sklivvz1971

The statement that "AI is better than human beings at the pattern-matching work of radiology, so the majority of radiologists will be unemployed" oversimplifies the role of radiologists. While AI can assist with pattern matching and improve scan quality, radiologists are doctors who diagnose pathologies based on multiple factors, not just scans. They also interact with patients, make important judgments, and determine when further investigation is necessary, for example.

While it is possible in theory for AI to handle these tasks, they are complex and difficult problems to solve. There is currently no evidence to suggest that AI will replace radiologists in the two decades. Therefore, it is important to recognize the valuable role that radiologists play in patient care and not underestimate the challenges that remain in developing AI technology that can effectively replicate their expertise.

The main argument presented in the blog is flawed. The assertion that "regulated" industries perform worse than "unregulated" because of regulation is not backed by any evidence provided. The graphs only demonstrate that labor-intensive sectors experience a proportional increase in cost with an increase in average labor cost, which is not particularly surprising.

Regarding the question of whether AI will cause unemployment, it is poorly framed. It is better to break it down into three distinct questions. First, will AI displace some current jobs? Second, will AI create new jobs? And third, will the balance of jobs be negatively affected?

When posed in this manner, it is reasonable to assume a "yes" response to the first two questions and an "unknown" response to the third.

Maybe this can help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity_loss

In very short terms: lack of biodiversity makes the ecosystem brittle and susceptible to collapse with changing selective pressure.

> Critics say that Colossal’s money would be better spent in protecting existing species

Ah, ye old whataboutism canard... it seems to be forgetting that this technology would have an immense value by itself!

> True de-extinction is nowhere near possible.

I'm not sure I can parse the convoluted English here. Are we saying it's impossible? I see no evidence in the article that it is correct. Are we saying it's really hard? Sure, but no one claimed otherwise.

I am not the kind of person that tends to have starry-eyed faith into any appealing idea, and perhaps it is truly hard to "resurrect" a dead species. However it seems to me that it's obviously doable at some level: Craig Venter has created a synthetic bacterium so I don't see why a particularly simple life form can't be "de-extincted".

I realize though that multicellular organism are much harder and quite far away from our current capabilities, but impossible? I don't see why.

IMO this will only appeal to people who don't like SQL or that have a narrow set of problems to solve.

First of all, the number of different dialects is a non-issue because projects that have to send the same queries to different databases are very rare.

Second, in my world where performance matters, you need to hand optimize queries. This is done quite specifically based on the database load and size, let alone specific quirks and strengths of the actual DB product. Something like this would only get in the way.

Third, even if all of these aren't important to you, and you just want to avoid SQL because you don't like it, there are plenty of ORMs in circulation. Many of them allow to specify queries in a fluent fashion.

Finally I think the cardinal issue is expecting that inventing a new dialect will change anything -- imagine the PRQL that compiles to a hundred-lines complex SQL query: would it be necessarily more readable? I doubt it.

> its our fault for not making a union

Surely a union would help avoid this exactly kind of things, I can assure you. Once I kept my job thanks to a union when there were mass layoffs at a company I worked for. Also, a union would probably have negotiated something better than an "at will" contract, which I assume Twitter employees are bound to.

You still have to transfer the generated image from stable diffusion to your browser... How do you compress that? :-D

They don't do that at all.

Where to start...

1) Stack Overflow caters to millions of users and hundreds of thousands of answer-writers (if not millions). This means that no matter what moderation rules you have, including removing the rules you don't like and yes -- also changing the rules the way you might be thinking right now -- _will_ have unintended side effects, _will_ leave some user disgruntled or puzzled, _will_ lead to some niche minority feeling offended or possibly discriminated. That's unavoidable and most suggestions usually given to SO are well intended, but completely off the mark. Leave that comment? What about the other thousands of self promoting garbage comments that were deleted?

2) It's amazing how someone with so much participation does not know one of the basic rules of SO: put all relevant information in the answer; comments are meant to improve the answer, not as a side note to it. It's not difficult, it's a trivial concept.

The article does not make much sense, starting with the unsupported statement that "restaurants have been competing on price." That's really not correct. In any economy, some actors compete on price, others on quality or other differentiators.

The competition is on price only in commoditized markets, and even there margins vary based on demand and offer. If you have a gold mine, you have fixed extraction costs, but the price of gold is floating.

In the restaurant business, shops have different categories. A Michelin star, for example, allows you to be in a different "price bracket." Some of this, of course, is reflected in ingredients, location, and skills, but usually, a restaurant doesn't need to change location or chef to get an extra star, they just need to improve quality.

