Computers have none of that and they will always click on you before you can click on them.

If you'd been paying any attention at all, you'd know that the AI's latency was set to 200ms, which is larger than the average human's.

Same as these guys -- their own logic is self-contradictory. Either DOTA is a game mainly about reaction time, in which case the 18-player limit will have almost no effect; or DOTA is a game mainly about strategy and how to use characters together, in which case the direct interface will have little effect. Given the fact that poorly-chosen characters caused the computer to lose decisively, I think the first one is much more likely.

The OpenAI team have stated over and over why they use the direct interface rather than scanning the pixels: Because they know how to get an AI to scan pixels, but they don't know how to get an AI to do strategy. So they're focusing their training time on strategy rather than wasting GPU time scanning pixels.

The question asked was: "Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?" The answer given was...

Yeah, I actually looked her up on Wikipedia before I responded.

First of all, the only good answer anyone who is not actively involved in education research can give on that subject is, "I don't know, I would have to do some research". As such, I agree with someone else in this thread who said it was a trick question.

Secondly, when given the opportunity to answer once she understood the question, she said:

Well personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the United States is on our map. I don't know anyone else who doesn't. And if the statistics are correct, I believe that there should be more emphasis on geography in our education so people will learn how to read maps better.

That seems like a pretty reasonable answer to me.

But by all means continue to believe her to be dumb as bricks if it makes you feel better.

...believe it or not, there are many of us who have to answer far more difficult questions on the spot on a daily basis.

Dealing with the stress and confusion of answering a question on stage is a learned skill. If you do answer such questions "on a daily basis", you are far better prepared than she was.

People don't get paid based on how hard they work

Indeed, that was GP's point -- Conservative dogma says that if you work hard you'll succeed, and if you don't succeed it must be because you're lazy. CEO pay proves this false.

People get paid based on the value they produce.

No, people get paid based on the value they can capture.

Try hanging around some business types for a while. You'll find that the good ones worry about two things: 1) "Creating" value -- i.e., doing something that people are willing to pay for 2) "Capturing" value -- actually getting money. Doing #1 isn't always easy, but the trick is that even after you manage to do #1, you then have to do #2 in order to have a sustainable business.

And they have a framework for analyzing how hard or easy it will be for you to capture value -- Porter's Five Forces. Compare a programmer's ability to capture the value she creates versus that of a CEO.

And of course, there's also the fact that in this case it's the perceived value that is being captured -- it's highly doubtful that highly-paid CEOs actually generate anywhere near as much shareholder value as they're being paid.

The vote ID, the vote and the signatures are printed as a paper receipts for the voter and for the vote handling organization, to ensure there is a paper trail that

What you've described is pretty close to what most people actually have now, just the reverse (i.e., now people take a scan-tron and pass it into a scanner, rather than filing out a screen and printing a receipt). The main difference is that your system has the additional possibility of verifying the result of your own vote after the fact. But there's still a lot of paper, and it assumes most people still have to physically show up at a polling station. That's not the "all-electronic" voting that people are decrying.

One thing the summary didn't point out was that game three they didn't let the AI choose their own heroes. The humans basically conceded defeat; so for the third game they were just experimenting: The let the "audience" choose the heroes, and they chose heroes specifically which would be poor at playing the style which the computers had played so far, just to see if it could change its playing style to adapt to the new heroes. And the human team chose exactly the heroes that the AI chose for the first two games. After that draft, the AI's rating of its own chance of winning was 2.3%, based only on the draft. The AI adapted somewhat, but not much; and near the end of the game, the AI seemed to be doing a bunch of fairly sub-optimal things; like, it knew it couldn't really win, so it didn't know what to do except random micro.

So, it was an interesting data point -- particularly the importance of choosing the right set of heroes. But it was certainly not a victory for humans. The AI soundly trounced them except when it was purposely crippled.

Matches, post-game commentary, and other information available on the OpenAI Blog about the match.

When I first signed up for WhatsApp, they had a great way of making money -- 1 year free, subsequent years $1/year. I was so excited when I saw that -- FINALLY, a platform that will just let me pay to use it, rather than trying to spam me with junk and sell my information!

When FB bought the company and cancelled the yearly fee, I knew it was only a matter of time. I'm mostly surprised it took them so long.

Even for-profit media (yes, run by an actual corporation!) is preferable to a bunch of uninformed idiots "just asking questions" without a single shred of proof between them.

Yeah, after I wrote this I realized that this could be taken to mean, "I get my news from memes and random inflammatory posts", which is not what I meant at all. A meme can contain commentary, but certainly not information; only a link to an authoritative source can do that. What I consider my "news" on Facebook generally does come from news organizations (although also from non-profits or other organizations). What I meant was, it's filtered through my friends, rather than an editorial board.

Would be nice if we could collectively be intelligent enough to form our own opinions.

Would be nicer if we could collectively be intelligent enough to not use social media as a source of news and information.

And what's better, corporate-controlled media?

My friends and family represent a very diverse range of people from all walks of life. Getting my news and information from Facebook means that I get exposed to a lot of different angles and ideas; and it's generally filtered by things that I think are important. Naturally that means I have to take things with a grain of salt sometimes, and often get stuff (on both sides) that's inflammatory or just plain wrong. I still think that's better than giving editorial control to some corporation.

