On the other hand, you can usually tell that people with green hair/400 piercings/mohawk/whatever do have problems.
There are several possibilities:
a) rejected by popular locus because of event(s), looks, lack of social graces -> depression -> dressing differently, acting like an asshole or drawn out and suicidal -> results in no friends because of deviant behavior -> start at 1
b) behavioral problem which means the person acts like a complete out of control idiot, possibly because of some trauma or hanging out with the "wrong" group (i.e., other people who act like idiots) -> fucking up in school -> tension because of behavior -> possible bad result
c) ignorance and teen angst -> exposure to stupid ideas -> world is all wrong syndrome (ugly, scary, the man is out to get you)
Computer "geeks" probably have more experience with depression and the i-dont-care-if-i-am-a-rejected-loser-because-i-am- intelligent syndrome.
Usually when people get older, they get over it. I did. That's why I cringe when I see people categorizing themselves as computer geeks. Often in this context it's because they feel rejected.
Obviously some people can't get over being a loser, if for example they are extremely ugly - but if they carried themselves differently (like developing other strengths) they would be in for some sort of improvement in human response in the form of friendship and cooperation.
That's not to say that I condone rejection. It'd just be easier if some people would realize that always being hostile or depressed is self destructive - though that's easy to say in hindsight.
Early adopters often want something special that not many other people have so they pretend other people like that 'thing "only because it's popular".
That's why people in certain subcultures get pissed off when something that was "theirs" becomes popular culture.
They even get to the point where they would rather see that 'thing stay a pathetic failure instead of becoming successful so that they can keep it as their own little special subculture.
Forgive me. I thought we were talking about a desktop here.
Anyway, that reminds me of this hyperbolic tree and the brain.
The first can't show multidimensional data.
The second can, though it just makes semi-transparent links between categories and objects and isn't good for anything other than traversing its tree/web in a single context.
Re:From the world of pointless GUI's
on
3D GUI Project
·
· Score: 5
I know this isn't what you were talking about, but check out this and this.
*Laugh*
Re:Sounds really intuitive, no no, really.
on
3D GUI Project
·
· Score: 2
"For example, what are the 4 locations on the screen to which you can move the mouse very fast? The 4 corners.. Windows makes use of this to some degree, with the close gadget in the top right, and the start button in the bottom left, but this is useless when windows are not maximized"
Also a lot of potential for mishaps. *slide mouse* Oh shit, not again...
There are lots of apps out there that use the four corners of your screen but they are mostly lame. The fix of course is to have the person wait in the corner for a fixed amount of time. But why? Just write the app to be in the windows systray and then click on it or something.
IMO, its not so much confusion, but overhead. If windows are always maximized I dont have to waste my time resizing windows.
The desktop metaphor with a vwm that has multiple desktops that each can be scrolled through, with resizable apps is kind of cool -- especially if you have eye candy like nice wallpaper or something.
Again, IMO, I'd rather focus on the application than waste my time doing window manager maintenance like resizing windows so that I can take the killer screenshot.
Don't get me wrong, having something like a "wharf" in enlightenment, windowmaker and blackbox are extremely cool, especially if they contain applications that you gain information from frequently. It allows you to glance over and gain information without having to slide your mouse over somewhere a la the windows systray.
": Make everything about 20% transparent. You can't work with half the environment hidden behind the other half"
Um, and make me blind?
": A 'recursive boxes' scheme, with whole new scenes hidden inside pickable objects works well. (A folder metaphor, if you will)"
How is navigating a hierarchy with "hidden" objects/tasks/whatever better than a linear list of tasks/objects/whatever if the screen has plenty of space to display the tasks in a linear manner (i.e., the windows/gnome task/start menu?). Do people really have this many applications open at once? I sometimes have >30 apps open at a time and the latency to switch tasks while longer is still fast because after getting "in the groove" of a certain pattern of switching tasks I will remember exactly where a task is on the bar and find it extremely fast.
