Or you could just leave some good books for them. (There is one in every crowd, and today, I am the one.)
Submitter here. We have loads of good books. My kids (aged 2, 2, and 4) will happily sit engrossed in their favorite story books for up to 30 minutes, despite not being able to read a word. They recite many of them by heart. But the youngest aren't yet able to be left unsupervised with soft-page books because they rip the pages, and hard-page books are too immature for them at this stage.
Best thing my father ever did was sell the TV set, back in the 80s. Forced us kids to go and make our own entertainment, and I think I had a much more enjoyable youth as a result.
Submitter here. Indeed we don't have a TV - only an iPad. I mostly sympathize with you. But I think there's good educational content to Mr Rogers and Sesame Street that I don't want to keep them from. I also think that a media-free child today would struggle to relate in the playground.
Also what I see is that with my three kids (aged 2, 2, 4), they get into battles about who holds the iPad. They're too young to resolve this themselves. Also the youngest are at an age where they still need parents to help make their own entertainment for longer than 30 minutes.
Is the goal to give your kids the most similar experience to growing up with a tv that you had? Why can't they pause grand parents story time if they have to pee? Because you didn't have time shifting when you were a kid? What's next, as teenagers are you going to scoff at them for texting their friends, and then tell your friends how the lost art of rambling in voice calls is a sign of the end times? I'm trying to be constructive here, your kids have access to technology that you didn't have as a kid, and that is a good thing. Why not just let them use a 5 year old cell phone with the Kodi/xbmc app to control a raspberry pi full of Mr Rogers episodes, and have enough faith in them that they won't spend the next 48 hours binge watching it like it won't be there tomorrow?
Submitter here. My children are aged 2, 2 and 4. For the past year, the eldest has had an ipad with Mr Rogers, Sesame Street, grandparents, and a few cartoons. She has chosen to ignore everything apart from the cartoons, and she gravitates towards the shallowest ones, the "candy".
More generally, children of these ages are all about testing limits, and they do so constantly. This is a good and normal and essential part of childhood development. I work hard to make sure that the limits they test are good constructive ones that will help them grow. I think though that limit-testing about when it's time to turn off TV or what to watch on it is singularly unhelpful - that becomes the kind of limit-testing that a drug addict does upon their friends.
You say "have enough faith in them that they won't XYZ". That misses the point. They don't spring out of the womb with fully-fledged good instincts. My job as a parent is to develop the right instincts in them, teach them over the years how to make the right decisions, so that by the time they're older then I'll be able (as you say) to have faith that they'll make the right decisions. I can do that now with the oldest using the potty, and choosing what clothes to wear, and mostly resolving conflicts with her friends. She's not quite there with TV. And when it comes to homework, assignments and studying for exams, I'm going to spend many years with her in middle-school and high school helping her plan it out and develop her own autonomy so that by the time she's in college then I can have faith she'll do the right thing herself -- not just fall off the edge of a cliff.
I think TV is a particularly difficult example. One the one hand she has the full weight of generations of behavioral-scientists and billions of dollars poured into the question of how to make shows that are addictive eyeball-catchers. On the other hand she has... what? Sure I can create experiences for her myself that are more compelling. But I'm not always going to be there. I have to give her creative mind space to come up with her own play that's more compelling than TV. She's getting there, but she's not strong enough yet to develop these faculties against an onslaught of on-demand cartoons.
This is a huge step forward in AI. I am sure these chips work very similarly to the way human brains work. Otherwise they wouldn't call them "neuromorphic", because that would be misleading.
Are you confusing anthroneuromorphic with just neuromorphic?
They have a huge network of reporters around the world, embedded in the local cultures for years at a time, picking up the kind of fascinating news stories that I don't see elsewhere.
Listen to the programme 'From Our Own Correspondent' for a taste. US listeners don't need to worry. Most of what's covered hasn't reached the US level of attention needed to give it partisan spin yet...
True there are other bits of the BBC that don't do real journalism as you describe. But anyone who decides to attack that side of it as a means to attack the real journalism is being pointless.
Looking around, I think technology has already mostly replaced child rearing. The last step is replacing the adult who's mostly there to take the responsibility if anything bad happens.
Could you say more? In what ways do you think technology has mostly replaced child rearing? My kids are aged 4, 2, 2, and I can't think of of much technology in their lives (save the oldest who gets 1/2 hour of iPad time every other day). I don't think their lives are much different now from when their mother and I were young 40 years ago.
After this or maybe the next wave of automation, there will be many humans whose labor will NEVER be worth what it costs to keep them alive.
That's an insightful and thought-provoking comment.
I wonder about child-rearing. I don't think automation will replace that for at least 100 years. Currently we place a very low dollar value on looking after children (in the form of stay-at-home parents, nannies, teachers, child credit, child-care tax relief). In the future you point to, I wonder if that will change?
Those pushing so hard for $15 minimum wage don't seem to realize this, but they've been instrumental in introducing economic distortions that won't just make full automation more economically attractive, but that will make full automation economically mandatory for any business that wants to survive. Socialists are always their own worst enemy. Their lack of understanding about the true nature of economics means that their policies will always be pushed too far, and will eventually destroy the economy that is hosting these socialists.
