yes_man

A monopoly regulates supply to extract more money from the consumer than a competitive market could. What's the good parts?

Is centralization of open source a good thing for the world or not? This thread seems to be overwhelmingly positive. And in the end we all will be critisizing it if all package repositories will be handled by a single entity. And that entity that is being applauded here in this case happens to be the most valuable corporation in the world right now. Healthy skepticism seems to be a disappearing attribute in the tech world

> The result of: (num_person-hours_saved_by_SO * num_of_developers_in_world * dev_hourly_rate) must be staggering. I'm sure companies around the world can point to SO for a non-trivial percentage of bottom line revenue.

There's also a negative effect on global developer skillset when developers don't have to dig deeper into things or read documentations because they can just find a working example from SO. Although Stackoverflow still probably has a positive net effect for global skill of developers regardless. But a developer who learns from the bottom up will most likely outperform a developer who relies on finding working solutions from SO in the long run. And while a company prefers to have a solution right now for monetary reasons, the quality of developers the global workforce has in the same long run dwindles when the primary goal is to save developer hours "right now". Again highlighting that I still do consider SO a net positive, just that it is not a flat out black and white hours saved function

What happens to Wikipedia every time the end of their runway is approaching? At least we can hope for a similar solution to appear for messaging.

Telegram's end goal is to create value for shareholders. Eventually they will profit from user privacy violations. Not to parrot other comments, but we should all use Signal. Its' existence isn't based on investment dollars that expect returns in more dollars.

The artistic value of AI generated art (to me at least) will come from the obsolence of human creativity and the strong feeling of void associated with the far-future idea that algorithms and processing power are starting to surpass our species in the only remaining way that made us relevant, and looking at the pictures in the article, we are not there yet.

I am not an art connoisseur, but as a layman those pictures do not spark any emotion in me. They are like random noise that do not convey any context. Whereas there are paintings that mesmerize the mind by connecting the viewer with the painter. The day that AI art will emotionally strike people is the day when it can deduce context from our world that is relevant to us, and the art in it is the creation of the empty feeling inside us when we realize we are now being emotionally moved by an algorithm, in a way only an exceptional artist could (or surpassing talent of such artists).

I am skeptical about current machine learning methods taking AI art that far. Perhaps ML will make for example great music by generating sequences out of training sets, but it's hard to see it creating a new music genre people will vibe with in the near future.

> All machine learning algorithms can be implemented on a Turing machine, so they all are subject to the halting problem.

Assumption that all learning algorithms can be implemented on a Turing machine cannot hold true, since there are mathematical problems that cannot (take for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_tenth_problem). Unless you categorise machine learning problems as problems that can be implemented with a Turing machine, making the statement a tautology.

Edit: thinking about my comment maybe I am the one being tautologic. If there is a learning algorithm that can solve Hilbert's problem it would transcend mathematics

Reminded me of this: https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/addis-ababa-china-cons...

Not to be pedantic but a person can in return also revoke their obligation to abide by these rules (like paying for food at the cashier or board a train without a ticket) at any time. So essentially there always exists a choice to not play by the rules if the regulators of this cashless society decide to cut you out

Out of curiosity, if someone proved P to not equal NP, what kind of scope and effect would it bring to the world outside academia? P == NP would obviously be a world-transforming proof

Maybe the human (or generally any conscious nervous system) existence is such an anxious experience that finally realizing it was all a trip that is ending is such a giant relief that the imminent death feels like a warm home? Not to sound too bleak but it would explain the contentment