aperrien

Except that's not how the GI Bill works; it didn't work that way when I was using it.

I'd think that a robot that could neatly wire up racks with cabling (ethernet, power, & fiber) would be quite doable and useful. Does anyone here have experience with such a project?

Are there any plans to add Let/Lambda functionality to LibreOffice/OpenOffice?

What is M?

I appreciate the explanation, but it's not for me. I'm trying to find a good book to recommend to my grandkids. I've had fun teaching them how to use old retro computers (c64, Apple II, and such). It's been a fun experience, but I'd like to give them some references that aren't me! I've personally come a long way in my computing skills since I was staring at shiny new Pong screens :)

This is awesome, but as a kid back in the Pong era, I always wondered how the basic squares of pixels worked. In your travels writing this book, did you ever come across one that explained that in a way friendly to 12 year olds?

I'd go with: "Sufficient stupidity[1] is indistinguishable from malice"

[1]: Where stupidity is further defined as "willful ignorance"

I think that you're both arguing a bit past each other. Fountainofage is stating that the situation as it stands is untenable and needs to change, and they've given several good reasons as to why. You are asking for examples of a direction for society's legal systems to change to, to fix the problem.

Basically you both are in violent agreement, I think.

All happiness is temporary and short lived. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I believe that any action that gave us truly permanent happiness would turn us into lotus eaters...

I'm confused. The goal of my proposal was that someone who was wrongly flagged (a false positive) could identify themselves as such by being willing to put up a (cash) bounty, or identify themselves with a financial/government institution that is set to handle such things at scale. Someone who is committing fraud, or trying to steal anonymously, or is involved in other criminal activities, is extremely unlikely to do such things. Legitimate people, however would have a route out of this kafkaesque maze. That system could even be automated, and it would work better than what's going on now. At a certain point, some problems just cannot be solved with just code.

Then what you do is set up some sort of monetary charge, to verify that the person you are dealing with is real. Someone willing to pay for support is highly likely to be an actual customer, not a fraudster; and you can even have their local bank or notary to verify their identity, if you are worried about identity theft.

This is a problem that is largely solved at government scale, which is what Google is now, and there's no reason not to take advantage of existing infrastructure to do so.

The Diablo Swing Orchestra made a sale from me today. Does the same music list show up for everyone?

How large are those toxic fields of coal ash again?

I don't think that seeking to be starving and on the street should be the ultimate end goal of philanthropy. I much prefer to limit my generosity via the First Rule of Rescue: be careful not give away so much that now you need charity yourself.

I've learned several new things from this conversation. Thank you for saving it.

I learned something new and valuable today. The emoji make no difference at all to me, as they do not affect the quality of what I have learned by any discernible measure.

Is there any way to export or backup Notion data to your own personal servers? I'd happily pay for a nice way to do that.

Create a nonprofit to accept the "raised" contribution, and then swap it with another candidate in the pool for "consulting fees"...

It might be helpful to think about this situation this way:

What is your evidence that oxygen exists?

How would you test that?

What tools would you need to test that?

How do you know those tools work the way that you expect?

To me, it much more closely resembles a key-value retrieval system. I wonder if we could learn anything about that by training an artificial neural net to perform key-value storage?

Instead of being fatalistic and bemoaning the problem, you'll find yourself in a better mental space if you just apply yourself to solving it. Yes, you will only start with small steps, and yes, that will be a great risk, but in the end it the only chance we have of making things work.

Not everyone wants to be pioneers, but thankfully for humanity, a small fraction of us do. And on a planet of 7.5 billion people, that fraction is pretty substantial...

I'd like to help maximize the opportunities for that small fraction, personally.

I'm incredibly curious as to how much that cost will be vs. a mid-career employee's 401k. If a middle class family with a decade or so of experience could cash theirs in, would they be able to afford to go?

How much are the adapters? I don't really see prices on that site.

I'm planning to use a SCSI2SD adapter for my old IRIS stations:

https://store.inertialcomputing.com/product-p/scsi2sd-v5-st3...

I'm going to paraphrase something I heard from a neuroscientist and a computer scientist in a discussion once:

Spiking neural networks (of which brains are an example of) are a special case of mathematics called a petri network. We know how to run those mathematically, so in principle there's nothing stopping us from running a brain now. And yes, computers are definitely powerful enough to run some brains, as OpenWorm has demonstrated. You can try that for yourself, if you have the ability to run docker containers and a modest video card for the computations. It's even available on Docker Hub...

To run the emulation of a spiking neural network, you need three things:

1. A map of all the connections in that network (it's Adjacency List, or connectome)

2. A listing of all the rules that the nodes of the network execute

3. A computer powerful enough to execute those rules

And that's it. Sounds simple on paper, but in practice, we are still working on our ability to scan large biological networks. *

The fly connectome here gives the first part of the process; we still need the ruleset for the individual neurons to calculate what they do correctly. There's been quite a bit of work on this part of the problem, looking into the field of optogenetic, and neural staining (brainbow) will give you a fair idea of the progress. Also, the Allen Labs in Seattle has been doing some outstanding work categorizing the different neurons, and the rules by which they operate. According to what I've seen of their work, it may be possible to get by with a (really sophisticated) combination of a lookup table and calculation to determine spiking rules, but I am not a specialist in that area, so take my observations with a sufficient dose of salt.

Doesn't it really depend on how you define the weights? If you can't answer that question, you'll have no idea what to look for. For example, I understand that FIB-SEM microscopy can currently sample the chemical makeup of the voxels where the synapses lie. Those should be the answer to this question, if we agree that the neurotransmitter type and density are the weights. However, if you define the weights as the type and quality of dendrites that lead up to the synapse, you'll get a different answer. Perhaps a better answer to the question is that we are still studying what the weights should be, and having a complete connectome will make it much easier to test the different theories.

Yes, but then you as an author can choose to place your own performance in the public domain.

I agree with you about IT careers. Back in the late 80s when I was starting college, it was exactly the way you describe. It is really interesting how things changed in the late 90's regarding this. I remember it falling back for a while after the dot com boom, only to pick back up in late 2000. A lot of people really don't realize that the prestige that comes from IT is only a recent thing, I think because having grown up around it, it's all that they know.

Would you use anything given to you from a random individual at defcon?