Oh, that's BS. Lots of Chinese people *suck* at Chinese. Why do you think they simplified the characters? Because it was hard for them, too.
If the Chinese had as many problems with their script as half the English population has with there/their/they're or your/you're, after simplification no character would have been left standing with more than five strokes.
(If you think this project is impossible, you haven't considered Randall Munroe. At a sustained rate of one character simplification per hour, he could have the first draft on the core 8000 characters completed in four standard work years, all down to five strokes, each and every one of them. Then you'd have to check that he hasn't turned all the characters that only show up only in the names of bird species into stick-figure girlfriends. Names of Chinese birds "According to this list in Wikipedia, the avifauna of China include a total of 1,314 species. Brelsford still has a ways to go before documenting most of them. But he seems like the kind of person who will persist to the end. He has what I call in Chinese "snail spirit" — go slowly but persistently; eventually you'll reach your goal.")
Simplification might have been a bit premature. Reading the traditional characters wasn't all that hard. But writing some of them took a lot of practice (and time, too, if you had to draw the three dragons without the use of ditto marks).
But soon we had computers (with decent input systems) to do all the actual writing, so that tedious skill rapidly became secondary.
I'm far from convinced that English would be easier to read, either, if we gave a thousand words the "thru" tummy tuck.
You really need to ask a deep neural network if the patterns are unreasonably complicated. "thru" might be simpler for a shallow network, whereas "through" might be far more consistent with the rest of the language once the network has trained for a while.
Human novices do prefer skills they can initially learn with shallow networks. So why don't we have an Esperanto version of everything? Because for anything we use heavily, we gravitate towards the minimal deep network. Our intuitions aren't very good yet about what this means. But now that we have all manner of sophisticated deep networks to interrogate, I'm expect we'll begin to progress on this eternal question any day now.
Just a little more snail spirit, we'll crack this one yet.
Says a man whose hardware business model is bloated and slow security updates (if you can get them at all) rendering devices barely out of their puppy years far slower than the day you bought them (even for simply things), soldering RAM onto the system board at 400% markup over street upgrades, and torpedoing the right to repair.
First of all, once we became networked, it was possible for 90% of everything to be propagated by word of mouth. This wasn't the case back in the 1980s. (I was there.)
Second, if you never make a formal claim, you can't ever be wrong.
Right around the time that most developers realized that their application could only ever be as stable as the APIs you develop on top of (the dark days began with Windows 95 and progeny) it became wise to keep a low profile on your software ever working precisely as advertised. What's your other choice? Become a lifetime expert on the care and feeding of Windows 95, 98, and next of sin? A true coding artist could write a stable program on top of Windows 95, but how long does that last in the marketplace?
Right. Three years. Absolute maximum.
Then, you kind of want to write in your manual: well, this function would work properly, except for that bug-ass piece of shit library underneath. But finger pointing is a dangerous game, because maybe what you're suffering from is conceptual impedance mismatch, and you might both be at fault (it takes two to tango).
[*] But of course, a true coding artist could design an API that wouldn't elicit conceptual impedance mismatch in the first place...
Another thing about the 1980s: half of all software design was cramming a large thing into a tiny place. Seriously. If it wasn't a RAM problem, it was a pixel problem, or a disk sector problem. So a lot of your manual explained a host of unnatural design decisions. These are no longer primary. These days, bad design is mainly self-inflicted.
Finally, the primary factor in application choice in the 2010s is UI style. People tend to choose a UI style they're comfortable with (there's generally a lot of choice, too, in the variables least important to long-term function and stability). Consequently, most manuals would be preaching to a self-selected choir.
I still read the manual a lot (online). PostgreSQL isn't going away any time soon, even if there's now twenty other cloud-compatible databases. I'll read the manual for something with staying power at the drop of a pin.
On the other hand, life is too short to read any manual with the title "xxxScript for Dummies". Don't even try. It's like machine learning, where the fastest way to fall behind is to keep up (you can either read the results of others, or pursue your own; pick any one).
Not only infinitely differentiable—and smooth, smooth, smooth like a baby's bottom—but also infinitely and indefinitely monotonic in instantaneous prospect.
And to think that another perspective is that the whole fragile edifice hangs by the thread of one stupid trade war.
This must be part of a twenty year plan to grow a new batch of Trump-style electors: people who confuse their tribe—and the size of its roar—with their political interests.
I tend to see the recent political era as the ascendancy of people who can't explain anything.
Trump has actually admitted an error or two. But he's still never explained a single physical or political mechanism with more than two moving parts.
This is why Bannon was on Maher the other day suggesting that Bernie would have been more effective if his style was more like Michael Avenatti (which pot/kettle was this suggestion most intended to blacken by association?), and then immediately followed up on this by suggesting that maybe Oprah was the kind of person who could carry the Democratic nomination in the near future.
Yeah, great: another person in bright glare of the media business, who's consistently light on explanation as a matter of personal style.
PS: I guess I would have to accept visceral reference-frame cottonmouth (the roller-coaster stomach-in-mouth thing) as a unique exo-perceptive sense outside the original five.
The method of Bulverism is to "assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error."
This is easily accomplished by misconstruing the original frame. Unless you have an intellectual conscience.
