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* Posts by sarahhart

2 publicly visible posts • joined 11 May 2017

Intel's Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs have nasty hyper-threading bug

sarahhart
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Re: This is gonna suck.

did... you seriously just tell a blind person that you're "sure" they can "find someone" to just be a screen reader?

if you *really* do sympathise with the difficulties that come with being disabled, then please, heed my advice: comments like the one you just left aren't helpful, and in fact, they are patently unhelpful.

this person quite obviously knows their living situation and everything associated with it. if there was someone who lived locally enough that would help, that the person trusted, that they would do that? instead, they said their *only* option would be taking it to a store, which they didn't trust with their computer.

which goes to say that if there were a generic Someone they could ask "to be a screen reader", they probably wouldn't trust that they were only doing what was asked of them too.

let alone, like... i'm guessing since you post on this site you've had the "joy" of doing tech support for uninitiated family members over the phone? ones who describe what's on screen in such a bizarre way that you have *no* idea what's going on? that's almost certainly what it would be like for this person with a generic Someone, even if such a person were available.

now, i'm going to assume good faith here, and bring up that: a lot of disabled people (or people with disabilities, depending on what the OP to this chain prefers [people do often prefer one or the other, i usually go with "disabled" for myself rather than "person with disabilities"]) do live independently enough that family and friends don't live anywhere near close enough to just come round and offer support like this on a whim.

i bring this up because it's still very prevalent in our popular culture the idea that disabled people always have family, or a romantic partner, or some kind of hired carer, available at all times. which is simply not the case for a lot of people (even though there are people who need such 24/7 help) and as such, is generally pretty patronising to say something like what you said, that you're "sure [they] could find someone". why? *what* makes you sure? please take some time to think about that.

disclaimer: i am sighted, but disabled in other ways. i do not presume to have all the answers of how to speak to blind/Blind people specifically. rather, i am just painfully aware of how people with all kinds of disabilities get given "advice" like "get a friend or neighbour to help you with it", as if it should be normal for someone to just need the charity of an abled person to do something everyone else can do independently.

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The rise of AI marks an end to CPU dominated computing

sarahhart

LISP, and lessons from the past

(apologies if this shows up multiple times, i'm new and unsure why i only see my preview but not the comment anywhere)

is anyone else reminded of LISP machines? massively parallel, with a special language requirement.. sounds a lot like CUDA. at least CUDA is good for games, too.

as for those who are complaining about so many things being called AI.. this is how the field has been for, what, coming on 60 years?

for so long, "expert" systems seemed to be the answer, the technology that would lead AI out of the dark and into helping everybody make decisions with their life.. but then they found the limits of expert systems.

of course, it's not like neural networks have no uses! they've been massively helpful in speech recognition, as well as about.. a million other things.

but now we're entering a period of huge investment in any company that claims to want to do anything at all with "machine/deep learning". most of these companies clearly cannot all change the world.

AI winters have always fallen after a period of huge investment, buyouts, etc. investment bubbles must always pop.

someone above me touched on the idea that once things become commonplace, you don't think of them as "AI", anymore, either.

when's the last time you felt like "an AI" was in control of your laundry or dishes? fuzzy logic is in most if not all household appliances now, in some way or another.

and once upon a time, fuzzy logic seemed like the new big thing. finally, computers having nuance in how they think, etc.

but now it's not considered that special. "AI" can be taken to mean "cutting edge data processing", really.

naturally, i would love it if we never have another AI winter. but, as i said earlier, all investment bubbles pop. usually, AI fields fall with them for a while. can AI resist this next one?

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