> One would expect it to reach a middle ground somewhere.
If you look at supply and demand curves, once you have an infinite supply, the price of an item (in this case the now-limitless H1B qualified jobs, because the "limit" is now just a fig-leaf) reaches zero.
Arguments like yours are based on the assumption by Milton Friedman and his ilk that jobs are just as fungible as money, and that it's *your fault* that your price is too high by your simply living in civilization. You are being forced into a race to the bottom. Races to the bottom have no winners.
Compressed air is anything but safe. Pressure vessels are basically bombs if not welded correctly or are damaged, which is why industrial air compressors over a certain pressure/volume need yearly inspection and certification. It's why people who weld pressure vessels get as much money as they do.
At least a fuel tank leaking gasoline is only a fire hazard instead of a hazard that can take out an entire block in one go. Compressed natural gas buses aren't even allowed in tunnels, and CNG is even lower pressure than what is required to run a car on compressed air.
And here's the question. Considering how dumb some people are, do you trust Joe Sixpack to drive around with a fucking bomb?
>Actually I would disagree with that. Most software I have seen and used is actually quite pretty IMO although to some the word "ugly" may be more appropriate, however pretty does not necessarily mean functional.
I'm referring to aesthetics and actual functionality. There's a lot of crap out there that is useful but stupidly laid out. Blender, before the GUI rewrite, was especially bad.
Also, there is Sturgeon's Law. "90 percent of SF is crud because 90 percent of anything is crud." This applies to software, television shows, literature, hand tools, cookware, etc.
>command line and character driven interfaces versus GUI
There is good UI and bad UI. It's easier to make a mess of things in a GUI and it shows. But then there is bad UI at the command line. Case in point: PowerShell. PowerShell is useful, but it sucks as a terminal and the syntax is a nightmare of typing. Its one saving grace is that the typical Unix commands are aliased to PowerShell commands.
ProComm, before it became a Windows monstrosity, was one of those really nice character driven interfaces that did exactly what you wanted in an elegant manner. Telix was almost as good, but not quite the same.
Play, the SoX media player, is also an elegant command-line program.
>the only thing that GIMP has over Photoshop is the ability to record keystrokes
I would disagree. One of the most important features of PS since CS3 is computing through the video card. CS3 was the last Photoshop that didn't require a 3D video card for various filter calculations. GIMP doesn't have this. I wish it did, to silence the critics. While this might not seem important if you're just doing your own photos on a casual basis, people who do a lot more photos consider this a big time saver. Couple this with scripting through PS and you've got a powerful tool that GIMP can't touch.
I'd like to see PS ported to Linux. But considering Adobe's hatred of everything *nix except Apple, I doubt this is going to happen any time soon. I think we're going to see PS as a SaaS cloud application (I seriously think they're headed this way) before a native port to Linux or BSD.
Until then, there is Wine and virtual machines (xen with vga passthrough to take advantage of 3D acceleration).
>Imagemagick
This.... this program fuckin' rocks, but the UI is intimidating. I never do anything in it before looking at a Howto to at least remind myself of the syntax.
But like I said, you can list all the individual programs you want as examples of decent programs, but I think you can certainly find a lot more stuff with awful UI than with good UI.
Pretty much. Marketing dweebs somehow think that bells/whistles/idiot alerts sells software and that checkboxes mean something, even if the feature in the checkbox is implemented half-arsed, or even quarter-arsed and they hold sway over the specs and visual design of a commercial software package far too much than is deserved.
Let's just take a look at Windows malware detection packages. They are so full of bogus frou-frou to tell the user that it's "doing something" that the only one that doesn't offend me highly is MSE. The vast majority just won't friggin' shut up and just run. Look at Norton, Avast, etc.
And for all the scorn heaped upon GIMP, the interface for Photoshop doesn't win any prizes either, as it's got 25 years of UI cruft and should *really* be re-written from scratch.
The number of software packages that are truly elegant from a UI standpoint is vanishingly small on either side of the commercial/OSS spectrum.
I guess you could say "photosynthesis in general" because they all use the same mechanism - chromophores- just different wavelengths and "packaging schemes"
I am reminded of the Bloom County cartoon where the Banana Junior computer is celebrating life, and then dances a few inches too far and unplugs itself.
