I remember one show, I think it was a movie, where there were a couple of office ladies who worked in accounting. They were losing their jobs due to computers taking over the industry.
I think you're talking about Desk Set. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.
It's certainly true that technology is a challenge for some jobs, but it also creates new jobs. The speed of revolution just happens to be faster than it ever was. Some industries (e.g. service industries, such as aged care) are booming.
My biggest concern of all, and it's a concern shared by a lot of Slashdotters I suspect, is that the promise of a better tomorrow won't happen (or won't happen until much later) for reasons unrelated to technology. The current 3D printing boom is a case in point: this game-changing technology was held up for over 20 years by a patent thicket. Only after some of the key patents expired did we all start seeing the benefit.
Right now, the benefit of the sharing economy is being held back by regulation. I strongly suspect that we won't get the benefit of the "Internet of Things" until the DMCA and its non-US equivalents are reformed.
Just like "troll" (ah, the Golden Age of Usenet, I remember it well), the term "SJW" used to mean something specific. The Urban Dictionary definition is the best one I've seen.
Today it's meaningless, and that's a shame, because we've lost a really good word. The distinction between real-world activists who are honestly trying to make the world a better place as they see it, and those who forcefully regurgitate half-understood material exclusively online in return for kudos points, is still a distinction that exists. We just don't have a good word for the latter any more.
Of course that person was trying (and failing) to parody what they think a "SJW" (whatever that means these days) would say.
Ask practically anyone that you would consider to be a "SJW", and they would no doubt agree that both Ted Cruz and Ben Carson are a) not white (by the standards of a white supremacist), b) privileged and powerful, and c) prone to racism, at least when it comes to Syrian refugees.
I can't say I really work in AI as such, but I am the sort of person who gets paid to (amongst other things) apply machine learning to real-world problems, so I'm not really sure that I could say where all this is headed.
Right now, I'm more scared of people than I am of machines. The biggest forseeable risk of having a crapload of data and a lot of hardware to throw at it is that it will be used against people by people.
Yeah, I thought the same thing. You can interpret his use of the word as putting words in the mouth of someone who dismisses the issue of police violence because "well, it's only happening to [insert terms of racial abuse here], so who cares". When you only have 140 characters, that's a very powerful way of putting it.
No, the third part is pretty much correct. Biologically speaking, "race" isn't a thing.
There are genetic traits that run in families, and this effect does scale up. There is no trait or collection of traits that correlates with whatever "race" means this decade.
There might be some big hitters (e.g Google, Microsoft, Apple) poking in that direction and with a limited interested but, from what I'm seeing, they're pulling those employs from academia and not off the street.
The main reason why it's the big hitters working in the neural network space is that they have ambitious problems (where there is no "understanding" that can be applied), more data to throw at the problem than we mere mortals, and more people to assign to one project than you do.
"One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." - T.S. Eliot
What you really need for ML is statistics. Lots of statistics.
How much statistics do you need? It's hard to say, but a good rule of thumb is that if you know what a conjugate prior is and where to look them up, then you certainly have enough.
Once you understand the ideas, write a simple NN program.
How can I put this politely? Err... this is extremely bad advice. If you want to get into machine learning, steer clear of neural networks for the foreseeable future.
They're just not that useful for the vast majority of problems. For problems of simple-to-moderately complexity, their performance (both accuracy and speed) is atrocious compared to other methods, but more to the point, the model itself is uninformative. You almost always want to use a technique where examining the model will give you insight into the problem that you're trying to solve.
I would start by finding a problem which interests you. Then pick an appropriate technique and apply it to that problem. Maxent or SVM are good ways to start if it's a classification problem, or go straight to latent variable models (e.g. hierarchical Bayes) if you want to discover structure.
That's not quite true. In Australia, "football" may refer to Australian rules, rugby league, rugby union, or soccer. However, only the first two of these may be referred to as "footy".
(Obligatory Australian joke. Q: What's the difference between a kangaroo and a wallaby? A: One plays rugby league, the other plays rugby union.)
No, it couldn't. As has been noted several times in this thread, in the case of a porn actress, there is (one may safely presume) a written contract, probably in the form of a model release. Any case where the former actress tried to "retract consent" would be resolved with respect to the text of the contract, or whether or not the contract was legal in the first place. (Even if all those Traci Lords movies hadn't been illegal on other grounds, she may have had a case to have them withdrawn on the basis that, being underage, any contract she signed was void.)
