Not only that, these people coming in saying "programming is not fun" are making it worse for the rest of us. Because they don't know how to self-manage, crappy processes (like 'agile' from people who never read the manifesto) get imposed to make sure we keep working. Bad designs get built by people who don't enjoy it, and then the rest of us have to work in that code.
Fixing other people's bugs is indeed not fun. If you don't like programming, I suggest you stay out and not make things worse for other people. Or learn why it's fun.
As well as being highly analytical and creative, software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks. Manic attention to detail is a must; slovenliness is verboten.
Attention to detail? Slovenliness? These people must not have looked at much corporate code, there's a world of kludges out there.
If you don't think programming is fun, then you're really missing out. The reason so many people work on open source code for free is exactly because it is fun, and we can see that the quality of code from people doing things for fun can be quite high.
If programming isn't fun for you, then something's wrong. Maybe you have a manager who completely stifles you, or maybe you only glue together libraries other people wrote. I can see how that wouldn't be much fun. Or maybe you have a manager who writes code, gives it to you, and says, "here, debug this." That would be hell. Either way, if your job is programming change stuff around until you can really see what is so much fun about it, otherwise you're in for a miserable career.
Go is, as you mention, even bigger. So it was solved by brute force, much more powerful computers, and improved pruning algorithms.
No, that's not at all how Alpha Go works.
Yes, yes it is. It's primarily a tree searching algorithm. On top of that, they use a heuristic (the neural network, which doesn't learn while it plays) to figure out which branches to search down. Then it also uses a monte carlo algorithm to prune the tree to a manageable level.
But I do still wonder if whoever said "meh" isn't partly right too. Is this really an AI kind of approach?
It's a clear example of "weak" AI, not "strong" AI. It's a clever solution to the problem with a solution inspired by human intelligence, but the machine is not learning in the general sense.
Nah, it's basically the same. Chess was solved, not by brute force (because, just like Go, the branching factor is too big), but by brute-force combined with some pruning algorithms.
Go is, as you mention, even bigger. So it was solved by brute force, much more powerful computers, and improved pruning algorithms. That's basically it.
No, you're wrong. The gold standard worked for millenia. All the examples you linked to of problems are merely problems of governments unable to balance a budget.
Furthermore, you're a moron because you think that the Weimer republic money wasn't fiat currency. What, do you think they were backing it with gold? Read your own link, it literally says, "To pay for the large costs of the ongoing First World War, Germany suspended the gold standard"
Also, Where did the leap come from to relate intelligence to skin color?
Race is mainly determined by skin color. There is so much genetic variety among (for example) black skinned people that to expect them all to to have similar genetic makeups is silly because they don't have similar genetic makeups. Saying "this race is less likely to be intelligent than that race" is like saying "birds can fly better than squirrels"
You don't know history. If you did, you wouldn't trust the institution of science any more than you trust any other institution. They all start with good intentions, and become corrupted by venality, greed, fear, etc.....
You can actually look at the Gosling source code here. It was a library for drawing updates to the screen (with a dynamic programming library), and actually the source code got shared and was being used in a lot of places, not just emacs. That was the main thing Stallman had to rewrite, and when he did, he ended up making it more efficient.
Likewise, if the institutions of science, collectively, support discrimination, then we probably out to be discriminating. Presumably because they've used science-the-tool to come to that conclusion, as is their job.
You're very, very badly wrong here. There are plenty of examples of the institutions of science being co-opted by politics, or not using the tools of science in other ways. I gave you a really good example which you completely ignored. In fact, you're either ignorant or a fool if you think the institutions of science should be believed, and I don't think you're a fool.
. . . Yeah? It's pretty well known that... "both genes and the environment have something to do with".... say... your maximum running speed. ie, if you train to be a runner, you'll be able to run faster. That's the environment. And if you're born without legs, you probably won't be running too fast.
It's not clear at all that intelligence, especially related to skin color, is determined by genetics in the same way leg-length is.
A scientist is someone who uses the tool of science, who thinks like a scientist. You don't need a degree to be a scientist.
And yes, she clearly turned off whatever science brain she has while writing that post.
"Science" has two commonly used definitions: science as a tool, and science as an institution. You might add "science as a faith" too, but let's ignore that for now.
Science as a tool is just a tool, it doesn't take political sides. In that sense, of course you are right.
Science as an institution, on the other hand, is a bunch of people, and absolutely can take political sides, and does often enough that it's depressing. The author of the OP is referring to science as an institution.
I guess for a lot of people in the march for science, it's kind of a religion, they even talk about belief and romance, I guess. Making it about romance turns it into kind of a clique.
