_yosefk

Hey, at least if Earth ever needs to fight real-life Space Invaders, Google's AI armed with the Pentagon's hardware should do well!

To be "fair" (?), the opposite of Intel in this context isn't ARM but the sum total of IC fabs and designs done outside Intel, of which ARM is a small part.

My favorite conspiracy theory regarding drug legalization is, "the rich" will want to legalize drugs to get rid of "the poor" on the theory that people who've been put out of work by machines are an unnecessary burden, and that widespread use of drugs among such people is a good way to reduce their numbers.

(I don't quite "believe" this theory in the sense of imagining a bunch of rich people sitting in a room, conspiring about this and cackling evilly. I "believe" in this more in the sense of, I think drugs are very bad for you on average and they certainly are the #1 cause of untimely death among the people I've personally known, and I think that the kind of people making policy decisions will not be that upset if large numbers of poorer people are very adversely affected by legalization, any more than they are upset by the adverse effects of draconian prohibition measures.)

Erm... you totally ought to ignore the stated "desires" of victims when, say, going after a murderer, who may threaten the surviving relatives so that they say they don't want persecution. There are pretty good reasons for criminals being sued by the state for some crimes and by the victim in others (I don't have a source but I'd use "economic analysis of law" to find some of the sources that try to approach this issue systematically.)

On the other hand, since in reality the rule of law is often way weaker than the rule of, say, public opinion, or bribes, etc. etc., it of course matters a lot what the victim thinks; if one thinks that the whole purpose of the FBI is to sway the public opinion to gain power, then of course the way to counter this is to sway the public opinion in the opposite direction, and the public will care about the victim's opinion. (In general, it feels that the share of the population truly believing in "the rule of law" as in "let's follow these written rules literally instead of arbitrarily interpreting them to suit our current desires and then priding ourselves on having and following great laws" is rather small; I'm not sure if it's good or bad...)

I think JSFuck beat you to it: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/02/ebay-has-no-plans-to... ('Clever "JSFxxK" technique allows hackers to bypass eBay block of JavaScript.')

Why then does MS work on Bing? Bing is more likely to infringe on Google's patents than a Windows clone is likely to infringe on MS's patents, not? And Bing is certainly lots of work.

Why doesn't Google make a free, compatible Windows clone, for the same reasons Microsoft as well as Google made free, compatible browser clones? I honestly don't understand it.

Before that becomes the main problem, that other problem must be solved where you give it your picture and the Mona Lisa whose style is to be copied and the way it copies the style is it paints her eyebrow atop your mouth. 'Cause it's not like this thing can really distinguish between "style" and "content". What it does is it pastes patches from the "style" image onto the "content" image. Sometimes the result is interesting, much of the time it's between boring and terrifying. It's cool and all, but it's not much more intelligent than your favorite Photoshop filter.

"Going the way of the dodo..."

Actually many people have a preference for writing their Python libraries in C :-) Python was explicitly designed under the assumption that much of the heavy lifting will happen in C. And C programmers write their parsers in Yacc, etc.

(This is not to say that rewriting libc is a good way for people knowing Rust to spend their time. It's a ton of effort with the result most likely to be unused and if it is used, then it provides a small benefit to C and C++ programs at the expense of a rather scarce resource - Rust developers - having been diverted from benefiting Rust programs. If I were a Rust enthusiast, I'd much rather write libraries in Rust designed to be used in Rust programs so that more such programs get written more quickly than use Rust to put lipstick on the pigs that are C and C++.)

Interestingly, this thought experiment kinda works for company managers, too (try firing the CEO of a company where you're a minority investor.) Perhaps things converge to a state where, regardless of who's the nominal owner (citizens/stockholders/etc.), we are ruled by mostly unaccountable managers.

Well, define "problem." Naive, correct C++ code will copy objects because it's the simplest way to make sure each object has one obvious owner and won't leak without having to write memory management code or fiddling with smart pointers, which have non-trivial semantics. Yeah, you can avoid the copying, but C++ definitely encourages it in the sense of making it the path of the least resistance.

Well, yeah, but if a guy from the CIA murders a doctor in the US, will he be punished? I kinda think he will be. Is he likely to threaten a doctor with murder in the first place, as a way to ensure his relative is properly treated? I kinda think he's not. Why do you think a guy from the mossad is any different or will be treated any differently? Would you ever put "CIA" in the same sentence where you put "mossad" in your comment if the story happened in the US?

> I had an array of widgets. Those widgets had textures. Those textures were copied over and over and over again, because containers can do that, so I had to go back to rethinking the storage class for the widgets.

