Posts by JDX 6848 publicly visible posts • joined 28 May 2010
>>I don't really see the point of this, unless it happens for all lighting, everywhere
>>Unless most people spend hours every night in darkened rooms staring at their mobiles
Um, that's rather the point - lots and lots of people do spend their time playing on their phone or watching Netflix, or reading a book on their tablet, in bed with the lights off. Plus it's closer to your eyes. And I think even modern lighting is quite yellow unless you deliberately put bright white bulbs in your bedroom.
A few people but I think that's an overly derogatory position. More simply, lots of people have the money that they can buy an Apple Watch as just another fun gizmo. They might have several great watches already, buy one of these and play with it for a bit before it goes in a drawer, the way we might by a Pi or some £10 remote control helicopter.
If you're wealthy, you don't need a great justification for spending £500.
This talk of "entitlement" and "needing to feel important" is simply a response from jealous people who want to prove that they're better than those who are rich. Why bother? You're neither better nor worse. Just poorer.
Sure, but a year or two later Deep Blue would have mashed him - these days nobody even questions if a human could beat a computer. That Alpha has come right out and done so well so soon is pretty damning. All the human players were talking about how easily they would beat it 2 weeks ago...
Interesting point. However after 4 games, the computer still won game 5. Human players have the same issues of having to learn each others' style of play and you'd expect the best player in the world to adapt very fast.
They may well open-source this or sell it so we'd be able to know for sure but considering this is basically a 1.0 version (if that) and it ALREADY beats the top player, exactly how long do you think humans will be able to keep up?
It's a very narrow definition of intelligence to demand it learns in the same way a human does.
You make the comparison of "an accurately trained monkey" - a monkey cannot read but it is certainly intelligent. If we could make something as smart as a monkey, that would be pretty remarkable.
You and all those who have upvoted your faux-authoritative answer are totally wrong (why are people trusting someone who got 27% in their maths exam to discuss the principles of advanced maths and computer science?!)
>>Intelligence is not about knowing stuff. Any twat can know stuff. Even more wankers can look stuff up, which is all this charade does
The very point of this ENTIRE project is that Go is NOT about knowing stuff or looking stuff up. That's why Go was chosen, because you CAN'T brute-force it. Even the top players have to rely on intuition and 'gut-feeling' rather than, say, chess where every move can be analysed and explained by the player and expert commentators.
The people who wrote this software didn't know how to beat the top player at Go. They designed some software to figure out the answer to that question. More than likely, they actually do not know how it works themselves - that's a key feature of neural networks.
So this is entirely ground-breaking and very cool. Not specifically relating to Go, but as proof of progress in machine learning and neural networks. Software that figures out how to solve the task given it is pretty much a definition of one part of AI.
Azure clients running Linux would be a great example of a good target market (is this common?) Clients who are interested in .NET on Linux would be another though these are probably rare (for now).
Any sensible company who finds their options for a serious DB have just increased should investigate, it's not like there are loads of options as it is.
And then there are companies who use a mix of technologies.
I have ABP on my PC but have not (as far as I know) ever tried installing anything on my iPad, my WinPhone, or my Mac (used rarely). I don't find the web a horrible place on the unblocked devices but then I don't tend to visit sites with awful ads. Or maybe my brain blocks the ads for me.
Oh, other than ads on Youtube. They are a PITA.
One reason against "why not just put the data centre on the coast" is cost. The coastline is often premium residential property and not ideally suited to big ugly data centres ruining sea views.
It seems a bit of a wacky proposition, but these things are worth at least exploring.
You people do realise that human chess players are 'programmed' how to play, right? They are taught the rules, they read books on chess theory, they learn openings and end-games, they take lessons, they have their games studied and are given feedback and they study past games.
This Go system sounds far more like an AI than chess-based systems, if it is learning on its own BY playing or by interacting with humans. If they programmed it how to go about learning how to get good at Go, rather than how to play Go, this IS a big step.
It's not a human-level AI, but an ant is not a human-level intelligence either. We don't have to create something of reasoning, abstract thought and language for it to be an AI.
Note that a)I only raised the environmental angle for completeness b)the cost angle is worth considering. I'm no greenie so I brought it up for debate/completeness in an open-minded way.
I'm not sure the "you can only re-use it if you use rockets" argument is valid. You could 'chute most of the way and use rockets purely for the landing or something.
I do think that we should be seeking to use the environment (in the non-greenie sense) wherever possible. Clearly Mars is different but what's necessary on Mars might not be the best solution here.
Parachutes are also good in the environmental/cost senses that you're not burning fuel you don't actually need. I don't know if the amount of fuel is large enough to be worth caring about, but it does seem a good principle to only use resources when you need to. Have jets for emergencies perhaps, but use chutes if possible?
Yes the fact anti-matter has positive mass was rather my point... if two particles appear and one falls into the BH, wouldn't it's net mass increase?
And in fact given that anti-matter responds to gravity the normal way, wouldn't the number of particles and anti-particles falling into the BH be equal and therefore its net energy increases?
Why? I've read Brief History (though had thought most of it was no replaced by more modern work) but not for a long time.
If a particle+antiparticle pair are created, why does one falling into the BH cause its mass to decrease?
And that's exactly why Linux won't ever make gig strides on the desktop. You ask a perfectly nice "has the UI improved over the last few years" question and get randomly insulted for not buying into some world-view about how one is supposed to use the software.
As for "you can't make a simple interface to a powerful program", that is just crap. Older FOSS used to be very obviously made by coders who didn't know or care about UX, as a coder myself I know what it looks like when a coder designs a UI.
As for documentation, a)most FOSS documentation is crap and if you complain you get told to look at the source b)it wouldn't answer my question, only trying to use the thing would.
My only experience of Gimp was quite a few years ago, when as a non-artist I wanted to a little image-editing and 3D modelling and looked into Gimp and Blender respectively.
Back then, both of these epitomised the old-school Linux school of thought on UI i.e. it was awful. Both were already very powerful but for a Windows user like myself, the barrier to entry was just too high.
This was as I say a long time ago so I'm genuinely interested, how have things changed? If we compare it with tools like Photoshop how easy is it to get started and do a few basic things, figure out what the buttons do and the UX hangs together just by using general computer-savvyness?
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