Yes, of course. What else did you think I meant? It's an idea. It's not a certainty. I'm not sure what your point is. Care to elaborate?
When I say "no idea" I mean literally we have no demonstrable understanding of any one single cognitive function of the brain. Any brain
You might have meant that, but writing "no idea" didn't (and still doesn't) actually say that. The statement was made that we have no ideas. We do, in fact, have ideas.That was the assertion, and that is my answer.
Human brains? We've got nothing.
Human brains are not what are at issue here, but even so, that statement is incorrect. We have made progress at the small scale (see Numenta's work) and there are multiple ideas out there that presently have significant merit. Personally, as someone working in the field and conversant with a lot of what's going on in the technical sense, I have a fairly high level of confidence that we're much closer than the popular narrative would have us believe. Am I right? We will see.:)
Understanding how humans store and recognize images primarily is not a barrier to AI. It's not memory or image recognition that's the hill to climb; The fundamental algorithmic/methodological challenges are thinking, along with conceptual storage, development and manipulation (these things incorporate memory use, but aren't a storage problem per se.) Hardware needs to be able to handle amounts of ram and long term, high speed storage that can serve as a practical basis for the rest as well. Right now, we're getting close, but it'll be a few more years yet before anything really smart can be instantiated. That's even if we were to figure out precisely how to do it right now.
It is possible -- though I consider it doubtful -- that we would implement human style vision neurology in hardware for an AI, but frankly our abilities are so poor compared to what can be accomplished I really don't see why we'd cripple an AI that way. It'd be abusive. "We could have made your visual recall incredibly acute, but... instead you're like us, and really don't have much more than a general idea what was in a scene after you have seen it." [AI nukes silicon valley] (Mods: that's humor. HUMOR.]
Of course, understanding how humans store and recognize images is (very) important to our understanding of human physiology and disease, and it's wonderful that we're working on it.
"Adds heat" is a woefully inadequate simplification of whether or not it's an issue to be concerned with. When temperature goes up, other things change as a result of the relevant phsyics. For instance, the evap/precip cycle accelerates, carrying more warm air and moisture up, and more cool air and moisture down. CO2 in the upper atmosphere reduces radiation by a factor, but more heat up there, more often, increases radiation. More CO2 almost universally implies conditions better for plants. More and healthier plants means more of all sorts of things and less of others.
Dire predictions: Warming moves the zone(s) within which plants and animals flourish north. There's plenty of room to go, a great deal of northern area is frozen wasteland at this point. More CO2 is good for plants. People might have to move. They do that all the tiime. Coastlines may change and infrastructure may need to maintained, adapted, moved or replaced. That happens all the time. Currently estimated timescale for sea level changes: inches per year. Totally yawn-worthy.
In short, the issue is complex beyond any possible "on noes, warming" assessment -- hysteria is entirely uncalled for.
Science is a method. When facing something new, it involves formulating a hypothesis, testing that to validate or disprove it, and then drawing conclusions. We have not seen and do not know what happens when CO2 increases by large amounts due to our production of it. In the historical record, CO2 increases trail warming, not lead it -- which is another way of saying that historically speaking, CO2 increases herald cooling, so that is not any kind of adequate confirmation of the idea that human-caused CO2 increases will lead to significant climactic warming. Doesn't mean it won't -- it just means that this is a new thing and that drawing conclusions either requires flawless modeling that takes everything significant to the process into account (which we don't have... not only in re natural processes, but in re unanticipated technology), or actually seeing what happens. Without one of those - which again, we don't have -- it's not settled science. It is unvalidated hypothesis.
o Yes, we should be trying to figure this out. o No, we have not figured it out.
When will we know when we have figured this out? When we have a model that accurately predicts climate change as known to have occurred in the historical record.