The "street food" or "comfort food" business does compete on price and generally uses marketing and location as a differentiator. You buy a cheap hot dog at the stadium because it's there. Competition for the cheapest street food is what she refers to, assuming that a niche is a whole market.

A market where there's too much competition on price means that there is more offer than demand. If several restaurants close, it means the number of restaurants and the number of people that need one rebalance, and this will mean higher margins for the remaining ones.

The whole article is trivial and trite, yet dressed up as something novel.

The irony of claiming to represent a readable language, that others are in denial of reality about this, and presenting your thesis on a '90s looking website with typographic lines spanning almost 400 chars at 100% width...

ABTASTTSBMR than the whole sentence. OK.

The OP probably doesn't understand agile, yet they will tell us their seemingly quite uninformed opinion based on limited non-agile experience.

Standups are incredibly useful if one wants to have a team self organize to deliver something. If they have a bunch of singleton actors working in silos, and they are OK with this, then they don't need standups. Standups degenerate into status reports and are useless, which is likely what the OP thinks they are meant to be. They are also evidently not doing agile.

On the other hand, my teams do agile, I need to break silos to let teams self-organize, and standups are necessary to let teammates know how and when to help each other, especially in remote teams.

I don't have any statistics, but at a personal level, I find that logic, complexity, algorithms, etc. are trivial subjects that I learned in large part by myself during high school. I'm pretty sure this is year one stuff at a CS course.

All the rest that you are saying applies equally to any college student or merely to any intelligent, learned person who constantly improves their intellectual skills.

All the points mentioned in the article are not specific to CS, and they are mostly about living normal adult life (socializing, deadlines, etc.)

I don't think that going to college is necessary or detrimental. It's probably good that people from 18 to 21 stay somewhere safe and learn something out of their parent's home.

That said, there is very little that a CS course can teach you that is both practically useful on the job and you can't easily learn from yourself. That's because a large part of coding is not about knowing the most advanced and obscure data structures or algorithms.

Which brings me to the point. Neither of those options teaches you how do develop a product feature. That's what people still learn on the job today, and it's why knowing how to code is merely necessary but certainly not sufficient to be a good developer.

  Location: Italy (CET)
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  Email: marco.cecconi@intelligenthack.com

I'm looking for small to medium companies that need VP of Engineering help implement a modern department: pay back tech debt, implement a modern DevOps culture, have a functional methodology. I have a vast experience in the field and have worked to that effect with companies such as Stack Overflow, Toptal, and many other small-to-medium companies.

Well, think about a star shining, that's a hell of a lot of gravitational energy being turned in to radiation...

Explained much better than me, I've removed my reply!

Basically, from the "derivation" in the page:

1) Two point-masses at a distance subtend a sphere with the radius equal to the distance

2) That sphere has a radius and a maximum capacity for holding information (in bits) depending on the area and the Planck constant

3) If we treat the bits as particles in a gas, we can derive the temperature of that gas based on the mass of one of the two point-masses and Einstein's equivalence

4) Assuming that the temperature is due to Unruh effect, we can calculate the acceleration that would cause it

5) Lo and behold, this is the same acceleration due to Newton's law of gravitation

What an interesting and well-researched article. Also, the tone is hilarious, as appropriate. Bravo!

What a useless article.

Consciousness is not an impossible problem. It only becomes absurd if it's tinted of mysticism and dipped into a half-digested understanding of the current scientific consensus.

First, let's demystify conscience. Scientifically, there's no soul - it's a religious concept that has no meaning outside of it. What's left of conscience is its shell, its interface.

If we can model something that behaves like conscience, well, we created a genuine conscience.

There are two sides to the shell of conscience. One is the outer shell: the problem is to build something that appears to be conscient. This is a reasonably hard CS or neurobiology problem but by no means impossible. We are getting reasonably close to generating seemingly conscious automata. Surely it's possible to see specific parts of the brain connected to this function: for example, the speech center, and so on. So: hard to do, but doable.

The other part is the inner shell, or "self-conscience." This has to do with perception, mostly, and abstraction. We have already created expert systems that can perceive and give meaning to a lot of inputs.

The trick is creating a system that can perceive itself, its state like it sees the world. This will require a general AI or strong AI, which is currently believed by many experts to be possible although super hard to do. Again though, this is a CS problem, it's addressable by science, and I have no doubt it's a matter of time until we can settle it.

