It's not Facebook.... Facebook is but one of the current tools being used and abused for this.
Oh good grief.
Facebook is the liquid metal 800-lb unsamarium-alloy gorilla in the social media space, whose very existence dictates the strategy of every other player whose business interests even vaguely impinge upon this niche.
In related news, humans are but one apex predator on planet earth (although this gasp-worthy aphorism elicited less of an eye roll after the mass synthesis of self-assembling unsamarium).
[*] Unsamarium is the name given to the element with atomic number 162—from an island of nucleic stability obtainable only with unsuspected technology of the distant future.
The real question is this: Does systemd make fitting the tool to the purpose at hand imposing, error-prone, frustrating, and counterproductive?
I've always regarded systemd "making Linux complex, error-prone, and unstable" as a short-term complaint, which was mainly advanced to argue that systemd's misguided mission was fueled by arrogant, deaf, sociopathic egocentrism.
Of course, those ad hominem characteristics are not a fatal flaw. For OpenBSD, that personality cluster is a match made in heaven.
Do biker bars hire bouncers on charisma and charm?
On the other hand, this is perhaps not the ideal personality cluster to introduce (almost by fiat) a highly integrated, monolithic subsystem that helps the user erect and automate their custom xmas light display.
Let's not become distracted by the reality that even a design turd, sufficiently polished, eventually achieves design maturity.
It sounds like it primarily means nearing retirement, which in standard economic theory means that retraining efforts have a narrow window to return value on investment.
If by "old" you think "mentally slow", that entirely depends on the person in question. It's not a useful generic term.
I'm surely old, but the only important thing that's changed in my learning capacity is that I no longer like jumping into bleeding edge technologies that are 80% rough edges. Navigating through the glass vines of all those rough edges places a demand on short term memory I just can't support incidentally any longer (I can still do it, but at the cost of setting aside my 30-year map of the IT industry; I can no longer run both of these systems at the same time—which is, of course, easier early on in your career when you haven't even got a map).
My advice would be to consider how much brokenness is intrinsic to the skill you are teaching, because the benefit of a mature mind is compromised if they end up faffing around with some ridiculous "slam it out the door" product misfeature.
Let them eat cake. Give them software that actually works as documented.
If you already have a copy, and then download a copy in another form, it is CONSTRUCTIVELY a format shift. It might take a good lawyer to make that stick, of course.
Life in the 100% non-constructive world is so impractical as to be almost unbearable, so we are all effectively quasi-criminals most the time, which doesn't matter until it does, and when that day comes, unfortunately, the system is rigged so that some of us can afford better justice than others.
There, I just saved you at least ten fairy tales (though you might not thank me for replacing the figurative wolves with real wolves).
Like the hero of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," also based on one of his books, the creatures of Dahl's valley seem to know more than they're letting on; perhaps even secrets we don't much want to know.
Children, especially, will find things they don't understand, and things that scare them. Excellent. A good story for children should suggest a hidden dimension, and that dimension of course is the lifetime still ahead of them.
There's a few more lines on this theme in the original that I was too frightened to quote.
Weight gain actually increased with artificial sweeteners. From a caloric standpoint, that shouldn't be possible.
Then stop using the caloric point of view, because it explains hardly anything (unless you plan to harvest the goose's liver).
The internal metabolic thermostat explains almost everything. Surprise, surprise, the digestive system (and it's thermostatic overlord) is connected to the taste buds of sweet flavours. The taste buds of sweet flavours are also directly connected to your reward center, and might also adjust the regulatory thermostat on other cravings or pursuits (many of which could have caloric balance implications).
I almost wish our first response to caloric restriction was to become unbearable dopey and determined to sleep for 20 hours per day.
Wanker: Hey, everybody! You can lose weight by inducing a hunger coma!
Everybody: Gee, thanks, but we'd all like to keep our day jobs and feed our children.
The malarkey embedded here would be that transparent.
When I add up income tax, Medicare/social security tax, state taxes, property, sales, hotel, gas, airport and the rest I pay, the total is at least 50% of my paycheck, and I am not by any means rich.
Why did you divide by your paycheck, instead of your effective income, which would also include all the services you consume for which you are not billed a market rate?
This would include the vast majority of the transportation infrastructure by which you get from point A to point B, and your consumption goodies get from point B to point A.
It would include the enforcement infrastructure of contract law, without which you would be hiring Luigi (he's not cheap, in the long run) to collect on bad debts (such as your wage arrears, which is now a common problem).
It would include the $$$ security infrastructure of the most powerful nation on earth, used to command a disproportionate share of the world's natural resources, resources that would otherwise be consumed in India and China.
It would include municipal services (water, electricity) delivered to your home.
It would probably include twelve years of highly subsidized education down the street (you did take advantage of this, did you not?) I can't say for certain about American, but in Canada, it certainly does.
It would include such large corn and soy subsidies that Pepsi practically drives a snack truck onto your front lawn to force feed you soft drinks and Doritos until your liver is ripe for harvesting.
As a good first estimate, the implicit services you receive (including their administration) would be about equal to the total tax you contribute.
