If you give me directions I don't have to learn how to follow them, because I've previously learned how to do that. I have lots of practice following directions, and all of the subtasks that go into that.
There's a great paper showing that you can easily create a game that is very difficult for a reinforcement learning system to learn to play, but quite easy for humans. Except if you remove contextual information from that game (the princess you're supposed to rescue is pink, the thing you're supposed to avoid looks like fire, etc.) then humans do just as badly.
I'm not sure what number of qubits you're using as a target to run Shor's algorithm on a practical cryptographic factoring problem, but I suspect you're leaving out error correction. The expert estimates I've heard range from 5000 to 50000 qubits required... assuming reasonable connectivity, which has been a challenge in the larger architectures.
"Honestly is Bitcoin any worse than a portfolio that has biotech stocks?"
Yes, it is. Biotech companies produce tangible products. Individually they may succeed or fail, but on average across the sector they create real value, and the expected return for investments in that sector is positive. Investing exclusively in a specific biotech stock is of course risky, and usually not a good idea.
Conventional commodities are *something*. A barrel of oil or an ounce of gold. They have at least some intrinsic value, even if that value is vastly different than their market value.
Bitcoin is a virtual commodity. It isn't anything, and it's not backed by anything. You're effectively "investing" in the bet that the world will adopt a particular accounting system in the future. Unlike regular stocks, there are also very good reasons to believe that if any cryptocurrencies are successful, only a single one will be. So you can't really protect your investment by diversifying. There's also the observation that treating cryptocurrencies as investments harms their utility. Currencies work best if they're non-volatile and slowly lose value over time. That's the opposite of what you want in an investment.
Bangladesh is actually a case study in population control. The birth rate was one of the highest in the world, somewhere around 7 / woman. The country realized this was a problem and tried all kinds of things, including heavily promoting (and giving away) birth control.
Nothing really put a dent in the birth rate. However, concurrently, the ministry of education had decided that all children, including girls, should receive a mandatory minimum education. Bam, birth rate dropped. Now it's about 2.1 / woman.
Huh? I live within easy walking distance (less than 5 min) of two general grocers and half a dozen fresh fruit and vegetable and specialty grocery places. Population density in my neighbourhood is around 8000 / km^2, which is nowhere near the density downtown.
Flooding as the result of sea level rise is a non-linear process because flood/no flood is a threshold. Your shore management system was maybe planned and built in the 60s and there's been 10 cm of rise since then. That was fine, big storms might surge over it but day to day high tide wouldn't. Except high tide with the right wind gets closer and closer to the top of that berm each year....
You missed one in #1. The vast majority of IP generated by academic research is released into the public domain. IP is only protected if the researchers and their institution decide to patent. Particular software implementations can be protected as well, but that also happens very rarely, and the nature of academia means you have to tell everyone how your super-secret program works anyway.
I think those particular initiatives, while admirable, are missing the point. It's great that scientific publishing moves to a free-to-read model, but the real problem is the predatory pricing. $2000+ to "coordinate" volunteer reviewers (i.e. send some e-mails) and then put a PDF on a website is ridiculous, whether that fee is paid by libraries through subscriptions or by authors themselves.
The machine learning community has long supported its own journals that are entirely free, and while physics journals are not free, the preprint servers are. These are funded by grants, and they publish their budgets. IIRC the ML journals publish for about $1/paper, which is the cost of registering a DOI. Arxiv has a few million dollars a year of funding but it publishes a very large number of papers. I worked it out and it came to somewhere around $6/paper.
Scientific publishing needs to be reclaimed by universities and scientific associations. Scientific products need to be free to access but also published at the lowest possible expense.
Zuckerburg cares a great deal about privacy. In fact, his billions depend on your information remaining as private as possible, known only to you and Facebook.
He must have been pissed when he found out Cambridge Analytica had been stealing from him.
"And even if we DO need to take military action, we can send the robots in instead of your kids."
