What do you want the AI to do? If it's prediction, and you do the correct statistical analysis, you're likely to find that some correlations are less useful for prediction because they're accounted for in correlations that make better predictions. If you're just dumping stuff into an AI, and you're not careful to have it perform a careful analysis of variance of its input, you're likely to wind up with predictions that may be reasonably accurate but based on correlations that don't exist.
If poor people are more likely to X than middle-class people, and poor blacks and poor whites are equally likely to X, and middle-class blacks and middle-class whites are equally likely to X, then proportionately more blacks than whites will X. Good statisticians try to control for this when making analyses
Blacks could be committing more crimes.
Police could investigate in such a manner that they tend to catch more black suspects, relatively, than white.
There may be crimes more typical of blacks than whites, and police may pursue those crimes harder.*
Prosecutors could prosecute blacks disproportionately more often.
Blacks, being on the average poorer than whites, probably get bad legal representation more than whites.
Juries may be prone to convict blacks with less evidence than they'd want to convict whites.
There may be crimes more typical of blacks than whites, and these crimes may call for harsher punishment.
Judges may give longer sentences to blacks than whites.
Blacks may tend to get into more trouble in prison (for a variety of reasons) and don't get as much time off for good behavior
Remember here that, given steady states, the percentage of a certain group in prison is proportional to the number going to prison times the effective length of their sentences. Statistics are like bikinis: what they reveal is important, what they conceal is vital.
*The classic case is cocaine use by sniffing powder (claimed to be more common for whites) vs. cocaine use by smoking crack (claimed to be more common for blacks). Punishments for smoking crack were more severe than for sniffing coke, so, given a black man and a white man convicted of cocaine use, the black would probably serve a longer sentence.
That's not a given. Given prejudiced police and other people in the criminal justice system, it's entirely possible that one race will have more convictions per act than another. Perhaps the police hunt down blacks more than whites. Perhaps blacks get worse representation overall, as the overall richer whites can get better legal representation. Perhaps juries tend to convict blacks more than whites, given similar evidence. And, of course, the police and juries justify this because blacks have relatively more convictions for murder, rape, etc.
There's logical implication and then there's causation. A implies B and B implies C means A implies C. A is characteristic of B and B correlates with C doesn't tell us how the causation runs, or indeed what's the best way to estimate C. It may be that, holding socioeconomic class constant, there's no significant difference between blacks and whites defaulting, in which case race would be useful in a prediction only as a proxy for socioeconomic class.
If it's irrelevant, a data mining system might still pick race out as a factor in loan defaults, particularly if it didn't have socioeconomic class as an input. In many contexts, that's illegal.
If we find someone who can consistently do magic, you'd better believe that there would be a swarm of physicists quantifying everything. Heck, if I could do magic, I'd be measuring things myself, making small changes to incantations to see what happens, etc. It might not be good for my life expectancy, but I couldn't resist it.
Can you name an ideology that hasn't left a bloody trail for centuries? Capitalism has left a bloodier trail, overall.
Also, what was the blood Socialism was allegedly spilling in 1817? Until a century later, people who considered themselves socialists didn't run anything large enough to make much of a trail. There have been lots of peaceful Socialists. (The main political opposition to WWI was Socialism, FWIW. Many Socialists were bitterly disappointed that the workers of Europe lined up behind their governments rather than with their counterparts in other countries.)
There's all kinds of people who call themselves socialists, and most of them don't actually favor genocide.
Why should someone retain control? If I buy something, I can use it as I see fit, and the vendor does not retain control unless there's an explicit side agreement (my mortgage has language that I need to keep the house in decent condition, for example). I regard restrictions on what I can do with my property as inherently a bad thing, to be tolerated when necessary. I don't want someone else saying what I can and cannot do with what I've purchased.
What I object to is Sunde's hypocrisy in pretending that his actions are driven by principle.
They likely are driven by principle.
Copyright prevents me from using my personal property in ways I might want. If I have a recording of a movie, I don't have a legal right to make copies using my own personal device and my own blanks. I don't have a legal right to transfer it to another device. I bought it, I paid for it, and there's arbitrary restrictions on it. That's one principle, and someone who doesn't like government interference should be familiar with it.
Economically, pieces of art are valuable, and are enjoyed by people. If there's more pieces of art to be enjoyed by even more people, that increases total wealth, which in itself is a good thing to do. I know people who very much enjoy reading Jim Butcher's Dresden File books, but don't have the money to buy them. If I make copies and hand them out, I'm making these people happier. This is, other things being equal (which, in this case, they aren't), a good thing. Restrictions on art that make it less accessible to people means we're all poorer. That's another principle.
