You don't. You assume everything is physical and from that you can conclude *surprise* that everything is physical. It is an elementary beginner's mistake. Physics, incidentally, makes no such claim.
"Insane" indeed. Nobody with at east a shred of understanding for software-engineering would ever do such a thing. It explains a lot about the broken nature of most JavaScript though.
Well said. I have noted that too. Explains a lot. Physicalists are a very strange kind of fundamentalist religious, as they always assume their view is obviously true and the only possible one. These people are thinking they have rejected religion, only to replace it with something that has all the characteristics of fundamentalist religion. (Well, no personal God, but that is not strictly required for religion.) They are bad at Science as well (like other fundamentalists), because in Science the question is wide open as in "we have no clue at this time". I find it always funny when they claim consciousness is an "emergent property" of complexity, which is just pseudo-mystical bullshit.
The lack of even a credible theory how strong AI could be implemented in this universe is something of a pretty strong hint though, if you take into account how much effort has gone into that. The only thing known that maybe could implement strong AI (automated deduction) does not scale in this universe to things a smart human being can do.
We will see how this evolves. The idea that humans are mind-body hybrids, with the mind only physical in that it can use certain interfaces, has some things going for it though and it is compatible with a number of different world-models, including the one where the physical universe is a simulation.
Bah, facts. You have no business bringing facts into this. They may just show how ridiculous the whole story is or how incompetent and viscous "law" enforcement is.
Not nearly as well, obviously. That is why they did not do that far more appropriate comparison. Just like the D-Wave scammers that compare their machine to a simulation of their machine on a single CPU and get ridiculous speed-ups, when in actual reality they are slower when said far cheaper single CPU actually runs an algorithm suitable for it. It is lying with numbers and it has gotten very bad indeed because a lot of people fall for it.
You fell for the hype. "Deep learning" is not learning at all and carries zero qualities of insight or understanding. It is parameter adjustment to a sample of data. It is something that looks very well on grant applications or marketing material though.
Very much this. It cannot to basically everything that the human opponent it beat _can_ do. It can do this really simple game with really simple rules extremely well, but that is it. Here is a comparison I like to use: Take a pocket-calculator or slide-rule or even a book of mathematical tables. All are several orders of magnitude better than humans at some, very specific mathematical operations. Yet nobody sane would claim either of these objects is intelligent.
Neural networks are non-linear classificators. They are not anything intelligent, and speeding up the parametrization process (misleadingly called "learning") does not do a lot except possibly make them cheaper. They do not gain capabilities by this.
Hahahhaha, no. AI is even farther removed from reaching its stated goals today then it ever was. It looks quite possible today that AI is infeasible in this universe.
If you think this Go-machine is intelligent, then you probably also think that a slide-rule of book of mathematical tables is intelligent: It both can do computations far better than humans can. Yet clearly both are inanimate objects and hence clearly not intelligent at all. The Go-machine is just the same idea scaled up and with some motors added. It can do one special extremely well defined but tiny task extremely well. It has no understanding of what it does though, and outside of this task, it is about as useful as a paperweight. True, you can change the software, then you get another tiny, extremely well defined task it can do, but you lose the original one.
At the current state-of-the-art computing machinery has exactly zero capability for "thought" or for creating/understanding abstractions. All it can do is use abstractions it is programmed to use. One reason I see why so many people get this wrong is that they do not have a lot of effective intelligence themselves and are mostly driven by an emotional system that may well be mostly mechanical.
There is not comprehension in machines. That very likely requires consciousness, i.e. some major fundamental breakthrough that is not even on the very far horizon as nobody has any idea what it is and as it does not seem to be part of what can be implemented with physical machines (there just is no mechanism for it).
And please do not tell me that consciousness is an "emergent property" of complex machinery. That is pseudo-mystical bullshit. There are no emergent properties in Physics and the whole cannot be more than the sum of its parts and their configuration in Physics.
To create a spec that a bad engineer can deliver a well-working product on is much more effort and much more difficult than to create the well-working product directly.
The art of good user-interface design is lost these days. Your problem is very well known and very well documented in the literature, the cretins designing things just never had a look at the basic knowledge of their field. This is, incidentally, also why the current VR bubble will burst just as the ones before have: Too many people get real problem unless the content and VR equipment is done exceptionally well (at exceptional cost that all these morons that waste their lives trying to get rich will not be willing to spend).
