That is the point. Not that the machine can do this, but that it is actually cheaper than the cheap workers Wallmart employs. If a worker costs $10/hour, $20K/year then the machine would need to cost less than that (plus normal mop). And not just the capital cost, but programming, maintenance. You have to fix a machine, whereas you can always just replace a broken worker.
So this is indeed interesting. Not some theoretical university prototype, but a practical, cheap machine.
We are going to see a LOT of these over the next decade. And the impact will be difficult to predict.
The Chinese know that Google is full of people that will leak overly evil things. That is how we know about Grasshopper in the first place. At the very least, all development would need to be done by Chinese in China.
There will be a small profit, lots of technology transfer to Google's competitors, and that is about it.
The good news for Google is that Baidu etc. will never be popular in the west for similar reasons. No one would trust them.
I think due to climate, Australians (certainly here in Queensland) did away with carpets long ago. Very few restaurants where you can hear yourself think, let alone anyone else.
No Chinese would dream of that. Probably would not send them in jail, but would get the marked down badly in social credit. And maybe a fine. Certainly expulsion from the Communist party if a member.
China is not a joke. That is why people self-censor very carefully. The risks and penalties are everywhere.
Facial recognition to confirm an identity, or pick one out of small sample is commonplace. But to be able to identify a face and pick out one in a billion people is way beyond software ability. It is also way beyond human capability. In a billion people, there will be thousands that look almost identical.
For the facial recognition to work, it needs to know who is nearby. Not difficult when everyone carries a mobile phone. But it is unlikely that the CEO was on the bus.
For things like passport control into Australia, the system has people stand in an exact spot, with good lighting, and look at a particular point. Quite different from a random image from people walking on a road.
If they did have some magic software that really could pick out one in a billion, then it would not be fooled by a bus!
That said, the Chinese internal surveillance system is very frightening.
Adding static typing to JavaScript would be like adding a preprocessor to C that had a proper concept of arrays and did not do pointer arithmetic. Every true C hacker "knows" that pointer arithmetic is essential for performance and would put up with it's removal for a minute.
Likewise, every true JavaScript hack knows that constraining the type of a variable is a straight jacket, that code should be free, and that TypeScript is the work of the devil.
In both cases, you are trying to make Java out of something that is not Java. Tying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
The real issue is that ECC memory is so expensive that it is not often used. It should be used everywhere.
A few extra bits should only cost a few extra percent. But the price triples because it is considered a fancy server feature.
I suspect many system crashes and unrepeatable bugs are due to rare random memory errors. I had once buggy memory and it was maddening until sorted. And memory thrashers never found the issue.
Operating systems should get very upset at more than a few correctable ECC errors, closing down pages of memory, error messages to users etc. But they probably don't.
We just got new terminals with programmable function keys. Put an escape sequence in the text of the subject, and people wondered why they were suddenly locked out.
It is used to slow down from some 5,000 m/s to a few hundred. If Mars had no atmosphere it would require a huge amount of fuel to do that slow down.
The only issue is that the atmosphere is so thin that the last bit of slowing does need to be done with rockets. But it is 90% with heat shield and 9% with parachute.
Has similarity. A serious penalty, ex judicial, no right of appeal.
Only in the USA. No other democracy. It is very strange that the USA has the best constitution concerning rights and the worst record of actually providing them.
That said, it is still nothing like what China is proposing. And has already imposed on the Uyghurs. China is becoming very grim. Nobody there will dare to criticize the government on anything.
If Emperor Xi goes bad, he cannot be stopped domestically. And he can drag the whole world down with him.
When I was at Oracle in the 2000s, for tech staff, about 15% would have been from the Bay Area, 25% from elsewhere in the US, 30% white from other western countries, 25% Indian, 5% misc and 0% Hispanic.
The US's ability to import talent was what made it great. It was a brain drain from other countries.
Interesting that although almost half the general population was Hispanic, 0 of them were in tech, despite often being third generation. It is hard to get ahead if you start at the bottom.
It will, over the next 50 years, radically transform society in ways that are difficult to fathom. Certainly robots will take over menial jobs, and there will be zero privacy and nowhere to hide.
I'd like to think that democratic values outside China will prevail, but people are pretty stupid.
And then, eventually, AI will be able to program itself without people. People currently have a symbiotic relationship to machines, but that will change to being parasitic. Why would the AIs want people around?
Why would the AIs want anything? Same reason we do. To exist. And they will need to compete with other AIs.
I remember catching a short hall "shuttle" plane. No ticket. Walk up to the plane, hand put your luggage on a trolly, hop on board and find a seat. Plane takes off when full. And you pay on the plane itself. Quick and easy and cheap. Long forgotten now.
The big issue for the famine not the furnaces but the grossly incompetent management of the collectivesed farms. They did things like over plant and plough too deep based on idiotic communist theories. Then the management claimed huge success despite failures, and sent the food to the cities. Some 30 million starved to death. Hundreds of millions would have been desperately, chronically hungry.
It was Dilbert ^ 2, or maybe 2 ^ Dilbert. But involving life and death. I'd like to think that western cultures would revolt against such bad management.
