downer68

An order of magnitude. Jeepers, that sounds really bad.

Economy of scale, my dude.

An organization seeking to market a product based on any spare slack or wastage of their bare metal could stitch together a niche product like this from enough resources, and price it in the space where it nets them money, and is cheaper than something an individual or small business might be capable of building on their own, with the cheapest possible parts.

That's basically the the core principle of every cloud product being sold.

Good job, guys! Nice downvotes! Real nice!

I answered substantively, addressing each point carefully, and I was pleasantly rewarded for the time I took to respond.

Great incentive system you guys have worked out! Glad to see it being used as intended! Works like a charm!

I don't know how you found your way onto the addition operator (+) on your keyboard, because that's not at all what I was driving at.

I think you are... JUMPING! TO CONCLUSIONS! (get it?)

Anyway, at it's core, much of the logic within a turing machine winds up being addition in an accumulator. So, you widen the pipeline, and that adds place settings to the numeric values addressed at a location in RAM.

I think we both know that each place setting increases the maximum valus of the addressible unit by an exponential factor of the base, which in computing, and so in this instance, is binary.

Specifically: 2^4096 instead of 2^64

Golly, did I get my math right? This sure is difficult to for me to understand!

Why would anyone want a 4096 bit CPU? Oh, I dunno. I suppose 640K ought to be enough for anyone.

Actually, if you marshall all of your addressible units up front (4096 bit sentences, instead of 64 bit words), which aligns well with raw allocation units on many file systems, as an end user of the service, the overhead (to you) is reduced to network I/O if the product is built correctly.

The only hard part requiring serialized synchronization is the carry bit, across compute nodes. Share the carry bits between nodes, and while relaying a sentence to a cluster of synchronized nodes, the pipeline can shoot the sentence into the cluster as a unit, proxy and chain together the carry bits with a coordinated execution plan, and on the other side of the pipe, you get your well-timed 4096 bit result, all at 1 GHz, because the service is designed and produced to handle input at nanosecond intervals.

What are the advantages? Predictability, and expanded throughput.

Now you can look at an entire passage of text and make a determination about it in less time. Or stack many passages and composite them to assess or intuit variation. Designing the product this way makes it easy to reason about, and thus easier to market and sell. Is it possible to make a profitable system that works like this? Gee, great question! There's no obvious answer.

But anyway, from the perspective of a subscriber, it's on them to marshall their data, and then, if they have operations for which the scale of 4096 bit chunks improves results, they can get their granular operations done at 1 GHz, which allows them to predict time spent and overall cost more easily.

(e.g. I have all these [less-than-but-up-to] 4096 bit toots marshalled in a single data store, from a shit ton mastodon instances (i did all the crawling and retrieving, and saved them in one place, as a standardized data set), and I think this fact might be true about some of them, here is the rule set to interpret, please give me back the members of the toot array that return true when the function of this rule set returns true)

BTW, don't get hung up on 4096 as "the best number" I just chose it because it's a nice square number.

BTW, as an addendum, I wrote this as a pure response to the parent comment, without RTFA, and the original HN title of the submission was that of the article itself (The Right to Kill) didn't disclose that this was specifically an article WRT murder as a crime of passion, since framing an idea as a Right is more abstract, whether the victims are children or not.

Moral relativism aside, the more civilized approach to produce an effect of nearly the same outcome as murder, is exile.

This is an option that was explored and proven successful by ancient and medieval societies across the globe. When something unforgivable and unforgettable happens, those responsible may be banished instead of executed, and in a civilization of unlimited resources, dungeon-like conditions need not be a term of excommunication.

But, within the context of a scenario like this, where the sterility of contact with the outside world is, in fact, a prerquisite to the concept at hand, the approach to handle the preservation of alien customs apart from society at large demands elaborate effort.

Beyond adopting the effort to carry out what amounts to a charade, one still needs to seek a rational basis for the effort. Why bother? Why should one tread lightly when maybe the life of a child is at stake?

The handy answer is because we can. We can have it both ways. The primitive culture can be preserved, if a channel of willful exile is opened, as an alternative to murder. And having it both ways affords the option of live and let live, which is better.

Perspective may say that this condones something akin to honor killing, as mitigated circumstances, sometimes you have to cut your losses and look at what you still have left.

It would require a carefully designed protocol, to handle the exfiltration of exiled tribal citizens that primitive clans rejected for perceived crimes, but it could be done. Is it worth the effort? I think a quantitative analyst would question how much it costs, and the answer is that it's probably quite affordable.

I'm not sure that I enjoy the idea of communicating with millions or billions of people. That's not why I use the language I use.

The incidental fact that I share a common language with certain other individuals of high status, isn't why I speak this language. Would that I could choose another language, would that be the reason to choose it?

If that's true, certainly there are people with more than me, operating at higher status in other languages, so why don't I simply open doors for myself and choose to learn one of those languages?

(hint: you can't just walk up to someone and kick it to them, not in any language; there are more rules to the equation, and they are neither trivial nor obvious; I mean look at how I'm disagreeing with you right now, and in your own language, no less!)

