electrograv

https://mobile.twitter.com/ABC/status/936805557029048321

You’ll probably want to pick another day to sarcastically mock people who distrust the “mainstream media”.

I’m glad ABC formally retracted this “fake news”, but the fact that it existed at all is deeply disturbing and profoundly irresponsible and incompetent reporting from ABC and others.

Can someone clarify why this is bad (working with Russia to fight ISIS), to someone who is very out of the loop on the whole issue?

Seriously, why is this bad for Trump? I understand Flynn is guilty of lying, and will likely see jail time for it, but that’s a separate issue. The above quote seems to describe what presidents are ordinarily supposed to do — work with other global powers to cooperate towards shared interests (like destroying ISIS).

Even beyond that though, there is something to be said for seeking to approach perfection. Nobody is requiring or expecting perfection, but when someone offers an easy way to get closer to it, it will rub many the wrong way when someone rebukes the helpful suggestion with the excuse of “good enough is fine, so stop providing helpful product improvement advise!” This is how you achieve mediocrity.

Person(s) act to cover up a data breach -> Individual criminal liability -> A long time in federal PRISON.

A data breach is disclosed -> Massive FINES on the company (up to and including liquidating and shutting the company down), but no personal liability or criminal charges.

So, the only really hard part of this problem is the political will (vs lobbying / powerful people) to implement law at all to address this. Until we start taking privacy and data leaks VERY SERIOUSLY from the perspective of liability, nothing will happen. Sadly, to me this means nothing will happen :(

I always enjoy reading analysis/ideas/intuitions about how the brain works, because it provides inspiration for machine learning improvements that can be applied in the real world.

That said, I’m still optimistically waiting for Numenta (and Geoff Hinton’s capsule theory) to set the new bar at one of the many difficult image/speech/language/etc recognition challenges.

Ideas are great, but at the end of the day science moves forward when we measure our ideas against reality. (To the credit of this paper, it does make a series of predictions, though those seem extremely difficult to measure in biological systems for the time being.)

Regarding the human element of dining: I think you lack foresight. We will look back at human waiters as we now look at horses, vs modern cars. People still ride horses, and that’s fine, but to suggest they’re the only way or even the best way to go is just archaic and indiciative of an unhealthy level of denial, or a calcified brain unable to change. Open your mind.

I’m sorry, but that actually sounds like a wonderfully peaceful way to dine.

I really hate to bring this up, but "no mass shootings" does not equal "no mass deaths". There have been plenty of attacks in Europe to great effect without guns being used -- for example, the truck attack in Nice, Paris is still unrivaled by any gun massacre in America.

We shouldn't play semantic games / statistical filtering games with phrases like "reducing gun violence" and "reducing mass shootings"; I think we all can agree that our collective goal as decent human beings is work towards reducing violence/harm/death, period. Why qualify it on only gun attacks -- other than for political reasons?

If banning guns indeed reduces mass killings overall (again, it's rather a red herring to say your only goal is to reduce mass shootings rather than mass killings in general), then by all means let's work towards that.

But the data so obviously shows this to be a false correlation: Right now Europe is if anything the poster-child of why gun control doesn't work, with all the truck and bomb attacks. Again, I hate to bring this up, but so often Europeans use this as a common insult to Americans but I see this as a rather strong case of cognitive dissonance.

So yeah, I’m pretty happy to call this a “design bug” in the entire language. Those kinds of bugs are hard to fix, because you need the whole C++ committee to fix this, and we all know how bad design-by-committee performs.

So just switch to Rust :)

In short: If you do not have the right to defend a thing, you do not truly own it. If I give you an apple, but say “you’re not allowed to stop me if I try to take it back”, then you do not truly own the apple. Even if I continue to let you have the apple, ultimately I remain the sole owner of the apple (despite any illusions of the contrary) because I have the exclusive power over it. This applies to the self as well; if you do not have the right to effectively defend yourself, you are effectively owned by your government.

If only your government has the authority to physical force towards defense of your property and yourself, then it is your government that truly owns you and ‘your’ property. All notions of ownership you may have are illusory, in the absence of such rights to defense.

Now in China, at least there is no illusion of freedom. Everyone knows they are owned by the government.

Edit: The 'undefined' clause here is due to invoking a function at address 0, rather than any lack of variable initialization (since global variables are automatically initialized to 0, as the poster below points out).

Does ONNX aim to serve as a human-readable and human-maintainable network description for experimentation and research, or does ONNX aim to serve only as a model export interchange format (primarily to be machine-interpreted)?

This could serve very well in the latter case, but would be quite problematic in the former -- where conditionals, for loops, etc. are essential to a compact and readable representation of many network architectures.

Reading a static neural network architecture descriptor of a very deep neural network is akin to reading assembly code from a compiler that does loop unrolling. Static network descriptions work great when pushing a model to production, but are much less suitable for the research and development stages (IMO).

Most humans have not spontaneously invented new usable alphabets, so I suppose that means most humans haven't meet the bar for true intelligence either.

I still don't understand this obsession for trying to define "hard AI" or "true intelligence" in binary terms. Intelligence is a spectrum, and deep learning has advanced it forward, thus making machines more intelligent -- yes, we can use that word 'intelligent' for computers just as we do for biological machines. Don't freak out.

