Posts by TRT

Re: The whole article

Interesting. Why do you say most of us failed it?

Re: 180 Turing

The Voight-Kampff test might be more revealing.

Re: Sentience? Meh...

TBH you'd be lucky if the cat even showed up FOR the Turing Test.

Re: The real issue

How do I know that I'm thinking? Or even that this is itself a thought?

How do I know that what I hear in my mind is me thinking?

How do I even know that that is a question?

And who asked it?

Perhaps I only think I'm being asked questions... when the men in my mind come and I think they're asking me questions, what do you hear in your mind, puss? Do you hear them asking me questions?

Perhaps you think they're just singing to you, and that I'm only interpreting their singing as them asking me questions?

Perhaps they are just singing to you and I only think that I'm hearing them ask me questions?

Though it seems to me to be very strange behaviour to come all that way just for the privilege of bringing me whisky and singing to my cat.

Or at least it appears to me to be strange behaviour.

Or at least I *think* it appears to be strange to me...

Re: Chinese Room

Well it's like I've always said... don't tell me what stains Bold 3 can removed that Bold 2 failed to... tell me what Bold 4 will be able to do that Bold 3 can't. That way I won't have any false expectations.

Re: The whole article

What do YOU think the point of the Turing Test is?

Re: We'd have to start borrowing phrases from French.

Zut alors!

Re: Not happened to me, but

She'd learn the satanic art of necromancy in order to raise you from the dead just so as she could kill you herself.

Mine would.*

* Not really. She's a spiritualist medium. I'd never get a minute's peace for all eternity.

Re: Kyber

Isn't that one of Naruto's mates?

Re: The Real Hero of the Story

Are you Marty? I said is your name Marty McFly?

Yeah. I mean, ugh, yeah?

I got something for you... a letter.

A letter? For me? That's impossible!

Re: Making love in a canoe

American beer is like making love in canoe... fucking close to water.

Re: Ethics Department

No. They merged it into the South-East Department along with the Thuthics Department.

I think that says more about the state of emotional / psychological therapy the 1960s than the state of either AI research or society's awareness of technology!

Re: Emergence

Can you prove to me that you know what feelings are and that you have them?

As far as I can tell the only way that you can prove that you have feelings is to find a common frame of reference rooted in the nature of a common biology.

Except... does it prove that I love you (and feel love) if I sacrifice my life to save yours (and it isn't a case of either "the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the few or the one" or genetic altruism)?

Re: Turning tests around

This is the best summary of the situation I've seen so far.

Re: It gets more fun...

I had an argument with an audiophile once about my use of a graphic equaliser. They said that it was altering the original intention of the person who mixed it. I said that the person who mixed it wasn't listening to it whilst sat in my front room with all the acoustic vagaries of that environment.

Re: Digital transmission?

"Lost information can't be recovered"? Depends how you define "lost" but you know they recreated colour from black and white transfers of Dr Who etc using the noise pattern the black and white transfer created?

I had one of those! Still got some of the cartridges for it and the manual. Yours if you want them! It was the Sharp RP... erg... memory fail. Also sold badged as the Realistic RP-100 I think. Orange and green light up thing on the front.

Re: Stop wasting you’re time!

I went to the Barry Gray tribute at Royal Festival Hall... It was amazing.

Re: Digital transmission?

I've had CDs that self destruct. It took >10 years but they de-silvered eventually.

Re: Digital transmission?

Better or different? You have to qualify that.

I have Bat Out Of Hell in four different formats:

Vinyl, AAC, CD and tape. All bought at different times, for different reasons.

Tape was first, as I wanted it for my Walkman. Then vinyl because I wanted to hear it better than the old portable could manage. CD was for when I was at university and didn't want to cart fragile vinyl around. Finally, as a comparison, I bought it on iTunes.

And I prefer the vinyl copy. It's got the odd pop and it means you have to get up to flip sides, but it just sounds like it was intended to. The AAC version is too clean, the bass is not as organic or warm. The CD version has a bit of quantisation error in the upper frequencies, which is why I guess they remastered it for iTunes a few years ago. The cassette version, I can't really check as my tape deck needs a good servicing and I can't be arsed lugging it into London to put it on the scope - besides it's hard to get the right calibration tapes nowadays.

Re: Oh, how ironic

Erk... yes. And the number of times I've found text entered on web pages which has to be totally rewritten when the CSS is changed (e.g. for accessibility).

Ah, but how do you do double entry on Excel, eh?!

Re: Manual page numbering

They're not meant for posters or drawing illustrations either, but some people use them for it all the same!

