gnode

> Not sure how one would even measure the "intelligent behavior" that you mention.

I meant behaviour in the general psychological / cognitive sense; how an actor responds to stimuli.

Current popular IQ tests are designed to test many facets of intelligent behaviour -- verbal comprehension, arithmetic, working memory, symbol searching, etc. Abstract problem solving is only one category of testing.

I'm arguing that to study short-term cognitive deficits, it makes more sense to use other measures of cognition. It appears this is actually what was done, but this was incorrectly re-reported as "IQ".

> Why wouldn't IQ tests be great for studying short term cognitive effects?

IQ testing is designed to test for intelligent behaviour, which is largely based on long-term neurological development. The connections in the brain, densities of neurons, and long-term potentiations don't change greatly on a short-term basis. Measures which fluctuate based on spot-performance factors are typically deemed unreliable for the purpose of IQ testing.

Cognitive deficits caused by exposure to drugs and other substances tend to impact functioning of the neurons, and are detrimental to measures of intelligence, but are more appropriately measured by more specific tests, which focus on factors such as reaction time, or motor accuracy. Consider the cognitive tests performed by police when driving under the influence of alcohol is expected, for instance. Such cognitive tests also help provide a clearer picture of how a substance affects the brain.

These goals blur together. R&D effort, and usage of die area are all justified by market potential. Knowing how large the market for a technology or tradeoff actually is has value.

> I'd hope this could be measured without collecting a ton of personal data.

Intel's claim is that they don't: "we would like your permission to collect [...] The categories of websites you visit, but not the URL itself" also the privacy safeguarding statement at the top of the page.

The whole purpose of CIP is to gather data on actual users' computing needs. For many computer users, the web is most of their computing experience -- it seems appropriate therefore to include usage of the web in the program.

Much like any customer experience study, privacy is an issue. Intel do at least claim to be mitigating the impact to privacy.

I think the anecdotal comment was actually meant for a different discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21565841).

> “Sometimes we think crafting the perfect email will be the best way to persuade people,” he said. “But what we find in our work is the voice can be quite impactful.”

Conversely, I think this is a large part of why I agonise over emails, and generally prefer to just go and talk to people. When I talk to someone, my attention is on their reactions, and I choose how to say things in response to that. In writing, I'm speculating about how every word will be perceived, spending effort imagining fictional readers.

Although not about noise pollution, it does bring to mind the question of how well some of these studies might have controlled for the effect of noise pollution, which would likely have an effect on cognition, and correlate with air pollution.

The original post doesn't mention IQ. IQ is a terrible metric for studying short-term cognitive effects.

Or more analogously, how the agricultural lobby opposes legislation on immigration, animal welfare, and food standards.

Google et al often stand to benefit from privacy regulations (e.g. GDPR), because they can bear the cost of compliance, while smaller competitors copying their business model can't. Increased costs in return for a stronger monopoly.

It seems that's partly the case here: they want more legislation, but also want to make sure it won't hurt them.

I think buboard was referring to how the most prominent voices heard in political discourse today are not humans speaking for themselves, but corporate entities; lobbyists (correct me if my interpretation is wrong).

It makes perfect sense to me. Electric cars from traditional manufacturers have a reputation as substandard vehicles for green activists, largely owing to the compliance car.

Ford want to emphasise that this car has a focus on performance and is for enthusiasts. It needs to gain that perception to sell well in the market segment it's aimed at. Ford's generic branding doesn't come with that perception, but Mustang does.

You should turn it off; others won't, and their sacrifice will help Intel design products for real world usage.

Usage data could be very useful for decisions on what to dedicate die area to, and how to price products.

They might find that a market segment doesn't do a lot of playing 3D games, but does spend a lot of time watching Youtube on battery, and so make the decision to drop integrated GPU shader cores and dedicate more die area to video decoding, to make energy efficiency better when watching video.

Human drivers have less sensory capability than a machine driver can have, but we compensate with situational awareness from general intelligence.

For a machine, direct sensory knowledge of what's solid and how far away everything is has a lot more added value.

If the machine driver sees something it has little experience with, it can't reason about its properties, but if it knows it's a solid object in its path, it can take action in spite of that.

"It's not a bug, it's a feature."

Going beyond the obvious motive of child car seat manufacturers wanting to undermine the second-hand market, I expect design flaws could also play a part.

In case there is a flaw, e.g. poisons; unexpected decay of material strength; mold growth, then it's good to reduce the number of the old product around in case it's discovered, and a lawsuit manifests. Possibly the expiration could even mitigate damages in case of liability.

While superfluous product expiry is generally useful for selling more of any kind of product, a safety device for children is exactly the kind of product where mitigating liability from latent design flaws would be desirable for a manufacturer.

Basalt fibre reinforced concrete looks promising. The tensile strength is greater than steel rebar, and inexpensive when compared to carbon fibre. The environmental impact is much lower, as it's a melting process similar to fibreglass production, rather than smelting.

I get the impression that the continued use of steel rebar is less because there aren't superior technical solutions, but because there are significant regulatory, training and qualification hurdles. Use of non-steel rebars seems to complicate projects, and is only justifiable in special situations. Steel is usually adequate when appropriate anti-corrosion measures are taken (such as coating the rebar in epoxy).