Against that, we have the practical matter that requiring people to buy copies of something and giving some of that money to the creator is an efficient way to encourage people to create. I'm much more interested in getting society working than in being ideologically pure, so I favor reasonable copyright laws.
As far as ownership of "intellectual property" goes, that seems, AFAICT, to not exist naturally, but rather is a result of legal constructs. Long ago, musicians would hear other people's melodies and either copy them or build on them. Storytellers would listen to other people's stories and repeat them. A storyteller who insisted that nobody could repeat his stories without paying him would be considered a weirdo.
If you and I come to the post office with packages of similar size and weight and category*, with similar destinations, we'll pay the same. All other considerations are irrelevant. If you've run a business for twenty years that requires mailing out packages in large quantities, and I'm just starting a business, we pay equal postage. If you're mailing clothes and I'm mailing tools, same postage. Now, if I want my package to get to its destination faster, I can pay for that, and you can pay the same amount for the same acceleration. If you want to mail out a large number of identical things, you can do some pre-sorting and get a discount, and if I want to do the same thing I can.
This is what people want for Net Neutrality: that the internet carry packets regardless of who they're from.
*It isn't necessarily the same postage for everything, because there's a few exceptions. If you are mailing books while I'm mailing tools, you can use Media Mail for a discount, IIRC.
It's only true in places where the government has picked winners and losers,
Which would be everywhere on the planet. In order to serve me internet access, my provider has to have a data link from their center to my house. This will use limited resources and go over private property or limited public property.
LTE requires an allocation from the limited EM spectrum, which then can't be used for something else. Physical connections take up volume. If the connections are on poles, then the government has to limit the number of poles, and there's a limited amount of connections a pole can support. If the connections are underground, the government has to regulate who can dig up what when. If the connections don't go on public property, they need to go on private property, probably owned by lots of different people, and eminent domain is the only way to do that.
A system providing access to services for large numbers of people is not going to function in an anarchy.
Moreover, if I can't buy it, who am I harming by making an illicit copy? The complaint about piracy is that it results in reduced sales. If they're already zero, and projected to be zero forever, I can't possibly reduce its sales. Not by piracy, not by giving it a bad review, not by threatening to shoot anyone who buys a copy.
That was a response to your claim that nothing would be lost by not making professional-quality movies. A very large number of people would disagree with you, and would object to your values being set in law to the point that nobody would make another good movie. We have an imperfect system now. Changing it to destroy large swaths of art needs more justification than ideological purity.
In theory, copyright is a restriction on what people can do with their property, and particularly to use it to make more valuable stuff. In practice, we want some way to pay money to people who create things we like, both to encourage them and to make it more possible for them to exercise their creativity. (This varies by art form. A novelist can have a day job that pays the bills, but making movies requires a lot more money than people will put into the pot just so they can be creative.)
Ideally, we'd want the compensation mechanism to be based pretty much on how people like the creation. We'd like it to be possible for people to create things on spec, rather than waiting for someone's approval, and be potentially rewarded. This encourage more creativity. It's cheaper to allow creative people a shot at lots and lots of money than to compensate them reasonably, human nature being what it is. Giving the creator some money for each copy of his or her work does this well, provided we have some cost for making these copies (so I don't make a few zillion copies of one of my mediocre novels and clean up).
On the other hand, if we had a system that allowed people to copy freely, there'd be more people able to enjoy more art (of various forms), so copyright isn't a perfect system.
Not knowing that floating-point values are inexact is likely to bite you sometime, and you won't know why. Things will just be wrong. So, if you're OK with being stumped by problems that seem to have no solution, you need exposure to floating-point processing, and knowing endianness is useful.
Some of the layers have disappeared into the hardware. An i7 doesn't directly execute x86 and amd64 instructions. It decodes them and runs them on a RISC processor using all sorts of intelligent scheduling. When I was younger, and I had to chase stegosauri off so I could use my TRS-80, the CPU corresponded to a pretty small part of an i7.
So a very simple explanation is gravity from the mass of the galaxy warps space in such a way that mass around it seems sped up.
Except that we have General Relativity, which has been found to be correct time and again, which tells us exactly how the galaxy warps space and what that causes. If this is how it works, then we need some sort of modified gravity theory. Real live physicists have been coming up with modified gravity theories to explain galactic rotation for a long time. None of them work really well, and they also fail to explain things like the Bullet Cluster.
If there was a really simple explanation involving changes to General Relativity, it would have been found by now.
That article is about dark energy, not dark matter. Two entirely different things with similar names. It's like saying my browser can't use Javascript because Java is disabled.
