It was ugly, far-out anime / insect looking stuff. I liked the solidity of the Doom & Quake characters better. You spend a lot of time in the creatures' company and you have to enjoy them in some sense to enjoy the game; they have to project some minimal sense of personality, some integrity as a creature, and I didn't like Quake II because I didn't get that from Paul Steed's creatures. Give me a Shambler, Fiend, Flying Skull (what were those things?): Paul Steed's creatures were all just weird, stylized hodge-podge horrors, in my opinion.
I have to say if Paul Steed got fired I'm sure it wasn't purely political; they probably disliked him to boot. I doubt either of the other two principals would cut off their noses just to spite their own faces.
There's a Sci - Fi story about a similar thing, glass with such complicated transitions that it takes years for light to pass from one side of a pane to the other. So people leave it near beaches, forests, mountains for years, then sell it to city dwellers. Good story.
Have you used an IDE? <P> Sans IDE you have to type the same things over & over, (ok shell history saves you some) but really computers are supposed to save you repetitive work, it's much nicer to point & click. <P> Something that you can't get outside of an IDE (I'd be delighted to be proved wrong) is sticky breakpoints. Say you need a dozen attempts at debugging something, and need a breakpoint on a certain line. You edit your source, & if your breakpoint is not on a whole function you've got to re-specify it each time you change its location. <P> I just doubt that a many of the people dissing IDEs have used them.
She writes well, but it's more of a human story with elements of S.F. than a story about S.F. Her writing is nice & human paced, she doesn't try to dazzle which is refreshing. And she has nice little human insights which I liked, too. It's not Bruce Sterling, I would say its entertainment is in the story & characters rather than being a headful of S.F. The 'Chinese Marxism Wins' angle could be interesting, but it's pretty much background in the first book, I hope she explores it more in the later ones. I usually go for denser SF but I'm hooked, I'll probably read the rest of the series.
Ads aren't designed to respect your mind
on
Thus Spake Stallman
·
· Score: 1
Because you tune out commercials, writers don't appeal to your rational mind, but below it, to every hot spot, higher & lower impulse, human drive you have. They're often very subtle & deliberate about it *.
Benetton eg skips your mental defences, doing dissociative fashion spreads of people on death row, smiling downs syndrome kids, a burning car wreck, trying to make an impression & associate themselves with a sensibility, in your mind. The ads' very un-categorizableness gets past your expectations and gets around your tuning it out. They try to stake a claim in your conceptual / sensibility space. You know all this most likely, but the point is that ad writers are doing their best to get past our reasoning minds and manipulate us more / less directly.
And, they're ubiquitous; more & more these days we seem to trade free stuff for having someone plaster ads in our sight. Govt's even, are financing things with ads on public property. Manipulative or banal, I think it costs us to have to deal with so much of it.
* 'Coercion' by Douglas Rushkoff is good though it's not specifically about ads.
Get to me & I'll give you the citations but, now people are doing things that bridge the gap; one recent paper was about how a net of categorizers can sit on top of the output of a (artificial) creature's motor network, and learn to classify the handful of different turn types of turns the creature makes as it wanders a maze. Now the turns are 'real'; they take an extended period of time & have the usual infinite, slight variations you'd expect, but the net above the messy motor signal is able to take the flow and categorize it into the same larger, more meaningful terms that we would, namely left turn, right turn, etc. These are the beginnings of symbols. There are a couple of other cases of people doing similar but only indirectly related things.
A couple of other exciting (to me) things:
Human-level skill at categorization has eluded researchers for a long time, but someone's developed a computer model, 'Sustain', that matches it (in a limited, but real & recognized test domain that, as I've said, had thwarted previous models).
In a recent neural network journal someone's finally got a method for truly continuous motor control learning. Previously the user had to artificially pick a way to break the continuity, & discretize it. This means one less little bit of hand-holding.
People are beginning to get down & nasty in simulating animals' brain networks, down to the timing of the waves of firing in the different layers, to get different learning effects out of them. Sorry to be unspecific, but if you haven't looked at journals in a couple of years this is better than you're probably thinking. It's the kind of thing that makes you think that in 15-20 years, maybe, someone could make a complete, artificial rat.
