A lot of rivers will always have dams because the flooding that comes if you don't can be a literal disaster.
Incorrect, building in a floodplain is the cause of the disaster, not the lack of a dam. In fact, if you want to restore large parts of the ecosystem, relocating towns away from floodplains and reinstalling beavers to better regulate the flow rate of rivers than we currently do with concrete dams by slowing the water down so that more water gets absorbed into the groundwater table and allows for more habitat for wildlife that man made dams don't allow for.
Because of course you want to give up the most valuable and productive farm land AND the greenest source of base load power because of some river fish. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Yeah they are to busy trying to get a theocracy started. Everything the right accuses the left of is what the right actually want for themselves.
You and the GP are both right. But the right isn't anywhere close to actually creating a theocracy and doesn't seem to be moving in that direction. However, the hard core feminists really do hate sex and right now this is the only type of action the left can get accomplished as its something the religious right and the feminists on the left agree upon. Also, neither group is very interested in looking at research on the topic and instead rely upon an ideology which often makes things worse for the folks they are claiming to protect (much like climate change, the war on drugs, and issues around sex ed in schools). Ask the women (and men) who do sex work and they have ZERO love for the feminists.
This is because feminism isn't really about poor women. Poor women have always had jobs. Feminism is about rich women who could be homemakers but instead feel like they must work and be in some weird competition between the sexes. Also, consider when women first entered the workforce in large numbers is about when middle class wages began stagnating. So now we have a situation where both parents now work but the family income is basically the same amount as before women started working (partially because now a good chunk of that second income is now spent on child care). Not saying this is a bad thing but its not nearly as simple as "empowering women" makes society a better place.
You must be kidding. The biggest EV battery makers are Chinese. There is no magic battery "tech" anyway. Tesla certainly doesn't have any.
That's only true if you aren't looking at things YOY. Most people look at things YOY and for 2018 Tesla will be the world's largest EV battery maker. And reread the model 3 teardown, you will learn that they use far less Cobalt than other makers which gives them a cost savings due to the issues with getting Cobalt in large quantities. Better close your positions today, time is getting short.
They want hydrogen cars to be big because they missed the boat on battery electric and a lot of the basic tech is now owned by other companies. They are facing either having to delay their EVs to wait out the patents or pay royalties, and all the while need to do their own EV R&D to avoid falling further behind.
Battery electric has already won. We already have 99% of the infrastructure in place.
Maybe in Hipster Central, SoCal... But out here in the real world 1% of the infrastructure isn't even in place.
Also my time isn't free. Spending an hour recharging just go to the 5 miles to home is a huge waste. If someone manages to produce hydrogen from seawater cost effectively, battery cars are effectively dead.
The most common place to charge your EV is at your home. Generally, unless you are taking a road trip its difficult to need to charge anywhere else. You don't have electricity at your residence? In cities where you might only have street parking EVs are more of a problem. In suburbs or rural areas you have plenty of your own parking and likely have an outdoor plug already available. The only real infrastructure is something like the supercharger network where its available along major transportation routes. I still think it wouldn't be that practical to use an EV as your only car if you take road trips but we are getting much closer and if and when EVs reach more market share, you will see charging popup to fill the demand.
As for hydrogen, we are basically nowhere when it comes to infrastructure and it introduces a huge inefficiency into the energy cycle.
"Have you looked at Ontario finances? We're on the verge of going broke to the same extent as Greece."
Greece has a debt to GDP ration around 180%, and Ontario's is around 40% ?
Ontario is a province and as such doesn't take most of the tax revenues while Greece is a country and as such its national government takes a much larger share of the taxes paid by its citizens. California at its worst point (which only lasted about a year) had about $50B in debt which is a debt to GDP ratio of around 5% which is bad for a US state. So its apples and oranges comparing Greece to Ontario. Certainly any province or state (or other sub-national government) shouldn't have more than about a 10% debt to GDP ratio and that's being very generous (it should probably be about half of that). So Ontario being 40% is certainly quite worrisome.
The real problem with a debt of that size is that you won't possibly be able to pay it back over the duration of the bonds so it will be rolled over. And since the debt to GDP ratio is sky high, those interest rates will be high which causes the debt to be harder to pay off. This causes a vicious cycle of larger debt and higher rates leading to default. This is a bad deal and the World Bank and WTO are often and rightly criticized for trapping poorer countries in this same cycle but in those cases it was the lenders suggesting the loans in the first place. In the case of Ontario (and Greece), they did it to themselves.
I've heard of Qt since the late 90's, and use it every day. Its an application development framework, not end-user application software. So yeah, Qt has a model to support itself.
But please tell me, again, how exactly one makes money off of F/OSS "end-user application software" built using Qt?
I'm waiting...
Qt is nice; I like it too. In the case of end-user FOSS software, it would usually be a support contract. Not saying its a good business model but there it is. The other model is a limited free version and a paid full version. As long as there are not any statically linked GPL libraries, this is all legal. If you are using a JVM (or other interpreted or VM based) language, this isn't even an issue. All the GPL really enforces is that you can update GPL binaries inside of your application.
For end-user software, you should probably be trying to rent it out first, if that isn't possible then sell it and if that isn't possible make it FOSS. FOSS isn't great for end-user software. Really FOSS isn't great if you users are not developers. If you are developing a FOSS end-user app, then that's not the easiest way to make a living and you have my sympathy.
The folks who use those libraries should be buying maintenance contracts on that software. That was the original business plan for FOSS.
But this business plan creates all the wrong incentives. If you want to make money from maintaining your open source software, you need to make maintenance necessary - but if your software is good enough to begin with, people won't need maintenance, and you won't get paid.
