I'm more concerned that we've now been conditioned to having to buy water in bottles when it's one of the most abundant substances on Earth.
You're free to drink all the sea water you like. It's *incredibly* abundant. *Potable* drinking water, on the other hand, can be remarkably rare in nature. If you can find a glacier-fed river you're lucky. Otherwise you have to take a chance on a spring-fed river that can be laced with heavy metals, or a pond or lake that can harbor toxic algae.
Because the Cyc project, amongst others, tried doing this for 30 years and failed. They plugged in millions of rules having to do with how the world works and tried to use various algorithms to see if they could pull inferences from these giant rule sets. They couldn't get the engine to learn anything, nor draw any inferences that made any sense.
Wow, so computers are really bad at calculating individual decision trees that are all dependent on each other?
Yep, you run into all kinds of coherence problems, latency and bandwidth issues, routing complexity, etc...
What you need to approximate how an organic brain works is something like this, where the logic and memory are distributed somewhat arbitrarily across nodes.
Back in 80's and 90's they tried getting around this with all kinds of exotic parallel architectures like hyper-torus rings and networked fabrics, none of which worked very well for the workloads most people were using. Once bus speeds got fast enough, it was easier to just dump a bunch of CPUs on a really fast bus and shovel data to them as fast as possible, which is great for finite element analysis and rendering, but not so great when the CPUs all need to talk to each other.
Put simply - most of the "Human Intelligence" you see is really fancy pattern matching as well.
That's a big part of it, but there's some "secret sauce" that lets organic brains combine patterns in new and different ways that AI researchers haven't been able to crack. Whatever it is, it's more than just matching patterns.
The other thing you need for an organic-style intelligence is massive parallelism. Modern computers are great at doing this for granular sequential algorithms. They are terrible at doing this if the algorithm is thousands of individual decision trees that are all arbitrarily dependent on each other, which is what an organic neural network does.
Put simply - most of the "Artificial Intelligence" you hear about in the news is really fancy pattern matching. So you can have software that can recognize voice commands, or faces in pictures, or general patterns in data.
What you don't have, and aren't even close to, are computers that can "think." That is, put different sets of data together in arbitrary ways and make sense of it. You can't feed in a bunch of musical information to a computer and have it spontaneously generate music. You can't feed in a bunch of economic data and have it decide that certain regulations are required to achieve some economic goal - unless someone specifically programs it to do so.
The underlying reason is computers lack any way of attaining "common sense." If you tell a computer a person is in a room, the computer has no concept of what you are talking about but will dutifully note that a person is in a room. To a computer that could mean the person is occupying all the space in the room, that the person is in every room that exists, that the person is in the room AND outside the room, or that a person IS a room. In actuality, the computer makes no inference beyond "something called a person is in something called a room, whatever that means."
My wife bought a few of the kid's Christmas presents and they showed up on time. Last-minute I bought a heating pad for my mom that showed up right on time, and that was on Saturday. Beyond that my wife likes the shows on Prime Video, and I've been watching Mr Robot and Endeavor.
Last year I ordered a set of knives (that apparently you can ONLY find on Amazon for some weird reason) for Christmas but used the cheapo shipping to get a few Amazon gift cards. They all showed up well before Christmas.
I'm sure there have been problems but I haven't seen any.
and our wealthy and ruling class are no longer terrified of the Russians.
I don't think you've been paying attention to the corporate media recently. At least not for the last two years.
Massive public works projects and good government pay for them further increased wages. And a massive tech boom driven largely by discoveries made at Public Universities helped too (Internet anyone?).
Well the UK put $1.4 billion pounds into the project which, apparently, isn't good enough to have any say or special access. If it were me I'd ask for the money back but apparently May isn't interested.
Because they all need to petition redmond for a signature with the redmond key to be somewhat viable as a competitor to redmond.
That's *ONLY* if you get a machine with secure-boot enabled by default and Windows pre-installed, and even then it's only a couple of manufacturers that only include Microsoft keys. I think it was only a *requirement* on WinRT devices, which are now dead and buried. My MSI motherboard from four years ago lets you add keys to UEFI to enable secure-boot for other OSes.
From what I gather the issue with the Amiga was support for developers. For traditionalists, developing on top of an OS was a new experience. Granted you could kick the workbench out of the way and access the hardware, mostly, directly. But it was still a new experience for many. I've heard Commodore was pretty bad at support for these kinds of things. The differences between Kickstart versions 1, 2 and 3 were pretty substantial, and broke a lot of stuff, which also put off some devs.
Commodore wasn't the only company with similar problems, but other companies managed change a bit better and managed to survive.
I think they should be evaluated on a case by case basis. If for some reason the devs on a project keep messing with the magic number assigned to a file type, a well placed comment cussing them out to prevent that behavior is probably called for. Cussing someone out for a dumb mistake in the code is probably not warranted and should be reverted.
