I think he is describing an "80-20" rule or some-such: that coding common tasks using standard libraries can be accomplished in a few hours, especially drawing on decent example code. Yes, you can get stuff done that way in a reasonably productive way, especially if you have experience in similar languages (all languages draw on previously used syntaxes and paradigms).
No, this reference to the Ems Dispatch is false. Bismark intercepted and forged nothing. The Ems Dispatch was issued by Bismark's office, and described an exchange between the French Ambassador and King Wilhelm I wherein the Ambassador made an impolitic request, or demand.
A bit like the game of Chinese Whispers ("Telephone") the account of the exchange, underwent changes as it was recounted by the King to Bismark, Bismark's public dispatch about the incident, and then translated and reported by the French press, being perceived as an insult to the Ambassador in France, and leading to a really poorly considered response - the declaration of war.
Capitalism. And a government that has been bought and paid for by those big ass corporations.
You realize that those two things are diametrically opposed? I mean, you admit that one of the problems is the government. Government interference in a market is a socialism thing.
It is a crony capitalism thing. Also, a fascism thing. Markets and trade do not exist without laws of some kind to regulate them. A "regulation free" economy is a fantasy - it has never existed (even ancient economies had regulations for fair weights and measures). Given that laws and regulations must exist, who writes the laws and enforces the regulations becomes a subject of political contention. When businesses, and the rich, are in a position to dictate how they are written and administered you get crony capitalism (fascism is an extreme form of this).
There is absolutely no contradiction between government and business getting into a corrupt bed together. Happens all the time, if the political system permits it.
The primary reason for their extinction seems to be the obliteration of canebrakes, the wetland cane stands that they used for breeding. The parakeet vanished when these were all converted into farmland through drainage. This has driven several other species to the brink of extinction also, including the Florida panther.
Nothing that was created by a deliberate process of design that requires teaching can be considered 'natural' - that is what the term 'artificial' means, more or less. There are some very limited cases of non-human species showing the ability to design some things within sharp limits, but this is quite different from the demonstrated abilities of humans, transmitted through culture, and which can be extended to arbitrary, unbounded purposes and materials.
1) It's unlikely we'd be able to bring back enough individuals to avoid inbreeding and thus a population that would soon go extinct again.
Odd notions about "inbreeding" abound. This remark manages to capture a number of misunderstandings about inbreeding and its significance.
Population ecologists do value, and try to maintain, existing genetic diversity since managing populations does become more difficult with low levels of diversity. But inbreeding per se is not some sort of apocalyptic doom for a population or species.
First note that successful wild populations with very low levels of genetic diversity are not rare.
The cheetah for example is an extreme case of low diversity since it appears to have gone through two bottlenecks (about 100,000 years ago, and about 12,000 years ago) with only a breeding population of fewer than a dozen each time, but went on to spread quite widely and develop a large population in Africa and South Asia. Many populations of various species have been founded by a few breeding pairs, or even one pair - all New World monkeys for example seem to have descended from a very small group African monkeys (perhaps a single breeding pair) who rafted across in a rare event tens of millions of years ago and went on to diversity into all the New World monkeys. As humans spread out of Africa, through Asia, and Oceania there were many cases of very small founder populations successively founding successful communities from populations that had already gone through multiple bottlenecks.
High levels of inbreeding do cause deleterious or lethal genes to surface with harmful effect. But over time this tends to remove them from the population. People tend to get a warped idea about the significance of this from a population perspective by the well documented existence of royal families among humans. Sure, inbreeding brings about monarchs who are idiots, infertile, or with other serious genetic problems - but in the wild this is how those genes get removed. Outside of human culture those drooling idiots would not be monarchs, they would be non-breeding dead ends, it is only human cultural tradition that insists they play the role of leader.
Similarly it is well know that many highly inbred domesticated "show" breeds have serious genetic problems. But this is due to the malfeasance of human breeders who intensively select for arbitrary cosmetic traits and ignore serious genetic disease.
