If they could then there would be some kind of metric.
According to whom? According to what belief system?
If children were performing science on equal level with tenured professors then yeah I would say it is not exactly respectable.
I have yet to hear a single thought from you that's worthy of an average sophomore philosophy student, so that tells us something about its rigor. Yes, sure, you can talk about philosophy, and so can children, in much the same way that children can talk about quantum mechanics. They can talk about it, but they probably won't understand it, and the conversation will probably not be very fruitful if they're not interested in learning about the topic.
but it allows you to recover the data in the event of a hard drive failure (and the loss of data on that drive).
Well, it allows you to recover data in the event of a hardware failure specifically on one of the hard drives, nowhere else, in such a way that doesn't cause data corruption first. In much the same way that if you have a redundant power supply, it will protect you against the specific event of hardware failure where one of your power supplies fails without there being a problem with your power source or damage to any of the other internal components.
That is to say, it's hardware redundancy. Nothing more. Of the events that lead to data loss or power failure, hardware redundancy does protect you against the case where the problem is limited to hardware failure of one of the redundant parts, and everything else works properly. A "backup" however should be a more generalized strategy for protecting against a total loss of the service, i.e. power goes out or data is lost.
And tapes can be lost or corrupted, or someone can burn the building down.
This is an old argument, and every time it gets revisited RAID starts to look better.
This isn't a competition. I'm not saying, "Screw RAID! It's a terrible backup." It's just not a backup. I'm not going to fight with you over this. Go ahead and use RAID as a backup. Maybe you'll be lucky and you'll never need to learn your lesson.
Sorry, no, in IT terms that's not a backup. It's a backup when it's an independent system with a history. Calling a RAID1 a backup to protect against data loss is similar to calling a redundant power supply a backup to protect against power failure. It's kind-of-almost-right in a limited sense, but it misunderstands the problem. It's just hardware redundancy, not a backup.
You're both right. RAID can decrease the chances of data loss due to some kinds of problems, but ultimately it shouldn't be considered a reliable protection against data loss. A RAID can be lost or corrupted, or someone can overwrite or delete a file. If you want to assess the risk to your data and talk about the set of data that is protected against loss, you should only consider your backed up data to be "protected". The protection that RAID offers is too weak to be considered to be significant protection.
Therefore, the fundamental purpose of a RAID is to prevent the downtime due to failure of an individual hard drive. If you did not have RAID, then your data volume would stop running, and you'd have to be offline while you repair the device and restore from backups, so that's what you're successfully preventing. All the data that has been backed up (assuming your backup is good) should be safe, and any data that has not backed up is not safe, regardless of whether you have a RAID.
Well I think you're missing a few things. For one thing, I may be wrong about this, but I believe that the majority of violent crimes are actually committed by white people. The statistic that gets cited a lot is that black people make up a disproportionate amount of violent crime-- that is, if they make up 30% of the population (I don't remember what their actual population is), then they make up more than 30% of the crime.
But anyway, that's not really the point. The point is, even if the majority of violent criminals were black, it does not then follow that the majority of black people are violent criminals. It's really a big logical jump to assume that these particular kids are violent criminals, so your talk about "educating these kids not to break the law" is completely unfounded.
But even forgetting all that for a second, I think you're missing a pretty important thing: Even if they were seeking out criminals for this educational program, it would still be the best thing for everyone involved. Essentially, they're teaching kids how to deal with police officers so that things don't escalate to the point of violence. Nobody wants more stories of teenage kids getting shot by police officers. These kids don't want to get shot, the public generally doesn't want them to get shot, and I don't think most police officers want to shoot them.
Now there's the issue of teaching the kids to assert their constitutional rights. I don't see this as a problem. They have every right to assert those rights. Now maybe you'll drag out that tired concept that we hear so often, "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear." Why shouldn't these kids allow these searches, unless they're criminals, right? Well in just the same way, I'd ask this of the police: If your searches are legal and ethical, then you have nothing to fear. The only problem with people asserting their rights is that it prevents the police from conducting searches that they have no right to conduct anyway.
No, you don't need FTL to be an interstellar species, but it seems like you would need it to reach another galaxy in the next 1000 years.