Dark matter used to be just matter we couldn't see that explained galactic rotation. It then became also the explanation for gravitational lensing where we can't detect matter, and an explanation for the makeup of the Universe. It appears to be a form of matter that doesn't interact electromagnetically. There have been attempts to detect dark matter particles with weak interactions, with AFAIK no success yet. The idea isn't far-fetched, as neutrinos are dark matter by the definition I gave, although neutrinos move far too fast to be what we're observing.
Investment isn't enough. Lots of people invest in ideas that go nowhere until their investments are worthless. To win big, you have to invest at the right time with the right people.
Something that makes it possible for people to eat and get nourished (and marijuana seems to do that in a fair number of cases) is going to save lives and help cure other things. At least if it's legalized.
Every company claims to be helping humanity, but I can judge which ones I think do. I think reducing cost to low earth orbit helps us a lot more than making financial markets more fluid. Also, Space-X seems to be making better progress on the cost reduction than others, while I suspect that if Goldman-Sachs went away other companies would fill the gap nicely.
He's doing stuff I want people to do, takes risks (which could turn into some sacrifice) and has been accomplishing stuff I want accomplished. That doesn't make him a hero, but it does make him a guy I really admire.
No, zero interest is effectively the same thing as paying cash.
No. Just no. I am paying off my new car on a zero-interest four-year loan. That means I pay very little up front (a hundred or two), and let the rest of my money sit in my investment account making maybe 6% (it varies wildly) until it's time for the loan payment. A zero-interest loan is better than cash. Even if you get nothing on your savings, having to pay $32K this year is not as good as having to pay $8K this year and $24K later. Look up "discount rate" in financial planning.
That brand new $35K car will have depreciated by $8K within a year or two
If it's one year, it tracks the loan principal. If it takes two, it's worth considerably more than what I owe on it.
Repairs are a thing but if you maintain a vehicle and it isn't a rental or salesman car they are uncommon until you get in that 12-15yr range.
Sure (although I'll take your word on the last two years; haven't owned a vehicle quite that long). It's also significantly more common than with a newer vehicle. Odds are that the repair won't be a budget buster, but it may well take your car out of action for a few days. Newer is more reliable.
Cars are liabilities not assets,
My car is pretty much necessary to get between my home and my job, hence vital for me to earn money. That's an asset. It's a depreciating asset, like many others, and you do want to watch what you pay for your assets, but if it's a liability you're doing it wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you want the AI to do? If it's prediction, and you do the correct statistical analysis, you're likely to find that some correlations are less useful for prediction because they're accounted for in correlations that make better predictions. If you're just dumping stuff into an AI, and you're not careful to have it perform a careful analysis of variance of its input, you're likely to wind up with predictions that may be reasonably accurate but based on correlations that don't exist.
If poor people are more likely to X than middle-class people, and poor blacks and poor whites are equally likely to X, and middle-class blacks and middle-class whites are equally likely to X, then proportionately more blacks than whites will X. Good statisticians try to control for this when making analyses
Let's go through some possible causes:
Blacks could be committing more crimes.
Police could investigate in such a manner that they tend to catch more black suspects, relatively, than white.
There may be crimes more typical of blacks than whites, and police may pursue those crimes harder.*
Prosecutors could prosecute blacks disproportionately more often.
Blacks, being on the average poorer than whites, probably get bad legal representation more than whites.
Juries may be prone to convict blacks with less evidence than they'd want to convict whites.
There may be crimes more typical of blacks than whites, and these crimes may call for harsher punishment.
Judges may give longer sentences to blacks than whites.
Blacks may tend to get into more trouble in prison (for a variety of reasons) and don't get as much time off for good behavior
Remember here that, given steady states, the percentage of a certain group in prison is proportional to the number going to prison times the effective length of their sentences. Statistics are like bikinis: what they reveal is important, what they conceal is vital.
*The classic case is cocaine use by sniffing powder (claimed to be more common for whites) vs. cocaine use by smoking crack (claimed to be more common for blacks). Punishments for smoking crack were more severe than for sniffing coke, so, given a black man and a white man convicted of cocaine use, the black would probably serve a longer sentence.
That's not a given. Given prejudiced police and other people in the criminal justice system, it's entirely possible that one race will have more convictions per act than another. Perhaps the police hunt down blacks more than whites. Perhaps blacks get worse representation overall, as the overall richer whites can get better legal representation. Perhaps juries tend to convict blacks more than whites, given similar evidence. And, of course, the police and juries justify this because blacks have relatively more convictions for murder, rape, etc.
This stuff gets complicated real fast.
