It doesn't matter whether technology is involved or not, or what their comedic intent was: stating something about wanting to go ahead with terrorism or murder is going to get the attention of authorities, and they are going to start by doing a full investigation of the threat with no smile or laughter whatsoever.

Kids need to wise up

"Amy Ford, director of communications for the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT), says that section of highway cannot easily be widened and is too narrow to support the addition of a guardrail. When accidents do occur there, it’s crucial to alert emergency responders as quickly as possible."

Super informative. Don't know what I'd do without you, Slashdot.

I like the general sentiment here, but I think there are a lot of details to iron out, and we would have to be careful regarding unintended consequences.

For instance, there's the matter of how to treat trade secrets, which are common in computer code. In many cases, the creator of a work doesn't even have a right to distribute source code that they've purchased a license to (say, a game engine) and have modified, so this is untenable unless you are willing to make entire business models completely flat.

I suspect on re-reading your comment that you mean the portion of a work that is distributed--in this case the game client. There are less issues with that, but still licensed assets are a fairly reasonable part of the copyrighted works market. Perhaps unlimited duplication after a lapse time would be allowed, but derivative works would not be?

It's an interesting thought. It's not going to happen, but something like it's now on my wishlist.

Actually, at 30 mentions of owners and ownership in Title 17, Chapter 2 alone, you are dead wrong:
https://www.copyright.gov/titl...:

Read all of the laws there. You will find plenty more mentions. And in case you try to backpedal and amend your statement, since the term is used to describe the copyright itself, and not the work, you can find the term "owner of a work" and "ownership of a work" in multiple official documents associated with our government's various copyright bodies:
https://www.federalregister.go...
https://www.copyright.gov/docs...
https://www.copyright.gov/poli...

I'm not saying I agree with US copyright law, but lets get our facts straight. Your conclusions may (or may not) be valid, but that particular argument regarding legal wording is so wrong that I have to wonder if you've even read these laws.

Bonus: Contrary to your main argument, DCMA *does* in fact prohibit actions involving circumvention of copyright--many of which are actions taken for personal use, say, displaying a legitimate copy of a video from a computer by illegally circumventing HDCP or the like. This is absurd, but that's how the law was written, and I doubt it was put there by accident.

is part of a healthy and balanced diet.

So, one problem is that there is not always more data. In my field, we have a surplus of some sorts of data, but other data requires hundreds of thousands of hours of human input, and we only have so much of that to go around. Processing all of that is easy enough, getting more is not.

Also, by "effective", I should have made it clear that I meant "an effective overall solution to the problem", which includes all costs of training a wider, lower-precision network. This includes input data collection, storage and processing, all of the custom software to handle this odd floating point format, including FP16-specific test code and documentation, run time server costs and latency, any increased risks introduced by using code paths in training and , etc.

I'm not saying that I don't believe it's possible, I've just seen absolutely no evidence that this is a significant win in most or even a sizable fraction of cases, or that it represents a "best practice" in the field. Our own experiments have shown a severe degradation in performance when using these nets w/out a complete retraining, the software engineering costs will be nontrivial, and much of the hardware we are forced to run on does not even support this functionality.

As an analog, when we use integer based nets and switch between 16-bit and 8-bit integers, we see an unacceptable level of degradation, even though there is a modest speedup and we can use slightly larger neural nets. I'm very wary of anything with a mantissa much smaller than 16 bits for that reason--those few bits seem to make a significant difference, at least for what we're doing. We're solving a very difficult constrained optimization problem using markov chains in real time, and if the observational features are lower fidelity, the optimization search will run out of time to explore the search space effectively before the result is returned to the rest of the system. It's possible that the sensitivity of our optimization algorithm to input quality is the issue here, not the fundamental usefulness of FP16, but I'm still quite skeptical. If this were a "slam dunk", I'd expect to see it move through the literature in a wave like the Restricted Boltzmann Machine did.

Oh, and thank you for the like (great reading) and the thoughtful reply. Not always easy to find on niche topics online.

This is by far the best comment I've ever seen regarding this sort of algorithmic labor management.

Normally I'm all for this sort of thing--my company is a client and uses it to handle large bursts of data processing quickly--but the information symmetry argument is a powerful one. Also, there doesn't seem to be a lot of competition in this space, which might otherwise ameliorate a lot of the problems induced by the "take it or leave it" bargaining approach.

The analysis provided by the article is absurd, but yours seems to lead to the inescapable conclusion that some kind of regulation is necessary to prevent blatant exploitation. Maybe just reducing information asymmetry in some way, or requiring transparency in reports available to the public on the website regarding effective wages paid to workers as a fraction of the minimum and average wages of employees in their respective countries. Surely someone can find an answer to this.

Accidentally posted as anonymous coward, reposting under my actual name.

There's a lot of rounding error with FP16. The neural networks I use are 16-bit integers, which work much, much better, at least for the work I'm doing. Also, do you have a good citation that FP16 neural networks are, overall, more effective than FP32 networks, as you've described?

They have hypergolic-fueled engines on the Dragon spacecraft. They're already in development on a more powerful hypergolic engine that could be useful for a lander.

In 2005 I was a sysadmin at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin. Biggest project I worked on was porting RS 485 serial drivers from a legacy unix system to Linux 2.6 and setting up the HP rack servers which we then shipped down to the pole from New Zealand on a C-130 Hercules. Also, I built a data visualization system in python+django which ran over a 1km-long DSL network between the drilling site and the south pole base. Never got to down there myself (my FTE boss did), but it was a fun project for a student and looks good on the resume and all. Did I mention SSH connections over satellite to Antarctica are pretty slow?

Read the guy's blog. He eats "normal" food on social occasions, or when he just feels like experiencing a certain taste. Soylent is just supposed to be about the vast majority of meals you eat where it's just about fueling your body so you can get on with more important things.

The product being shipped to customers is not being produced in that warehouse. The warehouse in the article was for prototyping. The facility the consumer version is being produced in is an FDA regulated and inspected facility.

The actual product being shipped to customers is being prepared in a fully FDA certified and inspected facility. The place where they were making the prototype formula was just that - a place for prototyping.

Orbital and SpaceX could easily take their craft in for docking themselves, but NASA's rules require them to do it this way. NASA's rules are that nobody is allowed to put something on a trajectory that intercepts the ISS, even for an instant, for any reason. This is the reason that a secondary payload on an earlier Falcon launch wasn't allowed to be put into its desired orbit. An engine failure on the Falcon's first stage required it to take a modified trajectory into orbit, at which point boosting the secondary payload would have required that, for an instant during its boost, its trajectory pass through the ISS. For this to be dangerous, it would have required the engine to fail in the middle of its burn at a very precise instant. NASA disallowed it, so the secondary payload wasn't able to perform its mission.

So, bringing a spacecraft in for docking requires you to put your craft on a collision course. Docking is just a low-speed collision, after all. NASA will not allow this, so anyone bringing payload to the station has to rendezvous and place the craft within range for the ISS to grab it and bring it in.