667 karma · joined February 20, 2011
I have a React Native app in App Center and it works great.
I'm concerned what happens when human-sized combat robots become capable of defeating a trained and motivated human opponent. Such a thing is certainly a way off, but requires no fundamental advances in our understanding (very much unlike skynet/singularity-style general AI) so I see it as a certainty sooner or later, and the way everything is going probably sooner.
Throughout human history, the inherent power the rich have over the poor has had an equally-inherent counterpower: there are many more poor people, and if the rich make things too miserable for them, if they all rise up together, they will win. To my knowledge this is a universal in human history (please prove me wrong!), and in general tyrants and elites everywhere have to devote SOME of their resources at least to maintaining the 'general welfare', which is really a nice way of saying 'giving the poor enough to stop them rising up and taking our stuff'.
If robots become capable of beating serious human opponents one-on-one, then I think this age-old balance changes, because once you can build one such robot, you can build a hundred thousand, and what are the poor people going to do about that?
I always found it disappointing that even the best mechanical watches drift by around a second a day. I guess growing up with software has given me unrealistic mechanical expectations :)
If you have 3 people working on this, presumably you have an actual product on the way, care to share more?
Everyone living nearby knew what the base was and what it was for. When I asked my dad about it, he said "We use it to watch Mr. Gorbachev eating his cornflakes". Now 'we' use it to watch Mr. Al-Baghdadi eating his cornflakes instead.
Don't make the mistake of thinking the majority of the British public disapproves of NSA/GCHQ's capabilities and actions. They're more likely to be proud of them.
Looking forward to trying it out.
I think 3D printers will go the same way. How many little plastic parts does the average consumer ever want to print? Probably not enough, and not rapidly enough, to justify a big purchase, when they can pay per-item at a (physical or online) Kinkos equivalent and get a higher-quality part printed on a machine like this.
Especially if you're not eighteen any more like me.
Some technical solutions might be possible, in terms of allowing users provably to withdraw their data, but it would be messy and probably not bulletproof.