"BTW, IIRC, there are now places where "super-charges" can be done in 20-30 minutes"
Well, nice. The issue is that if 90% of cars would be electric, all those cars would need an always available overnight charging station, but not all people have their own garages and unless plugs for charging would be available _everywhere_ on the street - so you can plug the car in at every position on your street - this 90% is simply not viable. Even today there are cases where you have to wait for charging stations to become available, and the few stations in malls et al. are i). not enough for the 90% and ii). not an option for those who park on the street - and they make up the most of that 90% -, and iii). they won't be free/cheap anymore when 90% become electric (also, tax breaks will disappear well before that).
Well, all is good, and it's good to know 90% could theoretically become electric today (given the proper infrastructure), it will take a looong time for everything to align just well for that number to become real.
Also, batteries either will become much better by then, or the airlines will be really happy since we'll need to fly+rent for every trip longer than half-a-day (and that's how relaxed roadtrips become airport hassle filled expensive frustrations).
It's just typical govt bullying, using their powers to get just enough money out of companies' pockets that they will consider paying for the idiots to go away.
"Google of forcing retailers to install and keep a suite of its app on mobile phones"
Well, Google could stop "forcing" (yeah, people are stupid, but in such cases it's on purpose) Android on others, even better, could stop giving it away, buy out some manufacturer, build their own Nexus lines and let all other phone makers die in pain. Imagine that:)
"... stopping them from doing so would raise broadband rates..."
I don't believe there is anything here on this Earth or anywhere in the freakin' Universe that could ever stop US broadband providers from continuously rising their incredibly high prices. About privacy, you should've already gotten used to loosing all versions of it - both in the US and elsewhere -, and don't expect to actually have better privacy even if you end up paying for it. They'll still give every information to everyone asking for it, plus, do you really think they'd get your money and invest in actually protecting your privacy? Right.
It's a stupid question. I never switch languages. I use several. Hell, by the time I finished highschool I was quite fluent in half a dozen. That was 19 years ago, extrapolate. I have favorites, not many, but usually I code in what's easier to do what I want to do, or in what is specifically requested. That's it. The question is still stupid.
"Licensing, not exceptions to copyright, drives innovation. Innovation is best achieved through licensing agreements..."
I do enjoy sometimes when they keep trying to re-interpret and re-explain what's what, but it does get boring after a while. And, of course, it's all bullcrap. But I wish they all would be transported to a universe where innovation is best achieved through licensing agreements and have fun over there:)
This! +1, no +100. Nobody fscking cares about a few mm less width, on the contrary, please use the "surplus" millimeters that you want to cut down, to include a bit higher battery capacity while retaining the previous models' width.
First, the paper is about safely interruptible AI algorithms. Not some AI kill switch.
Second, everyone - commenters included - seem to confuse AI with artificial consciousness. Killing an AI should always be fairly easy, since such algorithms are targeting specific application areas where it can learn to be better (e.g., recognizing things, performing specific movements, etc.), and in such systems it should be straightforward to keep basic control mechanisms separated from the algorithmic parts that deal with the task and are allowed to improve upon themselves by continuous learning. In some hypothetical self-aware artificial consciousness, this wouldn't be so easy, since such a system in theory would be able to recognize it's own system parts and deal with them. However, such systems are so far off in sci-fi land, that it's not much point in loosing sleep about the issue.
Well, the more important issue is not how much mobile data any American will use, but:
- how much will 22gb/month cost for them, and
- how many of those average Americans will have at least a usable 4G connection by then.
"[...] more capable than human intelligence [...]"
I just can't understand all this nonsense some high profile people are talking about regarding AI these days. We're so far away from "real" AI today, that it's not even funny. While there has been great progress in machine learning in the last 2-3 decades - recent results pushing results more to the spotlight -, what we have are certain specific tasks where we have good results for (pattern/object/image recognition, games, etc.) but we have no intelligence in any sense of the word. Every working architecture that we have today is targeted and extensively trained for a single, very specific task (e.g., playing go, recognizing scenes and objects, recognizing specific patterns in signals and mimicking them - robotic arms, Google's music composer, etc.), incapable of doing anything else. E.g., an architecture built and trained for classifying and recognizing certain images and objects can't do anything with audio signals, radar signals, a go playing "AI" can't play chess, etc. No generalization, no transfer of gained experience for application to other tasks, and no real high level understanding and reasoning about anything. And let's not even start about chatbots.
I could go on with this, but my point is, talking about AI being more than humans, taking over, etc. is still very much sci-fi territory.