PS: coral does not "die when you touch it." I have multiple coral reef tanks. I touch my corals (hard ones and soft ones) all the time to move them around, frag (subdivide and transplant) them, brush them when I'm reaching for something else. I cut colonies of soft corals with a razor in order to divide them into more than one instance and place them in multiple places and/or share them with other coral reef owners. Certainly doesn't kill them (doesn't even seem to hurt them.) For hard corals, you break them into separate instances (frag them) with tools that are basically smallish hammers and chisels. You even do this out of the water. Again, doesn't kill them. They don't die because they were bothered or touched. I've never, ever seen that happen. Some of them don't react at all or very much, but the most I've ever seen them do is pull away or retract, dependably to return to their original extension and condition within minutes of the disturbance that caused it ending. Fish touch them all the time as well. Doesn't hurt a thing.
The things that I have seen be directly and immediately detrimental to corals are Ph changes, temperature changes, salinity changes, very large and sudden changes in lighting, and the actions they engage WRT each other (chemical warfare among corals has to be seen to be believed. They are nasty to each other at times.)
Climate change panic bores me. Climate change dismissal bores me. But, like a lot of other induced hysteria, it's a major component of pop culture and the media's slavish devotion to fanning same, so I have to actually work to avoid both.:)
o 14% approval rate -- that was a poll o 94% re-election rate -- that was actual voters. o In the same election, national turnout was 36.3%.
I think the advent of the net's new accessibility to information outside of the laundered and agitprop driven channels, the money-based reasoning of SCOTUS, the lobbyist factor, the obvious malfeasance of Fox news, MSNBC, the blatantly unconstitutional legislation coming out of congress... and so on... all combine to give a very large portion of the people who might otherwise vote a sense that the system is so massively corrupt that there just is no point to it.
When you ask them -- polling asks them -- they tell you that. That's why the 14% approval rate.
But the only people voting are the droolers who watch MSNBC and Fox. They're agenda- and plank-driven (abortion! guns! perverts! terrorists! taxes! etc.) and that's driving them to or from one party or the other. And *they* are controlling the narrative here; that's why the polls just aren't -- and won't be -- working in the current context.
It's just an idea. But the data is hard data. Something has to explain it. It's too skewed to be any kind of random happening.
I actually do vote, but I have to say, it's pretty damned fruitless. This is a red (very red) state, and so that's the way the pendulum swings here, regardless of how I vote. If I vote progressive on something, it's not going to happen. If I vote conservative on something, it would have happened any way. This is not encouraging.
The only thing less productive than voting for progressive ideas here is voting for a third party candidate. Neither one does any good at all in terms of biasing the political system, but at least the progressive vote isn't buried or simply not mentioned. Sneered at, I think might be the most accurate term around here, actually. But they at least talk about it.
If you want to open a business in a free country like the United States and advertise your business as a communication platform there is NO problem requiring that business allow open communication by all.
"Private." "Requiring." I do not think those words mean what you seem to think they mean. Free speech, as the constitution mentions it, applies to what the feds are not allowed to do with regard to the speech of the citizens. It's not a mandate enabling them to force the citizens to participate in things they aren't interested in. It just means that the government can't stifle you. A private entity is something else entirely. You may not like it, but there it is.
You should go read Facebook's terms of service. It'll be educational. I promise.
I didn't come here to read what Dice wrote. I came here to read what you wrote.
For better or worse, slashdot attracts a collection of some very smart, and well-informed, and funny, people. And trolls, but hell, trolls are everywhere. Many places seem to only have trolls.
You don't believe me? Good grief, it's been illegal to consider all manner of things when hiring for years, all over the place. Not to mention there are questions you can't even ask.
Oh, FFS. Look. No matter *what* I chose, the point, which you completely missed, was that one malfeasance is in no way made less by the existence of others.
By concentrating on the particulars -- which named no one and drew no level of equivalence except withing the example, as without -- you failed.
The example is the same if it is stealing from the cookie jar or shoplifting -- or murder -- or twisting the truth. That's the WHOLE POINT. That's the whooshing sound you heard.
The slashdotter below you screws up and makes some dumb remark about my post, missing the point? Doesn't excuse you doing it at all. How's that? A little closer to home?
No it shouldn't. If gender is a predictor of ability then the probability distributions are BY DEFINITION not independent. If therefore you use the knowledge of gender after evaluating ability then you are treating them as independent variables when you combine them. This is mathematically bogus.