If a word processor is not meant for large book, what good IS it? OK, most page layout software will have the ability to or a plug-in for chapterising, indexing, referencing across chapters, numbering of figures, tables of illustrations, appendices etc. but who can afford £400 for Quark Xpress now? Or £800 for one of the really decent plug-ins? The point is that Word *used* to be able to do all of this quite happily. OK, Word didn't do imposition, and it makes a royal fuck up of images, text flow, hyphenation etc, BUT it does reduce the amount of interfacing required between an author and a publisher for things like indexing and bibliography. I don't know who on here would even realise that there is a specific job for people who go through a text building up an index of significant words, terms, sub terms etc. OK, everyone on here probably knows it happens, because they'll all have read text books. If they stop for a second to think about HOW their text books at uni had a bit at the back that said "Operating Systems" with a sub list of subjects like Apple Macintosh, Microsoft / Windows, DOS, Unix & derivatives, DEOS, DEC, Chromium etc and all the page numbers on. Someone has to draw up a list of terms, tag them, understand their context and use, understand what people may be using the text for etc.

I've lost my thread of thought...

Anyway, yes, there needs to be someone to do it, and it seems a shame that Word has now lost the ability to do things like this in any sensible or efficient fashion.

Re: Two spaces after a full stop was ::mercy snip::

Which is what I just said. The size of the space is proportional to the requirement. OK, depending on what's available the typesetter may use more than one slug, BUT conceptually and even physically, it's ONE SPACE of variable size. Just the same as a paragraph mark should be one paragraph mark, not a sequence of three in order to get a double spaced blank line.

Re: Two spaces after a full stop was ::mercy snip::

Which is precisely the point. In the days of typesetting by hand there was only one space after all punctuation. It's just that the one space was of variable size. Typewriters minimised the numbers of keys due to the complexity of mechanical linkages, hence l for 1 and O for 0 etc. Very few had multiple space bars - usually only the typewriters derived from keyboard typesetters. The double space thing was a kludge that produced the same appearance as a typeset document.

Done all that. Great fun. Hot foil impression is a good one too. And bookbinding.

HoTMetaL Pro was a dream to use. Knocked most everything else into a cocked hat.

Word now flags period-double space as an error.

Researchers found that period-double space speeds up reading, but they used a fixed width typeface for their study - it turns out that if you use a proportional typeface the reading speed remains the same.

When they submitted their paper to the journal, however, they did so with period-double spacing and the sub-eds changed them all to single spaces.

Other researchers in the past have found it makes reading faster, slower and makes no difference.

One of the last hold outs for that style, the APA, has recently updated its style guidelines to single space.

Re: Manual page numbering

True. Mailmerge is an art form.

And then there are those who put in TWO spaces after a full stop. I understand that's an accepted practice in some countries. Just seems wrong to me. Any decent optically kerning typeface should be able to make a sentence just as easily readable with a single space character.

Ooh! FrontPage... that sent a shiver down my spine. It's a word you never want to see. They used to teach that at college. I kept telling them that there are better options, far better. But no... they had some kind of deal with Microsoft. I've moved from Dreamweaver to JetBrains now.

Re: Manual page numbering

Oh my god. The options for doing that kind of thing in Word have just evaporated into thin air nowadays. It used to be the way that you would write a long book... they taught that. Break it up into Chapters, create a master document to manage the style sheets, link the individual chapter documents through the master so that page numbering, indexing, contents, references etc could be handled. I presume it was something to do with fitting the files onto floppies or providing some kind of safety against file corruption taking out a 40 chapter book.

Anyway, nowadays they'd teach you to do the whole thing in one document I expect, because I could find NONE of those options in the most recent versions of Word.

Re: Tab and return

I had one of those fancy schmancy jobs. It would stop clicking the daisy wheel once you reached about 75% of the way across the page, then as you reached just beyond the right margin of the page it would work out where the spaces were and fill the words in going backwards along the line before moving the paper up and putting the remainder on the next line.

It could also do fully, centre and right justified the same way but it would hold a whole line and for fully justified it would adjust the inter-character spacing too.

Re: "I thought MacWrite needed no explanation"

Ah, but the encoder/transmitters that SHADO used to use to send orders in UFO had a built in vaporiser as well as scanner, encrypted digital frame store and handwriting recognition system. Quite advanced for the time.

I'm always perplexed by the amount of time and effort people put into documents when they don't use the full power of a word processor. I mean, even Word. AND I've even seen lecturers teaching this incorrectly. Things like not using the Paragraph formatting tools to keep a heading with the next paragraph and relying on carriage returns to adjust the pagination. They change a sentence around near the front of the document and spend the next half hour going through correcting the pagination by adding and deleting carriage returns, which they can't see because they type with non-printing characters set to invisible.

And then doing things like adjusting the number of pages to bring it into a page count limit by shrinking the typeface one paragraph at a time instead of using styles.

And using commas instead of full-stops.

It makes me want to weep - really, it does.

I used to do Quark as well... transferring a word document into a page layout programme and imposing it for plate-making... there are automated plug-ins for importing, but there's a limit to how much Word dross they can tolerate.

Re: Does this mean there can now never be a USB-D?

I like the original USB. No bloody A, B, C -or- D.

Re: Apple's next move?

Apple's next move will be Wireless charging only.