That is not even remotely the situation here. We're talking about what consent is implied by virtue of being in an intimate relationship. There is no paperwork to consult to sort the case out.
No one is being forced to use facebook, if they want to require users send them a blood sample, their left tooth, and 5 million dollars to keep their account, I don't see how they shouldn't be "allowed" to demand this.
One could argue that given that the government has a monopoly on issuing certain kinds of documentation, there should be some legal limits on how that documentation can be used.
Yes, you do, and many of the choices that you have involve attempting to persuade Facebook to change its policies.
You are free to publicly protest their rules. You are free to state your case about why you think Facebook's requirements are ridiculous. You are free to publicly shame them if you believe they are acting in a way contrary to social moires or the moral sensibilities of their target audience. You have the right to tell the world that Facebook is just a web site and maybe it should get over itself.
You even have the right to rant in Slashdot comments. Truly, the Internet is a grand place to be.
I have no doubt that Maine is pretty safe by United States standards.
I wasn't really trying to make a point. But if you'd like me to make a point, it's this: Violence probably has less to do with the amount of hardware that it's possible to be violent with, and more to do with the culture of the place.
It's useless to compare the number of guns per capita by country, because no other country is in the same league as the United States. However, if you plot the violent crime rate versus the gun ownership rate, there is a positive correlation which largely disappears if you exclude the United States. If there is less violence in Maine, it's probably because the culture of Maine is less violent than other places.
Using the rather silly "mass shooter" metric [...]
So far, nobody has proposed a fairer metric which measures what we mean by "mass shooting". It's less silly than only looking at people who died.
Slashdot Mirror
Haha, ok, then y'all modern types are trying to redefine the word "race", [...]
It's not so long ago in the United States that Irish people were not considered "white". European Jews still aren't, to most racists.
I was thinking DSS K-7. But honestly, I'd be happy with Space Station V at this point.
I remember one show, I think it was a movie, where there were a couple of office ladies who worked in accounting. They were losing their jobs due to computers taking over the industry.
I think you're talking about Desk Set. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.
It's certainly true that technology is a challenge for some jobs, but it also creates new jobs. The speed of revolution just happens to be faster than it ever was. Some industries (e.g. service industries, such as aged care) are booming.
My biggest concern of all, and it's a concern shared by a lot of Slashdotters I suspect, is that the promise of a better tomorrow won't happen (or won't happen until much later) for reasons unrelated to technology. The current 3D printing boom is a case in point: this game-changing technology was held up for over 20 years by a patent thicket. Only after some of the key patents expired did we all start seeing the benefit.
Right now, the benefit of the sharing economy is being held back by regulation. I strongly suspect that we won't get the benefit of the "Internet of Things" until the DMCA and its non-US equivalents are reformed.
Just like "troll" (ah, the Golden Age of Usenet, I remember it well), the term "SJW" used to mean something specific. The Urban Dictionary definition is the best one I've seen.
Today it's meaningless, and that's a shame, because we've lost a really good word. The distinction between real-world activists who are honestly trying to make the world a better place as they see it, and those who forcefully regurgitate half-understood material exclusively online in return for kudos points, is still a distinction that exists. We just don't have a good word for the latter any more.
Did you know that there are actually standards which define terms like "chihuahua"? That's because dog breeds are marketing terms, not descriptions of phenomena found in nature.
Of course that person was trying (and failing) to parody what they think a "SJW" (whatever that means these days) would say.
Ask practically anyone that you would consider to be a "SJW", and they would no doubt agree that both Ted Cruz and Ben Carson are a) not white (by the standards of a white supremacist), b) privileged and powerful, and c) prone to racism, at least when it comes to Syrian refugees.
I can't say I really work in AI as such, but I am the sort of person who gets paid to (amongst other things) apply machine learning to real-world problems, so I'm not really sure that I could say where all this is headed.
Right now, I'm more scared of people than I am of machines. The biggest forseeable risk of having a crapload of data and a lot of hardware to throw at it is that it will be used against people by people.
Yeah, I thought the same thing. You can interpret his use of the word as putting words in the mouth of someone who dismisses the issue of police violence because "well, it's only happening to [insert terms of racial abuse here], so who cares". When you only have 140 characters, that's a very powerful way of putting it.