The technology that permits the recreation of extinct species, by reconstructing a genome, is more than able to remove harmful genes with the same tools. There is no difficulty, really, in having a highly inbred population of low diversity, with no disease. This is what the standard strains of white mice and rats used in laboratories are. They are quite healthy but have zero diversity within a strain, they are literally clones of each other.
BTW - the mainstream culture of Americans has a peculiar and distinctive horror of inbreeding to a degree that is not supported by evidence. Throughout human history humans have commonly bred in small closed groups of only dozens to hundreds of individuals with little or no outbreeding. First and second cousin marriages are common in human culture. It turns out that a certain amount of inbreeding is actually optimal for successful reproduction, surviving child fertility is highest among humans with third cousin marriages, unrelated humans have lower success rates.
2) It's likely that the reasons that it went extinct in the first place haven't been corrected.
3) It diverts resources from saving species that are on the verge of extinction, of which there are many. It's far easier to save something that is still alive than to bring it back.
--PeterM
The reasons that species went extinct do need to be addressed, to bring a species back, though it is certainly possible to maintain some species in captivity. But not rarely the factor that needs to be addressed
I dislike the rote phrase "jack of all trades and master of none" as if the only form of mastery is specialization. This phrase treats "jack of all trades" as an insult. Being versatile across a wide variety of disciplines is an extremely valuable form of mastery in itself, and quite rare. Such people should be celebrated, not insulted. And such people are usually pretty darn good with many of those trades, better than your average "specialist".
The value of such people is especially true in software tech where it is extremely difficult to perform integration, problem monitoring, failure analysis, etc. without people whose knowledge and experience span technologies and layers of the stack. The phrase is the sort of meme that short circuits thinking (quoting it as if it were a law of nature) rather than something that reflects or provides true insight.
Fortunately on a continent with a third of a billion people and a $18 trillion dollar economy, we don't need to have just one source of electricity.
The levelized cost of nuclear power, cost over plant lifetime. is the most expensive form of electricity on the market. There is no dispute about it, any study will show this. So where ever possible you would Not want to use it, you would want to use one of the cheaper alternatives.
So you can have a distributed system of power plants of many different types, with the cheaper ones providing most of the aggregate demand.
And basic economics dictates that the cheaper power source will be deployed overwhelmingly.
Solar/wind do fine most of the time, you can push over 80% without much difficulty.
At worst then solar power deployment stalls at that point, with natural gas peaking plants taking up the slack.
But this is a problem some 30 years in the future - they provided 7.6% of U.S. electricity in 2017, it is going to be awhile before the >80% problem is encountered.
Ways will be found by then to push costs for gap-filling power below what is currently available, pushing the reasonable cost power gap closer to 100%. Perhaps we never get to 100% but keep use natural gas for that last little bit.
Getting nuclear power plants into the picture requires altering economic decision making - imposing carbon taxes to make nuclear more cost-effective (but this does not help against wind/solar, its long term competitors), or mandating construction by legal compulsion (or have the government build them). These last two are more-or-less what France did, and China is doing.
There are 800 KV DC transmission lines being built in Europe and Asia that have losses of 3% per 1000 km. Very modest excess production capability can compensate for this, a mere 10% for a 3250 km run (far enough to take southwest solar energy to New England).
Ironically you attempt to disprove that the MSM is parroting far-right talking points by quoting a shallow MSM talking head (who leans right) parroting a far-right talking point for support.
I'd even question 5600 miles. Once they get to 1 million I'd say they are there.
Depends on what an intervention is. There is huge difference between "coming to a safe stop because the vehicle is confused" and "slamming into an obstacle without stopping". The former would be an annoyance, and might be unacceptable in a consumer product, but be quite acceptable for commercial trucking where they can factor in the cost of handling such incidents.
The Google and Uber metrics are useful for evaluating the relative maturity of the systems though.
Why is "release early, release often" good for Linux, but not Java?