The original five senses were all exo-perceptual.
This was back when no other category had been explicated in specific terms (the ancient Greeks were no dummies and surely suspected interior sensation).
Wikipedia doesn't add a "(film)" clause to movie titles, unless the title already has an established meaning (such as the book upon which the movie was based). But then more pages are added, and sometimes that old film without "(film)" has "(film)" added in retrospect (or eventually "(1998 film)" added in retrospect).
Note that "sixth sense" in its early meanings was usually exo-perceptive: eerie emanations of metaphysical misalignment in the world around you.
Humans don't seem to have magnetic perception. The melanopsin sensors in the retina can't be classified as "vision". However, "sight" is almost viable, so I'm not quick to add this as an entirely separate item.
So what other exo-perceptions might we now add to the archaic list? We've already got the skin, eyes, ears, mouth, and nose on the list. That's the majority of the human periphery. The anus can discriminate gas, liquid, solid. But it's hardly exo unless you're badly prolapsed (I mean your anus, not your argument).
Within its pre-existing category, I really don't think the original five was totally off base.
The word "deep" was never intended to mean we solved the whole problem all at once.
Nor is human-equivalent vision anywhere close to requisite for 90% of the initial applications.
We've barely scratched the surface on this recent breakthrough.
Many of these problems are fixable within the current regime.
Capabilities will evolve as relentlessly as chess engines.
But, let's all pause to remember "this isn't deep". That's the key lesson to take home, here, as this technology rapidly reshapes the entire global economy: this isn't deep.
In the version I'm seeing, the Bloomberg attributes the piece to Michael Schuman (credited as "the author of The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia's Quest for Wealth and Confucius and the World He Created").
I see no reference to Kai-Fu Lee at all.
Upside: superior click-bait.
Downside: not actually associated with the article.
African nations have weak rule of law, [many other universally shared African flaws]...
The one basket-case-fits-all model of African development is exposing your ankles, restricting your natural leg movement, and giving you a hideous muffin top.
Get a bigger pair of pants. (Updating your intellectual wardrobe every twenty years or so would make for a good start.)
This is a list of holds (beginning with the most recent) covering most of August and September, for myself and my wife.
* Martha Stewart's Pressure Cooker (2018) * Kurt Vonnegut: complete stories (2017) — over 900 pages * The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (2012) * Suicide of the West (2018) * Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich (2012) — author Chrystia Freeland has a small problem on her hands lately * Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae (1998) * How (2007) * The Lost Art of Reading (2010) * Leadership: In Turbulent Times (2018) — author of Teams of Rivals * Fear: Trump in the White House (2018) * The Shadow President: the truth about Mike Pence (2018) * The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything (2013) — this could be a ten-minute skim * The Obesity Code (2015) * Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (2018) * Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018) * It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work (2018)
Between us, we generally read about 1/3 of the total amount of text that passes through the house. This is the second pass on Plutocrats, because my wife had only managed about 1/3 on the first borrowing. (Amortized page-consumption quota not including compilations like Vonnegut's, where the target in the first place was to sample a few of his more famous stories.)
I'm also not sure how much attention the Trump/Pence books will receive. They could end up on my frozen list along with four other recent political books to fill some gap in my queue somewhere down the road when I'm less attentive to sourcing enjoyable subject matter.
</overtly ontopic>
Book review screed of the moment HOT HOT HOT
Unfortunately, The Tyranny of Cliches is already in hand, and pages 19–20 are a nightmare to behold.
I understand getting so wound up in your head about a perceived aggravation that you depart planet earth, and make a bit of an ass of yourself in doing so, I've done it myself a few times. But this one made it through the long publishing process. I can't recall the last time I've seen a page in print hold up less well, six years on. I had listened to the author interviewed on EconTalk, and he's an excitable, affable man with a first-class gift of gab and some decent chops in political theory. Just last night I described myself to my wife as someone with liberal inclinations, but largely a conservative implementation toolkit. So where a typical conservative sees government as having a 40-lb tumor, I see government as having a BMI of 25. The true conservative wants to put government on the operating table for radical surgery, whereas I'd be happy just to get government on a rigorous treadmill program—except for the excessive influence of money, which I've always blamed more on the Johns of industry than the Jezebels of congress (greed is not bad, and it's married to a hot wife—capitalism—though you suspect it might divorce its childhood sweetheart in a heartbeat if it wasn't also banging capitalism's trashy sister on the side, any old way it pleased.)
Back to Jonah Goldberg's tirade (that should never have it into print)—he's losing his cookies over one sentence of an early Obama speech:
"What is required," declared our president-elect, "is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives—from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry—an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels."
Grammatically, that's a horror show. I think the implied grammar is "this being an appeal...". Once you slip this tiny little banana peel into its formal cumberbund, the false resonance is laid bare, de rigeur as it were (who wants a president who can't hide a slippery banana peel in his cumber
The crooks reportedly mined for Monero, infecting over 4,700 victims and generating over 62 Monero coins, worth today nearly $7,000.
The word "today" is a little too broad, is it not?
How about this:
The crooks reportedly mined for Monero, infecting over 4,700 victims and generating over 62 Monero coins, with a viscous cash equivalency of nearly $7,000, when I checked right after lunch.
