I have the mod points, but I was only barely able to resist giving you the Flamebait. Your post is kind of like a mod-point meta-troll. You see something new every day.
"There is no reason to believe that the theory won't be falsified."
T.S. Kuhn would say that every theory ("paradigm", to him) has its anomalies, but these are usually insufficient to spike it. In other words, "falsifications" in science are not all they are cracked up to be. For instance, Newtonian dynamics had anomalies in predicting the motion of Mercury that weren't resolved until the 1800s. But the paradigm was so powerful and implied so much that scientists used it anyway, as it turns out.
Here we have a different situation. The paradigm is so complex that there is finally a test case several decades after it is first promulgated. I would be interested to know more, but it looks like it takes an act of genius just to create an application of the theory.
Read the Wikipedia on Burkhard Heim. He's a Tesla sort of character. In one way, it is hard to call such men crackpots; in other ways, it is hard not to. The wiki on his theory is also enlightening.
There's a little spot on the UC-Berkeley campus that is not under the jurisdiction of any government. "This area belongs to no nation or territory and is not subject to any laws or treaties..."
You could always try to live under the sea. "Homer, that's your solution to everything: to move under the sea. It's not gonna happen!"
Not with that attitude, my friend. Not with that attitude.
Well, there is a certain wing of scientists who don't think that we'll get strong AI unless we grow brains in vats and hook them up to the computers (roughly).
My research is toward intuition and metaphorical thinking, but Cyc in general is about collecting common sense knowledge that can be used as a sort of broad context to understand natural language. Naturally, I hope this isn't a terrible blind alley, but in fact it does seem to have a lot to do with how children learn more when they learn facts in contexts and make connections and suppositions.
The computers aren't as parallelized as the human brain and might never be (until quantum computing comes about, maybe). But they do have big advantages in areas like computation and persistence of memory. I think if we ever do get a very smart AI, we will do it more by faking the process than by emulating the human brain's patterns.
But yes, there is a certain I, Robot quality about soft computing approaches to strong AI. If we set this massive neural net humming and hook it up to a knowledge base like Cyc, then give it the Google home page and leave it alone for six years, it will kind of be the point that we don't know how it works really. If we had to know how it worked, it would take too long to make it. I'm thinking of the last story in I, Robot where the machines are directing human society to God-only-knows what destiny.
That kind of freaks me out, but not enough to stop working on smart expert systems in narrow domains. Talking computers would, for better or worse, change the world.
Because Darth Maul got chopped in half. Maybe this is a symbol of his torn heart as he tries to decide which great offer to take. And I wasn't aware of any big Sith tournament to the death to become the apprentice. Is that canon?
Darth Vader did kill the evil emperor eventually. But they had some good times ruling the galaxy. Good times.
Darth Vader also had it up on the competition because he had a bunch of computer parts. "He's more machine now than man." Too bad we never see Vader shutting off the trash compactor with his thumb.
I started reading Xooglers and it is mesmerizing. I'm an MS CS in artificial intelligence (with OpenCyc and ResearchCyc if you're interested; I want to make my computer talk to me). I always say I want to go work at Google after I finish my thesis, but now that goal (hubris?) is getting a much-needed reality check. Not that it's cooled my infatuation with the world's coolest company (soooo dreamy!), just glad to know.
I'm a Protestant, and I don't start with Biblical inerrancy or something like that. In fact, I find those ways of reading the Bible rather dubious. Rather, I have been profoundly affected by the figure of Jesus; who is he? What was he about? What would he have to say to people like me? The answers to those questions, and to others about the meaning of life and death and about lived beliefs, brought me to Christianity.
As a person of faith, I find that such a stance frees me to be rather more objective about the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible. If I find out that Christ's story is a cheat, I can drop it, finally, in the knowledge that I was faithful to my reasons as far as they went. But now I don't have to concentrate on every so-called contradiction in the Bible. Instead, I can begin to know Jesus by examining the writings of the people who knew him best, and slowly expand from there.
So I don't always know how to take the Hebrew Bible. The sons and daughters of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob talked about God, at times, in ways I don't recognize. I am not trying to revive the Manichean heresy (he thought that the Adonai of the Old Testament was the evil God, and Christ was the good God who defeated Adonai). But I can allow the questions to get a lot deeper into my thinking this way.
Hack your neighbors wireless connection and feed false information to their RSS printed TP. Imagine the fun you could have. Program it to tell your neighbors wife she's fat and needs to lose weight. Program it to insult your neighbor's husband's manhood. There's so much potential here it is staggering...
