maxander

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331.
by maxander 9y ago
I clicked on this article expecting a graph of an exponential curve, and they utterly failed to deliver. Who cares how many cars they’re making, if they can’t make a decent exponential curve? That is the #1 priority product of any Calif
332.
by maxander 9y ago
There is almost a 0% chance that the GP, as (presumably) an educated and well-fed citizen of a first-world country, has a serious vitamin deficiency. That's not the failure case that he's avoiding. My guess would be that that &q
333.
by maxander 9y ago
The article is a bit hyperbolic. Nutrition is complex and hard-to-study, the research is under various distorting pressures from several industries, and it's been gotten disastrously wrong in the past, but such is science- science i
334.
by maxander 9y ago
Increasingly, you can simply contract out the physical end of experimentation out to dedicated commercial labs (at least in the biological sciences.) It takes a bit of money (well, a lot, even) but it’s much friendlier to small-scale enter
335.
by maxander 9y ago
And this is the climate while tremendously powerful corporations consider personal data collection to be a lynchpin of their moneymaking strategy (i.e., advertising.) Once internet advertising becomes broadly recognized as being not wort
336.
by maxander 9y ago
This is why open source software works so well- layers of duct tape transition seamlessly into the thing itself.
337.
by maxander 9y ago
There's going to be a bunch of these "OMG a robot car hit someone!!!" stories that then morph into "the robot actually had nothing to do with it." Perhaps it will finally cue people in to how intrinsically dangerou
338.
by maxander 9y ago
The article doesn't really say how the algorithm works aside from "they use machine learning," but the basic principle turns out to be pretty simple. In the work by Amgartden , they classify lengths of sequenced DNA by looki
339.
by maxander 9y ago
Terrorists are a simple-to-state example of the problem, but if that doesn't sound convincing, remember that most (or all?) of these fabs are in a region dominated by a superpower that is moving towards dictatorial authority [1], and a
340.
by maxander 9y ago
This sort of thing shows how scarily centralized electronics production is. If a disruption at one plant can take out 3.5% of global production, how many of these plants are there? On the order of 30? Imagine a terrorist group decides to
341.
by maxander 9y ago
Everything in biological systems depends on everything else; all variables are global, all methods are public, and all definitions are recursive. It's all spaghetti code- there is nothing like the separation of functionality that we
342.
by maxander 9y ago
Your idea of "morphogenetic fields" is fundamentally incorrect; re-read the wikipedia article you linked to, the word "electricity" doesn't appear in it at all . It's talking about "fields" of chem
343.
by maxander 9y ago
Score one for the deist "divine watchmaker" idea.
344.
by maxander 9y ago
If they can make a "flying taxi" airplane that isn't unsafe, isn't obnoxiously loud, isn't energy-guzzling, doesn't require undue landing/takeoff space, and is scalable beyond the ultra-elite, great! But
345.
by maxander 9y ago
Just for the sake of asking interesting questions, and not in contradiction of your point about “most people’s conception of God”: Roughly speaking, the “God hypothesis” is simply that the ultimate cause is a person of some sort. What is
346.
by maxander 9y ago
I suspect the issue is that, if whole classes of chips that are important for military purposes (wireless communications, for example) are made exclusively by China, they could put in backdoors and other traps that would compromise U.S. m
347.
by maxander 9y ago
What we ought to have is a blackout shade that will automatically roll down at night and back up in the morning, when we want sunlight to start waking us up.
348.
by maxander 9y ago
Are you saying someone has to either be a paragon of virtue or just give up on ethics altogether? No one is at either extreme. As you pointed out, even wearing clothes makes you complicit in the moral turpitude of pennies-for-the-hour o
349.
by maxander 9y ago
One wonders if we've made technology unnecessarily complicated. In order to build something like the Oculus Rift, they obviously needed expertise in hardware design, optics, display technology, manufacturing, user interface design, et
350.
by maxander 9y ago
It's possible to participate in injustice in a multiplicity of implicit, difficult-to-see ways and yet still object to participating in explicit, obvious injustices. Doing so is still far preferable to not objecting to obvious inj
351.
by maxander 9y ago
Russia is a perennial political issue for most of the Western world, yet has a GDP somewhere around that if Spain. They’re not China- if they try to make internet giants now to their authoritarian norms, the giants are going to realize the
352.
by maxander 9y ago
I think the key question of the article is finally asked explicitly near the end: > Why are we the way we are? Is Kenneth Eng a schizophrenic whose illness finds expression through florid racism? Or is he a racist asshole who is also sch
353.
by maxander 9y ago
Another case where “the winning move is not to play.”
354.
by maxander 9y ago
One wonders what these people are thinking, when the very suggestion of having these weapons available to use puts the whole planet incrementally nearer to nuclear catastrophe. The cost-benefit analysis is so painfully slanted against any
355.
by maxander 9y ago
As a Bostonian, I am absolutely mystified by this “never met anyone who mentioned that they have recently eaten seafood” thing. Sure fish is hard to find in middle America, but California and Florida? Fish on restaurant menus, at least, c
356.
by maxander 9y ago
> These changes are coming, and we need to tell the truth and the whole truth. We need to find the jobs that AI can’t do and train people to do them. We need to reinvent education. These will be the best of times and the worst of times.
357.
by maxander 9y ago
Yeah yeah, I’m excited too. But it figures this is being done by Amazon- for years they’ve been out to condition us to like having all our needs met by an inhuman yet weirdly friendly technological regime. Good odds the Minds all sound re
358.
by maxander 9y ago
DNA sequencing is mature and, if anything, almost getting to be late in the game for new startup entries. Determining gene function through ML methods is a whole different thing, and that's what I, and the OP, was talking about.
359.
by maxander 9y ago
This is a course on a fairly novel field of research, not a method to do anything remotely consumer-facing.
360.
by maxander 9y ago
Have you ever worked retail? There was presumably much much more to that guys job than reading books to kids.

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