One of them looks like a chemical engineering PhD student and the other is a tech, so maybe not. The third is an electrical engineering professor who's supposed to be doing software performance research though. He should definitely know better.
Although, when I was at the U of C the people doing software stuff in the EE department had some very interesting ways of doing things.
They're not doing something weird, the article is crazy.
Basically, they wrote some shitty code to do highly inefficient string concatenation and, wow, it turns out that it's less efficient than the caching code in the operating system. They're not comparing in-memory versus disk operations at all.
Uranium nukes are even worse. They require strip mines to get the uranium, and then a bunch of very special purpose equipment to enrich it. If you think it's hard to hide a nuclear reactor from a spy satellite, try hiding a strip mine!
"The Sum of All Fears" was released in 1991. Clancy's comment about using computer weapon design is even more applicable today. CnC machines are also now something geeks build in their basements out of a few hundred dollars worth of parts.
I agree. Now turn it around. Think of all the things on the Internet you WOULD miss if they were gone. Now think of how many of them you would be willing to pay for. Think of the number of times you've seen the term "paywall" used on Slashdot.
I'm not sure I really follow your argument, but the open source community seems like a reasonable example. Linux is paid for - big companies sink billions of actual dollars into it, and contributors put in even more value in time. Quality, in the things that are important to the people contributing to it, is high. Quality in the things that are not important to contributors, but are important to many of the people who do not contribute? Not so high.
Quality is also high in ad encrusted click bait sites - in the eyes of the people contributing to them. But that's not you.
Everybody gets stereotyped in film. Stereotypes let the audience feel familiar with characters they don't have time to get to know. Sometimes a movie will take one or two characters and write them out of their stereotype in order to tell a story, surprise the audience, or win an Oscar.
Longer running formats, like TV series, like to start with stereotyped characters everyone can become familiar with quickly and then do episodes that focus on their "other side."
That's actually a more interesting fact than you might think. Males are actually more likely at birth, and outnumber females until the age of 30 or so. But in the > 30 demographic females are in the majority, and that majority increases with age. Why? Because males die at a higher rate. Being male has a higher risk of death than being female.
It's our fault. We abhor anything on the Internet that's not free. Where people are in the habit of paying for things, the providers of those things worry about quality.
We already have manufacturing robots. AI will definitely be given control of those.
There's a science fiction story, unfortunately I can't remember who wrote it, where the premise is that smart computers get so good at managing complex systems that the humans "in charge" basically get instantly fired if they don't implement the computer's recommendation. The computers aren't actually directly in charge of things, but their recommendations are so much better that not following them makes you uncompetitive. It turns out that there are a few humans who are suspicious and don't always do what the computer recommends. They get away with a few transgressions by carefully covering them up but the computers know, and these humans have a tendency to get in accidents. Behind the scenes, the computers are having things built unbeknownst to humans. With a very complex system like world-wide manufacturing, and lots of decisions being made, it's easy for them to hide their activity.
The idea is that once you create an AI you put the AI to work. We certainly would let it run the pipelines and traffic lights and air traffic control system. But we'd probably also put it to work doing research, such as designing new and better AIs. The fear is that once that happens, smarter AIs design even smarter AIs in a positive feedback loop and eventually they're so far beyond us that we're irrelevant. It does assume that greater individual intelligence lets you build smarter AIs though. That's a pretty big assumption.
Super-intelligence shouldn't be any more impossible than the regular kind. Evolution didn't optimize us to be the most intelligent things possible, it made us just intelligent enough to confer a survival benefit. With caesarean sections and a policy of only letting the most intelligent people breed, we could presumably create super intelligent humans in a few tens of thousands of years. If you also selected against whatever you didn't want, you could make sure those traits didn't survive.
We can probably manage it quicker with hardware and software development.
There are a few things in there that made me raise an eyebrow. Humans don't really experience much neurogenesis. There are some areas where new neurons can form, under certain conditions, but they tend to be special purpose ones, and the older structures in the brain as well. The thing that really differentiates us from other animals is our overdeveloped cortex, particularly the frontal lobes, but the neurogenesis that's been found is mostly in the deep gray matter and is more associated with things like motor coordination and reward processing. One interesting exception is the hippocampus which is known to be important in memory formation. Indirect hints of neurogenesis in the cortex have been reported, but other methods that should turn them up haven't, so the evidence is contradictory. I'm also not aware of neurogenesis being particularly pronounced in humans. It occurs in other primates, and in other vertebrates.
