BUT people remember the "spikes" of accidents such as 3-Mile-Island.

Which just goes to show that people are beyod terrible at estimating risk. It's something like the third worse nuclear powerplant accident ever and no one died and very little leaked and pretty much all trace of that has gone. In the greater scheme of incidents involved in power generation, that's somewhere approching negative.

We probably have to just live with that fact unless somebody invents breakthrough persuasion technology.

Preach it, brother.

It's not tautology. One could come up with flawed definitions which preclude computers. If for example you defined learning in terms of physical neurons or chemical changes, for example.

You don't have to avoid the brain as reference, but if your definition of learning is too specific, then it becomes rather circular.

So anyway, do you have a definition of learning?

Turned on, eh? If you insist that's the case, I hope for your sake you never see a close relative breast feeding.

But that side, the less puritanical among us don't get raging boners every time we see a flash of ankle.

nor an article about how there are things human consciousness can do which no deterministic process can more than imperfectly mimic.

This implies that the only thing separating humans brains from Turing machines on a fundemental level is some out-right randomness, or, you are asserting that the human brain is a more powerful computing model in that it can solve problems that are formally non computable.

It's very easy to create a computer with genuine randomness. You need a source of noise (as someone who occasionally works in analog circuitry, I can assure you this is not hard to find), such as a reverse biased PN junction or a resistor, and amplifier and something that turns that all into logic levels. Shove that into a convenient input pin and you now have a deterministic machine which can make truly non deterministic decisions by using thr random noise.

Come to think of it if you just read from /dev/random, you'll get truly random noise since that's seeded from random exernal events like network packets and keypresses.

End result: you personally own several otherwise deterministic computers with good access to truly random processes for when you want some genuine nondeterminism.

Is that what you mean?

OK, mbeckman.

Here's a challenge for you: define "learning" in such a way that it could hypothetically be performed by a computer. Unless you also state good reason to claim that they are the only possible source of intelligence, you must avoid any reference to terran brain structures.

emale breasts are sex objects. Until males of our species stop being turned on by the sight or touch of them, they will be sex objects. The end.

Until humans stop shoving things up their arses to turn themselves on, arse-shovable-sized objects will be sex will be sex objects. The end.

Or possibly, in both cases it's context dependent. Nah.

Given the interest in diversity, it's perfectly reasonable to rule out the probability that there were any because the interest in diversity would have almost invariably lead to them being given hiring priority if they applied.

You can keep on repeating the same rubbish: it doesn't become true if you say it enough.

This is not about favouring unqualified "minorities", it's about actually getting them to apply in the first place.

Oh and equal opportunity so that when they do apply they're not being judged based on race/gender/whatever and instead on actual ability.

If

You're entire premise is based on an unsupported supposition, mixed with other random crap likethe feeble attempt at some sort of racism-reflection.

Rcruiting through peer networks (what a lot of tech companies do) tends very strongly to hit exactly the same demographic they've already got. FBs numbers are below the numbers on the courses at uni and in the industry so it implies strongly that their recruiting message isn't getting outside a rather select demographic.

IOW there are talented people who they're never going to recruit because their recruitment strategy is flawed.

I don't think that pointing out a fact to another person falls into "calling yourself something" .

Ah, so it's a fact that you are/were a C++ guru, eh? So my man, what precisely defines guru that makes such thing a fact? Calling yourself a guru is akin to insisting your nickname is Mr Awesome.

I don't think he's an intel fanboi as much as an Intel hater, which is fine, because they're pretty despicable. They're crooks but the legal system seems to love large companies so, for example when they dealt an illegal yet crippling blow, they got away with a $1bn payoff which is certainly less than they've made from their illegal activities.

When fines for bad behaviour have a strongly positive ROI, then there's something deeply broken with the system.

It's also funny that on Linux, with fully open benchmarks on phoronix, the AMD chips trade blows with the Intel ones and the top end ones of each are actually pretty close, with AMD being a bit slower on average than the top intel ones, but not far off. You don't have to be a fanboi to read the benchmark results.

These days I buy AMD if at all possible because they're fast in most cases and I'd rather not give my money to a crook if I can avoid it.

It doens't have 8 separate 256 bit FPUs. It can however split the 256 bit ones into separare 128 bit ones. So unless you're hammering on AVX instructions, then it effectively has one FPU per core.

Um, that's utter crap.

No it ain't. AMD at that point had an actually scalable architecture using hyper transport and could scale in multi socket boxes way, way better than Intel. It made a huge difference.

I never call myself a master in martial arts, however I am ...

you just did.

Apache can serve webdav shares. It can back them with SVN.

WebDAV can be mounted as a FS by all major OSs, and SVN also has a web based history. You need to provide some auth system to hook into (obviously), but otherwise it works really very well.

You're shifting your claim.

From what to what? You may wish tocheck what my claim actually was.

PTAM is decent C++ code with probably pretty decent performance, but it isn't "high performance numerical code" or even high performance embedded code; it contains none of the performance tuning that such code usually should have.

It's not pure numerics, as you're thinking of them. It's certainly not embedded code. It is certainly high performance however. It is a very CPU bound algorithm and it uses what was at the time state of the art algorithms for pretty much every step. Not only that but very fast implementations of them. It is a very, very well written piece of code.

I think it is dishonest on your part to recommend Eigen, when you know (or ought to know) that it actually isn't high performance

OK, you're determined to completely ignore a large facet of computing. For large amounts of small matrices the fixed sized numerics libraries won't be beaten. I've examined the output of the ASM code. For such things, the cache locality is good and the compiler knows about aliasing. So unless you provide benchmarks, I simply won't believe you.

Also, the eigen benchmarks seem to show it matching BLAS and LAPACK for speed.

and is deeply mired in C++ idiosyncracies.

I think personally, that TooN has a nicer interface than Eigen. I suspect others don't agree because Eigen is more popular. In any case, the idosynchracies are in the function defintion, which frankly doesn't matter nearly as much.

The actual maths code reads like maths. That's the important bit.

Likewise, I think it is dishonest of you to portray C++ as the only high performance computing language in town,

Except I didn't. I said I don't know anyone who uses anything else. I also asserted C++ has the best combination of performance and expressibility. Or course you could write in C or FORTRAN, they're both high performance and Turing complete.

C++ is still more expressive though.

You seem very angry though. I think you should go back and carefully re-read my posts and the context and sift out what I actually said and whatever random things you've hallucinated.