I know what you're saying. TP is big "business". Just imagine what it could do for the sexual pharmacology industry.
More potential than potent? Looking for staggering manhood? Wipe no further!
I feel sheepish. I've used GMail without noticing bugs, so you're probably most right. Maybe I should say "as gold as anyone else".
I noticed how fast Google fixed the Google Desktop/IE vulnerability quickly too. Two data points is a trend.
I also notice that almost all of what they're doing is server-side applications. That probably enables a lot more bug fixing that is unobtrusive to the customer. Seems I read a Paul Graham article to that effect.
This seems transparent to me. You expect Betas to change and add features. When the new feature gets added, you get buzz on Slashdot.
GMail is in Beta? Get real! What's the last bug report you sent in? For all purposes, it is a "gold" product. But here's why it's still called a Beta: you expect new features and incremental improvements as a matter of course; you don't need a splashy launch and marketing campaign like Microsoft does when it upgrades.
Google is changing expectations from a long release cycle with a major build released every year or two to an extremely fluid release cycle with minor upgrades once a month. They benefit from the flexibility this affords for development, but also from the impression that they move quickly and improve their software in an ongoing way, while their competitors move slowly and produce gigantic buggy messes. Hey, the impression might even be true.
"Actually, Caesar (Trajan) did invade Iraq (Parthia). I don't know if he used catapults, but I wouldn't be surprised. Nuclear weapons were definitely not used."
Let's just say that the proof of WMD use has not been conclusively established. Maybe they were spirited away to Persia on the backs of camels with four eyes.
I noticed when the Grateful Dead shows went off but I didn't know why. Now it shows there are 1100 shows back there (still not all of them back). Maybe putting the other 1500 back on is why the archive has been running slowly today.
I'm having trouble clicking through the link now, so who knows what the deal is.
I think the point of the story is that she is having to either cough up a lot of money or waste a lot of time, whether she's guilty or not. When you have a large family and you are living at the margins (like most people in America), the two things you don't have a lot of are time and money. I have enough trouble going to school fulltime and work another halftime and being a father to only one kid with a loving wife as my partner for life. Her life is going on hold because she wants to be innocent in a court of law.
I don't know this woman's life story and neither do you, but hey, maybe you get sexual pleasure in calling women sluts on Slashdot and imagining how dirty they are. I could understand the sick psychological makeup that would drive you to such behavior. Oh oops, did I malign your character? And I've never met you? My mistake.
Maybe you and your neocon buddies (oops again! I've really never met you) think enforcing unjust laws disproportionately against the poor is just the way the world works, so the rest of us bleeding hearts should just suck it up and quit whining about the unfairness of it all. The nerve of us!
Maybe someone should sue you for nothing sometime. Then I could tell someone else on Slashdot to shut up and stop defending you because after all, it's the law.
1. Go to http://www.archive.org/audio/etreelisting-browse.p hp . All the music is legal, live concert, artist permitted, and free. Download Grateful Dead, 311, G Love and Special Sauce, Cracker, Glen Phillips, Andrew Bird, and the Ditty Bops and so on to your heart's content.
2. Listen to commercial-free streaming audio via ITunes (Radio) and other internet media.
3. Reward the artists whose work you enjoy this way by going to their concerts. Reward any artists whose albums you can hear from front to back for free, like Nickel Creek on CMT.com and the Ditty Bops on dittybops.com.
Amen. There is something a little dodgy about calling art "a thing made with artistic intent". You haven't done anything but change a noun to an adjective; all the same questions remain. You might as well say that language is "a thing (Platonic Idea? concept? shared delusion?) made with linguistic intent".
If we're going to call anything people create art (which is the direction I think nero is heading), and oppose art to nature, things uncreated by people, we're going to get an unacceptably broad definition. Are the Ten Commandments art? They have a certain poetic structure, but also a moralizing dimension as strong as the polemical dimension in Nazi propaganda. Are they incidentally art or primarily art? Is everything art?
Maybe it would be better to talk about "good art" and "bad art". Then we'll get closer to what art really means.
Art is an emotional space created by someone else (or you) that can be experienced ("lived in") for a while.
Is talking art? How about a telephone message? I don't think your definition is specific enough. Now, there may be kinds of talking that really are art, and kinds of telephone messages that are art too. But I think your definition is too broad. [Also your definition includes the term "artist", but I don't know if your understanding of art depends on a private meaning of "artist".]