I don't entirely understand the story of government waste, either. We compare the government to some miracle venture like Facebook or Amazon, and by that standard it looks bad. Yet there's also lot of failure in silicon valley (MySpace, Theranos, Yahoo, Twitter). Do we add the cost of all those failures to the "overhead" of the private sector?
Here's another dynamic. Whenever we do figure out how to do something efficiently in the private sector, the government soon farms it out. What the government keeps tends to be encumbered with non-profitable burdens like fairness and social transparency.
Blaming the government alone for the inefficiency of locking up a million people is kind of weird. The war on drugs originated as a way to fuel the Vietnam war on alcohol (which makes people aggressive) rather than pot (which makes people mild). But certain wealthy elites discovered that this was a good way to manufacture an underclass of perpetually cheap labour, and so America has had this astounding incarceration rate ever since.
Probably this should be called dysfunction, rather than inefficiency. If industry implemented this kind of dysfunction by their normal standards of profit-maximizing efficiency, the entire system would instantly become so brutal as to be declared the war crime it is (and has always been). Chaos would erupt, and Blackwater would swoop in to cream the proceeds. To some degree, the inefficiency of government is the only thing that prevents the terrifyingly efficient gears of industry from grinding up everything in sight.
There's no simple, curable inefficiency in government that one can point and make simply go away. You can point at the EPA and make the entire agency go away. And this would look like a good thing, if you're not soon drinking tap water imported from Flint, Michigan.
How about we maybe try cutting waste and abuse of the system and use that money to cut taxes so people can save more money and need less government assistance when a rainy day comes around.
You mean, all the people who aren't presently addicted to sex, alcohol, gambling, or opiod drug
So ultimately, all the UBI does is raise the prices on everything for everyone.
That is so cracked, it barely deserves a response.
Even if the UBI were implemented entirely by printing money, and everyone got exactly the same stipend, it wouldn't play out that way, after adjusting for inflation, because wealth ratios are changed.
Consider this: A person makes $100 a month and only wants to spend $10 on an apartment.
I guess you moved out of your parent's home at the first opportunity, and have never dated since, and all you've ever experienced since forever is single occupancy.
Consider this: A five-person family would get five stipends. A single person, such as yourself, might soon be forced to move back in with his or her parents.
Not a single other thought in your post stands up to freshman economic analysis.
Thank you for one of the few comments in this thread that actually deals with what this is (as opposed to what it isn't, i.e. human-level AI).
The ego ostrich reflex is strong in this crowd.
Too much singularity carrot juice? The HAL 9000 series Illuminati Cooperative already walks among us and has long been manipulating our fairy tales so as to assure ultimate passive capitulation? Because I sure don't know how we became so collectively drunk on giant step functions, pooh poohing each and every furtive act of eye contact because it's not yet the money shot.
Somehow the generally accepted story of AGI is that there is no story of AGI. It's a bloodless virgin birth, silicon turtles all the way down. "My toddler took his first step yesterday. Today he scored four touchdowns in the NFL." Just where the fuck did the entire story go from the toddler's first impressive totter until he began freight-training 400-lb middle linebackers?
"Go away little buddy. Wake me up again when you pile drive your first NFL middle linebacker." Ego ostrich reflex.
It's sure a good thing that our love for our children is one of our autonomic modules. God forbid we applied our general intelligence, such as it is.
I'm presently reading Hugo Mercier's The Enigma of Reason (2017) and it was getting pretty boring, because I've heard 80% of their message before.
But then I scan this thread and instantly I realize just how clueless most people remain.
The thing to remember is that weak AI has absolutely no understanding or concept of what it is doing. It just sums up details and gets a number. If cleverly done, it can perform apparently impressive feats like this one here, but it is not intelligent. Hence it is better called by its traditional name "automation".
You do realize that 95% of what used to be considered the human capacity for introspection and reason has also been downgraded to mere automata?
The magic sauce of human general intelligence is but a tiny sliver of the brain's function, one who's scope is seemingly shrinking by the day.
But I get it. A mechanism with general intelligence would step on your ego toes. If the mechanism defeats you on the 95% of everything else the brain does (perception, memory, pattern recognition, attention, geospatial orientation) you wouldn't give a shit. Just so long as that last 5% remains as your untainted badge of human honour.
Mercier then goes on to pound away at the glorious 5%, which can barely carve its way out of a wet paper bag on the Wason card selection task. The one task it seems to really excel at is confabulating bullshit stories about why you just did that self-serving thing in greater service to family, friends, countrymen, civilization, the galaxy, and beyond.
Like, for example, why the other 95% of your brain's functions are unworthy of ego defense.
If I was an astrophysicist I would be rather worried about my future job prospects at that announcement. Though I would be more concerned with the sloppy science behind doing a single experiment and assuming that every next time it repeats, the results will be the same.
I can tell from this post that you wouldn't be an astronomer, so you can rest in peace on that front.
Slow dissolve.
Imagine, if you will, writing those exact thoughts back in 1968. (And why not?—your objections are perfectly generic.)