But science as a tool doesn't care or not care. It is a finely honed point dispelling ignorance and error for anyone who will wield it.
The most obvious way to solve that problem is to create a sub-currency backed by bit-coin. Sort of like how a share of Berkshire Hathaway stock is worth over $100k, but you can get a B division of Berkshire Hathaway for closer to $100.
Add to that: there's always another chance to get rich. Right now, today, there is a stock you can buy that will get you millions in the next six months. The question is, and always has been, identifying it.
That's a false premise. The gold standard didn't fail, it worked for millennia. We moved off the gold standard as an international currency because it was too hard for the US government to balance its budget.
On the other hand, we have seen fiat currencies fail many, many times. The US has only been on fiat currency since 1971. It remains to be seen if we can manage it or not.
Sorry, but wrong. Deflation is indeed a bad thing. Deflation means that currency gets more valuable with time. This means that is to everybody's advantage to hoard currency, since it gets more valuable the longer you hold onto it. That means less currency in circulation, which means it gets even more valuable with time, which means people hoard it more. This is a bad vicious cycle.
I want to point out that this is a hypothesis frequently used to justify inflation, but in fact there is little evidence to support it. There just haven't been many periods of deflation to really develop an empirical understanding of how people will react, so all we have is guess work. And somehow the guesswork always leans to the side that people wanted it to.
Scientists, for a few centuries, were also really big on spontaneous generation. But that also turned out to be false thanks to Francesco Redi and Pasteur. It gets better with time. It's certainly not perfect now, but the alternative is literally guesswork.
Nahhhh..... you are trying to frame it as "gets better with time" when actually it was scientists not being scientific. Newtonian mechanics going to quantum mechanics was progress. Social Darwinism was just plain wrongness, dressed up to look nice by scientific establishments. It was empirically unsupported, and we still see remnants of it today when people talk about the infinitely undefinable "natural talent."
According to her bio, she got undergrad degrees in applied math and computer science, got a masters degree in computer science, and then got a PhD in education science and technology policy. So it seems she at least knows something about each of those fields.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, these people coming in saying "programming is not fun" are making it worse for the rest of us. Because they don't know how to self-manage, crappy processes (like 'agile' from people who never read the manifesto) get imposed to make sure we keep working. Bad designs get built by people who don't enjoy it, and then the rest of us have to work in that code.
Fixing other people's bugs is indeed not fun. If you don't like programming, I suggest you stay out and not make things worse for other people. Or learn why it's fun.
As well as being highly analytical and creative, software developers need almost superhuman focus to manage the complexity of their tasks. Manic attention to detail is a must; slovenliness is verboten.
Attention to detail? Slovenliness? These people must not have looked at much corporate code, there's a world of kludges out there.
If you don't think programming is fun, then you're really missing out. The reason so many people work on open source code for free is exactly because it is fun, and we can see that the quality of code from people doing things for fun can be quite high.
If programming isn't fun for you, then something's wrong. Maybe you have a manager who completely stifles you, or maybe you only glue together libraries other people wrote. I can see how that wouldn't be much fun. Or maybe you have a manager who writes code, gives it to you, and says, "here, debug this." That would be hell. Either way, if your job is programming change stuff around until you can really see what is so much fun about it, otherwise you're in for a miserable career.
Go is, as you mention, even bigger. So it was solved by brute force, much more powerful computers, and improved pruning algorithms.
No, that's not at all how Alpha Go works.
Yes, yes it is. It's primarily a tree searching algorithm. On top of that, they use a heuristic (the neural network, which doesn't learn while it plays) to figure out which branches to search down. Then it also uses a monte carlo algorithm to prune the tree to a manageable level.
No current artificial computational system is capable of ignoring its own constraints.
It is also possible that we are not capable of ignoring, or maybe even knowing, our own constraints.
But I do still wonder if whoever said "meh" isn't partly right too. Is this really an AI kind of approach?
It's a clear example of "weak" AI, not "strong" AI. It's a clever solution to the problem with a solution inspired by human intelligence, but the machine is not learning in the general sense.
Nah, it's basically the same. Chess was solved, not by brute force (because, just like Go, the branching factor is too big), but by brute-force combined with some pruning algorithms.
Go is, as you mention, even bigger. So it was solved by brute force, much more powerful computers, and improved pruning algorithms. That's basically it.
No, you're wrong. The gold standard worked for millenia. All the examples you linked to of problems are merely problems of governments unable to balance a budget.
