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Comment Re:Strategy games? (Score 2) 148

It's not even a good example of image recognition, because the images to be processed don't have to be "understood" to be used. On top of that, the graphics of the games in question were very simple and primitive compared to what image recognition software deals with.

Add to that the repetitive nature of old video games that were based on 99% reaction time and 1% strategy, and you can just flat out colour me "unimpressed" with this "research".

Back in University, my AI project was a game player (a simple strategy game whose name I forget.) As it turned out, the entire game mapped down to a pre-determined set of decisions, so after playing only a dozen games, the "AI" would win every time, and that was just with a simple weighted-algorithm system of play. Some problems are just eminently suited to "AI" is all that I ended up learning from that project, but it was a useful lesson on the difference between optimizing a decision tree and actual "intelligence".

Until someone comes up with a system that can deal with bad and erroneous inputs as well as humans, I will continue to be unimpressed. Yet at the same time, I don't consider it necessary for a computer to be able to think and understand per se to be considered an "intelligence." It just needs to be able to make decisions and choose between alternatives faster than it's human counterparts in order to be useful, and to reduce the number of errors compared to it's human counterparts.

I have little faith in "neural networks." They place too much emphasis on emulating simple biological components and not enough on the "art" of understanding. Neural networks basically take the approach that "if it's big enough, we'll maybe get lucky and it will start to think." That's not "solving a problem." That's "playing the lottery."

Comment Re:Instilling values more important (Score 1) 698

Paypal is a scam company now. It wasnâ(TM)t really a scam company when it was originally founded. It broke new ground in paying for stuff on the web when the web was in its infancy. It was also had to deal with massive scams coming from the other direction, faux customers.

Bitcoin companies seem to be having a much worse problem with being scams than Paypal did, at least until it was sold off by the founders to EBay at which point, yes it turned in to an obnoxious, kind of a scam company.

It should also be noted 9/11, the Patriot act and the 2008 crash all happened in there which made Paypal increasingly obnoxious in reaction to crushing Federal scrutiny of and intrusion in to financial transactions.

Comment Re:Instilling values more important (Score 3, Interesting) 698

Point her to the Elon Musk TED talk. When asked how he did so many amazing things, one of his more insightful comments was he learned physics, and he learned how to approach things from the bottom up the way a physicist would. If you learn something at a fundamental level you can do amazing and new things. If you learn stuff, shallowly, from the top down, you often end up copying others which is both less amazing and less valuable.

Also has pretty good lessons for all the wanna be startup founders in Silicon Vally who are doing Uber of . . . or AirBNB of . . ., me too companies.

He also covers doing big, hard things for the benefit of humanity part pretty well.

Comment Good luck with that (Score 1) 406

Overkill it may be, but I've been writing my prototype security code to generate new AES256 keys for each session, using the pre-generated keys only to initialize communications and handshake the generated keys. Even I won't know what keys are in use.

The NSA can kiss my ass. So can CSEC, GCHQ, and everyone else who thinks they have a "right" to spy on me.

Approach the service provider with a properly signed warrant in the appropriate jurisdiction of the server if you want access to my data.

Comment Re: Drop your weapon... (Score 1) 318

Doesn't matter. What matters is why the officers understand they've been dispatched to the scene, and what they believe they're seeing when they arrive.

Obviously you're able to tell a real gun from a replica at a distance while someone waving it around, but most people can't, including cops, until they have it in hand, personally. You might be comfortable risking other people's lives by making them assume that all guns are toys until they've been shot at, but people who actually do have, as a feature of their daily job, other people assaulting and trying to kill them, probably wouldn't want you armchairing on their behalf.

The solution? Actual thinking parents not sending their kid out into public to act stupid with a replica gun. To teach a kid that when they see a cop car rolling up, to perhaps consider not looking crazy and waiving said replica gun around. This is a 100% lapse on the part of parents and a completely crappy position for the cops to have been put in. I know that you would be safe, because you would omnipotent and know, from a distance, that the replica gun wasn't real, and that if it was real, the universe's special karma system would protect you from the laws of physics because you are A Better Person Than Cops Are, and bullets wouldn't be able to hurt you.

Comment Re:Drop your weapon... (Score 2, Insightful) 318

If you're that unable to grasp the difference between the possibility that someone might be carrying a weapon (say, in a violin case), and cops responding to someone's alarmed call about a guy brandishing a gun in public, and having that gun waved at them as they arrive on the scene, then you are completely out of touch with reality. Cops get killed, more often than you seem to know (or perhaps not as often as you'd like?) for misjudging the risk to their lives as they come upon such scenes or make a traffic stop. If you did that all day, every day, and some of your colleagues died doing what you have to do for your job, you might look at it a little differently. You're probably thinking that the police should have just hidden behind their magic bullet-proof cruiser doors like in the movies, right? Yeah. That kid shouldn't be dead. I blame his parents, 100%.

Comment Re:To answer your question (Score 3, Interesting) 279

A buddy's brother works (or worked, who knows now) for Intel, and used to bring along demos of the latest and greatest lab technology when he came for visits. Some of the stuff he had was up to 10-15 years ahead of actual release cycles in terms of performance and capability. I'm sure some of the ideas got scrapped, but a lot of them probably made it into production in the chips we use today.

Wild stuff. Both brothers were major hardware geeks.

I'd love to see what kind of technology he's showing his brother from the labs over Christmas and Easter holidays nowadays. :D

Comment What kills them all are the dev kits (Score 1) 153

What kills all console games eventually is the difficulty of working with their development kits, and the paucity of documentation about how to wring maximum performance out of those development kits.

Write a game using OpenGL or DirectX, and you have millions of potential buyers. Write a game using Android or iOS APIs, and you have millions of portable buyers.

Consoles? Not so much. Your only market with those devices are dedicated gamers willing to spend money just to play games. It's a smaller market share by a huge margin.

Comment Re:Protip (Score 4, Insightful) 398

Somebody beat me to it. :)

No matter what you do in life, you are going to die. There is no escaping that.

So live a life of wonder, mystery, and enjoyment, rather than spending it fretting about exactly what might be the thing that kills you. Eat a bacon sandwich. Put cream in your coffee. Have a steak once in a while. Have a doughnut once a month. And by all means, have a glass of wine with your meal and spark a bowl of cannabis afterwards.

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