logicrook

Really? It seems to me that downvotes are used very negatively, as they are put a strong incentive (for most people) not to express unpopular opinions, even if they are good comments. If they were used only to discourage low quality posts, it wouldn't change a lot, since the most upvoted comments would still be to the top.

He suggests to remove lives for spam/harassment, not for shitposting. So basically, positive loop+ draconian enforcement of essential rules, and no negative loop.

Thank you, for the excellent rephrasing.

>But Go (and tetris etc) are games of perfect information where perception of the game state is not a challenge.

In general, "perception of the game state" is not a challenge, at least according to good game design principles (e.g. in danmaku shmups, perception can be a challenge because of visual effects that are not really part of the game, but this is seen as poor game design, similarly to how being unable to differentiate backgrounds from platforms in a run&jump is bad design). Although there are games where the perception of the game state is a game mechanic, but Doom isn't really one.

But even in Doom, you can separate quite neatly the two tasks. The vision task essentially aims to reconstruct a model of the world. But in a video-game, this model comes for free. You can trivially limit the information an agent get to what he would get as a player (in games like MGS it's already the case, albeit in a very simplistic way). It's fairly easy to make a function that computes what is visible, what sounds a player would hear, etc. You can then rephrase the problem as make an AI that can only access this function, and this wouldn't change anything.

So for the AI community, I think a more interesting question would have been to design an AI over such a function.

The question seems flawed, as having an AI making decisions only based on visual information is basically confusing how you get the information (visual) and what information the AI get (only limited information, similar to what the player has). Two different problems that can be solved completely independently. The first problem makes no sense for a game (how intensive would be the computation), while the latter one could be very interesting, since it would rely on designing the AI more like a natural player. The catch however is that it's a "could", in itself there is no reason to imagine such AIs would make the game better in any way (over "cheating" AI's).

This is brilliant. I so wish I enrolled for an ethology PhD now...

And the thread concerning that much better model: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11403653

I agree with most of your comment, but here are two nitpicks.

>This is what makes the cult of science dangerous, not the word "bitches".

Nobody said that, so there's no need to burn your strawman there.

Science is all about the method and proper use of critical thinking, so you could assume it is a direct contradiction to have a vapid attitude of shitty reposts of forced-meme-tier macros that are often inaccurate, without trying to think about it an instant because it's nice virtue signaling (IFL in a nutshell). But you're right, he could write it explicitly.

There's a nice writeup of this problem on the language log [0], arguing that science is basically filling the role of biblical parables.

>Woo-pushers have appropriated the vocabulary of science indistinguishable to a layperson.

They are not responsible for that, and honestly, nobody is. Recently, I read the description of some machine learning algorithm that was filled with buzzwords and dubious physics analogies to a point that I thought it was a clever Sokal, but after some reading all of it was genuine. That's just how jargon works, you assume that the one who using it understands what he is saying, as long as he's using it seemingly properly, but you can't know unless you have a sufficiently good grasp of the semantics.

[0]http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003847.h...

Another human activity where avant-garde is fully indistinguishable from straight parody. Such a world we live in.

The takeaway should be to keep some sane garde-fou principle, such as "form follows function", and use it as unit test before rolling out a design/product/...

Nothing to do with the movie, but I thought his autistic aspects to be violently hilarious when reading more about him. He seemed to be at times completely oblivious of social implications and rules, which gave many great anecdotes to punctuate his life.

To rephrase you question, do you prefer something stupid, or something stupid that pretends to be clever (and sully something you like)?

Also, false dichotomy.

>HN is what we make it.

Exactly, and certainly there are other people who would like to see more of that in first page, but you just can't bash useful comments, so even with good intentions you can be part of the problem (talking for myself).

Thank you for this comment, and again for resubmitting this.

Oh thanks, that looks pretty interesting, and will distract from shitposting on random pop-science/political quasi-journalism articles for a while. It seems that it was the purpose of HN, but I'm not sure anymore.

