CodiePetersen

For those who don't want to read the whole thing.

Use your brain regularly on many types of tasks, drink coffee or tea, play video games, exercise, and provide your brain with either proper nutrients or appropriate levels of supplements. Too much or too little supplements will have negative or no effects. Everything else doesn't have enough research and some side effects might not be what you wanted. Not to mention there are placebo effects as well.

If you didn't know that before then go ahead and read it. You might get something from it.

I feel like they got heavy inspiration from unity. There is a lot of terms and functions named exactly like and perform the exact same functionality in unity. And having programmed in both unity and unreal I can say they aren't just generic naming conventions. But I've only briefly read some documentation so they might actually say it was directly inspired by unity. At any rate great job huge undertaking. I'll check it out some more.

The new blender is pretty slick though. They have really cleaned up the interface and made it more user friendly and something that industry artists on other platforms will be more familiar with. I suspect we will probably see a lot of people switching to blender.

That's a nice strawman argument but it's not the scenario actually being played out. People may think that the talk to text option is no different than storing predictive text models on their own phone. That IS technically harder to think of because as I have stated most people don't know how that works and how much processing is needed for it.

There is a reason Facebook intentionally hid it's intent and usage and that's because participation would be markedly lower. Their motto is ask for forgiveness later and to hell with user privacy.

That's actually a really good point.

https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/personal-injury/types-of-...

Probably because the majority of the people using Facebook are neither programmers or employees that handle data so don't know the laws or methods used.

So I would argue there isn't common sense around this issue because it's not a common issue for people.

Yes the state is the entirety of the boards configuration.

Then multiply that by how many actions you have per state. We'll suppose 9 because you can only change one tile at a time. Then multiply that by 4 bytes assuming we are using a float instead of a double and you get 4.8 gigs of memory for whatever this simple problem is.

Well I don't know about q learning being talked about more but unsupervised reinforcement learning definitely needs more attention in general.

Yeah that's a good example. Say for alpha go for instance. Without the DL network the q learner would be massive. And that's just for a board game. Imagine trying to do that for systems like moving human body parts. Every single body configuration would be a state and then you have every single possible action from each state.

It's not used a lot in ambiguous tasks like image recognition and audio because you would need to have a state for every single possible wave form or image variation. You would have to have a similarity preserving hash or some other related method to reduce related states to a single common state. That's why it's better to use them near the ends of DL networks. If you didn't do that, every image of the same apple with just one pixel different would be a new state.

Q learners have always been too brute forcey imo. Every action from any known state gets a value. That will explode on any meaningful task. Its better to use it in combination with some other model that reduces how many states are seen by the q learner.

But it is a good model to understand some principles and motivations behind the general ideas in AI and machine learning.

Wow, very cool. I've been wanting to get into hardware for a while now. Well just as long as I have been in programming to be honest which is about 10 years or so now. So as the useful things I can learn start petering off in programming for me I think I will be diving into hardware as a hobby. I have been doing some robot stuff with me niece, but not as much as I would like. But this article and spectramax's comment I think has kind of warmed that little ember of curiosity in it again.

Thanks.

Wow, I had read an argument criticising statistcal significance before but it made nowhere near as good of a case as this article has.

Why don't you just talk to them yourself instead of ranting on YCNews. It amazes me how many people don't follow the guidelines on this site and the mods just let it fly. Every single one of the members of Knowm you can directly email. I know because I have actually talked to them. One lady is not on Linked in so you will have to talk to her through her her academic email.

Also your "ha no industry experience" is pretty laughable considering the entire Quantum Computing Industry is blossoming out of universities and PHDs. Musk had no Rocket ship industry experience, Zuckerberg had no social media industry experience, Paulmer Luckey had no hardware or entertainment industry experience, etc. I can go on forever.

Maybe instead of mocking someone elses work and slandering their name with barely a whiff of an idea of who they are and what they are doing you should engage in some sort of meaningful criticism or debate.

I'll not be responding or reading your reply. So feel free to do whatever with that knowledge. Just thought I should mention that this site is apparently supposed to be about hackers conversing in useful conversations and enlightening themselves. So maybe try to stick to that.

Yes it has been tested in Spanish courts and google news is blocked there.

Being that it's the internet you should think more outside whatever country law you are referring to. For example Spain blocked google news because of aggregating the news as is with little to no transformation.

Plus moving it to the client side would free up whatever resources they are currently using to feed summary info to us.

Well this was also on MIT's The Download. So I think more than just HN crashed it.

I think what is wrong with using such data, as I have stated, is that it is used at scale from single entities. If you look at the point of free speech what was it? The point of free speech was that many ideas could be expressed and there would be less of a chance that bad ideas take over. If you look at anti monopoly laws, what was the purpose. The idea was again that single entities had less bad influence over the economy. These are obviously simplified reasons, but in the end, the effects are actually that simple.

I believe we have run up to scenario where we must again reevaluate our laws to protect society from bad/harmful trends from large singular actors. They may not intend it to be harmful, but the fact is, it could be.

"[..] a massive and untested leap of logic." Google advertising is that massive and very well tested leap in logic. As for potential ISIS members, if you recall it, then you know that they were not only targeting just fighters they were also targeting ISIS brides and sympathizers. Any counter intelligence expert, or you can just read the manual on counter intelligence readily available to the public [https://publicintelligence.net/us-army-counterintelligence/], will tell you that terrorist or guerrilla support networks are just as important and damaging as the actual fighters, hearts and minds they say. They provide intel, monetary support, propaganda support, non combatant support like supply runs, etc. So you can be a member without being a fighter and still be vital.

