Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Dumb (Score 2) 140

Exactly. Whenever people say to me: "being a programmer, you must be really smart"! I reply with "no, I've spent lots of time learning to be dumb -- but dumb in the same specific way as a computer. Only by being dumb in the same way as a computer can I know how to tell it what to do."

Comment Re:Cars Are Not More Expensive (Score 1) 622

The father of one of my lifelong friends was an executive with a major auto manufacturer. He was fond of pointing out that, relative to many commodities, automobile prices increase at a very reasonable rate. The unstated problem, of course, is that if the cost of a loaf of bread doubles, it can be hardship, but most families can cut back somewhere to make up the few dollars. If the cost of a car doubles, it's suddenly completely out of reach of a lot of families. He was a smart guy, and I know he could understand this. However, having lived most of his life at considerably above the median income, he had no intuitive grasp of the problem. He could only see one side of the economic equation: the marketing side.

Comment Re:It is highly possible that "no one" at all did (Score 1) 618

Occam's razor (or maybe just cynicism) makes me doubt whether you're right in this case, but I think you've predicted a class of scenarios that is almost bound to occur in the not-to-distant future as machine learning takes hold. The ways ML finds to "cheat" will always be ahead of the safeguards on cheating.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Why can't we ever attempt to solve a problem in this country without having a 'War' on it?" -- Rich Thomson, talk.politics.misc

Working...