The reality is that, all I really get from this language is a the house and food that keeps me going. The quantity of people I could theoretically interact with isn't a benefit, because the quality of people I could possibly interect with is much lower than the peaks and unicorns of whatever metric you might use to chart the value of social interaction in an objective manner, which, by the way, is conceptually repugnant to me.

So, preserving a dying language, what's that worth? Well, in the sense of using selective breeding to artificially create stunted or distorted animals as curiosities for entertainment, yeah, it seems ethically distasteful to force A child to learn esperanto, without an endgame in mind, other than for the purpose of injecting an artificial sense of nostalgia into a custom that will never see practical use. Under the hood, the mechanics of this almost translate to wasting a child's time as investment in future emotional blackmail.

So, then, to look at that idea as a corrolary to preserving and forcing an enclave to remain isolated and backwards because it's so quaint. Or perhaps because it serves as a visceral teaching tool, to demonstrate an interactive example of human existence that predates certain discoveries. What does that really mean?

Does blocking access to modernity mean, if not so much (outsiders blocking said access) for the mature members of a primitive clan within an isolated tribe, then moreso it means permitting those older members to engage in what is effectively child abuse. All this transpiring as they foster a new generation of children who will grow up without refridgerators and freezers, and effectively be restricted from knowing the delight of ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children's ice cream?

What could have been? What would we see, as we watch these children blossom into adults (as modern citizens of the global village), were it not for our morbid fascination with the primitive cultures of indigenous peoples? On the one hand, children raised in mud huts could certainly do without the tape worms and eye infections that leave some of them blind, malnourished and half-starved. And what of all the patently wrong misinformation of superstition and ritual? But then again, the hollow, selfish emptiness of modernity, and the auto-immune problems, endocrine disorders and psychiatric medication required to cope with the cognitive dissonance of living beneath an RFID geolocated surveillance ad tech apparatus designed by quantitative economists leaves something to be desired, so where's the goldilocks zone in all this?

An interesting side-effect of this, is that it would enable a standard of synchronization, across geographic regions, such that one could treat a set of virtual machines as one ultra-wide-bus CPU with a 1 GHz clock speed.

All of the local overhead of real system resouces and network synchronization could handled by the remainder of the real CPU clock available to the bare metal, but contribute to the computation of a segment of a virtual bit field, at speed.

So, now maybe we get a commodity 4096 bit 1 GHz CPU as a service. Which, is maybe comparable to a 64 core processor, but without the overhead of chunking down to the width of 64 bits.

Honestly, 1994 or not, styling a passage of text with CSS just isn’t as useful anyone would like to imagine it being.

Buses fucking suck.

Buses make you wait in the rain.

Buses get stuck in traffic very easily.

Buses create traffic and make it worse with their size.

Buses idle diesel fumes as they stand in traffic.

Buses are noisy and idle outside of homes.

Bus stops in front of homes are filled with noisy people.

Buses that permit requested stops go nowhere slower than ever.

Buses are a half measure.

Buses fucking suck.

Actually, HN does do /almost/ private messages, if you hellban your account, and the recipient of your reply comment has “show dead” turned on.

(of course, anybody can activate the “show dead” option, but, in reality, there’s no such thing as privacy on a web server, since there’s always a system administrator noticing unhashed passwords scroll through the log stream)

To be honest, I really don't think laser/LED chanels are being used.

I've never seen a remote control quad copter sold off the shelve with IR LED TV remote style I/O for it's tranceiver control system.

Yes, newts and salamanders in cave systems have lost their eyes, due to scarcity of nutrition and habitats devoid of light.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_blind_salamander

"Lasers." (although, line of sight, point-to-point communication is admittedly less trivial to interfere with)

The point being that, if "criminal gangs" are up to no good, but they're parting their equipment with off-the-shelf Best Buy and Radio Shack products, they probably aren't programming DSP interfaces, aren't encoding and decoding raw bit streams, aren't masking binary objects with base64 blobs, aren't rolling their own encryption.

Or, if they are rolling their own encryption, they're using Excel spreadsheets to do it. [0]

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/22/ba_jihadist_trial_s...

This is a joke. Consumer electronics radio communication systems may be trivially jammed, with little to no effort. It's simply a matter of political protocol (aka: warrants) for when and where such things must happen.

The article states that the services used to relay data links were common wi-fi and ordinary cellular telephone service.

The first thing that usually happens in a war zone is HAM radio service experiences disruption. [0] Cell phone back doors via CALEA [1] are already used to disrupt would-be suicide bombers around the world, and yes even in the United States. [2]

If push comes to shove, we'll all lose wi-fi and cell phones in an area of effect, around any hostile activity, whenever shit gets real.

[0] http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-radio14jan14-story.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_...

[2] http://codegreenprep.com/2013/04/boston-bombing-shows-you-ca...

So what?

If I never intended for the GET to be GOT, then the browser is just as much at fault for such unintended consequences.

  This, kids, is why GET requests should be idempotent.