Actually, that's just mathematically simplistic. Here's what your reasoning does not account for: There are leanings, abilities and competencies that do not exist in isolation from other influences. Gender can be one of those. Therefore, to the extent that affect is possible, it is a valid consideration.
It could be a positive for either sex.
For instance, the air force has definitively determined that females are significantly better at maintaining more comprehensive situational awareness in complex aerial situations. This is because of a real world gender-based difference in information processing.
On the other hand, if one was hiring a bouncer, the competencies lean strongly the other way.
There will be outliers, of course, but that's why we need to think about these things rather than operate by rote. The law, unfortunately, but needfully (due to blind prejudice), specifies decision by rote. This is why many parts of the decision making process have gone missing from public view.
In this case (there are certainly others), they are using deceptive reporting to mislead people on the current state of affairs. Ask yourself why they would do this. The answer isn't "because they are angels."
And with Ruby you don't need a specialized editor to tell me the difference between space and tab characters.
If your editor can't tell you the difference between tabs and spaces, you need a better editor. It's 2015. No need to stick with weak development tools.
Which is not to say that Ruby isn't a fine language. It is. As is Python 2. And 3.
Python 3.x is not Python 2.x by any means. Python 2 code won't work under Python 3, and safe conversion requires complete re-testing and so is unlikely to be a practical or sane option for many installations, regardless of tools that do it automatically. That's not to say that Python 3 might not be a better language than Python 2; just that it isn't the same language, any more than Ruby or Perl is the same as Python 2.
But this is one area where open source comes to the rescue. The ability to keep Python 2.x relevant without breaking everything is readily available to anyone who needs it and can afford the investments in time and effort. Python 3 is an option, not a requirement, just as the new version of Perl is.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it does. Among many other things. Thanks for taking the time to mention it.
Yes, of course. What else did you think I meant? It's an idea. It's not a certainty. I'm not sure what your point is. Care to elaborate?
You might have meant that, but writing "no idea" didn't (and still doesn't) actually say that. The statement was made that we have no ideas. We do, in fact, have ideas.That was the assertion, and that is my answer.
Human brains are not what are at issue here, but even so, that statement is incorrect. We have made progress at the small scale (see Numenta's work) and there are multiple ideas out there that presently have significant merit. Personally, as someone working in the field and conversant with a lot of what's going on in the technical sense, I have a fairly high level of confidence that we're much closer than the popular narrative would have us believe. Am I right? We will see. :)
Understanding how humans store and recognize images primarily is not a barrier to AI. It's not memory or image recognition that's the hill to climb; The fundamental algorithmic/methodological challenges are thinking, along with conceptual storage, development and manipulation (these things incorporate memory use, but aren't a storage problem per se.) Hardware needs to be able to handle amounts of ram and long term, high speed storage that can serve as a practical basis for the rest as well. Right now, we're getting close, but it'll be a few more years yet before anything really smart can be instantiated. That's even if we were to figure out precisely how to do it right now.
It is possible -- though I consider it doubtful -- that we would implement human style vision neurology in hardware for an AI, but frankly our abilities are so poor compared to what can be accomplished I really don't see why we'd cripple an AI that way. It'd be abusive. "We could have made your visual recall incredibly acute, but... instead you're like us, and really don't have much more than a general idea what was in a scene after you have seen it." [AI nukes silicon valley] (Mods: that's humor. HUMOR.]
Also, check out Numenta's work.
Of course, understanding how humans store and recognize images is (very) important to our understanding of human physiology and disease, and it's wonderful that we're working on it.
We do have some ideas. This, for instance
"Adds heat" is a woefully inadequate simplification of whether or not it's an issue to be concerned with. When temperature goes up, other things change as a result of the relevant phsyics. For instance, the evap/precip cycle accelerates, carrying more warm air and moisture up, and more cool air and moisture down. CO2 in the upper atmosphere reduces radiation by a factor, but more heat up there, more often, increases radiation. More CO2 almost universally implies conditions better for plants. More and healthier plants means more of all sorts of things and less of others.
