This faulty reasoning is however a favorite of anti-science people
I'm not sure anymore. I think they intentionally ignore the science for their pet topics while perfectly ok with it in other topics. It's like the preacher telling about modern technology being the devils work - in a church built with modern building techniques over a computerized speaker system. Or the islamists burning evil western electronics and filming it with smartphones.
There people aren't necessarily "anti-science". They are just in their specific field of interest so dead set on their preconceptions that they'll let nothing get in their way. Argument, logic, science, whatever.
Truth is never subjective, but our knowledge of it can be limited or false.
If someone said something, that's a truth. He said it. If we have recordings of it, we can prove that he said it (ignoring forgery for a moment). Thus the truth value of a statement that says "he never said..." can be established and evidence can be provided.
A machine like this does need to know the "undetermined" answer. It cannot work binary. "I don't know" has to be one of its answers as well as "there is conflicting evidence, here it is".
This is actually a very, very interesting application for AI.
I don't want it to judge. But I would love to have a Firefox plugin that scans texts and adds comments. So the next time someone posts "vaccines cause autism", there'll be a small symbol and you can click it to expand to a short summary of facts. Just the facts, e.g. "99% of scientific studies deny this claim, on the Internet the opinion is largely found on social media, 3 of its main proponents were sentenced in trials about the question, found to be lying". Something like that.
There are controversial topics and I wouldn't want the AI to decide what's true. But it could help greatly in doing background research and presenting a summary.
I still love the game, but wish it were up-to-date with technology. That's why I made Might & Fealty, but for some reason it didn't catch on quite as much.
I'd very much love to see the concept of BM in an AAA open-world MMORPG. But I guess the business model just isn't there to pay for that.
I'm thinking this is in a big part a reaction to the massive stones they've put into Teslas way, trying to force them into a traditional retailer model instead of direct sales. After a while you ask yourself if the hassle is really worth it.
For the moment anyway the order queues are full, so not a big deal. But I would be surprised if not at least one person inside Tesla is thinking about a new approach that doesn't have the issues the old one had. I quite like the "showroom" idea. Maybe if you can't buy a car there, it will get Tesla out of the conflict with the car retailers?
What I hate about modern games is how the constant nagging for microtransactions reminds me of the real world. I play games to unwind after a long day. It's an escape. Nothing drags me back faster than a frickin' advert and a reminder about real money in the real world.
This. I've had times in life when money was a real problem - I mean, who has money to spare after just buying a house? When I've dealt with finances for the whole day and the result wasn't making me too happy, throwing a "buy this DLC" into my face was a certain shortcut to the uninstall button.
But game designers don't get that, I fear. Or not enough of us do it.
You got an hour in, died and had to go right back to the start.
But that was designed into the game. The early jump & run games, for example, were all made so that any individual part was not crazy impossible, so you always made progress. But to get to the end with enough lives left to conquer it was hard.
So on your first play, you'd lose one life here and one life there and then be out of lives maybe in the middle of the level. Then by design you start at the beginning again, with full lives, because on your second run you reach the middle with one or two lives left, and go further into the level with them, but not enough to reach the end. The third time through you know the level well already and get to the middle with only one life lost... you get the idea.
And, of course, games like nethack had much of their challenge exactly in the permadeath. Once you figured out how to save and restore save games, they became much less interesting.
I find that a common theme in games release in the last decade or so.
I'm a gamer. Not addicted but I've clocked in enough gaming hours and enough different games that it's really hard to surprise me anymore. And somehow, games used to be more fun. For a long while I attributed that to the stupid payment models. Pay2Win, DLCs, subscriptions, whatever, they all require game designers to change the gameplay away from maximum fun to maximum profitability. When you bought a game and that was it, the game could focus entirely on giving you a good time, because that's what you'd tell your friends and they would then buy it. Now, just keeping you engaged for longer maximizes profit (subscriptions) or dangling carrots in front of you does (pay2win) or intentionally making you lose just barely, or making you feel that you almost accomplished that (despite you were far...) or any number of hundreds of tricks they now put into these games.
I've been a game designer in the past (hobby, not commercial, though I'm proud to say that my longest running browser game turns 20 soon and the gods only know what happens when it starts drinking). So I know a lot of how to make a game and maybe spot more of this stuff than pure consumers. And I've stopped playing games because it was just darn obvious that they are manipulating my gameplay and skill didn't matter. You would always just barely win or just barely loose no matter if you played shitty or brilliant, for example. Sure, you would win or lose, but the game would always make it feel close even when it should've been.
But recently, even games that have no pay2win or DLC elements and aren't subscriptions have begun to use the same methods. Maybe the designers just became too used to them?
"The bottom line is that we all share common ground: We see tremendous opportunity ahead and want to see Ebay's full potential realized over the long-term,"
It's obvious that this is nonsense.