Thanks for the post! I couldn't find any more recent information than a few years ago when NIF stopped. What fuels are difficult to find? Last I heard it was mostly deuterium, which isn't *that* hard to get.
I've seen very select cases where swearing in comments can be useful.
There was a piece of code I saw that people thought was a bug, but was actually purposefully written a particular way to get around a bug in the compiler. Even after comments like// SERIOUSLY do not touch this it's a workaround for CVXXXXXX
People kept messing with it. Finally the dev checked in// DO NOT F****ING TOUCH THIS
and the regressions went away. Again, niche applications, but still valid.
Nobody has hit ignition yet. This includes the massive complex at Lawrence Livermore. Know how long they have been trying? The "laser bay" set in Tron was filmed in the prototype for the Livermore system. It was built in the 90's, at four times the original cost, and still isn't up to "full power," apparently because they don't know how to get it there.
So, yeah, fusion research in the US has been a total debacle. Hopefully the Europeans can get it to work, but they're already spending the money, so why does the US have to? I think we have the sunken cost fallacy going on with the National Ignition Center.
There is no reason why unions should make people unfireable,
In the union situation I was involved with, you weren't promoted based on ability. You were promoted based on how long you've been there, and, more importantly, who you suck up to. Your career path was entirely dependent on the union reps liking you. There were shenanigans you wouldn't believe.
One manager was sleeping around with her subordinates. Her uncle was the union rep (which is how it was theorized she got her job in the first place as she didn't really know what she was doing.) When the *clear* violation of work rules was discovered, her punishment was having to fill out a form and a reprimand was filed in her record that was expunged after a year.
A year later, another, less well-connected, union employee was fired for going on a date with a co-worker. They weren't even in the same department, and the complaint was filed by a third party manager who just happened to not like that employee. The fired employee's position was then filled by a friend of themanager whom filed the complaint.
A friend of a union rep got himself fired for outright stealing from the organization. It was so egregious the union couldn't really help keep his job, as police reports were involved and couldn't really be covered up. However, he managed to get re-hired a year later in a different department at a higher pay grade than before.
I could go on and on with stories like this. A friend of a union rep managed to I'm not saying the union is the cause of this utter nonsense, but it certainly is an enabler.
because they can always dangle the threat of turning you into a temp when you get too uppity. Crap like this is why workers Unionized and why companies spend a small fortune demonizing Unions.
You need to be choosier on who you work for. I used to work in a union environment and it was a nightmare. Office politics out the wazoo. I still have friends there and all they talk about is how a third of their coworkers are incompetent and un-fireable, and how it's generally impossible to get anything fix or improved. The people who are lousy at their job get promoted so competent people can fill in the positions that actually do work.
I now work for a medium-sized IT company and, basically, have complete control over how I do my job. Everyone helps each other. If I need any additional resources I get them. I can work from home when I want to, unless there are meetings, which are rare. There are zero office politics, nobody is gunning for anyone else's job. Best of all, my boss, his boss, and HIS boss are all ex-programmers and IT guys. I can walk into any of their offices with any kind of problem and they'll try to get it fixed.
I'm sure such an environment could exist under unions, but I think unionization stems from a bad work environment to begin with. It certainly doesn't seem to help.
Apple is apparently working on its own, in-house developed modem to allow it to better compete with Qualcomm
Apple doesn't *compete* with Qualcomm. Apple doesn't sell baseband chipsets and Qualcomm doesn't sell phones. They don't want to use Qualcomm parts anymore.
1. A professional monitor is tuned assuming you are going to be sitting a couple of feet away looking at graphics, and 2. A TV is tuned assuming you are sitting on the other side of the room watching movies
Mostly, there are issues with brightness, contrast, white balance, motion processing and latency.
In general it's the chloride that's the problem, not the sodium ion, so CaCl2 is not much better than NaCl for the environment. It does de-ice at a lower temperature, though.
Er, no. Sodium chloride tends to interfere with water take-up in macro- and micro- organisms. It's an issue with sodium chloride in particular. Calcium Chloride *can* have the same effect, but you need a *very* high concentration. The chloride ions can be a problem, also, but again, you need a TON of the stuff to impact anything.
It's just one data point, but there is a river that runs near my house that snakes it's way for miles towards a lake. The majority of storm drains in the county I'm in dump into it. Where it hits the lake is some of the best fishing in the area. It's dense with seaweed and fish. If increased calcium chloride had any kind of adverse effect on micro or macro organisms, it would be occurring in that spot.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm more concerned that we've now been conditioned to having to buy water in bottles when it's one of the most abundant substances on Earth.
You're free to drink all the sea water you like. It's *incredibly* abundant. *Potable* drinking water, on the other hand, can be remarkably rare in nature. If you can find a glacier-fed river you're lucky. Otherwise you have to take a chance on a spring-fed river that can be laced with heavy metals, or a pond or lake that can harbor toxic algae.
