_yosefk

You could buy shares in GS or any other public company investing in private companies and/or underwriting IPOs, so there's that. That said, the idea that public capital markets are widely considered to be a way to increase equality, of all things, is stunning to me. I thought/think that people supporting capital markets view them as a method for companies to raise capital in exchange for a share of future profits, and that people opposing capital markets view them as casinos, pyramid schemes, etc., and that the point of extra regulation for public companies is to protect investors, while the point of having less-regulated private companies is to lower the cost of raising capital for those ventures that can make do with a small number of rich investors.

Even if people widely consider the stock market to be an "equalizer", it doesn't seem obvious that adding more early-stage small-cap stocks to the market serves that purpose, because these companies are more likely to go bust, with a small fraction of them capturing most of the growth, and an index with a share in all those companies is not unlikely to underperform a large-cap index. (Incidentally, this is related to the reason that widespread stock ownership seems to me more likely to increase rather than decrease inequality - the prices of these things have a high variance; taxing and redistributing wealth and/or capital gains sounds like a surer path to equality, if that's what you want.)

Regarding the PC ecosystem vs the ARM and MIPS ecosystem - I'm not sure what happened back when MIPS and ARM made chips, just that most of their volume came when they were IPs, and at that point chip makers were keeping things rather closed. I'm pretty sure both Intel and say MS do not see the PC as the ideal model for their business, they just happen to profit more from it than they would from an attempt to kill it.

Generally, today ARM will sometimes break OS-level code between releases - something Intel would never do - and I think ARM does this because it sells an IP, not chips, and so in any case the only way to sell a CPU to a consumer is through a chip maker licensing ARM and then porting OSes to the new chip - and the chip maker can handle ARM-related breakage while they're at it. But it does not follow that ARM is to blame for most chips being closed and/or hard for an OS unsupported by the chip maker to work on the chip across its various generations; I'd guess that most of the difficulty comes from the chip-level breakage and lack of documentation, not CPU-level issues of this sort.

So IMO it's not that ARM or MIPS actively prevent(ed) the emergence of an open platform like the PC while Intel was pushing for open platforms; it's that Intel happens to have succeeded mainly selling chips for an open platform, while ARM and MIPS happen to have succeeded mainly selling CPU IP for various closed platforms.

Regarding the SPARC IP that you mentioned - I'd have to look at it more deeply to have an informed opinion. Generally for a chip vendor who wants source code, as opposed to wanting an open source IP, MIPS is just fine, they'll give you the source. Otherwise what you want from your CPU vendor varies (ARM for instance gives you not just the CPU but everything you need to build say a cellphone application processor - probably not the best one on the market, but a completely functional one. At the level of the CPU itself, you might want a bunch of things - like hardware virtualization support, or cache coherence with other processors, etc. etc. - that different vendors support differently, if at all.) So as I said, I don't think I have a serious opinion about the product you mention.

I, for one, have downloaded and tried Brave, but I am not going to use its payment system until I can pay with a credit card or PayPal. I happen to have a bitcoin (1 BTC), printed on a piece of paper (it was a wedding gift), but I'm not going to bother with wallets and shit just to use Brave.

It's different in that I can accept a cash payment from you without having to worry that your cash will somehow harm me. Not so with a request coming from an IP address from which malicious requests are known to originate.

So with cash, people can disagree on its benefits and drawbacks to society as a whole, but as long as it's legal, there's little reason for me, individually, to not use it, regardless of my opinion on its value to society. With IP addresses, I might conclude that I'm much better off blocking some even if I lament the consequences of this for causes that I approve of.

Delayed sleep phase is defined in the article as going to sleep at 2-3am and getting up at noon. It said that most people wake up at around 7am but ~40% wake up noticeably earlier or later than that. So I wouldn't say it's irrelevant for the vast majority of the people.

(I personally like to wake up late, though it's not tremendously painful to adjust to another schedule.)

From that piece: " Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win.)"

I don't claim to have good/better ideas on this issue, but starting a trade war and fighting it to win does not sound very promising, especially since trade wars can develop into, well, plain wars (the decade from 1929 to 1939 had its fair share of protectionism and ended pretty badly.)