Indeed. Scalability, reliability, efficiency, security, being fit to be deployed, maintainability, KISS, etc. all things that are not for beginners. You begin to understand these after maybe 10 years (if you are dedicated, smart and talented), and become good at them later.
Matches my experience. Example: Just recently about 5 "engineers" from 3 different teams at a customer failed to find out for more than a week that the source of their problems was their test server not running. Took me about 20 minutes to get approval to look at it (I am an external consultant and wayyy more expensive), 5 minutes to look at it and 20 minutes to write it up with evidence so they could understand it. This is not a rare or unique situation. That is the level of people you routinely find in the industry. You also find a few that are really really good and are fed up because they get to clean up every mess the others make. I think only having these few really good people would be far better.
Unfortunately, these terrible people make something like 85% of the whole. But I agree, telling these people to stay the hell away from coding (or STEM in general) is a far better idea than the converse. These people often end up having negative productivity because the few competent people get bogged down cleaning up after the incompetent ones instead of being productive.
Aaaaaaand....FAIL! Nobody will be fluent after "learning" to code without passion, dedication and talent. Incidentally, programming languages are not a communication tool and have no use as such. The most you can get is a data-description functionality (e.g. LUA), but even that is very, very restricted as communication tool.
Congratulation, you just added more insight-less bullshit to the pile.
And if you look at no-so advanced mathematics taught in school, it is blatantly obvious that most people cannot benefit from any coding "skills" at all, because they never learn them well enough. On the other hand, those capable and motivated (and both are critical to ever become a good coder) will teach themselves far better.
Teaching everybody to code is about as useful as teaching everybody to sing opera.
Have you seen code coming from India? No smart Indian engineer is working in outsourcing there and many of the smar ones leave the country to work someplace else. That means only the inexperienced and the not-smart ones do outsourcing work. Coding there is already an almost unmitigated disaster, having these people do design can only result in utter failure.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't. You assume everything is physical and from that you can conclude *surprise* that everything is physical. It is an elementary beginner's mistake. Physics, incidentally, makes no such claim.
Because cheap code monkeys cannot write real code.
Sad, but true. We do not have to few coders. We have far too many and most of them bad.
"Insane" indeed. Nobody with at east a shred of understanding for software-engineering would ever do such a thing. It explains a lot about the broken nature of most JavaScript though.
The story here on /. is not any better. This whole thing almost reads like a fuzzy religious argument, not a fact-based one.
Well said. I have noted that too. Explains a lot. Physicalists are a very strange kind of fundamentalist religious, as they always assume their view is obviously true and the only possible one. These people are thinking they have rejected religion, only to replace it with something that has all the characteristics of fundamentalist religion. (Well, no personal God, but that is not strictly required for religion.) They are bad at Science as well (like other fundamentalists), because in Science the question is wide open as in "we have no clue at this time". I find it always funny when they claim consciousness is an "emergent property" of complexity, which is just pseudo-mystical bullshit.
The lack of even a credible theory how strong AI could be implemented in this universe is something of a pretty strong hint though, if you take into account how much effort has gone into that. The only thing known that maybe could implement strong AI (automated deduction) does not scale in this universe to things a smart human being can do.
We will see how this evolves. The idea that humans are mind-body hybrids, with the mind only physical in that it can use certain interfaces, has some things going for it though and it is compatible with a number of different world-models, including the one where the physical universe is a simulation.
Bah, facts. You have no business bringing facts into this. They may just show how ridiculous the whole story is or how incompetent and viscous "law" enforcement is.
Not nearly as well, obviously. That is why they did not do that far more appropriate comparison. Just like the D-Wave scammers that compare their machine to a simulation of their machine on a single CPU and get ridiculous speed-ups, when in actual reality they are slower when said far cheaper single CPU actually runs an algorithm suitable for it. It is lying with numbers and it has gotten very bad indeed because a lot of people fall for it.
You fell for the hype. "Deep learning" is not learning at all and carries zero qualities of insight or understanding. It is parameter adjustment to a sample of data. It is something that looks very well on grant applications or marketing material though.
Very much this. It cannot to basically everything that the human opponent it beat _can_ do. It can do this really simple game with really simple rules extremely well, but that is it. Here is a comparison I like to use: Take a pocket-calculator or slide-rule or even a book of mathematical tables. All are several orders of magnitude better than humans at some, very specific mathematical operations. Yet nobody sane would claim either of these objects is intelligent.