Actually, I'm not 100% sure that's what the guy I was responding to was saying, but he was certainly saying that our understanding of physics would have improved to the point of allowing FTL travel.
That would be my point."You can't identify which of us is useful or "serious" that's up to us to decide but we can't".
Who said that philosophers can't identify 'serious' philosophy? I don't know what you're talking about, other than that someone several levels up on the conversation said, "It's clear you do not know what serious (as opposed to populist) philosophers are concerned with." I don't think that statement was using the word 'serious' in the way that you interpret. I don't, for example, think that he was drawing a distinction between "good philosophers who are correct" and "bad philosophers who are incorrect."
You have reduced a so-called "respectable" field into nothing better than what I engage in with my friends while passing left.
Again, I'm not sure what you're on about. I mean, for one thing, I don't know what that statement is coming from. For another, I don't see a problem with imagining that a "respectable" field would be one that you talk about with your friends. Do you not ever talk about science with your friends? Do school children not perform scientific experiments, sometimes for fun? Does that make science no longer respectable?
Philosophy has its place but this current arrogant attitude of it being supremely important because everything can be technically defined as "philosophy" is exactly why it is currently useless.
I guess everything could be defined as "philosophy", in much the same sense that anything can be defined as anything. I can define "giraffes" as "rocket launchers", but I'm not sure that means anything, especially since I won't be able to get any agreement on that from either experts on giraffes or experts on rocket launchers. But why does that bother you?
Chemistry largely came from alchemy but it would be asinine to declare alchemy is an important or insightful field of study because of the gains from chemistry.
I didn't say that philosophy was an important field of study because is was a forerunner to science. No, I would sooner argue that "science" hasn't surpassed "philosophy" any more than "quantum physics" has surpassed "science". It's more like a branch, or a subset. "Science" is the modern branch of natural philosophy that uses some well understood engineering techniques to develop our understanding of the material world. Science can not develop our understanding of things that are not physical, or that do not lend themselves to that set of engineering techniques, so other branches of philosophy are needed to develop our understanding of everything else.
Using a worm hole to travel between two points faster than light can pass between those points would be an example of faster-than-light travel. There's speculation that we possibly might someday figure out how to do it, but it's still at the point of being "really wild speculation that we have no real reason to think is possible."
We don't know what will be possible in the next 1000 years, but it's entirely possible that out inability to travel faster than light is not a technological problem. That is, as our knowledge of physics becomes deeper, we might only confirm that FTL travel is simply impossible, no matter what technology we bring to bear. It's impossible for us to say with certainty, at least at this point in our development, but there is no reason to think that we can actually develop technology for FTL travel, time travel, teleportation, or a lot of other scifi technologies.
Now you might bring up flight, as many people do. "200 years ago, you would have said that there's no reason to think that we would develop the technology for manned flight, but we have!" True, but at least there was a precedent. We knew that flight was possible, because we'd seen birds do it. Even in traveling through space, there has been a precedent in that we've known for a while that meteors fell from "the heavens" for quite a while, and people may have suspected that it was the case even before that, so we knew that material could traverse the sky. And anyway, there didn't seem to be physical laws that prevented it, other than that we're heavy, and there didn't seem to be any way to get up there. There was the potential to build a staircase as high as your architecture skills would allow.
But FTL travel? All indications at this point are that it's simply impossible. If we were to posit that mankind will someday achieve inter-galactic travel, I would guess that it would be by developing suspended-animation and AI capable of piloting a ship over that kind of time frame. The logistics of planning that kind of trip are pretty unimaginable, but I still suspect it's more realistic than FTL travel.
I think if you're an IT worker-- one who's actually interested in his job-- then this information is probably of some interest. It sounds like a lot of it would be things I already know, but "How to setup SSL/TLS properly so that it uses the bare minimum of resources," seems like a helpful bit of information to have.
I'm not sure how it relates to the conversation, but the US still does have a lot of engineers. Unfortunately, a lot of them are scrambling in competition to build a half-assed mobile app that they can sell to Google for a billion dollars. That's the American dream these days: make a half-assed company that I can sell for a lot of money before people realize it's useless and the whole thing implodes.
There's also the "Immigrant laborers are doing jobs americans dont want to do!" rhetoric...That does NOT attract the "best and brightest".