I don't think your interpretation of games "entertaining" rather than "communicating" holds much water. Chrono Trigger is very entertaining and it's not particularly communicating, as if you could divine the secret message of the video game if you only had the hermeneutical key. It doesn't seem so important to me that art has these messages embedded at the root. What does Casablanca communicate? What is the meaning of Ode on a Grecian Urn?
On my definition, Chrono Trigger and Casablanca do create an emotional space for you to experience. It makes you feel like your actions matter because the world changes when you do something important. In that way and many others, it tries to help you pass the Rubicon and live in a new emotional space just like any good fiction.
I think we would agree that Galaga and chess don't create any great emotional space to live in, and maybe they don't count as art. I'm not an master chess player, so I wouldn't know.
But Final Fantasy VII and Planetfall do arouse those strong emotions. We really care about what happens to these fictional constructions of 1s and 0s. You forget that Cloud and Floyd are not real, because they are real within the confines of their little emotional world, and you get to travel in that world and experience it with them.
If that's not art, what is? And there are countless other examples. "For every Carmageddon there is an equal and opposite Half-Life 2." Okay, maybe not "every". But there are plenty of high-profile examples of artistic games.
RTFA. A disappearing dye has so many potential uses it's scary. How about re-dying biological structures several times, or in several colors?
Hair coloring? Tattoos? Clothes? Color-shifting camouflage? Color-changing pens? Teachers could use these on the first board and have it clear by the time they filled up the rest of the boards.
Not to mention that these guys are going to make a frigging fortune.
It's like Miyazaki (I think) said about the guy that made Pokemon; he did it because he loved it. We should all be so lucky.
Maybe you should drop whatever you're doing and go rebuild New Orleans, I hear that's pretty important. But then you won't be able to fight world hunger. Or work on the AIDS vaccine. The truth is that we all have to run our own race, and the sooner we know where to run the better off we'll be.
Slashdot Mirror
I have the mod points, but I was only barely able to resist giving you the Flamebait. Your post is kind of like a mod-point meta-troll. You see something new every day.
"There is no reason to believe that the theory won't be falsified."
T.S. Kuhn would say that every theory ("paradigm", to him) has its anomalies, but these are usually insufficient to spike it. In other words, "falsifications" in science are not all they are cracked up to be. For instance, Newtonian dynamics had anomalies in predicting the motion of Mercury that weren't resolved until the 1800s. But the paradigm was so powerful and implied so much that scientists used it anyway, as it turns out.
Here we have a different situation. The paradigm is so complex that there is finally a test case several decades after it is first promulgated. I would be interested to know more, but it looks like it takes an act of genius just to create an application of the theory.
Read the Wikipedia on Burkhard Heim. He's a Tesla sort of character. In one way, it is hard to call such men crackpots; in other ways, it is hard not to. The wiki on his theory is also enlightening.
There's a little spot on the UC-Berkeley campus that is not under the jurisdiction of any government. "This area belongs to no nation or territory and is not subject to any laws or treaties..."
You could always try to live under the sea. "Homer, that's your solution to everything: to move under the sea. It's not gonna happen!"
Not with that attitude, my friend. Not with that attitude.
Good luck.
Well, there is a certain wing of scientists who don't think that we'll get strong AI unless we grow brains in vats and hook them up to the computers (roughly).
My research is toward intuition and metaphorical thinking, but Cyc in general is about collecting common sense knowledge that can be used as a sort of broad context to understand natural language. Naturally, I hope this isn't a terrible blind alley, but in fact it does seem to have a lot to do with how children learn more when they learn facts in contexts and make connections and suppositions.
The computers aren't as parallelized as the human brain and might never be (until quantum computing comes about, maybe). But they do have big advantages in areas like computation and persistence of memory. I think if we ever do get a very smart AI, we will do it more by faking the process than by emulating the human brain's patterns.
But yes, there is a certain I, Robot quality about soft computing approaches to strong AI. If we set this massive neural net humming and hook it up to a knowledge base like Cyc, then give it the Google home page and leave it alone for six years, it will kind of be the point that we don't know how it works really. If we had to know how it worked, it would take too long to make it. I'm thinking of the last story in I, Robot where the machines are directing human society to God-only-knows what destiny.
That kind of freaks me out, but not enough to stop working on smart expert systems in narrow domains. Talking computers would, for better or worse, change the world.
Because Darth Maul got chopped in half. Maybe this is a symbol of his torn heart as he tries to decide which great offer to take. And I wasn't aware of any big Sith tournament to the death to become the apprentice. Is that canon?
Darth Vader did kill the evil emperor eventually. But they had some good times ruling the galaxy. Good times.