Navigating some hierarchy would be a lot slower, even if I know exactly where I'm going -- no?
lol, yeah. What we really need is a lot more screen space (i.e., 4 or 5 monitors so that we can be in several applications at once without having to change tasks. That is, slightly moving my head and refocusing has much less latency than a) scanning a taskbar for a task
b)if location already "cached" end
b) finding the icon that matches your app
d)if only one app of said type open end
e) read text next to icon to isolate the window you want...
In a 3d navigable interface where you navigate around using spatial skills you would have to travel around clicking on icons with text under them or something. But how does that actually increase efficiency? Maybe if you have 124 applications open at once...
It would be kind of cool to navigate tasks by clicking on constellations or something though (or maybe not).
I've tried a lot of "alternative" interfaces and most of them are annoying and time wasting, even after forcing myself to spend a week re-training myself how, what and where to click.
From what I see here though the story is just a normal 2d interface that's been jazzed up with some 3d graphics. Nothing special.
That sounds almost like "prove to me that you have free will". Obviously I can't - though, in the context of the sentence I used "chinese room" to illustrate the fact that the only AI we know (weak AI), doesn't really know anything about the symbols it's manipulating except under limited conditions.
I don't subscribe to the conjecture that machines will never be sentient - just that at current complexity and understanding, it's somewhat illusory.
Perhaps. But isn't that a little like having a million monkeys crack away on typewriters until they've reinvented Esperanto or something? Obviously an effort would have to be guided by people with an idea of where they were going - i.e., having a hand in design and therefore understand something about the system they are concocting.
"Incidentally, you don't need emotions to create a course of action, just a lot of horsepower"
Well deep blue is just something programmed to play chess by a bunch of people which iterates through a huge game tree with pruning help from the programmers, is it not?
Anyway, I'm vague because I don't sufficiently understand this stuff. That said, you can obviously hard code goals - but how would a program create new goals without emotion? For example, let's say thinking of making a lot of money makes me happy as it is an instrumental goal to doing things that will ultimately make me happy (i.e., travelling, time with loved ones - which are instrumental goals towards blah blah etc). Without the emotion I would not be able to add new goals, as nothing would motivate me to do so. If I was waiting for the subway and I saw someone getting beat up, I might feel anger and perhaps fear. Whichever one won out as a result of a cognitive process (i.e., thinking I might be next, or believing I can "take that guy") would affect goal oriented behavior.
You might say that we could do the same thing by calculating value in some sort of action matrix - but when sufficiently complex, wouldn't it be an emotion equivalent?
My ideas may just be outdated, as they were primarily formed by a 1995 book titled (Descartes' Error : Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain) by Antonio Damasio.
Yeah - obviously you can always hard code something. The "specific keys with a different font" example was only used in context of thinking. For example, my keyboard has some keys where the text is below the actual key - but we intuitively know that the text below the key relates to the key above it. If I encountered another keyboard with the same key, but with the text on the key, I would automatically conclude that they have the "same" key - as in function. Just represented differently. Obviously a computer program cant figure that out. It would need some sort of reasoning to figure that out - yet a straight program that recognizes objects wouldn't have a chance in heck.
IMO, It's only that our current systems aren't sufficiently complex and generalized to deal with said problems.
When the government models nuclear explosions, they aren't modelling what's happening to every atom in a city block.
Also, just because you can describe configurations of atoms in space (if we could) doesn't mean you can therefore model identical macro behavior of a cell - that is, unless your model of force atomic behavior was extremely good.
My point, however, was that let's say we model a one cell amoeba. We would also have to model its environment to duplicate said behavior. If it isn't getting any feedback through interactions with the world, it isn't doing anything.
How about computer programs and devices that will act to make you "super human". That is, agents with current ai and good human interface which will act to enhance human memory and task proficiency and as a result abstract thinking?
Its always been supposed that we were all going to stop working when robots could take over all our tasks - but isn't it the truth that we just shift to other tasks that computers aren't good at?