Note: that I'm not in the "mainstream media is fake news" camp. Breitbart and Fox are corporations as much as WP and NYT, and the latter do actually care about the truth. But they're still companies with their own biases -- with FB I choose my own newsfeed's bias (or lack thereof).

Worse yet, if you're "guaranteed" a job, can you be fired? If not, then for some people it's the equivalent of basic income, because they can just show up when they want, do what they want, and not worry about the consequences. Worse, because the people who *are* trying to work will be demoralized and understaffed. And if you can be fired, then it's not really guaranteed, is it?

But that's a skill-based game, as opposed to strategy or anything needing intelligence. "Skill" as in reaction time to seeing an opponent and successfully moving clicking the mouse of their head.

Strangely enough, they already thought of that:

First, we noticed that the agents had very fast reaction times and were very accurate taggers, which could explain their performance. However, by artificially reducing this accuracy and reaction time we saw that this was only one factor in their success. ...Even with human-comparable accuracy and reaction time the performance of our agents is higher than that of humans.

Both the summary and the Verge article seem to have missed the point of this development -- an improvement to the agent design scheme.

Last year, after smashing both go and chess with their self-play-from-zero strategy, they tried the same thing with Starcraft. And they lost spectacularly -- even after millions of games, their self-trained DeepMind agents were unable to beat even the most simplistic "scripted" StarCraft AI -- the ones designed for n00b humans to beat up on. They discovered that while the self-play agents were able to eventually figure out activities like "harvest minerals", they were unable to put those together into higher-level activities like building an army and winning a game.

One of the key refinements they introduce in this paper is to allow the agents to evolve their own internal "rewards", which were sub-steps towards winning. These goals included things like killing an opponent, capturing a flag, recapturing their own flag, avoiding being killed, and so on. The programmers architected in that such rewards were *possible*, but let the learning algorithm define what those rewards actually were and how much the reward was for each one.

They call this architecture 'FTW'. Then they ran their vanilla "self-play from nothing" bots again, and found that just like in StarCraft, the bots never made much progress; but they found that the new bots, which had self-made internal rewards, were able to consistently beat strong humans, even after having their reaction time and visual accuracy reduced below that of measured humans.

One thing though, like Slashdot it keeps asking for permissions over and over no matter how often you decline. GDPR allows you to remember that preference with a cookie. Or just make it less intrusive than a full screen overlay.

More than that, I actually went through the "other options" screen and checked a bunch of boxes (I don't mind adverts, or being remembered; I just don't like being chased around the internet with ads trying to sell me something I just bought) -- and I still get the permission screen.

While they called themselves "communism", they actually fall under fascism in most respects that matter.

First of all, it doesn't matter if they were "really" communist or not, you left them out. They were certainly atheists, so maybe you should have called them "organized atheism".

Second, we could play the same "Are they really X?" game with religion. The people who did the worst atrocities in the Crusades, as with Islam extremists today, often clearly violated the teaching of the leaders in whose name they claim to be acting. So either those people don't count as "organized religion", because they weren't "really" Christians / Muslims / whatever; or, Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao do count as "communists" (and "atheists"), because whatever Marx would have thought of them, they did see themselves as trying to follow his teaching.

You can't have it both ways: You can't tar me with the Crusades without accepting the black mark of the Killing Fields.

And only for HTML emails...

This could be misunderstood -- the whole point of the attack is that the attacker changes a non-HTML email into an HTML one. If your mail client doesn't support HTML (or displays the formatting but doesn't fetch anything) then you're fine.

...and only in Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Postbox and Airmail.

This isn't correct.

There are two bugs. One is a sort of braindead one which only affects a small number of clients (including Thunderbird and Apple Mail), and has nothing to do with PGP or SMIME.

The other one is more serious, and does have to do with SMIME and PGP. Basically, if an attacker has a copy of an email which is encrypted but not signed, and knows what some of the plaintext is exactly, she can splice out those bits and put in other bits. And basically all e-mails contain things like Content-type: text/plain. So, an attacker can modify that to Content-type: text/html\n\n <img src=.

Regarding this bug, the website says:

Our analysis shows that EFAIL plaintext exfiltration channels exist for 25 of the 35 tested S/MIME email clients and 10 of the 28 tested OpenPGP email clients.

I agree that it's a bug for MUAs to automatically download external content in encrypted emails. But it's a much more understandable bug to make.

“I thought it was freeware,” Lundgren told the Times. “... The value’s in the license. They didn’t understand that.”

It may be that the value is in the license, but that doesn't change the way the actual laws work. The idea is in the word: "copyright" is a right to make copies. It doesn't matter whether money changed hands: Microsoft has a copyright on those bits, and he copied them without their permission, so legally, he violated their copyright.

Is it a jerk move on Microsoft's part, to prosecute this guy for helping people keep software working which they've already paid for? Sure, and they deserve to be publicly shamed for it.

But there's nothing wrong with this ruling from a legal perspective. Everyone benefits when the law is clear and applied consistently, and in this case it was. Remember that those same laws which allow Microsoft to prosecute a guy for copying "free" bits also allow people who write GPL software to prosecute companies for copying "free" bits without giving back their changes.