Or rather, perhaps the best text to try it with is the same instructional text words, but just scrambled. The fact that the instructional text contains the words expected to be encountered in the interface may be all that is relevant, that it actually is conveying some kind of information via the logical statements contained therein, a completely erroneous conclusion.
My first impression of the linked article is one of skepticism that they are really getting out of it what they think they are... While a computer program could certainly apply word relationships from an instruction manual to its interactions with a game program, presumably it has some method of characterizing and tracking word relevance as it "learns."
That very characterization process may actually contain all the necessary "learning," and the actual text be irrelevant. The real test they need to do, is not to compare it with a program that isn't using a text as a guide, but one that is using a completely irrelevant text as a guide. I think the learning may be happening entirely in their learning mechanism such that any text would work as well-- "wrong" advice would be characterized as such by trial and error, so even bad information is useful in a system like that.
I recall back in the 1960s or early 1970s, reading a children's craft project book of some kind that had a simple AI project where you could manually train a system of matchboxes containing colored candies, what the right answer for a given input pattern was (it was either a simple letter pattern recognizer, or would learn tic-tac-toe board patterns, I forget). But what I do remember, is even the "voters" in the population who consistently voted wrong provided useful information, if you can characterize them as always doing that. I wish I could remember what book it was in, but it did make some light bulbs turn on at the time. I suspect that the word-characterization process here might work just as well given ANY piece of text fed into it, it's just a source of data to characterize, and once the data is characterized, pretty much any data would produce the proper trained result. The manual text is then just a substrate on which to hang the learning information on, such that pretty much any substrate will do.
So how often did your db9/db25 connector studs back out when unscrewing the cable instead of the cable screws because someone had overtightened them? Seems to me it was an all-too-common occurance.
It's too much baseball, football, etc.. The "my team, right or wrong," mentality has spilled over into the politics, no doubt aided by the media which is populated by an overabundance of sporting promoters.
That, and the fact that sticking to one team no matter what means you don't have to think about the issues, you only have to repeat the quips fed you by the team spokespersons.
Yes, reviews can be shills, emails can be spam, phonecalls can be telemarketers, pages in magazines can be advertisements, etc.. But if you have any kind of a hard time identifying them as such, you've been living in a CAVE for the last generation or so. There's a lot of yahoos out there and you need to take everything with a grain of salt. You needed Dvorak to tell you THAT?
What we do with our net connections is not the isp's business, we should all be routinely using https and vpn connections anyhow. That we're not already is pure complacent laziness on developer's parts. Maybe this will light a fire under their asses.
No, you are confusing "reasoning" with "the right reasons.". "Reason" as TFA refers to it is not "the truth," it's a path to truth that can in fact lead one to erroneous conclusions. It's "reasoning," regardless of where you end up, or even if you don't reach a conclusion at all.
The only "bias" needed is one towards improved survival. That a strategies that work in that context will develop should be no surprise for anyone whose world view isn't biased towards special apologetics.
The vast majority of people care more about themselves than their relatives and much more about their relatives than some starving child in Nowhereistan. Which is precisely what you'd expect from genetic explanations of 'altruism'.
The real 'altruists' who sacrifice everything to feed starving Nowhereistans are badly programmed (and the end result of such behaviour is probably to cause more starvation as they put Nowhereistanian farmers out of business).
Hardly. If I was your relative, I'd much rather be stranded on a desert island with one of those altruists than you, and I'd wager also more likely to survive and to help the altruist to survive as well.
Reputation matters.
When you establish a reputation for aiding non-family members, it can be an advantage should you need similar aid from others. Also, it establishes a trust relationship that can facilitate negotiations.
Can't we get the fundies stirred up on this? They usually equate this sort of thing with "the mark of the beast." Perhaps it's a good time for a reminder...
Would you believe a plan to destroy a journalist's career simply because he supports Wikileaks? All just stupidity? The emails say otherwise [salon.com].