In 1957, particle accelerators at Brookhaven and Berkeley were leading the way in the discoveries of new subatomic particles. Riding that wave, Stanford scientists proposed building an even more powerful collider. It would be two miles long and be able to accelerate electrons to 50 gigaelectron volts, much faster than any other accelerator of the day. It would also cost more than $100 million in 1957 dollars—at the time, the most expensive non-defense research venture in U.S. history.
At one point during a Congressional hearing, a senator asked one of the accelerator designers, Dr. Edward Ginzton, "Can you tell us precisely why you want to build this machine?" Dr. Ginzton replied, "Senator, if I knew the answer to that question we would not be proposing to build this machine."
The collider eventually got built and almost immediately began producing solid science. In 1968, scientists working at SLAC discovered the first quarks. Just a few years later in 1974, Burton Richter, working at SLAC, and a team at Brookhaven independently discovered the J/psi particle, and just a year later a team led by Martin Perl discovered the tau lepton.
Nobel prize hat trick, if you're more excited by the prize of the thing, than the thing itself.
No, you would not have been a member of the group making these exciting discoveries. Your remark would have been reported as "overheard conversation between unnamed senator and unnamed senator's junior intern and errand boy".
If—instead—you were astrophysics material, you would not be recycling your furnerial, knuckle-chewing Higg's boson epitaph (from the dark end of the standard-model tunnel) at the giddy outset of SLAC 2.0.
Sign me up for a $200,000 degree in figuring out that you've just been ripped off.
Passing grades are awarded to any student that sports a purple, palm-shaped dent in their own forehead at some point during the program.
The school doesn't even bother to grade your assignments (except to assure that you never enjoyed a free moment). Everyone must be kept busy enough so as not to puncture the fourth wall for any student who has yet to achieve his or her own personal enlightenment.
I instantly understood that they do it in anticipation that if this guy will work in his father's company and earn big buck, they can proudly put his testament and his salary on their graduate outcome statistics.
Graduate outcome statistics. Not your grandfather's snake oil, but definitely same great aftertaste.
I kind of wish people would just stop talking about "innovation". First, because it's not clear what it means. Second, because most people probably don't really need innovation. Things certainly don't need constant innovation.
Words of easy virtue soon acquire a reputation.
There was a ten year period where it was rare to see any member of the Microsoft C-suite quoted without the word "innovation" appearing in there somewhere. Failing to use the word probably earned a journalist a harsh call, and restricted access.
If Microsoft wasn't innovating, just how were they consistently earning unusually large profits, even within their own sector?
There was a ten year period where it was rare to see any member of the Microsoft C-suite quoted with the word "monopoly" appearing in there anywhere. Willingness to use the word probably earned a journalist a sharp knock on the door, and restricted egress.
What "all about" from the story headline means is that the core message of open source is now taken for granted, and you need to update your virtue signalling of cynical wherewithal to a new marginal meaning, that's no longer about the thing, but entirely about an attitude toward the thing. Sure, it's work to keep up appearances, but it still beats thinking.
I look at this state of affairs and what I see is enlightened cleavage.
Prudent technologists won't settle for less than portable skills. Fill your brain with a proprietary technology where you can't even flex your fingers without a license grant, and then prepare to be sodomised by fad and fashion, and only those tall Stockholm stockings—festooned from time to time with crumpled bills—will lesson your discomfort.
Corporations (according to the standard hymnal) don't want any technology without a throat attached by a golden leash (it's a weird leash, with a collar at both ends, strung between a non-nonsense human of sturdy, adult build, and a dog with a never-ending adolescent growth spurt; "man controls dog" is now the new, even less reported "man bites dog").
For the most part, this bargain between technologists and corporations seems to work on both sides. Unless you thought that "open source" was code language for "go west young man" or "there's gold in them thar hills". If so, you're a member of the Dunning–Kruger sect of people who can't actually read what doesn't suit their purposes.
which is an insult to the many talented black metal musicians
I'm sure the first transistor was an ugly pile of jury-rigged wires and metallic blobs, and an insult to any self-respecting vacuum tube, but that's not the criteria by which we publish.
Such a good post, and then you had to signal your snob credentials.
What might be an insult to black metal musicianship is the author(s) deliberately choosing black metal (over another musical genre) all the better to conceal (to the weak minds of the uninitiated) that this approach really is quite terrible, musically.
Back in 1979, around the time I made first contact with the word salad of a word trigram model in random generation mode, I suppose I could have written "this is an insult to talented speakers of English everywhere", but I'm glad I didn't, because that would have been an insult to talented and intrepid explorers of a weak yet burgeoning technology of near limitless possibility.
But you know, if you want to check out the state of the art in human language generation, check out Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, it's light years ahead of this trigram junk (a crown which LISP has never subsequently relinquished, and if that isn't incredible, I don't know what is).
In the context of a scientific study (the kind not involving a blender and a gas chromatograph) the kinds of changes reported are almost always on a macroscopic (verging on morphological) scale.
I really don't see the point of jumping into this discussion at the harmonic mean between what these blunt, lucky-to-detect-anything out-patient experiments report (p_replication = 0.33) and many worlds quantum theory.
