"And despite the murderous wet dreams of some folks, the US has been waging war for 16 years now, and that uses up a lot of money. I severely dougt we could stand against the combined forces of the rest of the world."
Indeed but war doesn't actually cost much at all. Don't get me wrong, we spend boatloads of cash on war but that is only because we aren't particularly serious. If we were really serious the military wouldn't be paying for anything at all and our limits would be based on production capacity. Our production capacity is extremely high, we are the largest arms dealer in the world.
Most of the money we spend is still on research but of the rest we aren't actually using most of the arms we are producing. As for whether we could stand up to the combined forces of the world... we could likely make a pretty good show of it, especially because we have a highly armed civilian population (civil defense is the reason for the right to bear arms before even rebellion and certainly before shooting deer), but it really doesn't matter as there is no scenario in which we'd ever need to do that.
"The U.S. no longer leads the world in diplomacy, nor climate change, nor nuclear non-proliferation."
None of those things are things we really have to lead the world in though. The only things we really need to lead in are things that actually make us more powerful and our military and economic power still ensures we are very diplomatic even if we are complete assholes. But it is certainly true that while other nations may not have a choice but to deal with us, avoiding dealing with us where they can get away with it will certainly erode our position over time.
Given that for the most part the choices remain The US, Russia, and China though, the US is still the least distasteful of the bunch.
There is sometimes more money in the specialization route but part of the secret is to spread your resume out in a way that lets you emphasize the "specialist" hat they are looking for at the moment. Jack of all trades, master of many... at least within six months.
"Windows is a better platform for most things except engineering and scientific computing, to include embedded etc...."
You must be smoking something. Windows is a superior platform for backending a bunch of end user systems and essentially nothing else. Even that is only true because those "desktops" (really laptops these days) are running windows. Really, it is only present in the enterprise space because desktops are running it and integrate auth into directory services and it therefore is the simplest way to manage those directory services, since everyone is authenticating to that platform already you often have your other systems authenticate against AD as well. The desktop is kept essential because of office, you can't move away from Office because everyone you will share documents with is still running office. Even though sharepoint sucks relative to a real wiki it has tight office integration. Windows being familiar gives it an advantage for trying hook people into their development tools like visual studio and C# which aren't really superior to other solutions but you can start by developing on the desktop you already have and with tie-in's to Office. That gives them a development pool to draw from and then when people are looking to move to the cloud and so they've built their cloud solution all around windows and VS/C#/.Net.
You can't run light weight DNS on windows, you can't run a light overhead cluster on windows, you can't run lightweight backend processing for any web driven service on windows, you can't do light weight instances on windows at all, all that integration with all other MS stuff carries overhead and layers on layers of garbage services you just don't need. Even Microsoft knows that, that's why they added unix on windows to create the illusion you could run light weight guest os instances on azure.
There was a generation where this was true, basically if you were under 18 in the 90's you have a big advantage because tech exploded in big ways in the consumer market at that point. Adults at that time had trouble interacting with something as simple as a gas pump with a display or really anything with a display.
The basic concepts of an abstracted digital rather than physical interface were completely alien to the previous generation while intuitive to the younger generation. As a child from that time, especially compounded with the arrogance of youth, it really did feel like the adults were just idiots. Adult "What do I do?" Me "Is that a credit card?" Adult Looks down at card as if this is a magical puzzle then says uncertainly "Yes?" Me "Press the button next to credit" Prompt says processing or similar, Adult "Now what?" Me "It's processing, give it a second", etc. Not everyone from the older generation was this way but most were. When it was all done they'd talk about what a genius you were. There was a wide impression that anyone who knew anything about any digital system "knows computers." The last thing someone from this younger generation would want is to hire these people into technical jobs they were just too damn intimidated by new systems and ideas. Most of those exact same people from the older generation have caught on by now to how easy these things are but the impression was set.
Times have changed, the younger generation doesn't want to invest in difficult or custom solutions, figuring out unique answers. They want everything to be very easy and similar. That's why we have systems where it makes absolutely no sense and is ridiculously inefficient encapsulating everything into json or xml and trying to make everything that communicates work like a webserver even though there are dramatically better answers for many things. When my generation looks on the younger generation and they might be faster and more intuitive with a phone interface, we don't see genius, we just see someone who clearly spends way too much of their energy invested in a portable device trying to accomplish things with crude and cumbersome interface that isn't well suited to most tasks. We know if we invested similar time and energy into using that platform we'd have similar proficiency, most of us don't because objectively it isn't that great an answer and you can easily accomplish everything that platform is actually the right answer for without investing much into it at all.