Or, like, you know, how about a browser only sends a request when I'm actually fucking asking for something, and doesn't try to fetch everything I've ever thought about, with my every slightest accidental finger twitch against its touch screen?

What happened to deterministic user interaction?

Okay, but what about stannous flouride and sodium fluoride?

No one ever discusses the toothpaste fluorine ions, in conjuction with the much more terrifying acid, which is the boogey man that haunts the fears behind fluoridated water, and so on...

Or, more to the point, not one single person has any recourse, whether they're an evil serial killer/rapist or not.

But, I'm trying to think about a situation where a secret identity might leave behind trace evidence that could be linked to a readily identifiable relative's samples, thus unmasking... say Spiderman.

I guess, any situation involving trespassing or physical presence under other circumstances, where a person might leave behind a single hair follicle, including the root of the strand.

But not the conjunction thereof.

Honest opinion: Yuck.

Constructive feedback: I prefer the Gopher.

Mr. Bones Wild Ride is a funnier version of the same roller coaster concept.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix-aVhIgBO4 (the ride never ends)

Jesus christ, that fucking name, though.

  "smugmug"

Can they drop that, and retain flickr, please. Please?

Considering the topic of this thread, the debate is fundamentally about automation and machines operating with the authority to make decisions.

There are at least four broad, complicated areas of effect that need to be addressed to begin grasp the scope of what's at stake here.

  1. Hardware interfaces for software control.

This is the entry point that puts lives in harm's way. Software can do whatever it wants to a terabyte of RAM, but there's no outcome, if that RAM isn't driving a real world system. This is the point at which the tires spin and the steering wheel turns. Machine Learning is mostly about probability and statistical liklihood, so good luck unit testing that.

  2. Decision making and autonomy.

This is where, after the system comes online, checks its supplies, and determines it has everything it needs to attempt an action, it decides to do something. After Windows boots up, the autonomous entity sits at the keyboard, checks for disk space, battery life, time of day, gas in the tank, oil pressure, and anti-feeeze, and then considers options for where to go for a drive. Perhaps the corporation that owns the entity configures a default strategy of taxi service, before hauling cargo from a mine to a warehouse, or trash pickup assistance. Taxi service reduces wear on the vehicle chasis, so the entity opts to drive as a taxi. It checks in with a ride-hailing service, and offers it's resources to the pool, and queues up for an assignment. Since we're talking about an autonomous system, there's a division of activity between deciding to try something, versus carrying out the behavior that effects outcomes. This phase is simply parsing resources and allocating them, but not using them to do a thing. Budgeting capacity is a different form of autonomy than performing specialized work.

  3. Succeeding at a discrete task.

This is where the car negotiates the entire trip from garage to destination and back, without damaging property, harming others, getting stranded, and hopefully turning a profit, or at least fulfilling it's role as an appliance with a warranty (90 days, one year, 5 years or 100,000 miles?). This may be vertically dependent on multiple sub-products originating from multiple corporations, all interacting to produce the talent or skill exhibited by the system. Maybe it's a smart refrigerator, and it's defaulted to always keep a gallon of fresh milk available, but you never drink milk, and you don't know how to turn the feature off. Who's to blame for all that spilt milk? Maybe your autonomous taxi can deliver milk to the houses without smart refrigerators. Who's to say it's a problem or not? Maybe the self driving vehicle wouldn't have run over than pedestrian if you could have convinced the fridge to stop replenishing the milk. Which brings us to...

  4. Economic realities, sociological effects, 
     propaganda and psychological operations.

Yeah, great. Your car can drive itself around 24/7 earning a passive income for you while you surf the internet, and bandy about more great ideas. You and 20 million other people are all doing the same thing. This has a transformative effect in aggregate. Your car works as advertised. No bugs. No accidents. No injuries. A perfect driving record. But there could be deeper sociological ramifications to the introduction of such technology that is unanticipated, and thus hard to envision. Did Facebook drastically augment the outcome of an election, if not willfully then perhaps by sin of omission? Would we have imagined such a conversation in 1999, before the dot com bust? Why didn't AOL produce this sort of acrimony? So, if uber's gig economy and side hustle isn't disruptive, while we work out the kinks that run over pedestrians, what about the decentralized mastodon for self driving side hustles? What about self driving transoceanic zeppelins, over international waters, than launch their own weather satellites? Who will stop them from polluting low earth orbit?

Some of this isn't about software bugs. Some of it is behavior and psychology.

Sounds like stop-and-frisk TSA pat-down security theater. This is not the kind of concept that I'd ever expect to withstand a determined adversary.

Especially for machine learning scenarios, don't expect a show of force to prove as an adequate deterent. Posture and presumptive correctness aren't enough to protect you from entities ignorant of fear and indifferent to wastefulness.

This is a flawed concept from the outset. You either have appliances, or computational platforms.

Turing-complete systems are arbitrarily flexible as a matter of principle.

If the firmware can be altered; if any addressable memory can be changed, and a system relies on an internet connection for maintenance and support, it is an unreliable system.