Oh, the original post is definitely informative, but not as we know it, Jim.
Re:haskell for the masses? sure, but only...
on
OCaml For the Masses
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Be specific man! There as in "come across this thread" or there as in "irritated"?
Really, the next time you make a comment like that, is it too much to ask to bind the referenced variable that represents your meaning? Closures! Closures!
The problem with democracy is that it assumes everyone's opinions on every
subject are equal.
That's not a problem, that's a feature. Do you really want to go back to a feudal system (nobles opinions count more)? Do you really want to go back to a dictatorship (one guy's opinions count only)? Do you really want to go back to an oligarchy (ruling party members opinions count more)?
In the real world, they're not. With a sufficiently educated populace, or a
sufficiently minor subset of the populace who gets involved in voting and
politics, it can potentially work. But with a populace with shrinking levels
of basic education and basic abilities to rationally evaluate the information
they're receiving, the US is showing that democracy largely does not work.
Our education levels aren't shrinking, they're growing. Have you forgotten that a little over 100 years ago, large chunks of the populations in all advanced countries of the time were illiterate? Nowadays, just about everyone can open a book and learn if they want to.
And with the internet available, it's easy to discuss any topic with lots of people, even if they're on the other side of the world. When a hot political issue comes up, the average voter can now talk to more people with other opinions than ever before. Think back a generation, and people's opinions were formed from maybe one newspaper, a magazine, maybe a church preacher, and a tiny number of people with whom they discussed things - family, neigbours, work colleagues.
Just on slashdot today, you're exposed to more people than that when reading the comments on a story.
Education levels aren't the problem with modern democracies. However, it's never been easy to accept that other people's preferences may be *radically* different. If their world view is in direct conflict with yours and they win the elections, then your bottom line and way of life *will* be affected. Politics is serious.
It's ok. The police have set up official websites run by private contractors so that you can upload and register the pictures when you receive them, and there's even a facility for monitoring duplicates in case you accidentally upload something one of your fellow victims received already. To make it even easier to remember, the police have reserved a special domain called.XXX for those websites (three stick figures saying NO PICTURES!).
Nice. Of course his point is lost in the sea of proper grammar he insists on using throughout while simultaneously attempting to convince people of its superfluousness.
Advertisers don't care about people, they care about conversion. That's why you get ads targeting kids (who don't have any money to spend, but can nag the adults), that's why SEOs get paid (even though they explicitly cater to search engine robots, not people, but adults with credit cards use search), etc.
Being robot friendly also makes sense as a lowest common denominator for new web browsers. When Apple refused to put Flash on the iPad, all the websites with Flash ads lost out. Why would an advertiser deliberately want to ignore "non-humans" who happen to be humans using an iPad? Don't they have credit cards?
Why would I want to do or encourage that? This is backwards thinking, and leads to a crippled vision of the net.
Maybe instead of using the word robot, my meaning would be clearer if I use the word agent. An agent is an automated system that does something for me, that I don't have the time to do or am not willing to do myself. Agents aren't human, they're more like sophisticated scripts. But they represent a human being that wants something, by definition. A website should interact with them like if they were the actual human that they represent.
Now that's a vision of the net that scales. It's good for people, because they have more time to spend on the fun stuff. A person with two agents is like a master with two (highly specialized) slaves. For example, one agent might do the weekly shopping.
It's also good for websites, because instead of competing for the attention of actual human customers with credit cards, they can compete for the attention of three times as many customers with credit cards.
As to your problem, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. Most ads are flash and non-textual. So they can't be "understood" (processed) by robots. So robots won't be influenced by them. Duh. The only way to get a positive probability of influencing robots through ads is by making the ads readable, eg textual.
Suppose there's a robot out there trawling the net for mini railroad components. Once a week, the human gets a report on what the robot found. If the robot can "see" the targeted ads on some of the websites, it might actually follow the links.
I consider CAPTCHAs to be less evil than Flash. When used correctly they're only a mechanism for controlling resource access (this was always an option on the web, that's why HTTP servers have special return codes for denying access). A robot can be given login details if desired.