On the contrary, that creates an incentive to make the software buggy and incomplete. Businesses will need to hire you to fix issues and develop missing features. Also, if maintenance is too easy, a business could just hire some cheap intern to manage your software. This creates an incentive to make the barrier of entry to maintenance high enough - for example via bad documentation and obscure features.
I agree with you actually. Stallman was no business genius. The way I see that this could work would be if the malware insurers would require and fund this type of work but I have my doubts that that would happen. It makes way to much sense. Really there needs to be a cost to not having maintenance support in place to businesses and the only way I see that happening is via insurance requirements to get malware insurance. That might be a good way to go as I see every larger business putting costly processes in place to vet libraries but those processes are little more than rubber stamps most of the time and don't do what they were really designed to do. And outsourcing that to the malware insurer would be a way to ensure that process has some teeth and FOSS devs have to produce a certain level of quality to be included/used in business. But this entire scheme is highly dependent upon a processes that's likely to be highly bureaucratic which isn't exactly a recipe for success in software.
One of the most common business models I see people talk about, is the good 'ole "give away the code, but sell support." There are many variations of this approach, but they pretty much all rely on an assumption that you're making software that's useful to large companies with cash to burn.
However, in the huge field of "end-user application software," I have yet to see anyone offer up a viable business model. You're not going to be selling any nebulous "support," and there's a pretty good chance that your users will never be contributing developers. Just about the only approach I can think of (besides donations) is to make said software "paid" on some sort of app store, and hope that only a minority of your users ever find a way to get around that paywall.
You must be new here then. I guess you've never heard of QT. Their model is that you must purchase the software if your software is proprietary and you don't have to if its not.
Ok, you got past the clickbait..... basically my answer is why should it be subsidized by anyone, UNLESS, they have a vested interest in seeing changes/core features added to whichever part of the software that they are particularly interested in...... so the answer is.... the people working on the projects in their spare time for fun, do it as long as it's fun for them, and when it isn't, when it starts feeling like a job, either find someone that values your contributions and get them to pay you to work on it, or stop and do something else.
Because most of the folks who use that FOSS aren't aware they are using it, but you better believe that if that software breaks they get upset. The folks who use those libraries should be buying maintenance contracts on that software. That was the original business plan for FOSS. Of course, plenty of folks never contribute either with code or maintenance contracts.
The funny part of all of this, is that currently there is a lot of recognition by the business powers that be that bad software is now a serious business risk. But of course their solution is to buy malware insurance when instead they should be fixing their IT and buying maintenance contracts for things like OpenSSL.
Now there is a big difference between LLVM or gcc or some of the other major FOSS packages and whatever favor of the week web framework someone shit out because they don't understand why parts of the API they use do the things they do (often for good reasons). Most FOSS software probably doesn't rise to the level of deserving funding but I find the level of acrimony over someone asking for funding to be way over the top. If you don't think a posters project doesn't deserve funding, just scroll down. If someone else chooses to contribute that's good for you. Why be so against someone asking?
"Are you kidding? Dairy isn't exactly a luxary - eating healthy isn't something you should expect people to give up"
What's healthy about eating dairy? It's a lousy way to get calcium or vitamin d, and literally only certain WASPs and their descendants have the gene for digesting dairy in adulthood. Don't get me wrong, I love butter, but I don't imagine that it's health food. Most of the world consumes very little dairy, all of it cultured.
Well, cultures that don't consume much dairy are generally shorter, less healthy and die earlier. And its absolutely the most efficient way to get calcium but seeing as you need calcium for your brain to function well, you might not realize it. I'm sure you think taking vitamins is the best way to get calcium but most of that calcium will get passed right through you as we are not evolved to digest pills. And you can't digest milk because you stopped drinking it at some point (probably before or during college) and when you do that for long periods of time, your body stops producing the protein that breaks down milk sugars which makes you lactose intolerant. While my body might keep making more of that protein longer, it is still your own fault that you can no longer digest milk (which is a basic food stuff for all humans since long before recorded history). Plenty of WASPy folks are lactose intolerant for the exact same reasons as you.
Also, fuck you for using open source software and then trying to deny the folks that built that software basic food stuffs. Seriously, fucking just kill yourself as if you can't even find it in your heart to think that those that are giving your free software libraries (that are often better than the ones your preferred vendor write) should have access to basic nutritional requirements. Maybe that milk isn't even for him and is for his niece. But then again, drinkypoo I've been here for years and remember some of your other posts. You've always been a piece of shit...
Seems like human judgement will always be necessary for application of "fuzzy" rules.
Reminds me of a joke about the Turing test: if it can explain the offside rule consistently, it's a computer.
Definitely wasn't said by someone knowledgeable about sports. Offside is one of the very few rules that's pretty simple across sports. Now if they could explain what a foul in basketball is, that would be a computer.
According to the summary, his (human) manager failed to renew his contract in the new system, during their changeover.
So a machine did not fire him. A human failed to renew his contract, and the machine obediently carried out the steps that it should carry out when that happened.
The narrative about an evil AI here is far more interesting than what actually happened.
There was no evil AI here. It was that firing a contractor was marked as opt-in instead of opt-out. This was obviously a poor choice. Then when a human didn't opt-in, the system operated as designed. Maybe that company simply is a poorly managed mess which is what it sounds like. I'm sure that once the humans reinstated his contract, all would be well again.
Only counts US shipments which have been basically suspended until July 1 due to how the EV tax credits work. Nobody knows what their production numbers are right now and we won't have a good proxy again until mid July.
Disclosure: I'm an industrial engineer (and an accountant) and my day job is running a company that makes auto parts. I literally build assembly lines for a living so I'm actually talking about something I know pretty well here.
Knowledgeable about the subject? I'll bet you even RTFA. You obviously don't belong in this thread!