Theoretically (very theoretically), a better approach for any two countries, and eventually it might become the only workable approach, is to act to maximize the benefits for the citizens of both countries. How to get there I don't know.

Well, they didn't stop at concepts as contracts to be checked, instead they let you have a different oveload called depending on what concepts your argument types implement. Hence the problem with having to sift through potential overloads and reasons for rejection.

"Concepts have been widely expected to produce better error messages than are currently produced when template instantiation fails. ... Unfortunately, it turns out not to be so simple and use of concepts sometimes results in worse error messages. Constraint failures frequently manifest as overload resolution failures resulting in a potentially long list of candidates, each with its own list of reasons for rejection. Identifying the candidate that was intended for a given use and then figuring out why the constraint failure occurred, can be a worse experience than navigating a template instantiation stack."

Perhaps someone indeed has been "widely expecting" a huge new source of complexity in C++'s already very complex static binding rules to help produce better error messages. I personally have never met that someone.

True in the sense of what one is offended with in their day to day life.

Not true in that it's really easy to invent countless new offenses if you need to in order to bypass a filter.

Good luck to MS...

"Far as I knew, it dominated desktop due to backward compatibility and other strategies. It wasn't open in many ways." - we're agreeing here, I said "it was less open than competitors at the time, which was perhaps one reason for its success." The only part we're disagreeing about is, I think it's more open than newer products (as a part of the general trend of hardware getting more closed.)

I worked on chips which included both ARM and MIPS CPUs; I don't think it makes ARM or MIPS "open" in many of the ways that matter, because, for one, programming those chips without the consent of the company that made them is very problematic both technically and legally. So ARM and MIPS in practice are "open" to select partners who make chips which are in turn "open" to select partners, unlike the PC where you have not only Windows, Linux, BSD etc. but things like MenuetOS and TempleOS and it's both legal and technically feasible to do this kind of thing. Of course this isn't due to Intel or anyone else behind the PC being more benevolent than other vendors, it's just an older platform and closeness wasn't or at least didn't seem as important for profitability as it is today. Here BTW Intel's focus on backward compatibility is very helpful - low-level software for the ARM or MIPS becomes obsolete more quickly and developing working low-level software for newer version of these in a timely manner might require partnering with the vendor, AFAIK. Basically ARM and MIPS are way more open than x86 to me as a chip architect (although an ARM architecture license AFAIK costs $30M or so... meaning that a lot of chip makers ought to take whichever implementation ARM provides and you're at their mercy to a much greater extent than you'd often desire), but they are far from fully open and then they're way less open than x86 to the users.

And then both MIPS and ARM are pretty old... the trend of really closing everything, where you can't get any spec without partnering with the vendor, didn't take off until maybe the 2000s.

I wonder what it'd take for open IPs to gain significant traction in hardware. It's easy to come up with reasons for them to fail or succeed but it's not easy to predict which reasons will end up more dominant.

Well, currently shipped SPARC's volumes are relatively low AFAIK, and ARM and MIPS (now IMG) are in fact monopolies, they just happen to license the ISA & the implementation because they choose to do this. Intel does not choose to let AMD and VIA ship x86 CPUs and in this sense it's less of a monopoly. Of course you could argue that ARM is more open than x86 in some other significant sense; here I think that the PC is a more open platform than perhaps any widely shipped ARM-based system, in terms of the variety of available operating systems and software and the ease of developing such software, especially if said software is to have reasonably wide applicability and long shelf life, and also in terms of the degree of control that any single entity has over the platform.

In general I think that the "vertical disintegration" where you have fabs which are open to everyone making chips integrating cheap IPs, instead of companies with their own fabs, has destroyed "openness" - it used to be the case that you knew exactly what the hardware was doing, and it is now the case that you need to sign a draconian NDA to program most of the components in most chips, and this option is only available to select "partners." x86 is an older product and hence more open than most successful newer products; it was perhaps less open than its competitors at the time, which in part explains why it was more successful than those competitors... (A closed platform is a kind of a high-risk, high-reward game.)