That doesn't make sense. This kind of automation and grocery store hasn't reduced the amount that our country produces. If anything it's made it produce more efficiently. There's more wealth. The problem remains, as always, how that wealth should be apportioned. Some people (maybe including you) believe the way to apportion that wealth is to have a bunch of poor people work degrading jobs that aren't quite enough for them to get by, and they also must depend upon taxpayer-funded handouts for essentials.
Is that because you think it's morally the right way to apportion society's wealth? Or because you think there exists no other better way?
Take it as a challenge? Amazon will thank you for providing edge cases to help harden their AI. I'm sure they expect to lose money on this approach for a few years while they gather extensive real world field testing. You're the product...
Damore write a memo full of gaps, leaps and ambiguities. If it were code then it wouldn't have compiled. As it was, people could and did fill those gaps according to their preconceptions, and judged him accordingly. It's not surprising that there were such different reactions.
The responsibility for this man's death lies solely with the criminal who made the call. It's called proximate cause. But for his phone call, the police would never have gone to the residence and interacted with the man.
It's not proximate cause. Proximate cause has two requirements -- the "but-for" test you mentioned, and also whether the action is "sufficient", i.e. could it have naturally and foreseeably led to the death.
On basis of past evidence, NO similar swatting had ever before lead to a death. So it'd be hard to argue proximate cause for manslaughter. Indeed the prosecutors aren't even trying to argue it. They're only arguing felony false alarm.
Say, imagine you invite someone for a drive in your car, and they get in, and die in a road accident. But for your invitation they wouldn't have got in. And you know there's a 1 in 100,000 chance of a car trip leading to death by accident, which is higher than the chance of death by swatting. So there'd be a stronger argument that you were the cause of the death, then there is that Barris was the cause of the swatting death.
This is *exactly* what you should expect when you attempt to socially engineer a solution that violates the rules of business, in this case, artificially raising the cost of labor beyond the market value. One hundred percent entirely predictable, and predicted.
Sure, predictable, predicted. But go on and think through a bit further...
The GDP isn't lessened by switching to robots. As a civilization/society/country, we're not producing any less by this transition. If anything we have the ability to produce more. The only difference is how society's production is apportioned to everyone.
Some people believe that the right way to structure society is by using degrading low-paid jobs as a way to apportion a pittance to poor people. It sounds like you're in this camp. Is that because you believe there exists no other feasible way of apportioning, or because you think this is the best out of all feasible ways to apportion?
I'm still not clear on why I have to go to Amazon for this and not the phone's vendor. Using a proprietary app to lock down a child's device could be like robbing peter to pay paul; sure they won't go to Instagram any more but they will see 'Amazon' advertising all over the place. If this is something I can install on my kid's phone that will block their access to Instagram when I want it blocked and they don't have to see anything 'Amazon' I will use it. When I look at the link for this on Amazon it seems like a full Amazon store and that's not what I want either.
I agree with you. Amazon's heart and soul is in advertising. Also, Disney's "Circle" offering is all about cross-advertising too (e.g. its 404 page says "Sorry, that website is blocked; do you want to go to this Disney content instead? or this Disney instagram account?")
I would much rather trust Apple than anyone else, given Apple's better-than-anyone-else track record for respecting privacy. If Apple did decide to enter the "Parental Controls" market in earnest, I'd buy their products in a heartbeat, even if it means buying expensive iPad Minis rather than $50 Amazon Fire tablets.
I'm not clear on how Amazon FreeTime is used or how it relates to Apple devices. I tried searching on it and found a lot of Amazon advertisements but no real information on how it would be used on an iPhone or Android phone.
FreeTime doesn't exist for Apple devices. There have been lots of requests to Amazon for this, but so far complete silence.
It is available for Android devices. You install it from the app store. I'm not an Android expert, but as far as I understand, (1) the Android OS provides the necessary hooks/APIs for restricting access, (2) the Android OS also provides app-specific APIs that each individual app author can use to expose or hide bits of the app. Amazon's FreeTime app provides a user-friendly control panel to control those things. I assume that folks are asking for Apple to provide both. https://forums.developer.amazo...
In addition to that, a few other things are disabled (mobile ads, in-app purchasing, browsing the web, opening settings, social networks, etc.) Please look through this high level overview: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UT...
You can only restrict some applications that come with the phone. There is no way to restrict instagram and snapshat specifically while allowing a third party alarm clock app or organizer app.
??? Sure you can, and existing products already do something roughly similar...
Amazon's FreeTime works on a whitelist basis. As a parent, I specifically chose to allow which of the installed apps my children can use.
Amazon's FreeTime Unlimited, a bit like Amazon Prime Video, provides access to 9000+ videos, apps and books. They are curated and assigned an age-appropriate level. As a parent, I can specifically chose to let only material appropriate for 2-4 year olds be available on my Kindle Fire. The curation also indicates whether a given item is education or entertainment. As a parent I can have the software allow 30 minutes entertainment a day and that only after 30 minutes education. It also curates youtube videos, so as a parent you can let your child browse just an Amazon-curated subset of youtube.
