In fifty years people who get this implant will probably have better than normal vision.
At which point it's your brain's ability to process the incoming information that's the limiting factor. I wonder if covering the inside of your skull with electronics and interfacing auxiliary processors into brains might be the next big thing?
Re:LISP a bad choice as a starter language.
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Land of Lisp
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· Score: 3, Insightful
While I admire LISP for its simplicity, elegance, and consistency, back in the Real World (TM) it has a lot of unncessary and redudant parenthesis that do nothing except clutter up code, making that crap near un-readable -- at least in C/C++ you can remove the braces for one-liners.
Thus saving a whole single character per line. That's real efficiency.
Algol-like languages have a better mapping to mathematical functions. foo(x) vs (foo x)
I wonder how many bugs have been introduced when people have confused Algol-like functions (which have side effects) with mathematical ones (which don't)?
Re:"Alice" one of the best learning languages toda
on
Land of Lisp
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· Score: 1
I wouldn't recommend BASIC or LISP for someone wanting to learn modern object-oriented programming today. A lot of us started out with a structured languages like this, but you wouldn't want to start out that way if you were doing it for the first time now.
Yes, you would. Objects are meant to solve a problem, and simply get in the way until and unless you run into that problem. Of course, the same goes for structured programming...
Alice teaches much more modern object-oriented principles that would be much more useful than BASIC or LISP to a modern programming student.
Does it also teach them why OO programming is used? Because if it doesn't, it'll produce plenty of fodder for TheDailyWTF...
Re:Python is the Lisp of the 21st century
on
Land of Lisp
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· Score: 1, Troll
Different from parentheses, it's very easy to undo a bunch of indentations, just put the left margin where you want it.
This is what I really, really, really hate about Python: indentation-based blocks. In other programming languages, I can easily restructure code when prototyping or exploring simply by adding or removing parentheses. In Python, I have to manually indent or unindent every single line.
You have neither options with neural networks (even in general, it's very very hard. For continuous-valued recurrent neural networks it's beyond hopeless.
Hardly. Each node/neuron resembles the output of its inputs, and with recurrent neural networks some inputs are simply an earlier state of the same system. For example, human vision system has neurons that recognize "there's an edge here", higher-level ones that recognize geometric shapes based on edges, yet higher ones that recognize things like faces, etc.
In fact, in the case of feed-forward neural networks, it's simple to understand them: just look at connection strengths to see what input features each neuron in the first layer sums up, then look at how the neurons connected to them sum up those summaries, and continue all the way to the final decision. Recurrent networks are slightly more complex, since you have to consider how previous states influence decisions, but they're hardly "hopeless".
Of course, we could argue over the semantics of what's meant by "understanding" here, but the fact remains that you can both explain why a given neural net made a particular decision, and also how it should be altered to alter the decision (which is what learning algorithms for neural nets do).
Humans are continuous recurrent neural networks : you can't make a model of a human mind that is simpler than the human mind was in the first place*).
...So? "You can't capture every last detail if you leave something out" is true for everything from humans to ants to rocks, and not very relevant.
They're chaotic. The only way to see what they'd to given some input, is to give that input to them. A human mind is as complex as climate or planetary movements, absolutely impossible to predict except in the most absurd simple cases.
And yet most humans have no problem predicting how some other people might react.
* this of course means, that if you ask yourself what someone else will do, you can't reliably predict that at all
Yes, I can, and in fact do all the time. So do others. Human society would collapse pretty fast if you were right.
Why are the people interested in celebrity drivel when there's no paywall, and "quality content" when there is?
"Interested in" does not mean "willing to pay".
If they get hits when they post a big headline about paris hilton, means their costumers are looking for it, and providing "news" on what people are interested in is exactly what they need to get people to pay.
Except that you can get celebrity drivel from pretty much anywhere, so why pay for it?
the difference is that a bayesian network will tell you WHY it's doing something, while the actions of a neural network cannot be derived in any way except confronting the network with problems and seeing what it does*, like a biologist might do.
Based on Wikipedia, Bayesian network seems to be a partially connected neural net that uses slightly different terminology ("output value" rather than "probability of the variable represented by the node") and names its nodes.
The mathematical problem is that there are infinite amounts of important details, thereby of course guaranteeing that you'll miss at least a few.
Actually, this guarantees that you miss almost all of them.
It was difficult to beat, but also very boring to beat, because it kept spamming one attack. I added a small check, so it only exploits that advantage 50% of the time. Otherwise, it goes on down to less-than-optimal options. It's a lot more interesting this way.
Of course, if simply spamming a single attack is the optimal strategy, then I'd predict that the game gets really boring really soon. After all, human players don't pull their punches.