It is done on company time, with company money, and doesn't really relate to their business mission or processes at all.
That's a ridiculous view of President Swamp Drain (with all new billionaires).
Trump has had a huge impact on the business climate in America, right across the board, and he brags about it nearly every day. Plus his constant attacks on the MSM, where Google and Facebook are presently the two most powerful media aggregators on planet earth.
Trump's whole campaign was about detonating a shock and awe cluster bomb in Washington, D.C. And this from a man not known for delicacy or nuance. Any venture the size of Google not taking immediate stock of this Bravado New World deserves to have its C-suite head examined.
Not having to plug and unplug the wire really is a convenience.
The kind of people enamored with convenience are the same people who also find it inconvenient to pause to quantify the magnitude of any benefit received. The proxy metric becomes number of mandatory, minor context switches out of narcissism fugue.
For example, see this piece of fruit? See this little sticker? That sticker wasn't there when I was a kid. But somewhere as the years passed, someone had the bright idea to put that sticker on the fruit. Why? So it could be easier for us to check out at the grocery counter.
Well that's great, we can get in and out of the store quickly. But now, there's a new problem. When we get home and we're hungry and we see this ripe, juicy piece of fruit on the counter, we just want to pick it up and eat it. Except now, we have to look for this little sticker. And dig at it with our nails, damaging the flesh. Then rolling up that sticker — you know what I mean. And then trying to flick it off your fingers.
(Applause) It's not fun, not at all.
My first reaction to this—and it's never changed—is to thank my lucky stars I don't suffer from Sticker Peeling Annoyance Syndrome. What a horrible way to have to live.
Comedians know all about this. Jerry Seinfeld's entire career was built on noticing those little details, those idiotic things we do every day that we don't even remember. He tells us about the time he visited his friends and he just wanted to take a comfortable shower. He'd reach out and grab the handle and turn it slightly one way, and it was 100 degrees too hot. And then he'd turn it the other way, and it was 100 degrees too cold. He just wanted a comfortable shower. Now, we've all been there, we just don't remember it. But Jerry did, and that's a comedian's job.
I'm sure every engineer has watched their non-engineering spouse try to set the car temperature by making a major initial adjustment, and then never accounting for the feedback delay tau (either the initial cold-start tau, or the subsequent recirculation-delay tau), so this is promptly followed by an extreme adjustment (equilibrium has now departed the grocery wagon for the next half hour).
Voila! Shower Temperature Adjustment Syndrome, exactly as Jerry describes.
What Tony Fadell fails to add is this: all the same things Jerry notices are the sandpaper of George Costanza's existence.
If you are George Costanza, you can loose a pitched emotional battle with a small fruit label. That's Seinfeld's world.
Jerry actually said (IRL) that Seinfeld couldn't exist in modern times. Kramer would text, and never crash the perimeter—unless he had to come over to use Jerry's charging matt, because his own matt failed (perhaps he tried to charge his phone after it was vacuumed up by his Roomba—he was only concerned, in the short term, about hearing a certain ring tone).
And then—inevitably—the glorious communal convenience of the charging matt would lead to soured romantic interests all around.
Of course, if Kramer never actually gets his phone out of his Roomba (and he finds a charging matt sufficient to the cause), they actually could resurrect Seinfeld (at least in Trump's white America) and continue to have Kramer crashing the gates in every episode.
So put that universal boner tingle back in your pants—everything in life is a tradeoff, if you so much as back the lens 1 mm away.
Instead of 200 ms per paint of a small section of the screen, it renders the entire screen in 15 ms.
Why do I suspect those numbers predate the 1950X Threadripper (which would tear your GPUs arms off in the hexakaidecathalon).
I really don't think the word "sucks" should be applied to an elite athlete with 4% body fat who runs for a living, just because his pipes are too studly to ace the ultramarathon.
Just because a handful of Android phones have something doesn't mean most of them do. Apple doing something makes Android makers look at the customer reaction and often follow suit.
I guess you've never followed the relationship between Intel and TSMC. For the longest time, Intel was always first to every new line size, because that was fundamental to their business model. TSMC was never exactly just waiting around to see how things went for Intel.
Just yesterday I saw an estimate that 10–15% of the population has narcissistic tendencies (I though this estimate was a bit self-serving on the part of the psychiatrist, but it's probably not whole cloth). Narcissists all buy iPhones, because they are all early adopters (so far as they can afford to live this lifestyle), and they'll never settle for second best. Apple will remain in front (by some small margin) for precisely as long as they can devise or invent—Terry Pratchett style—features that narcissists demand to have, while paying top dollar every other year.
Case in point: TSMC no longer marches to Intel's drum. Between the phones and the GPUs, TSMC has now decided to play its own drum. At no point was TSMC observing Intel while thinking "let's wait and see if this next shrink actually works". It was always a boring calculation of fiscal prudence.
Or you could argue that if Rambo didn't go there first, the rest of the U.S. Army would fear to follow. I somehow doubt that was ever the actual relationship there, even if Rambo always appeared to be out in front.
'Dom' and 'sub' are perfect replacements, depending on your age, and how you feel about operator overloading.
