mikhael

(just curious if you're willing to share which station that is. i'm sincerely interested in checking it out.)

i can't speak for all rail lines through tokyo - the ones i've taken have been fine. quick searching suggests they're probably mostly fine. the standard for me is not "is it easy?" but "is it possible?" or maybe "is it not a huge pain in the ass?" - it's always cleared that for me. signage could often be better, i'll definitely say that.

tokyo more broadly: it's improving, but yeah, it's nowhere close to 100%. obviously i won't disagree with you there.

and i didn't mean to come off as too harsh. but i imagined someone reading your comment and being deeply discouraged (as i might have been, many years younger) when in reality tokyo has possibly one of the best and most accessible subway systems in the world.

it's not all roses, but outside of the US, most of the world is not so wheelchair-friendly (in my experience and talking to disabled folks, at least). (and don't get me started on NYC, which is just wheelchair-hostile.)

yeah, that's mostly correct, but i don't see it as a barrier. i don't think an elevator needs to be slammed down next to every staircase. if there's a way in, and a way out, i consider that a win. will i lose maybe 5 minutes because the accessible entrance is not in the most convenient location that day? perhaps. but it's just that - an inconvenience.

on the staff support: i don't really see any problem here at all. in fact, i think the service that the staff provides is truly excellent. most lines have nearly level train-to-platform gaps, but if i feel like i need a ramp, i can ask the attendant at the gate, and they will arrange for someone to quickly unfold a portable ramp when the train arrives, and for someone to do the same at the destination, exactly where i arrive. (coming from the US, can i imagine this level of service at any US city? uh, yeah, no.)

i use the subway here nearly everyday - many different routes, not just touristy areas, often to small stations on the outskirts of the city, or other places i haven't been, just for fun. i don't think i've ever seen a station with only one elevator, it's always at least one platform-to-ticket-gate, and one ticket-gate-to-ground (maybe that's what you meant). the worst i've experienced has been a wheelchair-accessible stair lift or escalator (a bit dreadful, but they do work). if you want to do some random sampling, pull up a random station map and check the accessible routes.

(i use a wheelchair.)

i'd be interested learning how you've come up with that - it's disinformation. i'm speaking from extensive, direct experience.

on tokyo train and subway stations specifically: maybe in the past they weren't accessible, but at least since the olympics, they've become so. i believe they're closing in on 100% now.

> Provide fake credentials? Three years behind bars.

this may lose the value of errno, right?

Learning From Data: https://amlbook.com/

> Our commitment? To tirelessly support our customers—zombie, ghost, or otherwise—while maintaining a level of integrity befitting the smallest scandal possible. After all, the abyss awaits us all… but here at MALIBAL, we’ll send you there with a smile.

so, we don't yet have AI good enough to do real work, but we do have AI good enough to punish people for not doing work.

Mostly, I think, we don’t really understand your argument that Intel couldn’t easily replicate the parts needed only for inference.

hopefully this doesn’t sound insulting - have you considered cities outside of the US, like Tokyo or others in Japan?

VSCode can run with its backend in a container:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers

If anyone is interested in supporting the use of technology to assist those with disabilities, you might consider donating to the Seth Teller Memorial Fund: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/PPAT/SethTellerMemorialFund.pdf

it's worth reading some of the early smalltalk/MVC stuff to try to understand how MVC was originally formulated (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~redmiles/ics227-SQ04/papers/KrasnerP...). it can be a little hard to understand, because it's pretty significantly different from how most modern GUI toolkits work, but (as i understand it, not actually having written smalltalk code) at its core it's fairly simple:

Model: business data

View: on-screen representation of Model; reacts to changes in Model to re-draw accordingly

Controller: maps user input to changes in Model; may need to interact with Views, and may pass control through a hierarchy of Controllers, to determine the Model being manipulated

in other words, user-input data flows as: C -> M, and M -> V. i see a Controller modifying a View (rather than just querying it) as impure MVC, and i normally strive to avoid it, even though that's essentially impossible if you're forced to use a platform's GUI toolkit.

i don't think of MVC as having "gone wrong," but rather that the name has been co-opted and the pattern corrupted by so many different people, in many different ways, as to make the original name extremely confusing. iOS' concept of "MVC" drives me crazy. i think it's probably fair to call it MVP (Model-View-Presenter), the difference being that the Presenter can indeed do some of the work of modifying the View. but i still mostly think of this as a hack: the more work that gets shoved into the Presenter, the more complicated it gets.

without having looked at it in much detail, does anyone know how/whether this is related at all to bluespec (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluespec,_Inc.)?