There is experience and then there is what we call intelligence - the ability to use what is learned in ways that are useful or creative, or whatever you want to classify intelligence as.
Accumulating and sorting raw data is not enough to be called intelligence.
And this is where we get into the philosophical discussion if just what intelligence actually is, which after millennia, is still being hotly debated among people who make these things called IQ tests.
Mechanical things are simple. A wing is mere geometry and materials.
We still don't even know how neurons actually work. Sure, we can describe chemically what happens at the synapse, but what happens at the molecular level where a neuron "remembers" how to fire which axons and not? We have simulators, but they are crude and huge compared to actual physical neurons. We've built a brain simulator with software neurons, and it takes up a supercomputer and megawatts of electricity to run.
We *are* far behind MomNature with regards to AI.
To make a car analogy:
Current AI is to biological computers as the Roman Chariot is to a Ferrari.
No, you're *simulating* neurons on the FPGA. And you're ignoring size and power considerations, which I also brought up.
Show me a neuron simulator on an FPGA that is smaller than a neuron with an architecture that is 1/4 the size of current high-end lithography. And I'll even give you a head start in ignoring the power demands.
Only nominally, and if you depend on someone holding a certification as the sole way to demonstrate that they know something, you deserve what happens to you if you work in HR/own a company/hire a contractor.
If you are running a business, there are two kinds of people who you need to trust entirely, and a betrayal of this trust could ruin your company.
The CFO and other *Os. The Janitor.
The CFO looks after the finances, for example, and a guy with evil in his heart could either skim off the top or just send your company to Davey Jones' Locker. The Janitor has to have access to areas that other people in your organization aren't allowed to have access, unless you like emptying your own wastebaskets your own damn self. The janitor even goes into the CFO's office which is littered with confidential information just about everywhere. The perfect occupation for corporate espionage.
(I used to work where if you walked into the CFO's office, it was like something out of Hoarders)
"Is it your belief that human brains process information in some way that can't be replicated by a system that isn't composed of a network of mammalian neurons, and, if so, why?"
Not just mammalian neurons, but invertebrate neurons too. I think that until we surpass what MomNature has already bioengeineered and abandoning the VonNeumann/Turing model of how a computer is "supposed to be" that we will not construct anything AI that is more performant than what already exists in biological systems.
And that's the eventual goal of AI, harder/better/faster/stronger (to the tune of Daft Punk) than the biological model.
I watched a movie the other day called Microcosmos^1 (a visually stunning movie, highly recommended). Consider how small the invertebrate brains are and marvel at the complex behaviors invertebrates exhibit. To surpass that is a lofty goal indeed. We are probably going to have to reinvent MomNature's wheel (the biological neuron) on our way to this goal. And since we haven't discovered how the neuron depends on quantum mechanics to work (like how we've discovered how chloroplasts do just this past year), we need more physics too.
By the time we invent AI that actually works, it won't be artificial anymore.
Modern AI involves having some system, which ranges from statistical learning algorithms all the way to biological neurons growing on a plate, learn through presentation of input. The same way people learn, except often faster.
Biological neurons on a plate learning faster than neurons inside one's head? They are both biological and work at the same "clock speed" (there isn't a clock speed).
Besides, we do this every day. It's called making babies.
The argument that I'm trying to get across is that the evangelists of AI like Kurzweil promote the idea that AI is somehow able to bypass experience, aka "learning by doing" and "common sense." This is tough enough teaching to systems that have been the result of the past 4.5 billion years of MomNature's bioengineering. I'm willing to bet that AI is doomed to fail (to be severely limited compared to the lofty goals of the AI community and the fevered imaginations of the Colossus/Lawnmower Man/Skynet/Matrix fearmongers) and that MomNature has already pointed the way to actual useful intelligence, as flawed as we are.
that passes for intelligence in college, so what's the problem?
That's the *only* place it passes for intelligence. And that only works for 4 years. It doesn't work for grad level. (If it's working for you at grad level, find a different institution, because you're in one that sucks).
A lot of knowledge is not published at all. It's transmitted orally. It's also "discovered" by the user of facts through practice as to where certain facts are appropriate and where not appropriate. If you could use just books to learn a trade, we wouldn't need apprenticeships. But we still do. We even attach a fancy word to apprenticeships for so-called "white collar" jobs and call them "internships."