There's logical implication and then there's causation. A implies B and B implies C means A implies C. A is characteristic of B and B correlates with C doesn't tell us how the causation runs, or indeed what's the best way to estimate C. It may be that, holding socioeconomic class constant, there's no significant difference between blacks and whites defaulting, in which case race would be useful in a prediction only as a proxy for socioeconomic class.
If it's irrelevant, a data mining system might still pick race out as a factor in loan defaults, particularly if it didn't have socioeconomic class as an input. In many contexts, that's illegal.
If we find someone who can consistently do magic, you'd better believe that there would be a swarm of physicists quantifying everything. Heck, if I could do magic, I'd be measuring things myself, making small changes to incantations to see what happens, etc. It might not be good for my life expectancy, but I couldn't resist it.
Meaning that we haven't abolished slavery, we've merely forced the slaveowners to get a conviction first.
Can you name an ideology that hasn't left a bloody trail for centuries? Capitalism has left a bloodier trail, overall.
Also, what was the blood Socialism was allegedly spilling in 1817? Until a century later, people who considered themselves socialists didn't run anything large enough to make much of a trail. There have been lots of peaceful Socialists. (The main political opposition to WWI was Socialism, FWIW. Many Socialists were bitterly disappointed that the workers of Europe lined up behind their governments rather than with their counterparts in other countries.)
There's all kinds of people who call themselves socialists, and most of them don't actually favor genocide.
Why should someone retain control? If I buy something, I can use it as I see fit, and the vendor does not retain control unless there's an explicit side agreement (my mortgage has language that I need to keep the house in decent condition, for example). I regard restrictions on what I can do with my property as inherently a bad thing, to be tolerated when necessary. I don't want someone else saying what I can and cannot do with what I've purchased.
They likely are driven by principle.
Copyright prevents me from using my personal property in ways I might want. If I have a recording of a movie, I don't have a legal right to make copies using my own personal device and my own blanks. I don't have a legal right to transfer it to another device. I bought it, I paid for it, and there's arbitrary restrictions on it. That's one principle, and someone who doesn't like government interference should be familiar with it.
Economically, pieces of art are valuable, and are enjoyed by people. If there's more pieces of art to be enjoyed by even more people, that increases total wealth, which in itself is a good thing to do. I know people who very much enjoy reading Jim Butcher's Dresden File books, but don't have the money to buy them. If I make copies and hand them out, I'm making these people happier. This is, other things being equal (which, in this case, they aren't), a good thing. Restrictions on art that make it less accessible to people means we're all poorer. That's another principle.
Against that, we have the practical matter that requiring people to buy copies of something and giving some of that money to the creator is an efficient way to encourage people to create. I'm much more interested in getting society working than in being ideologically pure, so I favor reasonable copyright laws.
As far as ownership of "intellectual property" goes, that seems, AFAICT, to not exist naturally, but rather is a result of legal constructs. Long ago, musicians would hear other people's melodies and either copy them or build on them. Storytellers would listen to other people's stories and repeat them. A storyteller who insisted that nobody could repeat his stories without paying him would be considered a weirdo.
If you and I come to the post office with packages of similar size and weight and category*, with similar destinations, we'll pay the same. All other considerations are irrelevant. If you've run a business for twenty years that requires mailing out packages in large quantities, and I'm just starting a business, we pay equal postage. If you're mailing clothes and I'm mailing tools, same postage. Now, if I want my package to get to its destination faster, I can pay for that, and you can pay the same amount for the same acceleration. If you want to mail out a large number of identical things, you can do some pre-sorting and get a discount, and if I want to do the same thing I can.
This is what people want for Net Neutrality: that the internet carry packets regardless of who they're from.
*It isn't necessarily the same postage for everything, because there's a few exceptions. If you are mailing books while I'm mailing tools, you can use Media Mail for a discount, IIRC.
Which would be everywhere on the planet. In order to serve me internet access, my provider has to have a data link from their center to my house. This will use limited resources and go over private property or limited public property.
LTE requires an allocation from the limited EM spectrum, which then can't be used for something else. Physical connections take up volume. If the connections are on poles, then the government has to limit the number of poles, and there's a limited amount of connections a pole can support. If the connections are underground, the government has to regulate who can dig up what when. If the connections don't go on public property, they need to go on private property, probably owned by lots of different people, and eminent domain is the only way to do that.
A system providing access to services for large numbers of people is not going to function in an anarchy.
Moreover, if I can't buy it, who am I harming by making an illicit copy? The complaint about piracy is that it results in reduced sales. If they're already zero, and projected to be zero forever, I can't possibly reduce its sales. Not by piracy, not by giving it a bad review, not by threatening to shoot anyone who buys a copy.
