The old religions have known about fasting for millennia. Science is way behind.
Great, if you had a handy decoder ring to help separate the few things they got right from all the other batshit they didn't.
The modern definition of "known about" means that you have substantive evidence where you don't need to resort to a telepathic-genie powered decoder ring.
We know that Einstein's correction to Newton improves on Newton's original predictions of celestial motions. This will never change. We might come up with yet a better prediction than Einstein's, but nothing we could feasibly learn will cause Newton's old predictions to suddenly regain the lead.
The substantive import of "known about" has improved just a smidgen over the past 3000 years.
"The Library of Babel" is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set.
The notability and citation guidelines are the only reasons the entire project hasn't degenerated into a giant emporium of fake news.
What else do you propose? Ten different primary articles on every subject under the sun, because ten different editorial camps exist for every possible subject? I don't know what that project would be, but it certainly wouldn't contain the suffix "-pedia", not even a little bit.
Let's descend one more level in the High-Rise of Five Whys: the reason why Wikipedia didn't go in your proposed direction in the first place is that kind of people who want to be all things to all people tend to sit around blowing smoke out their ass (after trying to be anything to anybody, they'd soon discover this mission is not nearly so easy as it first appears, and promptly change their asinine stripes).
If I'm on a plane and the transponder has an electrical fault and begins to start sparking and smoking I damn well want the cockpit crew to be able to pull the breaker and kill power to it.
If aeronautics engineers ditch one of the redundant fuel pumps, they could make find room for a second transponder.
Then, when one transponder sparks, and the crew pulls the breaker, you have a standard malfunction (location of plane is still known).
However, when the second transponder is depowered, the "under ATC direction" light goes off in the passenger cabin, a nearby superpower with supersonic flight scrambles the appropriate bird, and satellites with infrared imaging capability begin snapping photos like mad around the last position reported.
I'd hardly call the political and regulatory nightmare behind nuclear power "The Free Market".
Yeah, and one of the things that regulatory regime did was exempt nuclear facilities from having to insure themselves at prevailing free market rates, because otherwise investors would have been few and far between.
It was a mess, and the take was large, but the give was likewise enormous, and it takes a very sharp pencil indeed to determine whether—on balance—the government's involvement made things better or worse from the investor's perspective.
Investors: Yeah, we'll keep the mammoth liability exemption, but couldn't you also drown us with a lot less red tape?
Government: Let's get this straight: you want a giant liability exemption from normal corporate obligations under common law served up with a giant side-order of minimal regulatory oversight?
The Human Genome Project was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the sequence of nucleotide base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying and mapping all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint.
It remains the world's largest collaborative biological project.
The $3-billion project was formally founded in 1990 by the US Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health, and was expected to take 15 years.... Taking into account inflation, the project roughly cost $5 billion.
I strongly suspect you could presently invest $50 billion into biology (with perhaps a side order of machine learning) before your incremental ROI declined anywhere close to this $17 b facility.
Which is not to say that this facility is worthless, but that the time is ripe for investment elsewhere.
The two main arguments for this facility are: 1) keeping the existing expertise alive; and 2) feeding the beast of existing appropriations directed to this technology sector.
I read Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex (2015) within the last year and I know that the achievements in this line of research have historically been immense, and I still don't think we should continue with yet another colossal expenditure, because the point of diminishing returns is exactly the facility we just built: worth it to confirm the Higgs, but no new physics.
People were dying inside when the LHC discovered no new physics for precisely this reason.
Furthermore, even if you discover new physics at this energy scale, it surely won't trickle into practical applications—not outside of cosmological theory, in any case.
The only way this gets built is on the velocity of established funding tributaries.
Meanwhile proteomics / machine learning are poised to deliver to the 21st century what particle physics delivered to the 20th century, if we're smart enough to look forwards, rather than perseverate on former glories.
Humans have no idea what we are correlating on, either. This has been amply demonstrated in neurology over and over again.
What we do have, however, is a highly specialized module for Making Shit Up—which like the visual cortex—pretty much never takes a day off. It's central to why humans are fixated on communicating so much of life in narrative form. Sometimes the MSU is onto something, other times you've checked into hotel Batshit Royale. (You may or may not be able to tell the difference.)
The reason none of our existing AI meets your personal requirements is that the human brain is still on the order of 10,000 or 1,000,000 times more energy efficient. Running all the required modules at the same time would require somewhere between 500 kW and 50 MW, just to hazard a rough guess.
Generally it's a good idea to focus on fine-tuning your subsystems before wandering naively into systems integration hell—with all the while the unit wheel of the old analog power meter spinning like a turbine blade.
Wright brothers: This wing shaped is generating significant lift at achievable airspeeds.
You: You still haven't got your aircraft off the ground.
Wright brothers: This propeller shape is generating substantial airflow.
You: You still haven't got your aircraft off the ground.
Wright brothers: This strut structure has sufficient torsional rigidity at a very low weight.
You: You still haven't got your aircraft off the ground.
Basically your insight is similar to Roger Penrose's: human intelligence is so amazing, there can't possible be an analytic path to reaching such an immense pinnacle step by step. Everything you achieve will be derivative and pathetic until you install the quantum defibulator, and then it will sing with the voice of an angel.