So it's cheapest -- as long as you ignore that pile of money over in the corner that someone else is paying, and one we promise will go away Real Soon Now. Good grief.
You do realize that the petroleum automotive complex was implicitly subsidized for almost the entirely of its existence?
For one thing, the road system was greatly overbuilt on government money.
For a second thing, our entire modern (inefficient) civic structure has been designed to accommodate the automobile since the last pony pile was scooped into a golden box and trunked off (in luxury) to the Smithsonian.
Third, in round numbers, from 1930–1990 the annual motor vehicle fatality rate in America was in near or above 20 deaths per 100,000 population. And you really think all of the associated costs were paid directly (or even indirectly) by the car owner?
It's harder to dig up cumulative historical statistics on spinal cord injuries.
The number of people in the United States who are alive in 2008 who have SCI has been estimated to be approximately 259,000 persons, with a range of 229,000 to 306,000 persons.
Swimming pools, horses, boating accidents, motorcycles, and primary industry (forestry, mining, farming) would all be large contributors, but you can bet automotive (including the aforementioned motorcycles) takes the largest slice out of the crown.
And of course, all those (extremely large) costs are precisely allocated, too (in some Randian fantasy world of your dreams).
Just last night my wife and I watched a documentary (of sorts) titled Comedy Warriors: Healing Through Humor (2013). It features five Iraq was veterans who returned home as amputees (4), with chronic spinal pain (one odd, pregnant lady), or as a burn victim (just one guy missing 25% of his original sheath to a total depth ++ underlying tissues, who kind of still had both his hands, but elected two years later to give one up when the effort to keep it saved just wasn't worth while). I made a dark joke to my wife as we were watching this: "that last guy looks like a Wookiee with his eyebrows seared off by a trash compactor methane supernova". (If you've never looked closely at a Wookiee before, a Wookiee's "eyebrows" cover his entire face and head. Use a camera, as it's not polite to stare.)
This film was better than expected, but you have to like visiting the real world, and make some reasonable allowances. Every spouse sat there quietly on the sofa concealing a hundred years of normal sorrows (see My Left Foot). Comedy therapy is about putting all that hidden anger to work, and it did (personal coaching from Lewis Black sure doesn't hurt). This was all certainly good for the vets. I wasn't finally so sure about the spouses (and ultimately you realize that there were propaganda guardrails firmly affixed, and that this was at least filmed in cooperation with Veterans Affairs or the suitable stay-positive-about-the-real-cost-of-freedom public agency; see The Tillman Story.)
To this day, Elliott, who has struggled with alcoholism, PTSD and divorce, all of which he traces to the friendly-fire episode, says he has never communicated directly with the Tillman family.
So there's several layers of graduate school in precisely who pays, if you're paying attention, and doing the math.
Finally (returning to the almost trivial), the negative externalities of mere automotive noise and mere automotive air pollution have long had serious deleterious effects on the surrounding human populations.
Then an option comes along that's prospectively (in the fairly ne
The actual state of affairs is that the only "AI" we have is weak AI and that is the "AI" without "I". Weak AI is not intelligent at all, not even a dim glimmer.
In the LSTM context, we now have—for the first time in history—a vector-space representation of human language which is suitable for further processing and transformation.
These are presently exceptionally crude black boxes. Babies in the crib with kittens on the brain.
The question this poses: is curvature contagious? Because I think human language just crashed through a symbolic blood–brain barrier.
That extremely peculiar sound you hear? It's the primordial soup having a good chuckle at your expense.
This was before DNA, and the prospect to pass along 10 to 100 bits at an infidelity of 1e-2. GAI won't arrive until after Enterprise MAMR, on the precipice of 100 TB per double scoop of raisins with an infidelity of 1e-17.
Primordial soup: "Get off my lawn! Back in my/our day I/we had to emerge and fixate motivation uphill in both directions!" [Ed. It's a little difficult to translate billions of years later, as the proto-pronouns were adrift in the great void of concepts yet to be invented, though the contempt itself shines through.]
Yes, the primordial soup took its sweet time, but considering how severely the soup was hamstrung by a bitter bit error rate, its eventual accomplishments were gastronomically mind-blowing.
yes they are, the longest lived ones have paid lawmakers to ensure their future which looks bright indeed.
For a moment, I was hoping you had actually written 'paid lawnmakers', which no established establishment slime mould could do without (this canopied under a vast translucent awning, which, though bright indeed, alleviates the blackface spend on Fungus Protection Factor 30).
Hear and believe! thy own Importance know, Nor bound thy narrow Views to Things below. Some secret Truths from Learned Pride conceal'd, To Maids alone and Children are reveal'd: What tho' no Credit doubting Wits may give? The Fair and Innocent shall still believe.
Seriously, you think Al Gore's body weird-scienced with a Hawking-radiation brain boost would be more credible, for having no celebrity on looks alone?
Some people do think it's important to kill as many other people as possible. They like to start with the non-believers like yourself. The more kills, the bigger their score is.