[*] Dom and sub remind me of nothing else in the short history of computer science (well, not since the late seventies where we deliberately truncated every word and identifier in our source code down to two or three or four letters to save precious kb of disk space).
Norms are not a static cultural thing where you only need to understand the norms in order to make suitable choices. You also need to understand the history and processes which underlie those norms, and your own place in reinforcing or adapting those norms to the present circumstance.
Done right, pretty much requires full-blown AGI.
I drive in relationship to the speed limit at all times. I have an uncle-in-law who drives 105 km/h in a familiar 100 km/h zone, end of story (except in the kinds of extreme weather conditions you hear about on the radio before you leave your house).
My own rules have about twenty different terms, including my state of being, the emotional state of traffic, the location of the sun, the weather, the time of year, the behaviour patterns of wildlife, whether I have my attention 100% on the road right in front of me (sometimes you're mentally navigating 50 km down the road), whether my GPS has lost its mind, etc.
A big part of this model is how my behaviour impacts the behaviour of the other drivers. I have no interest to model being an ass.
I can sometimes be quite aggressive, but I always use the C++ as-if rule: that my deviation from conservative practice has few downstream consequences on other drivers (as a pedestrian, I tend to cross the road as-if I'm invisible, so far as this is practical).
I'm sometimes courteous to other drivers and hold back to let them merge from some parking lot hellhole, but other times I look in my rearview and promptly decide it's not worth complicating matters.
The edge case depends on whether the frustrated driver is sharp enough to realize they've been offered the perfect entrance gap, iff promptly energized (so many drivers have not mastered this simple skill, it positively just kills me; every so often a professional driver looks down as his or her clipboard at exactly the wrong time, so even that assessment is not sure fire).
If you're going to let someone in (from the American right), the less you block their sight line to the neighbouring lane (on your left) the quicker and more confidently the person can assess and perform the maneuver (and the less pissed the asshole behind you becomes). About one driver in every four takes a gander at the glorious sight-line you've provided (in addition to sitting at a conspicuous complete stop, long fractional seconds after the car in front of you has pressed forward in the resumed flow of traffic) and then decides that you've lost your mind—only someone out of control on their cell phone would ever manufacture a perfect courtesy-merge scenario. In their minds, it's not possible that anyone exists who thinks three steps ahead: the conspicuous invitation, room to perform the invitation, and a sufficient sight line to perform it with the least fear and hesitation (which benefits everyone, all around).
Jerry tells George about a woman named Laura he met in Michigan who is coming to New York for a seminar. Jerry wonders if she has romantic intentions. The two continue to talk about her after they leave the luncheonette. Jerry then receives a telephone call from Laura, who asks if she can stay overnight at his apartment. Jerry invites her, but is still unsure whether or not her visit is intended to be romantic. Jerry and Laura arrive at the apartment. Laura then receives a call and when Laura gets off the phone she tells Jerry: "Never get engaged." Jerry then realizes that he has no chance with Laura, but has already committed himself to an entire weekend with her.
Basically every third point in the video above is that the comedy of Seinfeld is based on how "norms" constantly fall through the cracks, and you're left not really understanding expectations, at all.
"But the plans were on display..." "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them." "That's the display department." "With a flashlight." "Ah, well, the lights had probably gone." "So had the stairs." "But look, you found the notice, didn't you?" "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."
Sometimes obscurity is a feature not a bug (though mostly for human subtype: cockroach).
Soon we'll barely be able to link to XKCD, and then what to trim this ravenous stupidity plant?
Deterministic prediction is not a problem. Simple case: predict short, relative, backward conditional jump 100% taken.
But do speculate on this guess carefully: never allow a data-derived address (non-deterministic) to modify any internal processor state until the access checks are complete (not even page tables or TLB entries, much less cache lines or MESI bits).
Prediction which tracks execution history (branch prediction tables) is far more troublesome. Execution history must be regarded as process confidential. Any leak from execution history is a possible side channel.
I recall reading in the early 1980s about the difference between concrete state and abstract state, around the time C++ started to take const seriously. A typical case study was a representation of a point on a plane, which automatically toggled between polar and Cartesian representation, depending on whichever proved most convenient for the last calculation. This makes the representation of the point inherently non-const, just for calculating on the point's value. But we justified this seeming const violation by distinguishing the abstract state (the location of the point) and the concrete state (the actual representation in memory at any given moment).
You rarely (or never) saw this kind of debate inside the functional languages, which practically by edict ban discussion of concrete state (repeat after me: in the view of the application programmer there is only the abstract state, in the view of the application programmer there is only the abstract state,... but of course, any practical implementation was very tricksy under the hood with concrete optimization, which the application programmer was basically forbidden to understand, because interaction with the time domain is somebody else's hot, embarrassing mess.)
In the context of memory management, one can view the set of memory allocations as the abstract state, and the actual memory addresses backing those allocations as the concrete state. (This is why virtual machines are even possible.)
Distinctions between abstract and concrete state in silicon go at least as far back as the 80286.
The 286 LOADALL is widely known because a 15-page lntel confidential document describing its use was given to many developers.
Intel originally included LOADALL in the CPU mask for testing purposes and In Circuit Emulator (ICE) support.... LOADALL loads all of the software-visible registers such as AX, and all of the software-invisible registers such as the segment descriptor caches.