You do realize that this disclosure means he loses money if TSLA succeeds. Its equivalent to saying 75% of my net worth is invested in TSLA shorts. Its manufacturing, not rocket science (that's SpaceX). I'm sure they will figure it out, what the GP hasn't figured out is that ICE car companies can't make EV batteries and haven't even bought the land to make a battery factory yet. And it turns out that EVs use so many batteries, that the only way to make a car at an attractive price point is to own your own battery factories and invest heavily in battery R&D. Which the auto markers will do too slowly to adapt once the market starts turning on them.
I think you're deriving the wrong conclusion because your assumptions are wrong.
The Miligram experiment makes my point. 65% of the participants preformed the nasty deed. 35% refused. The prevailing theory is that those 65% caved in to authority and were only evil because they were 'influenced' to be.
My theory is that the number of 'evil' people, 65%, reflects the number of people in the real world who will not do the right thing. They aren't 'good people like you or me' they are the proof that humanity consists overwhelmingly of more or less horrible people.
So in any country where evil people come into positions of leadership can count on 65% of the populous supporting them because they more or less agree with the actions of the leadership and 35% make up the resistance and a good portion of the victims.
Not a popular conclusion, but one I think history supports pretty well.
No, the Miligram experiment would seem to say that 65% of people can be made to do the "nasty deed" using the lever of authority. I would bet that the other 35% would respond to some other lever(s) (but there is no evidence of this either way in these 2 experiments). And this is really the crux of what I'm discussing, that YES YOU TOO can be manipulated into doing things against your value (me too). This is the lesson I have always taken from these experiments and I imagine that most people who don't know as much as you do about psychological research take the same lesson.
We are not making these smaller subtle distinctions about exactly what the lever was and if the experiment was setup correctly. Obviously, it would be ideal if researchers could somehow in an ethical way do this type of research into how people can be manipulated into committing atrocities but that's obviously difficult to impossible. And its good that psychologists are discussing the details about exactly what we do and don't know about these levers.
But its irresponsible in the extreme to make blanket statements about this research being invalidated in this day and age as you know that some folks will use these statements to possibly enable very bad things to happen. And nobody should understand that simple fact more than psychologists. Adding to that the reproduction issue in psychology, and you can see how some folks would reject your arguments as irresponsible, unwise and unbecoming an expert in human behavior. Even if you are technically correct, you are missing the more important issue.
Sounds like GOAP - goal orientated action planning. You start at the end state then perform actions (in reverse) until you get to the current state. I read the article which doesn't tell you much more about how they did it. It sounds like they brute forced a bunch of moves to build up a tree then used A* on the tree. Then they trained a neural net on the brute-forced solutions. They talk about evaluating how close a cube state is to the goal state, but they don't explain how the AI determined that. It sounds like they hard coded what closeness means, so they're lying when they say the AI worked without human assistance. Without human assistance means they would have needed to use a GA, self-playing, or some other learning method to determine what closeness means. The article's "without human assistance" refers to them not hard-coding any move sequences. I consider that a very far stretch of the word. I'd call hard-coding moves as cheating. If you give it everything it needs, it turns an AI into an algorithm in my mind.
Search is the basic AI problem and thus part of AI. And no, they are not using GOAP here (which is just a type of search). It looks a lot more like Value Iteration which is a type of RL (Reinforcement Learning). The point of this research is that it learns to not blindly try random things but learns to search in a more intelligent fashion. But unfortunately for them, their technique was invented decades ago and so just slapping a new name on it doesn't really impress anyone.
Hehehehe, nice. No, not actually AI, just a planning algorithm as being used and researched for something like > 50 years now. This is another instance of machines getting faster, not of them getting any smarter. On the face of it, the Rubic's cube is a very simple problem with a very simple description and a low number of states. Sure, the number of states is actually pretty large when seen absolutely, but for a planning problem, it is not that large and, in particular, the score for a state is downright simplistic: The number of moves to it being solved.
Real-world planning problems are nowhere near that simple. Hence while we will continue to see these stunts, we will not see any real-world problems solved this way for a long, long time, if ever. Also take into account that single-core CPU speed scaling is dead and that most planning algorithms are, in the end, strongly constrained by single-core speeds.
That's not all that off base but its not quite correct either. You are just missing some context. So this appears to be using a part of AI called Reinforcement Learning (I did my thesis on RL at CMU 20 years ago). So in RL, there are a bunch of techniques for taking a pre-defined domain with a reward function that shapes the behavior learned by the system. There are plenty of algorithms (Value Iteration, Polity Iteration, Q-Learning, etc) for solving a problem with an existing reward function and a discrete set of states (and actions).
But now we want to learn the reward function somehow. This is where the current research is focused. To that end, there are techniques to try to learn this discrete reward function that best supports the learning process (Double Q Learning, Actor-Critic, and others). This research in the article seems to be another technique to learn these reward functions but in this case, there was still an existing model of the game (the states of the cube). But in this case, it seems they just reinvented Value Iteration (which is about 30 years old), slapped a new name on it, but didn't seem to link up their work with where other RL researchers. So just a big yawn...
After 6 days, the "game" wasn't fun for the prisoners anymore, they were tired of the psychological abuse, and Zimbardo ended the study, claiming to have proven something.
All he proved is that 18-22 year old psychology students getting paid $15 a day in 1970 will do what they're told to do. At least for 6 days.
Seems to me that you are being deliberately obtuse about busdriver's point. The exact minutia of what levers you can use to get normal "good" people to do horrific things are still debated (which is good). But the basic point that most lay folks derive from the story of the experiment is that "good" people (ie people like them) can be manipulated into doing pretty nasty things. The reason people thought it was so important to make this point was obviously the events in Germany and Japan during WWII.