For the jobs you're talking about, it's not clear to me that they intend to attract the "best and brightest". They're willing to settle for, "Will work long hours picking fruit for almost no money, and will be too afraid to report me if I break labor laws."
I'm not too familiar with what you're specifically referring to, but I would wonder if they've really simulated insects. It seems more likely that there have been projects that created and tweaked some kind of machine learning that resulted in behaviors similar to insects. The distinction may not be obvious, but it's one thing to say, "I've completely simulated the intelligence of a bee," and another to say "I've been able to create an AI project with artificial 'bees' that are able to exhibit some of the same swarm behaviors that real bees do."
In humans, intelligence is a very rough term applied to an enormous pile of features. Processing speed, memory, learning algorithms, response time, and many more features all contribute to what we think of as intelligence.
I think it's worth pointing out, though, that your listed "features" are all computing features. I know you also say "many more features", but the fact that you list computing features seems to already assume that intelligence is a function of computing. It's not clear to me that we can make that assumption.
I agree that it's a rough/vague term, which is why I think it would be important to be clear what we're talking about before we can say how close we are to achieving it. I've heard some people suggest that Watson is a good example of AI because it has shown that a machine can perform some intellectual function better than people can. Fair enough, but then we could have said that about computers quite a long time ago-- computers have long been able to memorize numbers and perform arithmetic faster and more reliably than people.
On the other hand, a person might suggest that to have real "intelligence" in the way that people do, it would be necessary for an artificial intelligence to be able to empathize with others. Even if that's something that could be simulated with computing power, the activity itself is not a direct "feature" of computing that belongs in the same list as "processing speed" and "response time".
Now you might be reading this post and thinking, "Empathy?! This guy is stupid. Obviously you can have intelligence without empathy!" Well, perhaps you can, but I think it depends on what you mean by 'intelligence', which is not something that has ever been made clear.
And being as the only way to tell who is a "serious" philosopher is using some kind of objective metric
Not necessarily. Here's where things get difficult: the question of how you tell who is a "serious" philosopher, and whether there's such a thing as an "objective metric", is a question for philosophers.
I guess you agree that the "scientific method" was achieved in spite of and not because of philosophy.
I would not agree. What we call "science" is an offshoot of "natural philosophy". The scientific method was created by natural philosophers as a refinement of practices they were already using: observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and falsification. Philosophers realized that if you limited a line of inquiry to only things that could be tested and falsified by physical experimentation, that they could make much more effective progress in those particular topics. Hence, science.
And I know, there are people who think that philosophy is just a bunch of silly idiots arguing about nonsense that can't be proved or disproved. Ironically, those people are generally subscribing to a specific philosophic viewpoint, and not a very well thought out one.
I also think it's important to understand the context of the "stop and frisk" stuff going on in NYC. There's a practice of randomly searching people without any real grounds for a search, and statistically, minorities are being frisked much more often than white people. A while back, there was even a recording leaked where police officers were being specifically instructed to search young black men.
If police are going to target young black men, it seems only reasonable that young black men should be educated on how to respond so as to protect their rights and to avoid getting hurt.
Yeah, but they didn't just skip version 9. According to Microsoft's internal versioning scheme for Windows, Windows 8.1 is actually v6.3. Microsoft decided to skip 6.4, 7, 8, and 9.
So no, this is unlikely to be the result of anything other than Microsoft finally saying, "Let's have our internal versioning scheme match the marketing versioning scheme, and just make all references to Windows show 'version 10'."
In that sense, I think it's also about setting realistic expectations. With almost anything you want to do, there's some limit to how fast it can be done, even with unlimited resources. Limiting the resources available below the optimal level will increase the amount of time to accomplish things. So you can't take a project that will take 6 months to complete, cut the resources to keep the budget low, and then set a project schedule for 3 months and expect it to work.
After a certain point, providing big bonuses doesn't make things happen faster. It just encourages people to cut corners to meet the technical requirements for the bonus, even if it means providing a useless end-product at the end of it all.
First, that doesn't seem to be what the article is saying. Second, I don't really believe that it's true.