No, the third part is pretty much correct. Biologically speaking, "race" isn't a thing.
There are genetic traits that run in families, and this effect does scale up. There is no trait or collection of traits that correlates with whatever "race" means this decade.
There might be some big hitters (e.g Google, Microsoft, Apple) poking in that direction and with a limited interested but, from what I'm seeing, they're pulling those employs from academia and not off the street.
The main reason why it's the big hitters working in the neural network space is that they have ambitious problems (where there is no "understanding" that can be applied), more data to throw at the problem than we mere mortals, and more people to assign to one project than you do.
Admit it, you'd have suspended disbelief it if they were launched from a gravity gun.
Close enough to violate a design patent or dozen.
"One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." - T.S. Eliot
Indeed. Machine learning is the trendy term of the whole decade.
Here's your handy guide to the field:
What you really need for ML is statistics. Lots of statistics.
How much statistics do you need? It's hard to say, but a good rule of thumb is that if you know what a conjugate prior is and where to look them up, then you certainly have enough.
Once you understand the ideas, write a simple NN program.
How can I put this politely? Err... this is extremely bad advice. If you want to get into machine learning, steer clear of neural networks for the foreseeable future.
They're just not that useful for the vast majority of problems. For problems of simple-to-moderately complexity, their performance (both accuracy and speed) is atrocious compared to other methods, but more to the point, the model itself is uninformative. You almost always want to use a technique where examining the model will give you insight into the problem that you're trying to solve.
I would start by finding a problem which interests you. Then pick an appropriate technique and apply it to that problem. Maxent or SVM are good ways to start if it's a classification problem, or go straight to latent variable models (e.g. hierarchical Bayes) if you want to discover structure.
That's not quite true. In Australia, "football" may refer to Australian rules, rugby league, rugby union, or soccer. However, only the first two of these may be referred to as "footy".
(Obligatory Australian joke. Q: What's the difference between a kangaroo and a wallaby? A: One plays rugby league, the other plays rugby union.)
No, it couldn't. As has been noted several times in this thread, in the case of a porn actress, there is (one may safely presume) a written contract, probably in the form of a model release. Any case where the former actress tried to "retract consent" would be resolved with respect to the text of the contract, or whether or not the contract was legal in the first place. (Even if all those Traci Lords movies hadn't been illegal on other grounds, she may have had a case to have them withdrawn on the basis that, being underage, any contract she signed was void.)
That is not even remotely the situation here. We're talking about what consent is implied by virtue of being in an intimate relationship. There is no paperwork to consult to sort the case out.
I made my piece of gauze sign a pre-nup.
Only cowards censor.
I am a proud coward and I resent that remark.
No one is being forced to use facebook, if they want to require users send them a blood sample, their left tooth, and 5 million dollars to keep their account, I don't see how they shouldn't be "allowed" to demand this.
One could argue that given that the government has a monopoly on issuing certain kinds of documentation, there should be some legal limits on how that documentation can be used.
People use their real names online?
Sure they do!
Yes, you do, and many of the choices that you have involve attempting to persuade Facebook to change its policies.
You are free to publicly protest their rules. You are free to state your case about why you think Facebook's requirements are ridiculous. You are free to publicly shame them if you believe they are acting in a way contrary to social moires or the moral sensibilities of their target audience. You have the right to tell the world that Facebook is just a web site and maybe it should get over itself.
You even have the right to rant in Slashdot comments. Truly, the Internet is a grand place to be.
Surely everyone who's read even a single page of a New Kind of Science [...]
Yeah, that's as far as I got, too.
I have no doubt that Maine is pretty safe by United States standards.
I wasn't really trying to make a point. But if you'd like me to make a point, it's this: Violence probably has less to do with the amount of hardware that it's possible to be violent with, and more to do with the culture of the place.
It's useless to compare the number of guns per capita by country, because no other country is in the same league as the United States. However, if you plot the violent crime rate versus the gun ownership rate, there is a positive correlation which largely disappears if you exclude the United States. If there is less violence in Maine, it's probably because the culture of Maine is less violent than other places.
So far, nobody has proposed a fairer metric which measures what we mean by "mass shooting". It's less silly than only looking at people who died.