Disney's Circle works at the wifi level via ARP spoofing (for folks whose routers aren't as configurable or friendly to configure). It lets you specify, for instance, which social media sites are allowed to be served to which MAC address and which aren't, or at what times of day. Yes it can certainly limit snapchat and instagram without limiting BBC News.
Apple's Guided Access sort of works with i-devices in more limited ways, but kids by their early teenage years pretty soon learn to disable it by powering off the device and then powering it back on again. And then social-engineering the passcode out of their parents.
That was just the technical answer to your comment. On a parenting philosophy level, I'm following an approach called "RIE" promoted by Janet Lansbury. It stresses that it's important to respect your children (e.g. give them freedom in their playtime to make their own autonomous choices), but always give them the solidity of knowing there are boundaries (e.g. it's in their nature to ask for more than what they should have, and it ultimately reassures them when they can't get it). I've so far found that a whitelist like I use with Amazon's Kindle works best for this, in hand with me setting time limits. It's certainly better than hovering over their shoulder all the time -- that would take away their autonomy at a time when they should be developing it, and I'm not the helicopter parent either at the playground or at home.
On another parenting philosophy note, after reading stuff about "The Paradox of Choice", I believe it's bad parenting to give kids huge unlimited choice. So they get the autonomous choice to use their device for only 4 things that I think are age-appropriate and formative right now... at the moment, Sesame Street, Mr Rogers, videos of their grandparents from the other side of the world reading stories to them, and The Snowman (soon to be replaced by Kipper The Dog). And one game, "Peekaboo Barn".
Get off your high horse and worry about yourself instead of thinking yourself superior and others being too stupid to think for themselves thus needing you to think for them.
The people are asking for Apple to provide "parental-control" software so that parents can, well, parent.
I give my four-year-old daughter an iPad to use for half an hour a day because I think that Sesame Street, Mr Rogers and a few games are a good way to grow up. I think that "having an adult always hovering over her shoulder" is a bad way for her to grow up, and creates bad expectations on her part. Nevertheless it's the only way I have to stop her delving into iPad stuff that she shouldn't.
I decided to switch to Amazon's Kindle Fire for Kids for my younger children. This has its own different set of problems. It has a Kid Mode called "FreeTime Unlimited" which thinks the best thing for 2-4 year old kids is hand them complete unfettered access to 9000 curated streamable titles and cross-advertising. I think this is also a bad way for them to grow up at this stage (with reference e.g. to "The Paradox of Choice"). Amazon let me hand-curate this list down to just the four videos/apps/books I want them able to consume, but only by manually blacklisting the remaining 8996 items. It took about four hours to achieve to achieve this and required a factory reset because apparently they don't expect people to use the device this way and Amazon's software couldn't handle it right. You can't accuse me of being lazy!:)
Either way, I think the market is still way open for better parental-control software. There's "Disney Circle" which has signature Apple-style friendliness for managing internet connected stuff. But there's nothing that yet nails it for younger kids or downloaded software.
I never heard of someone getting their phone service cut because they were doing something illegal with it. WTF is an ISP doing trying to play law enforcer? The authorities should get a warrant, tap the traffic, then make an arrest.
I think the whole system was designed to continue protect the government's grant of copyright, but without the huge drain on the public coffers that your proposal would involve.
The good news is that consumers appear to be getting the message that "smart" devices are dangerous; from what I've read, sales are way down. Security vulnerabilities are the most obvious issue, but there's also stuff like this (the vendor fucking with you for unrelated reasons) and the question of long-term support. Heating and cooling can be matters of life and death. I wouldn't entrust them to the Internet. (Monitoring them, sure, but not controlling them.)
Your comment doesn't make sense in the context of the article. As the summary itself said, if your internet access is downgraded, then you might not be able to control your thermostat REMOTELY. Nothing about local control.
And yes, anyone who actively wants to remotely control their thermostat (i.e. the ones who might be affected by this) are precisely the ones that want a "smart" device. By definition.
Words matter, caveman. What we are calling "AI" is definitely artificial, not not intelligent. If we are going to start calling computer programs "AI" just to start another VC hype cycle, then what is the point? Microsoft Word is "AI".
There's a straightforward difference. If the logic (or business logic, or branching structure / conditionals) was authored by a human programmer then we call it a conventional program. If the logic was an emergent property of running a learning algorithm over a training set, then we call it AI.
This is a practically useful distinction for us working software engineers. (Why? The latter can't usefully be checked into source control itself; only its training data. You can't diff it. The typical bugs you get is very different between the two - the first kind of software has weird discontinuous edge cases, and the latter is generally "smooth". We engineers need different skillsets to develop and debug the two. The way we respond to requirements specs is different between the two. Each of them have their strengths at particular classes of problems - compiler-writing is dominated by the first kind; real-world sensory processing was done at first by the first kind like OpenCV up to 2010, but has been wholly eclipsed by the second kind).
