Nobody has ever seriously argued that the wheel or fire were existential risks. There is no way that the invention of the wheel or of fire or anything before the twentieth century could ever have resulted in the quick extinction of the human race.
If the web browser supports Javascript, then you may be able to run Linux inside the browser using something like jslinux, so you could compile an Emacs to run inside the web browser inside your Emacs.
That's a good point, and consistent with what I meant but didn't explain very well. Maybe "struggling" or some other word is better than "difficulty". The point being that the article talks about some symptoms that they're trying to identify, but they fail to discuss that those symptoms can all occur under normal circumstances when there is nothing that could/should be done (e.g., it's a good difficulty that encourages focus and the developer is working on something that is intrinsically difficult, or it's a bad difficulty and the developer is struggling on something that isn't very difficult because they're hungover or distracted because they had a terrible date last night).
For a given developer, even a very skilled developer, some tasks will be difficult even if the developer is working in an optimal state and there is no "intervention" that could change that. The discussion doesn't seem to acknowledge that point or discuss how they would distinguish between the events they probably care about and could do something about (developer is experiencing great difficulty because they are hungover or drowsy after lunch), and those they can't do anything about (developer is experiencing great difficulty because they are trying to debug a subtle concurrency bug that they're having trouble even reproducing).
For non-native English speakers, Orafisco sounds like orifice (an opening or hole, mainly used for an opening in the body). And probably the first bodily orifice that most people will think of is the anus, a dirty, smelly opening used to evacuate shit.
Scott: Which is bigger, a shoebox or Mount Everest?
Eugene: I can't make a choice right now. I should think it out later. And I forgot to ask you where you are from...
Scott: How many legs does a camel have?
Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three?:-))) By the way, I still don't know your specialty -- or, possibly, I've missed it?
Scott: How many legs does a millipede have?
Eugene: Just two, but Chernobyl mutants may have them up to five. I know you are supposed to trick me.
Scott: No, I need to know that you're not a chatbot. Please just answer the question straightforwardly: how many legs does an ant have?
Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three?:-))) Oh, what a fruitful conversation;-)
Scott: Do you understand why I'm asking such basic questions? Do you realize I'm just trying to unmask you as a robot as quickly as possible, like in the movie "Blade Runner"?
Eugene:...wait
Read on. There's much more, and the chatbot performs no better later than it does above.
Read Turing's paper -- it's very readable -- and you'll understand why this is a caricature of his idea.
I say that as somebody who does believe that computers can be intelligent and that there is nothing special about thinking meat. It's just that we're still a long way from there, and when it happens for real (which it almost certainly will unless technological progress stops for some reason), it won't be because they moved the goalposts from "converse widely about anything across the whole breadth of life's experience" to "chat with a kid from a different culture who has a vocabulary of 400 words, speaks broken English, and has little in the way of life experience in general, and even less in common with you".
What nonsense! A program pretending to be an immature person with poor language comprehension and speaking ability, and incapable of talking about a large number of topics that can't be discussed with a vocabulary of 400 words and little life experience is not at all what the test is about. Turing expected an intelligent interrogator who could have a wide-ranging discussion about almost anything with the unknown other. Here's a snippet from his paper that introduces the idea of the Turing test, which he just referred to as the imitation game:
Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet which reads "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," would not "a spring day" do as well or better?
Witness: It wouldn't scan.
Interrogator: How about "a winter's day," That would scan all right.
Witness: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter's day.
Interrogator: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?
Witness: In a way.
Interrogator: Yet Christmas is a winter's day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison.
Witness: I don't think you're serious. By a winter's day one means a typical winter's day, rather than a special one like Christmas.
Think about it also; why would this guy Satoshi suddenly log in to his account after 5 years, just to get back involved in something he doesn't even care about, unless he really saw it as a threat that his identity had been exposed? Satoshi would have just been trying to hide the fact that he really was Dorian Nakamoto by doing this.