The apprentice phase is where one picks up the "common sense" for a trade.
As for the rest of your message, it's a load of twaddle, and I'm sure that Mike Rowe's argument for the "common man" is much more informed than your flame.
Please note where he talks about what so-called "book learned" (the SPCA) say about what you should do to neuter sheep as opposed to what the "street smart" farmer does and Mike's own direct experience. That's only *one* example.
In short, your follow-up sentence says that you are an elitist prick who probably would be entirely lost without the rest of the "lower" part of society picking up after you.
AI assumes that you can take published facts, dump them in a black box, and assume that the output is going to be intelligent. Sorry, but when you do this to actual humans, you get what is called "book smart" without common sense.
I'm sure everyone here can either identify this or identify with it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Wages in the US have not been on an inevitable downward march,
Adjusted for inflation, this statement is bullshit. Since 1999, household income has *fallen.* That's 14 solid years.
But hey, you go look up these facts yourself. They're googleable.
--
BMO
No, they will be victims in the next race to the bottom.
The problem with races to the bottom is that there really isn't one until you hit zero and people go broke.
Then out come the pitchforks and guillotines.
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BMO
> One would expect it to reach a middle ground somewhere.
If you look at supply and demand curves, once you have an infinite supply, the price of an item (in this case the now-limitless H1B qualified jobs, because the "limit" is now just a fig-leaf) reaches zero.
You failed macroeconomics 101, didn't you?
--
BMO
>By definition they are,
Can you pick up tomorrow and go to Norway?
People are *not allowed* to migrate at will. If you have a DUI conviction, you can't even visit Canada.
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BMO
Your corporate bootlicking is disgusting.
Arguments like yours are based on the assumption by Milton Friedman and his ilk that jobs are just as fungible as money, and that it's *your fault* that your price is too high by your simply living in civilization. You are being forced into a race to the bottom. Races to the bottom have no winners.
--
BMO
Compressed air is anything but safe. Pressure vessels are basically bombs if not welded correctly or are damaged, which is why industrial air compressors over a certain pressure/volume need yearly inspection and certification. It's why people who weld pressure vessels get as much money as they do.
At least a fuel tank leaking gasoline is only a fire hazard instead of a hazard that can take out an entire block in one go. Compressed natural gas buses aren't even allowed in tunnels, and CNG is even lower pressure than what is required to run a car on compressed air.
And here's the question. Considering how dumb some people are, do you trust Joe Sixpack to drive around with a fucking bomb?
--
BMO
>Actually I would disagree with that. Most software I have seen and used is actually quite pretty IMO although to some the word "ugly" may be more appropriate, however pretty does not necessarily mean functional.
I'm referring to aesthetics and actual functionality. There's a lot of crap out there that is useful but stupidly laid out. Blender, before the GUI rewrite, was especially bad.
Also, there is Sturgeon's Law. "90 percent of SF is crud because 90 percent of anything is crud." This applies to software, television shows, literature, hand tools, cookware, etc.
>command line and character driven interfaces versus GUI
There is good UI and bad UI. It's easier to make a mess of things in a GUI and it shows. But then there is bad UI at the command line. Case in point: PowerShell. PowerShell is useful, but it sucks as a terminal and the syntax is a nightmare of typing. Its one saving grace is that the typical Unix commands are aliased to PowerShell commands.
ProComm, before it became a Windows monstrosity, was one of those really nice character driven interfaces that did exactly what you wanted in an elegant manner. Telix was almost as good, but not quite the same.
Play, the SoX media player, is also an elegant command-line program.
>the only thing that GIMP has over Photoshop is the ability to record keystrokes
I would disagree. One of the most important features of PS since CS3 is computing through the video card. CS3 was the last Photoshop that didn't require a 3D video card for various filter calculations. GIMP doesn't have this. I wish it did, to silence the critics. While this might not seem important if you're just doing your own photos on a casual basis, people who do a lot more photos consider this a big time saver. Couple this with scripting through PS and you've got a powerful tool that GIMP can't touch.
