- I think the point is that when the AI takes over the control of the world it does not have to be through a technological singularity, with Roko's Basilisk and all the drama. It could as well be through generations of people progressively yielding their free will to what he calls "apps". In this scenario, our choices, over the course of a century or so, become ultimately non-existent.
- Yes, you are right, it is much simpler when you have just a single number to "optimize" across population. And the correlations are strong indeed. But if you want to explain more variance, you need to reach for better tools.
We are all well familiar with people's various simplified models of the world. They tend to itch hackers, because they work well enough to not be automatically rejected by their users, yet hackers know, and sometimes even have proofs, that the models are ultimately wrong. The same thing happens with IQ. We all know it is mostly bullshit, but the truth is that it does work as a rough predictor of performance. It does explain some of the variance, not all of it.
- I'm from east Europe, so the problem could not concern me as it has been written, as nobody here really flashes their money around like a clown. But I remember the feeling of being excluded as a student not coming from a top notch high school. The majority of the other people had nice groups of friends from day zero. But guess what - I graduated with a really good diploma, easily landed a job at a major tech company, and most of these people are now my friends or colleagues.
What matters in the end is your results, and your results only.
- This is so cool. But, here is a question: why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVd-rYIqSy8
Because we can.
- Fabrice Bellard also did some research on pi digits calculations. Because of that, in 2009 he held a record for the longest pi expansion ever calculated.
- Ebola is a very "clever" virus with its interferon-blocking properties. But still, out of the infections we still cannot vaccinate against, influenza has been the single most deadly one in the past, and sexually transmitted diseases are the real issue in the developed world. Why don't we encourage people to have flu shots and use condoms? Well, we do. But this is boring.
So I guess Ebola is big news because it is something new on the panic scene, sweating with blood sounds crazy dangerous, the fears have been accelerated by having the outbreak in a place that "has been forgotten by the god", devastated by wars being fought by children. As to why there is nothing to be afraid of, take a look at the CDC's data.
http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/2014-west-africa/prev...
- Well, considering: the extreme working hours (that can in extreme cases result in death, or a psychiatric disease), high risk of exposure to drugs, the fact that the starting banking positions do not pay that much money, the fact that you often do things you absolutely do not care about, well, the answer is not that simple.
http://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-to-silicon-valley...
- Well, I will argue with the examples you have provided.
As to maintaining a blog, take a look at Joel on Software's "Advice for Computer Science College Students"[1], section "Learn how to write before graduating."
Learning Prolog, Erlang, Haskell, VHDL or some other out-of-the-box language is an eye-opening experience, and even more so is writing an interpreter or a compiler for such a language. It is a way to discover brain functions that you were not even aware are there in your mind. I speak this from my own memories about fiddling with a Hindley-Milner inference implementation.
Authoring a framework is not on my 'done' list, and it is not on the 'done' list of any of my friends, so I have no idea how influential is such an exercise. However, I will give the author of the matrix the benefit of the doubt - he got the rest well.
[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html
- Exactly. You do not need to understand what does NP-hardness mean to be an excellent developer.
Understanding complexity, computability and modern logics is pretty satisfying, I'm personally in love the Godel's incompleteness theorem. But it is just one of many variables. There's plenty of things to improve on.
- I meant a distribution with "discrete" probability, i.e. a distribution where the probabilities of singletons are all equal and nonzero, so that a simple Bayesian argument could possibly be extended. My bad for not being precise enough.
Perhaps I should have stuck to natural numbers in my previous comment, otherwise yes, you can have uniform distributions with respect to some additional structure of the probability space (like [0,1] with the Lebesgue measure you suggest).
- It still does hold up, but becomes more complicated. In general, there is no uniform distribution over any infinite set. We might: a) think about a pipe spitting out objects that have two possible features - being a raven and being black, or b) use a nonuniform distribution over an infinite set of objects and integrate (sum) to get a similar Bayesian result.
- That would be only delaying the issue, as QE is a program of buying bonds with imaginary money, not giving out the imaginary money for free. Bonds have maturity dates.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2013/11/25/the-fed...
- The title seems to be misleading. Nowhere in the article does the author explicitly state that salts should not be used, because well, they should be used. His point was that salts are not enough, you need to couple them with a possibly slowest, yet acceptable hash function. And then hope that Moore's law does not breach your passwords.
- No, of course not by censorship. Through: fines for monopolist practices (happened to Microsoft), general smear campaign (happens to Amazon in Germany over working conditions), poking with a stick (the "right to be forgotten"), or just plain old taxes (the new "internet tax" is a current topic in the EU). There is always a way if you are determined enough. Politics.
- This is a very sound approach. The main benefit is that all JVM languages can utilize optimizations if the optimizations are in the JVM, thus logic duplication is reduced.
Also, please note that both Clang and GCC use the same approach, except in their cases the programmer typically does not see the intermediary code (which is LLVM for Clang, and a family of intermediate languages for GCC).
- Under-representation of females in the IT industry is not a matter of hiring. Look at technical faculties all over the world and check their gender ratios. Or go to a gender-equalized party and start talking about technology, see what happens.
I'm not a misogynist, I like woman. But this lawsuit is not going to change anything, because it attacks just the symptoms. Women need to understand first that they really are just as good as men, consider Maire Curie or Ada Lovelace good examples.
> And in fact, you could argue that the reason why we’ve generated computational devices is consciously or unconsciously, we’ve come to recognize that our endogenous, organic computing power is not up to the task and we have to recruit machines to represent culture, because we cannot. I think there’s good evidence for that.
> The atom bomb, for example, forced a crisis. We had an extraordinary power and we didn’t really have the moral probity or sophistication to deal with it. We still do not. And that’s not making a judgment about whether our actions were right or wrong; it’s just that I think thinking reasonably about how to deploy power on that scale is beyond us.
> Human beings are hardware that’s about 100,000 years old, but we run string theory, Lie algebra. We’re running 21st-century software! How is it possible that old, antiquated hardware can continue to run ever newer and more complex cultural software?