What these actions are more likely to accomplish is a short-term cash inflow that can be turned into a short-term stock bubble which these "activist" (rofl) investors can use to sell off their stock and turn a profit.
I mean, how much more transparent can you play that game?
But a security device should have Internet access, because that is a secure storage for its data. If it would stream to a desktop machine inside the house, then in case of a burglary chances are good that this computer is gone.
Actually not. We started having "first post" jokes back when I joined. Soviet Russia came later. Maybe they existed before, but the time when they became popular was a couple years later.
Has a law been changed? A fine been issued? A court case been filed? Has the company or the executive been in any way punished? Or just mildely inconvenience for two minutes?
So the answer is "not enough". They rank somewhere in the middle and he just may have dropped them a hint to move up into a more... preferable... position.
It's not the first headline of this type, and not the first case of someone protecting his own privacy while playing it fast and loose with others.
So again, what it actually accomplishes?
It's the same question I ask about political comedians and satire. I enjoy it a lot, but I always wonder if it doesn't provide a harmless outlet for dissatisfaction that should better make efforts towards change their outlet.
a) CEOs of this type are often psychopaths. They have no problem with this kind of conflicting information. (I don't mean that as an insult, it's a proven fact that some personality types are more common among top-level managers than in the general population)
b) what exactly does this change except confirming a suspicion? That's the point. Will it have any effect on the court case? Will it have any effect on stock prices? Revenue? Anything?
That and the fact that... I mean... Marvel Comics introduces a character named Captain Marvel. It's hard to grasp proper words to describe what my intuitive reaction to that is, but it's not exactly "omg, I have to go and watch that".
Batman, Superman - they are household names. Thor and Loki are familiar enough that on a lazy day you'll be like "let's check what these two are up to". I didn't know about Guardians of the Galaxy before (not a comic fan), but the name is enticing. But "Captain Marvel"? Without lots of advertisement, which at least over here in Europe I haven't seen yet, I don't even know why I should care.
In a good story, the technology (or magic, or deities or whatever) is just a metaphor to transport meaning. It is there to serve a purpose to the storytelling. SciFi is still Fiction, not an academic paper written in narrative form.
The main difference is that Science Fiction tries to not jus use technology, but use it in believable ways. If your story requires FTL travel, you invent a way that doesn't flat out break or ignore the laws of physics, but elegantly circumvents them, shyly dodges through loopholes or expands upon them with a fictional expansion the way Einstein expanded upon Newton.
It's not the number of dimensions, it's what that means, which consequences it brings to your story. If you have FTL travel, does it have downsides? What happens to causality? How does it affect trade and cultures - which is all something we can take from human history, where changes in travel have also had lasting affects on nations. With a SciFi story you can put humanity into the position of the Indians without stepping on political correctness feet - what would happen to our culture if a superior space-faring race would visit us, start to trade with us, and begin to colonize the solar system?
SciFi isn't told for the purpose of the technolgy that is part of the story.
It may have been because I read The Wandering Earth in a collection of short stories that is titled the same and after reading about halfway through without realizing that there are more, entirely different stories to follow I was going "what the heck is going to happen in the rest of this book??!?!" but I really, really loved it. I also loved Three Body to death, and seconded, it's right up there with the superstars of SciFi and above most of them. But Wandering Earth is just blowing you away with its massive scale and fearlessness. Three Body goes to a higher scale but only at the very end, where it's much less shocking and blowing you away.
I'm so much looking forward to a movie. Can't imagine how to turn some of the things into visuals, but if it comes out, I'll definitely watch it, no matter what the critics say.
On the Earth, just think what happens to the oceans when you accelerate. *slosh*
The dramatic changes of the entire process are actually a major theme in the story. It's not a story about Earth flying around in the universe and it just somehow one day started. The largest segment of the story is about how it was done and which massive changes to the ecosystem, the human society and the planet this includes.
Liu Cixin thinks big in his stories, and you can't appreciate just how big until you've read them. He's a true SciFi author, not a "soap opera, just set in space" or "western movie with a space theme" one.
the river of air 35,000 feet above the New York City area, known as the jet stream
That's a way to describe a planet-circling phenomenon, if you are one of those morons whose map of the world has written "here be dragons" on everything outside the USA.
It's not a way to talk to an educated audience like/.ers who know, many from first-hand experience, that places outside the three locations Hollywood places movies in actually do exist.
Especially in a story that doesn't make sense unless you understand the actual reach of the jet stream.
Slashdot Mirror
But it is emphatically not up to non-experts to determine which is which.
This, btw., is a problem - science isn't democratic.
We'll have to solve that problem if we want both of them to survive.