No, Microsoft Word isn't "AI" under this commonly-used definition.
If you want to keep railing against it, why not (1) recognize that it's a practically useful distinction to make, (2) come up with a term you think is better?
Case in point: Home for the holidays, I was asked about recent accomplishments and attempted to explain the process of producing compact visualizations of branched undo/redo histories.
You've gone into the wrong kind of detail. The useful answer generally has the form "X is the general problem that people have which you can relate to in some way from your personal experience. Y is the state of the art. I've improved upon the state of the art in Z."
Thus: "You know how sometimes in Word you type a paragraph, then want to undo it and start again, but you sometimes want to keep a sentence or two from the thing you typed even though you undid it? People usually use copy+paste, if they remember, but it gets hard to keep track and sometimes you accidentally mess things up so you can't redo back to your first draft. You're confused at this stage? -- exactly!:) Well, I've been working on a new way that avoids the pitfalls. It seems to be working, and users have been giving good reports so far. I'm not adding it in Word of course. But who knows? maybe my idea will catch on."
People aren't interested in the technical details of your solution. They're more interested in the general scope of human endeavor, and the conflicts and social dynamics in the research field. So if you meet a researcher or a PhD student, the second question you ask them (after "what's your field?") is "what are the main opposing ideas in the field?"
If you're not advancing the state of the art in any way, and if you're just implementing a solution that someone else has done, again don't talk about the technical details of the implementation. For instance you're doing a back-end database and you're copying some scaling algorithm/implementation from someone else, you can say "Imagine how Amazon must have to process like two hundred million order requests every day? My company also needs to process one hundred million widgets. We're not quite at the same scale as Amazon, but I've been copying some of their techniques too. It's fun. I've learned [incidental social fact about the human endeavor that is software development]".
My day job is doing technical implementation of language features inside a code editor (think autocomplete, signature-help, hover,...). Even when I'm speaking with my MANAGERS and PEERS I don't talk about the technical side. The first and last thing to talk about is always what's my overall mission? and specifically, what user-facing problems/scenarios am I trying to solve? The technical details is always an afterthought. Successful software engineers are primarily good communicators.
How common is it in practice to use Node other than as a server for dynamic websites that also use JavaScript in the browser?
Other common uses of Node -- to host standalone desktop applications that are implemented in Javascript -- VSCode editor, Atom editor, Slack, Visual Studio Installer. I'm sure there are loads of other standalone desktop apps that run on Node, but these are the ones I'm aware of.
(Come to think of it -- of the applications open on my mac on a day-to-day basis, the only ones not running on Node are Terminal and Outlook).
if it didn't decide the outcome then how is it powerful? Do you want to talk brexit and say that the british people only voted for brexit because of Russia as well?
What I believe happened in Brexit and the US elections is that Russia (and presumably other actors to a lesser extent) tested out their new generation of propaganda warfare. I think they got good telemetry on their warfare too, of the form "If we spend $X then we can influence a 0.01% shift among this demographic" and "if we spend $Y then we can influence a 0.05% shift" and so on. I think they got good telemetry because the internet is now built on advertising and telemetry is its plumbing and I think they got to use the same plumbing. And I think they got estimates of how far this will scale -- i.e. how much more money they would spend to influence a larger portion, and what the feasible limit of their influence is.
And I think they got the answer that these techniques (1) will scale a couple of orders of magnitude more than traditional propaganda, (2) will be a couple of orders magnitude cheaper than traditional propaganda.
How is it powerful? -- because (I think) it scales more and is cheaper than the alternatives.
Do I think that British voters only voted for Brexit because of it? -- No, that's ridiculous, and there's no reason for you to suggest that given that I agreed with your perspective on Trump and Hillary.
Please show me what I missed. Because I think I've been paying attention here.
I don't know. Have you bought any advertising online yourself yet? Done any viral marketing? Assessed its reach or effectiveness? You seem to keep reaching for these absolutes ("it didn't tip the balance and therefore it was ineffective") rather than seeing it as a process. I guess Scott Adams would call it "systems thinking".
Hillary didn't lose because of Russia. Trump didn't win because of Russia. Ignore Russia for five seconds if you can... Hillary was a weak candidate and so was pretty much the entire republican field.
I agree with everything you wrote in the body of your message - Hillary didn't lose because of Russia, Trump didn't win because of Russia, Hillary was a weak candidate, and so on.
But to conclude that it "doesn't matter"? -- I don't know how you get that. This, and earlier influence in Brexit, looks to me like the first steps to a kind of propaganda machine that's orders of magnitude more influential than anything we've seen before, one that within 5-10 years will dominate certain parts of international relations and domestic politics. It looks like something that DOES matter, because we have to get a grip on it before our adversaries do.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could just leave some good books for them. (There is one in every crowd, and today, I am the one.)
