Wish I had mod points... Convenience is worth squat if that convenience lets the thief walk away with my money.

if all work has dignity then all workers deserve a living wage with healthcare and a retirement when you're too old to work.

Oh ye of little proof.

If a person's efforts aren't worth all those things, who are you going to steal from to provide them?

If the alternative is criminalizing homelessness and adding more to our already excessive prison population....yes.

This is just Amazon Smile. The user has to specifically choose which 501c3 they want to support with their purchases. Any 501c3 qualifies for Amazon Smile donations.

What the fuck, Slashdot?

On Slashdot? Roughly 50 times per day.

Whatever you think of Scientology -- I'll bet they created less addicts than the pharmaceutical-industrial complex you seem so supportive of.

My source is over 30 years old, but as of 1988 there was only one coolant licensed. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/0...

Seems like they imported an IRS list... not every charity is supported by everyone, but to each their own. For the record, my AmazonSmile donation goes to code.org .

And if I sent you out with a spear to hunt bison, you'd find it just as hard. Use the right tool for the job.

I don't know how to catch crickets in the prairie, but I did meet some people who hunt cicadas... with a bamboo pole, where the end had been dipped in something sticky.

Reposting again for truth.

You have no idea how stupid that is. Turing's corpse just blew dehydrated flecks of cyanide-laced apple skin into the moldy remains of his nasal cavity.

This only works if you can iterate within the typical set of the target domain.

The minimum fully distinguished hash length for a truly random input string is the same size as the input string, plus an anti-collision pad of about 16 bytes (ambiguous cases reduced to one part in 2^128).

What you've actually described is a data inflation method.

Crank score 10/10.

———

Extra explanation for round two.

We typically use hash functions to map items from a fluffy set of typical input strings. For example, English sentences. They are "fluffy" because they are encoded much longer than the underlying entropy of the typical set.

A hash function loosely creates a 1:1 map between members of your fluffy set and your densely encoded set (hash keys), where the length of the hash key in bits is approximately log2(fluffball).

So if you had a fluffball set of 2^800,000,000 possible values that English Wikipedia could have been over reasonable alternative histories, your algorithm will map the hash value back to the unique member of this fluffball that our actual Wikipedia contains.

But we don't have a fluffball of 2^800,000,000 possible values that English Wikipedia could reasonably have otherwise been. That's a rather large counterfactual space to tuck into your back pocket, and makes the compression challenge look rather minor by comparison.

When you iterate of a set of densely encoded random input strings, your input space is indistinguishable from your hash space. When you see a string that looks like it might have come from Wikipedia, you'll have to then ask: are you showing me a string from the hash space or the input string space? Depending on the size of your hash pad inflation, these are not too far apart.

Hashing is not a magic form of compression. It's a way of mapping a chosen set of fluffy encodings onto dense encodings.

Usually the chosen fluffy set is constructed as "all inputs I actually see in the first one trillion years of runtime". Then you set your stored hash length to log2(trillion_year_cardinality) + paranoia_pad, where the pad is usually bounded in practice somewhere between 4 and 20 bytes (or none at all, or slightly less than none, if you algorithm fall through to a second-level verification).

Admittedly, it's a bit weird to delegate your chosen set into the future like that, but it works because hashing references back onto observed history, because it functions at the bookkeeping layer.

I actually once implemented a hash table where the pad was slightly less than none because it was a pure speedup, and it was more effective to filter out only the annoying extra collisions in the next step (we did in fact run through the input space exhaustively to determine all collisions, then classified the collisions as irrelevant or annoying, and then created a tiny supplementary data structure to only subtract the annoying ones). Our hash table ended up with rather many "phantoms" as a result: completely ridiculous answers generated from spurious collisions pertaining to questions no-one would feasibly ever ask.

We actually considered it an advantage that our data structure effectively contained a vast number of trap streets.

It made our software hard to copy, because our hash function was contained in an Israeli-made hardware dongle which only we could source. Or you could rebuild our data structure with a different hash function, including all the phantoms, at 50x the original data size. (Not all that viable in the 640 KiB days of yore.) Of course, you could eliminate the phantoms if you had the same linguistics expertise we had, to determine which questions could be reasonably asked, and which ones could not. But possessing such a typical set is not cheap. See above.

Sometimes these hardware dongles could be reverse engineered, but that takes real talent, and real talent costs real money. As evidenced by some of the answers on this forum thread which are cynanide snortable.

Separating the 2 questions, 1) "Why not just use BERT?" and 2) "Why exclude parallel hardware?"