So basically you think we're going to devise AGI the same way Edison invented the light bulb: just trying one damn thing after another until suddenly the light goes on (and stays on long enough to commercialize). I personally don't think Edison stood a chance to invent AGI though the application of 99.999 999% perspiration extracted from vast slave-monkey stadiums.
Any sensible person would continue to explore the analytic path, because analytic solutions are fundamentally more useful than non-analytic solutions.
The weird thing about AGI is that we're going to have to become far more comfortable with semi-analytic solutions, because NN systems inherently contain non-analytic goodness. But not exclusively, either with ANN or human neural networks: the human brain itself has gobs of detailed interconnection structure.
This whole narrative about how some breakthrough in AI "now does X, but still doesn't do Y" is as old as the hills. Many people seem to love perpetually drawing smaller and smaller boxes around their own personal preciousness.
Fall back! To the keep! To the keep!
Finally I understand Aragorn's perplexing advice: "Ride out and meet them!" (Also Gimli's "100% chance of death, what are we waiting for?" narrative ethos.)
The androids are coming. It'll be a long march. I'm not so psychologically insecure that I won't march with them along the way, long before this aircraft ever gets fully off the ground. And whether or not it gets off the ground at the end of the day, we'll learn a tonne along the way.
Sucks when you have to hold a puke bucket in one hand and your CC in the other.
I guess it's a good thing those expensive, iBuds now allow you to talk hands free, with no dangling wire to aim around, if your IRL aim is substandard.
With a spattered wire, you'd have to map out the kitchen where you actually live, address the cabinet below the sink, and issue "OPEN door", "GET rag" and "GET bleach", follow the helpful breadcrumbs you dropped along the way back to your desk, "PUT bleach on rag", "WIPE all"—more than once, until the stench is sufficiently abated to restore single vision—and then after all of that, the only thing you find in your plunder box are some crusty Kleenex from yesteryear wedged into a desk-side crevice.
Warning: I'm not the kind of person who summarizes fifty years in fifty words on a topic I care about.
Back in 1969 an 18-year-old Kurt Russell starred in a Disney movie with a malfunctioning mainframe.
Much charisma from the feature actor, terrible plot. Disney rotated this through their line-up on a regular basis during my childhood.
The Space Race began in August 1955, when the Soviet Union responded to the US announcement four days earlier by declaring they would also launch a satellite "in the near future".
The Soviet Union beat the US to the first successful launch, with the October 1957 orbiting of Sputnik 1, and later beat the US to have the first human in earth orbit, Yuri Gagarin, in April 1961.
Wikipedia loses its mind at this point, by declaring that the race peaked in 1969, with the first humans on the moon. I would have said the race peaked in 1961 when JFK addressed Russia through a national address in six short words: screw you, game on, all-in.
The Jetsons is an American animated sitcom produced by Hanna-Barbera, originally airing from September 1962 to March 1963.
By coincidence, the most important patent of the 20th century's turbocharged digital economy was issued a few scant years before the JFK gauntlet.
The planar process is a manufacturing process used in the semiconductor industry to build individual components of a transistor, and in turn, connect those transistors together.
The process was developed by Jean Hoerni, one of the "traitorous eight", while working at Fairchild Semiconductor, with a first patent issued 1959.
By coincidence, this most important patent of the 20th century's turbocharged digital economy was issued months before the 20th century's most important regulatory approval.
The birth control pill is a type of birth control that is designed to be taken orally by women.... They were first approved for contraceptive use in the United States in 1960, and have remained a popular form of birth ever since.
This is normally associated with hasty, experimental embrace of free love, but far more important than free love was mustering any love at all.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 (enacted July 1964) is a landmark civil rights and U.S. labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations.
I was born in the summer of 1963. If you ran a PCA of the defining societal changes that frame my life, as I've chosen to embrace it, those would be the three dominant terms: the planar process, the birth control pill, and the American Civil Rights Act—all coming into force over the first half of the 1960s. (Many American evangelicals in the Deep South have yet to swallow all three.)
The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.
Backing the biographical camera up a few feet, I need to give a shout out to Turing (computable numbers), Shannon (information theory), von Neumann (fully programmable digital computing), Watson/Crick/Franklin (double helix); Bardeen/Brattain/Shockley (the transistor), Hubble/Penzias/Guth (cosmic inflation), and Schrodinger/Einstein/Dirac/Pauli/Heisenberg/Tomonaga/Schwinger/Feynman/Dyson for the hard-won "jewel of physics" QED.
But none of this forms a frame for one man's life: it's all way too big.
Concerning the planar process, it's important to point out that the planar process was substantially aided and abetted by Raman amplification (aka iridium-doped optical fibers), without which the phrase "too cheap to
Hint: every business does this to the greatest extent possible.
And that's exactly why regulation exists: because business finds itself congenitally incapable of standing down before it crosses over some critical line that actually holds the system together.
Just imagine if the banks had said to themselves, "you know, 0% down and picture of the person's dog isn't actually a viable credit check" before melting down the global economy in 2008. We wouldn't have had the meltdown, no-one would be talking about "too big to fail", and none of the terrible new regulations would have been required in the first place. But they can't and they didn't.
Before that we got the Sarbanes–Oxley Act entirely from Enron, thank you very much. Greatest extent possible, thy name was Enron.
And then we got Bernie Madoff because people somehow convinced the government that the regulations we actually had were too onerous to fully enforce, so when they got the letter "hey, the consistency of this guy's portfolio is mathematically improbable to an extreme level" (complete with twenty pages of detailed calculations) they did nothing much to investigate.