"legal theory that it had already been disclosed to a third party, in this case a telephone company"
How could anyone interpret the phone company being a 3rd party in such a case? I'd say they are the 1st party, maybe I could even be convinced that they are the 2nd party (the user being the 1st), but 3rd? The phone company is the first party to get and possess the location information, it comes though their infrastructure, it's in their database, they handle the information, and they can provide it to the police. Also, you don't "disclose" your location, you just acknowledge that they know it, since them knowing your location is an integral functional part of their service.Ehh.
"The argument for lowercasing Internet is that is has become wholly generic[...]"
I don't think that's the case. Everyone still refers to it as "the" Internet, since there are lots of networks, but there's only one Internet. It's not like there are lots of internets out there (like one of the bad examples, "telephone"), and it's alo not a natural phenomenon like the other bad example, "electricity". It's the one, and I can't see why it couldn't be kept capitalized. I don't much care if it's lower case of not, but I can't agree with the argument here. Also, "the two names for the great global network" is just wrong - their meaning might have merged for the general public, but they are not the same thing.
"Because there is not other way for logind to determine that "screen" was one of the things a user actualy intends to keep running, or something that is still running because it's exit logic is misbehaving."
Bad point of view. It shouldn't be systemd's task to decide who is running properly and who is not. If a process lingers because of some bad behavior or bug, than that should be corrected, but assuming every process is an idiot and should be killed is very stupid. The default behavior should be - as it always was - that if a process is running after the user left, does so intentionally. Such decades old expected behavior should not be changed because of some idiot thinks everyone's usage patterns fits his own.
I was lucky to read about this before I updated to this new systemd version (which I didn't), but we can't assume everyone will read about it, they're in for a real treat.
"killing leftover processes on logout. In my world, that's what I actually expect"
Well, he's simply an arrogant idiot. Usually, that wouldn't be a problem, but when it affects thousands of users, it surely becomes a big one. It takes a particularly huge moron to think everyone uses their computers like Mr. Know-it-all.
Well, maybe because if you read the linked thread you'd see that screen/tmux/nohup/etc. are all affected by this idiotic change. Never liked the systemd philosophy, and their attitude even less, and such changes certainly won't make me like them.
One example, a few months back I had to write code that needed pretty heavy graph theory knowledge, which was no problem - after a bit of deep concentration:) - but I can't imagine how a "simple" coder could've produced a result nearly as efficient.
Lots of coders dismiss this these days, saying there are good libs out there that can help you solve (or well, avoid) lots of algorithmic issues, but even so there are lots of occasions where not knowing things will be a real hindrance.
I don't think there's really a wrong way to show kids how to code. The only wrong way would be not to show anything. (Well, it might be a bit wrong to over-complicate things, since we don't want to make them uninterested or scare them away.)
I know you're mostly not interested in some john doe's life story, nevertheless, I'll give you my example, since I also was taught coding before knowing anything about CS or higher level math.
The first ever line of code I wrote was about 25 years ago in 6th grade. There was a computer club or something at our school, after classes in the afternoon, where we - a group of ~6 - were shown/taught coding in some sort of Basic on some really junk machines. I started learning CS when I started high school (in a math+CS-specialized class - meaning we had extra classes of math, phys, CS, and extra coding labs) and I never felt it a problem that I only started to know things deeper at that time. On the contrary, when we started the more "boring" part:) I was already interested enough to care about it:)
I know some people who started this way and turned out quite OK:)
Point is, start early, start at a level that makes kids interested, and continue to teach them deeper stuff according to their age, gathered knowledge, and of course, interest (if there's any, not everyone has to be a CS+coder guru).
However, after a while CS needs to kreep in, since even if most companies need "normal" coders more, my unsurprising experience is that more knowledge really produces better results.
I mean come on, we love (well, some love) nostalgia, but not the Automats [1] please:) Might have the old-is-new-again feeling that is in fashion again these days, but I don't think this is the way to go. Although, I don't eat at Wendy's more than once or maybe twice a year, so yeah, who cares:))))
While this story might seem funny at first, it quickly becomes sad. Also very inconvenient for a few hundred people who sit on the plane and get delayed beacuse of an idiot. Lots of people would say better safe than sorry, but this is much more than that: usually ignorance won't hurt many people, but it can reach a point where it will make the lives of the rest of the population a living hell.
