Apple is a dictatorship run by an obsessive-compulsive designer. It works its employees hard to produce well-integrated, very refined products, following one man's vision.
Google is a confederacy of teams joined by a common culture. People within the organization have considerable freedom to pursue their own agendas, and Google tries to harness this energy to make its search business more profitable, even if it means taking a scattershot approach.
Good to know. I'll be sure to double-check my storage in future, before I trust any of my data to it.
Interestingly, the standard read/write tests won't identify this as a fraud, because they read back the data just after they've written it. You'd need something more like,
Seed random number generator with X
Write pseudorandom sequence to fill drive
Reseed random number generator with X
Read back file, comparing against simultaneously-generated values
That's because choosing anything other than 5 or 1, regardless of what you think the true value should be, weighs your vote less. Really, you're driving the average towards whatever you think it should be as hard as you can. You can write down formal game-theoretic models for this, but I don't think they really offer any more insight.
The article posted by Intron here seems to indicate that they did spend some time solving something like Laplace's equation. I haven't read the paper, so I don't know whether radiative transfer between different components of the spacecraft was considered, or just conduction.
I think the real purpose of his work is more historical. It's less, "how does one build an A-bomb" and more "how did they build an A-bomb?"
There was a pretty good magazine article about him a few years back -- I think in Rolling Stone, or maybe Esquire, of all places. They'd spent a lot of time interviewing him, and the picture you got was that he found tiny, probably irrelevant, details of the bomb's construction fascinating. The work he's done for a hobby isn't that of an engineer per-se, but more that of a technical historian.
Viewed in that light, I think what he's done is quite valuable.
It reminds me of a Monty Python skit where a building is being held up by trust. It’s only standing up because people are believing it will stand up[...]
You might be interested to know that the algorithm you describe is pretty close to Q-learning, which actually is a staple in AI/robotics/etc. Also see the closely-related "Value Iteration" algorithm.
I tend to be of the philosophy that the supposed differences between algorithms that "look ahead" and those that "learn" is just a matter of perspective: Both A* and Q-learning, for instance, can be viewed as "just" methods for computing the Bellman Value Function. (I'd say that, at base, about half of robotics, AI, and optimal control is about computing the Bellman Value Function. The other half is Bayes' Rule).
I'm pretty sure that, by the time you're old enough to afford a hi-fi set of sufficient quality, your ears can no longer tell the difference. Sadly, we humans don't regrow cilia.:-(
You may be interested in this story. There, veterinarians attached titanium pegs to the leg bones of a cat that had lost its feet; they were designed to mimic deer antlers, and protruded through the skin in such a way that the skin would grow into a groove in the metal and, it was hoped, form a tight seal. I haven't heard any updates on this story, so hopefully the project has been successful and the cat hasn't been getting infections.
Helpful to whom? To you? To me? To the company which was targeted? To anons? To cops?
Helpful to anon and their cause. The problem is that this isn't.
Fucking around on a telecommunications network is not an exercise of real power. All it does is demonstrate how truly impotent Anonymous really is, while simultaneously giving those who do have real power excuses to further restrict use.
Ultimately, this is a political issue. The little guy wins at politics only through sheer force of numbers. That means being popular. I understand that "popular" is a word that Anon's members probably have a hard time identifying with, but it's one they really need to take and use for their own if they want to achieve their goals.
Anonymous needs to be appealing. It needs to be photogenic. People should want to have sex with it. That's how the world works: People do not clearly separate moral principles, from political goals, from personal desires, from sexual urges, from the respect of their peers. Study after study has shown, for instance, that people with more attractive faces are judged to be more honest; "beauty is good" is wired into our brains. When was the last time you saw a balding man, or a short man, elected president? Anonymous will not succeed if it looks like a bunch of smelly nerds. It needs a better image. People need to like them.
Assange, the paranoid, has an uphill battle; he is not a naturally likeable person. But he did one smart thing: When he found himself in the limelight, he got a haircut and bought a suit. That's what you do.