Do you know how incredibly stupid it is to move everything around from host to host as markup text? It's the future, hell it is already the present and it's incredibly idiotic.
"But about that language, if it's just yet another rehash of an idea that came ind went in the '80s because it seemed like a good idea until someone tried to actually use it and I'll tell you that too."
That's the trap. There are enough younger people who won't listen that the idea and/or language will be adopted into widespread usage and you won't have an essential skill. It's also possible that something has changed which you aren't accounting for.
I guess it depends on what you call proficiency. I for one don't really care what you know about excel, but I may well judge you if you can't figure out what you need to do a particular thing that requires excel by it's due date tomorrow.
That's the biggest difference between office workers and talented tech workers, office workers know what they know, tech workers know how to figure things out and really talented tech workers appear to know tremendous amounts because they can figure things out so fast they complete work in timeframes people who already knew the answer would have set. It's also important to know enough about things you encounter to have a rough idea of their capabilities.
I have a big paper sheet used to track production of my family's oil wells month by month for the past couple decades and you suggest excel might be a better answer than killing trees and save a lot of time. The next day you bring it back as an excel sheet. What difference does it make whether you knew excel yesterday? Unless you told me I'd walk away thinking you must be an excel guru.
"And the advantage I have is when everybody raves about some exciting new tech, I can use the good parts and recognize the parts that are either reinventing the wheel, or were discarded decades ago because they were a bad idea."
Therein lies the problem, so many things are a bad idea that isn't easy to objectively prove and because tech is younger generation heavy the bad ideas become very widespread. In the minds of the younger majority, refusing to use the bad ideas is refusing to stay current. Because they are flying by the seat of their pants implementing the bad ideas they will develop mitigating workarounds for some of the bad ideas before they come crashing down and say "see old timers, the sky wasn't falling" then when the wheel turns they'll remember all that mitigation and workaround be telling the next generation why the same underlying principle is a bad idea... rinse and repeat.
Let me put this another way since so many seem to think I'm talking about dumbing it down enough to be fun to play. We aren't talking about a game bot we are talking about an AI development project.
Humans are a ridiculously powerful AI's, much more powerful than AlphaGo, so why can it beat us? It isn't because AlphaGo never sleeps, in fact, AlphaGo does sleep it just spreads it among more frequent and smaller time scales. We can't beat it for the same reason we can beat AlphaGo at everything but playing go. From the moment of birth we'd need to be hard-wired into a minimal set of controls with a direct brain interface with all unrelated sensory input shut off, feeding and waste removal processes automatically handled. That is the human equivalent of the AI they are building. Except they are pre-programming it with the rules and objective even though Go has an extremely simple play mechanism.
This approach is only going to get you so far, if it weren't humans would be better go players. Human limitations exist for a reason we don't get bored with performing a single task over and over forever because we suck, we get bored as a mechanism to shift and spread mental resources among more skills which provide alternative insights that can map back as well as be combined to tackle ever more complex super skills. Mastering Go in itself is pretty useless, mastering go alongside a highly realistic warfare simulation on the other hand...
I'm not talking about dumbing it down to provide a useful challenge for humans, I'm talking about having it play Go, compose music, and write poetry. Using AI for anything but a toy application like this will require AI that master many poorly related skills and combine those skills to execute a complex task. If you ever want an AI to write a useful fiction crime novel that AI will not only need to be able to compose English and be creative it will need to be able to research the various topics involved come to a high level understanding of these various unrelated subjects and hypothetically apply them in some unique, plausible, and unsurprising way. You are never going to get there if you are with algorithms designed to waste effort trying to be the best at everything, you need algorithms that look for "just as much as I need" otherwise your book writing AI would spend a lifetime on each of the dozens of different things it needs to research to write the book.
"Remember folks, "neural network" in the sense of AI is a marketing term, it does not in any way imply that it functions in a manner similar to how our brains work."
Neural network in the sense of AI is in fact at it's core an implementation of a mathematical replication of at least part of how our brains work.
"If anybody claims to know, then please ask them to describe in detail how memory is encoded in our brains, and have them demonstrate by altering a memory in a predetermined way."
We can't even do that with AlphaGo. All we can do is poke, test, replicate, and model pieces and when some pieces are simple enough maybe reverse engineer them, the same as our own brains.
Next up, calling people out for begging the question on that whole gravity "theory" by asking them guess where an Apple tossed up in the air will land when it comes down.