When I say "don't believe that it's true", I'm saying, "I don't believe that the removal of managers necessarily gets work done faster." I'm not talking about programming specifically-- I'm not a programmer, and managing programmers is not my expertise-- by my general experience is that a lot of people think managers are just wasting everyone's time, when the reality is more that most people don't understand what managers do. Unfortunately, this sometimes includes managers.
A good manager often spends his day trying to figure out how to remove obstacles so that the people he's managing can just do their jobs. For example, the summary says, "The article encourages managers to let devs contribute to the process and say 'No' if the specs are too vague." That sounds right to me. First, a good manager will of course listen to the people he's managing. That doesn't mean doing whatever they say, but when I have managed programmers, I assume that they know what they're doing better than I do, so if they say there's a problem of some sort, there's a problem of some sort. I wouldn't always go with their recommended solution, but would I listen to their explanation of the problem and try to come to a solution that addressed the programmers complaint as well as meeting the business needs we were trying to address.
If specs are too vague, that seems like the sort of thing a good manager would help to work out. For example, I might suggest talking to the programmer, trying to figure out which aspect of the specs are too vague, and then meeting with the stakeholders to try to clarify the specs. I wouldn't necessarily make the developer get involved in the process of clarifying them, since unless they're needed for the discussion, they probably have better things to do.
But being a good manager is pretty difficult in general. It's often not clear what needs to be done, or how it ought to be done, and it's your job to figure that out. It's pretty much impossible to be a bad manager without annoying people, but even the best managers might seem annoying or clueless because you don't see what they're doing for you. Sometimes good managers are only noticeable in their absence-- when they go away, you suddenly go "Oh jeeze, things are falling apart a bit here. How was it that we never had these problems before?" And the answer is, you were having those problems, but your manager was dealing with them when you weren't paying attention.
Maybe I'm just in a bad mood and being an asshole, but I can't quite wrap my head around this post. "Hi everyone, I'm a random anonymous person on the Internet. For reasons I won't explain, I've decided I don't like Linux, and I want to try BSD. My needs are that I really want to play 3 specific games and run Firefox." I'm not even seeing where he actually asks a question, but timothy wants to know how Mr. Anonymous can fix his undisclosed Linux problems by moving to BSD.
Well, let's see. First, since you're apparently just running games, who cares what OS you're using? Does your current OS play those games? If yes, keep it. If not, look to see what operating system supports those games, and choose one of those operating systems to try out. Firefox and some kind of view player? I don't think that'll be much of a problem. Somehow the issue of hardware support isn't raised.
You know what? Use PC-BSD. AFIAK, it's basically the only BSD distribution, aside from Mac OSX, that's specifically targeting desktop use. Or maybe, since you only need a web browser and a couple of games, you should use whatever OS runs those games and stop worrying about it.
while somehow failing to recognize that the results of those methods are products that are often not unstable
It should be either "products that are unstable" or "products that are not stable". My point there is, you can make lots of iterative improvements on Google Plus because it's software that can be changed after deployment, and if you screw it up and have a small disaster, who cares? People are briefly without their social network while you fix the problem or restore from a backup, or whatever. A lot of things aren't like that. Not all software engineering concepts are universally applicable.
I don't think it's really off topic. When I read, "What did it mean that one of the world's most ambitious and capable innovation companies couldn't invent a cheap renewable energy tech?" my first thought was, "It probably means that inventing cheap renewable energy is difficult, if not beyond our current technology, if not impossible. What, did these Google engineers really believe that the only reason it hasn't been done yet is that everyone else is stupid?"
There's definitely something a bit silly about startup culture, where there's an assumption that software and fresh ideas provide the solution to everything, as though all problems in life can be solved by a cleverly designed mobile app. There's also a sort of assumption that the skills involved with programming are the most important and most useful skills possible, and are applicable everywhere. I've heard arguments that programming methodology should be applied to all fields-- medicine, engineering, government, everything-- while somehow failing to recognize that the results of those methods are products that are often not unstable, both in the sense of "ever changing" and in the sense of "crashes a lot".
I've met a bunch of Google employees over the years as well as other startup-y tech companies, and the general trend seems to be that they're nice people, and they may be very good at what they do, but they overestimate the importance and universal applicability of what they do.
Slashdot Mirror
If they could then there would be some kind of metric.
According to whom? According to what belief system?
If children were performing science on equal level with tenured professors then yeah I would say it is not exactly respectable.