I'd like to see PS ported to Linux. But considering Adobe's hatred of everything *nix except Apple, I doubt this is going to happen any time soon. I think we're going to see PS as a SaaS cloud application (I seriously think they're headed this way) before a native port to Linux or BSD.
Until then, there is Wine and virtual machines (xen with vga passthrough to take advantage of 3D acceleration).
>Imagemagick
This.... this program fuckin' rocks, but the UI is intimidating. I never do anything in it before looking at a Howto to at least remind myself of the syntax.
But like I said, you can list all the individual programs you want as examples of decent programs, but I think you can certainly find a lot more stuff with awful UI than with good UI.
--
BMO
but 99% of commercial software is ugly as sin.
Pretty much. Marketing dweebs somehow think that bells/whistles/idiot alerts sells software and that checkboxes mean something, even if the feature in the checkbox is implemented half-arsed, or even quarter-arsed and they hold sway over the specs and visual design of a commercial software package far too much than is deserved.
Let's just take a look at Windows malware detection packages. They are so full of bogus frou-frou to tell the user that it's "doing something" that the only one that doesn't offend me highly is MSE. The vast majority just won't friggin' shut up and just run. Look at Norton, Avast, etc.
And for all the scorn heaped upon GIMP, the interface for Photoshop doesn't win any prizes either, as it's got 25 years of UI cruft and should *really* be re-written from scratch.
The number of software packages that are truly elegant from a UI standpoint is vanishingly small on either side of the commercial/OSS spectrum.
--
BMO
>as opposed to commercial software--where a central leadership maintains control
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
--
BMO
>Do you have a source
I... did.
I wish I had bookmarked it now.
I guess you could say "photosynthesis in general" because they all use the same mechanism - chromophores- just different wavelengths and "packaging schemes"
These are related
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120524092932.htm
http://phys.org/news/2012-01-role-quantum-effects-photosynthesis.html
How different wavelengths affect yield:
http://www.plantcell.org/content/early/2012/05/21/tpc.112.097972.abstract
You deny quantum physics?
Quantum physics is how transistors work, buddy.
All chemistry is quantum mechanics at its root. The evidence keeps mounting every day.
That page is decrying handwaving. It has nothing to do with actual physics.
--
BMO
>Also, try holding your breath for an hour.
I am reminded of the Bloom County cartoon where the Banana Junior computer is celebrating life, and then dances a few inches too far and unplugs itself.
--
BMO
There is experience and then there is what we call intelligence - the ability to use what is learned in ways that are useful or creative, or whatever you want to classify intelligence as.
Accumulating and sorting raw data is not enough to be called intelligence.
And this is where we get into the philosophical discussion if just what intelligence actually is, which after millennia, is still being hotly debated among people who make these things called IQ tests.
--
BMO
Mechanical things are simple. A wing is mere geometry and materials.
We still don't even know how neurons actually work. Sure, we can describe chemically what happens at the synapse, but what happens at the molecular level where a neuron "remembers" how to fire which axons and not? We have simulators, but they are crude and huge compared to actual physical neurons. We've built a brain simulator with software neurons, and it takes up a supercomputer and megawatts of electricity to run.
We *are* far behind MomNature with regards to AI.
To make a car analogy:
Current AI is to biological computers as the Roman Chariot is to a Ferrari.
--
BMO
No, you're *simulating* neurons on the FPGA. And you're ignoring size and power considerations, which I also brought up.
Show me a neuron simulator on an FPGA that is smaller than a neuron with an architecture that is 1/4 the size of current high-end lithography. And I'll even give you a head start in ignoring the power demands.
--
BMO
The KDE team has a touch interface. It's pretty good.
It's called Plasma Active
http://plasma-active.org/
They just keep it separate from the Desktop interface, because you know, desktops and handhelds are different things.
I wish Microsoft knew this.
--
BMO
I'm currently using Precise Pangolin with KDE 4.9.5 as the desktop.
It's spectacularly stable and useful.
--
BMO
Only nominally, and if you depend on someone holding a certification as the sole way to demonstrate that they know something, you deserve what happens to you if you work in HR/own a company/hire a contractor.
--
BMO
Warning, severe tangent ahead.
If you are running a business, there are two kinds of people who you need to trust entirely, and a betrayal of this trust could ruin your company.