I'm not so sure that's what they say. We could just have a maverick loose cannon at HB Gary who went too far afield in his zealousness to grab a big contract, and whose sense of ethics is, shall we say-- AWOL? Despite the fact that the presentation was prepared "in conjunction with several top security firms," no doubt the presentation was thrown together by one individual, likely this same maverick, without any of the brains of these security firms awareness before it was too late. While it's possible they were all on the same page, even a couple of idiots could do damage all by themselves if they are salivating over landing a huge B of A contract to do some "black ops" -- and even if B of A execs saw the presentation, they could have been too naive to know exactly how far over the line some of these proposals are (if they understand them at all), and what was either legally permissible or what an outfit supposedly "in the business" could get away with or how far afield these big named security corps might go. Quite possibly, the fact that these other security firms name was on the presentation was the credibility HB Gary needed to sell it to B of A, in order to assuage fears that this might be risky behaviour...
Not to excuse any of them, but I'm hesitant to read more into it than is there, and I think there's no question that stupidity is a significant component in any case.
Yes. Imagine a decentralized facebook where only you host your content, so that you can fully control it. How you keep crawlers from aggregating anyway is the problem. I've always thought that the main problem with anarchy is that it's too easy in such an environment for control systems to form. What's required is an active collection of gremlins who are constantly undermining the formation of control structures-- a series of Bugs Bunny's, who's job is to keep things just enough out of control.
Among other things. What it should be most is 1) open, and 2) encrypted. Open so that pretty much anything that may be imagined in the future can be tied in, and encrypted so that governments and commercial interests must have your permission for access to your data and info on what you do. The challenge is in negotiating the conflicts between these goals
Except here we're not talking about compiler front ends, we're talking about protecting against information leaks and implementing automated surveillance robots and nanomachines. You have to ask 1) are such systems capable of eliminating whistleblower leaks given the fact we live in a country with free speech protectections, 2) is that an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars, 3) are such surveillance systems cost effective for what they can actually do, and 4) can we afford this sort of thing right now?
I'm totally amazed by the Pollyanna attitudes by those who just seem to think that the ends justify the means, and since there are some bad guys out there we have to do everything we can to protect against them. When you look at things like the pass given to Scooter Libby for outing a CIA agent, and giving AT&T amnesty for spying on US citizens, I think you have to ask yourself-- do you trust people like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, or Orrin Hatch, for example, with the power to arbitrarily listen in on the phone conversations of US citizens without a warrant? Some of which no doubt, would be conversations between running candidates and their party members while planning their election campaigns? Do you trust these folks with micro robots that can be joysticked into your bedroom without a warrant? Ok, so you all seem to hate one side or the other, Obama or Palin or whatever, but only until the idea comes across that we should allow ALL of these bozos to violate law after law in the name of protecting us all against terrorist boogeymen? When did we become such a nation of cowards?
We're talking about spending money that we don't have on technologies that may not even work or can't be used legally in the US (of course, that doesn't stop them as we've seen). Why should my tax money be spent on this kind of scam when instructors at the local schools are being laid off in droves, the elderly's saftey net is being looted, and basic infrastructures are being ignored. And most of you are just going to roll over for it. "La la la, " the government is going to fund more useless security theater (like the TSA), invade your privacy and waste your money, and you just can't wait to get a piece of that through a grant to R&D some new electronic toys for them all.
When I see the sort of total fiscal irresponsibility this government has come to embody, and then someone comes along and says that the government is going to spend $500B on blue-sky security theater? Give me a break. I'm as in favor of science as the next guy, but I'm sorry, this is just not a "Sputnik Moment."
I didn't talk about the President, I talked about the idea, knee-jerk. And you obviously have no idea how research grants are awarded. P. T. Barnums are pretty synonymous with defense contractors and opportunistic PhDs. It's an expensive solution
that we can't afford right now, and is unlikely to produce results that are both useful and constitutional. If the fear is Wikileaks, I'm sorry, but privacy is dead, get over it and stop wasting taxpayer dollars.
All that fancy stuff is useful in theory, but in reality will pale in comparison with boots on the ground, from both the practical and economic standpoint. A fully automated Big Brother security system sounds impressive, but you still have to keep it working and up to date over time, even if there aren't any exploitable bugs in it.
Techno P. T. Barnums are plentiful, and always ready to collect your money. And in this case, there's a politician looking for an easy answer born every minuite.
Nice to have someone to blame tho, eh? Frankly, I'd like to see you pissed off. Pissed off enough to do something about it. But I don't really get the sense you're pissed off enough, at least not yet.