You are nitpicking about the exact nature of the levers when the lesson that most people will take from this is that "good" people can't be manipulated into doing acts against their current values. That is inherently dangerous, especially right now. Not to mention that even the reproduction you linked to doesn't really invalidate Zimbardo, it says that he was (very very) sloppy about controlling for which levers he was pulling.
"I am startled by the ease with which I could turn off my sensitivity and concern for others for ‘a good cause." seems to say that the basic thing that Zimbardo was trying to prove was true. That is that good people can be manipulated into doing things against their values. Another experiment that shows this basic point is the Milgram experiment. The only differences is what the exact levels you need to pull to get the desired bad behavior. That Zimbardo's work does little to tell us exactly what those levers are doesn't invalidate the basic point that most people take from the story.
there is plenty of it, millennia of fuel supply....but....
we don't need it now.
A mere hundred square miles of solar arrays in sunny places would power the USA, and existing tech can store and distribute it (yes, in production 1500 mile UHVDC lines are reality)
We do have tons of thorium. Quite a bit of it is safely sitting in tailing piles in the western US and since we don't have a thorium industry and thus no real demand for it, its considered economically inefficient to clean it up. So it safely leaches into the groundwater instead. Of course, thorium would be a base load power source. Again, this is unlike solar and wind which are variable power sources and not useful for base load. So YES, WE FUCKING NEED IT. Like yesterday.
I'm starting to think the Sierra club gets donations from the coal industry. Of course it doesn't really matter since their actions and the actions of the rest of the environmental folks are exactly the same either way (pro coal and anti-nuclear). Quit helping and let the engineers fix the damn problem.
The FUD on wind and solar can be answered with 70's technology - 1870's. Specifically pumped storage hydroelectric power. If it's good enough to back up nuclear power plants, it's good enough for renewables. That and building out your generating capacity across the grid - same as you do for coal and nuclear power.
Then point out those projects...oh wait they are in fantasy land with clean coal. Solar and Wind are not base load power sources, get over it...
It (and you) actually illustrates the opposite, that most people hear the words "Javascript" and immediately think it can't do anything much, largely because they associate it with it being combined with a web browser that imposes restrictions and causes it to get blamed for things that really have to do with the poor design of a web browser + javascript combo, not JS itself.
As a result, there's a lot of knees that jerked upon hearing that Office365 would be rewritten like this. Despite JS being fine for such a task, and despite the reality that it'd probably benefit people overall, both making the job of the web version working like the desktop version easier, and making it easier to port if combined with frameworks like Electron.
But that's sort of the point, Electron is awful and somehow folks like you seem to think its a good idea to either use it or emulate it. It produces apps which consume huge amounts of memory unnecessarily and can slow to a crawl under real world loads.
And JS it a terrible general purpose language but since you probably don't know any other languages, ignorance is bliss. Each language is a tool and should be used at what its best at and there in lies the problem for JS. There really isn't anything outside of the web browser that its best at. Node.JS isn't as good at being a microservice as any of the other options. Its interpreted and slower than other languages. Its libraries are a mess compared to what you have available to the C compatible languages (C++, Python, anything that allows C bindings, etc) or the JVM languages (Java, Scala, Kotlin). JS's introspection and metaprogramming facilities don't really know what a type is (which is a problem). I could go on for a while but to put it simply, you don't know what you don't know and you don't seem to want to learn about what else it out there. Instead you want to claim you can do "full stack" which really just produces slow and insecure sites on the cheap. Just because you make it sort of functional doesn't mean you did the work up to professional standards and folks like you are probably a big part of why we have so many data breaches these days.
I don't see the problem with this. I got a 23 on my ACT (an acceptable but not great score). I graduated from university Magna Cum Laude.
I've always done terrible on standardized tests but I do very well on regular tests. That's been true all the way back to the fun Iowa Basics tests.
The plural of antidote isn't data. The data says differently. You are just the outlier and not the norm. Nobody is saying only use tests but what criteria (that's difficult to game) would you suggest?
That is why most universities have personal interviews, check the students records, Look at other activities and accomplishments....
The SAT and the like tests, are about proper prep, vs actual knowledge and skill. If students took the test cold without prep, then it may be more fare of a test, but for the most part the more affluent students will have hours of SAT Test training, taken multiple practice tests, and prepped for the full test.
And all of those other criteria can be biased and highly in-favor of the affluent as well. In fact, most of those things can be far more in favor of students from richer households and can be gamed by those with more time and resources at their disposal. Perhaps for some majors and fields these tests are not useful, but for STEM they most certainly are. There is a considerable amount of research that says they are the best indicators that admissions staff have as things like GPA can be very different things at different high schools (especially when you add in international students from entirely different systems). I think these changes will make it harder for those from poor backgrounds to be admitted and will favor most those from richer families (and to an even greater degree those who are of the right demographic groups).
Creating a system for evaluating students is very very hard. Consider the game theory aspects of trying to reduce the amount of "gaming the system" that those with more resources can do (think Freakonomics). Any set of criteria you come up with (outside of outright quota systems based upon demographics) can be gamed, even standardized tests. The issue is which criteria are "gamed" by the smallest amount and in favor of who are those criteria? And the research that I've seen says its the tests that are the hardest to game as its the one place where everyone truly has a level playing field. Now if a design program doesn't use the SAT or ACT at all, I think that is sensible. But getting rid of it across the entire university seems foolish at best, especially for the STEM departments.
Slashdot Mirror
Damming rivers is an environmental disaster.
A lot of rivers will always have dams because the flooding that comes if you don't can be a literal disaster.