This faulty reasoning is however a favorite of anti-science people
I'm not sure anymore. I think they intentionally ignore the science for their pet topics while perfectly ok with it in other topics. It's like the preacher telling about modern technology being the devils work - in a church built with modern building techniques over a computerized speaker system. Or the islamists burning evil western electronics and filming it with smartphones.
There people aren't necessarily "anti-science". They are just in their specific field of interest so dead set on their preconceptions that they'll let nothing get in their way. Argument, logic, science, whatever.
Truth is never subjective, but our knowledge of it can be limited or false.
If someone said something, that's a truth. He said it. If we have recordings of it, we can prove that he said it (ignoring forgery for a moment). Thus the truth value of a statement that says "he never said ..." can be established and evidence can be provided.
A machine like this does need to know the "undetermined" answer. It cannot work binary. "I don't know" has to be one of its answers as well as "there is conflicting evidence, here it is".
This is actually a very, very interesting application for AI.
I don't want it to judge. But I would love to have a Firefox plugin that scans texts and adds comments. So the next time someone posts "vaccines cause autism", there'll be a small symbol and you can click it to expand to a short summary of facts. Just the facts, e.g. "99% of scientific studies deny this claim, on the Internet the opinion is largely found on social media, 3 of its main proponents were sentenced in trials about the question, found to be lying". Something like that.
There are controversial topics and I wouldn't want the AI to decide what's true. But it could help greatly in doing background research and presenting a summary.
Thanks for the compliments.
I still love the game, but wish it were up-to-date with technology. That's why I made Might & Fealty, but for some reason it didn't catch on quite as much.
I'd very much love to see the concept of BM in an AAA open-world MMORPG. But I guess the business model just isn't there to pay for that.
I'm thinking this is in a big part a reaction to the massive stones they've put into Teslas way, trying to force them into a traditional retailer model instead of direct sales. After a while you ask yourself if the hassle is really worth it.
For the moment anyway the order queues are full, so not a big deal. But I would be surprised if not at least one person inside Tesla is thinking about a new approach that doesn't have the issues the old one had. I quite like the "showroom" idea. Maybe if you can't buy a car there, it will get Tesla out of the conflict with the car retailers?
What I hate about modern games is how the constant nagging for microtransactions reminds me of the real world. I play games to unwind after a long day. It's an escape. Nothing drags me back faster than a frickin' advert and a reminder about real money in the real world.
This. I've had times in life when money was a real problem - I mean, who has money to spare after just buying a house? When I've dealt with finances for the whole day and the result wasn't making me too happy, throwing a "buy this DLC" into my face was a certain shortcut to the uninstall button.
But game designers don't get that, I fear. Or not enough of us do it.
You got an hour in, died and had to go right back to the start.
But that was designed into the game. The early jump & run games, for example, were all made so that any individual part was not crazy impossible, so you always made progress. But to get to the end with enough lives left to conquer it was hard.
So on your first play, you'd lose one life here and one life there and then be out of lives maybe in the middle of the level. Then by design you start at the beginning again, with full lives, because on your second run you reach the middle with one or two lives left, and go further into the level with them, but not enough to reach the end. The third time through you know the level well already and get to the middle with only one life lost... you get the idea.
And, of course, games like nethack had much of their challenge exactly in the permadeath. Once you figured out how to save and restore save games, they became much less interesting.
I find that a common theme in games release in the last decade or so.
I'm a gamer. Not addicted but I've clocked in enough gaming hours and enough different games that it's really hard to surprise me anymore. And somehow, games used to be more fun. For a long while I attributed that to the stupid payment models. Pay2Win, DLCs, subscriptions, whatever, they all require game designers to change the gameplay away from maximum fun to maximum profitability. When you bought a game and that was it, the game could focus entirely on giving you a good time, because that's what you'd tell your friends and they would then buy it. Now, just keeping you engaged for longer maximizes profit (subscriptions) or dangling carrots in front of you does (pay2win) or intentionally making you lose just barely, or making you feel that you almost accomplished that (despite you were far...) or any number of hundreds of tricks they now put into these games.
I've been a game designer in the past (hobby, not commercial, though I'm proud to say that my longest running browser game turns 20 soon and the gods only know what happens when it starts drinking). So I know a lot of how to make a game and maybe spot more of this stuff than pure consumers. And I've stopped playing games because it was just darn obvious that they are manipulating my gameplay and skill didn't matter. You would always just barely win or just barely loose no matter if you played shitty or brilliant, for example. Sure, you would win or lose, but the game would always make it feel close even when it should've been.
But recently, even games that have no pay2win or DLC elements and aren't subscriptions have begun to use the same methods. Maybe the designers just became too used to them?
"The bottom line is that we all share common ground: We see tremendous opportunity ahead and want to see Ebay's full potential realized over the long-term,"
It's obvious that this is nonsense.