Actually, he didn't have to rethink it, and many people don't - instead, their code just copies things. Avoiding copying increases the chance for mishandling ownership and deleting a still-used object (or you can use shared_ptr, an then at some point the reference counting involved might get slower than the overhead of gc.) Beating gc in terms of memory footprint and speed without adding bugs is possible, but not necessarily trivial - and it's often very easy to lose to gc instead.

There are many good reasons why no language ever copied C++'s approach to "values" and "references", where every type can be passed either by value or by reference and redefine copying, assignment and now "move semantics." The proliferation of unnecessary copying is one of those reasons.

It's not without its merits, but the question then remains whether emacs suffers when closed if it accumulated enough state for Steve Yegge to consider it "conscious" the way humans are.

How can one support the theory of people having feelings, except for assuming that people feel more or less what you feel yourself? Unless you can experience others' feelings yourself somehow, you can always call everyone else's behavior "responses to repeated stimuli in a way that generates a more advantageous outcome." Personality is no different (so different fish, or people, have a different strategy of generating advantageous outcomes - learned or innate, it indicates some degree of complexity, but not "feelings.")

The whole subject of "feelings" is kinda thorny as long as you either subscribe to a worldview where there's no real difference between inanimate and living objects (it's all just a bunch of atoms, it just so happens that some bunches move and some are stationary), or, alternatively, if you do believe in such a difference but have nothing but a gut feeling to rely on when defining the limit between "machines" and "feeling beings." Which means it's a thorny issue for, well, most of us.

Seriously - what do you think? If it was in the US, what would you bet on - it being a guy from the mafia or from the CIA? "Mafia", obviously (or whatever you'd call Israel's somewhat-organized criminals.)

It's not about "being above the law", either, it's about the criminal being better protected by the law, in this instance, than the victim. The policeman likely told her the truth - that no action taken against this guy based on her reported threat is going to deter him from fulfilling it, likely the reverse, so she better be careful.

I don't live in the US, but here's a story from Israel: a doctor I personally know was threatened by a relative of her patient, along the lines of "if he doesn't get well, I'll kill you." She told that to the police, who asked for the relative's name, and having heard the name, told her "be careful - this guy can actually kill you."

All is well (I guess the patient recovered), but I'm not sure she'd call herself "tough enough to deal with dangerous patients without using violence"!

Google says Oprah's net worth is $3G, and Shaq's is $350M. If neither is "wealthy", then I guess the word is reserved for Bill Gates (but not that "white man signing Shaq's check", in all likelihood.)

If he weren't a comedian, I'd say Chris Rock is so full of shit it's not even funny, but I guess they're two separate things (meaning that in this instance he's objectively full of shit, but that has nothing to do with him being subjectively not funny to me; there are other comedians who're just as full of shit, but I still find them funny.)

I suspect that the average person - actually, make it 99.5% of the people - is better off with advice along the lines of "if you can possibly help it, don't get into debt to buy anything that can't be used to make enough money to offset the interest, and be very careful even " then "get into debt as long as the utility offsets the interest."

I think so because I doubt that most people (regardless of how good they are at math) can trust their current selves to compare utility from consumption to disutility from having to pay back (meaning that their future self will often disagree strongly with their current self.) This is not to say that someone else should be trusted with decisions about savings and loans other than the saver/borrower (forcing someone to put money into a pension fund on the grounds that they're irrational and then not really paying the pension back is a bit too common for my taste), just that "by default, don't get into debt" is good advice.

More generally, IMO quite often clever utilitarian maximization works worse than simple rules designed to keep you out of trouble first, and seek "utility" later. (I guess I don't quite believe in people being utility-seeking machines, not to mention ones having stable preferences, nor do I believe that a person is truly better off having achieved more utility per unit of time.)

I realize it's not a satisfactory argument, of course, if one does believe in utility maximization as a good way to think about these things, and I really wish I could back this up so it's more than a hunch...

I'd say the opposite.

* The typical bribe is, you do something in your role as a government official, and later you legally get a high-paying job, or they pay you $100K-$200K/hour in speaking fees (the low number is Bush Jr's and the high number is Hillary's, AFAIK), etc. Works great with legal electronic payments.

* "Buying votes" usually means, either you promise government money to a group of voters, or you promise a donor to do something when you get elected. Either way, you're buying votes with the government's money so no need for cash. If by buying votes you mean that you're Trump and you're paying for your campaign, again, nothing illegal there, I doubt he travels with stacks of cash.