As a sidenote, such stories made me to really think about what I want to read on to/from-US planes, for many years now. Back in the days I mostly read technical stuff, papers, articles, but slowly I switched to "simple" novels with no math and no images. Might be crazy, but I just don't want to be the cause of some idiot delaying the flight - which, as we can see, happens from time to time.
"Elon Musk: 'We Need a Revolt Against the Fossil Fuel Industry'"
Yeah. Not. Everybody can guess there's much lobbying from the oil industry, no surprises there. However, nobody, and I mean nobody should come up to me and demand a revolution until they can actually create a suitable replacment.
Yes, I know how many people juuust looove Teslas - especially those who've spent pretty amounts for them no sh*t - but not everyone has a fast chargr at home, not everyone has a garage with a private always available charging source, not everyone uses their cars to only go short distances, not everyone has so long a life to spend hours on end for charging on a roadtrip, and I could on with this for hours.
Oh, and mind you, I actually like electric cars and support the direction these companies are trying to go towards.
I just don't like when they seem to be dilusional.
One more thing, which is actually beside the point, but I've just remembered I've read some people actually call the interior of the P90D luxurious. Now, come on people, we know love is blind, but there's only one thing there that's luxurious, and that's the price (yes, I know the'll release the cheaper, shorter range, less "luxurious" new model in like, a few years or so...).
My point is, if you want a revolution, you create it, then, we'll buy it. NOT the other way around.
"I have always communicated with the rule that if you don't understand what I am saying, it's my fault. It's far safer (and more likely to be correct) to assume that the failure is with the speaker than the listener, and I think the same goes for code."
I'm sorry, but I find that stupid. That logic implies that if you have to work with dumber people then you need to become dumber, which is crazy. If you actually work in such an environment, you'd better leave, fast. There can be occasions in large cooperative works when more easily understandable (i.e., faster to understand) code is more preferable, of course, but I don't see value in setting the level of "understandability" to the level of the idiots. If someone doesn't understand, I prefer "teaching" than lowering my standards.
Slashdot Mirror
"BTW, IIRC, there are now places where "super-charges" can be done in 20-30 minutes"
Well, nice. The issue is that if 90% of cars would be electric, all those cars would need an always available overnight charging station, but not all people have their own garages and unless plugs for charging would be available _everywhere_ on the street - so you can plug the car in at every position on your street - this 90% is simply not viable. Even today there are cases where you have to wait for charging stations to become available, and the few stations in malls et al. are i). not enough for the 90% and ii). not an option for those who park on the street - and they make up the most of that 90% -, and iii). they won't be free/cheap anymore when 90% become electric (also, tax breaks will disappear well before that).
Well, all is good, and it's good to know 90% could theoretically become electric today (given the proper infrastructure), it will take a looong time for everything to align just well for that number to become real.
Also, batteries either will become much better by then, or the airlines will be really happy since we'll need to fly+rent for every trip longer than half-a-day (and that's how relaxed roadtrips become airport hassle filled expensive frustrations).
It's just typical govt bullying, using their powers to get just enough money out of companies' pockets that they will consider paying for the idiots to go away.
:)
"Google of forcing retailers to install and keep a suite of its app on mobile phones"
Well, Google could stop "forcing" (yeah, people are stupid, but in such cases it's on purpose) Android on others, even better, could stop giving it away, buy out some manufacturer, build their own Nexus lines and let all other phone makers die in pain. Imagine that
"The BBC has been given such authority through the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act."
So, granting powers to a TV station no less. What's next, outsourcing police work to OmniCorp?
Yay, signal sensing equipment can be fooled by sending it fake signals!
Oh, and rain is wet.
"... stopping them from doing so would raise broadband rates ..."
I don't believe there is anything here on this Earth or anywhere in the freakin' Universe that could ever stop US broadband providers from continuously rising their incredibly high prices. About privacy, you should've already gotten used to loosing all versions of it - both in the US and elsewhere -, and don't expect to actually have better privacy even if you end up paying for it. They'll still give every information to everyone asking for it, plus, do you really think they'd get your money and invest in actually protecting your privacy? Right.
"infrequent use of a computer in later life could be an early sign of reduced cognitive ability"
However, infrequent reading of idiotic articles might just be an early sign of higher intelligence.
It's a stupid question. I never switch languages. I use several. Hell, by the time I finished highschool I was quite fluent in half a dozen. That was 19 years ago, extrapolate. I have favorites, not many, but usually I code in what's easier to do what I want to do, or in what is specifically requested. That's it. The question is still stupid.
"Licensing, not exceptions to copyright, drives innovation. Innovation is best achieved through licensing agreements..."