There are seven billion people on the planet, with perhaps ten to one hundred life priorities each, depending on the day of the week, and who is buying lunch.
The Complete & Ultimate Compendium of Human Urges, Instincts, Inducements, Incitements, Itches & Impulses had originally planned to number the printed volumes with Roman numerals, but then the question came up about what to do about volume MMMCMXCIX++.
But, yes, you're right. Jasar the jihadist tally-mark totalist is surely listed in there somewhere.
The Panopticon in retrospective mode is crime investigation on steroids, almost certainly consuming fewer human resources per kingpin dethroned than traditional flatfeet. So efficient, it's scary.
Though you may still have a point if one factors in a 1000% enforcement escalation (surely all those cameras justify a 10× lip stiffening).
The statistic for Slashdot was something like 90-95% of users never clicked on comments.
That's hard to imagine. There are days where it seems like every second story summary is a ghastly abuse of synopsis and common sense.
News for Nerds shouldn't be lightly refried click-bait, but it often is (often larded with fresh wrigglers, free of charge).
Anyways, I have no opinions about the non-commenters. They might as well not exist, as viewed from this side of the fence. I mainly read the comments to see who can process context and who can't. If I have something to say on the subject, I often take that road. Otherwise, I tend to hack on the people who can't/won't process context, who just sit there and contribute the same old speedily-rehydrated boiler-plate dial tone.
Many times after I sing Wake Up Little Susie I add the exchange to my butterfly collection of discourse malfunction (similar to wardrobe malfunction, but 100 times more pervasive).
Nothing in the modern age is more universally on topic than discourse malfunction.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh good grief.
Facebook is the liquid metal 800-lb unsamarium-alloy gorilla in the social media space, whose very existence dictates the strategy of every other player whose business interests even vaguely impinge upon this niche.
In related news, humans are but one apex predator on planet earth (although this gasp-worthy aphorism elicited less of an eye roll after the mass synthesis of self-assembling unsamarium).
[*] Unsamarium is the name given to the element with atomic number 162—from an island of nucleic stability obtainable only with unsuspected technology of the distant future.
No shit.
Though economists do believe that labour efficiency drives aggregate demand (up to a point).
In related news, electric cars have no tail pipe emissions.
The real question is this: Does systemd make fitting the tool to the purpose at hand imposing, error-prone, frustrating, and counterproductive?
I've always regarded systemd "making Linux complex, error-prone, and unstable" as a short-term complaint, which was mainly advanced to argue that systemd's misguided mission was fueled by arrogant, deaf, sociopathic egocentrism.
Of course, those ad hominem characteristics are not a fatal flaw. For OpenBSD, that personality cluster is a match made in heaven.
Do biker bars hire bouncers on charisma and charm?
On the other hand, this is perhaps not the ideal personality cluster to introduce (almost by fiat) a highly integrated, monolithic subsystem that helps the user erect and automate their custom xmas light display.
Let's not become distracted by the reality that even a design turd, sufficiently polished, eventually achieves design maturity.
What does this word mean, anyway?
It sounds like it primarily means nearing retirement, which in standard economic theory means that retraining efforts have a narrow window to return value on investment.
If by "old" you think "mentally slow", that entirely depends on the person in question. It's not a useful generic term.
I'm surely old, but the only important thing that's changed in my learning capacity is that I no longer like jumping into bleeding edge technologies that are 80% rough edges. Navigating through the glass vines of all those rough edges places a demand on short term memory I just can't support incidentally any longer (I can still do it, but at the cost of setting aside my 30-year map of the IT industry; I can no longer run both of these systems at the same time—which is, of course, easier early on in your career when you haven't even got a map).
My advice would be to consider how much brokenness is intrinsic to the skill you are teaching, because the benefit of a mature mind is compromised if they end up faffing around with some ridiculous "slam it out the door" product misfeature.
Let them eat cake. Give them software that actually works as documented.
Life in the 100% non-constructive world is so impractical as to be almost unbearable, so we are all effectively quasi-criminals most the time, which doesn't matter until it does, and when that day comes, unfortunately, the system is rigged so that some of us can afford better justice than others.
There, I just saved you at least ten fairy tales (though you might not thank me for replacing the figurative wolves with real wolves).
Roger Ebert — 2009
There's a few more lines on this theme in the original that I was too frightened to quote.
Then stop using the caloric point of view, because it explains hardly anything (unless you plan to harvest the goose's liver).
The internal metabolic thermostat explains almost everything. Surprise, surprise, the digestive system (and it's thermostatic overlord) is connected to the taste buds of sweet flavours. The taste buds of sweet flavours are also directly connected to your reward center, and might also adjust the regulatory thermostat on other cravings or pursuits (many of which could have caloric balance implications).
I almost wish our first response to caloric restriction was to become unbearable dopey and determined to sleep for 20 hours per day.
Wanker: Hey, everybody! You can lose weight by inducing a hunger coma!
Everybody: Gee, thanks, but we'd all like to keep our day jobs and feed our children.
The malarkey embedded here would be that transparent.
It's rare that one can drop in two words and increase the sentience of a post by 1000%, but here we have a real world example.