How do you know that?
Because the Cyc project, amongst others, tried doing this for 30 years and failed. They plugged in millions of rules having to do with how the world works and tried to use various algorithms to see if they could pull inferences from these giant rule sets. They couldn't get the engine to learn anything, nor draw any inferences that made any sense.
Wow, so computers are really bad at calculating individual decision trees that are all dependent on each other?
Yep, you run into all kinds of coherence problems, latency and bandwidth issues, routing complexity, etc...
What you need to approximate how an organic brain works is something like this, where the logic and memory are distributed somewhat arbitrarily across nodes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Back in 80's and 90's they tried getting around this with all kinds of exotic parallel architectures like hyper-torus rings and networked fabrics, none of which worked very well for the workloads most people were using. Once bus speeds got fast enough, it was easier to just dump a bunch of CPUs on a really fast bus and shovel data to them as fast as possible, which is great for finite element analysis and rendering, but not so great when the CPUs all need to talk to each other.
Put simply - most of the "Human Intelligence" you see is really fancy pattern matching as well.
That's a big part of it, but there's some "secret sauce" that lets organic brains combine patterns in new and different ways that AI researchers haven't been able to crack. Whatever it is, it's more than just matching patterns.
The other thing you need for an organic-style intelligence is massive parallelism. Modern computers are great at doing this for granular sequential algorithms. They are terrible at doing this if the algorithm is thousands of individual decision trees that are all arbitrarily dependent on each other, which is what an organic neural network does.
Put simply - most of the "Artificial Intelligence" you hear about in the news is really fancy pattern matching. So you can have software that can recognize voice commands, or faces in pictures, or general patterns in data.
What you don't have, and aren't even close to, are computers that can "think." That is, put different sets of data together in arbitrary ways and make sense of it. You can't feed in a bunch of musical information to a computer and have it spontaneously generate music. You can't feed in a bunch of economic data and have it decide that certain regulations are required to achieve some economic goal - unless someone specifically programs it to do so.
The underlying reason is computers lack any way of attaining "common sense." If you tell a computer a person is in a room, the computer has no concept of what you are talking about but will dutifully note that a person is in a room. To a computer that could mean the person is occupying all the space in the room, that the person is in every room that exists, that the person is in the room AND outside the room, or that a person IS a room. In actuality, the computer makes no inference beyond "something called a person is in something called a room, whatever that means."
My wife bought a few of the kid's Christmas presents and they showed up on time. Last-minute I bought a heating pad for my mom that showed up right on time, and that was on Saturday. Beyond that my wife likes the shows on Prime Video, and I've been watching Mr Robot and Endeavor.
Last year I ordered a set of knives (that apparently you can ONLY find on Amazon for some weird reason) for Christmas but used the cheapo shipping to get a few Amazon gift cards. They all showed up well before Christmas.
I'm sure there have been problems but I haven't seen any.
and our wealthy and ruling class are no longer terrified of the Russians.
I don't think you've been paying attention to the corporate media recently. At least not for the last two years.
Massive public works projects and good government pay for them further increased wages. And a massive tech boom driven largely by discoveries made at Public Universities helped too (Internet anyone?).
Yeah that's not how it's seen by the proletariat.
https://genius.com/Gil-scott-h...
Heheehe I just realized i said $1.4 billion pounds. I guess that's like £1.4 billion dollars.
Well the UK put $1.4 billion pounds into the project which, apparently, isn't good enough to have any say or special access. If it were me I'd ask for the money back but apparently May isn't interested.
LG makes $200 smartphones. They could have been used phones, as well.
Because they all need to petition redmond for a signature with the redmond key to be somewhat viable as a competitor to redmond.
That's *ONLY* if you get a machine with secure-boot enabled by default and Windows pre-installed, and even then it's only a couple of manufacturers that only include Microsoft keys. I think it was only a *requirement* on WinRT devices, which are now dead and buried. My MSI motherboard from four years ago lets you add keys to UEFI to enable secure-boot for other OSes.
libcaca.
http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libca...
Monopoly-wise, UEFI, has given Microsoft and unfair advantage to draw a circle around all (IBM Compatible) PCs and call them their own.
In what way? Pretty much every other x86-based OS can boot off of UEFI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
From what I gather the issue with the Amiga was support for developers. For traditionalists, developing on top of an OS was a new experience. Granted you could kick the workbench out of the way and access the hardware, mostly, directly. But it was still a new experience for many. I've heard Commodore was pretty bad at support for these kinds of things. The differences between Kickstart versions 1, 2 and 3 were pretty substantial, and broke a lot of stuff, which also put off some devs.
Commodore wasn't the only company with similar problems, but other companies managed change a bit better and managed to survive.