:)
I do enjoy sometimes when they keep trying to re-interpret and re-explain what's what, but it does get boring after a while. And, of course, it's all bullcrap. But I wish they all would be transported to a universe where innovation is best achieved through licensing agreements and have fun over there
"6. No one is asking for this."
This! +1, no +100. Nobody fscking cares about a few mm less width, on the contrary, please use the "surplus" millimeters that you want to cut down, to include a bit higher battery capacity while retaining the previous models' width.
First, the paper is about safely interruptible AI algorithms. Not some AI kill switch.
Second, everyone - commenters included - seem to confuse AI with artificial consciousness. Killing an AI should always be fairly easy, since such algorithms are targeting specific application areas where it can learn to be better (e.g., recognizing things, performing specific movements, etc.), and in such systems it should be straightforward to keep basic control mechanisms separated from the algorithmic parts that deal with the task and are allowed to improve upon themselves by continuous learning. In some hypothetical self-aware artificial consciousness, this wouldn't be so easy, since such a system in theory would be able to recognize it's own system parts and deal with them. However, such systems are so far off in sci-fi land, that it's not much point in loosing sleep about the issue.
Well, the more important issue is not how much mobile data any American will use, but:
- how much will 22gb/month cost for them, and
- how many of those average Americans will have at least a usable 4G connection by then.
"[...] more capable than human intelligence [...]"
I just can't understand all this nonsense some high profile people are talking about regarding AI these days. We're so far away from "real" AI today, that it's not even funny. While there has been great progress in machine learning in the last 2-3 decades - recent results pushing results more to the spotlight -, what we have are certain specific tasks where we have good results for (pattern/object/image recognition, games, etc.) but we have no intelligence in any sense of the word. Every working architecture that we have today is targeted and extensively trained for a single, very specific task (e.g., playing go, recognizing scenes and objects, recognizing specific patterns in signals and mimicking them - robotic arms, Google's music composer, etc.), incapable of doing anything else. E.g., an architecture built and trained for classifying and recognizing certain images and objects can't do anything with audio signals, radar signals, a go playing "AI" can't play chess, etc. No generalization, no transfer of gained experience for application to other tasks, and no real high level understanding and reasoning about anything. And let's not even start about chatbots.
I could go on with this, but my point is, talking about AI being more than humans, taking over, etc. is still very much sci-fi territory.
"legal theory that it had already been disclosed to a third party, in this case a telephone company"
How could anyone interpret the phone company being a 3rd party in such a case? I'd say they are the 1st party, maybe I could even be convinced that they are the 2nd party (the user being the 1st), but 3rd? The phone company is the first party to get and possess the location information, it comes though their infrastructure, it's in their database, they handle the information, and they can provide it to the police. Also, you don't "disclose" your location, you just acknowledge that they know it, since them knowing your location is an integral functional part of their service.Ehh.
"The argument for lowercasing Internet is that is has become wholly generic[...]"
I don't think that's the case. Everyone still refers to it as "the" Internet, since there are lots of networks, but there's only one Internet. It's not like there are lots of internets out there (like one of the bad examples, "telephone"), and it's alo not a natural phenomenon like the other bad example, "electricity". It's the one, and I can't see why it couldn't be kept capitalized. I don't much care if it's lower case of not, but I can't agree with the argument here. Also, "the two names for the great global network" is just wrong - their meaning might have merged for the general public, but they are not the same thing.
Innovation? Really?
"Linux has a fighting chance still to be relevant in the future, exactly because it changes."
Well, you assume every change is for the better.
Which is idiotic.
This change is a perfect example.
Also a perfectly good reminder about the f*ing boundless arrogance systemd's developers are equipped with.
"Because there is not other way for logind to determine that "screen" was one of the things a user actualy intends to keep running, or something that is still running because it's exit logic is misbehaving."
Bad point of view. It shouldn't be systemd's task to decide who is running properly and who is not. If a process lingers because of some bad behavior or bug, than that should be corrected, but assuming every process is an idiot and should be killed is very stupid. The default behavior should be - as it always was - that if a process is running after the user left, does so intentionally. Such decades old expected behavior should not be changed because of some idiot thinks everyone's usage patterns fits his own.
I was lucky to read about this before I updated to this new systemd version (which I didn't), but we can't assume everyone will read about it, they're in for a real treat.
"killing leftover processes on logout. In my world, that's what I actually expect"
Well, he's simply an arrogant idiot. Usually, that wouldn't be a problem, but when it affects thousands of users, it surely becomes a big one. It takes a particularly huge moron to think everyone uses their computers like Mr. Know-it-all.