i would argue that we can't accurately infer any likelihood without knowing what the entire probability space is. in the dressing-room example, we are assuming there are not many, many dressing rooms that look similar, and many, many people that look just like us, and many different sets of the same clothes. but that is just an assumption. we have no idea about the probability space of different material universes and how qualia is embedded in them.

i'll admit that that's a convincing argument, but there are ways in which apparent causality can be shown to be illusory. one thought experiment i remember from school involves someone watching a movie in which one character punches another character, and the punched character falls backward. suppose the watcher knows absolutely nothing about how movies are recorded, or re-played, and sees only the lifelike images; then there would be clear, apparent causality of the second character falling over as an effect of being punched by the first. in reality, the only causality is that set up by the mechanics of the movie projector.

i do not believe in materialsm, but i do believe that intention and goals are emergent phenomena. nevertheless, i think that's mostly a separate issue.

it is a false equivalency to say that materialism is false and that it is impossible to build strong AI. if the material world alone can be described by laws of causality, then we should expect to be able to simulate some significant part of it. if it cannot, and if extra-material forces impact the material world, then we may have no hope. but existence of extra-material stuff (which i call "qualia") may or may not assert a force that affects the material world.

if i understand you correctly, you seem to believe that qualia definitely affects physical reality. we don't know whether that's true or whether qualia is just a byproduct of physical reality, and given the probabilistic nature of what we can observe physically, we may never know.

fair enough that maybe i'm not in the target audience. and perhaps i'm too stuck in my own head, writing iOS apps, where i can't imagine general constraint solvers being used to solve a software-design problem (as opposed to an algorithmic problem, where it certainly does make sense). i am genuinely curious - are general constraint solvers useful as a software-design pattern?

are one-way dataflow constraints really any different from the observer pattern? i avoid cycles exactly because i implement it myself, and don't even have a solver, per se. even KVO seems not to handle cycles. and when e.g. i am using auto-layout in IB, even then i am careful to avoid over-constrainedness, even though the solver can settle on a "solution."

while i will go off and read a few of the linked papers, this post doesn't do a great job, in my opinion, of showing a meaningful relationship between generalized constraint solvers and one-way dataflow constraints. i use one-way dataflow constraints because they are simple/natural/expressive. generalized constraint solvers are vastly more general, and i can't see how they would apply in a non-geometric setting. isn't cassowary only really interesting when there are inequalities? when there are only equalities, isn't the system either over-constrained (bad) or not (fine)? (to be fair, i haven't read the cassowary paper.) would i ever want code that expresses an object in terms of an inequality with another object? will i ever care about cyclic graphs of constraints between objects that actually require a solver to determine if they are over-constrained, and will any solver be able to do the right thing without knowing some properties of the constraints (e.g. linearity)? (cycles are the one thing i'm careful to avoid when i write one-way dataflow constraints in e.g. MVC code.)

i wonder whether other cycles would cause the same problem.

In my opinion, the front page should really, really highlight the call-back-and-show-script feature. Sending this out to family and friends, this is the piece I really want them to see.

I read GauntletWizard's point as that such devices are becoming like "brain prostheses." If the device were embedded in your skull/brain, but could be wiretapped, would it be subject to the fifth amendment? If technology develops to read information from another's brain without their consent, would that be subject to the fifth amendment?

The state actually gave a fair amount of advance notice. I was given an exact date for when the lien would go in effect, with over a month of lead time, as I recall.

I'm a little too paranoid to say exactly what I did, but I will say that I'm glad I was given that advice. (I was younger, and had much less money saved at the time; obviously that amount would affect any similar decision now.)

I use a credit union, and I have been the victim of a similar problem as the author, and the credit union folded in exactly the same way. Notably, the credit union is local to a state different from the one that tried to shake me down. I don't especially blame the credit union, though: they were upfront and communicative with me, and told me that their hands were tied.

The advice I was given (not by the CU): either withdraw all my money from the account and put it in a safe deposit box, or wire it to a (very) close relative ASAP -- before the lien is officially issued.

The site that usually shows which MIT services are down/unavailable has evidently been hacked, too:

http://3down.mit.edu/

I think that (or I wonder whether) you've touched upon the difference between personal vs. public freedoms, the latter of which we impose many regulations upon. Many people would object to a sub-minimum-wage job offer, but would be fine to pay friends/family/neighbors (including children) such amounts for odd jobs. Or I might slander someone I don't like within a small group of friends, and nobody would object to that; but the New York Times, which is sold for public consumption, is prohibited from publishing libel or slander.