Incorrect, building in a floodplain is the cause of the disaster, not the lack of a dam. In fact, if you want to restore large parts of the ecosystem, relocating towns away from floodplains and reinstalling beavers to better regulate the flow rate of rivers than we currently do with concrete dams by slowing the water down so that more water gets absorbed into the groundwater table and allows for more habitat for wildlife that man made dams don't allow for.
Because of course you want to give up the most valuable and productive farm land AND the greenest source of base load power because of some river fish. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Yeah they are to busy trying to get a theocracy started. Everything the right accuses the left of is what the right actually want for themselves.
You and the GP are both right. But the right isn't anywhere close to actually creating a theocracy and doesn't seem to be moving in that direction. However, the hard core feminists really do hate sex and right now this is the only type of action the left can get accomplished as its something the religious right and the feminists on the left agree upon. Also, neither group is very interested in looking at research on the topic and instead rely upon an ideology which often makes things worse for the folks they are claiming to protect (much like climate change, the war on drugs, and issues around sex ed in schools). Ask the women (and men) who do sex work and they have ZERO love for the feminists.
This is because feminism isn't really about poor women. Poor women have always had jobs. Feminism is about rich women who could be homemakers but instead feel like they must work and be in some weird competition between the sexes. Also, consider when women first entered the workforce in large numbers is about when middle class wages began stagnating. So now we have a situation where both parents now work but the family income is basically the same amount as before women started working (partially because now a good chunk of that second income is now spent on child care). Not saying this is a bad thing but its not nearly as simple as "empowering women" makes society a better place.
You must be kidding. The biggest EV battery makers are Chinese. There is no magic battery "tech" anyway. Tesla certainly doesn't have any.
That's only true if you aren't looking at things YOY. Most people look at things YOY and for 2018 Tesla will be the world's largest EV battery maker. And reread the model 3 teardown, you will learn that they use far less Cobalt than other makers which gives them a cost savings due to the issues with getting Cobalt in large quantities. Better close your positions today, time is getting short.
They want hydrogen cars to be big because they missed the boat on battery electric and a lot of the basic tech is now owned by other companies. They are facing either having to delay their EVs to wait out the patents or pay royalties, and all the while need to do their own EV R&D to avoid falling further behind.
Battery electric has already won. We already have 99% of the infrastructure in place.
Maybe in Hipster Central, SoCal... But out here in the real world 1% of the infrastructure isn't even in place. Also my time isn't free. Spending an hour recharging just go to the 5 miles to home is a huge waste. If someone manages to produce hydrogen from seawater cost effectively, battery cars are effectively dead.
The most common place to charge your EV is at your home. Generally, unless you are taking a road trip its difficult to need to charge anywhere else. You don't have electricity at your residence? In cities where you might only have street parking EVs are more of a problem. In suburbs or rural areas you have plenty of your own parking and likely have an outdoor plug already available. The only real infrastructure is something like the supercharger network where its available along major transportation routes. I still think it wouldn't be that practical to use an EV as your only car if you take road trips but we are getting much closer and if and when EVs reach more market share, you will see charging popup to fill the demand.
As for hydrogen, we are basically nowhere when it comes to infrastructure and it introduces a huge inefficiency into the energy cycle.
The number of exclamation points you use is inversely proportional to both how many IQ points I estimate you have and how many fucks I give.
"Have you looked at Ontario finances? We're on the verge of going broke to the same extent as Greece."
Greece has a debt to GDP ration around 180%, and Ontario's is around 40% ?
Ontario is a province and as such doesn't take most of the tax revenues while Greece is a country and as such its national government takes a much larger share of the taxes paid by its citizens. California at its worst point (which only lasted about a year) had about $50B in debt which is a debt to GDP ratio of around 5% which is bad for a US state. So its apples and oranges comparing Greece to Ontario. Certainly any province or state (or other sub-national government) shouldn't have more than about a 10% debt to GDP ratio and that's being very generous (it should probably be about half of that). So Ontario being 40% is certainly quite worrisome.
The real problem with a debt of that size is that you won't possibly be able to pay it back over the duration of the bonds so it will be rolled over. And since the debt to GDP ratio is sky high, those interest rates will be high which causes the debt to be harder to pay off. This causes a vicious cycle of larger debt and higher rates leading to default. This is a bad deal and the World Bank and WTO are often and rightly criticized for trapping poorer countries in this same cycle but in those cases it was the lenders suggesting the loans in the first place. In the case of Ontario (and Greece), they did it to themselves.
I've heard of Qt since the late 90's, and use it every day. Its an application development framework, not end-user application software. So yeah, Qt has a model to support itself.
But please tell me, again, how exactly one makes money off of F/OSS "end-user application software" built using Qt? I'm waiting...
Qt is nice; I like it too. In the case of end-user FOSS software, it would usually be a support contract. Not saying its a good business model but there it is. The other model is a limited free version and a paid full version. As long as there are not any statically linked GPL libraries, this is all legal. If you are using a JVM (or other interpreted or VM based) language, this isn't even an issue. All the GPL really enforces is that you can update GPL binaries inside of your application.
For end-user software, you should probably be trying to rent it out first, if that isn't possible then sell it and if that isn't possible make it FOSS. FOSS isn't great for end-user software. Really FOSS isn't great if you users are not developers. If you are developing a FOSS end-user app, then that's not the easiest way to make a living and you have my sympathy.
The folks who use those libraries should be buying maintenance contracts on that software. That was the original business plan for FOSS.
But this business plan creates all the wrong incentives. If you want to make money from maintaining your open source software, you need to make maintenance necessary - but if your software is good enough to begin with, people won't need maintenance, and you won't get paid.