I have yet to hear a single thought from you that's worthy of an average sophomore philosophy student, so that tells us something about its rigor. Yes, sure, you can talk about philosophy, and so can children, in much the same way that children can talk about quantum mechanics. They can talk about it, but they probably won't understand it, and the conversation will probably not be very fruitful if they're not interested in learning about the topic.
but it allows you to recover the data in the event of a hard drive failure (and the loss of data on that drive).
Well, it allows you to recover data in the event of a hardware failure specifically on one of the hard drives, nowhere else, in such a way that doesn't cause data corruption first. In much the same way that if you have a redundant power supply, it will protect you against the specific event of hardware failure where one of your power supplies fails without there being a problem with your power source or damage to any of the other internal components.
That is to say, it's hardware redundancy. Nothing more. Of the events that lead to data loss or power failure, hardware redundancy does protect you against the case where the problem is limited to hardware failure of one of the redundant parts, and everything else works properly. A "backup" however should be a more generalized strategy for protecting against a total loss of the service, i.e. power goes out or data is lost.
And tapes can be lost or corrupted, or someone can burn the building down.
This is an old argument, and every time it gets revisited RAID starts to look better.
This isn't a competition. I'm not saying, "Screw RAID! It's a terrible backup." It's just not a backup. I'm not going to fight with you over this. Go ahead and use RAID as a backup. Maybe you'll be lucky and you'll never need to learn your lesson.
Sorry, no, in IT terms that's not a backup. It's a backup when it's an independent system with a history. Calling a RAID1 a backup to protect against data loss is similar to calling a redundant power supply a backup to protect against power failure. It's kind-of-almost-right in a limited sense, but it misunderstands the problem. It's just hardware redundancy, not a backup.
You're both right. RAID can decrease the chances of data loss due to some kinds of problems, but ultimately it shouldn't be considered a reliable protection against data loss. A RAID can be lost or corrupted, or someone can overwrite or delete a file. If you want to assess the risk to your data and talk about the set of data that is protected against loss, you should only consider your backed up data to be "protected". The protection that RAID offers is too weak to be considered to be significant protection.
Therefore, the fundamental purpose of a RAID is to prevent the downtime due to failure of an individual hard drive. If you did not have RAID, then your data volume would stop running, and you'd have to be offline while you repair the device and restore from backups, so that's what you're successfully preventing. All the data that has been backed up (assuming your backup is good) should be safe, and any data that has not backed up is not safe, regardless of whether you have a RAID.
RAID is redundancy, not backup.
Well I think you're missing a few things. For one thing, I may be wrong about this, but I believe that the majority of violent crimes are actually committed by white people. The statistic that gets cited a lot is that black people make up a disproportionate amount of violent crime-- that is, if they make up 30% of the population (I don't remember what their actual population is), then they make up more than 30% of the crime.
But anyway, that's not really the point. The point is, even if the majority of violent criminals were black, it does not then follow that the majority of black people are violent criminals. It's really a big logical jump to assume that these particular kids are violent criminals, so your talk about "educating these kids not to break the law" is completely unfounded.
But even forgetting all that for a second, I think you're missing a pretty important thing: Even if they were seeking out criminals for this educational program, it would still be the best thing for everyone involved. Essentially, they're teaching kids how to deal with police officers so that things don't escalate to the point of violence. Nobody wants more stories of teenage kids getting shot by police officers. These kids don't want to get shot, the public generally doesn't want them to get shot, and I don't think most police officers want to shoot them.
Now there's the issue of teaching the kids to assert their constitutional rights. I don't see this as a problem. They have every right to assert those rights. Now maybe you'll drag out that tired concept that we hear so often, "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear." Why shouldn't these kids allow these searches, unless they're criminals, right? Well in just the same way, I'd ask this of the police: If your searches are legal and ethical, then you have nothing to fear. The only problem with people asserting their rights is that it prevents the police from conducting searches that they have no right to conduct anyway.
No, you don't need FTL to be an interstellar species, but it seems like you would need it to reach another galaxy in the next 1000 years.
Actually, I'm not 100% sure that's what the guy I was responding to was saying, but he was certainly saying that our understanding of physics would have improved to the point of allowing FTL travel.