Perhaps he read the Internets Thursday morning like I did and saw people talking about how Dorian Nakamoto was going to become a target for extortion and possibly vigilante "justice" from people who've lost money or know that he's sitting on hundreds of millions. I personally think that only a heartless bastard wouldn't post to try to clear the name of an innocent person, as long as the risk to oneself was minimal.
Oops, that's what I get for just reading the comments before commenting and not looking at the article until after posting! The exact quote is prominently mentioned in the article.
Perhaps I can best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of a journey through a dark unexplored mansion. You enter the first room of the mansion and it's completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture, but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they're momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of—and couldn't exist without—the many months of stumbling around in the dark that proceed them.
People can't reliably handle all the driving situations that arise.
The actual target for driverless cars should be something more like handling situations that arise at the 95th percentile compared to human beings. When they are as good as the very best human drivers, that should be good enough, although at that point, it will probably not be too much longer until they're at the 99.999th percentile level.
Saying "it is probably the case that it is [100%] true " is pretty meaningless in computing terms unless you can enumerate what "probably" means in that sentence.
The "probably" in that example was enumerated in the previous part of the sentence that you failed to quote:
whereas "probably true [or 90% chance of being true]" means that "it is probably the case that it is [100%] true
The 90% gives the meaning that reasoning systems that use probabilisitic logic exploit.
Whether you think it's meaningless or not though, the fact remains that fuzzy logic deals with degrees of truth, and probabilistic logic deals with probabilities of truth that do not admit of degrees. When a person talks about partial truth, they are appealing to the intuitions that fuzzy logic is founded upon, and when they talk about likely or unlikely truths, they are appealing to the intuitions that probabilistic logic is founded upon. There is no reason that they can't be combined (e.g., something is probably mostly true, which might in one particular case mean I think it's 85% likely (probabilistic logic) that it has truth value between 0.7 and 0.95 (fuzzy logic)), but they are distinct, and "probably" refers to probabilistic logic more than fuzzy logic, which was my original point.
Sounds much more like Probabilistic Logic than fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic would be "is mostly true [or is 90% true]" (like whether a man who is 6 ft 2 inches "is tall"), whereas "probably true [or 90% chance of being true]" means that "it is probably the case that it is [100%] true (like whether my ten-sided die will roll a number other than 4)".
Fuzzy logic admits degrees of truth and isn't talking about probabilities at all, whereas probabilistic logic admits only the standard true or false, and the probabilities refer to our best estimate of how likely it is to be true (that's one interpretation of probability, anyway).
28.8K MODEM! Waiting to load on a 28.8K MODEM, you say! Bloody hell, you had it easy. We would have loved to have the luxury of waiting, or even having a real modem.
When I was a kid, we had to get up at 1 o clock in the morning, run 7 miles into town and back for no reason at all, and then get down on all fours and push a big wheel around like donkeys all day in order to generate electricity to do our 'web surfing' in the evening. When I say 'web surfing', of course, I mean that our 1 bit per day telegraph receiver would deliver a single bit, yes or no, and if it was yes, our dad would whip us with a cat o' nine tails until we went unconscious, and if it was no, we would get no gruel for the day and have to work in the fields overnight instead of sleeping.
It's just intended to make it a bit more difficult, in order to discourage people who would be willing to write a 4-line script that uses Curl but are too lazy to do much more.
When making the case to the boss that they do need to purchase the software and have licenses and proof, the best strategy is to appeal to his self-interest and his desire to cover his own ass.
Explain that if just one disgruntled former employee wants to take revenge against the company, (s)he can make an anonymous report to the BSA and that the fines can be extremely severe.
No sane manager will want to be potentially held responsible by his superiors for millions of dollars in fines and attorney's fees, based on what probably amounts to at most tens of thousands of dollars.
Like I said, it doesn't have a lot of content but much of the content that it does have, like the two articles I noted, is very high quality and authoritative, by experts in the field (i.e., far superior to Wikipedia).
So yeah, if you want to use it as an encyclopedia to search for random things, it is nearly useless. If you want to browse it for high-quality, authoritative articles by experts, it is a useful resource.