However, I consider the practice of requiring CAPTCHAs as a part of normal login to be evil though.
No, I'm assuming that the purpose of a site is to make information
available to all (human and robot without discrimination). There's
nothing wrong with "art", but 99.9% of flash sites aren't published for
the sake of art. In fact, most flash sites go out of their way to also
be "google" friendly, which is possibly the most famous robot of all.
It's probably not illegal in Brazil, but it is illegal in the US. Then again, he sounds like a US citizen, so US computer service theft laws apply to him everywhere;-)
The non-video side of Flash was never a good idea. It basically replaced open, robot friendly, webpages with an unparseable closed binary blob designed to interact with humans in a specific (and therefore inflexible) way.
It's a good thing it's going away, because the replacement (HTML5) is a much better way to share information in the long run.
This experiment, while fun, isn't exactly the infinite monkey experiment.
What's happening here (if I understand the writeup) is that the monkeys are typing random letter combinations, until they hit a small phrase that happens to be in shakespeare. Then
that phrase is marked as done.
Let n be the size in characters of the target phrase. If n=1, then the complete works of shakespeare are obtained as soon as each of the letters of the alphabet have been typed at least once. You could do this in a few seconds on your computer keyboard. If n=2, then the complete works are obtained as soon as all the possible pairs of letters have been typed. The experiment in TFA has n=9 I think.
As n grows larger, the time until completion grows exponentially. Once his expeiment is done, the case n=10 should take roughly 26 times as long (ignoring punctuation capitals and diacritical marks). Alternatively, it would require a cloud roughly 26 times bigger to do it in the same amount of time.
bash is a lot more powerful than python or perl, for small and medium complexity tasks.
It is certainly better at interactive uses, and it is much better at piping than either of those languages.
Use python or perl for complex tasks by all means, but they are a poor substitute for what the shell is good for.
If you want to share your photo with a web app through an new interchange mechanism, you'll have to wait until that app implements the relevant function to access the data before you can do the sharing. If you want to share your photo through the filesystem, you'll have to wait until that app implements the relevant function to access your filesystem.
There's no magic, it's all just client/server code.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, the original post is definitely informative, but not as we know it, Jim.
Be specific man! There as in "come across this thread" or there as in "irritated"? Really, the next time you make a comment like that, is it too much to ask to bind the referenced variable that represents your meaning? Closures! Closures!
That's not a problem, that's a feature. Do you really want to go back to a feudal system (nobles opinions count more)? Do you really want to go back to a dictatorship (one guy's opinions count only)? Do you really want to go back to an oligarchy (ruling party members opinions count more)?
Our education levels aren't shrinking, they're growing. Have you forgotten that a little over 100 years ago, large chunks of the populations in all advanced countries of the time were illiterate? Nowadays, just about everyone can open a book and learn if they want to.
And with the internet available, it's easy to discuss any topic with lots of people, even if they're on the other side of the world. When a hot political issue comes up, the average voter can now talk to more people with other opinions than ever before. Think back a generation, and people's opinions were formed from maybe one newspaper, a magazine, maybe a church preacher, and a tiny number of people with whom they discussed things - family, neigbours, work colleagues. Just on slashdot today, you're exposed to more people than that when reading the comments on a story.
Education levels aren't the problem with modern democracies. However, it's never been easy to accept that other people's preferences may be *radically* different. If their world view is in direct conflict with yours and they win the elections, then your bottom line and way of life *will* be affected. Politics is serious.
Or, the caveman was a paedophile serial killer with a side interest in modern representational art...
He should wear ultraviolet skin tights, then most people won't see them and he can pass incognito. Plus, he won't need a phone booth.
It's ok. The police have set up official websites run by private contractors so that you can upload and register the pictures when you receive them, and there's even a facility for monitoring duplicates in case you accidentally upload something one of your fellow victims received already. To make it even easier to remember, the police have reserved a special domain called .XXX for those websites (three stick figures saying NO PICTURES!).