The correct comparison is between Linux releases and JVM releases. If you want to have new improved JVMs for the same language specification, go nuts, its all good. Everything will continue to run on the virtual machine, just like applications continue to run on the actual machine with Linux releases. Changing the Java language is akin to changing the Linux API. That would create application compatibility problems at the very least, most likely break many.
"... which brings up the problem of consciousness becoming local to one's skull and inseparable from gray matter. This idea sounds a bit unscientific because it introduces the notion that there's something about our brain which cannot be described in terms of physics, almost like soul."
No, all it says is that a copy of a brain is not the original brain.
If you make a perfect copy of an orange, all the way down to the subatomic level, then that copy is still not the original orange. It's the copy.
Taking it down to the subatomic level you are engaging in metaphysical notions of identity. There are a limited number of parameters describing any particle. If two particles have exactly the same set of parameters there is no way to tell one from the other. They are not the same particle mind you, since they exist simultaneously in two locations, but they are truly equivalent in every way.
If you make a perfect copy of me, down to the sub-atomic level and that copy walks into my room, then I will not suddenly confuse that copy with myself.
If you have maybe a million dollars worth of equipment and a 3 meter or so telescope (which costs a lot more than a million dollars) you can. To actually detect the signal coming back requires a powerful laser, and some sophisticated detection equipment. The mirrors aren't very large and they are a long way away.
Right. There is literally no information about what he was actually doing, what caused the explosion, or what chemicals he had. Any speculation is speculation in complete ignorance at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he is describing an "80-20" rule or some-such: that coding common tasks using standard libraries can be accomplished in a few hours, especially drawing on decent example code. Yes, you can get stuff done that way in a reasonably productive way, especially if you have experience in similar languages (all languages draw on previously used syntaxes and paradigms).
But yes, you are only just learning the language.
No, this reference to the Ems Dispatch is false. Bismark intercepted and forged nothing. The Ems Dispatch was issued by Bismark's office, and described an exchange between the French Ambassador and King Wilhelm I wherein the Ambassador made an impolitic request, or demand.
A bit like the game of Chinese Whispers ("Telephone") the account of the exchange, underwent changes as it was recounted by the King to Bismark, Bismark's public dispatch about the incident, and then translated and reported by the French press, being perceived as an insult to the Ambassador in France, and leading to a really poorly considered response - the declaration of war.
Capitalism. And a government that has been bought and paid for by those big ass corporations.
You realize that those two things are diametrically opposed? I mean, you admit that one of the problems is the government. Government interference in a market is a socialism thing.
It is a crony capitalism thing. Also, a fascism thing. Markets and trade do not exist without laws of some kind to regulate them. A "regulation free" economy is a fantasy - it has never existed (even ancient economies had regulations for fair weights and measures). Given that laws and regulations must exist, who writes the laws and enforces the regulations becomes a subject of political contention. When businesses, and the rich, are in a position to dictate how they are written and administered you get crony capitalism (fascism is an extreme form of this).
There is absolutely no contradiction between government and business getting into a corrupt bed together. Happens all the time, if the political system permits it.
I thought politicians became statesmen after their deaths.
The primary reason for their extinction seems to be the obliteration of canebrakes, the wetland cane stands that they used for breeding. The parakeet vanished when these were all converted into farmland through drainage. This has driven several other species to the brink of extinction also, including the Florida panther.
Nothing that was created by a deliberate process of design that requires teaching can be considered 'natural' - that is what the term 'artificial' means, more or less. There are some very limited cases of non-human species showing the ability to design some things within sharp limits, but this is quite different from the demonstrated abilities of humans, transmitted through culture, and which can be extended to arbitrary, unbounded purposes and materials.
Probably that is what he is referring to. The Darwin Award for stupid dinosaur tenders.
1) It's unlikely we'd be able to bring back enough individuals to avoid inbreeding and thus a population that would soon go extinct again.
Odd notions about "inbreeding" abound. This remark manages to capture a number of misunderstandings about inbreeding and its significance.