1) BERT's algorithmic opacity leaves open an enormous "argument surface" regarding "algorithmic bias". There are >100,000 hits for "algorithmic bias" due to inadequately principled model selection criteria used by the ML community, thence google's algorithms. Algorithmic Information Theory cuts down the argument surface to its mathematical definition of natural science:
  Solomonoff Induction. Basically, it is provable that if classical (Cartesian) causality holds, distilling a dataset of observations to its Kolmogorov Complexity means you've factored out all the bias you possibly can if you claim to be "data-driven" in your policies. The BERT folks have yet to present a compressed enwik8 (100M) or enwik9 (1G) to demonstrate it is a superior unbiased model. They should do so. They don't have to submit an entry to the Hutter Prize for this, so they are free to use Google's entire TPU farm, or whatever. Let this be a challenge to them if they are serious about dealing with accusations of bias in their algorithms.

2) If one reads the relevant Hutter Prize FAQ answer, it becomes apparent that even a 2080Ti (or other GPU/TPU) may not be affordable to some of the best minds on the planet.

... the addict industrial complex complaining that the CoS is siphoning off funds that could be used to hand out free needles and run safe injection sites.

Well what's a gentleman to do when they won't play by gentlemen's rules?

Dude, that's the whole premise... Starfleet isn't itself.

I think your racist glasses need cleaning. Up to his resignation she seems to have been brown-nosing Picard, helping him any way she could. His downfall was also her downfall, but even though she's acting reluctant she's always helping her "J.L." out.

Funny that you mention Americans since they're a dozen different heritages, all calling themselves American now...

Hahaha no. They didn't.

Picard? No, those eeeeeeeeeevil scavengers. So 7of9's reaction is out of character, but she's signaling that with a neon sign. The federation's values are dead out there, it's the wild wild west all over again.

So? Again that's not Picard, it's an ally he's foolishly chosen. I agree that he should have been given more of a story, but the general plot seems to be Picard fumbling into situations he's not aware of.

Quantum Leap ended in 1993. The world has moved on, you clearly has not. That's not the world's problem....

And how did those deer ticks get from Europe to CT? During the annual deer swim?

Lyme disease is named after Lyme, CT, where the first cases were diagnosed. Lyme, CT is right across Long Island Sound from Lyme, CT. Use the map, Luke!

If only they hadn't found this out, it would've made for a fantastic Air Crash Investigations episode about 10 years from now. All these boeing aircraft dropping out of the sky, seemingly randomly, over the course of 5-10 years, thousands dead, the ATSB taking years to finally work out the common cause. Ah well.

The original plotline had human hooked into a neural network, but studio heads thought that would be too complicated and forced the change. Would have been interesting though if instead of the barren world present you saw a green world overtaking the ruins except where the machines had their manufacturing and power nodes.

Amazon relies on the lists published by Southern Poverty Law Center, and in doing so actually does block donations to many Catholic and christian groups.

CS101. API stands for Application Programming Interface (API). It is a userland program in Clark Kent mode. It cant do raw I/O, it can't do raw memory reads, and a competent operating system and database permissions, and any security credentials/tokens/handles are stored in protected memory where only OS calls can get them. The core problem is idiots writing highly privileged services and programs that get given Superman privileges to bypass normal operating system controls, or in old speak, supervisory calls. Such modules are usually untested, large, incorporate unaudited blobs from elsewhere, and lack parsing/length checks and checking return codes after every call. Then some donkey ass gives the module superman ring -6 privileges. Back in 1990's, major banks could and did withhold vendor maintenance fees when they detected egregious shit code that brought down their systems. Now most do not have the forensic capability ping the vendor, so everything is now a 'technical issue' rather that a brandname os/product CVE. Name and shame is the only way to go forward. Now we hope financial institutions flay the asses of vendors who employ unqualified workers, or retrained ex-Boeing staff that focus on get-it-out-the-door-fast mantra. One would like to see class actions against software vendors by the public injured so. Political donations mean the usual suspects can still shovel out shitware without mandatory financial consequences. The headline should read 'Politicians downgrading consumer protections by protecting big donors'.

Yeah... Amazon Smile even show "Warpstock Corp" which is a non-profit to support the annual OS/2 Warp meeting. See you all at Warpstock 2020 !!!!!

Granted, it's much faster to grab a copy of /etc/password and run your tools on it than it is to try www://foo.com/login.

Still betting at least 50% of the passwords will be brute force cracked before mine is.

They never gave up after they saw the amount of power the government could get after prohibition.