Even if we produce robots that are superior for job tasks, guess how much it would cost to manufacture plus upkeep of a robot to act as a janitor or fast food clerk compared to a humans minimum wage?:-)
I meant infinite relative to the resources needed to solve the problem. You're twisting or misunderstanding what I said. The example was for the purpose of illustrating that which we don't understand. His supposition was that we do understand all this stuff and computer power was what was holding us back.
"but the theoretical advancements have already been made"
WRONG. Let's say we have infinite computer power, infinite memory, and infinite disk space.
Do we have the algorithms to create emotion and therefore general systems to create goals and course of action. No. A program that iterates through a bunch of weighted goals doesn't have emotion (or at least enough "emotion" to understand the most crude positive and negative feedback).
How would the computer think upon long and short term goals?
Would a visual subsystem be able to recognize objects in space; for example 50 different types of chairs, desks, pens, books, cars, whatever? Nope, because the current systems are completely symbolic. Can such a system understand what an object is for, where it belongs, etc? Nope. At least not without some sort of language other than machine language and very simple inference, statistical, and very simple goal based reasoning.
Let's say you teach a computer to recognize keyboards and then keys, and then specific keys, whatever. How does it recognize different size keys (for example, I have a ms internet keyboard with litte non standard keys on top) or specific keys with a different font.
Computer program or artificial intelligence? Just because something can traverse a neural network of weighted rules doesn't mean that it can learn (i.e., reconfigure its network). Even if you have a system that can "learn" by reconfiguring itself due to some mathematical algorithm - it can't really think upon problems enough to do anything but the most crude "learning". It's nothing more than the chinese room.
And how are you going to absolutely simulate perfect atomic -> molecular -> macro molecular -> organelle -> cellular behavior? How is even a single cell going to behave similarly unless it has a near identical environment from which to work in?
"If you'll permit me to play pundit for a second: I think we'll reach these so-called "milestones" that the AI people and the nanotech people keep giving us and realize that while we can manufacture a computer with the MIPS/FLOPS/whatever of a mouse/dog/human brain, we don't have the slightest idea how to string all of that power together to actually perform the operations of the mouse/dog/human brain"
Yes this is true. However I think it's a little unfair to think that those who introduced the moores law as a function of animal intelligence comparison (i.e., Kurzweil in his book) are using it as the only basis of their prognostications.
Although I believe you are right that Kurzweil and others are a little out there in terms of being realistic. Humans are notorious optimists. Just because it's vogue to predict what's going to happen in 2050 doesn't mean we haven't learned from what Turing predicted 50 years before.
The current count on cnn.com says 1785 vote difference for bush. With everything counted and a majority of absentee votes likely to go towards bush, there would have to be some major mistakes found in a recount to allow Gore a win.
The networks aren't calling it because they already made two mistakes the night before.
Statistically, coming from cnn, one community is republican slanted and one is democrat slanted, and then we have estimated something like 2300 absentee votes which were statistically slanted republican in 1996, with 53%.
In the 4 and a half years I've had shaw@home, the majority of the time it has been reliable and fast. Of course, when I first got it in 1996 I was pushing 600k/s on most downloads, but that obviously would tail down when more people were put on my node and they implemented some sort of QoS (I now get 150-200 on most downloads). Anyway, there have been periods of several months (mostly back in 1998) where there had been constant packet loss and download speeds that were anywhere from 15 to 80k/s and upload speeds that could hardly break 3. Apparently they were just learning when to resegment a cable network and they did finally upgrade it.
I have a remote program check my site every 5 minutes and in the past year I've had 9 hours of downtime in total, mostly in the middle of the night. I can't blame one 6 hour period though, as cable was out in an entire 10 block radius due to downed power lines in more than one place.
But then I've heard horror stories from people on MSO's like rogers in ontario & bc as well as cox in the US. I'm talking down for 5 hours a day and speeds that are slower than dialup modems for weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, you can usually tell that people with green hair/400 piercings/mohawk/whatever do have problems.
- intelligent syndrome.