Testing becomes horrific once a processor begins caching historical state. Intel was justifiably terrified of venturing into this strange, new territory.
Caching is inherently a form of prediction: a prediction that the last value used is worth hanging onto, in case it is soon used again. (Caching in most contexts is insanely productive, so empirically, this is an extremely good prediction.)
Processors could be designed to save any amount of their concrete process state (generally invisible, except as a side channel) at every context switch, and to then clear all branch predictors, all TLB entries, all cache lines (probably involves MESI broadcasts to other processors, also evicts cached page table translations, for when the TLB is too small).
What really makes speculative execution different is its invocation of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and it's later miniaturization as the MIB neuralizer: leak concrete state into the process-visibl
Slashdot Mirror
If the Chinese had as many problems with their script as half the English population has with there/their/they're or your/you're, after simplification no character would have been left standing with more than five strokes.
(If you think this project is impossible, you haven't considered Randall Munroe. At a sustained rate of one character simplification per hour, he could have the first draft on the core 8000 characters completed in four standard work years, all down to five strokes, each and every one of them. Then you'd have to check that he hasn't turned all the characters that only show up only in the names of bird species into stick-figure girlfriends. Names of Chinese birds "According to this list in Wikipedia, the avifauna of China include a total of 1,314 species. Brelsford still has a ways to go before documenting most of them. But he seems like the kind of person who will persist to the end. He has what I call in Chinese "snail spirit" — go slowly but persistently; eventually you'll reach your goal.")
Simplification might have been a bit premature. Reading the traditional characters wasn't all that hard. But writing some of them took a lot of practice (and time, too, if you had to draw the three dragons without the use of ditto marks).
But soon we had computers (with decent input systems) to do all the actual writing, so that tedious skill rapidly became secondary.
I'm far from convinced that English would be easier to read, either, if we gave a thousand words the "thru" tummy tuck.
You really need to ask a deep neural network if the patterns are unreasonably complicated. "thru" might be simpler for a shallow network, whereas "through" might be far more consistent with the rest of the language once the network has trained for a while.
Human novices do prefer skills they can initially learn with shallow networks. So why don't we have an Esperanto version of everything? Because for anything we use heavily, we gravitate towards the minimal deep network. Our intuitions aren't very good yet about what this means. But now that we have all manner of sophisticated deep networks to interrogate, I'm expect we'll begin to progress on this eternal question any day now.
Just a little more snail spirit, we'll crack this one yet.
Says a man whose hardware business model is bloated and slow security updates (if you can get them at all) rendering devices barely out of their puppy years far slower than the day you bought them (even for simply things), soldering RAM onto the system board at 400% markup over street upgrades, and torpedoing the right to repair.
First of all, once we became networked, it was possible for 90% of everything to be propagated by word of mouth. This wasn't the case back in the 1980s. (I was there.)
Second, if you never make a formal claim, you can't ever be wrong.
Right around the time that most developers realized that their application could only ever be as stable as the APIs you develop on top of (the dark days began with Windows 95 and progeny) it became wise to keep a low profile on your software ever working precisely as advertised. What's your other choice? Become a lifetime expert on the care and feeding of Windows 95, 98, and next of sin? A true coding artist could write a stable program on top of Windows 95, but how long does that last in the marketplace?
Right. Three years. Absolute maximum.
Then, you kind of want to write in your manual: well, this function would work properly, except for that bug-ass piece of shit library underneath. But finger pointing is a dangerous game, because maybe what you're suffering from is conceptual impedance mismatch, and you might both be at fault (it takes two to tango).
[*] But of course, a true coding artist could design an API that wouldn't elicit conceptual impedance mismatch in the first place ...
Another thing about the 1980s: half of all software design was cramming a large thing into a tiny place. Seriously. If it wasn't a RAM problem, it was a pixel problem, or a disk sector problem. So a lot of your manual explained a host of unnatural design decisions. These are no longer primary. These days, bad design is mainly self-inflicted.
Finally, the primary factor in application choice in the 2010s is UI style. People tend to choose a UI style they're comfortable with (there's generally a lot of choice, too, in the variables least important to long-term function and stability). Consequently, most manuals would be preaching to a self-selected choir.
I still read the manual a lot (online). PostgreSQL isn't going away any time soon, even if there's now twenty other cloud-compatible databases. I'll read the manual for something with staying power at the drop of a pin.
On the other hand, life is too short to read any manual with the title "xxxScript for Dummies". Don't even try. It's like machine learning, where the fastest way to fall behind is to keep up (you can either read the results of others, or pursue your own; pick any one).
Not only infinitely differentiable—and smooth, smooth, smooth like a baby's bottom—but also infinitely and indefinitely monotonic in instantaneous prospect.
And to think that another perspective is that the whole fragile edifice hangs by the thread of one stupid trade war.
Or a pandemic.
Or a rising tide.
This must be part of a twenty year plan to grow a new batch of Trump-style electors: people who confuse their tribe—and the size of its roar—with their political interests.
I tend to see the recent political era as the ascendancy of people who can't explain anything.
Trump has actually admitted an error or two. But he's still never explained a single physical or political mechanism with more than two moving parts.
