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Comment k8s (Score 2) 116

The answer is Kubernetes. I have seen my own Kubernetes objects successfully deploy across four different public cloud vendors, and the Cloud Native Compute Foundation will continue ensuring industry support without locking folks to specific vendors.

Comment Re:Pretending... (Score 4, Insightful) 169

Okay, but pretending that the data is honest is pretending that objectivity exists. Data is just bits; it's not capable of discerning its own truth. (This is formally known as Tarski's Undefinability.)

More importantly, we interpret data relative to a model. Depending on what the model says, the data might support many different hypotheses. But if the model is garbage, then so is any interpretation. For example, race doesn't exist except as a social construction, but that doesn't stop AIs from believing that race is real. Similarly, there are more sexes than just men and women, but AI designed without knowledge of intersex people will be blind to them and always try to force them into one of two groups.

Comment Learn Lojban today! (Score 1) 173

Want a context-free language, easily parseable, with plenty of computer-driven tooling, without this irritating English ambiguity? Lojban is learnable today: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/la...

In all seriousness, it is mind-blowing to me that our tribe of computer scientists continue to expend so much effort deriving meaning from English utterances. If we only wanted to encode meaning in a computer-manageable way, we could have been doing it decades ago.

Comment Re:I disagree (Score 5, Insightful) 367

SuperKendall disagrees with RMS. Groundbreaking and new. More on this, including video, at 11. But first, our lead story: Should laws prohibit Facebook from carrying out their technically-legal but morally-dubious business strategy? Let's go to Jim with details. Jim?

Jim: Thanks Linda. Facebook would like us to ask whether they should be forgiven in exchange for improving their stewardship of our personal data. However, should we trust Facebook to reform themselves, or should we legislate instead to force Facebook to act? That's the main question here.

Linda: Sounds complex, Jim. What are the main arguments in favor of legislation?

Jim: Well, Linda, in our current state, not only can businesses store enormous amounts of personally-identifying information, or "PII", without any accountability, but they can also sell those databases to other businesses, as Facebook does, or they can become targets for hackers, like anybody from Target to Equifax to the Nova Scotian government.

Linda: Sounds dangerous, Jim. Can the government protect us?

Jim: Not likely, Linda. The government can store PII too, and while our current government doesn't use PII against citizens very often, only using it to gerrymander and influence voting patterns, other governments around the world use PII to violate human rights. These protestors in favor of legislation argue that we can bind the government's use of PII, so that no organization, GO or NGO, can build up a database like this.

Linda: I don't know, Jim; I like my Facebook account.

Jim: So do I, Linda. Whatever we do from here, though, we can't deny that Facebook has changed our lives, and our lives now depend on changing Facebook. Back to you.

Comment Re:Evidence? (Score 1) 290

Googlers cannot make most production changes without committing. Googlers *cannot* commit without code review. I had had a major code change (deprecating usage of a discontinued Python library) when I worked at Google, which sat open for years (and was probably still open when I left!) because the code owner refused to mark it as reviewed.

I'm not saying that I saw the behavior described by this engineer, but I can completely believe that not being able to get code reviews could lead to performance problems.

Comment Pirsig Morality (Score 1) 264

In his books, Pirsig develops the concept of morality as equivalent to rules of nature. To Pirsig, a helium molecule is moral when it obeys the requirements of chemistry: Rising in air, not burning at room temperature, fusing in stellar furnaces. We could view physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc. as sciences for empirically learning the morality of the universe.

I'm also reminded of Madoka, of course, but that's a completely different line of thought.

Comment As usual, journalists don't grok mathematicians (Score 4, Informative) 156

Nobody is racing, Scott Aaronson did not make a monetary wager this time around (and was also rudely misquoted), Blum is a respected mathematician who has been working in this subfield for years, most mathematicians expect that P != NP and also that the proof will be very difficult and not found by accidental observation like in Blum's paper, chess is within EXPTIME and not "out of the realm of possibility", and Traveling Salesman instances can actually be solved in pretty good time due to a TSP-specific heuristic.

Comment Re: Good, nazis need to pay (Score 2) 307

I think that Weird Al endorsed Bernie, but I'm not sure. I can't find anybody calling him a Nazi, although his song lyrics have referenced Nazis often enough that it complicates searching.

I like corner cases. Who has called Jill Stein, who almost certainly did not vote Democrat, a Nazi? I've found several nasty rants excoriating her, but nobody notable calling her a Nazi.

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