Comment CND (Score 1) 179
I remember trying to explain to a CND person, a decade ago, why AI is a far bigger threat to the world than nuclear weapons. I think it went in one ear and out the other.
I remember trying to explain to a CND person, a decade ago, why AI is a far bigger threat to the world than nuclear weapons. I think it went in one ear and out the other.
I didn't buy it for this, but ended up with using a refurb 2014 mac mini as a media centre. My Fire stick hasn't been used since. Sure I have to use a mouse and keyboard, but it runs everything and can be controlled over ssh, which is nice. So I use VLC instances with http and telnet so that they can be controlled remotely either by web or by scripts.
Task Manager -> End Task
Maybe that will shut the up.
Quantity of publication and reputation of journals have become targets which researchers are forced to aim at.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Honest researchers are outcompeted by frauds (or at least less honest researchers) when it comes to these measures.
With Starlink and friends, ground=based astronomy is basically f***ed already.
Eigenfunctions of something are inputs to something (say a transformation) which retain their nature. That is, their nature survives the transformation. Other things do not. This is survival of the fittest.
If you take an audio feedback loop (e.g. holding a microphone near a PA speaker), the signal evolves towards frequencies which interfere constructively, and everything dies out. This is evolution again: certain frequencies suited to the evolutionary niche survive and grow, and the other frequencies, ill-adapted to the feedback loop, die out.
When it comes to our brains, our immediate future brain state depends largely on its current state and its neurological input. Thought patterns which survive this grow, and those that don't die out. Thus the patterns in our brains evolve, going from thought to thought as animals go from generation to generation.
I've said to friends for years that evolution should be viewed as a very general phenomenon. As we get more specific, like biological evolution, then our notion of evolution takes on more particulars, and conversely, at its most general, all we know is that the state of a system depends on its present state, input from outside, and the laws which determine the immediate future state from theese.
The term I used at the time was Pattern Resonance. Just like resonance in many mechanical systems is a matter of frequency content, in the sense of sine functions and the Fourier transform, when it comes to mind and nature, things cease to be a simple function like this, rather what matters is some broad, general, complex notion of the stuff that is analogous to the sine functions in e.g. signal processing. I simply use the word Pattern.
Nature evolves, mind evolves, the state of the universe evolves, the outputs of recursively applied functions evolve. Wherever there is feedback there is evolution.
RMS's bullshit is why there are essentially no proprietary forks of the Linux kernel, or the GNU userland. (Almost. Red Hat have finally figured out the loophole. And f them. But companies like Apple like permissive licenses like MIT and BSD because they can take what they want and give nothing back to the community.) RMS's bullshit is why share-alike licenses exist. RMS's bullshit is why there was a *nix userland available to put on top of Linus' college hobby project. He may not be popular, nor woke, but his 'bullshit' has changed the world, and much of that change is a good thing.
This is a Welcome Offer, so you can only apply it to one item, and if the order is less than $8, you have to pay shipping.
Given that you can get proper brand (e.g. WD Green) second hand 120GB SSDs off eBay for around $10-$15, I think I'd go for those instead.
I don't have an SSD this cheap, but I have some supercheap brand ones. Something these supercheap SSDs are useful for is as an alternative to memory sticks for installing an OS. They are much quicker to write to (many times quicker), and quicker to read from, and can be rewritten more times. So this speeds the process. On the other hand, if it stops working, chuck it in the bin and grab another one.
I've not tried these, but at this price I may grab a few and see.
So far as I can tell, each Android device, or Windows with Hello, can act as a passkey. Basically anything that is modern Windows or Mac So you can both use your phones. When you try to log in with a passkey, you get a list of devices you can use. (That said, I've only just started exploring passkeys. Like you, I have strong passwords. For a few things I have memorised long strings of words. For others, I use hash-generated passwords combining a string unique to a particular website and a string common to a collection of websites as the hash input. The annoying thing is that you can't create passkeys on a Linux distro like Ubuntu. If I have access to one of my phones, or a Windows laptop, and likely (though I've not tried) a mac, I can log it in. For now i'll keep the password option available, but probably i'll sign in with a passkey wherever I can.)
If MS had the option to do what they allege Google might do, would they do it themselves? And what would they say when others complained about it?
They are complaining because they want to leverage courts and regulators to aid them in the competitive marketplace. They are saying whatever they think will help them in this regard. They are not saying this because they think the market is unfair, and would support an unfair market if it was unfair in their favour. That's just how business operates.
What needs to be done by somebody is to construct an overall picture of how the internet is structured: what is needed in terms of bandwidth and connectivity, what we have, and how it is paid for and by whom. Leaving things to the market means you have a bunch of interconnected fragments each controlled by a separate private entity who is primarily interested in their own profitability, not the overall picture and how they fit in. A modern company is incentivised to game rules to improve their own situation even if it comes at the cost of other players in the market. Areas of market failure (that is, areas where free market mechanics don't incentivise desirable overall outcomes), and then solutions sought. We want a market that leads to good overall outcomes, but this is far from guaranteed by just 'leaving it to the market to sort out'.
That's like saying there's no difference between a nuke and a stick of dynamite since they both go bang.
AI is capable of digesting and training on a level which is humanly impossible, just as nukes have the capacity to create explosions on a scale which is impractical to achieve with conventional explosives.
And it is easy to implement an end-to-end encryption messaging system given what open source code is already available.
So then companies such as Canonical (and RedHat) should be organising, funding and contributing the LTS for the kernels they use. If the mainstream kernel maintainers can't cope with the workload, others must take some of the burden.
IF I HAD A MINE SHAFT, I don't think I would just abandon it. There's got to be a better way. -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.