This is why Bannon was on Maher the other day suggesting that Bernie would have been more effective if his style was more like Michael Avenatti (which pot/kettle was this suggestion most intended to blacken by association?), and then immediately followed up on this by suggesting that maybe Oprah was the kind of person who could carry the Democratic nomination in the near future.
Yeah, great: another person in bright glare of the media business, who's consistently light on explanation as a matter of personal style.
PS: I guess I would have to accept visceral reference-frame cottonmouth (the roller-coaster stomach-in-mouth thing) as a unique exo-perceptive sense outside the original five.
But only since Einstein.
The method of Bulverism is to "assume that your opponent is wrong, and explain his error."
This is easily accomplished by misconstruing the original frame. Unless you have an intellectual conscience.
The original five senses were all exo-perceptual.
This was back when no other category had been explicated in specific terms (the ancient Greeks were no dummies and surely suspected interior sensation).
Wikipedia doesn't add a "(film)" clause to movie titles, unless the title already has an established meaning (such as the book upon which the movie was based). But then more pages are added, and sometimes that old film without "(film)" has "(film)" added in retrospect (or eventually "(1998 film)" added in retrospect).
Note that "sixth sense" in its early meanings was usually exo-perceptive: eerie emanations of metaphysical misalignment in the world around you.
Humans don't seem to have magnetic perception. The melanopsin sensors in the retina can't be classified as "vision". However, "sight" is almost viable, so I'm not quick to add this as an entirely separate item.
So what other exo-perceptions might we now add to the archaic list? We've already got the skin, eyes, ears, mouth, and nose on the list. That's the majority of the human periphery. The anus can discriminate gas, liquid, solid. But it's hardly exo unless you're badly prolapsed (I mean your anus, not your argument).
Within its pre-existing category, I really don't think the original five was totally off base.
The word "deep" was never intended to mean we solved the whole problem all at once.
Nor is human-equivalent vision anywhere close to requisite for 90% of the initial applications.
We've barely scratched the surface on this recent breakthrough.
Many of these problems are fixable within the current regime.
Capabilities will evolve as relentlessly as chess engines.
But, let's all pause to remember "this isn't deep". That's the key lesson to take home, here, as this technology rapidly reshapes the entire global economy: this isn't deep.
I really don't want my search results turned into an amusement park. Count me out, if there be any power left in User CSS.
What do Sumo wrestlers and SJWs have in common?
* weird top knots
What makes Sumo wrestlers and SJWs completely different?
* one is grotesquely overweight, the other has righteous blubber
* one can be pushed around, the other can't
Stay tuned for the next exciting insight linking body composition with moral virtue.
In the version I'm seeing, the Bloomberg attributes the piece to Michael Schuman (credited as "the author of The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia's Quest for Wealth and Confucius and the World He Created").
I see no reference to Kai-Fu Lee at all.
Upside: superior click-bait.
Downside: not actually associated with the article.
If we already define corporations as persons under the law, why not make algorithms persons, too?
Then we can hold algorithms to account and not sound like the blithering idiots in doing so.
How many people out there have ever actually soldered one of these?
It's a 20 mm Ã-- 20 mm eLQFP176 with a 55 nm pin spacing, er, lithography.
The one basket-case-fits-all model of African development is exposing your ankles, restricting your natural leg movement, and giving you a hideous muffin top.
Get a bigger pair of pants. (Updating your intellectual wardrobe every twenty years or so would make for a good start.)
From:
To:
<overtly ontopic>
This is a list of holds (beginning with the most recent) covering most of August and September, for myself and my wife.
* Martha Stewart's Pressure Cooker (2018)
* Kurt Vonnegut: complete stories (2017) — over 900 pages
* The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (2012)
* Suicide of the West (2018)
* Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich (2012) — author Chrystia Freeland has a small problem on her hands lately
* Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae (1998)
* How (2007)
* The Lost Art of Reading (2010)
* Leadership: In Turbulent Times (2018) — author of Teams of Rivals
* Fear: Trump in the White House (2018)
* The Shadow President: the truth about Mike Pence (2018)
* The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything (2013) — this could be a ten-minute skim
* The Obesity Code (2015)
* Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (2018)
* Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (2018)
* It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work (2018)
Between us, we generally read about 1/3 of the total amount of text that passes through the house. This is the second pass on Plutocrats, because my wife had only managed about 1/3 on the first borrowing. (Amortized page-consumption quota not including compilations like Vonnegut's, where the target in the first place was to sample a few of his more famous stories.)
I'm also not sure how much attention the Trump/Pence books will receive. They could end up on my frozen list along with four other recent political books to fill some gap in my queue somewhere down the road when I'm less attentive to sourcing enjoyable subject matter.
</overtly ontopic>
Book review screed of the moment HOT HOT HOT
Unfortunately, The Tyranny of Cliches is already in hand, and pages 19–20 are a nightmare to behold.