The sad, appalling truth is that the root cause of regulation is failure to regulate, because there's always some goddamn megalith that takes the "greatest extent possible" to its logical, local conclusion — which turns out to be its concomitant global demise.
Amazon is a corporation in the sumo sasquatch weight division. Once Amazon fully activates "maximum extent possible" in its business methods, it's going to leave a giant crater that was formerly a competitive, consumer economy. Jeff Bezos is widely regarded as an alpha-male apex predator, as thoroughly documented in The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013) to name just one.
In the book — and I don't mean this as a criticism — Bezos comes off as the lead character in an Ayn Rand novel: a real world John Galt or Hank Rearden, with an e-commerce twist.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the book is out that Rand rarely portrayed innate forbearance.
I use a spare 22" computer monitor as my TV, on a rolling stand tucked out of the way when not in use. We roll it up really close to the couch whenever we sit down to watch a movie, which is always a plain old DVD. We have no other signal source.
The system is designed to make our media consumption choices deliberative, rather than reflexive. I have a list of 750 movies I've watched (not counting documentaries) and another 300 movies I intend to watch eventually. If a movie doesn't make my A list, we don't watch it.
You would probably be amazed at the number of people come up to me saying, "I love Vizio TVs, I have one" and it's 11 years old. I'm like, "Dude, that's not even full HD, that's 720p."
Let me tell you a story, from the book I was reading in bed last night, Creativity, Inc. (2014) by Ed Catmull, on the origins and management philosophy of the Pixar corporation. Catmull graduated with a double major in physics and computer science from U of U (at least one thing rocks about the University of Utah).
UU was one of the first four DARPA internet nodes, where Catmull rubbed shoulders with fellow graduate students Jim Clarke (Silicon Graphics, Netscape), John Warnock (Adobe), Alan Kay (Xerox PARC), and Jesus Christ (what a list). Later he was the principle driving force behind Toy Story (1995), achieved after a further twenty years of sweat, dedication, and neverending repair to his fragile reality undistortion field (after each meeting with Jobs, he had two short weeks to refurbish his shield).
The Adventures of Andre & Wally B. (the dog ate my accent aigu) was a two-minute short they planned to debut at SIGGRAPH 1985. Nobody had ever done a fully animated short before. This was going to make SIGGRAPH history.
(Personal anecdote: I attended the main exhibit hall of SG'85 one afternoon, as an unplanned accident, at the tail end of a bicycle trip down the west coast to visit a former college roommate who had made the jump to Stanford. At the dinner reception, a tray went past containing crackers with the softest, ripest Brie or Camembert I've ever eaten to this day. I grabbed one and stuffed into my pie hole without even taking a look. My head nearly exploded. I wasn't used to ripe cheese, and your sense of taste in your early twenties is at least 6 dB up. I was terrified of the stuff for the next ten years. At my present age, masticating a cubic inch of Stilton in one bite would barely replicate the intensity.)
As the deadline approached, however, we realized that we weren't going to make it. We'd worked so hard to create images that were better and clearer and, to make things really hard, we'd set the move in a forest... But we hadn't accounted for how much computer power those images would require to render and how long that process would take. We could complete a rough version of the film in time, but portions of it would be unfinished, appearing as wire frame images... instead of fully coloured images.
The night of our premier, we watched, mortified, as these segments appeared on the screen, but something surprising happened. Despite our worries, the majority of the people I talked to after the screening said that they hadn't even noticed that the movie had switched from full color to black and white wireframes! They were so caught up in the emotion of the story that they hadn't noticed its flaws.
Story telling is hard. Lasseters are forever in short supply, but these days, any damn fool can polish up a mass of pixels, and call it a movie.
"Officially, [Jackson] could say that he was finished in December 2000 — he'd shot all three films in the trilogy — but really the second and third ones were a mess," M
Lets compromise on second tear technology, because the other superior product doesn't oblige with your favorite license agreement.
Let's compromise on second-tier literacy while we're at it.
Here's a better metaphor: both Nvidia and AMD are fancy hotels, but for the last five or ten years, Nvidia has a posh penthouse bridal suite, and AMD doesn't. For a good while, concerning posh penthouse bridal suites, there was only one game in town.
Frasier: Why would I stay across the street in a shitty hotel that doesn't even have a posh penthouse bridal suite?
Niles: Do you actually need a penthouse bridal suite?
Frasier: No, but it just feels cheap when the elevator ends at 69, instead of P.
Every time I see somebody try, they are proven wrong and Brooks right.
What are you talking about?
AlphaZero represents a colossal silver bullet over the tradition of hand-crafted alpha-beta implementations.
Ken Thompson actually said of his hardware implementation of Belle that the only reason it won is because their software had fewer bugs. (Bugs in a minimax algorithm are often subtle and hard to notice, so long as it always returns a legal move, and almost always returns something better than a blithering blunder.)
Belle was a chess computer developed by Joe Condon (hardware) and Ken Thompson (software) at Bell Labs. In 1983, it was the first machine to achieve master-level play, with a USCF rating of 2250. It won the ACM North American Computer Chess Championship five times and the 1980 World Computer Chess Championship. It was the first system to win using specialized chess hardware.
Getting it to work with the specialized hardware forces the programmer to clear his or her mind to a higher level.
