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Comment Re:Especially right before a midterm election (Score 2) 54

"Nothing can be fixed while people continue to believe there's a difference between Team Red and Team Blue when the same people own both Team Red and Team Blue"

Yeah, people have been spouting that off for decades. The funny thing is, whenever Team Red or Team Blue is in charge you see a real difference.

I've also never heard the dorm room philosophers who think both parties are the same ever explain exactly why if the same people own both Team Red and Team Blue why the billionaires spend so much time, money, and energy trying to get Team Red into office. Shouldn't they just relax?

Comment Re:The researchers concluded... Hmmm. (Score 1) 43

IIUC (I'm no specialist in the field!!):

No, but one of the possible meanings of "dark matter" is "black holes created during the big bang". It's tricky to make it work, and it requires some adjustment in how stable black holes are, but it's possible. The problem is that it would require that they evaporate more quickly and quietly than theory says that they should.

Note that these would be relatively small black holes. Possibly the larger ones became the nuclei around which the first generation of stars collected.

Comment Re:Rent-seeking (Score 5, Informative) 450

That design assumed a dispersed network. The networks have gotten increasingly concentrated. If there's only one connection, you can't route around it.

OTOH, SpaceX might reap large increases in business, because they would be the only route that wasn't broken. (I don't think Iran has orbital capability.)

Comment Author seems unclear on music technology. (Score 3, Informative) 19

"Despite the limitations of the 1993-era sound card drivers,"

The Gravis Ultrasound ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), as well as other soundcards which *USED WAVETABLE SYNTHESIS* were available.

Yeah, FM-synthesis sounds like a robot. The SNES SPC-7000 was wavetable. The Sega Genesis used a Z80 for FM synthesis. A GUS card was supperior to the SPC-7000.

If you want to know how good the music is, either run DOOM in DOSBOX with a correct GUS Wavetable patch set (which will let you know how *ACTUALLY GOOD* the music is). Alternatively, the Doom & Doom 2 remaster on Steam has an actual band covering the actual tracks. That also sounds awesome.

Lol; I guess the author wasn't aware of the state of the art in 1993 if that's what they wrote.

Comment Re:Everyone knows these are bad news right? (Score 1) 61

You're assuming that everyone is one extreme or the other. And not only is this wrong, there aren't only two sides, no matter what the news says.

OTOH, Flock *seems* to be an example of the "benefits of the surveillance state". I.e., we only hear about the generally approved of uses. If you were to believe that those were the only uses, I'd think you a simpleton. And it's impossible for me to make a decision that they're a good thing without knowing what those other uses are.

Comment Re:Training data (Score 2) 109

Your post was quite reasonable, and probably true, until you wrote "AIs aren't capable of reasoning". There *are* definitions of reasoning for which that it true, but they aren't the ones in common use. Cicero would use that kind of definition in his "school of rhetoric", where he taught people how to win arguments". Socrates would not. He was trying to find truth.

Clearly AIs have limited reason. They can (at least in principle) do perfect logic, but the difference between that an reason is not well defined. (And logic can prove that you can't prove algebra to be self-consistent.) To me reason is evaluating a set of data and a goal, and using logic to plot a nearly-optimal path to achieve the goal. I think where AIs are generally most deficient is in their goals, though obviously they also have an imperfect understanding of the current state. (Well, so do people.)

That said, there are many areas where current AIs seem deficient when compared with people. This doesn't mean or imply that they don't have a modest amount of the features that they are deficient in, but merely that we expect them to have more. Think of capabilities as being gradients rather than boolean variables. This is commonly called "jagged capabilities". They're better at some things than most people are, and worse at other things than most people are.

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