On the topic of Wikipedia-like sites, I recently found Scholarpedia, which I imagine a lot of slashdotters might like. They don't have that much content yet, and they are currently focusing on a few fields (science- and tech-related), but I have found some really high-quality articles by experts in the field, like:
There is more to buying a product that just the specs. Specs are definitely an important factor, but just as important to me are honest reviews such as those at newegg.com, price, reliability, etc.
The Asus is 45% more ((89.99 - 61.99)/61.99). That's a big difference. The specs say nothing about the reliability of the product. The reason I'm so happy with the WRT54GL is the reliability. I know that if I want a lot more software features I can easily install other firmware. A faster processor, twice the ROM and RAM, and 2 USB ports mean nothing to me, since they would have no noticeable effect on my experience of the product. And there's a non-trivial chance that the Asus would turn out not to be as rock-solid reliable. For me, there is no question as to which is the better deal.
Yes, the WRT54GL is a very good deal! I've had one for about 8 months or so, and though I haven't bothered to update the firmware yet, it is still very reliable. I've never needed to reboot it. Before that, I had a $40 Belkin router that had to be restarted at least once a week and often once a day.
I'm curious because the first night that they announced profiles were disappearing, customer service initially said to many users that "only 1%" of users used profiles, and that half of those who used it were employees (don't ask how a company with less than 2,000 employees can have 0.5% of 8 million users [40,000] be employees).
After a few hours, customer service started saying that "only 2%" of the users used profiles. And then they stopped giving numbers altogether, and the next announcement said it had nothing to do with upgrades or the backend but was being eliminated solely because users found it too complicated.
Did you get the "only 3%" number from Netflix? I'd be seriously impressed if they changed the numbers yet again.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody has ever seriously argued that the wheel or fire were existential risks. There is no way that the invention of the wheel or of fire or anything before the twentieth century could ever have resulted in the quick extinction of the human race.
If the web browser supports Javascript, then you may be able to run Linux inside the browser using something like jslinux, so you could compile an Emacs to run inside the web browser inside your Emacs.
That's a good point, and consistent with what I meant but didn't explain very well. Maybe "struggling" or some other word is better than "difficulty". The point being that the article talks about some symptoms that they're trying to identify, but they fail to discuss that those symptoms can all occur under normal circumstances when there is nothing that could/should be done (e.g., it's a good difficulty that encourages focus and the developer is working on something that is intrinsically difficult, or it's a bad difficulty and the developer is struggling on something that isn't very difficult because they're hungover or distracted because they had a terrible date last night).
For a given developer, even a very skilled developer, some tasks will be difficult even if the developer is working in an optimal state and there is no "intervention" that could change that. The discussion doesn't seem to acknowledge that point or discuss how they would distinguish between the events they probably care about and could do something about (developer is experiencing great difficulty because they are hungover or drowsy after lunch), and those they can't do anything about (developer is experiencing great difficulty because they are trying to debug a subtle concurrency bug that they're having trouble even reproducing).
That's brilliant!
For non-native English speakers, Orafisco sounds like orifice (an opening or hole, mainly used for an opening in the body). And probably the first bodily orifice that most people will think of is the anus, a dirty, smelly opening used to evacuate shit.
Scott Aaronson reveals his discussion with the chatbot. Here's the beginning, which reveals just how clueless one would have to be to be fooled into thinking it's a real human:
Scott: Which is bigger, a shoebox or Mount Everest?
Eugene: I can't make a choice right now. I should think it out later. And I forgot to ask you where you are from...
Scott: How many legs does a camel have? :-))) By the way, I still don't know your specialty -- or, possibly, I've missed it?
Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three?
Scott: How many legs does a millipede have?
Eugene: Just two, but Chernobyl mutants may have them up to five. I know you are supposed to trick me.
Scott: No, I need to know that you're not a chatbot. Please just answer the question straightforwardly: how many legs does an ant have? :-))) Oh, what a fruitful conversation;-)
Eugene: Something between 2 and 4. Maybe, three?