You've put your finger on the likely problem. The rate of violence at all levels has been decreasing exponentially in the world for at least the last 500 years or so (actually exponentially, backed up by numbers and stats). Much of this reduction, at the state level, is associated with engagement and interdependence on other nations. You wage war for economic or political gain. If waging war is expensive because you lose all your trade benefits, you're less likely to do it.
Killer robots remove one of the major political costs, particularly in a democracy. Wars are unpopular with the citizenry, especially when body bags start coming back.
"I wish he had a library card and could check out a history book..."
I wonder just how much history you've studied. One of my favourite courses in university was a double course entitled "The History of Human Conflict." The theme that emerged is that war at the state level is a surprisingly stylized, rigidly rule bound activity. The use of "dishonorable" weapons is highly suppressed. Which probably explains why any of us are still alive. It's also very highly conservative. Military officers study history extensively, and tradition is extremely important; "it takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition."
Stephen Pinker points out in "The Better Angels of Our Nature" that even guerilla and terrorist organizations violate accepted norms at their peril. Such organizations require popular support, and when they commit atrocities they tend to lose that support. The Red Brigade and IRA being prominent examples.
By the way, I know Bengio. He's very much not an idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
It's more than just gravity. If you take a video game and remove the stereotypical visual cues humans do very poorly at them.
If you give me directions I don't have to learn how to follow them, because I've previously learned how to do that. I have lots of practice following directions, and all of the subtasks that go into that.
There's a great paper showing that you can easily create a game that is very difficult for a reinforcement learning system to learn to play, but quite easy for humans. Except if you remove contextual information from that game (the princess you're supposed to rescue is pink, the thing you're supposed to avoid looks like fire, etc.) then humans do just as badly.
You're forgetting a few options. There's always outright overthrowing an elected government and installing a puppet dictator.
You do have a talent for making sweeping oversimplifications and wild assumptions based thereon, don't you?
I'm not sure what number of qubits you're using as a target to run Shor's algorithm on a practical cryptographic factoring problem, but I suspect you're leaving out error correction. The expert estimates I've heard range from 5000 to 50000 qubits required... assuming reasonable connectivity, which has been a challenge in the larger architectures.
"Honestly is Bitcoin any worse than a portfolio that has biotech stocks?"
Yes, it is. Biotech companies produce tangible products. Individually they may succeed or fail, but on average across the sector they create real value, and the expected return for investments in that sector is positive. Investing exclusively in a specific biotech stock is of course risky, and usually not a good idea.
Conventional commodities are *something*. A barrel of oil or an ounce of gold. They have at least some intrinsic value, even if that value is vastly different than their market value.
Bitcoin is a virtual commodity. It isn't anything, and it's not backed by anything. You're effectively "investing" in the bet that the world will adopt a particular accounting system in the future. Unlike regular stocks, there are also very good reasons to believe that if any cryptocurrencies are successful, only a single one will be. So you can't really protect your investment by diversifying. There's also the observation that treating cryptocurrencies as investments harms their utility. Currencies work best if they're non-volatile and slowly lose value over time. That's the opposite of what you want in an investment.
Moore's law is about transistor *cost*.
The NOAA seems to disagree with you:
https://www.epa.gov/climate-in...
Considering how low European emissions are compared to US emissions, quibbling over a bit of year-to-year shifts is a bit misleading.
https://www.google.ca/publicda...
Bangladesh is actually a case study in population control. The birth rate was one of the highest in the world, somewhere around 7 / woman. The country realized this was a problem and tried all kinds of things, including heavily promoting (and giving away) birth control.
Nothing really put a dent in the birth rate. However, concurrently, the ministry of education had decided that all children, including girls, should receive a mandatory minimum education. Bam, birth rate dropped. Now it's about 2.1 / woman.
Huh? I live within easy walking distance (less than 5 min) of two general grocers and half a dozen fresh fruit and vegetable and specialty grocery places. Population density in my neighbourhood is around 8000 / km^2, which is nowhere near the density downtown.
