yakult

1) Ubiquitous self-driving vehicles + facial recognition + cellphone gps tracking = plausibly deniable targetted killings on a massive scale.

In 2030 when the AI watching you on all the security cams decide your behaviour pattern skew two standard deviations toward terroristlike, your road accident rates go up.

The AI-driven car insurance companies are the first to catch on. When your car premiums shoot skyhigh for no reason, time to stop doing whatever you were doing.

2) 2030. Some researchers in a big prestigious university decides to do a study on SDC accident rates. They find that cars from a particular major maker have a tendency to hit women and black people more often. Results are published in a major journal, media has a field day.

The company apologizes profusely and promises to fix its racist mysogynist ways. Their software-engs are left scraching their heads because they can't find the bug. Everything seems to be working... except accidents still skew towards politically sensitive demographics.

In desperation the company decides to very slightly decrease the threshold for hitting non-black non-women, evening the numbers. This patch is combined with a major service release which improves accident rates across the board, so that the overall accident rate stays the same.

Six months later the journal publishes a very small correction for the original paper that fixes a few bugs in its statistics. The correction is behind a paywall. Nobody reads it.

Do apps still have access to location history data? If so this is a nothingburger.

Once you've added it, it's google's forever and you've only got their word that they've 'deleted' it. I bet it's still available with a warrant.

Because sometimes there is, and when you know you can control or at least predict the process. Sometimes this makes you mad dosh.

It is, of course, a joke. He's doing a reductio ad absurdem at the end of a tightly argued post about information theory.

It's the advantage of doing a blog post rather than a paper, I suppose.

So what's the right algorithm to use instead of md5 if I just want a fast checksum that's widely supported?

Needs a way to get the ball back up again, at a different point depending on where it came out. That way you can do recursion.

If DNN is just a crappy approximation of some kind of Bayesian inference, then where are the better approximations that beat it on all the metrics we care about? And if that magical thing does exist, why aren't people using it to beat the pants off the DNN people and take their lunch money?

This doesn't answer the question.

>There are a lot of problems for which you effectively have limitless data.

>For example, optimizing the shape of an aerofoil, wing, wind turbine, ship, pump, etc. The "real" data is the result of computationally costly fluid dynamics simulations.

I'm doing something similar at the moment. The data is not limitless. It's in fact quite expensive.

In most cases you still need to generate the large number of simulations in your training set, and the simulations are computationally expensive to do. If you're doing it on a metered platform you can tie the cost of the data set directly to the number of cpu hours need to generate it, and from there to a dollar value.

“Often, science is messy and things don’t turn out neatly,” Dasgupta says. But in this study, “it was very gratifying how clean the results were.”

This is an unfortunate choice of words in the age of p-hacking and publication bias.

>all three government agencies dropped their investigations because they were unable to determine what the lyrics of the song were, even after listening to the records at speeds ranging from 15 rpm to 75 rpm.

That works sort-of when the majority of the population is relatively well-off, though still inefficient. Not so well now with the immigration crisis and change in demographics.

The choice to sacrifice wages for more time with your kids is a luxury good, even if people choose to spend some of that time doing housework.

When you stir, you're stirring in a pattern, probably a circular one. Plus you're probably not paying too much attention to the shape of the pile, so it's gradient-free. It's pattern search. Except it's only approximately a circular pattern. There are random variations. Stochastic pattern search.

>Other than that, the sacrifice is minimal.

This is the difference. If you were making, say, a quarter what you're currently making, perhaps the sacrifice would be huge.

This is the crux: my point is that 1.5x the bacon is often still worth 2x the labour. Seriously, despite all the moaning about materialism and consumerism, the economy as a whole has suffered from a severe lack of bacon ever since the first monkey exchanged some bacon for a back rub, and this is definitely part of the solution.

Economically productive as in

1. the economy is bigger and produces more goods. 2. much of those goods are distributed to the two-worker families. 3. a few bored minimum wage workers can look after a very large number of kids.

The quality of childcare is on average a function of how much you pay. The boutique ones have professionally trained staff that get more than minimal wage.

But what about the families that can't afford any but the most rundown centers, I hear you ask? Won't they be better off under the old system? You know, the one where the economy was 30% smaller due to halving the labour supply?

Perhaps they would be living poor but honest lives, perfectly happy in their squalid conditions and lack of medical care.

>we're chasing the same things with more dollars.

you're missing the part where more demand creates more supply.

Sure, sometimes the market is distorted due to zoning, like in SF, and also land is finite, but generally speaking the market responds to the added demand by creating more housing, possibly denser housing. Same with other goods. Those are not empty dollars that got added into the system by fiat - they represent additional productive work done, and the goods / services they create is added to the economy.

As with almost all optimization problems, applying twice the resources (in this case, work hours) won't bring you back twice the (net) bacon, due to diminishing returns.

However, I think on net it is still more economically productive, at least in a large portion of cases.

It's unlikely that housework and childcare would optimally take up a full 50% of our entire reservoir of workable-hours, especially in the age of household appliances and childcare centres.

See other discussion in this thread.

>Groove also uses it to front-and-center feature artist information and album art of the currently playing song or some album you are looking at it.

Front-and-center is not the way I would describe it. They're squashed to the left, leaving huge swaths of empty.