The CFO and other *Os.
The Janitor.
The CFO looks after the finances, for example, and a guy with evil in his heart could either skim off the top or just send your company to Davey Jones' Locker. The Janitor has to have access to areas that other people in your organization aren't allowed to have access, unless you like emptying your own wastebaskets your own damn self. The janitor even goes into the CFO's office which is littered with confidential information just about everywhere. The perfect occupation for corporate espionage.
(I used to work where if you walked into the CFO's office, it was like something out of Hoarders)
Mistreat your janitor at your peril.
--
BMO
"Is it your belief that human brains process information in some way that can't be replicated by a system that isn't composed of a network of mammalian neurons, and, if so, why?"
Not just mammalian neurons, but invertebrate neurons too. I think that until we surpass what MomNature has already bioengeineered and abandoning the VonNeumann/Turing model of how a computer is "supposed to be" that we will not construct anything AI that is more performant than what already exists in biological systems.
And that's the eventual goal of AI, harder/better/faster/stronger (to the tune of Daft Punk) than the biological model.
I watched a movie the other day called Microcosmos^1 (a visually stunning movie, highly recommended). Consider how small the invertebrate brains are and marvel at the complex behaviors invertebrates exhibit. To surpass that is a lofty goal indeed. We are probably going to have to reinvent MomNature's wheel (the biological neuron) on our way to this goal. And since we haven't discovered how the neuron depends on quantum mechanics to work (like how we've discovered how chloroplasts do just this past year), we need more physics too.
By the time we invent AI that actually works, it won't be artificial anymore.
--
BMO
Footnotes:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcosmos_(film)
Modern AI involves having some system, which ranges from statistical learning algorithms all the way to biological neurons growing on a plate, learn through presentation of input. The same way people learn, except often faster.
Biological neurons on a plate learning faster than neurons inside one's head? They are both biological and work at the same "clock speed" (there isn't a clock speed).
Besides, we do this every day. It's called making babies.
The argument that I'm trying to get across is that the evangelists of AI like Kurzweil promote the idea that AI is somehow able to bypass experience, aka "learning by doing" and "common sense." This is tough enough teaching to systems that have been the result of the past 4.5 billion years of MomNature's bioengineering. I'm willing to bet that AI is doomed to fail (to be severely limited compared to the lofty goals of the AI community and the fevered imaginations of the Colossus/Lawnmower Man/Skynet/Matrix fearmongers) and that MomNature has already pointed the way to actual useful intelligence, as flawed as we are.
Penrose was right, and will continue to be right.
--
BMO
that passes for intelligence in college, so what's the problem?
That's the *only* place it passes for intelligence. And that only works for 4 years. It doesn't work for grad level. (If it's working for you at grad level, find a different institution, because you're in one that sucks).
A lot of knowledge is not published at all. It's transmitted orally. It's also "discovered" by the user of facts through practice as to where certain facts are appropriate and where not appropriate. If you could use just books to learn a trade, we wouldn't need apprenticeships. But we still do. We even attach a fancy word to apprenticeships for so-called "white collar" jobs and call them "internships."
The apprentice phase is where one picks up the "common sense" for a trade.
As for the rest of your message, it's a load of twaddle, and I'm sure that Mike Rowe's argument for the "common man" is much more informed than your flame.
Please note where he talks about what so-called "book learned" (the SPCA) say about what you should do to neuter sheep as opposed to what the "street smart" farmer does and Mike's own direct experience. That's only *one* example.
http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/05/mike_rowe_ted/
In short, your follow-up sentence says that you are an elitist prick who probably would be entirely lost without the rest of the "lower" part of society picking up after you.
--
BMO
AI itself is fundamentally flawed.
AI assumes that you can take published facts, dump them in a black box, and assume that the output is going to be intelligent. Sorry, but when you do this to actual humans, you get what is called "book smart" without common sense.
I'm sure everyone here can either identify this or identify with it.
--
BMO
>Apple //e computer ... used slashies before the //c.
>anon coward's pics
I.... I forgot...
I'm going to have to claim old timer's disease.
--
BMO
To be an asshole and a pedant, one uses brackets with the normal Apple ][ computers and slashies with the //c :-D
--
BMO