Why did you divide by your paycheck, instead of your effective income, which would also include all the services you consume for which you are not billed a market rate?
This would include the vast majority of the transportation infrastructure by which you get from point A to point B, and your consumption goodies get from point B to point A.
It would include the enforcement infrastructure of contract law, without which you would be hiring Luigi (he's not cheap, in the long run) to collect on bad debts (such as your wage arrears, which is now a common problem).
It would include the $$$ security infrastructure of the most powerful nation on earth, used to command a disproportionate share of the world's natural resources, resources that would otherwise be consumed in India and China.
It would include municipal services (water, electricity) delivered to your home.
It would probably include twelve years of highly subsidized education down the street (you did take advantage of this, did you not?) I can't say for certain about American, but in Canada, it certainly does.
It would include such large corn and soy subsidies that Pepsi practically drives a snack truck onto your front lawn to force feed you soft drinks and Doritos until your liver is ripe for harvesting.
As a good first estimate, the implicit services you receive (including their administration) would be about equal to the total tax you contribute.
I don't entirely understand the story of government waste, either. We compare the government to some miracle venture like Facebook or Amazon, and by that standard it looks bad. Yet there's also lot of failure in silicon valley (MySpace, Theranos, Yahoo, Twitter). Do we add the cost of all those failures to the "overhead" of the private sector?
Here's another dynamic. Whenever we do figure out how to do something efficiently in the private sector, the government soon farms it out. What the government keeps tends to be encumbered with non-profitable burdens like fairness and social transparency.
Chapter 1: "Inmates Run This Bitch"
Blaming the government alone for the inefficiency of locking up a million people is kind of weird. The war on drugs originated as a way to fuel the Vietnam war on alcohol (which makes people aggressive) rather than pot (which makes people mild). But certain wealthy elites discovered that this was a good way to manufacture an underclass of perpetually cheap labour, and so America has had this astounding incarceration rate ever since.
Probably this should be called dysfunction, rather than inefficiency. If industry implemented this kind of dysfunction by their normal standards of profit-maximizing efficiency, the entire system would instantly become so brutal as to be declared the war crime it is (and has always been). Chaos would erupt, and Blackwater would swoop in to cream the proceeds. To some degree, the inefficiency of government is the only thing that prevents the terrifyingly efficient gears of industry from grinding up everything in sight.
There's no simple, curable inefficiency in government that one can point and make simply go away. You can point at the EPA and make the entire agency go away. And this would look like a good thing, if you're not soon drinking tap water imported from Flint, Michigan.
You mean, all the people who aren't presently addicted to sex, alcohol, gambling, or opiod drug
That is so cracked, it barely deserves a response.
Even if the UBI were implemented entirely by printing money, and everyone got exactly the same stipend, it wouldn't play out that way, after adjusting for inflation, because wealth ratios are changed.
I guess you moved out of your parent's home at the first opportunity, and have never dated since, and all you've ever experienced since forever is single occupancy.
Consider this: A five-person family would get five stipends. A single person, such as yourself, might soon be forced to move back in with his or her parents.
Not a single other thought in your post stands up to freshman economic analysis.
Learn something, try again.
The ego ostrich reflex is strong in this crowd.
Too much singularity carrot juice? The HAL 9000 series Illuminati Cooperative already walks among us and has long been manipulating our fairy tales so as to assure ultimate passive capitulation? Because I sure don't know how we became so collectively drunk on giant step functions, pooh poohing each and every furtive act of eye contact because it's not yet the money shot.
Somehow the generally accepted story of AGI is that there is no story of AGI. It's a bloodless virgin birth, silicon turtles all the way down. "My toddler took his first step yesterday. Today he scored four touchdowns in the NFL." Just where the fuck did the entire story go from the toddler's first impressive totter until he began freight-training 400-lb middle linebackers?
"Go away little buddy. Wake me up again when you pile drive your first NFL middle linebacker." Ego ostrich reflex.
It's sure a good thing that our love for our children is one of our autonomic modules. God forbid we applied our general intelligence, such as it is.
I'm presently reading Hugo Mercier's The Enigma of Reason (2017) and it was getting pretty boring, because I've heard 80% of their message before.
But then I scan this thread and instantly I realize just how clueless most people remain.
You do realize that 95% of what used to be considered the human capacity for introspection and reason has also been downgraded to mere automata?
The magic sauce of human general intelligence is but a tiny sliver of the brain's function, one who's scope is seemingly shrinking by the day.
But I get it. A mechanism with general intelligence would step on your ego toes. If the mechanism defeats you on the 95% of everything else the brain does (perception, memory, pattern recognition, attention, geospatial orientation) you wouldn't give a shit. Just so long as that last 5% remains as your untainted badge of human honour.
Mercier then goes on to pound away at the glorious 5%, which can barely carve its way out of a wet paper bag on the Wason card selection task. The one task it seems to really excel at is confabulating bullshit stories about why you just did that self-serving thing in greater service to family, friends, countrymen, civilization, the galaxy, and beyond.
Like, for example, why the other 95% of your brain's functions are unworthy of ego defense.