What these actions are more likely to accomplish is a short-term cash inflow that can be turned into a short-term stock bubble which these "activist" (rofl) investors can use to sell off their stock and turn a profit.
I mean, how much more transparent can you play that game?
In general I agree.
But a security device should have Internet access, because that is a secure storage for its data. If it would stream to a desktop machine inside the house, then in case of a burglary chances are good that this computer is gone.
Crab Keys is in America, actually.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Actually not. We started having "first post" jokes back when I joined. Soviet Russia came later. Maybe they existed before, but the time when they became popular was a couple years later.
Someone pays for a 3-digit /. ID? What's the going rate?
But what exactly did she do?
Has a law been changed? A fine been issued? A court case been filed? Has the company or the executive been in any way punished? Or just mildely inconvenience for two minutes?
Nice link there.
So the answer is "not enough". They rank somewhere in the middle and he just may have dropped them a hint to move up into a more... preferable... position.
It's not the first headline of this type, and not the first case of someone protecting his own privacy while playing it fast and loose with others.
So again, what it actually accomplishes?
It's the same question I ask about political comedians and satire. I enjoy it a lot, but I always wonder if it doesn't provide a harmless outlet for dissatisfaction that should better make efforts towards change their outlet.
I got that, but
a) CEOs of this type are often psychopaths. They have no problem with this kind of conflicting information. (I don't mean that as an insult, it's a proven fact that some personality types are more common among top-level managers than in the general population)
b) what exactly does this change except confirming a suspicion? That's the point. Will it have any effect on the court case? Will it have any effect on stock prices? Revenue? Anything?
So she got her 15 minutes of fame, but does it change anything? Aside from the headline, is there any effect?
Totally. We celebrate Hitlers birthday and Mao. No, wait that was somewhere else I think. Also we still live in cottages and farm cheese.
That and the fact that... I mean... Marvel Comics introduces a character named Captain Marvel. It's hard to grasp proper words to describe what my intuitive reaction to that is, but it's not exactly "omg, I have to go and watch that".
Batman, Superman - they are household names. Thor and Loki are familiar enough that on a lazy day you'll be like "let's check what these two are up to". I didn't know about Guardians of the Galaxy before (not a comic fan), but the name is enticing. But "Captain Marvel"? Without lots of advertisement, which at least over here in Europe I haven't seen yet, I don't even know why I should care.
In a good story, the technology (or magic, or deities or whatever) is just a metaphor to transport meaning. It is there to serve a purpose to the storytelling. SciFi is still Fiction, not an academic paper written in narrative form.
The main difference is that Science Fiction tries to not jus use technology, but use it in believable ways. If your story requires FTL travel, you invent a way that doesn't flat out break or ignore the laws of physics, but elegantly circumvents them, shyly dodges through loopholes or expands upon them with a fictional expansion the way Einstein expanded upon Newton.
It's not the number of dimensions, it's what that means, which consequences it brings to your story. If you have FTL travel, does it have downsides? What happens to causality? How does it affect trade and cultures - which is all something we can take from human history, where changes in travel have also had lasting affects on nations. With a SciFi story you can put humanity into the position of the Indians without stepping on political correctness feet - what would happen to our culture if a superior space-faring race would visit us, start to trade with us, and begin to colonize the solar system?
SciFi isn't told for the purpose of the technolgy that is part of the story.
It may have been because I read The Wandering Earth in a collection of short stories that is titled the same and after reading about halfway through without realizing that there are more, entirely different stories to follow I was going "what the heck is going to happen in the rest of this book??!?!" but I really, really loved it. I also loved Three Body to death, and seconded, it's right up there with the superstars of SciFi and above most of them. But Wandering Earth is just blowing you away with its massive scale and fearlessness. Three Body goes to a higher scale but only at the very end, where it's much less shocking and blowing you away.
I'm so much looking forward to a movie. Can't imagine how to turn some of the things into visuals, but if it comes out, I'll definitely watch it, no matter what the critics say.
On the Earth, just think what happens to the oceans when you accelerate. *slosh*
The dramatic changes of the entire process are actually a major theme in the story. It's not a story about Earth flying around in the universe and it just somehow one day started. The largest segment of the story is about how it was done and which massive changes to the ecosystem, the human society and the planet this includes.
Liu Cixin thinks big in his stories, and you can't appreciate just how big until you've read them. He's a true SciFi author, not a "soap opera, just set in space" or "western movie with a space theme" one.
the river of air 35,000 feet above the New York City area, known as the jet stream
That's a way to describe a planet-circling phenomenon, if you are one of those morons whose map of the world has written "here be dragons" on everything outside the USA.
It's not a way to talk to an educated audience like /.ers who know, many from first-hand experience, that places outside the three locations Hollywood places movies in actually do exist.
Especially in a story that doesn't make sense unless you understand the actual reach of the jet stream.