of) religious people, it turns out that successful logic leads to the same place.
Whatever you call it, it's an incredibly valuable meme that wraps itself up in different guises. Everyone wants it instinctively, but few know how to tell it apart from the things that merely bear its marks. People who got it from family become fanatics for family, people who got it from religion become fanatics for religion, but they're all chasing shadows - words, really, instead of the meanings of the words. There are bad families and bad religions, too. Perhaps such people are afraid to admit that taking the short, non-questioning route, has drawbacks (exploitability) as well as advantages (availability).
Blame lies with the individuals in the institution, and not the institution itself. You may be able to get rid of lots of baggage by building a new institution, I don't really know. Anyway, focus on people, and I think everything else should fall in place
You misspelt corpse. An atheist is something different, not believing in an all-powerful god isn't incompatible with having desires and feelings. The situation is far more complex. The only real difference between an atheist and a ... er, a theist, I suppose, is that an atheist reasons through situations with logic and, barring that, intuition, rather than relying on a static matrix of verbally ambiguated sin acts to guide behavior.
There's a great incentive for following these rules, irrespective of the existence of God (and of Jean-Paul Sartre). To wit: people who act altruistically have aligned themselves with the species as a whole. Such creatures recognize each other instintively, work together, do better than individuals. This isn't religion, it's common sense. The rewards and punishment are obvious with the merest reflection.
The rules are 'optional' to anyone with free will. Religion has nothing to do with it.
What? It is relevant. Did you even read the post I replied to? Poster directly implied that Amazon wanted to hurt 'innovation'. If they wanted to hurt innovation, they would go after an innovator, not B&N.
As for your other comment, or lack thereof, feel free to bite me.
OTOH, the other reply to my comment actually makes a good point, that legal battles are expensive. But then the question becomes, when is it more profitable to litigate than not to? Clearly Amazon thinks that action against B&N must be the smartest move of all, but who's to say what they'll do afterwards.
Right. Without work, there isn't any market. By the same token, without employees there is no corporation, without taxpayers there is no government. But the people that analyze the market also go and report things to the people that run it, so whenever a pattern emerges, everyone immediately rushes to change everything to take advantage of it. Usually the pattern goes away, and everyone is back where they started. Or, perhaps, even worse off.
Big IPOs for small companies with unproven business plans frighten me almost as much as the megacorps do.
Do you really think you could organize a boycott against anything with a market as large as Amazon has? It strikes me as rather like trying to kill a bull elephant with spitballs ...
If squashing competition and discouraging innovation is Bezos' plan, then he's not doing a very good job of it, is he? If he were, you'd think he'd sue someone besides BN.com.
Anyway, what new ideas has B&N come up with lately? Please, tell me what unique and ingenius marvels of engineering they have on their site, for I am too lazy to go find out myself.
Anyway, I'm not going to cry for Barnes and Noble, given that they have tons of material assets in the form of successful bookstores all over the place, and Amazon has nothing but their name and CGI scripts.
If Red Hat pulled this kind of shit on Microsoft, only Microsoft, and no one else, I have a feeling that there would be fewer complaints than there are.
X isn't the place to look for information on why a program crashed, it's just another program, after all. The core, or, if there isn't one, the source, is. I've used Windows 95 and 98, and various incarnations of the MacOS and they, at least, don't provide core files, though that doesn't surprise anyone, as they don't provide dev tools, either. If you're lucky, they might give you an error message, but even then it's usually not useful information. A core is sometimes useful, with working dev tools.
It's also relevant to this question that the very next thing Knuth says in The TeXbook is that you can pronounce it Tex as in "Texas" or "Tex Avery".
Even if you won't recommend a compiler, will you at least tell us which ones you use? How do you decide which compiler is right for a specific purpose? What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of the various compilers?
Which operating systems did you compile under, and which did you compile for? GCC for Win32 isn't nearly as mature or developed as GCC for Linux.
Given that, it follows that GCC should whip BCC on Linux much like BCC whips GCC on Win32, the X-factor here being the fact that Borland can take optimization techniques from GCC, but not vice-versa. Of course doing so may put them in violation of the GPL, but copyright law never made sense wrt software to begin with.
In Debian, an easy way to find out what's installed is to examine /var/lib/dpkg/status. That file contains a comprehensive list of all the packages installed via apt. Don't edit it unless you know what you're doing, though.
You say that as if having dummified and geek-friendly interfaces are mutually exclusive. Linux as Linux doesn't have an interface (except for the API, obviously). IIRC, all interfaces are run in user space, even the CLI shell. This means that the interface can be replaced more easily than in any other desktoppy OS.
