maxander

Shareholders aren’t incentivized to act in the company’s long-term interest; only to maximize apparent growth for as long as they hold the company’s shares. This leads to companies making shortsighted moves that aren’t in their long-term interest, due to shareholder influence.

That’s the other thing- they still would get done. All the jobs we really need would stick around under UBI and we would have people working them. We would just have to pay them more, since their other option wouldn’t be starvation.

This argument works only if you consider those of us lucky enough to have interesting jobs, which we had some hand in choosing. Do you honestly believe that the person who cleans the toilets at your work thinks that this labor gives his life meaning?

[2006]

Also, checking out the abstract of the paper (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5800/787.long , paywalled, but it must be on scihub if someone has a moment) doesn’t mention extinction of anything. Presumably, predicting the apocalypse would merit a line there, right?

Climate change is real and awful, but hysteric doom-mongering reporting about it does far more harm than good. Compare the D.A.R.E. model of communicating about drugs to people.

Soon they’ll be A/B testing stealth designs. “Model AST—12-7 flying over NYC generated 23 reports of UFO sightings, whereas model TYR-X3 generated 5 along the same route; moving forward, we should adopt TYR-X3 for all chemtrail operations...”

From the description:

> Matter is confined energy, bound within fields, frozen in a quantum of time.

> Polarization of the local vacuum is analogous to manipulation/modification of the local space tie topological lattice energy density.

> If we can engineer the structure of the local quantum vacuum state, we can engineer the fabric of our reality at the most fundamental level

If real physics sounded that cool, it would convince me I took the wrong major in college. :)

Childless? AFAIK, the politicians holding back educational spending and maternity leave reform are mostly parents (mostly fathers.) The word you’re looking for is “rich.” :)

I get what you’re trying to say, but I’m not sure there’s such a thing as the “syntactic definition” of a word.

Symbolic AI and ML/DL AI are two entirely different technologies with different capabilities and applications, that both happen to be called "AI" for mostly cultural reasons. The success of one is probably unrelated to the success or failure of another. In most ways, symbolic AI has "faded" simply in that we now take most of its capabilities for granted; e.g., it never strikes you as odd that Google Maps can use your phone CPU to instantly plot a course for a cross-country roadtrip if you so desire, but that sort of thing was a major research project way back when.

In contrast, ML/DL AI is still shiny and new and we have a much less clear grasp of what its ultimate capabilities are, which makes it a ripe target for research.

For reference, there’s about 500 trillion square meters of land area on the planet; so even if trees are crowded together one per square meter, this is talking about a 500th of that.

But perhaps we can find a way to make the Sahara into a forest? That’s about what it would take.

A very abstract idea of its relevance, insofar as I understand it; engineering generally boils down to putting together available things to create some whole, and category theory gives a vocabulary for describing how things (considered very abstractly) can be put together.

So for instance, one of the big applications to CS is in type systems, which describe what kinds of expressions/values can be put together, and in what ways, to create valid programs.

Well, if prices don't drop, those 100k people will be paying something like a billion a year in rent (and/or condo mortgages,) making it probably one of the most high-return investments possible. There's not really a downside.

Ack! >_<. Thinking about an “European country with a coffee habit,” I guess my brain was predisposed to think about Sweden.

If Sweden were cut off from the world and forced to defend itself, I would hope its defenders wouldn’t simultaneously be fighting caffeine withdrawal. There’s your strategic justification.

Of course, if Sweden were under serious attack, it would likely mean that Russia was moving against NATO, and the world would be on the brink of apocalyptic nuclear war. But you wouldn’t want two problems. :)

I belatedly realize that almost everything I said in this thread was wrong, but it’s too late to delete it! The HN edit rules are cruel.

The “Hyper Suprime-cam” instrument came online in 2012, so it’s not new, and was presumably calibrated against well-understood targets; so its light-detection capabilities have been well tested. The physics of gravitational lensing is also well understood and verified, so they know what light they’re looking for.

If you can test each part of a system independently, and the parts connect in a reasonably trivial fashion, it’s about as good as testing the whole.

Well, maybe we're using different terms- as the article notes, there's technically no such thing as a "such-and-such speed impact." I was speaking in terms of how much kinetic energy is liable to go towards damaging the cars involved (or into the fireball of a particle collision); in that case, if you have X energy in two cars, or 2X energy in one and 0 in the other, the sum is the same.

If we consider debris or etc flying away after the collision, then you're right that they're different- the combined velocity of the two cars is 0mph in the both-moving case and 140mph (in some direction) in the one-moving case, and the velocity of all the debris will sum to that velocity. (And the sum of velocities would be weighted appropriately if one of the cars was more massive than the other.)

No, I don't think so- two cars impacting head-on at 70mph would have a "140mph impact," insofar as that it would be essentially equivalent to one car traveling at 140mph hitting a stationary car.

Certainly, I concur- the tofu is definitely better. :)

Sadly, we live in a world where everyone knows how to skillfully prepare beef, but no one knows how to do the same thing with tofu. I think that accounts for the difference. (Useful experiment: try a piece of raw beef, and then a piece of raw tofu. They’re both equally bad!)

A bunch of the projects described, and the (technical) difficulties encountered, make me wonder if GPT-2-style systems would have better odds. Is anyone looking into applying that to medical/scientific text NLP problems?