In politics, image is everything. Do you know how George Washington got the command of the Continental Army? He showed up to the Congress wearing his militia uniform -- and he was tall. Nevermind that he had no military experience of note; he looked the part. Why are actors -- unqualified in policy and unpracticed in analysis -- so successful at politics? Ronald Reagan, Jesse "The Body" Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger. They play a convincing, masculine role. People eat that shit up.
This is the game that Anonymous finds itself playing, whether it likes it or not. Image management is how you win at it.
Now what happens if Google, to improve its search results, starts copying Bing as well? Is this feedback interconnection stable, or will it merely result in spurious noise being amplified, which commentators will misidentify as vast social movements?
Even basic stuff in celestial mechanics... What constitutes an "orbit?" Why do we say the Earth orbits the sun? A better approximation would be that the earth-moon system and the sun both orbit the barycenter of those three bodies -- though even this is an approximation.
It may seem "obvious" in the context of the universe immediately around us, but how do you formally define it so that if, say, you're running an n-body simulation on a computer with all n(n-1)/2 interaction forces, the program can automatically draw ellipses, etc, to describe orbits? Remember that the frame matters! In an inertial frame where the sun has zero velocity, the moon's orbit just looks like an ellipse with little ripples...
You can come up with various answers, but as far as I know there's no clear reason for choosing one over another, apart from mathematical aesthetics.
(In fact, since this is somewhat outside my field, if anybody is familiar with some conventions I'd be interested.)
[Also, I guess the value of being too precise within a Newtonian framework is debatable, since, after all, GR seems to be a better approximation to reality.]
Interesting. That was my chief complaint about the previous version; it brought my slower laptop (FF 3.6, Win32, w. Adblock) to a crawl. The current redesign is actually much faster for me than that one. Of course, for speed, neither beats the vanilla HTML site of two versions ago.
I totally agree that the control aspects of this aren't too hard, but I wanted to clarify a few things:
1 - The natural frequency of the pendulum goes up as 1/sqrt(length), so a pencil is more difficult than a broomstick.
2 - In the controls community, fuzzy logic would not be employed to do this. Rather, one would probably use an "energy-pumping" swingup controller to get the pendulum near the critical point, and then a local, linear (maybe with feedback linearization) controller to stabilize the critical point. I think that's more-or-less standard. And although some of the supporting theory can get pretty "fancy," none of the actual computations that happen in the controllers are.
If there's something impressive here, it's not in the controls, but maybe in the fast, relatively low-latency computer vision. Though, again, for comparison, professional motion capture systems run at 100+ Hz and have latencies under a few milliseconds (which is plenty for this task).
Or maybe it's just supposed to be cool that this uses a bio-inspired architecture that is different from more standard methods.
...if we stopped calling exploitation attempts "attacks." It's trickery; it's spying; it's occasionally even -- and this is stretching the word a little -- sabotage (in the case of DoS). But "attacks?" It makes it sound like some kind of assault that one can somehow "get even" for. The metaphor is all wrong.
For instance, the whole 0.999... = 1 thing. I think that's a load of crap. You can bring in all sorts of complex calculations, but the fundamental rules (as we're taught) say a run-on number like 0.999... goes on forever.
What does the sequence of symbols 0.9999... actually mean? That's your problem. You need to get clear on what a real number is before you can tackle that. I agree that the "proofs" using simple algebra are unconvincing, because, again, they just blindly apply operations to these sequences of symbols without considering their meaning.
One way to define the real numbers is as Cauchy sequences of rationals under an equivalence relation. Rationals are in turn defined in terms of integers, which are defined in terms of naturals. Understand the definitions and everything will start to make sense. Math isn't universal truth; it's just stuff people made up: Figure out what, exactly, the standard definitions are.
Eating is a selfish act. Pretty much all of life is a selfish competition. [...] Either get over it, or take your argument to its logical conclusion and stop living.
