feral

14 ms·

91.
by feral 7y ago
Thanks for your detailed response. I hope you're right about the inherent safety of modern reactors, even in the face of malevolence. I don't know enough to contradict you. In 1605 Guy Fawkes put enough gunpowder under the UK parl
92.
by feral 7y ago
I feel folks aren't really taking the effort to understand my point here. >Nuclear power plants are designed with scenarios like terrorist attacks in mind Look, the world trade center was 'designed with scenarios like plane cra
93.
by feral 7y ago
>instances of catastrophic failure are known by pretty much everyone. I don't think anyone says we've seen the worst possible failures of nuclear plants. As an extreme example, what if some crazy terrorist deliberately blows on
94.
by feral 7y ago
I'm uncomfortable with this argument. The implied conclusion is that nuclear is safer than coal. That may be true, I don't know. But it's not clear you can argue this from historical data. For comparison, you could argue nucl
95.
by feral 7y ago
This debate isn't that simple. The other side of this isn't that everything magically just gets more accurate. The cost will be withholding true discoveries from the medical community for longer. Imagine you've done a study o
96.
by feral 7y ago
I'm only a middling chess player, but: > (Though I have a suspicion that it's a question of ‘rinse and repeat until I remember all the openings anyway’.) Its not that. There's a lot of interesting principles to learn, afte
97.
by feral 7y ago
Opinion: The tough truth is that improving the world at that scale is mostly about politics. Politics is how the nations allocate resources to problems. You maybe want them to talk about the technical fundamentals of the problem but the imp
98.
by feral 7y ago
> Accusing it of leading to the things you talked about is a non sequitur. I didn't say the replication crisis lead to bad incentives. I cited it as evidence bad incentives exist. > But insisting that its primary problem is that
99.
by feral 7y ago
>I suspect you'd find thousands of academics who dispute your claims. I should have chosen my words more carefully; we can probably find 1000s of academics to dispute a lot of perspectives on academia. > are not systemic and basi
100.
by feral 7y ago
That's naive. Academia isn't some perfect system with perfect incentives. There's plenty of incentive to dress something up as more complex and impressive and using more high powered machinary than needed, e.g. impressing rev
101.
by feral 7y ago
I want to take everything OpenAI says at face value (seem like good folk), but I can't help but wonder at the recent choice to keep GPT2 closed, on what seemed like pretty thin safety arguments to me. Now, the demonstrated ability to p
102.
by feral 7y ago
This is a fair point; its not easy to objectively define value. But I'd say to a first approximation, economic effort defined towards the pursuit of maximising arbitrary stats in a video game, is less likely to be valuable work. That&#
103.
by feral 7y ago
I was intending to agree with the first comment here, and to disagree with the comment I replied to, rather than taking issue with the original article.
104.
by feral 7y ago
> Those who claim to have a societal model where everyone can happily accumulate wealth while benefiting others and hurting nobody, know exactly what they are doing. I'm not claiming that. I'm claiming that activity in the real
105.
by feral 7y ago
If you don't have enough resources to eat or keep warm, that will feel pretty real, right? Loads of people don't have enough to get by. If the system is working properly, you should mostly be able to accumulate wealth only if you
106.
by feral 7y ago
> If all the world is six degrees or less from everybody else, then we could perhaps say people have an average of 45 or so first degree connections to other people (45^6 == population of the world, approximately.) So at two degrees, the
107.
by feral 7y ago
I disagree with your analogy, on the grounds of human factors. If we were talking about budgeting money to detect an asteroid in the first place, the analogy would be spot on. And indeed, we do suck at detection, its a tragedy of the common
108.
by feral 7y ago
Not a specialist, but I don't buy this. In this story, they have a 6-year warning of an asteroid with 35% chance of 700megaton impact. I just know that with that lead time, and with such an aligning mission, humanity would be able to d
109.
by feral 7y ago
I am completely convinced the problem was the invite-only launch, as others have said; let me explain why I think this: Facebook used its invite-only (campus-only, .edu only) natural to build status. However, a college campus is a dense su
110.
by feral 7y ago
> These are very small evaluation sets for deep learning. Evaluation is a statistics question, and it doesn't matter that the deep learning model used is high capacity and needs a lot of training data. There's nothing inherentl
111.
by feral 7y ago
> These are just some ideas, there could be any number of confounding factors. There _could_ be. But when the source dataset was carefully gathered for a competition and the academics are saying "Broad and international participatio
112.
by feral 7y ago
Look, I'm not a domain expert in the medical side of this, but the paper says they used a dataset, described in it's referenced paper as: "This challenge leveraged a database of dermoscopic skin images from the ISIC Data Arch
113.
by feral 7y ago
If you make a dermatologist 5x more efficient, don't you replace 80% of them? Or even better, allow them to spend more time on the hardest cases. And allow people with no access to a dermatologist now, access to a machine almost as goo
114.
by feral 7y ago
First off, if I'm reading correctly, it outperformed on its test set. This is different as it doesn't get to see that at any point before it's final. If the authors have done a diligent job here, that should be good evidence
115.
Wernher von Braun on how to reach the Moon (1955) [video](youtube.com)
8 points by feral 8y ago|1 comments
116.
by feral 8y ago
Or they'd have used something else to fetch files from the Internet, maybe something they wrote themselves. It wouldn't be as robust and reliable and probably it'd have security bugs. And the car would be a little more expens
117.
by feral 8y ago
Pretty interesting use of 'assume good faith' there! > people in the community know and whisper among themselves If no one else, tenured academics should be calling out bunk in their fields, or are failing, IMO.
118.
by feral 8y ago
https://home.cern/about/updates/2015/10/welcome-cern "As such, a domain that limits CERN to one country doesn’t acknowledge the international, and increasingly global, nature of the organization, no
119.
by feral 8y ago
> It wouldn't be worth anyone's time to try to correct the issue or write to the journal. I don't see how a research scientist could say this; something seems culturally wrong there. Nature is a pretty serious publication.
120.
by feral 8y ago
I think your argument is mostly running into selection issues. If its the middle ages and the only people who have learned to read are the very most educated part of the the population, then the average printed material is going to be intel

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