Many of the boomers I know are still renting and have recently lost their jobs. Of those who do have houses, none of them are paid for. Even the boomer MDs I know aren't doing all that well-- while they take in a lot of money you'd be amazed at how much it takes to run a doctors office-- office rents, equipment, insurance, staff, services-- and they're getting squeezed on the incoming, mostly by the insurance industry-- the numbers on their tax returns may be larger, but they're also way more in debt than my jobless friends.
Sure, there are plenty of boomers with a lot of capital, opportunist corporate exec hucksters & elected official hustlers, for the most part, who've now pushed all the unskilled jobs overseas because they can circumvent the labor laws (maybe you'd like us to repeal those, so we can get the sweatshops back online-- there's a job fer ya, eh? Oh, but you have an edycation-- you don't want unskilled jobs anyway, do ya?). The thing is, whether boomers or not, historically, older people are more likely to VOTE. But the amount of money that goes into selling them a bill of goods (most of them aren't experts on governance, don't have the aptitude for it and/or are just trying to live their lives as best they can).
I think the real problem is attributable not to excesses of the "previous generation," but to plain old incompetence combined with an overabundance of those hustlers and hucksters, and if you haven't noticed, you're generation has no shortage of those either. Those hucksters and hustlers sure know how to survive in a free-market anarchy, boy. Don't they?.
Many of the older generation were simply too ready to trust others to figure out things that were way over their head, and too easily fell for a slick song and dance that sounded good, and then fixated on being a "team player" and just follow their team and its sound-bite dogma right or wrong, because that's as deep as they can understand it. Not as many of them as as edycated as you are, whelp. So they either voted Republican, or voted Democrat, and trusted their team to make things right. If you do what you always do, you get what you always get. Maybe you'll be able to convince your generation to do something different. Many boomers thought so too, once. Years ago, when they were your age.
Maybe you'll just be able to do a better job. You want that job, don't you? I thought you did. Makes me feel better just knowin' that you're out there ready to jump in and fix it for us.
Slashdot Mirror
Or rather, perhaps the best text to try it with is the same instructional text words, but just scrambled. The fact that the instructional text contains the words expected to be encountered in the interface may be all that is relevant, that it actually is conveying some kind of information via the logical statements contained therein, a completely erroneous conclusion.
My first impression of the linked article is one of skepticism that they are really getting out of it what they think they are... While a computer program could certainly apply word relationships from an instruction manual to its interactions with a game program, presumably it has some method of characterizing and tracking word relevance as it "learns."
That very characterization process may actually contain all the necessary "learning," and the actual text be irrelevant. The real test they need to do, is not to compare it with a program that isn't using a text as a guide, but one that is using a completely irrelevant text as a guide. I think the learning may be happening entirely in their learning mechanism such that any text would work as well-- "wrong" advice would be characterized as such by trial and error, so even bad information is useful in a system like that.
I recall back in the 1960s or early 1970s, reading a children's craft project book of some kind that had a simple AI project where you could manually train a system of matchboxes containing colored candies, what the right answer for a given input pattern was (it was either a simple letter pattern recognizer, or would learn tic-tac-toe board patterns, I forget). But what I do remember, is even the "voters" in the population who consistently voted wrong provided useful information, if you can characterize them as always doing that. I wish I could remember what book it was in, but it did make some light bulbs turn on at the time. I suspect that the word-characterization process here might work just as well given ANY piece of text fed into it, it's just a source of data to characterize, and once the data is characterized, pretty much any data would produce the proper trained result. The manual text is then just a substrate on which to hang the learning information on, such that pretty much any substrate will do.
So how often did your db9/db25 connector studs back out when unscrewing the cable instead of the cable screws because someone had overtightened them? Seems to me it was an all-too-common occurance.
It's too much baseball, football, etc.. The "my team, right or wrong," mentality has spilled over into the politics, no doubt aided by the media which is populated by an overabundance of sporting promoters.
That, and the fact that sticking to one team no matter what means you don't have to think about the issues, you only have to repeat the quips fed you by the team spokespersons.
Yes, reviews can be shills, emails can be spam, phonecalls can be telemarketers, pages in magazines can be advertisements, etc.. But if you have any kind of a hard time identifying them as such, you've been living in a CAVE for the last generation or so. There's a lot of yahoos out there and you need to take everything with a grain of salt. You needed Dvorak to tell you THAT?
Getting into a patent war with Apple is a really bad idea. Apple's portfolio can no doubt put Samsung out of business. Payback is a bitch here.
