>No baby is born racist, they get taught that shit by someone or something.
They're not born racist, but they do learn fairly quickly to prefer people who look most like their parents.
As you get older, you tend (not always, there's also the allure of the exotic) to look for a mate who looks similar - but not too similar - to the people you grew up around. There's also some evidence there's a pheromone effect in play, as women have been found to prefer body odour similar to their father's.
We have plenty of social programming to divide everything into 'us' and 'them', and skin colour and general appearance are easy markers....We're not born racist, but we're damn well born with the programming in place to BECOME racist. However one of the nice things about our big brains and self-awareness is we can overcome Nature when she screws up.
>Likely he is not right either, because AI beyond statistical classification ("weak AI") may well be impossible
Nature did it with meat. Meat is not special. We have to learn how to replicate the mechanisms - which involves first understanding the mechanisms. Both of those are daunting tasks, but not fundamentally impossible.
If you think they are, then you must believe intelligence is a product of a supernatural process, and your theories are not appropriate for a science-based discussion site.
> I think we now have collected ample evidence that either our grasp of Physics is fundamentally incomplete, or that purely physical constructs cannot be intelligent.
Ahh. You believe in magic.
> And "replicating a mammalian brain"? That will not be within the grasp of humanity for thousands of years and likely never.
Expert systems aren't AI, and pattern-matching algorithms aren't AI. AI is something that can creatively solve problems based on unreliable inputs and abstracting specific experience to general cases.
The problem there is we don't even understand how that works in theory, so modeling and developing an actually AI based on that model is impressively difficult.
Personally, I think we'll get there (understanding intelligence) faster by trying to replicate a mammalian brain in silicon that we will trying to bash out new algorithms.
Bitcoin's had long enough to develop some share of economic activity and failed, because it is in no way superior to cash, a debit card, or a credit card, no matter how much you feel justified in prosthelytizing. It's coming up on a decade soon, and the best you can do is say, "I can use it to buy gift cards that I then use to buy stuff". In other words, it's good for low-level money laundering and illicit purchases. Yay.
Youtube, on the other hand, was a superior option and gained market share as a result.
And of course there's always the fact that adoption would kill Bitcoin faster than waiting for this particular 'get rich quick' fad to fade out, since it doesn't scale very well at all.
Well, I'm sure it's been done before more times than I could comfortably count, but I think Mars One sets the modern precedent for doing it on a global scale with a veneer of credibility and the help of the media.
Find a shiny idea that people are enthusiastic about, promise to let them in on it, then milk them for processing fees and sell them merchandise. If you don't understand the concept of morals, I suppose it's a living.
Waflor and Woftam sound like they'd be the cranky old twin Norse Gods of "I told you so, you stupid mortal". Sure, being Norse Gods I imagine they'd have big shiny weapons and a big mug of ale or mead at all times, but mostly I think they'd wander around cuffing fools and laugh at them when they fell on their mortal asses.
I'm not sure that portfolio's ever been assigned to a God before, but I like it.
>The transaction costs are a tiny fraction of what a bank or credit card processor charges to send Monopoly bank money.
Sure, as long as you're buying a car. Of course, you also have to find someone selling a car for bitcoin... Now tell me what it costs to buy your groceries, go to the movies, or get a cup of coffee?
>And you keep your coins in cold storage.
Uh-huh. And your average person keeps their keys where? On a computer, because nobody's going to write their access keys down on paper and lock them in a fire safe. In fact, they'll keep their keys in a wallet on their smartphone, where they'll be stolen by hackers. Or they'll use a web wallet, where - in the event they're not defrauded by the wallet provider - a keylogger steals their access codes. Hence the very popular Bitcoin phrase "Sorry for your loss".
>and even then the blockchain will show exactly who did that to you.
HAHAHHAHHAHAHA. Yep, you can trace the coins to the current keys with authority. Now match that to a person without the power of a major government to help you. And if the coins are tumbled, or even just cashed out in a different legal jurisdiction, what are you going to do? Bitcoin transactions are irreversible, it's in the design.