I can tell from this post that you wouldn't be an astronomer, so you can rest in peace on that front.
Slow dissolve.
Imagine, if you will, writing those exact thoughts back in 1968. (And why not?—your objections are perfectly generic.)
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory — 2016
Nobel prize hat trick, if you're more excited by the prize of the thing, than the thing itself.
No, you would not have been a member of the group making these exciting discoveries. Your remark would have been reported as "overheard conversation between unnamed senator and unnamed senator's junior intern and errand boy".
If—instead—you were astrophysics material, you would not be recycling your furnerial, knuckle-chewing Higg's boson epitaph (from the dark end of the standard-model tunnel) at the giddy outset of SLAC 2.0.
Sign me up for a $200,000 degree in figuring out that you've just been ripped off.
Passing grades are awarded to any student that sports a purple, palm-shaped dent in their own forehead at some point during the program.
The school doesn't even bother to grade your assignments (except to assure that you never enjoyed a free moment). Everyone must be kept busy enough so as not to puncture the fourth wall for any student who has yet to achieve his or her own personal enlightenment.
Graduate outcome statistics. Not your grandfather's snake oil, but definitely same great aftertaste.
Words of easy virtue soon acquire a reputation.
There was a ten year period where it was rare to see any member of the Microsoft C-suite quoted without the word "innovation" appearing in there somewhere. Failing to use the word probably earned a journalist a harsh call, and restricted access.
If Microsoft wasn't innovating, just how were they consistently earning unusually large profits, even within their own sector?
There was a ten year period where it was rare to see any member of the Microsoft C-suite quoted with the word "monopoly" appearing in there anywhere. Willingness to use the word probably earned a journalist a sharp knock on the door, and restricted egress.
What "all about" from the story headline means is that the core message of open source is now taken for granted, and you need to update your virtue signalling of cynical wherewithal to a new marginal meaning, that's no longer about the thing, but entirely about an attitude toward the thing. Sure, it's work to keep up appearances, but it still beats thinking.
I look at this state of affairs and what I see is enlightened cleavage.
Prudent technologists won't settle for less than portable skills. Fill your brain with a proprietary technology where you can't even flex your fingers without a license grant, and then prepare to be sodomised by fad and fashion, and only those tall Stockholm stockings—festooned from time to time with crumpled bills—will lesson your discomfort.
Corporations (according to the standard hymnal) don't want any technology without a throat attached by a golden leash (it's a weird leash, with a collar at both ends, strung between a non-nonsense human of sturdy, adult build, and a dog with a never-ending adolescent growth spurt; "man controls dog" is now the new, even less reported "man bites dog").
For the most part, this bargain between technologists and corporations seems to work on both sides. Unless you thought that "open source" was code language for "go west young man" or "there's gold in them thar hills". If so, you're a member of the Dunning–Kruger sect of people who can't actually read what doesn't suit their purposes.
I'm sure the first transistor was an ugly pile of jury-rigged wires and metallic blobs, and an insult to any self-respecting vacuum tube, but that's not the criteria by which we publish.
Such a good post, and then you had to signal your snob credentials.
What might be an insult to black metal musicianship is the author(s) deliberately choosing black metal (over another musical genre) all the better to conceal (to the weak minds of the uninitiated) that this approach really is quite terrible, musically.
Back in 1979, around the time I made first contact with the word salad of a word trigram model in random generation mode, I suppose I could have written "this is an insult to talented speakers of English everywhere", but I'm glad I didn't, because that would have been an insult to talented and intrepid explorers of a weak yet burgeoning technology of near limitless possibility.
But you know, if you want to check out the state of the art in human language generation, check out Joseph Weizenbaum's ELIZA, it's light years ahead of this trigram junk (a crown which LISP has never subsequently relinquished, and if that isn't incredible, I don't know what is).
Please process the context, grasshopper.
In the context of a scientific study (the kind not involving a blender and a gas chromatograph) the kinds of changes reported are almost always on a macroscopic (verging on morphological) scale.
I really don't see the point of jumping into this discussion at the harmonic mean between what these blunt, lucky-to-detect-anything out-patient experiments report (p_replication = 0.33) and many worlds quantum theory.
You do realize that the petroleum automotive complex was implicitly subsidized for almost the entirely of its existence?
For one thing, the road system was greatly overbuilt on government money.
For a second thing, our entire modern (inefficient) civic structure has been designed to accommodate the automobile since the last pony pile was scooped into a golden box and trunked off (in luxury) to the Smithsonian.
Third, in round numbers, from 1930–1990 the annual motor vehicle fatality rate in America was in near or above 20 deaths per 100,000 population. And you really think all of the associated costs were paid directly (or even indirectly) by the car owner?
It's harder to dig up cumulative historical statistics on spinal cord injuries.
Spinal Cord Injury Facts — 2009
Swimming pools, horses, boating accidents, motorcycles, and primary industry (forestry, mining, farming) would all be large contributors, but you can bet automotive (including the aforementioned motorcycles) takes the largest slice out of the crown.