On the contrary, that creates an incentive to make the software buggy and incomplete. Businesses will need to hire you to fix issues and develop missing features. Also, if maintenance is too easy, a business could just hire some cheap intern to manage your software. This creates an incentive to make the barrier of entry to maintenance high enough - for example via bad documentation and obscure features.
I agree with you actually. Stallman was no business genius. The way I see that this could work would be if the malware insurers would require and fund this type of work but I have my doubts that that would happen. It makes way to much sense. Really there needs to be a cost to not having maintenance support in place to businesses and the only way I see that happening is via insurance requirements to get malware insurance. That might be a good way to go as I see every larger business putting costly processes in place to vet libraries but those processes are little more than rubber stamps most of the time and don't do what they were really designed to do. And outsourcing that to the malware insurer would be a way to ensure that process has some teeth and FOSS devs have to produce a certain level of quality to be included/used in business. But this entire scheme is highly dependent upon a processes that's likely to be highly bureaucratic which isn't exactly a recipe for success in software.
One of the most common business models I see people talk about, is the good 'ole "give away the code, but sell support." There are many variations of this approach, but they pretty much all rely on an assumption that you're making software that's useful to large companies with cash to burn.
However, in the huge field of "end-user application software," I have yet to see anyone offer up a viable business model. You're not going to be selling any nebulous "support," and there's a pretty good chance that your users will never be contributing developers. Just about the only approach I can think of (besides donations) is to make said software "paid" on some sort of app store, and hope that only a minority of your users ever find a way to get around that paywall.
You must be new here then. I guess you've never heard of QT. Their model is that you must purchase the software if your software is proprietary and you don't have to if its not.
Ok, you got past the clickbait ..... basically my answer is why should it be subsidized by anyone, UNLESS, they have a vested interest in seeing changes/core features added to whichever part of the software that they are particularly interested in ...... so the answer is .... the people working on the projects in their spare time for fun, do it as long as it's fun for them, and when it isn't, when it starts feeling like a job, either find someone that values your contributions and get them to pay you to work on it, or stop and do something else.
Because most of the folks who use that FOSS aren't aware they are using it, but you better believe that if that software breaks they get upset. The folks who use those libraries should be buying maintenance contracts on that software. That was the original business plan for FOSS. Of course, plenty of folks never contribute either with code or maintenance contracts.
The funny part of all of this, is that currently there is a lot of recognition by the business powers that be that bad software is now a serious business risk. But of course their solution is to buy malware insurance when instead they should be fixing their IT and buying maintenance contracts for things like OpenSSL.
Now there is a big difference between LLVM or gcc or some of the other major FOSS packages and whatever favor of the week web framework someone shit out because they don't understand why parts of the API they use do the things they do (often for good reasons). Most FOSS software probably doesn't rise to the level of deserving funding but I find the level of acrimony over someone asking for funding to be way over the top. If you don't think a posters project doesn't deserve funding, just scroll down. If someone else chooses to contribute that's good for you. Why be so against someone asking?
"Are you kidding? Dairy isn't exactly a luxary - eating healthy isn't something you should expect people to give up"
What's healthy about eating dairy? It's a lousy way to get calcium or vitamin d, and literally only certain WASPs and their descendants have the gene for digesting dairy in adulthood. Don't get me wrong, I love butter, but I don't imagine that it's health food. Most of the world consumes very little dairy, all of it cultured.
Well, cultures that don't consume much dairy are generally shorter, less healthy and die earlier. And its absolutely the most efficient way to get calcium but seeing as you need calcium for your brain to function well, you might not realize it. I'm sure you think taking vitamins is the best way to get calcium but most of that calcium will get passed right through you as we are not evolved to digest pills. And you can't digest milk because you stopped drinking it at some point (probably before or during college) and when you do that for long periods of time, your body stops producing the protein that breaks down milk sugars which makes you lactose intolerant. While my body might keep making more of that protein longer, it is still your own fault that you can no longer digest milk (which is a basic food stuff for all humans since long before recorded history). Plenty of WASPy folks are lactose intolerant for the exact same reasons as you.
Also, fuck you for using open source software and then trying to deny the folks that built that software basic food stuffs. Seriously, fucking just kill yourself as if you can't even find it in your heart to think that those that are giving your free software libraries (that are often better than the ones your preferred vendor write) should have access to basic nutritional requirements. Maybe that milk isn't even for him and is for his niece. But then again, drinkypoo I've been here for years and remember some of your other posts. You've always been a piece of shit...
Seems like human judgement will always be necessary for application of "fuzzy" rules.
Reminds me of a joke about the Turing test: if it can explain the offside rule consistently, it's a computer.
Definitely wasn't said by someone knowledgeable about sports. Offside is one of the very few rules that's pretty simple across sports. Now if they could explain what a foul in basketball is, that would be a computer.
According to the summary, his (human) manager failed to renew his contract in the new system, during their changeover.
So a machine did not fire him. A human failed to renew his contract, and the machine obediently carried out the steps that it should carry out when that happened.
The narrative about an evil AI here is far more interesting than what actually happened.
There was no evil AI here. It was that firing a contractor was marked as opt-in instead of opt-out. This was obviously a poor choice. Then when a human didn't opt-in, the system operated as designed. Maybe that company simply is a poorly managed mess which is what it sounds like. I'm sure that once the humans reinstated his contract, all would be well again.
Accurate as of today...
Only counts US shipments which have been basically suspended until July 1 due to how the EV tax credits work. Nobody knows what their production numbers are right now and we won't have a good proxy again until mid July.
Disclosure: I'm an industrial engineer (and an accountant) and my day job is running a company that makes auto parts. I literally build assembly lines for a living so I'm actually talking about something I know pretty well here.
Knowledgeable about the subject? I'll bet you even RTFA. You obviously don't belong in this thread!