>It's a technologically better form of money, far more efficient for moving large sums across borders.
If you find someone willing to accept it on the far side.
>imagine what it will be like in a few years when millions more people grok the tech.
If millions more ADOPTED bitcoin, it'd crash instantly, since it's totally unscalable.
>Most Slashdotters will miss the boat. Not my problem.
Well, your ignorance and stupidity aren't mine, but here we are. Maybe you'll get lucky and BLASH. Maybe you'll hold on to your 'store of value' as it all crashes. But you've got your blissful ignorance and faith to make you feel superior, so you've got that going for you.
Maybe move out of mom's basement and get a real job. Sunlight's good for you.
It'd be nice to be able to cross Canada coast-to-coast in 9 hours, I just don't see this happening.
If you could link Montreal to Toronto to Winnipeg to Regina to Calgary to Vancouver, that'd probably be pretty sweet. But while the prairies are nice and flat, Ontario's extremely variable in elevation, with a LOT of rock just under the surface, and it's not like the terrain to the west of Calgary is anywhere near flat.
There would be a massive amount of tunnelling through rock required, and I just don't see the demand for speed covering the infrastructure expense when we have standard rail for freight and flight for people in a hurry.
I love the Hyperloop concept, but I tend to look at suggested implementations as if I'm watching the Simpsons "Marge vs. the Monorail".
>And this is why people see this as a volatile speculative commodity, and not a currency
Well, there's ALSO the transaction rate limit, the ridiculous transaction fees to compete for a reasonable transaction time, and the practical centralization of the 'decentralized' system with a handful of Chinese mining concerns. And the lack of vendor adoption. And the difficulty using it securely. And the ease with which access can be irrevocably lost. And the baked-in deflationary economic model.
But other than that, yeah, a drop-in replacement for a genuine government-backed currency!
Recognizing that you're targeting specific people in a specific situation... your arguments are still flawed. Trump's base is reacting in an ignorant way to a real problem. Just because they haven't correctly identified cause and effect doesn't mean they're not legitimately hurting.
>When you admit that you simply aren't as competitive in the free market as you thought you deserved to be
Globalism is ideal in that it shares opportunity around the world. None of us got to choose the circumstances of our birth, and in a perfect world we should all have an equal opportunity at the best life on Earth possible.
Globalism fails in that different societies have different standards that affect what a 'living wage' is. How am I supposed to compete with someone who lives in a country that doesn't bother with pollution regulations, or is OK with the common citizen living in abject poverty or maybe just doesn't worry so much about social safety nets?
The free market - without taxes and tariffs adjusting for those differences - simply means that the quality of life my ancestors made possible in my country will go down the shitter as every possible bit of labour and manufacturing is relocated to the worst places on Earth to exist as an average participant in the local economy.
> that your hatred of immigrants and non-whites is born of insecurity and envy
I don't hate immigrants; my country is full of them. I hate the idea that we should treat nations with lesser environmental, employment, health, and social standards as equals. That helps a few rich people get massively richer while draining wealth from the rest of us. It does also seem to (slowly) increase the average standard of living for those other nations, but I'm fairly confident that's accidental. The drive is more money for the richest of the rich.
Sadly, it's very easy for those of the common people on the losing side of this to just 'blame brown people' - most of us being white, after all. But again, that just means the people doing so have latched onto a false cause, not a false symptom.
When a significant segment of your population is losing hope watching wealth disparity leave them further and further behind and seeing no opportunity to catch up... there's a problem.
Reddit's admin moderating policy (as opposed to those of their countless amateur moderators) is not 'SJW' in nature. It's a pretty simple "is it going to cost us?"
I think they'd ban people sharing stories about saving kittens from trees if they thought it was going to get them bad press and a risk of legal action.
Nature already created a general intelligence through filtering randomly produced meat.
There's no way we can't reproduce that - and better - in silicon. I'm just not sure on a philosophical level if there will be any point in humans existing after that it finally managed.