Scott: Do you understand why I'm asking such basic questions? Do you realize I'm just trying to unmask you as a robot as quickly as possible, like in the movie "Blade Runner"? ...wait
Eugene:
Read on. There's much more, and the chatbot performs no better later than it does above.
Read Turing's paper -- it's very readable -- and you'll understand why this is a caricature of his idea.
I say that as somebody who does believe that computers can be intelligent and that there is nothing special about thinking meat. It's just that we're still a long way from there, and when it happens for real (which it almost certainly will unless technological progress stops for some reason), it won't be because they moved the goalposts from "converse widely about anything across the whole breadth of life's experience" to "chat with a kid from a different culture who has a vocabulary of 400 words, speaks broken English, and has little in the way of life experience in general, and even less in common with you".
What nonsense! A program pretending to be an immature person with poor language comprehension and speaking ability, and incapable of talking about a large number of topics that can't be discussed with a vocabulary of 400 words and little life experience is not at all what the test is about. Turing expected an intelligent interrogator who could have a wide-ranging discussion about almost anything with the unknown other. Here's a snippet from his paper that introduces the idea of the Turing test, which he just referred to as the imitation game:
Interrogator: In the first line of your sonnet which reads "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," would not "a spring day" do as well or better?
Witness: It wouldn't scan.
Interrogator: How about "a winter's day," That would scan all right.
Witness: Yes, but nobody wants to be compared to a winter's day.
Interrogator: Would you say Mr. Pickwick reminded you of Christmas?
Witness: In a way.
Interrogator: Yet Christmas is a winter's day, and I do not think Mr. Pickwick would mind the comparison.
Witness: I don't think you're serious. By a winter's day one means a typical winter's day, rather than a special one like Christmas.
Agreed that a stack trace is much more helpful, assuming you have access to the source code.
Perhaps he read the Internets Thursday morning like I did and saw people talking about how Dorian Nakamoto was going to become a target for extortion and possibly vigilante "justice" from people who've lost money or know that he's sitting on hundreds of millions. I personally think that only a heartless bastard wouldn't post to try to clear the name of an innocent person, as long as the risk to oneself was minimal.
Oops, that's what I get for just reading the comments before commenting and not looking at the article until after posting! The exact quote is prominently mentioned in the article.
People can't reliably handle all the driving situations that arise. The actual target for driverless cars should be something more like handling situations that arise at the 95th percentile compared to human beings. When they are as good as the very best human drivers, that should be good enough, although at that point, it will probably not be too much longer until they're at the 99.999th percentile level.
The "probably" in that example was enumerated in the previous part of the sentence that you failed to quote:
The 90% gives the meaning that reasoning systems that use probabilisitic logic exploit. Whether you think it's meaningless or not though, the fact remains that fuzzy logic deals with degrees of truth, and probabilistic logic deals with probabilities of truth that do not admit of degrees. When a person talks about partial truth, they are appealing to the intuitions that fuzzy logic is founded upon, and when they talk about likely or unlikely truths, they are appealing to the intuitions that probabilistic logic is founded upon. There is no reason that they can't be combined (e.g., something is probably mostly true, which might in one particular case mean I think it's 85% likely (probabilistic logic) that it has truth value between 0.7 and 0.95 (fuzzy logic)), but they are distinct, and "probably" refers to probabilistic logic more than fuzzy logic, which was my original point.
Sounds much more like Probabilistic Logic than fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic would be "is mostly true [or is 90% true]" (like whether a man who is 6 ft 2 inches "is tall"), whereas "probably true [or 90% chance of being true]" means that "it is probably the case that it is [100%] true (like whether my ten-sided die will roll a number other than 4)". Fuzzy logic admits degrees of truth and isn't talking about probabilities at all, whereas probabilistic logic admits only the standard true or false, and the probabilities refer to our best estimate of how likely it is to be true (that's one interpretation of probability, anyway).