A machine with both characteristics would be just as alive as you or me. It would perceive the world semantically. It would understand to be conscious, and we would recognize it to be conscious too.

At that point, the question of consciousness will become once more only attractive to philosophers and priests. The rest of us will have less problem accepting one of these machines as "alive and conscious."

"We <3 people who code"

...so we'll remove a useful home page and replace it with a marketing junk page which confuses everyone.

Pro-tip: if you are like me, never take note and divert all your attention to the lesson.

Getting copies of notes or reading the actual book can easily replace any note taking. Being distracted from the actual explanation because I'm using my attention to write, is a net loss.

I can't know what is the resolution but neither does anyone else, which is part of the problem. They only show 2 results at 30% (p 0.01) and 25% (p 0.05) which makes me suspect they have a very low resolution. I can't prove it, but I don't need to. They claim results without providing convincing evidence, not me.

If the author's setup can only statistically determine effects of 30% or higher, saying "there's no significant change" means "there's no significant change of 30% or more".

Nothing can be said of changes of less than 30%, and that's a hell of a lot of uncertainty. One of the variants could give you 25% more results and yet, those experiments would not see such a result.

As such, it is clear that the experiment is simply not thorough enough to imply the two alternatives are equivalent. Not in the least.

Sure, but "forgetting" that the significance level is a 30% effect is at the least misleading. A real 25% increase or decrease would not have been statistically significant.

Warning: bad statistics abound in the article. If you can't spot them, let me explain a bit why statistics do not work that way.

A _lot_ of data is necessary to call a result if the effect is relatively small. If not enough samples are taken, there will still be a "formal" result, but the level of certainty of it will be low. Of course, depending on how accessible that page is, it might take a very long time to achieve significance.

How much certainty do we need in the result? P-values are generally considered not a great measure, but they are standard, and they are what they are using (if I understand correctly). This can give you an idea of the numbers we'd like to see for that value: https://xkcd.com/1478/

In other words, only the first A/B test has conclusive results: accordion is worse than wizard by 30% with 0.01 p-value. Of course, you can see that there's a significant result _because the effect is large_. Note that this gives us an idea of the _resolution_ of their test system (i.e., how many As and Bs they have and how much effect they can see with their test). So we know they see an effect of about 30% change.

Now: all the other results are wrongly reported. The next four are mistakenly reported as "no statistically significant difference in performance." This is a false statement. Having high p-values means that any effect is below the resolution achievable with those numbers. In other words, the correct statement would be either "the experiment was inconclusive" or "the effect, if any, is less than 30% change". This is quite different from claiming "no change."

The last result has 28%, and it has a p-value of 0.05. I would _not_ accept it at face value. Such a p-value means the result has 1-in-20 chances of being due to a random fluctuation of data. There are six such experiments just in the post, so it's not unthinkable that the effect could be a fluke. More info on this here: https://www.xkcd.com/882/

All in all, the only result found is that _in their case_ the wizard was much more effective than the accordion. The rest is not supported by the facts presented and furthermore any generalization of the result outside their particular case is unwarranted.

Godel's proof is just a formal logic version of Augustine proof, which has been disproven.

Here's the "proof": God is perfect, all perfect things must exist, therefore God exists

Which is easily refuted by observing that the statement merely shows that either a perfect God exists or it does not. The fact that one can posit a perfect God does not make it real. Even a kid can understand that.

Atheists are well aware of the distinction, I can assure you. A statement like "I do not believe in God because there is no God" proves absolutely nothing. I could tell you "I do not believe in pink unicorns because there are no pink unicorns" and you would not take it as a statement of faith, just as the obvious truth. Such a truth is also obvious about the Judeo-Muslim-Christian God to atheists: there is no evidence of God, and in particular, there is no evidence whatsoever of Yahweh.

As a side note, the strange idea that Yahweh is the only "possible" God is taken as granted by religious people, but it makes really little sense to those who came to disbelief through a philosophical journey. A lot of atheists will tell you that the specificity problem is one of the most convincing reasons not to believe in God.

I'm sorry, but that's just incorrect.

Atheists are people who assert "I do not believe in God" and not, "I believe there is no God." It can not be otherwise, because the opposite makes no logical sense. Which God would the correct one to "believe against"? There are infinite Gods that one must equally disbelieve. Not believing in Zeus, Jupiter, Odin, Ra, Yahveh, and the flying spaghetti monster does not require any evidence at all, it's merely the default position which any rational person must take.

Atheists merely believe in one God less than believers.