Submitter here. We have loads of good books. My kids (aged 2, 2, and 4) will happily sit engrossed in their favorite story books for up to 30 minutes, despite not being able to read a word. They recite many of them by heart. But the youngest aren't yet able to be left unsupervised with soft-page books because they rip the pages, and hard-page books are too immature for them at this stage.
Best thing my father ever did was sell the TV set, back in the 80s. Forced us kids to go and make our own entertainment, and I think I had a much more enjoyable youth as a result.
Submitter here. Indeed we don't have a TV - only an iPad. I mostly sympathize with you. But I think there's good educational content to Mr Rogers and Sesame Street that I don't want to keep them from. I also think that a media-free child today would struggle to relate in the playground.
Also what I see is that with my three kids (aged 2, 2, 4), they get into battles about who holds the iPad. They're too young to resolve this themselves. Also the youngest are at an age where they still need parents to help make their own entertainment for longer than 30 minutes.
Is the goal to give your kids the most similar experience to growing up with a tv that you had? Why can't they pause grand parents story time if they have to pee? Because you didn't have time shifting when you were a kid? What's next, as teenagers are you going to scoff at them for texting their friends, and then tell your friends how the lost art of rambling in voice calls is a sign of the end times? I'm trying to be constructive here, your kids have access to technology that you didn't have as a kid, and that is a good thing. Why not just let them use a 5 year old cell phone with the Kodi/xbmc app to control a raspberry pi full of Mr Rogers episodes, and have enough faith in them that they won't spend the next 48 hours binge watching it like it won't be there tomorrow?
Submitter here. My children are aged 2, 2 and 4. For the past year, the eldest has had an ipad with Mr Rogers, Sesame Street, grandparents, and a few cartoons. She has chosen to ignore everything apart from the cartoons, and she gravitates towards the shallowest ones, the "candy".
More generally, children of these ages are all about testing limits, and they do so constantly. This is a good and normal and essential part of childhood development. I work hard to make sure that the limits they test are good constructive ones that will help them grow. I think though that limit-testing about when it's time to turn off TV or what to watch on it is singularly unhelpful - that becomes the kind of limit-testing that a drug addict does upon their friends.
You say "have enough faith in them that they won't XYZ". That misses the point. They don't spring out of the womb with fully-fledged good instincts. My job as a parent is to develop the right instincts in them, teach them over the years how to make the right decisions, so that by the time they're older then I'll be able (as you say) to have faith that they'll make the right decisions. I can do that now with the oldest using the potty, and choosing what clothes to wear, and mostly resolving conflicts with her friends. She's not quite there with TV. And when it comes to homework, assignments and studying for exams, I'm going to spend many years with her in middle-school and high school helping her plan it out and develop her own autonomy so that by the time she's in college then I can have faith she'll do the right thing herself -- not just fall off the edge of a cliff.
I think TV is a particularly difficult example. One the one hand she has the full weight of generations of behavioral-scientists and billions of dollars poured into the question of how to make shows that are addictive eyeball-catchers. On the other hand she has... what? Sure I can create experiences for her myself that are more compelling. But I'm not always going to be there. I have to give her creative mind space to come up with her own play that's more compelling than TV. She's getting there, but she's not strong enough yet to develop these faculties against an onslaught of on-demand cartoons.
For the love of god, don't these idiots have something more important to do? How much do we pay these idiots anyway?
We pay them with votes, but it's a gamble whether our vote gets the legislation we want, so we have to vote for them again and hope for the best.
This is a huge step forward in AI. I am sure these chips work very similarly to the way human brains work. Otherwise they wouldn't call them "neuromorphic", because that would be misleading.
Are you confusing anthroneuromorphic with just neuromorphic?
BBC does real journalism, as you describe it.
They have a huge network of reporters around the world, embedded in the local cultures for years at a time, picking up the kind of fascinating news stories that I don't see elsewhere.
Listen to the programme 'From Our Own Correspondent' for a taste. US listeners don't need to worry. Most of what's covered hasn't reached the US level of attention needed to give it partisan spin yet...
True there are other bits of the BBC that don't do real journalism as you describe. But anyone who decides to attack that side of it as a means to attack the real journalism is being pointless.
Looking around, I think technology has already mostly replaced child rearing. The last step is replacing the adult who's mostly there to take the responsibility if anything bad happens.
Could you say more? In what ways do you think technology has mostly replaced child rearing? My kids are aged 4, 2, 2, and I can't think of of much technology in their lives (save the oldest who gets 1/2 hour of iPad time every other day). I don't think their lives are much different now from when their mother and I were young 40 years ago.
After this or maybe the next wave of automation, there will be many humans whose labor will NEVER be worth what it costs to keep them alive.
That's an insightful and thought-provoking comment.
I wonder about child-rearing. I don't think automation will replace that for at least 100 years. Currently we place a very low dollar value on looking after children (in the form of stay-at-home parents, nannies, teachers, child credit, child-care tax relief). In the future you point to, I wonder if that will change?