On the other hand, I'm not sure there's much point to us NOW, yet many of us seem to have fun existing, so there's that.
Relativity in fact prohibits time travel (except in the usual forward direction) and relativity prohibits what you're likely thinking of as 'teleportation' - instantaneous travel.
You're likely in need of years of education to understand why, so you shouldn't feel angry or ashamed of having that pointed out to you. But if you don't want to look like a blathering idiot, you're going to have to ACCEPT it unless and until you have sufficient education and reviewed research to your name to credibly claim otherwise.
Server A contacts Server B with a mail notification, with a sender email address and message serial number.
Server B disconnects. At its leisure, it looks up the domain mail server for the sender's email address. Then, it contacts that server and requests the message by sender and message ID. If there is a match, server A responds to server B with the email. If there isn't, Server A knows somebody just failed to send it spam, and Server B knows somebody is using its name or address to send spam.
Bot nets would be unable to exploit that (assuming you use sufficiently long message IDs to avoid brute forcing), and it would be much easier to blacklist spam domains.
There's going to be a finite number of practical possibilities; we may actually be close to hitting a wall with regards to finding improved ways to push electrons through transistors. And then there's physics itself - there is an information processing limit based on the universe's physical laws.
That still leaves memristors, photonics, and quantum computing, and there's likely still a corner or two of under-understood physics to find and exploit.
My mail server should be deciding if it wants to accept mail, and it should require an outbound connection attempt using DNS to do so. Spoofed sender addresses won't work so well if my server can't look up the domain MX record, or if the listed mail server doesn't know anything about the email I think it has for me.
Just that basic change would kill a lot of crap right off the bat.
>I did a relocation and between 6% sales commission on the old house, closing costs, moving costs, and costs to fix up the new house it all adds up really quickly to the tune of more than you are going to be getting in terms of a raise over the course of the year.
Where I live we have a tax break for moving to be closer to work, so long as it's more than a certain distance. I paid no tax the last year I moved. IIRC, it's a percentage, so it's not everything, but it really cut the cost of the move.
As a Canadian... Richmond, VA is the only Richmond in the USA that impinges on my awareness at all. I would definitely need to be told if it were a different city from that one.
If I was reading this story on a site that wasn't heavily American by demographics I'd assume Richmond, BC until I read something indicating otherwise... like the summary that says, "a New Jersey-based software company went hunting for a U.S. city". I mean... that's at least two dead giveaways, right?
Creativity is what we call it when we come up with a novel thought. Your brain is a reasonably effective pattern matcher, and one way to enhance creativity is to mess with that pattern matching ability.
I don't have a problem with the concept that various drugs that alter your state of mind can enhance creativity. I have a problem with the concept that we don't know enough about everything those drugs do to your brain on either a temporary or permanent basis.
My brain works fairly well, and I'm NOT going to mess with it unless I have a problem and I've gone to a medical professional for advice on how to treat it. I need it to last another 40-50 years at least.
> Network Capital Funding Corp. opened an office in Miami to scoop up an attractive subset of college graduates -- those who settled for tolerable jobs in exchange for living in a city they loved
Honestly, my reluctance to relocate (which I've overcome a couple of times) is more related to how far I'd have to move from my ageing parents or how far I'd be pulling my kids from their social network.
When I was younger (and my parents were too!) and unmarried, I frequently considered moving elsewhere in the Empire for a good job. Now though? These roots aren't pulling up again until my parents have died and my kids have moved out, at a minimum.
There's no real shortage of nice places to live, but there's a massive shortage of places to live near my folks and my kids' friends.
Slashdot Mirror
>No baby is born racist, they get taught that shit by someone or something.
They're not born racist, but they do learn fairly quickly to prefer people who look most like their parents.
As you get older, you tend (not always, there's also the allure of the exotic) to look for a mate who looks similar - but not too similar - to the people you grew up around. There's also some evidence there's a pheromone effect in play, as women have been found to prefer body odour similar to their father's.