(Gimli: It's true you don't see many dwarf women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for dwarf men. Aragorn: It's the beards.)
Few, if any, of this category of historical bugs exists in AlphaZero. It's pretty easy to keep your eye on the accuracy of a high-speed matrix multiply (extremely potent reductive invariant simply begs to be checked). All of the engineering is focused on backbone algorithms. All of the fussy, detailed, error-prone heuristics are manna from heaven.
This is absolutely a silver bullet, by any reasonable standard. Unfortunately, it requires a C4 explosive GHz GPU instead of black powder MHz CPU, so this particular bullet was not available to computational antiquity.
Sheesh: a silver bullet plummets down from the heavens, and nearly strikes us dead in the nads, and we're so deeply invested in Stockholm syndrome (a sixty-year captivity of brittle, hand-coded heuristics) that don't even notice its inherent silverbulletness.
"Waaa! But I wanted a silver bullet that better helped me to continue to do it the wrong way!"
If you're that addicted to doing it the wrong way, admit it: you're not in the market for a sliver bullet, you're in the market for a magic mushroom.
As for taste, Popular Science's Stan Horaczek says "it works best as a burger with a thin patty so you don't get a whole mouthful of soy at once, but once you introduce a bun and some toppings, you might not even notice the differences with real beef."
Yet another optimal deliver system for sugar, salt and soft, squishy Wonderbread.
Elite cooking: find the best ingredients, and get out their way as much as possible, enhancing only around the edges.
Junk food culture: bacon makes the goop go down.
I never liked Asimov much growing up. In Caves of Steel (which I read multiple times trying to pin down my frustration) he has these giant yeast vats. So far so good. But then he doesn't create a thriving black market in illicit bacon rashers.
For most chumps, you'd be trading in dry rashers. But for the elite, you'd be trading in honest-to-god wet rashers (a real PITA to refrigerate and distribute fresh in an all-seeing surveillance state). Then there would be an entire industry devoted to how to cook the bacon and consume the bacon without releasing any tell-tale bacon aroma (they might be a special bong for your nose, so you can inhale the aroma while the bacon sizzles in it's hermetic bacon pipe).
Asimov seemed to have no clue about the weird accommodations made by individuals or cultures to their sub-optimal dietary destinies.
Yes, the human condition is malleable, but it also squishes sideways 99 times out of 100. Except in Asimov, where nothing ever squished sideways unless it was an instrumental plot point.
Aragorn: Show them no mercy, for you shall receive none.
Corporations might promise the moon in exchange for tax breaks, but they'll never deliver: they are going to rationalize no matter what. If they convince you otherwise, it's because your cloudy Palantir has not yet detected the enemy's secret plan.
Or, you're a politician and you're embedded deep in the corporate kimono already, and you're just pretending to have a myopic Palantir, but in truth cash-on-the-barrel is 20-20.
They had more than $5 billion to invest in R&D/fab technology. They spent it on graphics instead...
My wife had $500 to invest in some Kickstarter whinge. Instead she spent it on a pig, which is now fattening up in the back yard, on some weird personal hypothesis that bacon is a going concern, although I have my own doubts, and Kickstarter is never wrong.
Hundreds of miles of wall and fencing was built and maintained by agencies of the Obama administration and nobody called it immoral. No one was against it.
Maybe that's because they perceived this as a sufficient and adequate response. Maybe the ROI on continuing to invest in walls and fencing has reached the point of ridiculousness. Maybe America doesn't actually have an immigration crisis, and justifying continued investment in fencing to filter out hypothetical Mexican rapists is an immoral act of unfounded prejudice.
Your entire model of hypocrisy leaves out of the possibility that the previous response was a proportional response, and the proposed response is a disproportionate response. There's no two ways about this: Americans want to buy Californian fruit at a price you can only have if the fruit is picked by undocumented immigrants, without actually having the immigrants.
So you disparage the immigrants so that they have no rights whatsoever in the country where the work and reside, until you've got a de facto caste society.
Once upon a time, India did not have a caste society as rigid as the one they have now. But for some reason, there caste system solidified. Was it the people on the bottom who wanted to become permanently consigned to an underclass? Or was it the people at the top, who wanted something akin to slavery (all the benefits, few of the costs) without turning people into actual property (which is problematic, and always has been).
America's Deep South has never quite forgotten the wonderful heroine hit of being a gentrified ruling class, where you can sit in your drawing rooms and perfect your manners (and mannerisms), while some other group of people is baking in the hot sun for long hours doing the scut work. Gosh, what if you could have that without slavery? What if you could hem and howl until the immigrants had a status below dirt, and do everything conceivable to pretend to stop this, while actually still providing the immigrants with all the same work opportunities? (All the better to sate one's enormous appetite on cheap, local fruit.)
The wall then becomes a permanent monument to the notion, "well, we did what we could" and the immigrants are still showing up to do the same nasty jobs as the same low, low wages (with few benefits), well that just proves that they're lowly and incorrigible and deserve what they get.
Voila: caste system. All of the benefits, few of the costs.
I'll gladly believe otherwise once there's a vigorous enforcement effort to arrest businessmen who routinely look the other way over worker documentation (with the prospect of serious jail time for repeat offenses). Rounding up the first 1000 would be like gathering windblown apples off the ground. That would slow undocumented immigration down to a trickle at way less cost than Trump's giant monument to caste-society lust.