I understand getting so wound up in your head about a perceived aggravation that you depart planet earth, and make a bit of an ass of yourself in doing so, I've done it myself a few times. But this one made it through the long publishing process. I can't recall the last time I've seen a page in print hold up less well, six years on. I had listened to the author interviewed on EconTalk, and he's an excitable, affable man with a first-class gift of gab and some decent chops in political theory. Just last night I described myself to my wife as someone with liberal inclinations, but largely a conservative implementation toolkit. So where a typical conservative sees government as having a 40-lb tumor, I see government as having a BMI of 25. The true conservative wants to put government on the operating table for radical surgery, whereas I'd be happy just to get government on a rigorous treadmill program—except for the excessive influence of money, which I've always blamed more on the Johns of industry than the Jezebels of congress (greed is not bad, and it's married to a hot wife—capitalism—though you suspect it might divorce its childhood sweetheart in a heartbeat if it wasn't also banging capitalism's trashy sister on the side, any old way it pleased.)
Back to Jonah Goldberg's tirade (that should never have it into print)—he's losing his cookies over one sentence of an early Obama speech:
Grammatically, that's a horror show. I think the implied grammar is "this being an appeal ...". Once you slip this tiny little banana peel into its formal cumberbund, the false resonance is laid bare, de rigeur as it were (who wants a president who can't hide a slippery banana peel in his cumber
The word "today" is a little too broad, is it not?
How about this:
That's a ridiculous view of President Swamp Drain (with all new billionaires).
Trump has had a huge impact on the business climate in America, right across the board, and he brags about it nearly every day. Plus his constant attacks on the MSM, where Google and Facebook are presently the two most powerful media aggregators on planet earth.
Trump's whole campaign was about detonating a shock and awe cluster bomb in Washington, D.C. And this from a man not known for delicacy or nuance. Any venture the size of Google not taking immediate stock of this Bravado New World deserves to have its C-suite head examined.
Eureka! I finally figured this out.
The kind of people enamored with convenience are the same people who also find it inconvenient to pause to quantify the magnitude of any benefit received. The proxy metric becomes number of mandatory, minor context switches out of narcissism fugue.
The first secret of design is ... noticing — March 2015
My first reaction to this—and it's never changed—is to thank my lucky stars I don't suffer from Sticker Peeling Annoyance Syndrome. What a horrible way to have to live.
I'm sure every engineer has watched their non-engineering spouse try to set the car temperature by making a major initial adjustment, and then never accounting for the feedback delay tau (either the initial cold-start tau, or the subsequent recirculation-delay tau), so this is promptly followed by an extreme adjustment (equilibrium has now departed the grocery wagon for the next half hour).
Voila! Shower Temperature Adjustment Syndrome, exactly as Jerry describes.
What Tony Fadell fails to add is this: all the same things Jerry notices are the sandpaper of George Costanza's existence.
If you are George Costanza, you can loose a pitched emotional battle with a small fruit label. That's Seinfeld's world.
Jerry actually said (IRL) that Seinfeld couldn't exist in modern times. Kramer would text, and never crash the perimeter—unless he had to come over to use Jerry's charging matt, because his own matt failed (perhaps he tried to charge his phone after it was vacuumed up by his Roomba—he was only concerned, in the short term, about hearing a certain ring tone).
And then—inevitably—the glorious communal convenience of the charging matt would lead to soured romantic interests all around.
Of course, if Kramer never actually gets his phone out of his Roomba (and he finds a charging matt sufficient to the cause), they actually could resurrect Seinfeld (at least in Trump's white America) and continue to have Kramer crashing the gates in every episode.
CPUs suck at this, in much the same way that decathletes suck at high jump.
The only event that your GPU really loves is the marathon. Marathon anything—so long as it demands less cognitive agility than a biathlon.
Efficient frontier
So put that universal boner tingle back in your pants—everything in life is a tradeoff, if you so much as back the lens 1 mm away.
Why do I suspect those numbers predate the 1950X Threadripper (which would tear your GPUs arms off in the hexakaidecathalon).
I really don't think the word "sucks" should be applied to an elite athlete with 4% body fat who runs for a living, just because his pipes are too studly to ace the ultramarathon.
I guess you've never followed the relationship between Intel and TSMC. For the longest time, Intel was always first to every new line size, because that was fundamental to their business model. TSMC was never exactly just waiting around to see how things went for Intel.
Just yesterday I saw an estimate that 10–15% of the population has narcissistic tendencies (I though this estimate was a bit self-serving on the part of the psychiatrist, but it's probably not whole cloth). Narcissists all buy iPhones, because they are all early adopters (so far as they can afford to live this lifestyle), and they'll never settle for second best. Apple will remain in front (by some small margin) for precisely as long as they can devise or invent—Terry Pratchett style—features that narcissists demand to have, while paying top dollar every other year.
Case in point: TSMC no longer marches to Intel's drum. Between the phones and the GPUs, TSMC has now decided to play its own drum. At no point was TSMC observing Intel while thinking "let's wait and see if this next shrink actually works". It was always a boring calculation of fiscal prudence.
Or you could argue that if Rambo didn't go there first, the rest of the U.S. Army would fear to follow. I somehow doubt that was ever the actual relationship there, even if Rambo always appeared to be out in front.
'Dom' and 'sub' are perfect replacements, depending on your age, and how you feel about operator overloading.
[*] Dom and sub remind me of nothing else in the short history of computer science (well, not since the late seventies where we deliberately truncated every word and identifier in our source code down to two or three or four letters to save precious kb of disk space).