There is also something to be said for diversity in those games. Beating AlphaGo doesn't automatically translate into beating the people AlphaGo's strategy defeated.
This is one of the problems in the AI world. They should have targeted playing as well as the average human. There is minimal benefit in being the absolute best Go player that could exist. Difficult and complicated intelligences have to be far more general than that. There is tremendous value in developing an intelligence comparable to normal humans without need for it to be capable of defeating humans who've dedicated their lives to a single obsession at their own game.
That sentence isn't really clear. But the fact they are specifying "version of itself" suggests that they have a save state of the version that won those games but have not stopped improving AlphaGo AFTER it beat the world champion. It may well be able to beat that older version of AlphaGo 100% of the time but only be able to beat the latest and greatest AlphaGo 90% of the time. This is a fork, it might be so close as to be a major release revision number variation of the same software but it's had completely different nurture and experience and is a completely different mind than the first much like identical twins are different people.. creepy people yes, but distinct.
What are you defining as "Aircraft?" The wright brothers first flight was in 1903 which is long after the time of the Constitution... also depends on what you consider the "Time of the Constitution", I meant when it was written but if the "Time of the Constitution" is referring to when it was largely respected and enforced you can debate the exact point it was lost but there is no question that time period doesn't extend beyond the civil war.
It's funny, the civil war may have been about slavery rather than states rights but winning it abolished the independence of states and states rights far more decisively than it abolished slavery.
The original Constitution didn't allow an Air force but aircraft didn't exist so there is no possibility it could have. I think the air force being federal vs state level is consistent with the obvious intent of the founders though, very expensive craft that travel in a manner that need to cover more ground (air) than an individual state would control. This could have been done as an expansion to the Navy though rather than calling it a separate branch though.
Actually the federal government has hedged on all this, between the Marines, the blue angels, and the actual ships/nuclear subs we have all three branches replicated within the Navy.
Slashdot Mirror
"And despite the murderous wet dreams of some folks, the US has been waging war for 16 years now, and that uses up a lot of money. I severely dougt we could stand against the combined forces of the rest of the world."
Indeed but war doesn't actually cost much at all. Don't get me wrong, we spend boatloads of cash on war but that is only because we aren't particularly serious. If we were really serious the military wouldn't be paying for anything at all and our limits would be based on production capacity. Our production capacity is extremely high, we are the largest arms dealer in the world.
Most of the money we spend is still on research but of the rest we aren't actually using most of the arms we are producing. As for whether we could stand up to the combined forces of the world... we could likely make a pretty good show of it, especially because we have a highly armed civilian population (civil defense is the reason for the right to bear arms before even rebellion and certainly before shooting deer), but it really doesn't matter as there is no scenario in which we'd ever need to do that.
"The U.S. no longer leads the world in diplomacy, nor climate change, nor nuclear non-proliferation."
None of those things are things we really have to lead the world in though. The only things we really need to lead in are things that actually make us more powerful and our military and economic power still ensures we are very diplomatic even if we are complete assholes. But it is certainly true that while other nations may not have a choice but to deal with us, avoiding dealing with us where they can get away with it will certainly erode our position over time.
Given that for the most part the choices remain The US, Russia, and China though, the US is still the least distasteful of the bunch.
There is sometimes more money in the specialization route but part of the secret is to spread your resume out in a way that lets you emphasize the "specialist" hat they are looking for at the moment. Jack of all trades, master of many... at least within six months.
I'm not worried about replacing windows with a superior OS, I just want to make sure superior OS's don't get replaced by windows.
"Windows is a better platform for most things except engineering and scientific computing, to include embedded etc...."
You must be smoking something. Windows is a superior platform for backending a bunch of end user systems and essentially nothing else. Even that is only true because those "desktops" (really laptops these days) are running windows. Really, it is only present in the enterprise space because desktops are running it and integrate auth into directory services and it therefore is the simplest way to manage those directory services, since everyone is authenticating to that platform already you often have your other systems authenticate against AD as well. The desktop is kept essential because of office, you can't move away from Office because everyone you will share documents with is still running office. Even though sharepoint sucks relative to a real wiki it has tight office integration. Windows being familiar gives it an advantage for trying hook people into their development tools like visual studio and C# which aren't really superior to other solutions but you can start by developing on the desktop you already have and with tie-in's to Office. That gives them a development pool to draw from and then when people are looking to move to the cloud and so they've built their cloud solution all around windows and VS/C#/.Net.