Modern linux dists only have one windowing system but they have, about two `desktop environments,' four or five CLI shells, and even more window managers than that. The idea that there is only one interface allowed per operating system is an artifact from the MacOS. Even in Windows, there are things like LiteStep to allow virtual desktops, etc, and the DOS shell if you feel like you deserve some abuse.
Linux advocacy cliche #17: Choice, control, malleability - slack, if you will - is an advantage of Linux.
Anyway, I see KDE moving in the direction of dummification, and things like NextStep tending toward what you want. GNOME is kind of schitzophrenic in the sense of who it's targeted towards. But I suppose I use it because I'm not sure whether I want to be a dummy all the time, or a geek all the time, and GNOME caters to all the voices in my head.
BootlegNet (NaughtySharingNet?) in general. Ever notice how many bootleg mp3 sites are also warez, gamez, pr0n and emu sites?
A competent person or organization would have removed windows before the 68th reboot. And probably before the first, too.
If he posted them himself, there would be the assumption that he's engaged in shameless self-promotion.
It being "voiced multiple times" doesn't make it any more valid.
/. is smarter than some given person is absurd, not because it's wrong, but because it's redundant. There will always be someone more knowledgable in a given domain. If being smarter than everyone else is a prerequisite for writing articles, then there would never be any.
Q*Bert said, in effect, "we're smarter than you, so you have nothing to say." Saying that the sum readership of
How do you know what country that AC lives in?
The 10 commandments aren't just ethical, they are part of a specific religion. You can't post the 10 Commandments without posting corresponding material from every other represented religion. IIRC, the 10 Commandments are not exclusively, or even originally Christian - they are Hebrew. So your suggestion that there are "people now who aren't Christian" suggesting such postings should impress exactly no one.
If you're referring to the USA, as I assume you are, please note also that it is a country founded on the bones of slaughtered American Indians and the sweat of enslaved Africans, and now we will pay, and pay, and pay for it. Some of us would like to rise above what our country was founded on.
Flame more carefully in the future.
And thank god, you know, because it would be, as you say, crap. But complaining about it in advance isn't the solution - you've only replaced regular crap with pre-emptive crap. Now we don't even need an actual troll/ignorant person to give us our crap. We can think ahead and magically create our crap out of the mere possibility that someone else might eventually create some real crap. "Wah wah wah. MSFT sucks. RMS sucks. Linux sucks. BSD sucks. GNOME sucks. KDE sucks. People saying stuff sucks, suck. Wah wah wah."
It's the same old crap, and we still hate it. Did you have to peep?
Pardon my off-topicness, and sorry for not practicing what I preach, and other apologies about bad stuff I've done.
I guess you forgot that the killer-kids issue was incedental to the Hellmouth issue. The killers were also big fans of Adolf Hitler, a trait which is rather looked down upon by much of our "moral[sic] relativistic modern culture." Many consider it a sign of immorality, if not immorality itself, and either way it misses the point.
What made the hellmouth an interesting article is that people are, everyone is, abused by institutions and societies - because of their geekiness. Because they are interested in arcane or unpopular subjects, and maybe aren't nice or sexy or scary enough to talk people into doing what they want. And that's backwards. The extent to which I am a geek is the extent to which I am a useful and indispensable (rather than interesting or well-liked) member of society.
Should we feel bad for the killers, no. Are people unfairly persecuted because they dressed a certain way or liked video games, probably. Do socially destructive instiutions need to be broken down or reworked, almost certainly.
Dismissing the issue as hysteria and hype only shows that you've given up on the world as a place to live.
Though that does give me an idea for a question:
Jon Katz, now that you've written a number of articles on "geeks" and a book, actually titled "Geeks", do you think that you've started to break down the value of the term through overuse? Is there a clear distinction between a geek and, say, a programmer or engineer, or any skilled person, who is coincidentially odd or antisocial?
In twenty words or less, what is your definition of a geek?
According to his user page, he posts quite a bit. I think the real issue is that he doesn't post until after his articles get shoved back into the "older stuff" box, and that his posts aren't as meaty as the articles themselves, contrary to most of Slashdot. Consider this a vote for "less article, more comment."
There's a lot of undeserved hostility directed toward Jon Katz. I think it's childish. Sometimes he's wrong. Sometimes he says things that are just stupid. But if you let him experiment long enough, eventually he'll hit a vein. Remember the hellmouth?
He's not particularly aloof, despite saying so much in the root articles. Compared to the other authors, he's positively gregarious - look at his user page.
/me don't need no stinking fireproof suit.
Debian packages are much easier than the alternatives. apt-get does all the work - even finding and downloading the package file. RPM's are only slightly easier to work with than tarballs, and as more of the "easy-to-use" distributions realize this (Corel, Stormix), more packages will be available for Debian.