You do realize that this disclosure means he loses money if TSLA succeeds. Its equivalent to saying 75% of my net worth is invested in TSLA shorts. Its manufacturing, not rocket science (that's SpaceX). I'm sure they will figure it out, what the GP hasn't figured out is that ICE car companies can't make EV batteries and haven't even bought the land to make a battery factory yet. And it turns out that EVs use so many batteries, that the only way to make a car at an attractive price point is to own your own battery factories and invest heavily in battery R&D. Which the auto markers will do too slowly to adapt once the market starts turning on them.
I think you're deriving the wrong conclusion because your assumptions are wrong.
The Miligram experiment makes my point. 65% of the participants preformed the nasty deed. 35% refused. The prevailing theory is that those 65% caved in to authority and were only evil because they were 'influenced' to be.
My theory is that the number of 'evil' people, 65%, reflects the number of people in the real world who will not do the right thing. They aren't 'good people like you or me' they are the proof that humanity consists overwhelmingly of more or less horrible people.
So in any country where evil people come into positions of leadership can count on 65% of the populous supporting them because they more or less agree with the actions of the leadership and 35% make up the resistance and a good portion of the victims.
Not a popular conclusion, but one I think history supports pretty well.
No, the Miligram experiment would seem to say that 65% of people can be made to do the "nasty deed" using the lever of authority. I would bet that the other 35% would respond to some other lever(s) (but there is no evidence of this either way in these 2 experiments). And this is really the crux of what I'm discussing, that YES YOU TOO can be manipulated into doing things against your value (me too). This is the lesson I have always taken from these experiments and I imagine that most people who don't know as much as you do about psychological research take the same lesson. We are not making these smaller subtle distinctions about exactly what the lever was and if the experiment was setup correctly. Obviously, it would be ideal if researchers could somehow in an ethical way do this type of research into how people can be manipulated into committing atrocities but that's obviously difficult to impossible. And its good that psychologists are discussing the details about exactly what we do and don't know about these levers.
But its irresponsible in the extreme to make blanket statements about this research being invalidated in this day and age as you know that some folks will use these statements to possibly enable very bad things to happen. And nobody should understand that simple fact more than psychologists. Adding to that the reproduction issue in psychology, and you can see how some folks would reject your arguments as irresponsible, unwise and unbecoming an expert in human behavior. Even if you are technically correct, you are missing the more important issue.
Sounds like GOAP - goal orientated action planning. You start at the end state then perform actions (in reverse) until you get to the current state. I read the article which doesn't tell you much more about how they did it. It sounds like they brute forced a bunch of moves to build up a tree then used A* on the tree. Then they trained a neural net on the brute-forced solutions. They talk about evaluating how close a cube state is to the goal state, but they don't explain how the AI determined that. It sounds like they hard coded what closeness means, so they're lying when they say the AI worked without human assistance. Without human assistance means they would have needed to use a GA, self-playing, or some other learning method to determine what closeness means. The article's "without human assistance" refers to them not hard-coding any move sequences. I consider that a very far stretch of the word. I'd call hard-coding moves as cheating. If you give it everything it needs, it turns an AI into an algorithm in my mind.
Here's a link to the paper from the article. I don't have the time to read it right now: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.074...
Search is the basic AI problem and thus part of AI. And no, they are not using GOAP here (which is just a type of search). It looks a lot more like Value Iteration which is a type of RL (Reinforcement Learning). The point of this research is that it learns to not blindly try random things but learns to search in a more intelligent fashion. But unfortunately for them, their technique was invented decades ago and so just slapping a new name on it doesn't really impress anyone.
This is what I was thinking of as well (putting my 37 year old copy of The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence back on the shelf).
I think you mean Norvig Russell...here is a free PDF Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
Hehehehe, nice. No, not actually AI, just a planning algorithm as being used and researched for something like > 50 years now. This is another instance of machines getting faster, not of them getting any smarter. On the face of it, the Rubic's cube is a very simple problem with a very simple description and a low number of states. Sure, the number of states is actually pretty large when seen absolutely, but for a planning problem, it is not that large and, in particular, the score for a state is downright simplistic: The number of moves to it being solved.
Real-world planning problems are nowhere near that simple. Hence while we will continue to see these stunts, we will not see any real-world problems solved this way for a long, long time, if ever. Also take into account that single-core CPU speed scaling is dead and that most planning algorithms are, in the end, strongly constrained by single-core speeds.
That's not all that off base but its not quite correct either. You are just missing some context. So this appears to be using a part of AI called Reinforcement Learning (I did my thesis on RL at CMU 20 years ago). So in RL, there are a bunch of techniques for taking a pre-defined domain with a reward function that shapes the behavior learned by the system. There are plenty of algorithms (Value Iteration, Polity Iteration, Q-Learning, etc) for solving a problem with an existing reward function and a discrete set of states (and actions).
But now we want to learn the reward function somehow. This is where the current research is focused. To that end, there are techniques to try to learn this discrete reward function that best supports the learning process (Double Q Learning, Actor-Critic, and others). This research in the article seems to be another technique to learn these reward functions but in this case, there was still an existing model of the game (the states of the cube). But in this case, it seems they just reinvented Value Iteration (which is about 30 years old), slapped a new name on it, but didn't seem to link up their work with where other RL researchers. So just a big yawn...
After 6 days, the "game" wasn't fun for the prisoners anymore, they were tired of the psychological abuse, and Zimbardo ended the study, claiming to have proven something.
All he proved is that 18-22 year old psychology students getting paid $15 a day in 1970 will do what they're told to do. At least for 6 days.