I think they should be evaluated on a case by case basis. If for some reason the devs on a project keep messing with the magic number assigned to a file type, a well placed comment cussing them out to prevent that behavior is probably called for. Cussing someone out for a dumb mistake in the code is probably not warranted and should be reverted.
It was an old open source project in the late 90's. I could probably dig it up, if it's still around and the repo goes back that far..
Thanks for the post! I couldn't find any more recent information than a few years ago when NIF stopped. What fuels are difficult to find? Last I heard it was mostly deuterium, which isn't *that* hard to get.
I've seen very select cases where swearing in comments can be useful.
There was a piece of code I saw that people thought was a bug, but was actually purposefully written a particular way to get around a bug in the compiler. Even after comments like // SERIOUSLY do not touch this it's a workaround for CVXXXXXX
People kept messing with it. Finally the dev checked in // DO NOT F****ING TOUCH THIS
and the regressions went away. Again, niche applications, but still valid.
Nobody has hit ignition yet. This includes the massive complex at Lawrence Livermore. Know how long they have been trying? The "laser bay" set in Tron was filmed in the prototype for the Livermore system. It was built in the 90's, at four times the original cost, and still isn't up to "full power," apparently because they don't know how to get it there.
So, yeah, fusion research in the US has been a total debacle. Hopefully the Europeans can get it to work, but they're already spending the money, so why does the US have to? I think we have the sunken cost fallacy going on with the National Ignition Center.
There is no reason why unions should make people unfireable,
In the union situation I was involved with, you weren't promoted based on ability. You were promoted based on how long you've been there, and, more importantly, who you suck up to. Your career path was entirely dependent on the union reps liking you. There were shenanigans you wouldn't believe.
One manager was sleeping around with her subordinates. Her uncle was the union rep (which is how it was theorized she got her job in the first place as she didn't really know what she was doing.) When the *clear* violation of work rules was discovered, her punishment was having to fill out a form and a reprimand was filed in her record that was expunged after a year.
A year later, another, less well-connected, union employee was fired for going on a date with a co-worker. They weren't even in the same department, and the complaint was filed by a third party manager who just happened to not like that employee. The fired employee's position was then filled by a friend of themanager whom filed the complaint.
A friend of a union rep got himself fired for outright stealing from the organization. It was so egregious the union couldn't really help keep his job, as police reports were involved and couldn't really be covered up. However, he managed to get re-hired a year later in a different department at a higher pay grade than before.
I could go on and on with stories like this. A friend of a union rep managed to I'm not saying the union is the cause of this utter nonsense, but it certainly is an enabler.
because they can always dangle the threat of turning you into a temp when you get too uppity. Crap like this is why workers Unionized and why companies spend a small fortune demonizing Unions.
You need to be choosier on who you work for. I used to work in a union environment and it was a nightmare. Office politics out the wazoo. I still have friends there and all they talk about is how a third of their coworkers are incompetent and un-fireable, and how it's generally impossible to get anything fix or improved. The people who are lousy at their job get promoted so competent people can fill in the positions that actually do work.
I now work for a medium-sized IT company and, basically, have complete control over how I do my job. Everyone helps each other. If I need any additional resources I get them. I can work from home when I want to, unless there are meetings, which are rare. There are zero office politics, nobody is gunning for anyone else's job. Best of all, my boss, his boss, and HIS boss are all ex-programmers and IT guys. I can walk into any of their offices with any kind of problem and they'll try to get it fixed.
I'm sure such an environment could exist under unions, but I think unionization stems from a bad work environment to begin with. It certainly doesn't seem to help.
Apple is apparently working on its own, in-house developed modem to allow it to better compete with Qualcomm
Apple doesn't *compete* with Qualcomm. Apple doesn't sell baseband chipsets and Qualcomm doesn't sell phones. They don't want to use Qualcomm parts anymore.
Why not?
Because, oversimplified:
1. A professional monitor is tuned assuming you are going to be sitting a couple of feet away looking at graphics, and
2. A TV is tuned assuming you are sitting on the other side of the room watching movies
Mostly, there are issues with brightness, contrast, white balance, motion processing and latency.
In general it's the chloride that's the problem, not the sodium ion, so CaCl2 is not much better than NaCl for the environment. It does de-ice at a lower temperature, though.
Er, no. Sodium chloride tends to interfere with water take-up in macro- and micro- organisms. It's an issue with sodium chloride in particular. Calcium Chloride *can* have the same effect, but you need a *very* high concentration. The chloride ions can be a problem, also, but again, you need a TON of the stuff to impact anything.
It's just one data point, but there is a river that runs near my house that snakes it's way for miles towards a lake. The majority of storm drains in the county I'm in dump into it. Where it hits the lake is some of the best fishing in the area. It's dense with seaweed and fish. If increased calcium chloride had any kind of adverse effect on micro or macro organisms, it would be occurring in that spot.