However, it is unfortunately hard to make relevant comments on such articles. As the introduction says, it's pretty quick to set everything up (just one apt-get away), the clean racket syntax allows to define a calculus very neatly, but that's a far cry from being able to say much about it. I think I'll try to follow the tutorial with a classical calculus (λμ) and see how that turns out, but that's going to take some time. So here goes "This was posted once before by HN user 'ingve' but didn't get much attention".

> renders -> photoshop clarification was genuinely more useful

Except 'the clarification' is wrong. If you have a render, it doesn't mean it's 3D. It can be 3D, 2D, a mixture of both (last is probably the most frequent). It's a render.

This question can be more important than you think, since people may have the wrong expectations when they get a 'render' from the industry. Good post-processing (color balance, a bit of motion blur and other small effects) can work wonders to show off a product (e.g. video-game), while not being so representative of the end result. Which explains then the disclaimers on trailers and screenshots, which are not there to be pedantic.

Anyway, I'm off sending Wittgenstein to the camps.

Renders also mean drawings. Scott Robertson's book "How to render" does not explain how to press the render button in Blender, it explains how to actually draw (render) a concept art.

Usually, people don't feel the same way when thinking about any kind of work; you have to master the basics if you want express something. You need to learn to draw before you can get to the point of expressing yourself via paintings. You need to learn architecture before doing buildings, learn to code to do programs. Yet only the most extreme cases of idiots claim that learning the means of expression stifles expression. Why? I think it boils down to the lack of hard metrics and the link with social issues (the old orwellian fight between classes through language).

I'd say that you're not the only one thinking this way, but some would disagree because that makes you an "uncle tom".

The problem is when parents start seeing baby's poop splatters as artistic expression. The equivalent with computers would be to call bugs features?

>Sorry, the GIMP doesn't replace photoshop

See my other comment and go have a look at Krita.

>Except only MEGAcorp product is competitive.

Are you denying the existence of VLC, Firefox, and other successful OSS?

>Maybe FOSS needs to try harder to compete with MEGAcorp product instead of mocking people.

Who in free software has been mocking you? Is it that trolly Linus? Darn, he just never stops.

>This is fascinating. The word you're looking for is "features".

This is fascinating. You are confusing "features" with "interacting with closed software".

Want to take an example? Go have a look at Krita. It has so many "cutting edge features" it's impressive, and many people honestly think that it's better than Photoshop. Yet what I would even say is its biggest problem is its inability to open PS brushes. Now if you spent some time on HN, you must have read about the sheer horror that is the PSD format. So it's not just comparing the two softwares on an objective basis.

The point I'm making does not involve Canonical. When discussing a switch to Linux, most people answer with something like "oh but it should support X (MEGAcorp product) so I can't switch". It should support .docx, or whatever latest proprietary protocols. And when this is implemented, there will be a new shiny closed thing to have.

Also, in its current form your comment is just a Perfect Solution Fallacy.

It's a blogpost, made to express an opinion, so he doesn't have to say this. If this was supposed to be a serious article, or was involved in a serious debate, then it would be a different issue.

Second, I have a Firefox phone and no other phone. It's terrible right? Yet I'm happy with it, as it is less buggy than my previous phone, and it actually does what I want. The only thing that I'd like from it would be flac support, but it's something I can get around with a simple script. So, I can see how somebody could be able to live with a Ubuntu phone, and don't need to be paid to say good things about it.

Also, not throwing money at Apple/Google/Microsoft is a a big motivation, and a great pleasure.

Problem I have: I am dependent on MEGAcorp. MEGAcorp does not like freedom. So free solutions are not good.

Do you see the problem?

I agree with basically everything you said, yet I take quite a few pictures during my trips; a cheap phone shot that takes as little time as possible, that may be awfully blurry and with horrible colors, but that is enough to get the relevant information. Which is:

- Get a quick access to references that are mentally organized (because of the trip), without having to take time to actually gather the pictures.

- The specific element might not be photographed, or not possible to find at least. Maybe it's the design of some doorknob that's really great, in the middle of the countryside. Good luck finding that on google. Even some painters in the rijksmuseum are impossible to find on the web, so...