Is it really so hard to accept that intelligence isn't all-or-nothing?

Perhaps you'll require the Turing+++ test be conducted with audio rather than text. Then it will be video. Then a physical android. Then it will need to prove itself better than the human in an IQ test. Then it will need to pass various real world success tests, because IQ tests are too synthetic. But those won't be good enough either, so it will have to live 80+ years as a human in the real world without being discovered. But that's not enough, because maybe its life was too easy -- the real human experience is characterized by pain and suffering as well as joy, so we'll also need it to somehow prove its experience is more real. And on and on and on. It's always something else -- with every step forward, the success will be dismissed and the goalpost will move forward.

I should say this isn't intrinsically a bad thing, since it pushes us to advance the field of AI more and more. But IMO this is too often promoted as a pessimistic criticism of the AI field, rather than an encouraging push of optimism.

Why must this notion of binary "true intelligence" exist, anyway? Can't we see that intelligence is a spectrum (most likely with multiple dimensions of proficiency), and AI is continuously advancing upwards?

  > AI techniques, which are good at learning what is "in the data" 
  but have not yet been shown to be capable of thinking outside the box

  > AIs would be highly vulnerable

  > exploitable quirks in the AI

  > established lack of robustness of neural nets

  > clever human players will be quick to exploit them

Due to this mystical "cleverness" attributed exclusively to humans, I'm not convinced a majority of humans will ever allow machines to be considered 'intelligent', no matter how far the technology advances. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.

The rear peep sight on rifles take advantage of actual "optical effects", without any glass -- much like a pinhole camera can actually magnify images without any lenses or mirrors at all.

By simply providing an arbitrarily small "aperature" you're looking through in the rear, the front-rear sight alignment problem is not only capped at an upper bound of error (defined by the peephole size and sight radius), but the actual error from front-rear sight misalignment is visually magnified and centered through a fixed viewing point, making it vastly easier to keep the actual error near zero.

So generally, to achieve precision within the (small) upper bound of error with a peephole sight, all you need to do is place the front sight post on the target when looking through the rear peep sight. Even better precision is made much easier via a sort of "peephole camera" effect through the aperature of the rear sight.

Shooting accurately is much more than just physically holding the barrel steady; it's a whole "symphony" of coordination, involving physical, visual and mental components.

I grew up in a household with relatively little income, where you barely have enough for food and housing. I cannot imagine being in that situation and spending much on random next day delivery luxuries from Amazon - you literally would starve. The first thing on my mind would be upgrading from beans and rice to other foods, etc... that sort of thing.

Buying into luxuries only really occurs when you exceed the ability to provide for basic needs. Basic income if implemented will be tuned to provide basic needs, not luxuries -- the only time I see this changing is in a distant future post-scarcity economy.

(Even more, I love how we're seeing some convergence here: no-compromise improvements to weak spots on each "side" of the programming language spectrum.)

So new models like "dark matter" or "MOND" are all just different models that model observations better than prior theories but currently have the problem of being difficult to unify with the rest of theoretical physics.

But no matter what scheme we propose, I do worry that this would become an adversarial "gaming" situation a bit like hackers vs DRM -- no matter what the rules/criteria to reduce dangerous emissions, manufacturers will employ people specifically to circumvent them in any and all ways possible. This isn't to say we should stop trying to curb emissions -- just that they must be ongoing and open to change and adaptation to new "attack vectors".

If you want a denser read (less setup, etc.) that also has a lot of really thought-provoking concepts, I highly recommend also "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. Blindsight is probably my all time favorite scifi novel, actually.

That is a very strong claim I would love to see substantiated. What is an emotion (like sadness) without an animal capable of experiencing that emotion? Does the author claim that emotions like sadness are metaphysical, or at least, transcend human physiology?

What if we discovered an animal or alien species incapable of experiencing "sadness" as we do? The quoted statement seems to preclude this as a possibility, which is a very strong assumption.

> Aesthetic vision apprehends the universe as an immanent field of living forces. All of reality is ensouled, willful, alive. Small wonder, then, that works of art present the world as innately sentient.

Alive? Innately sentient? Citation needed.

This article is filled with emotionally flamboyant language that yields either extremely strong and testable claims, or useless drivel.

What if each particle/object has its own relative time frame? Doesn't that solve the problem without needing to invoke "retro-temporal causality"?

For example, in the double slit experiment, perhaps the wave/particle and the slits form a local time frame group, within which no further waveform collapse is necessary. When this group interacts with the "environment", it may or may not have to collapse a large set of possibilities into a smaller set. If that environment includes a system which requires particle-like behavior, the interaction resolves to particle like behavior (as opposed to wave interference). The interaction of the "slit-particle/wave group" with the "environment group" would be a "synchronization event" of sorts which actually determines "causality". No backward time travel necessary if the "arrowed" forward motion of time is the act of waveform collapse. Causality of this sort would affect trajectories we perceive as spanning into the "past" (because we tend to want to view time as globally synchronized), even if in reality that whole past-present trajectory was just a superposition of all possibilities, until resolved via interaction of other "quantum timeframes".

Does that make sense to anyone else? Apologies if this is obviously true or false -- I'm not a physicist, but do love thinking/learning about this stuff :)