Norms are not a static cultural thing where you only need to understand the norms in order to make suitable choices. You also need to understand the history and processes which underlie those norms, and your own place in reinforcing or adapting those norms to the present circumstance.
Done right, pretty much requires full-blown AGI.
I drive in relationship to the speed limit at all times. I have an uncle-in-law who drives 105 km/h in a familiar 100 km/h zone, end of story (except in the kinds of extreme weather conditions you hear about on the radio before you leave your house).
My own rules have about twenty different terms, including my state of being, the emotional state of traffic, the location of the sun, the weather, the time of year, the behaviour patterns of wildlife, whether I have my attention 100% on the road right in front of me (sometimes you're mentally navigating 50 km down the road), whether my GPS has lost its mind, etc.
A big part of this model is how my behaviour impacts the behaviour of the other drivers. I have no interest to model being an ass.
I can sometimes be quite aggressive, but I always use the C++ as-if rule: that my deviation from conservative practice has few downstream consequences on other drivers (as a pedestrian, I tend to cross the road as-if I'm invisible, so far as this is practical).
I'm sometimes courteous to other drivers and hold back to let them merge from some parking lot hellhole, but other times I look in my rearview and promptly decide it's not worth complicating matters.
The edge case depends on whether the frustrated driver is sharp enough to realize they've been offered the perfect entrance gap, iff promptly energized (so many drivers have not mastered this simple skill, it positively just kills me; every so often a professional driver looks down as his or her clipboard at exactly the wrong time, so even that assessment is not sure fire).
If you're going to let someone in (from the American right), the less you block their sight line to the neighbouring lane (on your left) the quicker and more confidently the person can assess and perform the maneuver (and the less pissed the asshole behind you becomes). About one driver in every four takes a gander at the glorious sight-line you've provided (in addition to sitting at a conspicuous complete stop, long fractional seconds after the car in front of you has pressed forward in the resumed flow of traffic) and then decides that you've lost your mind—only someone out of control on their cell phone would ever manufacture a perfect courtesy-merge scenario. In their minds, it's not possible that anyone exists who thinks three steps ahead: the conspicuous invitation, room to perform the invitation, and a sufficient sight line to perform it with the least fear and hesitation (which benefits everyone, all around).
Just yesterday I watched the following video: Seinfeld: How It Began (FULL). This was surprisingly good.
Pilot espisode (before Elaine):
Basically every third point in the video above is that the comedy of Seinfeld is based on how "norms" constantly fall through the cracks, and you're left not really understanding expectations, at all.
On the road, you influence traffic—if
Because the goal is to merely host content in a dark room, rather than having your content seen by other people.
Douglas Adams > Quotes > Quotable Quote
Sometimes obscurity is a feature not a bug (though mostly for human subtype: cockroach).
Soon we'll barely be able to link to XKCD, and then what to trim this ravenous stupidity plant?
Deterministic prediction is not a problem. Simple case: predict short, relative, backward conditional jump 100% taken.
But do speculate on this guess carefully: never allow a data-derived address (non-deterministic) to modify any internal processor state until the access checks are complete (not even page tables or TLB entries, much less cache lines or MESI bits).
Prediction which tracks execution history (branch prediction tables) is far more troublesome. Execution history must be regarded as process confidential. Any leak from execution history is a possible side channel.
I recall reading in the early 1980s about the difference between concrete state and abstract state, around the time C++ started to take const seriously. A typical case study was a representation of a point on a plane, which automatically toggled between polar and Cartesian representation, depending on whichever proved most convenient for the last calculation. This makes the representation of the point inherently non-const, just for calculating on the point's value. But we justified this seeming const violation by distinguishing the abstract state (the location of the point) and the concrete state (the actual representation in memory at any given moment).
You rarely (or never) saw this kind of debate inside the functional languages, which practically by edict ban discussion of concrete state (repeat after me: in the view of the application programmer there is only the abstract state, in the view of the application programmer there is only the abstract state, ... but of course, any practical implementation was very tricksy under the hood with concrete optimization, which the application programmer was basically forbidden to understand, because interaction with the time domain is somebody else's hot, embarrassing mess.)
In the context of memory management, one can view the set of memory allocations as the abstract state, and the actual memory addresses backing those allocations as the concrete state. (This is why virtual machines are even possible.)
Distinctions between abstract and concrete state in silicon go at least as far back as the 80286.
x86 memory segmentation
The LOADALL Instruction by Robert Collins
Testing becomes horrific once a processor begins caching historical state. Intel was justifiably terrified of venturing into this strange, new territory.
Caching is inherently a form of prediction: a prediction that the last value used is worth hanging onto, in case it is soon used again. (Caching in most contexts is insanely productive, so empirically, this is an extremely good prediction.)
Processors could be designed to save any amount of their concrete process state (generally invisible, except as a side channel) at every context switch, and to then clear all branch predictors, all TLB entries, all cache lines (probably involves MESI broadcasts to other processors, also evicts cached page table translations, for when the TLB is too small).
What really makes speculative execution different is its invocation of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and it's later miniaturization as the MIB neuralizer: leak concrete state into the process-visibl