Nice. Of course his point is lost in the sea of proper grammar he insists on using throughout while simultaneously attempting to convince people of its superfluousness.
Being robot friendly also makes sense as a lowest common denominator for new web browsers. When Apple refused to put Flash on the iPad, all the websites with Flash ads lost out. Why would an advertiser deliberately want to ignore "non-humans" who happen to be humans using an iPad? Don't they have credit cards?
Think about it. If usage were truly too hard to change, then it would never have become incorrect in the first place.
Begging the question is a fallacy.
Except in Australia. In Australia, cats have 6 lives, so death only occurs 1/12th of the time.
Maybe instead of using the word robot, my meaning would be clearer if I use the word agent. An agent is an automated system that does something for me, that I don't have the time to do or am not willing to do myself. Agents aren't human, they're more like sophisticated scripts. But they represent a human being that wants something, by definition. A website should interact with them like if they were the actual human that they represent.
Now that's a vision of the net that scales. It's good for people, because they have more time to spend on the fun stuff. A person with two agents is like a master with two (highly specialized) slaves. For example, one agent might do the weekly shopping. It's also good for websites, because instead of competing for the attention of actual human customers with credit cards, they can compete for the attention of three times as many customers with credit cards.
As to your problem, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. Most ads are flash and non-textual. So they can't be "understood" (processed) by robots. So robots won't be influenced by them. Duh. The only way to get a positive probability of influencing robots through ads is by making the ads readable, eg textual.
Suppose there's a robot out there trawling the net for mini railroad components. Once a week, the human gets a report on what the robot found. If the robot can "see" the targeted ads on some of the websites, it might actually follow the links.
However, I consider the practice of requiring CAPTCHAs as a part of normal login to be evil though.
No, I'm assuming that the purpose of a site is to make information available to all (human and robot without discrimination). There's nothing wrong with "art", but 99.9% of flash sites aren't published for the sake of art. In fact, most flash sites go out of their way to also be "google" friendly, which is possibly the most famous robot of all.
It's probably not illegal in Brazil, but it is illegal in the US. Then again, he sounds like a US citizen, so US computer service theft laws apply to him everywhere ;-)
It's a good thing it's going away, because the replacement (HTML5) is a much better way to share information in the long run.
D'you think there's room, with Ken on there already?...
Don't panic. The scrolls are God's reCAPTCHA for the Ark of the Covenant. Just keep guessing the words, and eventually the server will let through.
What's happening here (if I understand the writeup) is that the monkeys are typing random letter combinations, until they hit a small phrase that happens to be in shakespeare. Then that phrase is marked as done.
Let n be the size in characters of the target phrase. If n=1, then the complete works of shakespeare are obtained as soon as each of the letters of the alphabet have been typed at least once. You could do this in a few seconds on your computer keyboard. If n=2, then the complete works are obtained as soon as all the possible pairs of letters have been typed. The experiment in TFA has n=9 I think.
As n grows larger, the time until completion grows exponentially. Once his expeiment is done, the case n=10 should take roughly 26 times as long (ignoring punctuation capitals and diacritical marks). Alternatively, it would require a cloud roughly 26 times bigger to do it in the same amount of time.
Use python or perl for complex tasks by all means, but they are a poor substitute for what the shell is good for.
If you want to share your photo with a web app through an new interchange mechanism, you'll have to wait until that app implements the relevant function to access the data before you can do the sharing. If you want to share your photo through the filesystem, you'll have to wait until that app implements the relevant function to access your filesystem.
There's no magic, it's all just client/server code.
(Teal'c: Indeed.)
He should filter it. Probably, it's got too much H2O in it.
Agreed. Open Source is "bespoke", while IKEA is not.
So we can charge them for trinkets directly on their phone bills, since they don't have their own credit cards.
If so, then let me point out the elephant in the room:
When are Google and Facebook going into bankruptcy and who's going to buy them?