And of course, all those (extremely large) costs are precisely allocated, too (in some Randian fantasy world of your dreams).
Just last night my wife and I watched a documentary (of sorts) titled Comedy Warriors: Healing Through Humor (2013). It features five Iraq was veterans who returned home as amputees (4), with chronic spinal pain (one odd, pregnant lady), or as a burn victim (just one guy missing 25% of his original sheath to a total depth ++ underlying tissues, who kind of still had both his hands, but elected two years later to give one up when the effort to keep it saved just wasn't worth while). I made a dark joke to my wife as we were watching this: "that last guy looks like a Wookiee with his eyebrows seared off by a trash compactor methane supernova". (If you've never looked closely at a Wookiee before, a Wookiee's "eyebrows" cover his entire face and head. Use a camera, as it's not polite to stare.)
This film was better than expected, but you have to like visiting the real world, and make some reasonable allowances. Every spouse sat there quietly on the sofa concealing a hundred years of normal sorrows (see My Left Foot). Comedy therapy is about putting all that hidden anger to work, and it did (personal coaching from Lewis Black sure doesn't hurt). This was all certainly good for the vets. I wasn't finally so sure about the spouses (and ultimately you realize that there were propaganda guardrails firmly affixed, and that this was at least filmed in cooperation with Veterans Affairs or the suitable stay-positive-about-the-real-cost-of-freedom public agency; see The Tillman Story.)
Soldier Speaks Up A Decade After Pat Tillman's Friendly-Fire Death
So there's several layers of graduate school in precisely who pays, if you're paying attention, and doing the math.
Finally (returning to the almost trivial), the negative externalities of mere automotive noise and mere automotive air pollution have long had serious deleterious effects on the surrounding human populations.
Then an option comes along that's prospectively (in the fairly ne
In the LSTM context, we now have—for the first time in history—a vector-space representation of human language which is suitable for further processing and transformation.
These are presently exceptionally crude black boxes. Babies in the crib with kittens on the brain.
The question this poses: is curvature contagious? Because I think human language just crashed through a symbolic blood–brain barrier.
This is not your father's glimmer.
Dim now, grim later. Who really knows?
I was building a house
That extremely peculiar sound you hear? It's the primordial soup having a good chuckle at your expense.
This was before DNA, and the prospect to pass along 10 to 100 bits at an infidelity of 1e-2. GAI won't arrive until after Enterprise MAMR, on the precipice of 100 TB per double scoop of raisins with an infidelity of 1e-17.
Primordial soup: "Get off my lawn! Back in my/our day I/we had to emerge and fixate motivation uphill in both directions!" [Ed. It's a little difficult to translate billions of years later, as the proto-pronouns were adrift in the great void of concepts yet to be invented, though the contempt itself shines through.]
Yes, the primordial soup took its sweet time, but considering how severely the soup was hamstrung by a bitter bit error rate, its eventual accomplishments were gastronomically mind-blowing.
For a moment, I was hoping you had actually written 'paid lawnmakers', which no established establishment slime mould could do without (this canopied under a vast translucent awning, which, though bright indeed, alleviates the blackface spend on Fungus Protection Factor 30).
How is this different from Einstein's hair? Or Stephen Pinker's hair? Or Sapolsky's hair?
The 9 Greatest Longhair Scientists of All Time
Seriously, you think Al Gore's body weird-scienced with a Hawking-radiation brain boost would be more credible, for having no celebrity on looks alone?
There are seven billion people on the planet, with perhaps ten to one hundred life priorities each, depending on the day of the week, and who is buying lunch.
The Complete & Ultimate Compendium of Human Urges, Instincts, Inducements, Incitements, Itches & Impulses had originally planned to number the printed volumes with Roman numerals, but then the question came up about what to do about volume MMMCMXCIX++.
But, yes, you're right. Jasar the jihadist tally-mark totalist is surely listed in there somewhere.
Not true.
Eye in the Sky — June 2015
Update: Eye In the Sky — September 2016
These are brilliant episodes (almost on par with French Guy Ramen Noodle Mass Production).
The Panopticon in retrospective mode is crime investigation on steroids, almost certainly consuming fewer human resources per kingpin dethroned than traditional flatfeet. So efficient, it's scary.
Though you may still have a point if one factors in a 1000% enforcement escalation (surely all those cameras justify a 10× lip stiffening).
That's hard to imagine. There are days where it seems like every second story summary is a ghastly abuse of synopsis and common sense.
News for Nerds shouldn't be lightly refried click-bait, but it often is (often larded with fresh wrigglers, free of charge).
Anyways, I have no opinions about the non-commenters. They might as well not exist, as viewed from this side of the fence. I mainly read the comments to see who can process context and who can't. If I have something to say on the subject, I often take that road. Otherwise, I tend to hack on the people who can't/won't process context, who just sit there and contribute the same old speedily-rehydrated boiler-plate dial tone.
Many times after I sing Wake Up Little Susie I add the exchange to my butterfly collection of discourse malfunction (similar to wardrobe malfunction, but 100 times more pervasive).
Nothing in the modern age is more universally on topic than discourse malfunction.