There are several possibilities:
a) rejected by popular locus because of event(s), looks, lack of social graces -> depression -> dressing differently, acting like an asshole or drawn out and suicidal -> results in no friends because of deviant behavior -> start at 1
b) behavioral problem which means the person acts like a complete out of control idiot, possibly because of some trauma or hanging out with the "wrong" group (i.e., other people who act like idiots) -> fucking up in school -> tension because of behavior -> possible bad result
c) ignorance and teen angst -> exposure to stupid ideas -> world is all wrong syndrome (ugly, scary, the man is out to get you)
Computer "geeks" probably have more experience with depression and the i-dont-care-if-i-am-a-rejected-loser-because-i-am
Usually when people get older, they get over it. I did. That's why I cringe when I see people categorizing themselves as computer geeks. Often in this context it's because they feel rejected.
Obviously some people can't get over being a loser, if for example they are extremely ugly - but if they carried themselves differently (like developing other strengths) they would be in for some sort of improvement in human response in the form of friendship and cooperation.
That's not to say that I condone rejection. It'd just be easier if some people would realize that always being hostile or depressed is self destructive - though that's easy to say in hindsight.
"... liking it because it's popular"
Early adopters often want something special that not many other people have so they pretend other people like that 'thing "only because it's popular".
That's why people in certain subcultures get pissed off when something that was "theirs" becomes popular culture.
They even get to the point where they would rather see that 'thing stay a pathetic failure instead of becoming successful so that they can keep it as their own little special subculture.
That looks like what sacrifice uses. Although, they provide spells that you can click on at the bottom left of the screen if you want to instead.
Forgive me. I thought we were talking about a desktop here. Anyway, that reminds me of this hyperbolic tree and the brain. The first can't show multidimensional data. The second can, though it just makes semi-transparent links between categories and objects and isn't good for anything other than traversing its tree/web in a single context.
I know this isn't what you were talking about, but check out this and this. *Laugh*
"For example, what are the 4 locations on the screen to which you can move the mouse very fast? The 4 corners.. Windows makes use of this to some degree, with the close gadget in the top right, and the start button in the bottom left, but this is useless when windows are not maximized"
Also a lot of potential for mishaps. *slide mouse* Oh shit, not again...
There are lots of apps out there that use the four corners of your screen but they are mostly lame. The fix of course is to have the person wait in the corner for a fixed amount of time. But why? Just write the app to be in the windows systray and then click on it or something.
IMO, its not so much confusion, but overhead. If windows are always maximized I dont have to waste my time resizing windows.
The desktop metaphor with a vwm that has multiple desktops that each can be scrolled through, with resizable apps is kind of cool -- especially if you have eye candy like nice wallpaper or something.
Again, IMO, I'd rather focus on the application than waste my time doing window manager maintenance like resizing windows so that I can take the killer screenshot.
Don't get me wrong, having something like a "wharf" in enlightenment, windowmaker and blackbox are extremely cool, especially if they contain applications that you gain information from frequently. It allows you to glance over and gain information without having to slide your mouse over somewhere a la the windows systray.
": Make everything about 20% transparent. You can't work with half the environment hidden behind the other half"
Um, and make me blind?
": A 'recursive boxes' scheme, with whole new scenes hidden inside pickable objects works well. (A folder metaphor, if you will)"
How is navigating a hierarchy with "hidden" objects/tasks/whatever better than a linear list of tasks/objects/whatever if the screen has plenty of space to display the tasks in a linear manner (i.e., the windows/gnome task/start menu?). Do people really have this many applications open at once? I sometimes have >30 apps open at a time and the latency to switch tasks while longer is still fast because after getting "in the groove" of a certain pattern of switching tasks I will remember exactly where a task is on the bar and find it extremely fast.
Navigating some hierarchy would be a lot slower, even if I know exactly where I'm going -- no?
lol, yeah. What we really need is a lot more screen space (i.e., 4 or 5 monitors so that we can be in several applications at once without having to change tasks. That is, slightly moving my head and refocusing has much less latency than a) scanning a taskbar for a task
b)if location already "cached" end
b) finding the icon that matches your app
d)if only one app of said type open end
e) read text next to icon to isolate the window you want...