You can't run light weight DNS on windows, you can't run a light overhead cluster on windows, you can't run lightweight backend processing for any web driven service on windows, you can't do light weight instances on windows at all, all that integration with all other MS stuff carries overhead and layers on layers of garbage services you just don't need. Even Microsoft knows that, that's why they added unix on windows to create the illusion you could run light weight guest os instances on azure.
Seems unlikely when gen x is going to be unemployed for those 20 years.
You are mistaken though, there is definitely no shortage of young people and immigrants, especially immigrants.
There was a generation where this was true, basically if you were under 18 in the 90's you have a big advantage because tech exploded in big ways in the consumer market at that point. Adults at that time had trouble interacting with something as simple as a gas pump with a display or really anything with a display.
The basic concepts of an abstracted digital rather than physical interface were completely alien to the previous generation while intuitive to the younger generation. As a child from that time, especially compounded with the arrogance of youth, it really did feel like the adults were just idiots. Adult "What do I do?" Me "Is that a credit card?" Adult Looks down at card as if this is a magical puzzle then says uncertainly "Yes?" Me "Press the button next to credit" Prompt says processing or similar, Adult "Now what?" Me "It's processing, give it a second", etc. Not everyone from the older generation was this way but most were. When it was all done they'd talk about what a genius you were. There was a wide impression that anyone who knew anything about any digital system "knows computers." The last thing someone from this younger generation would want is to hire these people into technical jobs they were just too damn intimidated by new systems and ideas. Most of those exact same people from the older generation have caught on by now to how easy these things are but the impression was set.
Times have changed, the younger generation doesn't want to invest in difficult or custom solutions, figuring out unique answers. They want everything to be very easy and similar. That's why we have systems where it makes absolutely no sense and is ridiculously inefficient encapsulating everything into json or xml and trying to make everything that communicates work like a webserver even though there are dramatically better answers for many things. When my generation looks on the younger generation and they might be faster and more intuitive with a phone interface, we don't see genius, we just see someone who clearly spends way too much of their energy invested in a portable device trying to accomplish things with crude and cumbersome interface that isn't well suited to most tasks. We know if we invested similar time and energy into using that platform we'd have similar proficiency, most of us don't because objectively it isn't that great an answer and you can easily accomplish everything that platform is actually the right answer for without investing much into it at all.
I'm a gunslinger and at this point in life I'd like nothing more than to work for one company being very well paid for the next twenty years.
Do you know how incredibly stupid it is to move everything around from host to host as markup text? It's the future, hell it is already the present and it's incredibly idiotic.
No this is a real thing. There has been a silent windows creep back into the enterprise space. It seems to be coming alongside Azure usage.
"An engineer who mistakes proficiency in Excel as and engineering skill is in fact an engineer ready to lose their jobs"
I wish that were actually true in reality, I really really do.
"But about that language, if it's just yet another rehash of an idea that came ind went in the '80s because it seemed like a good idea until someone tried to actually use it and I'll tell you that too."
That's the trap. There are enough younger people who won't listen that the idea and/or language will be adopted into widespread usage and you won't have an essential skill. It's also possible that something has changed which you aren't accounting for.
I guess it depends on what you call proficiency. I for one don't really care what you know about excel, but I may well judge you if you can't figure out what you need to do a particular thing that requires excel by it's due date tomorrow.
That's the biggest difference between office workers and talented tech workers, office workers know what they know, tech workers know how to figure things out and really talented tech workers appear to know tremendous amounts because they can figure things out so fast they complete work in timeframes people who already knew the answer would have set. It's also important to know enough about things you encounter to have a rough idea of their capabilities.
I have a big paper sheet used to track production of my family's oil wells month by month for the past couple decades and you suggest excel might be a better answer than killing trees and save a lot of time. The next day you bring it back as an excel sheet. What difference does it make whether you knew excel yesterday? Unless you told me I'd walk away thinking you must be an excel guru.
"And the advantage I have is when everybody raves about some exciting new tech, I can use the good parts and recognize the parts that are either reinventing the wheel, or were discarded decades ago because they were a bad idea."
Therein lies the problem, so many things are a bad idea that isn't easy to objectively prove and because tech is younger generation heavy the bad ideas become very widespread. In the minds of the younger majority, refusing to use the bad ideas is refusing to stay current. Because they are flying by the seat of their pants implementing the bad ideas they will develop mitigating workarounds for some of the bad ideas before they come crashing down and say "see old timers, the sky wasn't falling" then when the wheel turns they'll remember all that mitigation and workaround be telling the next generation why the same underlying principle is a bad idea... rinse and repeat.