Dire predictions: Warming moves the zone(s) within which plants and animals flourish north. There's plenty of room to go, a great deal of northern area is frozen wasteland at this point. More CO2 is good for plants. People might have to move. They do that all the tiime. Coastlines may change and infrastructure may need to maintained, adapted, moved or replaced. That happens all the time. Currently estimated timescale for sea level changes: inches per year. Totally yawn-worthy.
In short, the issue is complex beyond any possible "on noes, warming" assessment -- hysteria is entirely uncalled for.
Science is a method. When facing something new, it involves formulating a hypothesis, testing that to validate or disprove it, and then drawing conclusions. We have not seen and do not know what happens when CO2 increases by large amounts due to our production of it. In the historical record, CO2 increases trail warming, not lead it -- which is another way of saying that historically speaking, CO2 increases herald cooling, so that is not any kind of adequate confirmation of the idea that human-caused CO2 increases will lead to significant climactic warming. Doesn't mean it won't -- it just means that this is a new thing and that drawing conclusions either requires flawless modeling that takes everything significant to the process into account (which we don't have... not only in re natural processes, but in re unanticipated technology), or actually seeing what happens. Without one of those - which again, we don't have -- it's not settled science. It is unvalidated hypothesis.
o Yes, we should be trying to figure this out.
o No, we have not figured it out.
When will we know when we have figured this out? When we have a model that accurately predicts climate change as known to have occurred in the historical record.
PS: coral does not "die when you touch it." I have multiple coral reef tanks. I touch my corals (hard ones and soft ones) all the time to move them around, frag (subdivide and transplant) them, brush them when I'm reaching for something else. I cut colonies of soft corals with a razor in order to divide them into more than one instance and place them in multiple places and/or share them with other coral reef owners. Certainly doesn't kill them (doesn't even seem to hurt them.) For hard corals, you break them into separate instances (frag them) with tools that are basically smallish hammers and chisels. You even do this out of the water. Again, doesn't kill them. They don't die because they were bothered or touched. I've never, ever seen that happen. Some of them don't react at all or very much, but the most I've ever seen them do is pull away or retract, dependably to return to their original extension and condition within minutes of the disturbance that caused it ending. Fish touch them all the time as well. Doesn't hurt a thing.
The things that I have seen be directly and immediately detrimental to corals are Ph changes, temperature changes, salinity changes, very large and sudden changes in lighting, and the actions they engage WRT each other (chemical warfare among corals has to be seen to be believed. They are nasty to each other at times.)
Climate change panic bores me. Climate change dismissal bores me. But, like a lot of other induced hysteria, it's a major component of pop culture and the media's slavish devotion to fanning same, so I have to actually work to avoid both. :)
Stats from the last congressional election:
o 14% approval rate -- that was a poll
o 94% re-election rate -- that was actual voters.
o In the same election, national turnout was 36.3%.
I think the advent of the net's new accessibility to information outside of the laundered and agitprop driven channels, the money-based reasoning of SCOTUS, the lobbyist factor, the obvious malfeasance of Fox news, MSNBC, the blatantly unconstitutional legislation coming out of congress... and so on... all combine to give a very large portion of the people who might otherwise vote a sense that the system is so massively corrupt that there just is no point to it.
When you ask them -- polling asks them -- they tell you that. That's why the 14% approval rate.
But the only people voting are the droolers who watch MSNBC and Fox. They're agenda- and plank-driven (abortion! guns! perverts! terrorists! taxes! etc.) and that's driving them to or from one party or the other. And *they* are controlling the narrative here; that's why the polls just aren't -- and won't be -- working in the current context.
It's just an idea. But the data is hard data. Something has to explain it. It's too skewed to be any kind of random happening.
I actually do vote, but I have to say, it's pretty damned fruitless. This is a red (very red) state, and so that's the way the pendulum swings here, regardless of how I vote. If I vote progressive on something, it's not going to happen. If I vote conservative on something, it would have happened any way. This is not encouraging.
The only thing less productive than voting for progressive ideas here is voting for a third party candidate. Neither one does any good at all in terms of biasing the political system, but at least the progressive vote isn't buried or simply not mentioned. Sneered at, I think might be the most accurate term around here, actually. But they at least talk about it.