Furthermore, you're a moron because you think that the Weimer republic money wasn't fiat currency. What, do you think they were backing it with gold? Read your own link, it literally says, "To pay for the large costs of the ongoing First World War, Germany suspended the gold standard"
Also, Where did the leap come from to relate intelligence to skin color?
Race is mainly determined by skin color. There is so much genetic variety among (for example) black skinned people that to expect them all to to have similar genetic makeups is silly because they don't have similar genetic makeups. Saying "this race is less likely to be intelligent than that race" is like saying "birds can fly better than squirrels"
You don't know history. If you did, you wouldn't trust the institution of science any more than you trust any other institution. They all start with good intentions, and become corrupted by venality, greed, fear, etc.....
"Great talent shows itself late in life."
-Tao of Programming
You can actually look at the Gosling source code here. It was a library for drawing updates to the screen (with a dynamic programming library), and actually the source code got shared and was being used in a lot of places, not just emacs. That was the main thing Stallman had to rewrite, and when he did, he ended up making it more efficient.
Likewise, if the institutions of science, collectively, support discrimination, then we probably out to be discriminating. Presumably because they've used science-the-tool to come to that conclusion, as is their job.
You're very, very badly wrong here. There are plenty of examples of the institutions of science being co-opted by politics, or not using the tools of science in other ways. I gave you a really good example which you completely ignored. In fact, you're either ignorant or a fool if you think the institutions of science should be believed, and I don't think you're a fool.
. . . Yeah? It's pretty well known that... "both genes and the environment have something to do with".... say... your maximum running speed. ie, if you train to be a runner, you'll be able to run faster. That's the environment. And if you're born without legs, you probably won't be running too fast.
It's not clear at all that intelligence, especially related to skin color, is determined by genetics in the same way leg-length is.
especially as disproving groupthink can make their career.
Although trying and failing can really mess up your career. High reward, high risk.
A scientist is someone who uses the tool of science, who thinks like a scientist. You don't need a degree to be a scientist.
And yes, she clearly turned off whatever science brain she has while writing that post.
"It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with racial differences [in intelligence]."
"Science" has two commonly used definitions: science as a tool, and science as an institution. You might add "science as a faith" too, but let's ignore that for now.
Science as a tool is just a tool, it doesn't take political sides. In that sense, of course you are right.
Science as an institution, on the other hand, is a bunch of people, and absolutely can take political sides, and does often enough that it's depressing. The author of the OP is referring to science as an institution. I guess for a lot of people in the march for science, it's kind of a religion, they even talk about belief and romance, I guess. Making it about romance turns it into kind of a clique.
But science as a tool doesn't care or not care. It is a finely honed point dispelling ignorance and error for anyone who will wield it.
The most obvious way to solve that problem is to create a sub-currency backed by bit-coin. Sort of like how a share of Berkshire Hathaway stock is worth over $100k, but you can get a B division of Berkshire Hathaway for closer to $100.
Add to that: there's always another chance to get rich. Right now, today, there is a stock you can buy that will get you millions in the next six months. The question is, and always has been, identifying it.
That's a false premise. The gold standard didn't fail, it worked for millennia. We moved off the gold standard as an international currency because it was too hard for the US government to balance its budget.
On the other hand, we have seen fiat currencies fail many, many times. The US has only been on fiat currency since 1971. It remains to be seen if we can manage it or not.
That's some smart economics thinking there.
Sorry, but wrong. Deflation is indeed a bad thing. Deflation means that currency gets more valuable with time. This means that is to everybody's advantage to hoard currency, since it gets more valuable the longer you hold onto it. That means less currency in circulation, which means it gets even more valuable with time, which means people hoard it more. This is a bad vicious cycle.
I want to point out that this is a hypothesis frequently used to justify inflation, but in fact there is little evidence to support it. There just haven't been many periods of deflation to really develop an empirical understanding of how people will react, so all we have is guess work. And somehow the guesswork always leans to the side that people wanted it to.
Scientists, for a few centuries, were also really big on spontaneous generation. But that also turned out to be false thanks to Francesco Redi and Pasteur. It gets better with time. It's certainly not perfect now, but the alternative is literally guesswork.
Nahhhh..... you are trying to frame it as "gets better with time" when actually it was scientists not being scientific. Newtonian mechanics going to quantum mechanics was progress. Social Darwinism was just plain wrongness, dressed up to look nice by scientific establishments. It was empirically unsupported, and we still see remnants of it today when people talk about the infinitely undefinable "natural talent."
According to her bio, she got undergrad degrees in applied math and computer science, got a masters degree in computer science, and then got a PhD in education science and technology policy. So it seems she at least knows something about each of those fields.