Population ecologists do value, and try to maintain, existing genetic diversity since managing populations does become more difficult with low levels of diversity. But inbreeding per se is not some sort of apocalyptic doom for a population or species.
First note that successful wild populations with very low levels of genetic diversity are not rare.
The cheetah for example is an extreme case of low diversity since it appears to have gone through two bottlenecks (about 100,000 years ago, and about 12,000 years ago) with only a breeding population of fewer than a dozen each time, but went on to spread quite widely and develop a large population in Africa and South Asia. Many populations of various species have been founded by a few breeding pairs, or even one pair - all New World monkeys for example seem to have descended from a very small group African monkeys (perhaps a single breeding pair) who rafted across in a rare event tens of millions of years ago and went on to diversity into all the New World monkeys. As humans spread out of Africa, through Asia, and Oceania there were many cases of very small founder populations successively founding successful communities from populations that had already gone through multiple bottlenecks.
High levels of inbreeding do cause deleterious or lethal genes to surface with harmful effect. But over time this tends to remove them from the population. People tend to get a warped idea about the significance of this from a population perspective by the well documented existence of royal families among humans. Sure, inbreeding brings about monarchs who are idiots, infertile, or with other serious genetic problems - but in the wild this is how those genes get removed. Outside of human culture those drooling idiots would not be monarchs, they would be non-breeding dead ends, it is only human cultural tradition that insists they play the role of leader.
Similarly it is well know that many highly inbred domesticated "show" breeds have serious genetic problems. But this is due to the malfeasance of human breeders who intensively select for arbitrary cosmetic traits and ignore serious genetic disease.
The technology that permits the recreation of extinct species, by reconstructing a genome, is more than able to remove harmful genes with the same tools. There is no difficulty, really, in having a highly inbred population of low diversity, with no disease. This is what the standard strains of white mice and rats used in laboratories are. They are quite healthy but have zero diversity within a strain, they are literally clones of each other.
BTW - the mainstream culture of Americans has a peculiar and distinctive horror of inbreeding to a degree that is not supported by evidence. Throughout human history humans have commonly bred in small closed groups of only dozens to hundreds of individuals with little or no outbreeding. First and second cousin marriages are common in human culture. It turns out that a certain amount of inbreeding is actually optimal for successful reproduction, surviving child fertility is highest among humans with third cousin marriages, unrelated humans have lower success rates.
2) It's likely that the reasons that it went extinct in the first place haven't been corrected.
3) It diverts resources from saving species that are on the verge of extinction, of which there are many. It's far easier to save something that is still alive than to bring it back.
--PeterM
The reasons that species went extinct do need to be addressed, to bring a species back, though it is certainly possible to maintain some species in captivity. But not rarely the factor that needs to be addressed
I dislike the rote phrase "jack of all trades and master of none" as if the only form of mastery is specialization. This phrase treats "jack of all trades" as an insult. Being versatile across a wide variety of disciplines is an extremely valuable form of mastery in itself, and quite rare. Such people should be celebrated, not insulted. And such people are usually pretty darn good with many of those trades, better than your average "specialist".
The value of such people is especially true in software tech where it is extremely difficult to perform integration, problem monitoring, failure analysis, etc. without people whose knowledge and experience span technologies and layers of the stack. The phrase is the sort of meme that short circuits thinking (quoting it as if it were a law of nature) rather than something that reflects or provides true insight.
Or idiots.
Fortunately on a continent with a third of a billion people and a $18 trillion dollar economy, we don't need to have just one source of electricity.
The levelized cost of nuclear power, cost over plant lifetime. is the most expensive form of electricity on the market. There is no dispute about it, any study will show this. So where ever possible you would Not want to use it, you would want to use one of the cheaper alternatives.
So you can have a distributed system of power plants of many different types, with the cheaper ones providing most of the aggregate demand.
And basic economics dictates that the cheaper power source will be deployed overwhelmingly.