Marketing can be seen as manipulation, or it can be seen as simply connecting with people and offering something they may find valuable.
And mafiosos can be seen as parasites or they can be seen as honest businessmen refusing to bow down to oppressive Government-maintained monopoly on taxes, violence and coercion.
Marketers, you are scum. Sorry. That's just a fact.
Most people don't yet have 3D TVs, so (assuming you buy into the value of 3D), by offering a movie in 3D you're offering something that for most people can't be pirated.
Unfortunately for this scheme, the reason most people don't have 3D TVs yet is that 3D has little to no value for them. And for some, such as myself, the value is negative: I watched Avatar in 3D out of curiosity, and the only time 3D was noticeable was when it got in the way.
Let's try 3D again when we have visible light phased arrays, but until then, it's 2D for me.
IT's impossible to create something new. All you can do is tie together preexisting systems. The only argument can be whether tying them together makes it something new, which I don't agree with. It's just a discovery that some configuration of things performs a given function.
Did that configuration exist before you tied the component systems together? If not, it's new.
Also, every definition of a word that makes it fit either everything or nothing is useless.
The lead lawyer on the case, Dan Ravicher, self identifies as a radical conservative who believes that when government isn't incompetent it's corrupt.
The Government is a large organization, which means that it's both incompetent and corrupt. Conservatives's problem is that they don't realize this extends to "private" corporations as well.
It's not like inventors come along and rewrite the laws of physics in our universe, people just string together things that work.
And those things they strung together didn't exist before they made them, so they invented them. They simply didn't invent the building blocks those things are made of.
To that extent, observing that such and such DNA controls such and such process in the body is not conceptually distinct from discovering that such and such arrangement of black plastic and magic smoke forms an LM741.
Actually, yes it is, in the exact same way as observing a painting and painting it are conceptually different tasks.
Now, if you go ahead and use your newfound knowledge to design a cure for cancer (or even acne), then that is an invention. And if someone else designs a different cure, then that too is an invention.
Inventions are methods - which may or may not involve a specific device - to achieve a certain effect, typically utilizing facts about nature. The facts they utilize can't themselves be inventions, because as you noted, the inventor did not design them.
People just pick some arbitrary level of complexity of a discovery and say "when the system is simpler than this, it's a discovery, when it's more complex, it's an invention."
When you're building something new, it's an invention, when you're observing something that existed before, it's an observation. What's arbitrary about this?
Wouldn't this at least keep them from declaring that fields adjacent to fields that use their seeds and somehow end up with genes from their "sterile" plants are somehow in violation of some kind of agreement or patent, since the genetic sequence itself can't be owned by Monsanto?
No, because they have more money than the farmer the field belongs to, and thus can outlast him in court.
HTTP has no such excuse. It was initially developed two to three decades after Telnet and FTP. That's 20 to 30 years of mistakes, accumulated knowledge and research that its designers and implementors could have learned from.
HTTP works perfectly fine for the purpose for which it was made: downloading a text file from a server. How were the developers supposed to know that someone was going to run a shop over it?
HTTP and the Web grew organically. That evolution has given it its own version of wisdom teeth. Unfortunate, but hardly the fault of either Berners-Lee or the microbes in the primordial soup.
But then you run into problems if sessions are to be detached to different servers, because not a single computer answers your requests, but a large server farm, maybe geographically distributed worldwide.
But these servers need to communicate anyway to maintain a "session" in any meaningful sense, so they can as well send the associated crypt key with the rest of the session information.
The good thing about C# and CLR in that perspective is that they are covered by the Open Specification Promise, which is essentially a patent waiver from MS.
We have one. It has the side benefits of being faster than Java,not having annoying bugs like garbage collection, and being applicable on anything from embedded devices to PCs. It's called C++, and the smart people never stopped using it.
C++ is a very nice assembler preprocessor macro system, but it's hardly a replacement for a mid-level language like Java. And, frankly, trying to pretend that PCs with gigahertz multicore processors, gigabytes of memory, terabytes of storage and an auxiliary graphical processing unit face the same programming problems than embedded devices simply results in a poor fit for both.
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At which point it's your brain's ability to process the incoming information that's the limiting factor. I wonder if covering the inside of your skull with electronics and interfacing auxiliary processors into brains might be the next big thing?
Thus saving a whole single character per line. That's real efficiency.
I wonder how many bugs have been introduced when people have confused Algol-like functions (which have side effects) with mathematical ones (which don't)?
Yes, you would. Objects are meant to solve a problem, and simply get in the way until and unless you run into that problem. Of course, the same goes for structured programming...
Does it also teach them why OO programming is used? Because if it doesn't, it'll produce plenty of fodder for TheDailyWTF...