What a worldview! And what declarative sentences you have! As though statements about meaning can possibly be true or false!
Have you tried taking your own argument to its logical conclusion (what's that?)? Why don't you kill your neighbors and take their stuff? Only the selfish fear of jail or execution? If you were sure you'd get away with it, what would stop you?
OP believes many kinds of creatures should be able to experience life. I'd say it's not an unreasonable assertion, and it's not clear how killing himself "logically" follows from it. But then, you didn't really mean "logical," did you? You just meant, "What I Believe," and, since you self-identify as "logical," you assumed that somehow Logic (which one?) supported your assertion.
I'd also be interested to know what "selfishness" even means. (What on earth is a "self" to begin with?) Are you a mere vessel of genetic information, an elaborate photocopier? Isn't sexual reproduction itself "unselfish;" shouldn't you invest in clones ("We have the technology.")? How similar to your own does a genotype need to be, for its carrier to be nothing but unwelcome competition? Does it need to be of the same species? Skin color? Immediate family?
Not really. Logic doesn't work that way. You've just asserted an axiom -- that certain rules only apply to humans. Somebody else can assert another one. Logic gives no way to choose between them.
I'm not so sure about that. For instance, the '98 Long-Term Capital Management Crisis was a pretty big deal, and that hedge fund was run by Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, who won a Nobel prize in economics. Granted, that's not the current crisis, but the point is I'm not convinced the "real economists" were blameless.
This was my thought exactly. The cost of enforcement seems higher than that of whatever productivity might be lost. The pound-foolish behavior of these control-freak bosses is losing company money.
At the risk of starting a flame war... you could just run Windows.
It has always struck me as odd that it's the operating system built on principles of freedom and openness that has converged to a solution for delivering software that requires centralized authority.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the impression I get:
Apple is a dictatorship run by an obsessive-compulsive designer. It works its employees hard to produce well-integrated, very refined products, following one man's vision.
Google is a confederacy of teams joined by a common culture. People within the organization have considerable freedom to pursue their own agendas, and Google tries to harness this energy to make its search business more profitable, even if it means taking a scattershot approach.
Apple has OCD. Google has ADD.
Nice.
Good to know. I'll be sure to double-check my storage in future, before I trust any of my data to it.
Interestingly, the standard read/write tests won't identify this as a fraud, because they read back the data just after they've written it. You'd need something more like,
That'll catch this sort of thing.
That's because choosing anything other than 5 or 1, regardless of what you think the true value should be, weighs your vote less. Really, you're driving the average towards whatever you think it should be as hard as you can. You can write down formal game-theoretic models for this, but I don't think they really offer any more insight.
The article posted by Intron here seems to indicate that they did spend some time solving something like Laplace's equation. I haven't read the paper, so I don't know whether radiative transfer between different components of the spacecraft was considered, or just conduction.
I think the real purpose of his work is more historical. It's less, "how does one build an A-bomb" and more "how did they build an A-bomb?"
There was a pretty good magazine article about him a few years back -- I think in Rolling Stone, or maybe Esquire, of all places. They'd spent a lot of time interviewing him, and the picture you got was that he found tiny, probably irrelevant, details of the bomb's construction fascinating. The work he's done for a hobby isn't that of an engineer per-se, but more that of a technical historian.
Viewed in that light, I think what he's done is quite valuable.
In the article, he writes,
It reminds me of a Monty Python skit where a building is being held up by trust. It’s only standing up because people are believing it will stand up[...]
Anybody know what skit he's referring to?
You might be interested to know that the algorithm you describe is pretty close to Q-learning, which actually is a staple in AI/robotics/etc. Also see the closely-related "Value Iteration" algorithm.
I tend to be of the philosophy that the supposed differences between algorithms that "look ahead" and those that "learn" is just a matter of perspective: Both A* and Q-learning, for instance, can be viewed as "just" methods for computing the Bellman Value Function. (I'd say that, at base, about half of robotics, AI, and optimal control is about computing the Bellman Value Function. The other half is Bayes' Rule).