Well, maybe because if you read the linked thread you'd see that screen/tmux/nohup/etc. are all affected by this idiotic change. Never liked the systemd philosophy, and their attitude even less, and such changes certainly won't make me like them.
+1
:) - but I can't imagine how a "simple" coder could've produced a result nearly as efficient.
One example, a few months back I had to write code that needed pretty heavy graph theory knowledge, which was no problem - after a bit of deep concentration
Lots of coders dismiss this these days, saying there are good libs out there that can help you solve (or well, avoid) lots of algorithmic issues, but even so there are lots of occasions where not knowing things will be a real hindrance.
I don't think there's really a wrong way to show kids how to code. The only wrong way would be not to show anything. (Well, it might be a bit wrong to over-complicate things, since we don't want to make them uninterested or scare them away.)
:) I was already interested enough to care about it :)
:)
I know you're mostly not interested in some john doe's life story, nevertheless, I'll give you my example, since I also was taught coding before knowing anything about CS or higher level math.
The first ever line of code I wrote was about 25 years ago in 6th grade. There was a computer club or something at our school, after classes in the afternoon, where we - a group of ~6 - were shown/taught coding in some sort of Basic on some really junk machines. I started learning CS when I started high school (in a math+CS-specialized class - meaning we had extra classes of math, phys, CS, and extra coding labs) and I never felt it a problem that I only started to know things deeper at that time. On the contrary, when we started the more "boring" part
I know some people who started this way and turned out quite OK
Point is, start early, start at a level that makes kids interested, and continue to teach them deeper stuff according to their age, gathered knowledge, and of course, interest (if there's any, not everyone has to be a CS+coder guru).
However, after a while CS needs to kreep in, since even if most companies need "normal" coders more, my unsurprising experience is that more knowledge really produces better results.
I mean come on, we love (well, some love) nostalgia, but not the Automats [1] please :) Might have the old-is-new-again feeling that is in fashion again these days, but I don't think this is the way to go. Although, I don't eat at Wendy's more than once or maybe twice a year, so yeah, who cares :))))
[1] http://www.wired.com/2008/07/g...
While this story might seem funny at first, it quickly becomes sad. Also very inconvenient for a few hundred people who sit on the plane and get delayed beacuse of an idiot. Lots of people would say better safe than sorry, but this is much more than that: usually ignorance won't hurt many people, but it can reach a point where it will make the lives of the rest of the population a living hell.
As a sidenote, such stories made me to really think about what I want to read on to/from-US planes, for many years now. Back in the days I mostly read technical stuff, papers, articles, but slowly I switched to "simple" novels with no math and no images. Might be crazy, but I just don't want to be the cause of some idiot delaying the flight - which, as we can see, happens from time to time.
"Elon Musk: 'We Need a Revolt Against the Fossil Fuel Industry'"
Yeah. Not. Everybody can guess there's much lobbying from the oil industry, no surprises there. However, nobody, and I mean nobody should come up to me and demand a revolution until they can actually create a suitable replacment.
Yes, I know how many people juuust looove Teslas - especially those who've spent pretty amounts for them no sh*t - but not everyone has a fast chargr at home, not everyone has a garage with a private always available charging source, not everyone uses their cars to only go short distances, not everyone has so long a life to spend hours on end for charging on a roadtrip, and I could on with this for hours.
Oh, and mind you, I actually like electric cars and support the direction these companies are trying to go towards.
I just don't like when they seem to be dilusional.
One more thing, which is actually beside the point, but I've just remembered I've read some people actually call the interior of the P90D luxurious. Now, come on people, we know love is blind, but there's only one thing there that's luxurious, and that's the price (yes, I know the'll release the cheaper, shorter range, less "luxurious" new model in like, a few years or so...).
My point is, if you want a revolution, you create it, then, we'll buy it. NOT the other way around.
"I have always communicated with the rule that if you don't understand what I am saying, it's my fault. It's far safer (and more likely to be correct) to assume that the failure is with the speaker than the listener, and I think the same goes for code."
I'm sorry, but I find that stupid. That logic implies that if you have to work with dumber people then you need to become dumber, which is crazy. If you actually work in such an environment, you'd better leave, fast. There can be occasions in large cooperative works when more easily understandable (i.e., faster to understand) code is more preferable, of course, but I don't see value in setting the level of "understandability" to the level of the idiots. If someone doesn't understand, I prefer "teaching" than lowering my standards.