Darth Vader also had it up on the competition because he had a bunch of computer parts. "He's more machine now than man." Too bad we never see Vader shutting off the trash compactor with his thumb.
I started reading Xooglers and it is mesmerizing. I'm an MS CS in artificial intelligence (with OpenCyc and ResearchCyc if you're interested; I want to make my computer talk to me). I always say I want to go work at Google after I finish my thesis, but now that goal (hubris?) is getting a much-needed reality check. Not that it's cooled my infatuation with the world's coolest company (soooo dreamy!), just glad to know.
Fascinating reading.
I'm a Protestant, and I don't start with Biblical inerrancy or something like that. In fact, I find those ways of reading the Bible rather dubious. Rather, I have been profoundly affected by the figure of Jesus; who is he? What was he about? What would he have to say to people like me? The answers to those questions, and to others about the meaning of life and death and about lived beliefs, brought me to Christianity.
As a person of faith, I find that such a stance frees me to be rather more objective about the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible. If I find out that Christ's story is a cheat, I can drop it, finally, in the knowledge that I was faithful to my reasons as far as they went. But now I don't have to concentrate on every so-called contradiction in the Bible. Instead, I can begin to know Jesus by examining the writings of the people who knew him best, and slowly expand from there.
So I don't always know how to take the Hebrew Bible. The sons and daughters of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob talked about God, at times, in ways I don't recognize. I am not trying to revive the Manichean heresy (he thought that the Adonai of the Old Testament was the evil God, and Christ was the good God who defeated Adonai). But I can allow the questions to get a lot deeper into my thinking this way.
I thought you were supposed to use toilet paper to decrease the amount of unadulterated bull crap in your bathroom.
Hack your neighbors wireless connection and feed false information to their RSS printed TP. Imagine the fun you could have. Program it to tell your neighbors wife she's fat and needs to lose weight. Program it to insult your neighbor's husband's manhood. There's so much potential here it is staggering...
I know what you're saying. TP is big "business". Just imagine what it could do for the sexual pharmacology industry.
More potential than potent? Looking for staggering manhood? Wipe no further!
Not to mention that you can write your own patch if you're upset with Firefox, but you can stick your thumb up your butt if you're upset with IE.
Whoa, I didn't know tech bloggers were into undercover drug sting philosophy. Or that Slashdot editors were into people who were into that.
The word you're scrabbling for is "narcissism". I'm too busy admiring my vocabulary to say more than that.
I feel sheepish. I've used GMail without noticing bugs, so you're probably most right. Maybe I should say "as gold as anyone else".
I noticed how fast Google fixed the Google Desktop/IE vulnerability quickly too. Two data points is a trend.
I also notice that almost all of what they're doing is server-side applications. That probably enables a lot more bug fixing that is unobtrusive to the customer. Seems I read a Paul Graham article to that effect.
This seems transparent to me. You expect Betas to change and add features. When the new feature gets added, you get buzz on Slashdot.
GMail is in Beta? Get real! What's the last bug report you sent in? For all purposes, it is a "gold" product. But here's why it's still called a Beta: you expect new features and incremental improvements as a matter of course; you don't need a splashy launch and marketing campaign like Microsoft does when it upgrades.
Google is changing expectations from a long release cycle with a major build released every year or two to an extremely fluid release cycle with minor upgrades once a month. They benefit from the flexibility this affords for development, but also from the impression that they move quickly and improve their software in an ongoing way, while their competitors move slowly and produce gigantic buggy messes. Hey, the impression might even be true.
"Actually, Caesar (Trajan) did invade Iraq (Parthia). I don't know if he used catapults, but I wouldn't be surprised. Nuclear weapons were definitely not used."
Let's just say that the proof of WMD use has not been conclusively established. Maybe they were spirited away to Persia on the backs of camels with four eyes.
http://www.archive.org/audio/etreelisting-browse.p hp?collection=etree&cat=Grateful%20Dead
I noticed when the Grateful Dead shows went off but I didn't know why. Now it shows there are 1100 shows back there (still not all of them back). Maybe putting the other 1500 back on is why the archive has been running slowly today.
I'm having trouble clicking through the link now, so who knows what the deal is.
I think the point of the story is that she is having to either cough up a lot of money or waste a lot of time, whether she's guilty or not. When you have a large family and you are living at the margins (like most people in America), the two things you don't have a lot of are time and money. I have enough trouble going to school fulltime and work another halftime and being a father to only one kid with a loving wife as my partner for life. Her life is going on hold because she wants to be innocent in a court of law.