Let me put this another way since so many seem to think I'm talking about dumbing it down enough to be fun to play. We aren't talking about a game bot we are talking about an AI development project.
Humans are a ridiculously powerful AI's, much more powerful than AlphaGo, so why can it beat us? It isn't because AlphaGo never sleeps, in fact, AlphaGo does sleep it just spreads it among more frequent and smaller time scales. We can't beat it for the same reason we can beat AlphaGo at everything but playing go. From the moment of birth we'd need to be hard-wired into a minimal set of controls with a direct brain interface with all unrelated sensory input shut off, feeding and waste removal processes automatically handled. That is the human equivalent of the AI they are building. Except they are pre-programming it with the rules and objective even though Go has an extremely simple play mechanism.
This approach is only going to get you so far, if it weren't humans would be better go players. Human limitations exist for a reason we don't get bored with performing a single task over and over forever because we suck, we get bored as a mechanism to shift and spread mental resources among more skills which provide alternative insights that can map back as well as be combined to tackle ever more complex super skills. Mastering Go in itself is pretty useless, mastering go alongside a highly realistic warfare simulation on the other hand...
I'm not talking about dumbing it down to provide a useful challenge for humans, I'm talking about having it play Go, compose music, and write poetry. Using AI for anything but a toy application like this will require AI that master many poorly related skills and combine those skills to execute a complex task. If you ever want an AI to write a useful fiction crime novel that AI will not only need to be able to compose English and be creative it will need to be able to research the various topics involved come to a high level understanding of these various unrelated subjects and hypothetically apply them in some unique, plausible, and unsurprising way. You are never going to get there if you are with algorithms designed to waste effort trying to be the best at everything, you need algorithms that look for "just as much as I need" otherwise your book writing AI would spend a lifetime on each of the dozens of different things it needs to research to write the book.
"Remember folks, "neural network" in the sense of AI is a marketing term, it does not in any way imply that it functions in a manner similar to how our brains work."
Neural network in the sense of AI is in fact at it's core an implementation of a mathematical replication of at least part of how our brains work.
"If anybody claims to know, then please ask them to describe in detail how memory is encoded in our brains, and have them demonstrate by altering a memory in a predetermined way."
We can't even do that with AlphaGo. All we can do is poke, test, replicate, and model pieces and when some pieces are simple enough maybe reverse engineer them, the same as our own brains.
Next up, calling people out for begging the question on that whole gravity "theory" by asking them guess where an Apple tossed up in the air will land when it comes down.
If it were all about tells there would be no online poker. Poker IS about reading other players but you can read a player from their play.
There is also something to be said for diversity in those games. Beating AlphaGo doesn't automatically translate into beating the people AlphaGo's strategy defeated.
This is one of the problems in the AI world. They should have targeted playing as well as the average human. There is minimal benefit in being the absolute best Go player that could exist. Difficult and complicated intelligences have to be far more general than that. There is tremendous value in developing an intelligence comparable to normal humans without need for it to be capable of defeating humans who've dedicated their lives to a single obsession at their own game.
That sentence isn't really clear. But the fact they are specifying "version of itself" suggests that they have a save state of the version that won those games but have not stopped improving AlphaGo AFTER it beat the world champion. It may well be able to beat that older version of AlphaGo 100% of the time but only be able to beat the latest and greatest AlphaGo 90% of the time. This is a fork, it might be so close as to be a major release revision number variation of the same software but it's had completely different nurture and experience and is a completely different mind than the first much like identical twins are different people.. creepy people yes, but distinct.
Come now, lets be honest, it enjoys playing with itself just like everyone else.
What are you defining as "Aircraft?" The wright brothers first flight was in 1903 which is long after the time of the Constitution... also depends on what you consider the "Time of the Constitution", I meant when it was written but if the "Time of the Constitution" is referring to when it was largely respected and enforced you can debate the exact point it was lost but there is no question that time period doesn't extend beyond the civil war.
It's funny, the civil war may have been about slavery rather than states rights but winning it abolished the independence of states and states rights far more decisively than it abolished slavery.
The original Constitution didn't allow an Air force but aircraft didn't exist so there is no possibility it could have. I think the air force being federal vs state level is consistent with the obvious intent of the founders though, very expensive craft that travel in a manner that need to cover more ground (air) than an individual state would control. This could have been done as an expansion to the Navy though rather than calling it a separate branch though.
Actually the federal government has hedged on all this, between the Marines, the blue angels, and the actual ships/nuclear subs we have all three branches replicated within the Navy.