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Comment Re:If I had some fancy new spy satellites... (Score 1) 34

Talking about deception, the picture in Der Spiegel article is definitely not how a SAR antenna looks like. In reality it's very likely an elongated structure that's supposed to unfold or extend to 10s of meters in total length.

Also in the public press they don't mention they are likely shooting for cm range precision, with good one pass 3d performance and with some underground seeing capability.

Comment Re:Mostly useless (Score 1) 57

Sure, some small advances may be made in the misnamed "AI" field, but mostly research there is not a question of computation power and that has been the case for some time. This thing merely serves for some politicians to maintain the illusion they are doing something useful.

This is not entirely true. A PhD student will be able to take on a problem proportional to computing resources available. This will open up some areas of research that would not be tackled otherwise.

Comment Who tests the tests? (Score 2) 56

Any one looking at the numbers seriously must ask themselves:
- who tests the tests ?
- what is the share of false positives ?
- what is the share of false negatives ?
- how about the share of false positives/negatives with the known presence of a very similar virus ?
- how do we know that the specific antibodies are specific to this variant of the virus and universal across people with different immune systems and different prior exposures ?
- how can we exclude other antibody variants from interfering with this specific virus ?

Without these answers at best we can look at these articles as some kind of pseudo-scientific garbage-in garbage-out with unknown bias.

Comment Does the math add up? (Score 0) 165

I'd like to know dr. Fauci's grades from probability and statistics, if he passed these subjects at all.

Can he explain, per example, how the current flu season is statistically worse than let's say the flu 3 years ago or the really bad one 12 years ago and how come the hospitals were nearly empty at the height of this so called pandemic compared to "normal" flu in December/January this year.

The numbers just don't add up.

Comment Give me FPS instead (Score 1) 224

I would far prefer a 4K display at 240 fps to an 8K display at 60 fps. The 8K spatial resolution is overkill for most people. High frame rates will be far more useful for games and watching sports.

Comment Re:After 20 years ... (Score 1) 133

20 years after Linux did, M$ still can't understand the concept of virtual desktops.

That's not completely true. There seems to be some support for the feature in windows already because there have been a handful of utilities that enabled the feature on Windows 7 (with some bugs attached).

However, I don't get it why Microsoft doesn't add this feature to the regular windows interface. In my opinion it would be the most productive feature added. If they just repackage Windows 7 with addition of virtual desktops and call it Windows 11 they will sell a lot.

Comment Re:Ideal for the State! (Score 1) 82

You can track EVERYTHING with Blockchain. Make the one-time association between user and hash, and you have everything they ever do. Perfect for an all-controlling State!

That's true, but how is that different from using a credit or debit card or any bank account that's associated to real person identity?

Comment Re:Still a meaningless stunt (Score 3, Informative) 111

You have no idea what this machine has just done. It's leapt forward some 10-20 years in terms of computer Go-playing capability in one fell swoop. The numbers involved in Go are so huge that brute-force search, even for a limited number of moves, is absolutely impossible in the times given.

And it isn't being given programmed hints, because Go is just too complex a game for that beyond amateur play. There's a handful of hard-and-fast rules of what's a stupid move and what's not and everything else interacts SO MUCH with the rest of the board and future plays that it's almost impossible to even tell who's winning most of the time!

As such, this system, no matter the power behind it, is doing something that dumb, brute-force, play-the-game AI written by world-experts in Go, AI, and game theory wasn't expected to be able to achieve within the next decade. And it primarily gets there because it learns from information fed to it.

For those who are more involved in AI research it is not so surprising. Similar general approaches to learning have been used in the "cognitive" branch of AI research for the last 15 years or so. The buzzword changed from "cognitive" to "deep learning" recently.

The key to success of AlphaGO is the position evaluation function that is learn from data. The surprise here is that learning from the game endings of internet GO players and somewhat informed computer vs computer games is enough to train an evaluation function with the predictive power to beat the world champion. In the old days of AI an expert-designed heuristic function would be used instead and a kind of smart position tree search would do the heavy lifting. But obviously this didn't work with GO due to combinatorial explosion and very difficult evaluation in the beginning and middle stages of the game.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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