Everyone else (ARM etc.) has a monopoly on the ISA or they don't even publish it (NVIDIA etc.) Intel actually makes perhaps the most open commercially significant platform.

I think I can totally make that impression now. I totally couldn't when I was younger - and when I would have provided you much more value for the money (meaning, I'd work my ass off for peanuts.) I would have failed on numerous grounds:

* desire to ship: more like "I don't care who uses my work, I just want a job"

* desire to grow: more like "I don't know what people grow into, I just want a job"

* rationality: I dunno, I might have tried to fake understanding something when I didn't out of fear

* poker face: I dunno, probably I'd have "very low levels of openness" because fuck, I really really need a job and I'm super nervous

In general, usually the guy who appears nice, sensible and calm is indeed a great hire, but they cost a fortune because they're actually quite rare. A very simple way to hire pretty great people cheaply is opening the doors for the hordes of somewhat-mentally-imbalanced people.

I think in such a case, say with humans with a 1000-year lifespan, we would have learned a lot of things that aren't so and stayed that way. "Progress in science happens through the old guard dying" and all that, and it's not limited to science. I've felt since forever that my views are ossifying every day, so that I must be increasingly hopelessly wrong in those areas where I'm wrong. I try to fight it but I'm not sure there's any cure to it remotely as reliable as death...

When you say that "we" (you?) don't need most of the people living today, or their offspring, ever, isn't it the perfect example of inability to care about people?

Also, it's fairly easy to replicate the Go-playing machine while good human Go players are very rare (and how about counting the resources needed to produce an environment where such a player can develop? Then again we could count the resources going into developing computer hardware...), and they cannot be predictably "produced."

Describing this as "a computer beats a human for the first time but using a lot of energy" somewhat misrepresents it because a Go bot running on a mobile device will wipe the floor with the vast majority of humans - and most amateur players, because there's a power law distribution with these things and so most players who're any good, including bots, are better than the majority of players (while at the same time being not even remotely interesting to play with for a very large number of stronger players.)

The point is that any mobile device can be "trained" with a few clicks to wipe the floor with most humans, for whom to catch up with the bot would require a lot of energy (and perhaps isn't always possible.) Does it make phones smarter the people? I dunno, but it certainly shows that these comparisons are never "fair" and the only real question is what practical implications of "intelligence" you care about, then you can evaluate things meaningfully.

For what definition of "species" is this true? (The definition I know is, a male A and a female B belong to the same species if B can give birth to A's children who can then themselves reproduce. By this definition, all humans are the same species. This is not to say that there aren't significant genetic differences between groups of humans coming from different lineages, just that it doesn't make them different species according to the definition I know.)

I understand the upcast (which is certainly legal but it forces the casting code to know the depth of the inheritance hierarchy - as in &derived->base1.base2), but what's the argument making the downcast back to Derived legal C? (I honestly wonder; personally I either compile with -fno-strict-aliasing or trust my tests to validate the build...)

I dunno, neural nets don't do that well on chess, for instance, at least not the chess engine that was recently published (it reached an IM level which is really bad compared to top-notch chess-engines.) That convolutional neural nets work for Go better than for chess is intuitively unsurprising because of the different game rules. IMO it's at least as likely that this is a step towards a better Go engine but not towards "true AI."

(People say Go is much harder than chess, but this is misleading. Both games are finite trees that are too large to exhaustively search for any existing physical entity we know of. Which tree is larger is irrelevant in a game of two players none of whom can search the entire tree; both players essentially rely on heuristics. Machines beat people earlier in chess, hence it was assumed that "chess is easier for machines" and "Go is harder", but a conclusion of that sort can always be reversed by further research; eventually, it is IMO likely that machines will be impossible for humans to beat at both games, and generally in any kind of board game, given enough research. But IMO no board game is very much like "real life" where our own intelligence operates, and I think people do not have a great intuition of which game is more like "real life" compared to other games - instead, that game which is most popular among the group of people in question and is not "solved" yet is considered the hallmark of intelligence (and here the process through which Go aficionados progress as machines get better is very much like the process chess aficionados went through a decade plus ago.) Then once a game is "solved", the goalpost moves to the next and the "solved" game is officially declared unrelated to "real intelligence", this part happens when a credit bubble pops and AI breakthroughs get peddled less as a result. Personally, "the" test of intelligence is still the Turing test, or if I can't get that, some variant such as automated translation that you can't tell from good human translation. This of course is "unfair" to machines, in that they've been better at multiplying numbers since the 40s and that ought to count for something, too; the reason I like the Turing test is that a machine passing it seems very likely to be almost strictly smarter than me, that is, being as good or better than me at almost everything.)