We have plenty of social programming to divide everything into 'us' and 'them', and skin colour and general appearance are easy markers. ...We're not born racist, but we're damn well born with the programming in place to BECOME racist. However one of the nice things about our big brains and self-awareness is we can overcome Nature when she screws up.
>Likely he is not right either, because AI beyond statistical classification ("weak AI") may well be impossible
Nature did it with meat. Meat is not special. We have to learn how to replicate the mechanisms - which involves first understanding the mechanisms. Both of those are daunting tasks, but not fundamentally impossible.
If you think they are, then you must believe intelligence is a product of a supernatural process, and your theories are not appropriate for a science-based discussion site.
> I think we now have collected ample evidence that either our grasp of Physics is fundamentally incomplete, or that purely physical constructs cannot be intelligent.
Ahh. You believe in magic.
> And "replicating a mammalian brain"? That will not be within the grasp of humanity for thousands of years and likely never.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Expert systems aren't AI, and pattern-matching algorithms aren't AI. AI is something that can creatively solve problems based on unreliable inputs and abstracting specific experience to general cases.
The problem there is we don't even understand how that works in theory, so modeling and developing an actually AI based on that model is impressively difficult.
Personally, I think we'll get there (understanding intelligence) faster by trying to replicate a mammalian brain in silicon that we will trying to bash out new algorithms.
Bitcoin's had long enough to develop some share of economic activity and failed, because it is in no way superior to cash, a debit card, or a credit card, no matter how much you feel justified in prosthelytizing. It's coming up on a decade soon, and the best you can do is say, "I can use it to buy gift cards that I then use to buy stuff". In other words, it's good for low-level money laundering and illicit purchases. Yay.
Youtube, on the other hand, was a superior option and gained market share as a result.
And of course there's always the fact that adoption would kill Bitcoin faster than waiting for this particular 'get rich quick' fad to fade out, since it doesn't scale very well at all.
Is if it did all processing locally, and was isolated from everything else.
Connect to my thermostat? Fine. Turn on a light? OK. Connect to my bank account? Not so much.
Send everything I say that it thinks includes a 'trigger word' to an off-site server for voice recognition processing and data mining? FUCK NO.
What the hell is wrong with people?
Well, I'm sure it's been done before more times than I could comfortably count, but I think Mars One sets the modern precedent for doing it on a global scale with a veneer of credibility and the help of the media.
Find a shiny idea that people are enthusiastic about, promise to let them in on it, then milk them for processing fees and sell them merchandise. If you don't understand the concept of morals, I suppose it's a living.
Waflor and Woftam sound like they'd be the cranky old twin Norse Gods of "I told you so, you stupid mortal". Sure, being Norse Gods I imagine they'd have big shiny weapons and a big mug of ale or mead at all times, but mostly I think they'd wander around cuffing fools and laugh at them when they fell on their mortal asses.
I'm not sure that portfolio's ever been assigned to a God before, but I like it.
>The transaction costs are a tiny fraction of what a bank or credit card processor charges to send Monopoly bank money.
Sure, as long as you're buying a car. Of course, you also have to find someone selling a car for bitcoin... Now tell me what it costs to buy your groceries, go to the movies, or get a cup of coffee?
>And you keep your coins in cold storage.
Uh-huh. And your average person keeps their keys where? On a computer, because nobody's going to write their access keys down on paper and lock them in a fire safe. In fact, they'll keep their keys in a wallet on their smartphone, where they'll be stolen by hackers. Or they'll use a web wallet, where - in the event they're not defrauded by the wallet provider - a keylogger steals their access codes. Hence the very popular Bitcoin phrase "Sorry for your loss".
>and even then the blockchain will show exactly who did that to you.
HAHAHHAHHAHAHA. Yep, you can trace the coins to the current keys with authority. Now match that to a person without the power of a major government to help you. And if the coins are tumbled, or even just cashed out in a different legal jurisdiction, what are you going to do? Bitcoin transactions are irreversible, it's in the design.