28.8K MODEM! Waiting to load on a 28.8K MODEM, you say! Bloody hell, you had it easy. We would have loved to have the luxury of waiting, or even having a real modem.
When I was a kid, we had to get up at 1 o clock in the morning, run 7 miles into town and back for no reason at all, and then get down on all fours and push a big wheel around like donkeys all day in order to generate electricity to do our 'web surfing' in the evening. When I say 'web surfing', of course, I mean that our 1 bit per day telegraph receiver would deliver a single bit, yes or no, and if it was yes, our dad would whip us with a cat o' nine tails until we went unconscious, and if it was no, we would get no gruel for the day and have to work in the fields overnight instead of sleeping.
With apologies to to those who really had it hard...
It's just intended to make it a bit more difficult, in order to discourage people who would be willing to write a 4-line script that uses Curl but are too lazy to do much more.
When making the case to the boss that they do need to purchase the software and have licenses and proof, the best strategy is to appeal to his self-interest and his desire to cover his own ass.
Explain that if just one disgruntled former employee wants to take revenge against the company, (s)he can make an anonymous report to the BSA and that the fines can be extremely severe.
No sane manager will want to be potentially held responsible by his superiors for millions of dollars in fines and attorney's fees, based on what probably amounts to at most tens of thousands of dollars.
Like I said, it doesn't have a lot of content but much of the content that it does have, like the two articles I noted, is very high quality and authoritative, by experts in the field (i.e., far superior to Wikipedia).
The fields they currently list are astrophysics, computational neuroscience, computational intelligence, dynamical systems, and physics (it looks there is stuff planned for quantum field theory and related: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Category:Quantum_and_Statistical_Field_Theory).
So yeah, if you want to use it as an encyclopedia to search for random things, it is nearly useless. If you want to browse it for high-quality, authoritative articles by experts, it is a useful resource.
No, I hadn't. It does not look like much is happening from that page, which is quite sad.
Yeah, that dark blue text on black background is practically unreadable on my monitor...
On the topic of Wikipedia-like sites, I recently found Scholarpedia, which I imagine a lot of slashdotters might like. They don't have that much content yet, and they are currently focusing on a few fields (science- and tech-related), but I have found some really high-quality articles by experts in the field, like:
Neural Correlates of Consciousness, by Christof Koch.
Algorithmic Information Theory, my Marcus Hutter.
There is more to buying a product that just the specs. Specs are definitely an important factor, but just as important to me are honest reviews such as those at newegg.com, price, reliability, etc.
The Asus router you mention is $89.99 at newegg and has only 1 review (so I can determine nothing of its reliability). The WRT54GL is $61.99 (after $8 rebate) and has 1423 reviews (with close to a 5 star rating).
The Asus is 45% more ((89.99 - 61.99)/61.99). That's a big difference. The specs say nothing about the reliability of the product. The reason I'm so happy with the WRT54GL is the reliability. I know that if I want a lot more software features I can easily install other firmware. A faster processor, twice the ROM and RAM, and 2 USB ports mean nothing to me, since they would have no noticeable effect on my experience of the product. And there's a non-trivial chance that the Asus would turn out not to be as rock-solid reliable. For me, there is no question as to which is the better deal.
Yes, the WRT54GL is a very good deal! I've had one for about 8 months or so, and though I haven't bothered to update the firmware yet, it is still very reliable. I've never needed to reboot it. Before that, I had a $40 Belkin router that had to be restarted at least once a week and often once a day.
Where did you get the 3% number from?
I'm curious because the first night that they announced profiles were disappearing, customer service initially said to many users that "only 1%" of users used profiles, and that half of those who used it were employees (don't ask how a company with less than 2,000 employees can have 0.5% of 8 million users [40,000] be employees).
After a few hours, customer service started saying that "only 2%" of the users used profiles. And then they stopped giving numbers altogether, and the next announcement said it had nothing to do with upgrades or the backend but was being eliminated solely because users found it too complicated.
Did you get the "only 3%" number from Netflix? I'd be seriously impressed if they changed the numbers yet again.