Those pushing so hard for $15 minimum wage don't seem to realize this, but they've been instrumental in introducing economic distortions that won't just make full automation more economically attractive, but that will make full automation economically mandatory for any business that wants to survive. Socialists are always their own worst enemy. Their lack of understanding about the true nature of economics means that their policies will always be pushed too far, and will eventually destroy the economy that is hosting these socialists.
That doesn't make sense. This kind of automation and grocery store hasn't reduced the amount that our country produces. If anything it's made it produce more efficiently. There's more wealth. The problem remains, as always, how that wealth should be apportioned. Some people (maybe including you) believe the way to apportion that wealth is to have a bunch of poor people work degrading jobs that aren't quite enough for them to get by, and they also must depend upon taxpayer-funded handouts for essentials.
Is that because you think it's morally the right way to apportion society's wealth? Or because you think there exists no other better way?
Take it as a challenge? Amazon will thank you for providing edge cases to help harden their AI. I'm sure they expect to lose money on this approach for a few years while they gather extensive real world field testing. You're the product...
Damore write a memo full of gaps, leaps and ambiguities. If it were code then it wouldn't have compiled. As it was, people could and did fill those gaps according to their preconceptions, and judged him accordingly. It's not surprising that there were such different reactions.
The responsibility for this man's death lies solely with the criminal who made the call. It's called proximate cause. But for his phone call, the police would never have gone to the residence and interacted with the man.
It's not proximate cause. Proximate cause has two requirements -- the "but-for" test you mentioned, and also whether the action is "sufficient", i.e. could it have naturally and foreseeably led to the death.
On basis of past evidence, NO similar swatting had ever before lead to a death. So it'd be hard to argue proximate cause for manslaughter. Indeed the prosecutors aren't even trying to argue it. They're only arguing felony false alarm.
Say, imagine you invite someone for a drive in your car, and they get in, and die in a road accident. But for your invitation they wouldn't have got in. And you know there's a 1 in 100,000 chance of a car trip leading to death by accident, which is higher than the chance of death by swatting. So there'd be a stronger argument that you were the cause of the death, then there is that Barris was the cause of the swatting death.
This is *exactly* what you should expect when you attempt to socially engineer a solution that violates the rules of business, in this case, artificially raising the cost of labor beyond the market value. One hundred percent entirely predictable, and predicted.
Sure, predictable, predicted. But go on and think through a bit further...
The GDP isn't lessened by switching to robots. As a civilization/society/country, we're not producing any less by this transition. If anything we have the ability to produce more. The only difference is how society's production is apportioned to everyone.
Some people believe that the right way to structure society is by using degrading low-paid jobs as a way to apportion a pittance to poor people. It sounds like you're in this camp. Is that because you believe there exists no other feasible way of apportioning, or because you think this is the best out of all feasible ways to apportion?
I'm still not clear on why I have to go to Amazon for this and not the phone's vendor. Using a proprietary app to lock down a child's device could be like robbing peter to pay paul; sure they won't go to Instagram any more but they will see 'Amazon' advertising all over the place. If this is something I can install on my kid's phone that will block their access to Instagram when I want it blocked and they don't have to see anything 'Amazon' I will use it. When I look at the link for this on Amazon it seems like a full Amazon store and that's not what I want either.
I agree with you. Amazon's heart and soul is in advertising. Also, Disney's "Circle" offering is all about cross-advertising too (e.g. its 404 page says "Sorry, that website is blocked; do you want to go to this Disney content instead? or this Disney instagram account?")
I would much rather trust Apple than anyone else, given Apple's better-than-anyone-else track record for respecting privacy. If Apple did decide to enter the "Parental Controls" market in earnest, I'd buy their products in a heartbeat, even if it means buying expensive iPad Minis rather than $50 Amazon Fire tablets.
I'm not clear on how Amazon FreeTime is used or how it relates to Apple devices. I tried searching on it and found a lot of Amazon advertisements but no real information on how it would be used on an iPhone or Android phone.
FreeTime doesn't exist for Apple devices. There have been lots of requests to Amazon for this, but so far complete silence.
It is available for Android devices. You install it from the app store. I'm not an Android expert, but as far as I understand, (1) the Android OS provides the necessary hooks/APIs for restricting access, (2) the Android OS also provides app-specific APIs that each individual app author can use to expose or hide bits of the app. Amazon's FreeTime app provides a user-friendly control panel to control those things. I assume that folks are asking for Apple to provide both. https://forums.developer.amazo...
Think of FreeTime as a customised restricted profile: https://developer.android.com/...
In addition to that, a few other things are disabled (mobile ads, in-app purchasing, browsing the web, opening settings, social networks, etc.) Please look through this high level overview: https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UT...
Also check this FAQ with regards to app submissions: https://developer.amazon.com/a...
You can only restrict some applications that come with the phone. There is no way to restrict instagram and snapshat specifically while allowing a third party alarm clock app or organizer app.
??? Sure you can, and existing products already do something roughly similar...
Amazon's FreeTime works on a whitelist basis. As a parent, I specifically chose to allow which of the installed apps my children can use.