>It's a technologically better form of money, far more efficient for moving large sums across borders.
If you find someone willing to accept it on the far side.
>imagine what it will be like in a few years when millions more people grok the tech.
If millions more ADOPTED bitcoin, it'd crash instantly, since it's totally unscalable.
>Most Slashdotters will miss the boat. Not my problem.
Well, your ignorance and stupidity aren't mine, but here we are. Maybe you'll get lucky and BLASH. Maybe you'll hold on to your 'store of value' as it all crashes. But you've got your blissful ignorance and faith to make you feel superior, so you've got that going for you.
Maybe move out of mom's basement and get a real job. Sunlight's good for you.
It'd be nice to be able to cross Canada coast-to-coast in 9 hours, I just don't see this happening.
If you could link Montreal to Toronto to Winnipeg to Regina to Calgary to Vancouver, that'd probably be pretty sweet. But while the prairies are nice and flat, Ontario's extremely variable in elevation, with a LOT of rock just under the surface, and it's not like the terrain to the west of Calgary is anywhere near flat.
There would be a massive amount of tunnelling through rock required, and I just don't see the demand for speed covering the infrastructure expense when we have standard rail for freight and flight for people in a hurry.
I love the Hyperloop concept, but I tend to look at suggested implementations as if I'm watching the Simpsons "Marge vs. the Monorail".
Wow. Good thing you posted as an AC, or everyone with half a brain would know your account was owned by a moron.
>And this is why people see this as a volatile speculative commodity, and not a currency
Well, there's ALSO the transaction rate limit, the ridiculous transaction fees to compete for a reasonable transaction time, and the practical centralization of the 'decentralized' system with a handful of Chinese mining concerns. And the lack of vendor adoption. And the difficulty using it securely. And the ease with which access can be irrevocably lost. And the baked-in deflationary economic model.
But other than that, yeah, a drop-in replacement for a genuine government-backed currency!
>All the Trump voters
Recognizing that you're targeting specific people in a specific situation... your arguments are still flawed. Trump's base is reacting in an ignorant way to a real problem. Just because they haven't correctly identified cause and effect doesn't mean they're not legitimately hurting.
>When you admit that you simply aren't as competitive in the free market as you thought you deserved to be
Globalism is ideal in that it shares opportunity around the world. None of us got to choose the circumstances of our birth, and in a perfect world we should all have an equal opportunity at the best life on Earth possible.
Globalism fails in that different societies have different standards that affect what a 'living wage' is. How am I supposed to compete with someone who lives in a country that doesn't bother with pollution regulations, or is OK with the common citizen living in abject poverty or maybe just doesn't worry so much about social safety nets?
The free market - without taxes and tariffs adjusting for those differences - simply means that the quality of life my ancestors made possible in my country will go down the shitter as every possible bit of labour and manufacturing is relocated to the worst places on Earth to exist as an average participant in the local economy.
> that your hatred of immigrants and non-whites is born of insecurity and envy
I don't hate immigrants; my country is full of them. I hate the idea that we should treat nations with lesser environmental, employment, health, and social standards as equals. That helps a few rich people get massively richer while draining wealth from the rest of us. It does also seem to (slowly) increase the average standard of living for those other nations, but I'm fairly confident that's accidental. The drive is more money for the richest of the rich.
Sadly, it's very easy for those of the common people on the losing side of this to just 'blame brown people' - most of us being white, after all. But again, that just means the people doing so have latched onto a false cause, not a false symptom.
When a significant segment of your population is losing hope watching wealth disparity leave them further and further behind and seeing no opportunity to catch up... there's a problem.
Reddit's admin moderating policy (as opposed to those of their countless amateur moderators) is not 'SJW' in nature. It's a pretty simple "is it going to cost us?"
I think they'd ban people sharing stories about saving kittens from trees if they thought it was going to get them bad press and a risk of legal action.
>> Another thing we can outsource to AI.
>Possibly not if Moore's law fails.