That was a response to your claim that nothing would be lost by not making professional-quality movies. A very large number of people would disagree with you, and would object to your values being set in law to the point that nobody would make another good movie. We have an imperfect system now. Changing it to destroy large swaths of art needs more justification than ideological purity.
In theory, copyright is a restriction on what people can do with their property, and particularly to use it to make more valuable stuff. In practice, we want some way to pay money to people who create things we like, both to encourage them and to make it more possible for them to exercise their creativity. (This varies by art form. A novelist can have a day job that pays the bills, but making movies requires a lot more money than people will put into the pot just so they can be creative.)
Ideally, we'd want the compensation mechanism to be based pretty much on how people like the creation. We'd like it to be possible for people to create things on spec, rather than waiting for someone's approval, and be potentially rewarded. This encourage more creativity. It's cheaper to allow creative people a shot at lots and lots of money than to compensate them reasonably, human nature being what it is. Giving the creator some money for each copy of his or her work does this well, provided we have some cost for making these copies (so I don't make a few zillion copies of one of my mediocre novels and clean up).
On the other hand, if we had a system that allowed people to copy freely, there'd be more people able to enjoy more art (of various forms), so copyright isn't a perfect system.
Not knowing that floating-point values are inexact is likely to bite you sometime, and you won't know why. Things will just be wrong. So, if you're OK with being stumped by problems that seem to have no solution, you need exposure to floating-point processing, and knowing endianness is useful.
Some of the layers have disappeared into the hardware. An i7 doesn't directly execute x86 and amd64 instructions. It decodes them and runs them on a RISC processor using all sorts of intelligent scheduling. When I was younger, and I had to chase stegosauri off so I could use my TRS-80, the CPU corresponded to a pretty small part of an i7.
Which has nothing to do with Dark Matter that I can tell.
Except that we have General Relativity, which has been found to be correct time and again, which tells us exactly how the galaxy warps space and what that causes. If this is how it works, then we need some sort of modified gravity theory. Real live physicists have been coming up with modified gravity theories to explain galactic rotation for a long time. None of them work really well, and they also fail to explain things like the Bullet Cluster.
If there was a really simple explanation involving changes to General Relativity, it would have been found by now.
That article is about dark energy, not dark matter. Two entirely different things with similar names. It's like saying my browser can't use Javascript because Java is disabled.
Dark matter used to be just matter we couldn't see that explained galactic rotation. It then became also the explanation for gravitational lensing where we can't detect matter, and an explanation for the makeup of the Universe. It appears to be a form of matter that doesn't interact electromagnetically. There have been attempts to detect dark matter particles with weak interactions, with AFAIK no success yet. The idea isn't far-fetched, as neutrinos are dark matter by the definition I gave, although neutrinos move far too fast to be what we're observing.
Investment isn't enough. Lots of people invest in ideas that go nowhere until their investments are worthless. To win big, you have to invest at the right time with the right people.
I have a cousin with Parkinson's. The difference between before and after the brain implant was amazing.
Something that makes it possible for people to eat and get nourished (and marijuana seems to do that in a fair number of cases) is going to save lives and help cure other things. At least if it's legalized.
Every company claims to be helping humanity, but I can judge which ones I think do. I think reducing cost to low earth orbit helps us a lot more than making financial markets more fluid. Also, Space-X seems to be making better progress on the cost reduction than others, while I suspect that if Goldman-Sachs went away other companies would fill the gap nicely.
He's doing stuff I want people to do, takes risks (which could turn into some sacrifice) and has been accomplishing stuff I want accomplished. That doesn't make him a hero, but it does make him a guy I really admire.
No. Just no. I am paying off my new car on a zero-interest four-year loan. That means I pay very little up front (a hundred or two), and let the rest of my money sit in my investment account making maybe 6% (it varies wildly) until it's time for the loan payment. A zero-interest loan is better than cash. Even if you get nothing on your savings, having to pay $32K this year is not as good as having to pay $8K this year and $24K later. Look up "discount rate" in financial planning.
If it's one year, it tracks the loan principal. If it takes two, it's worth considerably more than what I owe on it.
Sure (although I'll take your word on the last two years; haven't owned a vehicle quite that long). It's also significantly more common than with a newer vehicle. Odds are that the repair won't be a budget buster, but it may well take your car out of action for a few days. Newer is more reliable.
My car is pretty much necessary to get between my home and my job, hence vital for me to earn money. That's an asset. It's a depreciating asset, like many others, and you do want to watch what you pay for your assets, but if it's a liability you're doing it wrong.