Amazon's FreeTime Unlimited, a bit like Amazon Prime Video, provides access to 9000+ videos, apps and books. They are curated and assigned an age-appropriate level. As a parent, I can specifically chose to let only material appropriate for 2-4 year olds be available on my Kindle Fire. The curation also indicates whether a given item is education or entertainment. As a parent I can have the software allow 30 minutes entertainment a day and that only after 30 minutes education. It also curates youtube videos, so as a parent you can let your child browse just an Amazon-curated subset of youtube.
Disney's Circle works at the wifi level via ARP spoofing (for folks whose routers aren't as configurable or friendly to configure). It lets you specify, for instance, which social media sites are allowed to be served to which MAC address and which aren't, or at what times of day. Yes it can certainly limit snapchat and instagram without limiting BBC News.
Apple's Guided Access sort of works with i-devices in more limited ways, but kids by their early teenage years pretty soon learn to disable it by powering off the device and then powering it back on again. And then social-engineering the passcode out of their parents.
That was just the technical answer to your comment. On a parenting philosophy level, I'm following an approach called "RIE" promoted by Janet Lansbury. It stresses that it's important to respect your children (e.g. give them freedom in their playtime to make their own autonomous choices), but always give them the solidity of knowing there are boundaries (e.g. it's in their nature to ask for more than what they should have, and it ultimately reassures them when they can't get it). I've so far found that a whitelist like I use with Amazon's Kindle works best for this, in hand with me setting time limits. It's certainly better than hovering over their shoulder all the time -- that would take away their autonomy at a time when they should be developing it, and I'm not the helicopter parent either at the playground or at home.
On another parenting philosophy note, after reading stuff about "The Paradox of Choice", I believe it's bad parenting to give kids huge unlimited choice. So they get the autonomous choice to use their device for only 4 things that I think are age-appropriate and formative right now... at the moment, Sesame Street, Mr Rogers, videos of their grandparents from the other side of the world reading stories to them, and The Snowman (soon to be replaced by Kipper The Dog). And one game, "Peekaboo Barn".
Get off your high horse and worry about yourself instead of thinking yourself superior and others being too stupid to think for themselves thus needing you to think for them.
The people are asking for Apple to provide "parental-control" software so that parents can, well, parent.
I give my four-year-old daughter an iPad to use for half an hour a day because I think that Sesame Street, Mr Rogers and a few games are a good way to grow up. I think that "having an adult always hovering over her shoulder" is a bad way for her to grow up, and creates bad expectations on her part. Nevertheless it's the only way I have to stop her delving into iPad stuff that she shouldn't.
I decided to switch to Amazon's Kindle Fire for Kids for my younger children. This has its own different set of problems. It has a Kid Mode called "FreeTime Unlimited" which thinks the best thing for 2-4 year old kids is hand them complete unfettered access to 9000 curated streamable titles and cross-advertising. I think this is also a bad way for them to grow up at this stage (with reference e.g. to "The Paradox of Choice"). Amazon let me hand-curate this list down to just the four videos/apps/books I want them able to consume, but only by manually blacklisting the remaining 8996 items. It took about four hours to achieve to achieve this and required a factory reset because apparently they don't expect people to use the device this way and Amazon's software couldn't handle it right. You can't accuse me of being lazy! :)
Either way, I think the market is still way open for better parental-control software. There's "Disney Circle" which has signature Apple-style friendliness for managing internet connected stuff. But there's nothing that yet nails it for younger kids or downloaded software.
I never heard of someone getting their phone service cut because they were doing something illegal with it. WTF is an ISP doing trying to play law enforcer? The authorities should get a warrant, tap the traffic, then make an arrest.
I think the whole system was designed to continue protect the government's grant of copyright, but without the huge drain on the public coffers that your proposal would involve.
The good news is that consumers appear to be getting the message that "smart" devices are dangerous; from what I've read, sales are way down. Security vulnerabilities are the most obvious issue, but there's also stuff like this (the vendor fucking with you for unrelated reasons) and the question of long-term support. Heating and cooling can be matters of life and death. I wouldn't entrust them to the Internet. (Monitoring them, sure, but not controlling them.)
Your comment doesn't make sense in the context of the article. As the summary itself said, if your internet access is downgraded, then you might not be able to control your thermostat REMOTELY. Nothing about local control.
And yes, anyone who actively wants to remotely control their thermostat (i.e. the ones who might be affected by this) are precisely the ones that want a "smart" device. By definition.
Words matter, caveman. What we are calling "AI" is definitely artificial, not not intelligent. If we are going to start calling computer programs "AI" just to start another VC hype cycle, then what is the point? Microsoft Word is "AI".
There's a straightforward difference. If the logic (or business logic, or branching structure / conditionals) was authored by a human programmer then we call it a conventional program. If the logic was an emergent property of running a learning algorithm over a training set, then we call it AI.
This is a practically useful distinction for us working software engineers. (Why? The latter can't usefully be checked into source control itself; only its training data. You can't diff it. The typical bugs you get is very different between the two - the first kind of software has weird discontinuous edge cases, and the latter is generally "smooth". We engineers need different skillsets to develop and debug the two. The way we respond to requirements specs is different between the two. Each of them have their strengths at particular classes of problems - compiler-writing is dominated by the first kind; real-world sensory processing was done at first by the first kind like OpenCV up to 2010, but has been wholly eclipsed by the second kind).