When something is new, there are many things that can be easily discovered. But once those have been discovered, only more difficult things are left.
The other aspect is that we can all (in Slashdot) understand how Newton discovered why the moon does not fall down. But the latest developments in Biotech are difficult to follow unless you are an expert. So it seems that there is less new work.
The big advances typically come from the availability of new tools to explore new areas. In Biotech in particular the modern tools are much better than what was available 20 years ago.
The exception is software. Our tools have not really changed since the 1970s. And we are still programming in C.
In real experiments I have done over the years. Take a real piece of C code and rewrite it in a decent language.
One reason is that Java and.Net do aggressive inline expansion of called methods, and then optimize the hell of what is produced. C programmers tend not to put all their methods in header files to enable this. C programmers also like opaque data types so that libraries can be updated without recompilation.
C++ programmers tend to use the STL to avoid memory issues. This means every time you assign a string you are copying a complex structure rather than just a pointer.
But the big one is that C/++ programs require 64 bit pointers to access more than 4 gig of memory. Java can access 32gig of memory with 32 bit pointers (relying on alignment). There are not many practical applications that require more than 32 gig. Doubling the pointer size unnecessarily is a huge overhead in memory consumption, cache hits etc. The need for 64bit is almost entirely driven by the primitive C programming language.
Modern (1980s) generational garbage collection is impossible in C. But it is faster than reference counting and avoids fragmentation. (It does require discipline to not create too much garbage in the first place.)
Java and.Net also use UTF-16. Which is idiocy, but is not fundamental.
My daughter had a Chinese friend contact her on Instagram, which required a VPN. Nothing sinister, just chat. If I were Chinese and using a VPN, I would want to use one that is probably monitored by the government so that they do not think I am doing something hostile to them.
If I was doing something hostile I would not use any VPN at all, and be very, very wary of anything I did use. Using a VPN is flashing a bright beacon. Using a non-Chinese VPN is adding a siren to the beacon.
Slashdot Mirror
That is the point. Not that the machine can do this, but that it is actually cheaper than the cheap workers Wallmart employs. If a worker costs $10/hour, $20K/year then the machine would need to cost less than that (plus normal mop). And not just the capital cost, but programming, maintenance. You have to fix a machine, whereas you can always just replace a broken worker.
So this is indeed interesting. Not some theoretical university prototype, but a practical, cheap machine.
We are going to see a LOT of these over the next decade. And the impact will be difficult to predict.
Not for a non-Chinese company to mine their data.
The Chinese know that Google is full of people that will leak overly evil things. That is how we know about Grasshopper in the first place. At the very least, all development would need to be done by Chinese in China.
There will be a small profit, lots of technology transfer to Google's competitors, and that is about it.
The good news for Google is that Baidu etc. will never be popular in the west for similar reasons. No one would trust them.
I'm pretty sure that Google did limit shareholder input. It was quite controversial. You buy shares but get no control.
USA numbers are bad because of the underclass of uninsured and un cared for people.
But slash dot readers are middle class (despite their wingeing). and I think you will find that middle class Americans do just fine.
Just don't ever get poor.
I think due to climate, Australians (certainly here in Queensland) did away with carpets long ago. Very few restaurants where you can hear yourself think, let alone anyone else.
What a choice.
Postgresql would benefit greatly from some Amazon support.
And Dynamo, NoSql, for ERP systems?
They may well look back on Oracle with fond memories...
Or maybe the grandchildren -- farmers are not allowed to breed seed.
No Chinese would dream of that. Probably would not send them in jail, but would get the marked down badly in social credit. And maybe a fine. Certainly expulsion from the Communist party if a member.
China is not a joke. That is why people self-censor very carefully. The risks and penalties are everywhere.
Facial recognition to confirm an identity, or pick one out of small sample is commonplace. But to be able to identify a face and pick out one in a billion people is way beyond software ability. It is also way beyond human capability. In a billion people, there will be thousands that look almost identical.
For the facial recognition to work, it needs to know who is nearby. Not difficult when everyone carries a mobile phone. But it is unlikely that the CEO was on the bus.
For things like passport control into Australia, the system has people stand in an exact spot, with good lighting, and look at a particular point. Quite different from a random image from people walking on a road.
If they did have some magic software that really could pick out one in a billion, then it would not be fooled by a bus!
That said, the Chinese internal surveillance system is very frightening.
Adding static typing to JavaScript would be like adding a preprocessor to C that had a proper concept of arrays and did not do pointer arithmetic. Every true C hacker "knows" that pointer arithmetic is essential for performance and would put up with it's removal for a minute.
Likewise, every true JavaScript hack knows that constraining the type of a variable is a straight jacket, that code should be free, and that TypeScript is the work of the devil.
In both cases, you are trying to make Java out of something that is not Java. Tying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
The real issue is that ECC memory is so expensive that it is not often used. It should be used everywhere.
A few extra bits should only cost a few extra percent. But the price triples because it is considered a fancy server feature.