Flooding as the result of sea level rise is a non-linear process because flood/no flood is a threshold. Your shore management system was maybe planned and built in the 60s and there's been 10 cm of rise since then. That was fine, big storms might surge over it but day to day high tide wouldn't. Except high tide with the right wind gets closer and closer to the top of that berm each year....
You missed one in #1. The vast majority of IP generated by academic research is released into the public domain. IP is only protected if the researchers and their institution decide to patent. Particular software implementations can be protected as well, but that also happens very rarely, and the nature of academia means you have to tell everyone how your super-secret program works anyway.
I think those particular initiatives, while admirable, are missing the point. It's great that scientific publishing moves to a free-to-read model, but the real problem is the predatory pricing. $2000+ to "coordinate" volunteer reviewers (i.e. send some e-mails) and then put a PDF on a website is ridiculous, whether that fee is paid by libraries through subscriptions or by authors themselves.
The machine learning community has long supported its own journals that are entirely free, and while physics journals are not free, the preprint servers are. These are funded by grants, and they publish their budgets. IIRC the ML journals publish for about $1/paper, which is the cost of registering a DOI. Arxiv has a few million dollars a year of funding but it publishes a very large number of papers. I worked it out and it came to somewhere around $6/paper.
Scientific publishing needs to be reclaimed by universities and scientific associations. Scientific products need to be free to access but also published at the lowest possible expense.
I nominate you for advertising industry messiah. Please convince them this is the greatest idea ever. Maybe some bullshit about subliminal messaging.
It's funny, I never see ads on YouTube either, unless I'm using someone else's browser, and I'm not blocking them.
Perhaps YouTube has figured out that it's just not worth showing ads to some people?
Newspapers wonder why nobody seems to want to pay for them anymore. Curious.
Also, do you think the author was wearing pants while writing that description of a font?
Nope. Your initial reply was irrelevant to the thread, so we're currently exchanging historical trivia.
British forces experienced per capita casualties that were greater than *either* the US and Canada in WWII.
Can't you get a money order at a post office in the US?
Zuckerburg cares a great deal about privacy. In fact, his billions depend on your information remaining as private as possible, known only to you and Facebook.
He must have been pissed when he found out Cambridge Analytica had been stealing from him.
The supreme allied commander Europe was a guy named Eisenhower.
Sure. But airplanes that make sonic booms that sound like the soothing whispers of a breeze blowing through soft moss should be encouraged.
Pretty much as relevant as your neighbour's motorcycle.
Since you mentioned Vietnam perhaps you're American?
Canada had a higher percentage of its population die in World War II than did the United States.
There are a lot of people, not just in Canada, who would prefer to see the warmongers fuck off so we can all avoid a repeat.
"And even if we DO need to take military action, we can send the robots in instead of your kids."
You've put your finger on the likely problem. The rate of violence at all levels has been decreasing exponentially in the world for at least the last 500 years or so (actually exponentially, backed up by numbers and stats). Much of this reduction, at the state level, is associated with engagement and interdependence on other nations. You wage war for economic or political gain. If waging war is expensive because you lose all your trade benefits, you're less likely to do it.
Killer robots remove one of the major political costs, particularly in a democracy. Wars are unpopular with the citizenry, especially when body bags start coming back.
"I wish he had a library card and could check out a history book..."
I wonder just how much history you've studied. One of my favourite courses in university was a double course entitled "The History of Human Conflict." The theme that emerged is that war at the state level is a surprisingly stylized, rigidly rule bound activity. The use of "dishonorable" weapons is highly suppressed. Which probably explains why any of us are still alive. It's also very highly conservative. Military officers study history extensively, and tradition is extremely important; "it takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition."
Stephen Pinker points out in "The Better Angels of Our Nature" that even guerilla and terrorist organizations violate accepted norms at their peril. Such organizations require popular support, and when they commit atrocities they tend to lose that support. The Red Brigade and IRA being prominent examples.
By the way, I know Bengio. He's very much not an idiot.