This is what I really, really, really hate about Python: indentation-based blocks. In other programming languages, I can easily restructure code when prototyping or exploring simply by adding or removing parentheses. In Python, I have to manually indent or unindent every single line .
Who the Hell thought that was a good idea?
Hardly. Each node/neuron resembles the output of its inputs, and with recurrent neural networks some inputs are simply an earlier state of the same system. For example, human vision system has neurons that recognize "there's an edge here", higher-level ones that recognize geometric shapes based on edges, yet higher ones that recognize things like faces, etc.
In fact, in the case of feed-forward neural networks, it's simple to understand them: just look at connection strengths to see what input features each neuron in the first layer sums up, then look at how the neurons connected to them sum up those summaries, and continue all the way to the final decision. Recurrent networks are slightly more complex, since you have to consider how previous states influence decisions, but they're hardly "hopeless".
Of course, we could argue over the semantics of what's meant by "understanding" here, but the fact remains that you can both explain why a given neural net made a particular decision, and also how it should be altered to alter the decision (which is what learning algorithms for neural nets do).
...So? "You can't capture every last detail if you leave something out" is true for everything from humans to ants to rocks, and not very relevant.
And yet most humans have no problem predicting how some other people might react.
Yes, I can, and in fact do all the time. So do others. Human society would collapse pretty fast if you were right.
Lunacy? THIS! IS! CAPITALISM!
"Interested in" does not mean "willing to pay".
Except that you can get celebrity drivel from pretty much anywhere, so why pay for it?
Based on Wikipedia, Bayesian network seems to be a partially connected neural net that uses slightly different terminology ("output value" rather than "probability of the variable represented by the node") and names its nodes.
Actually, this guarantees that you miss almost all of them.
Of course, if simply spamming a single attack is the optimal strategy, then I'd predict that the game gets really boring really soon. After all, human players don't pull their punches.
I think that a female Cthulhu in bikinis lap-dancing on a bear goes beyond most normal pornography...
But I gotta admit, I do want some of what the makers drunk :).
And mafiosos can be seen as parasites or they can be seen as honest businessmen refusing to bow down to oppressive Government-maintained monopoly on taxes, violence and coercion.
Marketers, you are scum. Sorry. That's just a fact.
Just like subscription cable television doesn't have ads?
Unfortunately for this scheme, the reason most people don't have 3D TVs yet is that 3D has little to no value for them. And for some, such as myself, the value is negative: I watched Avatar in 3D out of curiosity, and the only time 3D was noticeable was when it got in the way.
Let's try 3D again when we have visible light phased arrays, but until then, it's 2D for me.
Did that configuration exist before you tied the component systems together? If not, it's new.
Also, every definition of a word that makes it fit either everything or nothing is useless.
The Government is a large organization, which means that it's both incompetent and corrupt. Conservatives's problem is that they don't realize this extends to "private" corporations as well.
And those things they strung together didn't exist before they made them, so they invented them. They simply didn't invent the building blocks those things are made of.
Actually, yes it is, in the exact same way as observing a painting and painting it are conceptually different tasks.
Now, if you go ahead and use your newfound knowledge to design a cure for cancer (or even acne), then that is an invention. And if someone else designs a different cure, then that too is an invention.
Inventions are methods - which may or may not involve a specific device - to achieve a certain effect, typically utilizing facts about nature. The facts they utilize can't themselves be inventions, because as you noted, the inventor did not design them.
When you're building something new, it's an invention, when you're observing something that existed before, it's an observation. What's arbitrary about this?
No, because they have more money than the farmer the field belongs to, and thus can outlast him in court.
HTTP works perfectly fine for the purpose for which it was made: downloading a text file from a server. How were the developers supposed to know that someone was going to run a shop over it?
HTTP and the Web grew organically. That evolution has given it its own version of wisdom teeth. Unfortunate, but hardly the fault of either Berners-Lee or the microbes in the primordial soup.
But these servers need to communicate anyway to maintain a "session" in any meaningful sense, so they can as well send the associated crypt key with the rest of the session information.
Care to elaborate a bit? Because I, for one, have no idea what kind of situation are you describing.
Actually, it does. You do know that's what physics is all about, right?
Unless you measure in zero pressure, at which point the mass component becomes zero, regardless of the size of a kilogram. Squared :).
And you actually believe them?
Mono is a C#/.NET runtime, and thus connected to Microsoft, making it even more of a liability than Java.
C++ is a very nice assembler preprocessor macro system, but it's hardly a replacement for a mid-level language like Java. And, frankly, trying to pretend that PCs with gigahertz multicore processors, gigabytes of memory, terabytes of storage and an auxiliary graphical processing unit face the same programming problems than embedded devices simply results in a poor fit for both.