Problem: a sudden wave of orchard bankruptcies among hard-working, tax-paying Californian orchard owners (mostly white) would shine a harsh spotlight in the evening news cycle for many months on the actual hypocrisy here. We wants them in one way (cheap prices), but we don't wants them in the other way (affording them dignity and civil rights).
A hugely expensive wall (that still won't actually work) is just a giant branding exercise in justifying this extremely un-American division between labour and civil rights. This is not so different from the extremely un-American division between taxation and representation that once lead to a giant tea party.
But times change, and tea party rebrand themselves. Now we're more like the British society from which we once sought refuge, than we are like our forefathers (and foremothers) who bravely endured the back-breaking labour of setting up shop in a giant land of opportunity, theirs for the taking.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on what you mean by the word "basic".
Old-fashioned: underlying reactions.
New-fangled: underlying reactions, plus the metabolic control regime.
Old-fashioned: Micro what?
New-fangled: Microbiota.
Old-fashioned: Epi what?
New-fangled: Epigenetic.
But I get your point: the basics of solar navigation haven't really changed much since the trusty slide rule.
Great, if you had a handy decoder ring to help separate the few things they got right from all the other batshit they didn't.
The modern definition of "known about" means that you have substantive evidence where you don't need to resort to a telepathic-genie powered decoder ring.
We know that Einstein's correction to Newton improves on Newton's original predictions of celestial motions. This will never change. We might come up with yet a better prediction than Einstein's, but nothing we could feasibly learn will cause Newton's old predictions to suddenly regain the lead.
The substantive import of "known about" has improved just a smidgen over the past 3000 years.
Nearly a Billion People Still Defecate Outdoors. Here's Why. — August 2017 CE
No, I did not drop the B from BCE, or write "billion" when I meant "million".
Notability and popularity are mildly correlated, but functionally orthogonal.
What you are proposing is Wankerpedia, where all knowledge amounts to having no knowledge at all.
The Library of Babel
The notability and citation guidelines are the only reasons the entire project hasn't degenerated into a giant emporium of fake news.
What else do you propose? Ten different primary articles on every subject under the sun, because ten different editorial camps exist for every possible subject? I don't know what that project would be, but it certainly wouldn't contain the suffix "-pedia", not even a little bit.
Let's descend one more level in the High-Rise of Five Whys: the reason why Wikipedia didn't go in your proposed direction in the first place is that kind of people who want to be all things to all people tend to sit around blowing smoke out their ass (after trying to be anything to anybody, they'd soon discover this mission is not nearly so easy as it first appears, and promptly change their asinine stripes).
That this was ever any other way in the first place is a tragic indictment.
If aeronautics engineers ditch one of the redundant fuel pumps, they could make find room for a second transponder.
Then, when one transponder sparks, and the crew pulls the breaker, you have a standard malfunction (location of plane is still known).
However, when the second transponder is depowered, the "under ATC direction" light goes off in the passenger cabin, a nearby superpower with supersonic flight scrambles the appropriate bird, and satellites with infrared imaging capability begin snapping photos like mad around the last position reported.
The transatlantic jet trails visible from space: How 'contrails' can stay in the sky for up to 14 hours — June 2012
That one is in the visual, but why not the infrared? How hard can it be to detect recently condensed steam against a backdrop of minus damn cold?
Simple solution, but perhaps someone will end up regretting that missing fail-safe fuel pump, though at least you'll know where it touched down.
But cancer wants to become fat cells, it just can't remember how without our helpful hints.
Yeah, and one of the things that regulatory regime did was exempt nuclear facilities from having to insure themselves at prevailing free market rates, because otherwise investors would have been few and far between.
It was a mess, and the take was large, but the give was likewise enormous, and it takes a very sharp pencil indeed to determine whether—on balance—the government's involvement made things better or worse from the investor's perspective.
Investors: Yeah, we'll keep the mammoth liability exemption, but couldn't you also drown us with a lot less red tape?
Government: Let's get this straight: you want a giant liability exemption from normal corporate obligations under common law served up with a giant side-order of minimal regulatory oversight?
Investors: Do you have to express it that way?
Government: Depends on the election cycle.
I strongly suspect you could presently invest $50 billion into biology (with perhaps a side order of machine learning) before your incremental ROI declined anywhere close to this $17 b facility.
Which is not to say that this facility is worthless, but that the time is ripe for investment elsewhere.
The two main arguments for this facility are: 1) keeping the existing expertise alive; and 2) feeding the beast of existing appropriations directed to this technology sector.
I read Big Science: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the Military-Industrial Complex (2015) within the last year and I know that the achievements in this line of research have historically been immense, and I still don't think we should continue with yet another colossal expenditure, because the point of diminishing returns is exactly the facility we just built: worth it to confirm the Higgs, but no new physics.
People were dying inside when the LHC discovered no new physics for precisely this reason.
Furthermore, even if you discover new physics at this energy scale, it surely won't trickle into practical applications—not outside of cosmological theory, in any case.
The only way this gets built is on the velocity of established funding tributaries.
Meanwhile proteomics / machine learning are poised to deliver to the 21st century what particle physics delivered to the 20th century, if we're smart enough to look forwards, rather than perseverate on former glories.
No greedy financial institution ever hired a graduate student with a physics degree to wrangle all that complex math?
I don't know what world you're living in, but it isn't this one.