- Nothing existing picture may be satisfying. Maybe the specific arrangement of shapes works best from a very specific point of view. Maybe it's because of the lightning conditions. There are many potential reasons.

- You can use the ref without fear of copyright infringement (well, orwellian states would differ, but nearly).

I agree with you. But what if you want to drink pure/purified water? You can do for little to no cost in certain conditions, but for city people there are either bottled water or some purifying systems that can be costly and of various levels of efficiency. Then, how much water does one liter of water costs?

But then you could argue that people don't need to drink purified water, tap water is good enough, lead levels, chlorine levels (etc) are low enough. But this is another question from the previous one, that should also be discussed taking the whole picture into account.

The point he is making is not reduced to that, it is that you should judge things with the same metrics. I.e. how much water is used for bottled water? For running water? How much harmful chemicals can you find in soft drink, bottled water, tap water? (because running water may be very cost-efficient, but it comes with a price, the dizzying quantity of chlorine you can find inside being one).

Just giving one number out of your hat is a dishonest persuasive move (unless everybody already knows the numbers for all the previous questions), precisely because the author knows very well that most people cannot put that number into perspective. This is not a very scientific attitude for something published in a 'scientific' journal.

My comment's intention was to illustrate that the derided sentence simply intended to say "it's abstract". So now, let's see how "The Turing Machine is really a machine, in every practical sense." is false, starting with the Oxford's dictionary definition of machine:

An apparatus using mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task.

So a mathematical notion definitely does not satisfy this definition. An abstract machine is definitely different from a machine. The map is not the territory (or was Korzybski wrong all along?).

>Medicine (and many other "closed" subjects) is widely taught in schools - it is not a secret guild.

We agree, but you could as well say thus that closed software is not really closed since you can learn software in schools. It's different from having easily accessible knowledge, when it's hard to get actual data on many subjects (in some cases, this data is even actually protected by law).

>It's not like CS or math where independent researchers can download a compiler or pick up a notebook and verify or extend other studies, you need years of work and large amounts of money.

It's not so much of a problem. There are enough people out there that are ready to test the ideas and techniques. If you could find say a set of various setups that worked for a set of given conditions (with a good description of costs, encountered issues and output) then you could have people who can test it by themselves while changing the parts they don't like, and contribute their own data. There's a huge amount of money spent on experimenting already, however it's basically all done in a closed manner.

BTW, if you have "the secret guild" feeling out of my comment, it's because discussing with my physician friends, they clearly advocated for some principles in this spirit (irrevocability of the physician's opinion, unilateral defense of their interests regardless of any moral issue, etc). It may vary depending on your country, of course.

I couldn't agree much. If you look outside of CS and mathematics, where FLOSS principles are widely represented, in most domains it is very hard to access the knowledge. Besides the experts protecting their expertise, there are some fields where they actively try to discourage any such dissemination of knowledge to protect the interest of the trade -medicine, where there is also a question of accountability- or to protect society as a whole -the knowledge to make weapons and explosives. Obviously, these are important arguments you have to deal with when trying to convince somebody that open knowledge is a benefit to society. There's also quite a deal of effort that goes into making these resources available, so it's not just a problem of opening things.

Have a look at 'open source ecology', there are things existing, but this is still a long way from getting to the point where CS/math is.

You can also look at Earthships, a fairly utopian idea, and how far they are from embracing openness, despite their proclaimed philosophy.

There's an article with an outrageous title (claiming one's getting towards the goal of simulating existence!) and the top comment is about "he doesn't use version control?!".

That's so HN.

A Turing machine is not really a machine. A TM can simulate the abstraction of a machine, a machine can simulate a TM. You can put bread in your toaster, you can't put the bread in a Turing machine (unless it's a toaster-enhanced TM with a special bread input tape and a temperature oracle).

With this subtitle, there is actually no need for an article.

You have beautifully captured the kind of intellectual emulation that drives people to HN. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that many great research projects started in the comment section. Maybe we should maintain a database of such good stories? MathOverflow has such a thread so why not HN?