I wish.
I'm more worried nothing will be deleted -- ever.
I'm pretty sure that, by the time you're old enough to afford a hi-fi set of sufficient quality, your ears can no longer tell the difference. Sadly, we humans don't regrow cilia. :-(
You may be interested in this story. There, veterinarians attached titanium pegs to the leg bones of a cat that had lost its feet; they were designed to mimic deer antlers, and protruded through the skin in such a way that the skin would grow into a groove in the metal and, it was hoped, form a tight seal. I haven't heard any updates on this story, so hopefully the project has been successful and the cat hasn't been getting infections.
Looks like an active research area.
Helpful to whom? To you? To me? To the company which was targeted? To anons? To cops?
Helpful to anon and their cause. The problem is that this isn't.
Fucking around on a telecommunications network is not an exercise of real power. All it does is demonstrate how truly impotent Anonymous really is, while simultaneously giving those who do have real power excuses to further restrict use.
Ultimately, this is a political issue. The little guy wins at politics only through sheer force of numbers. That means being popular. I understand that "popular" is a word that Anon's members probably have a hard time identifying with, but it's one they really need to take and use for their own if they want to achieve their goals.
Anonymous needs to be appealing. It needs to be photogenic. People should want to have sex with it. That's how the world works: People do not clearly separate moral principles, from political goals, from personal desires, from sexual urges, from the respect of their peers. Study after study has shown, for instance, that people with more attractive faces are judged to be more honest; "beauty is good" is wired into our brains. When was the last time you saw a balding man, or a short man, elected president? Anonymous will not succeed if it looks like a bunch of smelly nerds. It needs a better image. People need to like them.
Assange, the paranoid, has an uphill battle; he is not a naturally likeable person. But he did one smart thing: When he found himself in the limelight, he got a haircut and bought a suit. That's what you do.
In politics, image is everything. Do you know how George Washington got the command of the Continental Army? He showed up to the Congress wearing his militia uniform -- and he was tall. Nevermind that he had no military experience of note; he looked the part. Why are actors -- unqualified in policy and unpracticed in analysis -- so successful at politics? Ronald Reagan, Jesse "The Body" Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger. They play a convincing, masculine role. People eat that shit up.
This is the game that Anonymous finds itself playing, whether it likes it or not. Image management is how you win at it.
we'd still be under the rule of British monarchs
We'd be a god-forsaken hellhole roamed by cannibal gangs! Like Canada!
Now what happens if Google, to improve its search results, starts copying Bing as well? Is this feedback interconnection stable, or will it merely result in spurious noise being amplified, which commentators will misidentify as vast social movements?
Even basic stuff in celestial mechanics... What constitutes an "orbit?" Why do we say the Earth orbits the sun? A better approximation would be that the earth-moon system and the sun both orbit the barycenter of those three bodies -- though even this is an approximation.
It may seem "obvious" in the context of the universe immediately around us, but how do you formally define it so that if, say, you're running an n-body simulation on a computer with all n(n-1)/2 interaction forces, the program can automatically draw ellipses, etc, to describe orbits? Remember that the frame matters! In an inertial frame where the sun has zero velocity, the moon's orbit just looks like an ellipse with little ripples...
You can come up with various answers, but as far as I know there's no clear reason for choosing one over another, apart from mathematical aesthetics.
(In fact, since this is somewhat outside my field, if anybody is familiar with some conventions I'd be interested.)
[Also, I guess the value of being too precise within a Newtonian framework is debatable, since, after all, GR seems to be a better approximation to reality.]
Interesting. That was my chief complaint about the previous version; it brought my slower laptop (FF 3.6, Win32, w. Adblock) to a crawl. The current redesign is actually much faster for me than that one. Of course, for speed, neither beats the vanilla HTML site of two versions ago.