What we do with our net connections is not the isp's business, we should all be routinely using https and vpn connections anyhow. That we're not already is pure complacent laziness on developer's parts. Maybe this will light a fire under their asses.
Depending on how an editor handles tabs vs spaces can make a huge difference. Python's whitespace dependencies are truly myopic.
No, you are confusing "reasoning" with "the right reasons.". "Reason" as TFA refers to it is not "the truth," it's a path to truth that can in fact lead one to erroneous conclusions. It's "reasoning," regardless of where you end up, or even if you don't reach a conclusion at all.
If they think identity theft is bad now, just wait until they start sharing info with other organizations.
The only "bias" needed is one towards improved survival. That a strategies that work in that context will develop should be no surprise for anyone whose world view isn't biased towards special apologetics.
The vast majority of people care more about themselves than their relatives and much more about their relatives than some starving child in Nowhereistan. Which is precisely what you'd expect from genetic explanations of 'altruism'.
The real 'altruists' who sacrifice everything to feed starving Nowhereistans are badly programmed (and the end result of such behaviour is probably to cause more starvation as they put Nowhereistanian farmers out of business).
Hardly. If I was your relative, I'd much rather be stranded on a desert island with one of those altruists than you, and I'd wager also more likely to survive and to help the altruist to survive as well. Reputation matters.
When you establish a reputation for aiding non-family members, it can be an advantage should you need similar aid from others. Also, it establishes a trust relationship that can facilitate negotiations.
Can't we get the fundies stirred up on this? They usually equate this sort of thing with "the mark of the beast." Perhaps it's a good time for a reminder...
The Republican is fine with the fact the CEO got 11 cookies, because he's harboring the delusion that he'll be a CEO too one day.
Protect your privacy OR make money is more like it...
Would you believe a plan to destroy a journalist's career simply because he supports Wikileaks? All just stupidity? The emails say otherwise [salon.com].
I'm not so sure that's what they say. We could just have a maverick loose cannon at HB Gary who went too far afield in his zealousness to grab a big contract, and whose sense of ethics is, shall we say-- AWOL? Despite the fact that the presentation was prepared "in conjunction with several top security firms," no doubt the presentation was thrown together by one individual, likely this same maverick, without any of the brains of these security firms awareness before it was too late. While it's possible they were all on the same page, even a couple of idiots could do damage all by themselves if they are salivating over landing a huge B of A contract to do some "black ops" -- and even if B of A execs saw the presentation, they could have been too naive to know exactly how far over the line some of these proposals are (if they understand them at all), and what was either legally permissible or what an outfit supposedly "in the business" could get away with or how far afield these big named security corps might go. Quite possibly, the fact that these other security firms name was on the presentation was the credibility HB Gary needed to sell it to B of A, in order to assuage fears that this might be risky behaviour...
Not to excuse any of them, but I'm hesitant to read more into it than is there, and I think there's no question that stupidity is a significant component in any case.
And what's really great about them is it's all secret so no one will know how really badly run and wasteful they are.
If the enemies of a country have their secrets, can you still claim that their own people have no right to them?
Yes. Imagine a decentralized facebook where only you host your content, so that you can fully control it. How you keep crawlers from aggregating anyway is the problem. I've always thought that the main problem with anarchy is that it's too easy in such an environment for control systems to form. What's required is an active collection of gremlins who are constantly undermining the formation of control structures-- a series of Bugs Bunny's, who's job is to keep things just enough out of control.
Among other things. What it should be most is 1) open, and 2) encrypted. Open so that pretty much anything that may be imagined in the future can be tied in, and encrypted so that governments and commercial interests must have your permission for access to your data and info on what you do. The challenge is in negotiating the conflicts between these goals
Except here we're not talking about compiler front ends, we're talking about protecting against information leaks and implementing automated surveillance robots and nanomachines. You have to ask 1) are such systems capable of eliminating whistleblower leaks given the fact we live in a country with free speech protectections, 2) is that an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars, 3) are such surveillance systems cost effective for what they can actually do, and 4) can we afford this sort of thing right now?