That would be my point."You can't identify which of us is useful or "serious" that's up to us to decide but we can't".
Who said that philosophers can't identify 'serious' philosophy? I don't know what you're talking about, other than that someone several levels up on the conversation said, "It's clear you do not know what serious (as opposed to populist) philosophers are concerned with." I don't think that statement was using the word 'serious' in the way that you interpret. I don't, for example, think that he was drawing a distinction between "good philosophers who are correct" and "bad philosophers who are incorrect."
You have reduced a so-called "respectable" field into nothing better than what I engage in with my friends while passing left.
Again, I'm not sure what you're on about. I mean, for one thing, I don't know what that statement is coming from. For another, I don't see a problem with imagining that a "respectable" field would be one that you talk about with your friends. Do you not ever talk about science with your friends? Do school children not perform scientific experiments, sometimes for fun? Does that make science no longer respectable?
Philosophy has its place but this current arrogant attitude of it being supremely important because everything can be technically defined as "philosophy" is exactly why it is currently useless.
I guess everything could be defined as "philosophy", in much the same sense that anything can be defined as anything. I can define "giraffes" as "rocket launchers", but I'm not sure that means anything, especially since I won't be able to get any agreement on that from either experts on giraffes or experts on rocket launchers. But why does that bother you?
Chemistry largely came from alchemy but it would be asinine to declare alchemy is an important or insightful field of study because of the gains from chemistry.
I didn't say that philosophy was an important field of study because is was a forerunner to science. No, I would sooner argue that "science" hasn't surpassed "philosophy" any more than "quantum physics" has surpassed "science". It's more like a branch, or a subset. "Science" is the modern branch of natural philosophy that uses some well understood engineering techniques to develop our understanding of the material world. Science can not develop our understanding of things that are not physical, or that do not lend themselves to that set of engineering techniques, so other branches of philosophy are needed to develop our understanding of everything else.
Maybe not FTL, but what about worm holes...
Using a worm hole to travel between two points faster than light can pass between those points would be an example of faster-than-light travel. There's speculation that we possibly might someday figure out how to do it, but it's still at the point of being "really wild speculation that we have no real reason to think is possible."
We don't know what will be possible in the next 1000 years, but it's entirely possible that out inability to travel faster than light is not a technological problem. That is, as our knowledge of physics becomes deeper, we might only confirm that FTL travel is simply impossible, no matter what technology we bring to bear. It's impossible for us to say with certainty, at least at this point in our development, but there is no reason to think that we can actually develop technology for FTL travel, time travel, teleportation, or a lot of other scifi technologies.
Now you might bring up flight, as many people do. "200 years ago, you would have said that there's no reason to think that we would develop the technology for manned flight, but we have!" True, but at least there was a precedent. We knew that flight was possible, because we'd seen birds do it. Even in traveling through space, there has been a precedent in that we've known for a while that meteors fell from "the heavens" for quite a while, and people may have suspected that it was the case even before that, so we knew that material could traverse the sky. And anyway, there didn't seem to be physical laws that prevented it, other than that we're heavy, and there didn't seem to be any way to get up there. There was the potential to build a staircase as high as your architecture skills would allow.
But FTL travel? All indications at this point are that it's simply impossible. If we were to posit that mankind will someday achieve inter-galactic travel, I would guess that it would be by developing suspended-animation and AI capable of piloting a ship over that kind of time frame. The logistics of planning that kind of trip are pretty unimaginable, but I still suspect it's more realistic than FTL travel.
I think if you're an IT worker-- one who's actually interested in his job-- then this information is probably of some interest. It sounds like a lot of it would be things I already know, but "How to setup SSL/TLS properly so that it uses the bare minimum of resources," seems like a helpful bit of information to have.
Well yes, you should use SSL. It may have problems, but what's your other option?
I'm not sure how it relates to the conversation, but the US still does have a lot of engineers. Unfortunately, a lot of them are scrambling in competition to build a half-assed mobile app that they can sell to Google for a billion dollars. That's the American dream these days: make a half-assed company that I can sell for a lot of money before people realize it's useless and the whole thing implodes.
There's also the "Immigrant laborers are doing jobs americans dont want to do!" rhetoric...That does NOT attract the "best and brightest".