Nature already created a general intelligence through filtering randomly produced meat.
There's no way we can't reproduce that - and better - in silicon. I'm just not sure on a philosophical level if there will be any point in humans existing after that it finally managed.
On the other hand, I'm not sure there's much point to us NOW, yet many of us seem to have fun existing, so there's that.
Relativity in fact prohibits time travel (except in the usual forward direction) and relativity prohibits what you're likely thinking of as 'teleportation' - instantaneous travel.
You're likely in need of years of education to understand why, so you shouldn't feel angry or ashamed of having that pointed out to you. But if you don't want to look like a blathering idiot, you're going to have to ACCEPT it unless and until you have sufficient education and reviewed research to your name to credibly claim otherwise.
What a horrible, xenophobic attitude you have.
Well, that's simply bullshit; the laws of physics don't care about your opinion, and will continue to restrict us regardless.
Server A contacts Server B with a mail notification, with a sender email address and message serial number.
Server B disconnects. At its leisure, it looks up the domain mail server for the sender's email address. Then, it contacts that server and requests the message by sender and message ID. If there is a match, server A responds to server B with the email. If there isn't, Server A knows somebody just failed to send it spam, and Server B knows somebody is using its name or address to send spam.
Bot nets would be unable to exploit that (assuming you use sufficiently long message IDs to avoid brute forcing), and it would be much easier to blacklist spam domains.
There's going to be a finite number of practical possibilities; we may actually be close to hitting a wall with regards to finding improved ways to push electrons through transistors. And then there's physics itself - there is an information processing limit based on the universe's physical laws.
That still leaves memristors, photonics, and quantum computing, and there's likely still a corner or two of under-understood physics to find and exploit.
I don't think we've reached the limits yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Email needs to be 'notify and pull' not 'push'.
My mail server should be deciding if it wants to accept mail, and it should require an outbound connection attempt using DNS to do so. Spoofed sender addresses won't work so well if my server can't look up the domain MX record, or if the listed mail server doesn't know anything about the email I think it has for me.
Just that basic change would kill a lot of crap right off the bat.
>I did a relocation and between 6% sales commission on the old house, closing costs, moving costs, and costs to fix up the new house it all adds up really quickly to the tune of more than you are going to be getting in terms of a raise over the course of the year.
Where I live we have a tax break for moving to be closer to work, so long as it's more than a certain distance. I paid no tax the last year I moved. IIRC, it's a percentage, so it's not everything, but it really cut the cost of the move.
As a Canadian... Richmond, VA is the only Richmond in the USA that impinges on my awareness at all. I would definitely need to be told if it were a different city from that one.
If I was reading this story on a site that wasn't heavily American by demographics I'd assume Richmond, BC until I read something indicating otherwise... like the summary that says, "a New Jersey-based software company went hunting for a U.S. city". I mean... that's at least two dead giveaways, right?
Creativity is what we call it when we come up with a novel thought. Your brain is a reasonably effective pattern matcher, and one way to enhance creativity is to mess with that pattern matching ability.
I don't have a problem with the concept that various drugs that alter your state of mind can enhance creativity. I have a problem with the concept that we don't know enough about everything those drugs do to your brain on either a temporary or permanent basis.
My brain works fairly well, and I'm NOT going to mess with it unless I have a problem and I've gone to a medical professional for advice on how to treat it. I need it to last another 40-50 years at least.
> Network Capital Funding Corp. opened an office in Miami to scoop up an attractive subset of college graduates -- those who settled for tolerable jobs in exchange for living in a city they loved
Honestly, my reluctance to relocate (which I've overcome a couple of times) is more related to how far I'd have to move from my ageing parents or how far I'd be pulling my kids from their social network.
When I was younger (and my parents were too!) and unmarried, I frequently considered moving elsewhere in the Empire for a good job. Now though? These roots aren't pulling up again until my parents have died and my kids have moved out, at a minimum.
There's no real shortage of nice places to live, but there's a massive shortage of places to live near my folks and my kids' friends.