Notice how the actual functional buttons in the banner are tiny, have no frame around it and no hint that they're clickable. They're tucked away in a corner and almost an afterthought. Also, definitely not touch-friendly. (I suppose that paradigm is dead now.) Looking closer, I especially like how there is an 'additional functions' button at the end even though there's plenty of space to put more buttons.

Most of the space is just wasted on a pointless gaussian blur that would get old real fast.

Also note how the actual functionality (in the article picture for groove) is to display icon lists of albums, and there are certainly more than can be fit on the screen. The humongous banner comes at the cost of reduced functionality.

>As a design tool it's neither good nor bad, user hostile nor user friendly

The way tools are implemented and marketed can either push third-party devs towards user friendliness, or away from it, e.g. by making certain choices easier/harder or by promoting certain reference designs. The message I'm seeing so far is definitely not towards encouraging user-friendly UI.

This is a bad idea. Not only is it useless and take up a lot of space, it now moves as I interact with the page, further distracts me from the content that I'm interested in. Especially egregious on mobile if it pops back up again when I scroll up, then sort of bobs up and down if I press and hold at just the right spot.

>it's alive space that brings the eye to what's happening or what's new/fresh or what's about to go on.

That's the misalignment of interest right there. The devs would love to have their users focus on "what's new", i.e. ads and self promotion. The users give on average zero shits and just want the functionality they came for. I guess we all know which side MS is on.

Many of the apps shown have a humongous banner element that does nothing and take up nearly a third of the screen space. This might be unintentional and not part of the design language, but the fact that it wasn't caught before press release doesn't fill me with confidence. That and the fact that every single MS UI has sucked really bad and in very obvious ways ever since XP.

According to my GP, selection for doctors include psychiatric profiling designed to select for the most compassionate. While I can see why the hospitals would want this - compassionate doctors are good PR -this seems to be a case of misaligned incentives. Those with less compassion would suffer less and cope better when surrounded by death and suffering on a daily basis. On the whole, this probably means they'll do a better job, too.

when the extremely unlikely happens, always keep in mind that somebody may be fucking with you.

The main problem about this is that the author is basing his arguments on a show. A show written by writers who might even read the same pop-psych. Then he goes to reason from this show, into real-life. It's arguing from fictional evidence. If some of the actors behaves in a completely different way one week because there's a writer's strike or something, does it invalidate his theories?

IRL nobody behaves like people from The Show so any theory with this as the only basis is worthless.

>I think your comments are coming off as sassy hence the downvotes, but I don't mind.

Eh. No biggie.

>My argument is more that I believe large injections of money were the original cause of a lot of the problems we have, adding more is perhaps a band-aid solution.

This is more a question of resource allocation efficiency. You're right, the government does indeed waste a lot of the money it takes in, but the answer there is to improve efficiency, not artificially decreasing income. When there is an opportunity for large revenue increase while simultaneously cutting queue times? Still a go.

>I personally believe we need to suffer the short term pain of looking out for our own citizens above all else, most of which would mean popping the bubble and removing the interventionist policies.

If there is a bubble to be popped, the government would be in a stronger position if it first builds up a financial warchest.

>I am worried that this will happen along with the visa changes causing a greater loss of sovereignty than was ever intended...

With my plan we'll suddenly make a number of very rich and powerful people Australian citizens. If anything this brings in new blood to challenge the Murdochs media and their US slant. Plus I suspect the influx of business interests will see a strong swing against any sort of US-lead military adventurism. That's sovereignty right there.

I suppose there would be worries of a soft Chinese / Indian / whatever takeover, but this is mostly avoidable by setting the ticket price high enough to reduce the absolute numbers coming in, then supplement with subsidized tickets for preferred demos.

Let's look at this from another perspective: do you see an improvement to any of these large complex problems if we remove money from it? Do you see ways to marginally improve things with marginally more money? Just so you know, my answers are no and yes.

>If we still can't even select uni entrants based on those holistic measures what chance do we have of selecting migrants?

And yet migrants still get selected on a yearly basis. Sucks, I know.

There are no magic solutions that let you pick with 100% accuracy, but I sure can come up with things that still have problems but better than what happens currently. The current system is arbitrary, slow, and with large cross subsidies being flung around with no oversight.

Simply putting a dollar value on each document would give the policy makers plenty more incentive to make sure the subsidies at least go to the right place.

edit: I suspect your argument boils down to "we shouldn't do this thing that gives us huge amounts of money, because we don't need money."

Am I being uncharitable?

No, a business investment visa is an invitation to come over and set up a minimum viable, likely-not-profitable 'business' for the duration it takes to satisfy requirements. The government gets peanuts out of it, the 'investors' waste years of their lives playing pretend.

It's a shit show. Much better to just charge cash, speed up the processing and let in those who actually think they can make money despite the steep cost of entry. And if they fail anyway - reserve a small portion of the ticket price to put them on the dole.

Do you seriously think those problems can't be fixed with money? Increasing housing supply costs money. Upgrading the education system costs money. UBI and other social services for people replaced by automation costs money. Investment in innovation and basic scientific research costs money.

In the same way, preventing monoculture is a simple case of directly subsidizing people's visas/PR/citizenship on various grounds, humanitarian or otherwise, under my scheme.

The only difference is that by attaching a firm market value per document, we'll finally get a clear sense on the opportunity cost of immigration policy by fiat. The current system is a mess of inefficiency and hidden cross-subsidies that can mostly be much better spent on other, more urgent problems.