Seems to me that you are being deliberately obtuse about busdriver's point. The exact minutia of what levers you can use to get normal "good" people to do horrific things are still debated (which is good). But the basic point that most lay folks derive from the story of the experiment is that "good" people (ie people like them) can be manipulated into doing pretty nasty things. The reason people thought it was so important to make this point was obviously the events in Germany and Japan during WWII.
You are nitpicking about the exact nature of the levers when the lesson that most people will take from this is that "good" people can't be manipulated into doing acts against their current values. That is inherently dangerous, especially right now. Not to mention that even the reproduction you linked to doesn't really invalidate Zimbardo, it says that he was (very very) sloppy about controlling for which levers he was pulling.
"I am startled by the ease with which I could turn off my sensitivity and concern for others for ‘a good cause." seems to say that the basic thing that Zimbardo was trying to prove was true. That is that good people can be manipulated into doing things against their values. Another experiment that shows this basic point is the Milgram experiment. The only differences is what the exact levels you need to pull to get the desired bad behavior. That Zimbardo's work does little to tell us exactly what those levers are doesn't invalidate the basic point that most people take from the story.
there is plenty of it, millennia of fuel supply....but....
we don't need it now.
A mere hundred square miles of solar arrays in sunny places would power the USA, and existing tech can store and distribute it (yes, in production 1500 mile UHVDC lines are reality)
We do have tons of thorium. Quite a bit of it is safely sitting in tailing piles in the western US and since we don't have a thorium industry and thus no real demand for it, its considered economically inefficient to clean it up. So it safely leaches into the groundwater instead. Of course, thorium would be a base load power source. Again, this is unlike solar and wind which are variable power sources and not useful for base load. So YES, WE FUCKING NEED IT. Like yesterday.
I'm starting to think the Sierra club gets donations from the coal industry. Of course it doesn't really matter since their actions and the actions of the rest of the environmental folks are exactly the same either way (pro coal and anti-nuclear). Quit helping and let the engineers fix the damn problem.
The FUD on wind and solar can be answered with 70's technology - 1870's. Specifically pumped storage hydroelectric power. If it's good enough to back up nuclear power plants, it's good enough for renewables. That and building out your generating capacity across the grid - same as you do for coal and nuclear power.
Then point out those projects...oh wait they are in fantasy land with clean coal. Solar and Wind are not base load power sources, get over it...
It (and you) actually illustrates the opposite, that most people hear the words "Javascript" and immediately think it can't do anything much, largely because they associate it with it being combined with a web browser that imposes restrictions and causes it to get blamed for things that really have to do with the poor design of a web browser + javascript combo, not JS itself.
As a result, there's a lot of knees that jerked upon hearing that Office365 would be rewritten like this. Despite JS being fine for such a task, and despite the reality that it'd probably benefit people overall, both making the job of the web version working like the desktop version easier, and making it easier to port if combined with frameworks like Electron.
But that's sort of the point, Electron is awful and somehow folks like you seem to think its a good idea to either use it or emulate it. It produces apps which consume huge amounts of memory unnecessarily and can slow to a crawl under real world loads.
And JS it a terrible general purpose language but since you probably don't know any other languages, ignorance is bliss. Each language is a tool and should be used at what its best at and there in lies the problem for JS. There really isn't anything outside of the web browser that its best at. Node.JS isn't as good at being a microservice as any of the other options. Its interpreted and slower than other languages. Its libraries are a mess compared to what you have available to the C compatible languages (C++, Python, anything that allows C bindings, etc) or the JVM languages (Java, Scala, Kotlin). JS's introspection and metaprogramming facilities don't really know what a type is (which is a problem). I could go on for a while but to put it simply, you don't know what you don't know and you don't seem to want to learn about what else it out there. Instead you want to claim you can do "full stack" which really just produces slow and insecure sites on the cheap. Just because you make it sort of functional doesn't mean you did the work up to professional standards and folks like you are probably a big part of why we have so many data breaches these days.
I don't see the problem with this. I got a 23 on my ACT (an acceptable but not great score). I graduated from university Magna Cum Laude. I've always done terrible on standardized tests but I do very well on regular tests. That's been true all the way back to the fun Iowa Basics tests.
The plural of antidote isn't data. The data says differently. You are just the outlier and not the norm. Nobody is saying only use tests but what criteria (that's difficult to game) would you suggest?
That is why most universities have personal interviews, check the students records, Look at other activities and accomplishments.... The SAT and the like tests, are about proper prep, vs actual knowledge and skill. If students took the test cold without prep, then it may be more fare of a test, but for the most part the more affluent students will have hours of SAT Test training, taken multiple practice tests, and prepped for the full test.
And all of those other criteria can be biased and highly in-favor of the affluent as well. In fact, most of those things can be far more in favor of students from richer households and can be gamed by those with more time and resources at their disposal. Perhaps for some majors and fields these tests are not useful, but for STEM they most certainly are. There is a considerable amount of research that says they are the best indicators that admissions staff have as things like GPA can be very different things at different high schools (especially when you add in international students from entirely different systems). I think these changes will make it harder for those from poor backgrounds to be admitted and will favor most those from richer families (and to an even greater degree those who are of the right demographic groups).
Creating a system for evaluating students is very very hard. Consider the game theory aspects of trying to reduce the amount of "gaming the system" that those with more resources can do (think Freakonomics). Any set of criteria you come up with (outside of outright quota systems based upon demographics) can be gamed, even standardized tests. The issue is which criteria are "gamed" by the smallest amount and in favor of who are those criteria? And the research that I've seen says its the tests that are the hardest to game as its the one place where everyone truly has a level playing field. Now if a design program doesn't use the SAT or ACT at all, I think that is sensible. But getting rid of it across the entire university seems foolish at best, especially for the STEM departments.