There does seem to be a connection between intelligence and the brain to body size ratio. Bigger bodies require more neurons to carry and process sensory and motor information, and these neurons are probably not involved in intelligence.
What we call intelligence seems to me to be likely an emergent property of a bunch of neurons that don't have any pressing sensory or motor tasks keeping them busy. Various factors affecting communication efficiency and interconnection among neurons are probably important, but these can be disrupted quite a bit in human disease and the sufferers don't lose their human intelligence (although their cognitive abilities do decline). I don't think there's a magic humans-have-it-and-nobody-else-does bullet. Human intelligence is just what lots of animals have with lots of extra capacity, possibly redirection from other things (like senses) to boost that capacity, and maybe a few tweaks for optimizing neurons that talk to themselves over ones that communicate with the body.
They all read "The Emperor's New Mind" and believed Penrose.
Many smart people, particularly ones familiar with computers, got burned by believing the hype about symbol-and-rule AI. It turns out you probably can't make a computer smart by giving it a large number of simple, deterministic rules. Somehow "this approach doesn't work very well" turned into "my brain is magic." Quantum computing is the new "magic" that lets them believe in AI again.
Exercise is also an appetite suppressant, so it helps with the eating less. Plus if you do a little bit more intense exercise than strolling, it's a little more of a factor. I burn around 1000 calories for an hour of running. That's about 40% of the daily recommended intake.
Diet is certainly the easiest thing for most people to change though.
The ‘deception tactics’ outlined by the documents include ‘false flag’ techniques, carried out in order to ‘create unrest’. In a spectacular display of bureaucratic legerdemain, this process is apparently defined as ‘[altering] adversary perception’.
Single quotes from the article text, quoting the leaked documents. Emphasis mine. Yes, that's from the article, not just the summary.
Slashdot Mirror
The Python code
s = ''
for i in range(0,1000000):
s += str(i)
will be painfully slow too, for multiple reasons. Both Java and Python have ways to do this that aren't dumb.
One of them looks like a chemical engineering PhD student and the other is a tech, so maybe not. The third is an electrical engineering professor who's supposed to be doing software performance research though. He should definitely know better.
Although, when I was at the U of C the people doing software stuff in the EE department had some very interesting ways of doing things.
They're not doing something weird, the article is crazy.
Basically, they wrote some shitty code to do highly inefficient string concatenation and, wow, it turns out that it's less efficient than the caching code in the operating system. They're not comparing in-memory versus disk operations at all.
Uranium nukes are even worse. They require strip mines to get the uranium, and then a bunch of very special purpose equipment to enrich it. If you think it's hard to hide a nuclear reactor from a spy satellite, try hiding a strip mine!
"The Sum of All Fears" was released in 1991. Clancy's comment about using computer weapon design is even more applicable today. CnC machines are also now something geeks build in their basements out of a few hundred dollars worth of parts.
Generally it's not an accepted defence to say "you should have seen what I would have done if I hadn't nuked them!"
So is American culture. It doesn't mean all Americans are killers.
So you burn over 800 calories an hour running? Why is it you think I don't? I bet we're using the same calculators and you weigh a bit less than I do.
I think I struck a Slashdot nerve. You're the third person so far to reply with a weirdly aggressive and poorly researched message.
I agree. Now turn it around. Think of all the things on the Internet you WOULD miss if they were gone. Now think of how many of them you would be willing to pay for. Think of the number of times you've seen the term "paywall" used on Slashdot.
I don't weigh 150 lbs, and I didn't say per day.
I'm not sure I really follow your argument, but the open source community seems like a reasonable example. Linux is paid for - big companies sink billions of actual dollars into it, and contributors put in even more value in time. Quality, in the things that are important to the people contributing to it, is high. Quality in the things that are not important to contributors, but are important to many of the people who do not contribute? Not so high.
Quality is also high in ad encrusted click bait sites - in the eyes of the people contributing to them. But that's not you.
Or, you know, if you lift, bro.
Everybody gets stereotyped in film. Stereotypes let the audience feel familiar with characters they don't have time to get to know. Sometimes a movie will take one or two characters and write them out of their stereotype in order to tell a story, surprise the audience, or win an Oscar.
Longer running formats, like TV series, like to start with stereotyped characters everyone can become familiar with quickly and then do episodes that focus on their "other side."