In a 3d navigable interface where you navigate around using spatial skills you would have to travel around clicking on icons with text under them or something. But how does that actually increase efficiency? Maybe if you have 124 applications open at once...
It would be kind of cool to navigate tasks by clicking on constellations or something though (or maybe not).
I've tried a lot of "alternative" interfaces and most of them are annoying and time wasting, even after forcing myself to spend a week re-training myself how, what and where to click.
From what I see here though the story is just a normal 2d interface that's been jazzed up with some 3d graphics. Nothing special.
That sounds almost like "prove to me that you have free will". Obviously I can't - though, in the context of the sentence I used "chinese room" to illustrate the fact that the only AI we know (weak AI), doesn't really know anything about the symbols it's manipulating except under limited conditions.
I don't subscribe to the conjecture that machines will never be sentient - just that at current complexity and understanding, it's somewhat illusory.
Perhaps. But isn't that a little like having a million monkeys crack away on typewriters until they've reinvented Esperanto or something? Obviously an effort would have to be guided by people with an idea of where they were going - i.e., having a hand in design and therefore understand something about the system they are concocting.
"Incidentally, you don't need emotions to create a course of action, just a lot of horsepower"
Well deep blue is just something programmed to play chess by a bunch of people which iterates through a huge game tree with pruning help from the programmers, is it not?
Anyway, I'm vague because I don't sufficiently understand this stuff. That said, you can obviously hard code goals - but how would a program create new goals without emotion? For example, let's say thinking of making a lot of money makes me happy as it is an instrumental goal to doing things that will ultimately make me happy (i.e., travelling, time with loved ones - which are instrumental goals towards blah blah etc). Without the emotion I would not be able to add new goals, as nothing would motivate me to do so. If I was waiting for the subway and I saw someone getting beat up, I might feel anger and perhaps fear. Whichever one won out as a result of a cognitive process (i.e., thinking I might be next, or believing I can "take that guy") would affect goal oriented behavior.
You might say that we could do the same thing by calculating value in some sort of action matrix - but when sufficiently complex, wouldn't it be an emotion equivalent?
My ideas may just be outdated, as they were primarily formed by a 1995 book titled (Descartes' Error : Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain) by Antonio Damasio.
"You ever used OCR?"
Yeah - obviously you can always hard code something. The "specific keys with a different font" example was only used in context of thinking. For example, my keyboard has some keys where the text is below the actual key - but we intuitively know that the text below the key relates to the key above it. If I encountered another keyboard with the same key, but with the text on the key, I would automatically conclude that they have the "same" key - as in function. Just represented differently. Obviously a computer program cant figure that out. It would need some sort of reasoning to figure that out - yet a straight program that recognizes objects wouldn't have a chance in heck.
IMO, It's only that our current systems aren't sufficiently complex and generalized to deal with said problems.
When the government models nuclear explosions, they aren't modelling what's happening to every atom in a city block.
Also, just because you can describe configurations of atoms in space (if we could) doesn't mean you can therefore model identical macro behavior of a cell - that is, unless your model of force atomic behavior was extremely good.
My point, however, was that let's say we model a one cell amoeba. We would also have to model its environment to duplicate said behavior. If it isn't getting any feedback through interactions with the world, it isn't doing anything.
How about computer programs and devices that will act to make you "super human". That is, agents with current ai and good human interface which will act to enhance human memory and task proficiency and as a result abstract thinking?
:-)
Its always been supposed that we were all going to stop working when robots could take over all our tasks - but isn't it the truth that we just shift to other tasks that computers aren't good at?
Even if we produce robots that are superior for job tasks, guess how much it would cost to manufacture plus upkeep of a robot to act as a janitor or fast food clerk compared to a humans minimum wage?