Solar/wind do fine most of the time, you can push over 80% without much difficulty.
At worst then solar power deployment stalls at that point, with natural gas peaking plants taking up the slack.
But this is a problem some 30 years in the future - they provided 7.6% of U.S. electricity in 2017, it is going to be awhile before the >80% problem is encountered.
Ways will be found by then to push costs for gap-filling power below what is currently available, pushing the reasonable cost power gap closer to 100%. Perhaps we never get to 100% but keep use natural gas for that last little bit.
Getting nuclear power plants into the picture requires altering economic decision making - imposing carbon taxes to make nuclear more cost-effective (but this does not help against wind/solar, its long term competitors), or mandating construction by legal compulsion (or have the government build them). These last two are more-or-less what France did, and China is doing.
There are 800 KV DC transmission lines being built in Europe and Asia that have losses of 3% per 1000 km. Very modest excess production capability can compensate for this, a mere 10% for a 3250 km run (far enough to take southwest solar energy to New England).
Ironically you attempt to disprove that the MSM is parroting far-right talking points by quoting a shallow MSM talking head (who leans right) parroting a far-right talking point for support.
I'd even question 5600 miles. Once they get to 1 million I'd say they are there.
Depends on what an intervention is. There is huge difference between "coming to a safe stop because the vehicle is confused" and "slamming into an obstacle without stopping". The former would be an annoyance, and might be unacceptable in a consumer product, but be quite acceptable for commercial trucking where they can factor in the cost of handling such incidents.
The Google and Uber metrics are useful for evaluating the relative maturity of the systems though.
Why is "release early, release often" good for Linux, but not Java?
The correct comparison is between Linux releases and JVM releases. If you want to have new improved JVMs for the same language specification, go nuts, its all good. Everything will continue to run on the virtual machine, just like applications continue to run on the actual machine with Linux releases. Changing the Java language is akin to changing the Linux API. That would create application compatibility problems at the very least, most likely break many.
Yeah, the subject line should read "Oracle Releases Java 10, Threatens Much Faster Release Schedule".
Pretty much.
Zuck labored hard to wreck the web, and has profited immensely by doing it. To think that he will "fix" anything is ridiculous.
"... which brings up the problem of consciousness becoming local to one's skull and inseparable from gray matter. This idea sounds a bit unscientific because it introduces the notion that there's something about our brain which cannot be described in terms of physics, almost like soul."
No, all it says is that a copy of a brain is not the original brain.
If you make a perfect copy of an orange, all the way down to the subatomic level, then that copy is still not the original orange. It's the copy.
Taking it down to the subatomic level you are engaging in metaphysical notions of identity. There are a limited number of parameters describing any particle. If two particles have exactly the same set of parameters there is no way to tell one from the other. They are not the same particle mind you, since they exist simultaneously in two locations, but they are truly equivalent in every way.
If you make a perfect copy of me, down to the sub-atomic level and that copy walks into my room, then I will not suddenly confuse that copy with myself.
Umm... the "copy" says exactly the same thing.
Because beards are inherently evil (says a guy with a beard).
Lets remind ourselves what matter is before we trail off. Electromagnetic forces.
The baryons held together by the strong force, and which make up 99.97% of the mass of matter has something to do with it too.
But the headline is still wrong. The real situation is:
So the conclusion is that it is not completely impossible for it to be seen on rare occasions. This is in no way "likely".
If you have maybe a million dollars worth of equipment and a 3 meter or so telescope (which costs a lot more than a million dollars) you can. To actually detect the signal coming back requires a powerful laser, and some sophisticated detection equipment. The mirrors aren't very large and they are a long way away.
Right. There is literally no information about what he was actually doing, what caused the explosion, or what chemicals he had. Any speculation is speculation in complete ignorance at this point.
Should be modded up "funny". We all know that costs are socialized and only corporate profits are privatized.
299,792 km/sec. Its not just a good idea, its the law.