Also when you talk about conversion rate, you're not talking about who clicked the ad. You are talking about who "bought" or "interacted" with a product after clicking. So you are gauging real activity from people who are clicking and looking at your stuff. 500k minutes of video watched. On average about 2 minutes I believe. That's a huge amount of interaction. You can barely get an invested mobile game player to watch 15 seconds for rewarded things they can actually use.

You claim untested and unproven with no evidence a lot, but the results are right here: [https://redirectmethod.org/pilot/#results]. They showed remarkably different results. Twice as good actually, in the targeted approach. So I don't know what to tell you. There is evidence, there are experiments, and there are real tangible results and effects on the public. The only question in my mind is at what scale do we allow that.

I never said generic data was the sole item that acheived them their victories. I claimed data was helpful and lead to victories and then clarified data helpful in targeting certain individuals. You claim there is no evidence that data was useful and go so far as to say Trump didn't even have a real voter database. Even though running as a republican he had access to the RNCs and Cambridge Analytica did indeed provide support.

Targeted advertising can and does work. Google has shown this with an experiment called the redirect method in which they used ads to target and deradicalized potential isis members. Another individual used the same method to target suicidal individuals and was able to run a campaign to get them to call a hotline. He had I believe a 38% conversion rate where as a standard ad conversion rate is around 2% to 4%. Again this is in the public domain.

Data, targeted or otherwise, is like any other tool. It is not going to be some magical device that gives victory. In the end you have to use it wisely and correctly infer a pattern that can be exploited. Any relevant information is better than having no information. And based on the many papers and efforts to use data to influence the population there is more than enough evidence to suggest such data gives you an edge. It may no be a large margin but it could be enough to make a difference.

If we consider amazon for example, they don't need 40% conversion rate. If they can just gain even a 1% extra conversion rate, that represents 100s of millions of extra revenue. Especially at scale, data is indeed useful.

I might also add that Robert Mercer donated to both Trumps campaign and to prominent Brexit proponents. I forget exactly who but like I said it's all public knowledge.

Actually you have plenty of evidence. AggregateIQ through data was able to automatically fashion ads tailored at capturing audience members susceptible to certain messages. Leave used that data to campaign and attract voters who otherwise would have not voted. Cambridge Analytica employed similar methods with similar data to help secure president Trumps election. Both companies belonged to Robert Mercer who worked on AI and data analytics in its earlier years. You can read plenty on how both those companies were used to secure those votes. It's all in the public domain. Sure it wasn't all data but data was a pivotal weapon in winning their respective battles.

"Party cadres across the country are now required to use the app every day and accumulate their scores, according to recent state media reports."

I'm suggesting that the bad effects are usually from scale. So the only real effective way imo is to reduce the scale by breaking the companies both horizontally and vertically. Maybe each vertical has two or more companies created from it idk. But if there are more actors smaller populations can have a larger effect on policy because now the companies don't have many revenue streams to hold out until people forget. They would be subject to immediate public demands and people would have competitors they could flock to. Additionally many actors competing with data at smaller scales I think reduces the harmful effects of singular bad influence pointing society in the wrong direction.

But I agree I don't think there is much we can do about data ownership. The most we can do is make laws saying you have to inform them when you collect their data and that's already being done. Users just need to be conscious about their activity and sites they go to. But there needs to be real competitive alternatives to switch to if that is going to be effective.

Well I imagine the immediate downside is having companies that you dont care for trying to influence you with data you never gave them possibly quite on purpose.

In the end that's just a privacy concern again. I think the problem is always the scale. Knowing one persons data isn't to harmful to society. But knowing so many and having real incentive to use and abuse it has always been the problem. That type of data lead to Trumps election and Brexit both from the same person. So data can definitely move nations. I think the best option is to break the big tech companies up. On smaller scales they are less harmful.

I think better and worse are subjective. But the thought reconditioning camps, the concentration camps for the Muslims, and the forced propaganda app are in my opinion pretty bad.

Actually that is a very good point. It is a bit unfair to allow Baidu to operate free outside but hold Google to a certain ethical standard. I had never considered that.

I wouldn't say people don't. I would definitely say HN seems not to care.

I think what is more the issue is there are a lot of people on HN who see any criticism of China as nationalistic behavior from Americans at least considering the language our president has chosen to use. Which I would say that is a bad stance to take just because someone else's language is nationalistic on an issue doesn't mean my criticism is. But that seems to be the main issue. Not any particular company just talk around China.

But I agree many of these tech companies are constantly stepping over the line because they have no real competition. Which is why I say break them up.

That's not the only reason. You're trying to conform your neighboring country to an acceptable global standard. It's not just the feel good immediateness of "I'll take a censored Google because fighting for open access Internet is too hard" It's about that influence that will begin to dictate googles policy as more of their revenue comes from China. It's about changing the way China acts towards its citizens and adjacent neighbors. They are a power that can not be ignored. Their influence and policy progrogates through all companies navigating international business. That in turn effects societies they come from. Additionally they represent a HUGE chunk of the Internet and its hardware and on the topic of information security China definitely plays an important part on the way the global community thinks about policy going forward.

If those companies operate within our country we have an obligation to ensure they are following ethical standards everywhere. If you don't you directly fund any unethical standards being enforced elsewhere.

It doesn't matter who it is, whether it's NSA or Russia or Sweden if Google is cooperating with them in unethical ways you should do something about it. Apathy and a blind eye is why corporations can get away with working people to death so we can live in comfort. People may have excuses for that but there is no excuse for allowing them to go so far as what has been written in dystopia literature.

Also just step back for a moment and try to think of scenarios in which people would have to apply your "don't fight opposing systems". I feel you will find it does not apply to a great many things.