-1? Plus five ironic, more like. :)
"Private." "Requiring." I do not think those words mean what you seem to think they mean. Free speech, as the constitution mentions it, applies to what the feds are not allowed to do with regard to the speech of the citizens. It's not a mandate enabling them to force the citizens to participate in things they aren't interested in. It just means that the government can't stifle you. A private entity is something else entirely. You may not like it, but there it is.
You should go read Facebook's terms of service. It'll be educational. I promise.
I didn't come here to read what Dice wrote. I came here to read what you wrote.
For better or worse, slashdot attracts a collection of some very smart, and well-informed, and funny, people. And trolls, but hell, trolls are everywhere. Many places seem to only have trolls.
Knights. Huh. Not for me. I'm just a
shrubber
What hump?
So. How is life in a bubble?
You don't believe me? Good grief, it's been illegal to consider all manner of things when hiring for years, all over the place. Not to mention there are questions you can't even ask.
I didn't do anything of the kind. I substituted an act for an act. I pointed out a general truth that applies across the board. That's all.
Seriously, it's like some of you never made it through English class.
Oh, FFS. Look. No matter *what* I chose, the point, which you completely missed, was that one malfeasance is in no way made less by the existence of others.
By concentrating on the particulars -- which named no one and drew no level of equivalence except withing the example, as without -- you failed.
The example is the same if it is stealing from the cookie jar or shoplifting -- or murder -- or twisting the truth. That's the WHOLE POINT. That's the whooshing sound you heard.
The slashdotter below you screws up and makes some dumb remark about my post, missing the point? Doesn't excuse you doing it at all. How's that? A little closer to home?
Actually, that's just mathematically simplistic. Here's what your reasoning does not account for: There are leanings, abilities and competencies that do not exist in isolation from other influences. Gender can be one of those. Therefore, to the extent that affect is possible, it is a valid consideration.
It could be a positive for either sex.
For instance, the air force has definitively determined that females are significantly better at maintaining more comprehensive situational awareness in complex aerial situations. This is because of a real world gender-based difference in information processing.
On the other hand, if one was hiring a bouncer, the competencies lean strongly the other way.
There will be outliers, of course, but that's why we need to think about these things rather than operate by rote. The law, unfortunately, but needfully (due to blind prejudice), specifies decision by rote. This is why many parts of the decision making process have gone missing from public view.
See here
In this case (there are certainly others), they are using deceptive reporting to mislead people on the current state of affairs. Ask yourself why they would do this. The answer isn't "because they are angels."
What they should do is publish relevant and clear statistics on the issue instead of attempting to obfuscate the relevant issues at hand.
Try to keep up. It's really not that difficult.
You seem fringe left to me. But hey, perhaps you're just trolling. Difficult to tell.
Sure it is. Why are you doing it?
Do you simply love the smell of straw in the morning? Is there a crow problem where you live? C'mon, give over. Inquiring minds want to know!
There is an issue of readability that crops up when maintainance is a consideration. Serious regex reads like APL after being put through a shredder.
I'd rather not use a regex if there's something clearer available:
myString.find('searchTerm')
myString.replace('searchTerm','replacementTerm')
On the other hand, when writing my own language (yeah, I know, shut up), one of the very first things I did was incorporate regex handling, so WTF. :)
Yes. Much better to type 4 or 8 spaces when you could have just hit tab once. I totally see your point. You bet.
Can I subscribe to your newsletter?
If your editor can't tell you the difference between tabs and spaces, you need a better editor. It's 2015. No need to stick with weak development tools.
Which is not to say that Ruby isn't a fine language. It is. As is Python 2. And 3.
Yes. Precisely.
Python 3.x is not Python 2.x by any means. Python 2 code won't work under Python 3, and safe conversion requires complete re-testing and so is unlikely to be a practical or sane option for many installations, regardless of tools that do it automatically. That's not to say that Python 3 might not be a better language than Python 2; just that it isn't the same language, any more than Ruby or Perl is the same as Python 2.
But this is one area where open source comes to the rescue. The ability to keep Python 2.x relevant without breaking everything is readily available to anyone who needs it and can afford the investments in time and effort. Python 3 is an option, not a requirement, just as the new version of Perl is.