* "Hookers/strippers"... I dunno, whatever the problem with electronic payments there... I think a politician is in the best position to find a workaround, certainly in a better position than the average customer. In particular, if the workaround involves getting someone else to pay for it electronically, a politician is in a great position to reward that someone.

There are many kinds of evidence and many ways to interpret it - and many kinds of science (physicists disagree with each other less than economists for a reason.)

Incidentally, most "morons" disagree with you on matters where they can find a scientist on their side, or on issues of morality, or on inconsequential matters (like the origin of life, which is interesting to most but doesn't affect any practical decision.) Few "morons" jump out of windows in defiance of gravity, and those who do no longer bother you on Twitter.

Also, scientists err, falsify results, cherry-pick them, etc. Of course, so do "morons"...

If there are no bugs, you're right. However, every bug that does ship becomes harder to debug, and so does every bug you fight with during development. The impact of bugs becomes more severe and less predictable on average (dangling reference or buffer overflow can affect pretty much anything.)

The more accurate analogy is seatbelts' utility in a car fitted with various collision avoidance devices all the way up to fully autonomous driving. I say you'd still want the seatbelt for when collision does occur after all.

IMO simpler is better. A legal guarantee for anonymity that might end up being backed by complex technology is worse than a legal guarantee that you can pay with paper money regardless of anonymity. That's because paper is less likely to have an unnoticed back door (what anonymity does Bitcoin provide if your PC is running a keylogger?)

In fact this makes me think of all the nice things we could have if support for simple mechanisms was legally required in various areas of life.

What did the Unix tradition of composability though pipes produce though that was more complex than grep, to put it in an exaggerated form? It sorta seems that the classical Unix approach breaks down for big tasks, hence in practice big programs do not follow it. "...and the eulogy was delivered by Perl", as Pike put it.

It's a bit crazy to call Emacs bloated these days; vim is big, too, so is Eclipse, so are most useful programs. I don't like Emacs one bit, but its size is the last thing that bothers me.

What harm is done by giving something away without restricting anyone's options? How is it similar to a regional monopoly giving preferential treatment to some content? What are the reasons to oppose this that do not apply to giving away anything imaginable?

(I understand it's a self-serving move by FB but on those grounds alone one can be opposed to anything.)

I thought net neutrality was about protecting consumers from selective high prices set by regional monopolies. Here it "protects" them from a free product that anyone is AFAIK free to compete with. Do I miss something or did things go wrong with the net neutrality idea?

My old Chrome version actually renders the penis (the text, I mean) for a split second and then it disappears.

Actually economists are easily the worst offenders of any field - they even gave a name to it, "economic imperialism"

Not that it's my prediction, but evolution can also work by all humans dying due to the destruction of their environment and then something else evolving of whatever creatures survived. Human extinction is not different from dinosaur extinction; I believe that we'd rather avoid it for selfish reasons, regardless of the fact that it's just one paths of evolution among many. Certainly it being an evolutionary path not unlike others does not make it tempting.

"Evolution" is whatever is happening - survival of the survivors. If humans kill a certain number of badgers and the number of hedgehogs rises plus a bunch of other hard to predict things happens, it's "evolution" as much as humans having killed larger predators and done nothing about badgers and whatever happened next. An alien observer might comment that the number of badgers went down due to humans, or instead that the number of hedgehogs went down due to badgers. The only real question is whether you think more harm than good is done by reducing the number of badgers, and it ought to be answered on specific grounds.

Low quality doesn't automatically follow from cutthroat competition, at least not nearly as automatically as it follows from a lack of competition. "Too much" competition might result in shipping too quickly to capture market share, but how bad the product that is shipped can be and still make profit is limited by what people will buy - they might as well decide to wait for a competitor's product instead, and typically the wait isn't very long. "Too little" competition, on the other hand, means you don't have a choice; it certainly gives vendors more time to perfect the product, and more money since they can ship later and charge more - but it also removes much of the incentive to improve the product since now it doesn't have to be better than a competitor's, it must only be better than nothing, which is not a very high bar.

Now it'd be nice if we could have an amount of competition that is "just right" - just enough to improve the product, not enough to ship half-baked stuff while desperately trying to conceal its problems. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to get there, and since all arrangements that I know of overshoot in one direction or the other, we have to pick one of the extremes, and I think "too much" is way better for the consumer than "too little."

Would society be better off if programmers managed to restrict entry into the profession as did lawyers and doctors? On general grounds, I rather doubt it as described above, but those programmers who're already in the profession would most certainly benefit from it!