But at any rate, I believe there's real progress happening.
Your field of adaptive behavior is starting to show some exciting developments, eg lower neural network layers producing / integrating with higher, symbolic levels. What directions in the field do you feel are the most promising? Or, what most needs exploring?
Slashdot Mirror
I have to say if Paul Steed got fired I'm sure it wasn't purely political; they probably disliked him to boot. I doubt either of the other two principals would cut off their noses just to spite their own faces.
(/. won't accept empty body)
There's a Sci - Fi story about a similar thing, glass with such complicated transitions that it takes years for light to pass from one side of a pane to the other. So people leave it near beaches, forests, mountains for years, then sell it to city dwellers. Good story.
Have you used an IDE?
<P>
Sans IDE you have to type the same things over & over, (ok shell history saves you some) but really
computers are supposed to save you repetitive work,
it's much nicer to point & click.
<P>
Something that you can't get outside of an IDE (I'd be delighted to be proved wrong) is sticky breakpoints. Say you need a dozen attempts at debugging something, and need a breakpoint on a certain line. You edit your source, & if your breakpoint is not on a whole function you've got to re-specify it each time you change its location.
<P>
I just doubt that a many of the people dissing IDEs
have used them.
She writes well, but it's more of a human story with elements of S.F. than a story about S.F. Her writing is nice & human paced, she doesn't try to dazzle which is refreshing. And she has nice little human insights which I liked, too. It's not Bruce Sterling, I would say its entertainment is in the story & characters rather than being a headful of S.F. The 'Chinese Marxism Wins' angle could be interesting, but it's pretty much background in the first book, I hope she explores it more in the later ones. I usually go for denser SF but I'm hooked, I'll probably read the rest of the series.
Benetton eg skips your mental defences, doing dissociative fashion spreads of people on death row, smiling downs syndrome kids, a burning car wreck, trying to make an impression & associate themselves with a sensibility, in your mind. The ads' very un-categorizableness gets past your expectations and gets around your tuning it out. They try to stake a claim in your conceptual / sensibility space. You know all this most likely, but the point is that ad writers are doing their best to get past our reasoning minds and manipulate us more / less directly.
And, they're ubiquitous; more & more these days we seem to trade free stuff for having someone plaster ads in our sight. Govt's even, are financing things with ads on public property. Manipulative or banal, I think it costs us to have to deal with so much of it.
* 'Coercion' by Douglas Rushkoff is good though it's not specifically about ads.
Mail me at jdonner0@earthlink.net, & give me a couple days.
I'm just an interested amateur, though I want to go to grad school in this soon.
Get to me & I'll give you the citations but,
now people are doing things that bridge the gap;
one recent paper was about how a net of categorizers
can sit on top of the output of a (artificial)
creature's motor network, and learn to classify
the handful of different turn types of turns
the creature makes as it wanders a maze. Now
the turns are 'real'; they take an extended period
of time & have the usual infinite, slight variations
you'd expect, but the net above the messy motor signal
is able to take the flow and categorize it into
the same larger, more meaningful terms that we would,
namely left turn, right turn, etc. These are
the beginnings of symbols. There are a couple of
other cases of people doing similar
but only indirectly related things.
A couple of other exciting (to me) things:
Human-level skill at categorization has eluded
researchers for a long time, but someone's developed
a computer model, 'Sustain', that matches it
(in a limited, but real & recognized test domain
that, as I've said, had thwarted previous models).
In a recent neural network journal someone's finally
got a method for truly continuous
motor control learning.
Previously the user had to artificially pick
a way to break the continuity,
& discretize it. This means one less little bit of
hand-holding.
People are beginning to get down & nasty
in simulating animals' brain networks, down to
the timing of the waves of firing in
the different layers, to get different
learning effects out of them. Sorry to be unspecific,
but if you haven't looked at journals in
a couple of years this is better than
you're probably thinking. It's the kind of thing
that makes you think that in 15-20 years, maybe,
someone could make a complete, artificial rat.
But at any rate, I believe there's real progress
happening.
Your field of adaptive behavior is starting to show some exciting developments, eg lower neural network layers producing / integrating with higher, symbolic levels. What directions in the field do you feel are the most promising? Or, what most needs exploring?