I'm totally amazed by the Pollyanna attitudes by those who just seem to think that the ends justify the means, and since there are some bad guys out there we have to do everything we can to protect against them. When you look at things like the pass given to Scooter Libby for outing a CIA agent, and giving AT&T amnesty for spying on US citizens, I think you have to ask yourself-- do you trust people like Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, or Orrin Hatch, for example, with the power to arbitrarily listen in on the phone conversations of US citizens without a warrant? Some of which no doubt, would be conversations between running candidates and their party members while planning their election campaigns? Do you trust these folks with micro robots that can be joysticked into your bedroom without a warrant? Ok, so you all seem to hate one side or the other, Obama or Palin or whatever, but only until the idea comes across that we should allow ALL of these bozos to violate law after law in the name of protecting us all against terrorist boogeymen? When did we become such a nation of cowards?
We're talking about spending money that we don't have on technologies that may not even work or can't be used legally in the US (of course, that doesn't stop them as we've seen). Why should my tax money be spent on this kind of scam when instructors at the local schools are being laid off in droves, the elderly's saftey net is being looted, and basic infrastructures are being ignored. And most of you are just going to roll over for it. "La la la, " the government is going to fund more useless security theater (like the TSA), invade your privacy and waste your money, and you just can't wait to get a piece of that through a grant to R&D some new electronic toys for them all.
When I see the sort of total fiscal irresponsibility this government has come to embody, and then someone comes along and says that the government is going to spend $500B on blue-sky security theater? Give me a break. I'm as in favor of science as the next guy, but I'm sorry, this is just not a "Sputnik Moment."
I didn't talk about the President, I talked about the idea, knee-jerk. And you obviously have no idea how research grants are awarded. P. T. Barnums are pretty synonymous with defense contractors and opportunistic PhDs. It's an expensive solution that we can't afford right now, and is unlikely to produce results that are both useful and constitutional. If the fear is Wikileaks, I'm sorry, but privacy is dead, get over it and stop wasting taxpayer dollars.
All that fancy stuff is useful in theory, but in reality will pale in comparison with boots on the ground, from both the practical and economic standpoint. A fully automated Big Brother security system sounds impressive, but you still have to keep it working and up to date over time, even if there aren't any exploitable bugs in it.
Techno P. T. Barnums are plentiful, and always ready to collect your money. And in this case, there's a politician looking for an easy answer born every minuite.
Nice to have someone to blame tho, eh? Frankly, I'd like to see you pissed off. Pissed off enough to do something about it. But I don't really get the sense you're pissed off enough, at least not yet.
Many of the boomers I know are still renting and have recently lost their jobs. Of those who do have houses, none of them are paid for. Even the boomer MDs I know aren't doing all that well-- while they take in a lot of money you'd be amazed at how much it takes to run a doctors office-- office rents, equipment, insurance, staff, services-- and they're getting squeezed on the incoming, mostly by the insurance industry-- the numbers on their tax returns may be larger, but they're also way more in debt than my jobless friends.
Sure, there are plenty of boomers with a lot of capital, opportunist corporate exec hucksters & elected official hustlers, for the most part, who've now pushed all the unskilled jobs overseas because they can circumvent the labor laws (maybe you'd like us to repeal those, so we can get the sweatshops back online-- there's a job fer ya, eh? Oh, but you have an edycation-- you don't want unskilled jobs anyway, do ya?). The thing is, whether boomers or not, historically, older people are more likely to VOTE. But the amount of money that goes into selling them a bill of goods (most of them aren't experts on governance, don't have the aptitude for it and/or are just trying to live their lives as best they can).
I think the real problem is attributable not to excesses of the "previous generation," but to plain old incompetence combined with an overabundance of those hustlers and hucksters, and if you haven't noticed, you're generation has no shortage of those either. Those hucksters and hustlers sure know how to survive in a free-market anarchy, boy. Don't they?.
Many of the older generation were simply too ready to trust others to figure out things that were way over their head, and too easily fell for a slick song and dance that sounded good, and then fixated on being a "team player" and just follow their team and its sound-bite dogma right or wrong, because that's as deep as they can understand it. Not as many of them as as edycated as you are, whelp. So they either voted Republican, or voted Democrat, and trusted their team to make things right. If you do what you always do, you get what you always get. Maybe you'll be able to convince your generation to do something different. Many boomers thought so too, once. Years ago, when they were your age.
Maybe you'll just be able to do a better job. You want that job, don't you? I thought you did. Makes me feel better just knowin' that you're out there ready to jump in and fix it for us.