For the jobs you're talking about, it's not clear to me that they intend to attract the "best and brightest". They're willing to settle for, "Will work long hours picking fruit for almost no money, and will be too afraid to report me if I break labor laws."
We've been simulating simple insects for decades
I'm not too familiar with what you're specifically referring to, but I would wonder if they've really simulated insects. It seems more likely that there have been projects that created and tweaked some kind of machine learning that resulted in behaviors similar to insects. The distinction may not be obvious, but it's one thing to say, "I've completely simulated the intelligence of a bee," and another to say "I've been able to create an AI project with artificial 'bees' that are able to exhibit some of the same swarm behaviors that real bees do."
In humans, intelligence is a very rough term applied to an enormous pile of features. Processing speed, memory, learning algorithms, response time, and many more features all contribute to what we think of as intelligence.
I think it's worth pointing out, though, that your listed "features" are all computing features. I know you also say "many more features", but the fact that you list computing features seems to already assume that intelligence is a function of computing. It's not clear to me that we can make that assumption.
I agree that it's a rough/vague term, which is why I think it would be important to be clear what we're talking about before we can say how close we are to achieving it. I've heard some people suggest that Watson is a good example of AI because it has shown that a machine can perform some intellectual function better than people can. Fair enough, but then we could have said that about computers quite a long time ago-- computers have long been able to memorize numbers and perform arithmetic faster and more reliably than people.
On the other hand, a person might suggest that to have real "intelligence" in the way that people do, it would be necessary for an artificial intelligence to be able to empathize with others. Even if that's something that could be simulated with computing power, the activity itself is not a direct "feature" of computing that belongs in the same list as "processing speed" and "response time".
Now you might be reading this post and thinking, "Empathy?! This guy is stupid. Obviously you can have intelligence without empathy!" Well, perhaps you can, but I think it depends on what you mean by 'intelligence', which is not something that has ever been made clear.
And being as the only way to tell who is a "serious" philosopher is using some kind of objective metric
Not necessarily. Here's where things get difficult: the question of how you tell who is a "serious" philosopher, and whether there's such a thing as an "objective metric", is a question for philosophers.
I guess you agree that the "scientific method" was achieved in spite of and not because of philosophy.
I would not agree. What we call "science" is an offshoot of "natural philosophy". The scientific method was created by natural philosophers as a refinement of practices they were already using: observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and falsification. Philosophers realized that if you limited a line of inquiry to only things that could be tested and falsified by physical experimentation, that they could make much more effective progress in those particular topics. Hence, science.
And I know, there are people who think that philosophy is just a bunch of silly idiots arguing about nonsense that can't be proved or disproved. Ironically, those people are generally subscribing to a specific philosophic viewpoint, and not a very well thought out one.
I also think it's important to understand the context of the "stop and frisk" stuff going on in NYC. There's a practice of randomly searching people without any real grounds for a search, and statistically, minorities are being frisked much more often than white people. A while back, there was even a recording leaked where police officers were being specifically instructed to search young black men.
If police are going to target young black men, it seems only reasonable that young black men should be educated on how to respond so as to protect their rights and to avoid getting hurt.
Yeah, but they didn't just skip version 9. According to Microsoft's internal versioning scheme for Windows, Windows 8.1 is actually v6.3. Microsoft decided to skip 6.4, 7, 8, and 9.
So no, this is unlikely to be the result of anything other than Microsoft finally saying, "Let's have our internal versioning scheme match the marketing versioning scheme, and just make all references to Windows show 'version 10'."
In that sense, I think it's also about setting realistic expectations. With almost anything you want to do, there's some limit to how fast it can be done, even with unlimited resources. Limiting the resources available below the optimal level will increase the amount of time to accomplish things. So you can't take a project that will take 6 months to complete, cut the resources to keep the budget low, and then set a project schedule for 3 months and expect it to work.
After a certain point, providing big bonuses doesn't make things happen faster. It just encourages people to cut corners to meet the technical requirements for the bonus, even if it means providing a useless end-product at the end of it all.
First, that doesn't seem to be what the article is saying. Second, I don't really believe that it's true.