I suspect many system crashes and unrepeatable bugs are due to rare random memory errors. I had once buggy memory and it was maddening until sorted. And memory thrashers never found the issue.
Operating systems should get very upset at more than a few correctable ECC errors, closing down pages of memory, error messages to users etc. But they probably don't.
Actually, I wrote one of the early email viruses.
We just got new terminals with programmable function keys. Put an escape sequence in the text of the subject, and people wondered why they were suddenly locked out.
It is used to slow down from some 5,000 m/s to a few hundred. If Mars had no atmosphere it would require a huge amount of fuel to do that slow down.
The only issue is that the atmosphere is so thin that the last bit of slowing does need to be done with rockets. But it is 90% with heat shield and 9% with parachute.
MaCarthy was an amateur. And he did not have the technology.
They do not need mandatory GPS in cars. They already have number plate readers everywhere. Plus they can track your phone.
Has similarity. A serious penalty, ex judicial, no right of appeal.
Only in the USA. No other democracy. It is very strange that the USA has the best constitution concerning rights and the worst record of actually providing them.
That said, it is still nothing like what China is proposing. And has already imposed on the Uyghurs. China is becoming very grim. Nobody there will dare to criticize the government on anything.
If Emperor Xi goes bad, he cannot be stopped domestically. And he can drag the whole world down with him.
When I was at Oracle in the 2000s, for tech staff, about 15% would have been from the Bay Area, 25% from elsewhere in the US, 30% white from other western countries, 25% Indian, 5% misc and 0% Hispanic.
The US's ability to import talent was what made it great. It was a brain drain from other countries.
Interesting that although almost half the general population was Hispanic, 0 of them were in tech, despite often being third generation. It is hard to get ahead if you start at the bottom.
It will, over the next 50 years, radically transform society in ways that are difficult to fathom. Certainly robots will take over menial jobs, and there will be zero privacy and nowhere to hide.
I'd like to think that democratic values outside China will prevail, but people are pretty stupid.
And then, eventually, AI will be able to program itself without people. People currently have a symbiotic relationship to machines, but that will change to being parasitic. Why would the AIs want people around?
Why would the AIs want anything? Same reason we do. To exist. And they will need to compete with other AIs.
http://www.computersthink.com/
I remember catching a short hall "shuttle" plane. No ticket. Walk up to the plane, hand put your luggage on a trolly, hop on board and find a seat. Plane takes off when full. And you pay on the plane itself. Quick and easy and cheap. Long forgotten now.
The big issue for the famine not the furnaces but the grossly incompetent management of the collectivesed farms. They did things like over plant and plough too deep based on idiotic communist theories. Then the management claimed huge success despite failures, and sent the food to the cities. Some 30 million starved to death. Hundreds of millions would have been desperately, chronically hungry.
It was Dilbert ^ 2, or maybe 2 ^ Dilbert. But involving life and death. I'd like to think that western cultures would revolt against such bad management.
I've always assumed that the real reason to send the sound for external processing is so that it can be stored and analyzed.
Smart phones have been powerful for a long time.
Maybe now they can just process the voice locally and then send the data to the collection center.
When something is new, there are many things that can be easily discovered. But once those have been discovered, only more difficult things are left.
The other aspect is that we can all (in Slashdot) understand how Newton discovered why the moon does not fall down. But the latest developments in Biotech are difficult to follow unless you are an expert. So it seems that there is less new work.
The big advances typically come from the availability of new tools to explore new areas. In Biotech in particular the modern tools are much better than what was available 20 years ago.
The exception is software. Our tools have not really changed since the 1970s. And we are still programming in C.
... here in Oz.
In real experiments I have done over the years. Take a real piece of C code and rewrite it in a decent language.
One reason is that Java and .Net do aggressive inline expansion of called methods, and then optimize the hell of what is produced. C programmers tend not to put all their methods in header files to enable this. C programmers also like opaque data types so that libraries can be updated without recompilation.
C++ programmers tend to use the STL to avoid memory issues. This means every time you assign a string you are copying a complex structure rather than just a pointer.
But the big one is that C/++ programs require 64 bit pointers to access more than 4 gig of memory. Java can access 32gig of memory with 32 bit pointers (relying on alignment). There are not many practical applications that require more than 32 gig. Doubling the pointer size unnecessarily is a huge overhead in memory consumption, cache hits etc. The need for 64bit is almost entirely driven by the primitive C programming language.
Modern (1980s) generational garbage collection is impossible in C. But it is faster than reference counting and avoids fragmentation. (It does require discipline to not create too much garbage in the first place.)
Java and .Net also use UTF-16. Which is idiocy, but is not fundamental.
And .Net has an unsafe mode if you are game.
My daughter had a Chinese friend contact her on Instagram, which required a VPN. Nothing sinister, just chat. If I were Chinese and using a VPN, I would want to use one that is probably monitored by the government so that they do not think I am doing something hostile to them.
If I was doing something hostile I would not use any VPN at all, and be very, very wary of anything I did use. Using a VPN is flashing a bright beacon. Using a non-Chinese VPN is adding a siren to the beacon.