I meant infinite relative to the resources needed to solve the problem. You're twisting or misunderstanding what I said. The example was for the purpose of illustrating that which we don't understand. His supposition was that we do understand all this stuff and computer power was what was holding us back.
"but the theoretical advancements have already been made"
WRONG. Let's say we have infinite computer power, infinite memory, and infinite disk space.
Do we have the algorithms to create emotion and therefore general systems to create goals and course of action. No. A program that iterates through a bunch of weighted goals doesn't have emotion (or at least enough "emotion" to understand the most crude positive and negative feedback).
How would the computer think upon long and short term goals?
Would a visual subsystem be able to recognize objects in space; for example 50 different types of chairs, desks, pens, books, cars, whatever? Nope, because the current systems are completely symbolic. Can such a system understand what an object is for, where it belongs, etc? Nope. At least not without some sort of language other than machine language and very simple inference, statistical, and very simple goal based reasoning.
Let's say you teach a computer to recognize keyboards and then keys, and then specific keys, whatever. How does it recognize different size keys (for example, I have a ms internet keyboard with litte non standard keys on top) or specific keys with a different font.
etc etc.
Computer program or artificial intelligence? Just because something can traverse a neural network of weighted rules doesn't mean that it can learn (i.e., reconfigure its network). Even if you have a system that can "learn" by reconfiguring itself due to some mathematical algorithm - it can't really think upon problems enough to do anything but the most crude "learning". It's nothing more than the chinese room.
And how are you going to absolutely simulate perfect atomic -> molecular -> macro molecular -> organelle -> cellular behavior? How is even a single cell going to behave similarly unless it has a near identical environment from which to work in?
"If you'll permit me to play pundit for a second: I think we'll reach these so-called "milestones" that the AI people and the nanotech people keep giving us and realize that while we can manufacture a computer with the MIPS/FLOPS/whatever of a mouse/dog/human brain, we don't have the slightest idea how to string all of that power together to actually perform the operations of the mouse/dog/human brain"
Yes this is true. However I think it's a little unfair to think that those who introduced the moores law as a function of animal intelligence comparison (i.e., Kurzweil in his book) are using it as the only basis of their prognostications.
Although I believe you are right that Kurzweil and others are a little out there in terms of being realistic. Humans are notorious optimists. Just because it's vogue to predict what's going to happen in 2050 doesn't mean we haven't learned from what Turing predicted 50 years before.
The current count on cnn.com says 1785 vote difference for bush. With everything counted and a majority of absentee votes likely to go towards bush, there would have to be some major mistakes found in a recount to allow Gore a win.
The networks aren't calling it because they already made two mistakes the night before.
Statistically, coming from cnn, one community is republican slanted and one is democrat slanted, and then we have estimated something like 2300 absentee votes which were statistically slanted republican in 1996, with 53%.
Very close indeed.
he's been said to be one of the smartest speakers (or singer) against government
Oh please, the guy is a nimrod. My dog could come up with better political and social commentary.
In the 4 and a half years I've had shaw@home, the majority of the time it has been reliable and fast. Of course, when I first got it in 1996 I was pushing 600k/s on most downloads, but that obviously would tail down when more people were put on my node and they implemented some sort of QoS (I now get 150-200 on most downloads). Anyway, there have been periods of several months (mostly back in 1998) where there had been constant packet loss and download speeds that were anywhere from 15 to 80k/s and upload speeds that could hardly break 3. Apparently they were just learning when to resegment a cable network and they did finally upgrade it.
I have a remote program check my site every 5 minutes and in the past year I've had 9 hours of downtime in total, mostly in the middle of the night. I can't blame one 6 hour period though, as cable was out in an entire 10 block radius due to downed power lines in more than one place.
But then I've heard horror stories from people on MSO's like rogers in ontario & bc as well as cox in the US. I'm talking down for 5 hours a day and speeds that are slower than dialup modems for weeks.
And not every @home mso is evil either:
2 4BUS01d_FI-SHAW.html
http://www.thestar.com/editorial/smart97/200010
They know @home is bad business for them because they provide extremely shitty service.