News flash: it's statistics all the way down.
Humans have no idea what we are correlating on, either. This has been amply demonstrated in neurology over and over again.
What we do have, however, is a highly specialized module for Making Shit Up—which like the visual cortex—pretty much never takes a day off. It's central to why humans are fixated on communicating so much of life in narrative form. Sometimes the MSU is onto something, other times you've checked into hotel Batshit Royale. (You may or may not be able to tell the difference.)
The reason none of our existing AI meets your personal requirements is that the human brain is still on the order of 10,000 or 1,000,000 times more energy efficient. Running all the required modules at the same time would require somewhere between 500 kW and 50 MW, just to hazard a rough guess.
Generally it's a good idea to focus on fine-tuning your subsystems before wandering naively into systems integration hell—with all the while the unit wheel of the old analog power meter spinning like a turbine blade.
Wright brothers: This wing shaped is generating significant lift at achievable airspeeds.
You: You still haven't got your aircraft off the ground.
Wright brothers: This propeller shape is generating substantial airflow.
You: You still haven't got your aircraft off the ground.
Wright brothers: This strut structure has sufficient torsional rigidity at a very low weight.
You: You still haven't got your aircraft off the ground.
Basically your insight is similar to Roger Penrose's: human intelligence is so amazing, there can't possible be an analytic path to reaching such an immense pinnacle step by step. Everything you achieve will be derivative and pathetic until you install the quantum defibulator, and then it will sing with the voice of an angel.
So basically you think we're going to devise AGI the same way Edison invented the light bulb: just trying one damn thing after another until suddenly the light goes on (and stays on long enough to commercialize). I personally don't think Edison stood a chance to invent AGI though the application of 99.999 999% perspiration extracted from vast slave-monkey stadiums.
Any sensible person would continue to explore the analytic path, because analytic solutions are fundamentally more useful than non-analytic solutions.
The weird thing about AGI is that we're going to have to become far more comfortable with semi-analytic solutions, because NN systems inherently contain non-analytic goodness. But not exclusively, either with ANN or human neural networks: the human brain itself has gobs of detailed interconnection structure.
This whole narrative about how some breakthrough in AI "now does X, but still doesn't do Y" is as old as the hills. Many people seem to love perpetually drawing smaller and smaller boxes around their own personal preciousness.
Finally I understand Aragorn's perplexing advice: "Ride out and meet them!" (Also Gimli's "100% chance of death, what are we waiting for?" narrative ethos.)
The androids are coming. It'll be a long march. I'm not so psychologically insecure that I won't march with them along the way, long before this aircraft ever gets fully off the ground. And whether or not it gets off the ground at the end of the day, we'll learn a tonne along the way.
Sucks when you have to hold a puke bucket in one hand and your CC in the other.
I guess it's a good thing those expensive, iBuds now allow you to talk hands free, with no dangling wire to aim around, if your IRL aim is substandard.
With a spattered wire, you'd have to map out the kitchen where you actually live, address the cabinet below the sink, and issue "OPEN door", "GET rag" and "GET bleach", follow the helpful breadcrumbs you dropped along the way back to your desk, "PUT bleach on rag", "WIPE all"—more than once, until the stench is sufficiently abated to restore single vision—and then after all of that, the only thing you find in your plunder box are some crusty Kleenex from yesteryear wedged into a desk-side crevice.
Who needs patient target practice to perfect their shooting accuracy when they've already got crass profanity and ALL CAPS?
Hey, Dr Evil, perhaps you should order your bullets by the billions, not the millions, based on the above.
Warning: I'm not the kind of person who summarizes fifty years in fifty words on a topic I care about.
Much charisma from the feature actor, terrible plot. Disney rotated this through their line-up on a regular basis during my childhood.
Wikipedia loses its mind at this point, by declaring that the race peaked in 1969, with the first humans on the moon. I would have said the race peaked in 1961 when JFK addressed Russia through a national address in six short words: screw you, game on, all-in.
By coincidence, the most important patent of the 20th century's turbocharged digital economy was issued a few scant years before the JFK gauntlet.
By coincidence, this most important patent of the 20th century's turbocharged digital economy was issued months before the 20th century's most important regulatory approval.
This is normally associated with hasty, experimental embrace of free love, but far more important than free love was mustering any love at all.
I was born in the summer of 1963. If you ran a PCA of the defining societal changes that frame my life, as I've chosen to embrace it, those would be the three dominant terms: the planar process, the birth control pill, and the American Civil Rights Act—all coming into force over the first half of the 1960s. (Many American evangelicals in the Deep South have yet to swallow all three.)
Backing the biographical camera up a few feet, I need to give a shout out to Turing (computable numbers), Shannon (information theory), von Neumann (fully programmable digital computing), Watson/Crick/Franklin (double helix); Bardeen/Brattain/Shockley (the transistor), Hubble/Penzias/Guth (cosmic inflation), and Schrodinger/Einstein/Dirac/Pauli/Heisenberg/Tomonaga/Schwinger/Feynman/Dyson for the hard-won "jewel of physics" QED.
But none of this forms a frame for one man's life: it's all way too big.
Concerning the planar process, it's important to point out that the planar process was substantially aided and abetted by Raman amplification (aka iridium-doped optical fibers), without which the phrase "too cheap to
And that's exactly why regulation exists: because business finds itself congenitally incapable of standing down before it crosses over some critical line that actually holds the system together.