Reactors primarily use uranium, but plutonium is routinely used in the form of mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel (about thirty reactors in Europe, at least). One reason is to spend the plutonium from decommissioned nuclear weapons.

Using MOX in conjunction with thorium is also being tested to improve the void coefficient, making reactor operation more stable and safe.

Despite nuclear being statistically the safest power source per electrical energy generated, people will always complain that it isn't perfect, and that we must wait for X speculatively perfect technology to be developed before we can stop melting Antarctica and choking on smog.

I don't think the concern here is the abuses of companies, or technologies like mobile phones. The concern is technologies like thermonuclear weapons (much worse than even nuclear weapons used against Japan), which we are just very lucky have so far not been used in earnest. I think it is a commonly-understood truth that those technologies present an existential threat to society, if not all humanity.

Artificial intelligence is assumed by many to present such a threat (i.e. Terminator-style intelligence singularity scenario). Many speculate that applications enabled by quantum computing could also be similarly dangerous.

> find 1-3 bad non-ECC DIMMs

The problem of faulty memory is separate and can be addressed by memory testing (which can even be run while computers are online).

My understanding is that ECC's main purpose is to guard against corruption of non-faulty memory, due to ionising radiation for instance. It's rare for this to be a problem in normal scenarios (not in space or high-altitude), and use cases.

I'm not sure that it's a bad thing that regulation has made it hard to compete at surveillance capitalism. Arguably, a few accountable, regulated companies is better than many judgement-proof, unregulated ones, with zero being better than that.

The GDPR applies to all companies, and it makes it hard for a startup to do what Google does, but it doesn't make it hard to do what DuckDuckGo does.

> Too bad they didn't just let objects take anything as a key

They do, except they get coerced to strings in whacky ways. Objects can be used largely like arrays, and Arrays are Objects, but Array is more suited for an ordered collection of numerically indexed elements, and so has relevant properties and methods, like length and indexOf.

Stability was the main issue. My personal experience is that the kernel would crash frequently and unpredictably. If I remember correctly, this would depend to a large extent on drivers, and so vary depending on your hardware. The kernel and driver model design is based on the legacy Windows 9x family, rather than Windows NT (like its successors).

Apparently, according to Wikipedia: "Although Windows 9x features memory protection, it does not protect the first megabyte of memory from userland applications. This area of memory contains code critical to the functioning of the operating system, and by writing into this area of memory an application can crash or freeze the operating system. This was a source of instability as faulty applications could accidentally write into this region and with that halt the operating system"

As it was aimed exclusively at home users, various features aimed at enterprise (but often desirable to power users) were stripped out or broken.

I don't think this is a problem specific to autism. Schools, at best, are focused on preparing people for employment, or, more typically, on preparing students for exams. Neurotypical students are set up poorly to manage their mental and physical health, finances, relationships, etc.

Other forms of preparation for life: social skills; financial skills; political engagement; health, are rarely prioritised.

Giving autistic children help with academic learning and disruptive behaviour is conventional, as it is for all students (albeit with special measures and allowances made). Other life skills are neglected, as they are for all students.

> there's absolutely no reason to ever consider a stablecoin

Although Tether's purpose has largely been to avoid regulation, and participate in cryptocurrency speculation, a stablecoin would be superior for actual commerce. Bitcoin has failed for commerce, to some extent because of instability and speculation.

Being able to use something equivalent to cash to transact digitally, with client-side security seems like a desirable technology to me.

> How many node developers are going to fire up an alternative operating system and learn a new debugger to be able to find a memory leak?

I don't think this is much of a barrier, especially when "fire up" means: run a VM instance. Using various VMs and/or containers for development is already a common workflow.

I think the unfamiliarity of Illumos for most developers would be more of a barrier.

You portray encryption as a magical energy. To the best understanding of cryptanalysis research, current TLS is secure. Hypothetically it could be broken and publicly unknown, but this is not a matter of "power".

> the other endpoint

It's not sensible to say encrypted web traffic is snooped on by an actor with direct access to the plaintext.

As I suggested at the end, you could still employ OCR and have a barcode checksum. The checksum would ensure a misread of the human readable text would fail. As long as the checksum was not error-correcting (so could not be engineered to augment a correct OCR read), it doesn't matter that it is incomprehensible to humans, because the OCR is authoritative.

You could also implement the checksum as OCR-able text, although it wouldn't be as dense, and probably wouldn't help human readability.

I think ultimately it should not be trusted that a machine will read what a code appears to be. That should be enforced on the device: "Are you sure you want to visit malware.site?". It's also easy to manipulate computer vision; you can engineer patterns which will read as one thing to humans, but another to machines. In some ways it's better for these codes to not be human readable, such that trust is not misplaced, and the machine is used as the best source of truth.

This seems to be the worst of both worlds. It's not easy for a human to read a square (compared to a line of text). The pixellated font is also not easily readable compared to a vector font. It's also not easy for machines to read an optical coding with no spatially distributed redundancy.

QR codes and bar codes are brilliant for machines because misreads due to some spurious reflection or spec of dust is mitigated by error correction.

I feel like this problem is already well served by bar codes which have a human readable text representation below them (e.g. serial number stickers).

That said, I can see the security advantage of the computer reading the same representation as a human, although this is probably not the best place to enforce security. As there's no integrity check, there's little guarantee the computer will read what you see though. Maybe linear OCR combined with a barcode checksum would be a better way to achieve these goals.