No, Microsoft Word isn't "AI" under this commonly-used definition.
If you want to keep railing against it, why not (1) recognize that it's a practically useful distinction to make, (2) come up with a term you think is better?
Next up: drive-through funeral home and car-wrecker!
Case in point: Home for the holidays, I was asked about recent accomplishments and attempted to explain the process of producing compact visualizations of branched undo/redo histories.
You've gone into the wrong kind of detail. The useful answer generally has the form "X is the general problem that people have which you can relate to in some way from your personal experience. Y is the state of the art. I've improved upon the state of the art in Z."
Thus: "You know how sometimes in Word you type a paragraph, then want to undo it and start again, but you sometimes want to keep a sentence or two from the thing you typed even though you undid it? People usually use copy+paste, if they remember, but it gets hard to keep track and sometimes you accidentally mess things up so you can't redo back to your first draft. You're confused at this stage? -- exactly! :) Well, I've been working on a new way that avoids the pitfalls. It seems to be working, and users have been giving good reports so far. I'm not adding it in Word of course. But who knows? maybe my idea will catch on."
People aren't interested in the technical details of your solution. They're more interested in the general scope of human endeavor, and the conflicts and social dynamics in the research field. So if you meet a researcher or a PhD student, the second question you ask them (after "what's your field?") is "what are the main opposing ideas in the field?"
If you're not advancing the state of the art in any way, and if you're just implementing a solution that someone else has done, again don't talk about the technical details of the implementation. For instance you're doing a back-end database and you're copying some scaling algorithm/implementation from someone else, you can say "Imagine how Amazon must have to process like two hundred million order requests every day? My company also needs to process one hundred million widgets. We're not quite at the same scale as Amazon, but I've been copying some of their techniques too. It's fun. I've learned [incidental social fact about the human endeavor that is software development]".
My day job is doing technical implementation of language features inside a code editor (think autocomplete, signature-help, hover, ...). Even when I'm speaking with my MANAGERS and PEERS I don't talk about the technical side. The first and last thing to talk about is always what's my overall mission? and specifically, what user-facing problems/scenarios am I trying to solve? The technical details is always an afterthought. Successful software engineers are primarily good communicators.
How common is it in practice to use Node other than as a server for dynamic websites that also use JavaScript in the browser?
Other common uses of Node -- to host standalone desktop applications that are implemented in Javascript -- VSCode editor, Atom editor, Slack, Visual Studio Installer. I'm sure there are loads of other standalone desktop apps that run on Node, but these are the ones I'm aware of.
(Come to think of it -- of the applications open on my mac on a day-to-day basis, the only ones not running on Node are Terminal and Outlook).
if it didn't decide the outcome then how is it powerful? Do you want to talk brexit and say that the british people only voted for brexit because of Russia as well?
What I believe happened in Brexit and the US elections is that Russia (and presumably other actors to a lesser extent) tested out their new generation of propaganda warfare. I think they got good telemetry on their warfare too, of the form "If we spend $X then we can influence a 0.01% shift among this demographic" and "if we spend $Y then we can influence a 0.05% shift" and so on. I think they got good telemetry because the internet is now built on advertising and telemetry is its plumbing and I think they got to use the same plumbing. And I think they got estimates of how far this will scale -- i.e. how much more money they would spend to influence a larger portion, and what the feasible limit of their influence is.
And I think they got the answer that these techniques (1) will scale a couple of orders of magnitude more than traditional propaganda, (2) will be a couple of orders magnitude cheaper than traditional propaganda.
How is it powerful? -- because (I think) it scales more and is cheaper than the alternatives.
Do I think that British voters only voted for Brexit because of it? -- No, that's ridiculous, and there's no reason for you to suggest that given that I agreed with your perspective on Trump and Hillary.
Please show me what I missed. Because I think I've been paying attention here.
I don't know. Have you bought any advertising online yourself yet? Done any viral marketing? Assessed its reach or effectiveness? You seem to keep reaching for these absolutes ("it didn't tip the balance and therefore it was ineffective") rather than seeing it as a process. I guess Scott Adams would call it "systems thinking".
Hillary didn't lose because of Russia. Trump didn't win because of Russia. Ignore Russia for five seconds if you can... Hillary was a weak candidate and so was pretty much the entire republican field.
I agree with everything you wrote in the body of your message - Hillary didn't lose because of Russia, Trump didn't win because of Russia, Hillary was a weak candidate, and so on.
But to conclude that it "doesn't matter"? -- I don't know how you get that. This, and earlier influence in Brexit, looks to me like the first steps to a kind of propaganda machine that's orders of magnitude more influential than anything we've seen before, one that within 5-10 years will dominate certain parts of international relations and domestic politics. It looks like something that DOES matter, because we have to get a grip on it before our adversaries do.