You're basically saying that there's no task (including passing the Turing test, programming web apps, etc.) which requires intelligence and is best tackled with either something else than a neural network or with NN combined with something else. I think it's a pretty bold statement which is really hard to back up by anything but a hunch.

I dunno, Bobby Fischer was kinda deranged, for instance, and that often hurts outcomes in otherwise "lucrative" positions. Incidentally, he is credited with raising chess player compensation through his demands.

Generally I'd guess you're right though.

As it happened in chess, machines will beat humans in Go no matter how much knowledge about their inner workings will be provided to the human. (I've watched this story unfold in chess and the various hopes of how humans are still somehow better. $1K sez Go is exactly the same story. Can't beat a machine in a formal universe with a defined goal.)

"How gravity ruined flying"? PageRank looking at links isn't some arbitrary thing, it's a source of information every good search will take into account.

He also said there "you cannot argue with the evidence"... I'm glad someone is trying.

Perhaps it would have been an error in my attempt at utilitarianism, if indeed it were an attempt at utilitarianism; to me however it does matter whether someone is guilty or innocent when executed, and I think it also matters to most people (attempting Rawlsianism?) objecting to my comment on the grounds of any execution of an innocent person being unacceptable. (Can I say that the error in their attempt at Rawlsianism is that they don't also oppose cars which regularly cause deaths of innocent people? I guess I can say it except for the part where I attribute opposition to cars to a philosophy that I never studied in depth.)

I'd think that it matters how many innocent people are executed vs how many lives are saved by deterring potential murderers, and my trouble is I don't know how to get those numbers.

Regarding just the second number - deterrence - here's a claim that the death penalty deters, saving between 3 and 18 lives per execution depending on the study you choose (quite the spread, BTW...):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06...

...But here's a claim that the death penalty doesn't deter (though they cite, not direct statistical evidence, but the opinion of criminologists and the fact that some places without a death penalty have lower murder rates than places with it; but maybe if I dug deeper I'd find something more direct):

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-about-deterrence-and-d...

Perhaps someone who've looked into it more deeply can weigh in; all I'm saying is that it matters what the answer is.

(My own intuition would be that people aren't deterred by the death penalty very much, because they count on not getting caught, instead of multiplying the penalty by the probability or some such. But I could be wrong. Also I'm open to the opinion that you shouldn't do some things to people regardless of potential benefits to society, for instance I'm pretty sure torture would deter more than the death penalty because it's a very vivid picture a potential criminal would have in their mind, but it's great that nobody thinks we should go there. I just don't think that the capital punishment is "cruel and unusual" that way.)

To everyone criticising this or unimpressed by it - let's hope none of you ever becomes a victim of such a despicable act, and let's hope as well that the rest of us don't become less likely to either give or recieve in response to your comments which I find rather misguided.

I've known a few drug addicts who died young and left no children.

I dunno, often spaghetti code (long functions with plenty of scopes and conditionals) gets high complexity scores while ravioli code (lots of short functions with simple and almost-flat control flow calling each other - "lots" as in "you can't quite remember who calls who and why you're looking at this here function right now") gets low scores; while personally I'd rather have a bowl of spaghetti over a bowl of ravioli if I'm forced to choose one of the two on any day. So I'm not a huge fan of these tools. (Assigning higher complexity to longer programs does help; but then to me, wc -l is the ultimate complexity score...)

You mean space invaders in real life wouldn't behave in the same way as space invaders in the game that DeepMind has mastered? Fancy that. Could this generalize to other areas where AI works on toy examples but fails in the real world?!