I mean, GPT-2 still often produces nonsense more similar to dream imagery than useful reasoning, but I gather most medical residency students are half-asleep most of the time anyway, so... :)

Noodles and fried tofu takes no longer to cook than a steak, and is just as good. A big pot of curried lentils can be set up in ten minutes, let simmer for about an hour, and lasts all week. Tacos with refried beans instead of hamburger is a straightforward substitute. The list goes on. (Nor am I sure that any of those are significantly less caloric than the equivalent meat dishes.)

I suspect that most people who think they can’t manage a vegetarianism, by experience or otherwise, are making the mistake of thinking that a “vegetarian diet” consists of just the vegetarian side-dishes familiar from a meat-eating diet. That is not true, and if you try to do it that way, of course it’s not going to work. A proper diet finds foods that fill the role of meat, one way or another.

> Computer scientists should be involved in the R&D process from its very beginning, not just as sophisticated data analysts. Starting from the design of the wet-lab experiments — where the data is being generated. This is because we, as computer scientists understand that data is the most important resource. Your model, whether it is an incredibly sophisticated CGAN or a logistic regression is as good as your data.

This is the key point in the article. There's lots of bioinformatics and computational biology work being done, but the vast majority of it winds up being of questionable use- either because the researcher didn't understand the biological system well enough to make an appropriate model, or because the biologists at the bench didn't understand the analytical problems well enough to collect the right kind of data.

The typical model of research is "design experiment -> collect data -> analyze data -> results", and when each step is being done by different people, with different training and no input into each other's work, it's tremendously wasteful. It's the science equivalent of the waterfall method, except that instead of technical debt you wind up with dubious publications.

The “trick” was to add fake lane markings; did they test to see how many human drivers are susceptible to the same attack?

Remember that temperature does not indicate energy. A graphene layer is a tiny amount of mass per surface area, so a absorbing single (small-c) calorie of energy would be enough to raise a patch of graphene to outrageous temperatures- but, you'd still only be able to get that single calorie back out, which wouldn't do much to a liter of seawater or whatever.

For that matter, it doesn't seem like they specify under what conditions this heating is taking place. Fire a high-powered laser at something and you might see that behavior in a variety of materials.

The classic demonstration of superposition is the double-slit experiment [0], where an experimenter shines a (coherent) light through a pair of slits at a screen (or fires a stream of electrons through a pair of slits, or small particles- it works with anything.) Because light is waves [1], light coming through one slit will interfere with light coming through the other slit, producing an interference pattern. But weirdly, this still happens if you turn the light source down so low that it emits only one photon at a time. In that case, the photon is in a superposition that travels through both slits, and the interference is between "the part of the superposition going through the right slit" and "the part of the superposition going through the left slit."

So it's not a matter of our being unable to make detailed enough measurements; we can actually observe phenomena that directly indicate superposition happens.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment [1] And so are electrons, particles, humans, etc.

Blockchain to CSV, realistically.

Perhaps blockchains’ lasting impact will be as an overused plot device in future period pieces set in the early 21st century.

Well, yes, NIMBYism is a thing. But most oil and gas operations, while they take up less space, are more than toxic and smelly enough to make up the difference- and pipelines are regularly routed through public lands, skirting highly populated zones, in the face of massive public opposition. The reason those get built where renewables don't is simply that the oil industry is massive and knows how to work the necessary politics.

The renewable industry will need cultivate its clout, and learn to work the system just like the oil players have- and then, NIMBYism and lack of space will just mysteriously cease to be problems.

We're already sending out a signal into the cosmos (and one more powerful than the radar signals others have mentioned)- the recent sharp upswing in CO2 over the last hundred or so years [0] would look markedly artificial, which combined with the presence of oxygen (which wouldn't stay in the atmosphere if it weren't continually renewed) strongly indicates at least a complex ecosystem, if not directly implicating an industrial civilization. Detecting light reflected from exoplanets is something we can already do, or nearly so, so we can count on this being detectable from large distances by alien civilizations with access to potentially megastructure-scale space telescopes. At that point, any reasonably curious or concerned ETs could send a probe to get a closer look.

Earth, as far as we know, is an unusual planet, and obviously so. Either we're wrong, and there's Earths all over the place, or we're alone, or ET has been keeping an eye on us for a long time already; that we're "hidden" is hard to imagine.

[0] https://www.co2.earth/co2-ice-core-data

There is a way to avoid this kind of problem; have sufficiently complicated syntax that most random permutations caused by "fat-fingering" are incorrect. Python's problem is that the syntax is so minimalist, and the semantics so rich, that any random typo is liable to do something.

For what it's worth, I think Python's approach here is the right one (at least, for Python.) As others have noted, the common answer to this among Python users is to just use a linter to catch these kinds of issues, although I find that unsatisfying- linters can't catch everything, and they require you to have your stuff together well enough to use them (e.g., you can't be a student who is already overwhelmed with the bare necessary stack.) There are things that seem like they could be done to alleviate these kinds of problems within the language itself; most obviously, for the particular problem in the OP, a variable annotation expression could require the right-hand to be a type expression. It's not clear to me why these kinds of moves aren't taken.