Moore's law has effectively been over about 10 years ago.
Neural networks are non-linear classificators. They are not anything intelligent, and speeding up the parametrization process (misleadingly called "learning") does not do a lot except possibly make them cheaper. They do not gain capabilities by this.
Hahahhaha, no. AI is even farther removed from reaching its stated goals today then it ever was. It looks quite possible today that AI is infeasible in this universe.
If you think this Go-machine is intelligent, then you probably also think that a slide-rule of book of mathematical tables is intelligent: It both can do computations far better than humans can. Yet clearly both are inanimate objects and hence clearly not intelligent at all. The Go-machine is just the same idea scaled up and with some motors added. It can do one special extremely well defined but tiny task extremely well. It has no understanding of what it does though, and outside of this task, it is about as useful as a paperweight. True, you can change the software, then you get another tiny, extremely well defined task it can do, but you lose the original one.
At the current state-of-the-art computing machinery has exactly zero capability for "thought" or for creating/understanding abstractions. All it can do is use abstractions it is programmed to use. One reason I see why so many people get this wrong is that they do not have a lot of effective intelligence themselves and are mostly driven by an emotional system that may well be mostly mechanical.
There is not comprehension in machines. That very likely requires consciousness, i.e. some major fundamental breakthrough that is not even on the very far horizon as nobody has any idea what it is and as it does not seem to be part of what can be implemented with physical machines (there just is no mechanism for it).
And please do not tell me that consciousness is an "emergent property" of complex machinery. That is pseudo-mystical bullshit. There are no emergent properties in Physics and the whole cannot be more than the sum of its parts and their configuration in Physics.
To create a spec that a bad engineer can deliver a well-working product on is much more effort and much more difficult than to create the well-working product directly.
The art of good user-interface design is lost these days. Your problem is very well known and very well documented in the literature, the cretins designing things just never had a look at the basic knowledge of their field. This is, incidentally, also why the current VR bubble will burst just as the ones before have: Too many people get real problem unless the content and VR equipment is done exceptionally well (at exceptional cost that all these morons that waste their lives trying to get rich will not be willing to spend).
You cannot identify or hire good engineers via "puzzles". Why do you think Google is stagnating for about forever now? They make the same mistake.
Indeed. Scalability, reliability, efficiency, security, being fit to be deployed, maintainability, KISS, etc. all things that are not for beginners. You begin to understand these after maybe 10 years (if you are dedicated, smart and talented), and become good at them later.
On the other hand, if you think you can "code", you may have learned just enough to be dangerous to yourself and others.
Hahahaha, that so far removed from reality, it is really funny!
Matches my experience. Example: Just recently about 5 "engineers" from 3 different teams at a customer failed to find out for more than a week that the source of their problems was their test server not running. Took me about 20 minutes to get approval to look at it (I am an external consultant and wayyy more expensive), 5 minutes to look at it and 20 minutes to write it up with evidence so they could understand it. This is not a rare or unique situation. That is the level of people you routinely find in the industry. You also find a few that are really really good and are fed up because they get to clean up every mess the others make. I think only having these few really good people would be far better.
Unfortunately, these terrible people make something like 85% of the whole. But I agree, telling these people to stay the hell away from coding (or STEM in general) is a far better idea than the converse. These people often end up having negative productivity because the few competent people get bogged down cleaning up after the incompetent ones instead of being productive.
Aaaaaaand....FAIL! Nobody will be fluent after "learning" to code without passion, dedication and talent. Incidentally, programming languages are not a communication tool and have no use as such. The most you can get is a data-description functionality (e.g. LUA), but even that is very, very restricted as communication tool.
Congratulation, you just added more insight-less bullshit to the pile.
And if you look at no-so advanced mathematics taught in school, it is blatantly obvious that most people cannot benefit from any coding "skills" at all, because they never learn them well enough. On the other hand, those capable and motivated (and both are critical to ever become a good coder) will teach themselves far better.
Teaching everybody to code is about as useful as teaching everybody to sing opera.
Have you seen code coming from India? No smart Indian engineer is working in outsourcing there and many of the smar ones leave the country to work someplace else. That means only the inexperienced and the not-smart ones do outsourcing work. Coding there is already an almost unmitigated disaster, having these people do design can only result in utter failure.