I totally agree that the control aspects of this aren't too hard, but I wanted to clarify a few things:
1 - The natural frequency of the pendulum goes up as 1/sqrt(length), so a pencil is more difficult than a broomstick.
2 - In the controls community, fuzzy logic would not be employed to do this. Rather, one would probably use an "energy-pumping" swingup controller to get the pendulum near the critical point, and then a local, linear (maybe with feedback linearization) controller to stabilize the critical point. I think that's more-or-less standard. And although some of the supporting theory can get pretty "fancy," none of the actual computations that happen in the controllers are.
If there's something impressive here, it's not in the controls, but maybe in the fast, relatively low-latency computer vision. Though, again, for comparison, professional motion capture systems run at 100+ Hz and have latencies under a few milliseconds (which is plenty for this task).
Or maybe it's just supposed to be cool that this uses a bio-inspired architecture that is different from more standard methods.
...if we stopped calling exploitation attempts "attacks." It's trickery; it's spying; it's occasionally even -- and this is stretching the word a little -- sabotage (in the case of DoS). But "attacks?" It makes it sound like some kind of assault that one can somehow "get even" for. The metaphor is all wrong.
For instance, the whole 0.999... = 1 thing. I think that's a load of crap. You can bring in all sorts of complex calculations, but the fundamental rules (as we're taught) say a run-on number like 0.999... goes on forever.
What does the sequence of symbols 0.9999... actually mean? That's your problem. You need to get clear on what a real number is before you can tackle that. I agree that the "proofs" using simple algebra are unconvincing, because, again, they just blindly apply operations to these sequences of symbols without considering their meaning.
One way to define the real numbers is as Cauchy sequences of rationals under an equivalence relation. Rationals are in turn defined in terms of integers, which are defined in terms of naturals. Understand the definitions and everything will start to make sense. Math isn't universal truth; it's just stuff people made up: Figure out what, exactly, the standard definitions are.
Eating is a selfish act. Pretty much all of life is a selfish competition. [...] Either get over it, or take your argument to its logical conclusion and stop living.
What a worldview! And what declarative sentences you have! As though statements about meaning can possibly be true or false!
Have you tried taking your own argument to its logical conclusion (what's that?)? Why don't you kill your neighbors and take their stuff? Only the selfish fear of jail or execution? If you were sure you'd get away with it, what would stop you?
OP believes many kinds of creatures should be able to experience life. I'd say it's not an unreasonable assertion, and it's not clear how killing himself "logically" follows from it. But then, you didn't really mean "logical," did you? You just meant, "What I Believe," and, since you self-identify as "logical," you assumed that somehow Logic (which one?) supported your assertion.
I'd also be interested to know what "selfishness" even means. (What on earth is a "self" to begin with?) Are you a mere vessel of genetic information, an elaborate photocopier? Isn't sexual reproduction itself "unselfish;" shouldn't you invest in clones ("We have the technology.")? How similar to your own does a genotype need to be, for its carrier to be nothing but unwelcome competition? Does it need to be of the same species? Skin color? Immediate family?
Many questions.
Meh. True statements are impossible. Logic is impotent. "Reason" is an 18th-century linguistic fashion.
you completely lose any logical coherence
Not really. Logic doesn't work that way. You've just asserted an axiom -- that certain rules only apply to humans. Somebody else can assert another one. Logic gives no way to choose between them.
I'm not so sure about that. For instance, the '98 Long-Term Capital Management Crisis was a pretty big deal, and that hedge fund was run by Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, who won a Nobel prize in economics. Granted, that's not the current crisis, but the point is I'm not convinced the "real economists" were blameless.
This was my thought exactly. The cost of enforcement seems higher than that of whatever productivity might be lost. The pound-foolish behavior of these control-freak bosses is losing company money.
This will not become widespread.
At the risk of starting a flame war... you could just run Windows.
It has always struck me as odd that it's the operating system built on principles of freedom and openness that has converged to a solution for delivering software that requires centralized authority.