Just imagine if the banks had said to themselves, "you know, 0% down and picture of the person's dog isn't actually a viable credit check" before melting down the global economy in 2008. We wouldn't have had the meltdown, no-one would be talking about "too big to fail", and none of the terrible new regulations would have been required in the first place. But they can't and they didn't.
Before that we got the Sarbanes–Oxley Act entirely from Enron, thank you very much. Greatest extent possible, thy name was Enron.
And then we got Bernie Madoff because people somehow convinced the government that the regulations we actually had were too onerous to fully enforce, so when they got the letter "hey, the consistency of this guy's portfolio is mathematically improbable to an extreme level" (complete with twenty pages of detailed calculations) they did nothing much to investigate.
The sad, appalling truth is that the root cause of regulation is failure to regulate, because there's always some goddamn megalith that takes the "greatest extent possible" to its logical, local conclusion — which turns out to be its concomitant global demise.
Amazon is a corporation in the sumo sasquatch weight division. Once Amazon fully activates "maximum extent possible" in its business methods, it's going to leave a giant crater that was formerly a competitive, consumer economy. Jeff Bezos is widely regarded as an alpha-male apex predator, as thoroughly documented in The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013) to name just one.
Behold the Apex Predator: "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon" Review — 12 November 2013
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the book is out that Rand rarely portrayed innate forbearance.
FTFY.
I use a spare 22" computer monitor as my TV, on a rolling stand tucked out of the way when not in use. We roll it up really close to the couch whenever we sit down to watch a movie, which is always a plain old DVD. We have no other signal source.
The system is designed to make our media consumption choices deliberative, rather than reflexive. I have a list of 750 movies I've watched (not counting documentaries) and another 300 movies I intend to watch eventually. If a movie doesn't make my A list, we don't watch it.
Let me tell you a story, from the book I was reading in bed last night, Creativity, Inc. (2014) by Ed Catmull, on the origins and management philosophy of the Pixar corporation. Catmull graduated with a double major in physics and computer science from U of U (at least one thing rocks about the University of Utah).
UU was one of the first four DARPA internet nodes, where Catmull rubbed shoulders with fellow graduate students Jim Clarke (Silicon Graphics, Netscape), John Warnock (Adobe), Alan Kay (Xerox PARC), and Jesus Christ (what a list). Later he was the principle driving force behind Toy Story (1995), achieved after a further twenty years of sweat, dedication, and neverending repair to his fragile reality undistortion field (after each meeting with Jobs, he had two short weeks to refurbish his shield).
The Adventures of Andre & Wally B. (the dog ate my accent aigu) was a two-minute short they planned to debut at SIGGRAPH 1985. Nobody had ever done a fully animated short before. This was going to make SIGGRAPH history.
(Personal anecdote: I attended the main exhibit hall of SG'85 one afternoon, as an unplanned accident, at the tail end of a bicycle trip down the west coast to visit a former college roommate who had made the jump to Stanford. At the dinner reception, a tray went past containing crackers with the softest, ripest Brie or Camembert I've ever eaten to this day. I grabbed one and stuffed into my pie hole without even taking a look. My head nearly exploded. I wasn't used to ripe cheese, and your sense of taste in your early twenties is at least 6 dB up. I was terrified of the stuff for the next ten years. At my present age, masticating a cubic inch of Stilton in one bite would barely replicate the intensity.)
Story telling is hard. Lasseters are forever in short supply, but these days, any damn fool can polish up a mass of pixels, and call it a movie.
Viggo Mortensen calls 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy a 'mess' — May 2014
Let's compromise on second-tier literacy while we're at it.
Here's a better metaphor: both Nvidia and AMD are fancy hotels, but for the last five or ten years, Nvidia has a posh penthouse bridal suite, and AMD doesn't. For a good while, concerning posh penthouse bridal suites, there was only one game in town.
Frasier: Why would I stay across the street in a shitty hotel that doesn't even have a posh penthouse bridal suite?
Niles: Do you actually need a penthouse bridal suite?
Frasier: No, but it just feels cheap when the elevator ends at 69, instead of P.
What are you talking about?
AlphaZero represents a colossal silver bullet over the tradition of hand-crafted alpha-beta implementations.
Ken Thompson actually said of his hardware implementation of Belle that the only reason it won is because their software had fewer bugs. (Bugs in a minimax algorithm are often subtle and hard to notice, so long as it always returns a legal move, and almost always returns something better than a blithering blunder.)
Getting it to work with the specialized hardware forces the programmer to clear his or her mind to a higher level.
(Gimli: It's true you don't see many dwarf women. And in fact, they are so alike in voice and appearance, that they are often mistaken for dwarf men. Aragorn: It's the beards.)
Few, if any, of this category of historical bugs exists in AlphaZero. It's pretty easy to keep your eye on the accuracy of a high-speed matrix multiply (extremely potent reductive invariant simply begs to be checked). All of the engineering is focused on backbone algorithms. All of the fussy, detailed, error-prone heuristics are manna from heaven.
This is absolutely a silver bullet, by any reasonable standard. Unfortunately, it requires a C4 explosive GHz GPU instead of black powder MHz CPU, so this particular bullet was not available to computational antiquity.
Sheesh: a silver bullet plummets down from the heavens, and nearly strikes us dead in the nads, and we're so deeply invested in Stockholm syndrome (a sixty-year captivity of brittle, hand-coded heuristics) that don't even notice its inherent silverbulletness.