When I say "don't believe that it's true", I'm saying, "I don't believe that the removal of managers necessarily gets work done faster." I'm not talking about programming specifically-- I'm not a programmer, and managing programmers is not my expertise-- by my general experience is that a lot of people think managers are just wasting everyone's time, when the reality is more that most people don't understand what managers do. Unfortunately, this sometimes includes managers.
A good manager often spends his day trying to figure out how to remove obstacles so that the people he's managing can just do their jobs. For example, the summary says, "The article encourages managers to let devs contribute to the process and say 'No' if the specs are too vague." That sounds right to me. First, a good manager will of course listen to the people he's managing. That doesn't mean doing whatever they say, but when I have managed programmers, I assume that they know what they're doing better than I do, so if they say there's a problem of some sort, there's a problem of some sort. I wouldn't always go with their recommended solution, but would I listen to their explanation of the problem and try to come to a solution that addressed the programmers complaint as well as meeting the business needs we were trying to address.
If specs are too vague, that seems like the sort of thing a good manager would help to work out. For example, I might suggest talking to the programmer, trying to figure out which aspect of the specs are too vague, and then meeting with the stakeholders to try to clarify the specs. I wouldn't necessarily make the developer get involved in the process of clarifying them, since unless they're needed for the discussion, they probably have better things to do.
But being a good manager is pretty difficult in general. It's often not clear what needs to be done, or how it ought to be done, and it's your job to figure that out. It's pretty much impossible to be a bad manager without annoying people, but even the best managers might seem annoying or clueless because you don't see what they're doing for you. Sometimes good managers are only noticeable in their absence-- when they go away, you suddenly go "Oh jeeze, things are falling apart a bit here. How was it that we never had these problems before?" And the answer is, you were having those problems, but your manager was dealing with them when you weren't paying attention.
Maybe I'm just in a bad mood and being an asshole, but I can't quite wrap my head around this post. "Hi everyone, I'm a random anonymous person on the Internet. For reasons I won't explain, I've decided I don't like Linux, and I want to try BSD. My needs are that I really want to play 3 specific games and run Firefox." I'm not even seeing where he actually asks a question, but timothy wants to know how Mr. Anonymous can fix his undisclosed Linux problems by moving to BSD.
Well, let's see. First, since you're apparently just running games, who cares what OS you're using? Does your current OS play those games? If yes, keep it. If not, look to see what operating system supports those games, and choose one of those operating systems to try out. Firefox and some kind of view player? I don't think that'll be much of a problem. Somehow the issue of hardware support isn't raised.
You know what? Use PC-BSD. AFIAK, it's basically the only BSD distribution, aside from Mac OSX, that's specifically targeting desktop use. Or maybe, since you only need a web browser and a couple of games, you should use whatever OS runs those games and stop worrying about it.
while somehow failing to recognize that the results of those methods are products that are often not unstable
It should be either "products that are unstable" or "products that are not stable". My point there is, you can make lots of iterative improvements on Google Plus because it's software that can be changed after deployment, and if you screw it up and have a small disaster, who cares? People are briefly without their social network while you fix the problem or restore from a backup, or whatever. A lot of things aren't like that. Not all software engineering concepts are universally applicable.
I think people would settle for fusion. It seems that fusion is also a difficult problem to crack.
I don't think it's really off topic. When I read, "What did it mean that one of the world's most ambitious and capable innovation companies couldn't invent a cheap renewable energy tech?" my first thought was, "It probably means that inventing cheap renewable energy is difficult, if not beyond our current technology, if not impossible. What, did these Google engineers really believe that the only reason it hasn't been done yet is that everyone else is stupid?"
There's definitely something a bit silly about startup culture, where there's an assumption that software and fresh ideas provide the solution to everything, as though all problems in life can be solved by a cleverly designed mobile app. There's also a sort of assumption that the skills involved with programming are the most important and most useful skills possible, and are applicable everywhere. I've heard arguments that programming methodology should be applied to all fields-- medicine, engineering, government, everything-- while somehow failing to recognize that the results of those methods are products that are often not unstable, both in the sense of "ever changing" and in the sense of "crashes a lot".
I've met a bunch of Google employees over the years as well as other startup-y tech companies, and the general trend seems to be that they're nice people, and they may be very good at what they do, but they overestimate the importance and universal applicability of what they do.