That's actually a more interesting fact than you might think. Males are actually more likely at birth, and outnumber females until the age of 30 or so. But in the > 30 demographic females are in the majority, and that majority increases with age. Why? Because males die at a higher rate. Being male has a higher risk of death than being female.
There's always someone who has to misuse the concept of objectification. Most people don't like having sex with objects as much as with people.
It's our fault. We abhor anything on the Internet that's not free. Where people are in the habit of paying for things, the providers of those things worry about quality.
We already have manufacturing robots. AI will definitely be given control of those.
There's a science fiction story, unfortunately I can't remember who wrote it, where the premise is that smart computers get so good at managing complex systems that the humans "in charge" basically get instantly fired if they don't implement the computer's recommendation. The computers aren't actually directly in charge of things, but their recommendations are so much better that not following them makes you uncompetitive. It turns out that there are a few humans who are suspicious and don't always do what the computer recommends. They get away with a few transgressions by carefully covering them up but the computers know, and these humans have a tendency to get in accidents. Behind the scenes, the computers are having things built unbeknownst to humans. With a very complex system like world-wide manufacturing, and lots of decisions being made, it's easy for them to hide their activity.
You're right, I should have been more specific.
The idea is that once you create an AI you put the AI to work. We certainly would let it run the pipelines and traffic lights and air traffic control system. But we'd probably also put it to work doing research, such as designing new and better AIs. The fear is that once that happens, smarter AIs design even smarter AIs in a positive feedback loop and eventually they're so far beyond us that we're irrelevant. It does assume that greater individual intelligence lets you build smarter AIs though. That's a pretty big assumption.
Super-intelligence shouldn't be any more impossible than the regular kind. Evolution didn't optimize us to be the most intelligent things possible, it made us just intelligent enough to confer a survival benefit. With caesarean sections and a policy of only letting the most intelligent people breed, we could presumably create super intelligent humans in a few tens of thousands of years. If you also selected against whatever you didn't want, you could make sure those traits didn't survive.
We can probably manage it quicker with hardware and software development.
There are a few things in there that made me raise an eyebrow. Humans don't really experience much neurogenesis. There are some areas where new neurons can form, under certain conditions, but they tend to be special purpose ones, and the older structures in the brain as well. The thing that really differentiates us from other animals is our overdeveloped cortex, particularly the frontal lobes, but the neurogenesis that's been found is mostly in the deep gray matter and is more associated with things like motor coordination and reward processing. One interesting exception is the hippocampus which is known to be important in memory formation. Indirect hints of neurogenesis in the cortex have been reported, but other methods that should turn them up haven't, so the evidence is contradictory. I'm also not aware of neurogenesis being particularly pronounced in humans. It occurs in other primates, and in other vertebrates.
There does seem to be a connection between intelligence and the brain to body size ratio. Bigger bodies require more neurons to carry and process sensory and motor information, and these neurons are probably not involved in intelligence.
What we call intelligence seems to me to be likely an emergent property of a bunch of neurons that don't have any pressing sensory or motor tasks keeping them busy. Various factors affecting communication efficiency and interconnection among neurons are probably important, but these can be disrupted quite a bit in human disease and the sufferers don't lose their human intelligence (although their cognitive abilities do decline). I don't think there's a magic humans-have-it-and-nobody-else-does bullet. Human intelligence is just what lots of animals have with lots of extra capacity, possibly redirection from other things (like senses) to boost that capacity, and maybe a few tweaks for optimizing neurons that talk to themselves over ones that communicate with the body.
They all read "The Emperor's New Mind" and believed Penrose.
Many smart people, particularly ones familiar with computers, got burned by believing the hype about symbol-and-rule AI. It turns out you probably can't make a computer smart by giving it a large number of simple, deterministic rules. Somehow "this approach doesn't work very well" turned into "my brain is magic." Quantum computing is the new "magic" that lets them believe in AI again.
Exercise is also an appetite suppressant, so it helps with the eating less. Plus if you do a little bit more intense exercise than strolling, it's a little more of a factor. I burn around 1000 calories for an hour of running. That's about 40% of the daily recommended intake.
Diet is certainly the easiest thing for most people to change though.
Single quotes from the article text, quoting the leaked documents. Emphasis mine. Yes, that's from the article, not just the summary.
Like a flashlight! Oh, you say it was supposed to emit x-rays as well? So like a CRT then.