"Waaa! But I wanted a silver bullet that better helped me to continue to do it the wrong way!"
If you're that addicted to doing it the wrong way, admit it: you're not in the market for a sliver bullet, you're in the market for a magic mushroom.
Yet another optimal deliver system for sugar, salt and soft, squishy Wonderbread.
Elite cooking: find the best ingredients, and get out their way as much as possible, enhancing only around the edges.
Junk food culture: bacon makes the goop go down.
I never liked Asimov much growing up. In Caves of Steel (which I read multiple times trying to pin down my frustration) he has these giant yeast vats. So far so good. But then he doesn't create a thriving black market in illicit bacon rashers.
For most chumps, you'd be trading in dry rashers. But for the elite, you'd be trading in honest-to-god wet rashers (a real PITA to refrigerate and distribute fresh in an all-seeing surveillance state). Then there would be an entire industry devoted to how to cook the bacon and consume the bacon without releasing any tell-tale bacon aroma (they might be a special bong for your nose, so you can inhale the aroma while the bacon sizzles in it's hermetic bacon pipe).
Asimov seemed to have no clue about the weird accommodations made by individuals or cultures to their sub-optimal dietary destinies.
Yes, the human condition is malleable, but it also squishes sideways 99 times out of 100. Except in Asimov, where nothing ever squished sideways unless it was an instrumental plot point.
Aragorn: Show them no mercy, for you shall receive none.
Corporations might promise the moon in exchange for tax breaks, but they'll never deliver: they are going to rationalize no matter what. If they convince you otherwise, it's because your cloudy Palantir has not yet detected the enemy's secret plan.
Or, you're a politician and you're embedded deep in the corporate kimono already, and you're just pretending to have a myopic Palantir, but in truth cash-on-the-barrel is 20-20.
Open that door, and suddenly you'll discover that the wee "we" is a giant Pandora's box.
Lemma: We agree on nothing.
Proof: Well, I'd provide one, but you probably wouldn't even read it, so you might as well make your own.
Basically that translates to: assume the position; you can thank us later for providing you with such a nice, soft barrel.
My wife had $500 to invest in some Kickstarter whinge. Instead she spent it on a pig, which is now fattening up in the back yard, on some weird personal hypothesis that bacon is a going concern, although I have my own doubts, and Kickstarter is never wrong.
Maybe that's because they perceived this as a sufficient and adequate response. Maybe the ROI on continuing to invest in walls and fencing has reached the point of ridiculousness. Maybe America doesn't actually have an immigration crisis, and justifying continued investment in fencing to filter out hypothetical Mexican rapists is an immoral act of unfounded prejudice.
Your entire model of hypocrisy leaves out of the possibility that the previous response was a proportional response, and the proposed response is a disproportionate response. There's no two ways about this: Americans want to buy Californian fruit at a price you can only have if the fruit is picked by undocumented immigrants, without actually having the immigrants.
So you disparage the immigrants so that they have no rights whatsoever in the country where the work and reside, until you've got a de facto caste society.
Once upon a time, India did not have a caste society as rigid as the one they have now. But for some reason, there caste system solidified. Was it the people on the bottom who wanted to become permanently consigned to an underclass? Or was it the people at the top, who wanted something akin to slavery (all the benefits, few of the costs) without turning people into actual property (which is problematic, and always has been).
America's Deep South has never quite forgotten the wonderful heroine hit of being a gentrified ruling class, where you can sit in your drawing rooms and perfect your manners (and mannerisms), while some other group of people is baking in the hot sun for long hours doing the scut work. Gosh, what if you could have that without slavery? What if you could hem and howl until the immigrants had a status below dirt, and do everything conceivable to pretend to stop this, while actually still providing the immigrants with all the same work opportunities? (All the better to sate one's enormous appetite on cheap, local fruit.)
The wall then becomes a permanent monument to the notion, "well, we did what we could" and the immigrants are still showing up to do the same nasty jobs as the same low, low wages (with few benefits), well that just proves that they're lowly and incorrigible and deserve what they get.
Voila: caste system. All of the benefits, few of the costs.
I'll gladly believe otherwise once there's a vigorous enforcement effort to arrest businessmen who routinely look the other way over worker documentation (with the prospect of serious jail time for repeat offenses). Rounding up the first 1000 would be like gathering windblown apples off the ground. That would slow undocumented immigration down to a trickle at way less cost than Trump's giant monument to caste-society lust.
Problem: a sudden wave of orchard bankruptcies among hard-working, tax-paying Californian orchard owners (mostly white) would shine a harsh spotlight in the evening news cycle for many months on the actual hypocrisy here. We wants them in one way (cheap prices), but we don't wants them in the other way (affording them dignity and civil rights).
A hugely expensive wall (that still won't actually work) is just a giant branding exercise in justifying this extremely un-American division between labour and civil rights. This is not so different from the extremely un-American division between taxation and representation that once lead to a giant tea party.
But times change, and tea party rebrand themselves. Now we're more like the British society from which we once sought refuge, than we are like our forefathers (and foremothers) who bravely endured the back-breaking labour of setting up shop in a giant land of opportunity, theirs for the taking.
Why doesn't this rampant condition have a formal name yet?
Social Media Affective Disorder is practically screaming from the womb.