I don't know this woman's life story and neither do you, but hey, maybe you get sexual pleasure in calling women sluts on Slashdot and imagining how dirty they are. I could understand the sick psychological makeup that would drive you to such behavior. Oh oops, did I malign your character? And I've never met you? My mistake.
Maybe you and your neocon buddies (oops again! I've really never met you) think enforcing unjust laws disproportionately against the poor is just the way the world works, so the rest of us bleeding hearts should just suck it up and quit whining about the unfairness of it all. The nerve of us!
Maybe someone should sue you for nothing sometime. Then I could tell someone else on Slashdot to shut up and stop defending you because after all, it's the law.
The answer to the downloading conundrum is easy.
p hp . All the music is legal, live concert, artist permitted, and free. Download Grateful Dead, 311, G Love and Special Sauce, Cracker, Glen Phillips, Andrew Bird, and the Ditty Bops and so on to your heart's content.
1. Go to http://www.archive.org/audio/etreelisting-browse.
2. Listen to commercial-free streaming audio via ITunes (Radio) and other internet media.
3. Reward the artists whose work you enjoy this way by going to their concerts. Reward any artists whose albums you can hear from front to back for free, like Nickel Creek on CMT.com and the Ditty Bops on dittybops.com.
Amen. There is something a little dodgy about calling art "a thing made with artistic intent". You haven't done anything but change a noun to an adjective; all the same questions remain. You might as well say that language is "a thing (Platonic Idea? concept? shared delusion?) made with linguistic intent".
If we're going to call anything people create art (which is the direction I think nero is heading), and oppose art to nature, things uncreated by people, we're going to get an unacceptably broad definition. Are the Ten Commandments art? They have a certain poetic structure, but also a moralizing dimension as strong as the polemical dimension in Nazi propaganda. Are they incidentally art or primarily art? Is everything art?
Maybe it would be better to talk about "good art" and "bad art". Then we'll get closer to what art really means.
Art is an emotional space created by someone else (or you) that can be experienced ("lived in") for a while.
Is talking art? How about a telephone message? I don't think your definition is specific enough. Now, there may be kinds of talking that really are art, and kinds of telephone messages that are art too. But I think your definition is too broad. [Also your definition includes the term "artist", but I don't know if your understanding of art depends on a private meaning of "artist".]
I don't think your interpretation of games "entertaining" rather than "communicating" holds much water. Chrono Trigger is very entertaining and it's not particularly communicating, as if you could divine the secret message of the video game if you only had the hermeneutical key. It doesn't seem so important to me that art has these messages embedded at the root. What does Casablanca communicate? What is the meaning of Ode on a Grecian Urn?
On my definition, Chrono Trigger and Casablanca do create an emotional space for you to experience. It makes you feel like your actions matter because the world changes when you do something important. In that way and many others, it tries to help you pass the Rubicon and live in a new emotional space just like any good fiction.
I think we would agree that Galaga and chess don't create any great emotional space to live in, and maybe they don't count as art. I'm not an master chess player, so I wouldn't know.
But Final Fantasy VII and Planetfall do arouse those strong emotions. We really care about what happens to these fictional constructions of 1s and 0s. You forget that Cloud and Floyd are not real, because they are real within the confines of their little emotional world, and you get to travel in that world and experience it with them.
If that's not art, what is? And there are countless other examples. "For every Carmageddon there is an equal and opposite Half-Life 2." Okay, maybe not "every". But there are plenty of high-profile examples of artistic games.
They got to you too! Blink twice if it's the Mafia.
RTFA. A disappearing dye has so many potential uses it's scary. How about re-dying biological structures several times, or in several colors?
Hair coloring? Tattoos? Clothes? Color-shifting camouflage? Color-changing pens? Teachers could use these on the first board and have it clear by the time they filled up the rest of the boards.
Not to mention that these guys are going to make a frigging fortune.
It's like Miyazaki (I think) said about the guy that made Pokemon; he did it because he loved it. We should all be so lucky.
Maybe you should drop whatever you're doing and go rebuild New Orleans, I hear that's pretty important. But then you won't be able to fight world hunger. Or work on the AIDS vaccine. The truth is that we all have to run our own race, and the sooner we know where to run the better off we'll be.
It's "Vote for Pedro". [/geek]
True. I guess I was thinking of the language ready-made to write languages, the ideal instead of the real. Funny sig by the way. :o)
"C - The programming language programmers' programming language."
Not to flame, but Lisp is the programmable programming language. It can be written in itself. http://paulgraham.com/chameleon.html
Let's just encourage a taste for blood vessels. "Who ordered the aorta on rye?"