maxander

67 ms·

601.
by maxander 10y ago
It is quite possible that most of the new inventions will be coming from China, and also most of China's scientific production will be rubbish. China has been great with scaling up its scientific community, but the problem of establ
602.
by maxander 10y ago
This is an honest request for clarification: Are you serious?
603.
by maxander 10y ago
Any aliens that would drop by Earth are presumably far more advanced than us. Their technology is far more sophisticated and miniaturized than ours. And if we accept that the Singularity idea has any validity at all, they've long sin
604.
by maxander 10y ago
>I think this [AI beating humans at facial recognition] is scarier than most people give it credit for. It’s no big deal when computers beat humans at chess – human brains haven’t been evolving specific chess modules. But face recognitio
605.
by maxander 10y ago
To be honest, that's precisely what had been on my mind. Did you know Vinge is himself a computer scientist? IIRC, there's a point in A Deepness In The Sky where its implied that the protagonists' interstellar ramscoop ships
606.
by maxander 10y ago
Windowing systems and GUI modules and so on and so on, all give us powerful capabilities but also come with their own conceptual frameworks that need to be understood and plugged into each other. If both the module designers and the engine
607.
by maxander 10y ago
A lovely poem about how our society separates technological production from the human culture that it supports. There's much here that one could already know without having really appreciated. Not too long ago, I was talking with a
608.
by maxander 10y ago
What makes it slightly worse are the odds that the space will sit unused for an arbitrary length of time. Down the street from there is a big "space available" sign that three-odd years ago was a decent movie theater; how much mo
609.
by maxander 10y ago
The poster might want to comment on why he considered this article in particular worthy of posting. Crystal structure studies come out all the time, and at a glance this doesn't look like anything other than routine molecular biology
610.
by maxander 10y ago
According to the easily-found stats on Wikipedia [1,2], the MRO cost $720 million, whereas the Greek bailout given in 2010 (alone) was €110 ($119) billion . Notice the "m" in the first and the "b" in the second- your &
611.
by maxander 10y ago
Really the problem is that scheduling a drug makes it illegal (or at least, incredibly difficult ) to do research on. I'm not a fan of drug regulation either, but even considering the standpoint of those that are, letting these thing
612.
by maxander 10y ago
I suppose in a sort of realpolitik sense, in order to recognized such a "nation" would need to have appreciable geopolitical impact. Impact means resources, and having resources, for a state without natural resources, means col
613.
by maxander 10y ago
Else Heart.Break() has definite aesthetic charm, but the programming required (as far as I played, at least) is pretty shallow- geared towards clever highschoolers, I suspect. A collaboration between them and Zachtronics would be lovely .
614.
by maxander 10y ago
Work, I gather, though the game also includes a bunch of (to laymen) dense schematics, one of which is indeed in (what looks like) chinese. So. All of this talk about how miserable embedded development is makes it sound like these guys nee
615.
by maxander 10y ago
> Jason Healey, a senior research scholar on cyber issues at Columbia University, said the Pentagon’s Cyber Command should disrupt Russian hacking operations. “Go after their command and control,” he said. “ ‘Counteroffensive’ is the key
616.
by maxander 10y ago
And I'm arguing that, in any other issue, you would think "controlling for background statistics" in a formal sense is unnecessary. I'm not telling you not to think, quite the opposite. Think of this: In a country with
617.
by maxander 10y ago
Thank you kindly for directly demonstrating my point . You are exactly the target audience for the data the article is talking about. In most other aspects of daily life, people are willing and able to make judgements from circumstantial
618.
by maxander 10y ago
Its difficult to quantify teleology, but people make the obvious judgements. What it does is track police initiated violence. What it's for , given the context it exists in, is almost certainly to advance public acceptance of the
619.
by maxander 10y ago
Ok, the vision of scientists as an ascetic class only appealing to the dyed-in-the-wool seekers of knowledge has some appeal. But, there's a problem there, too- sure, Einstein would still have published his breakthroughs, but many of
620.
by maxander 10y ago
As other commenters have noted, they're not completely primitive. And while yes, their technical know-how is far behind South Korea's, with the state of modern cybersecurity its equivalently harder to keep people out than it is t
621.
by maxander 10y ago
I would have a hard time swallowing the argument that we pay scientists too much, or that society respects them too much. A distant observer might think this could be the case since, from their perspective, what they see as "scienti
622.
by maxander 10y ago
No one, including Musk, says that colonizing Mars is a "good" idea economically or practically. This guy's arguments are fundamentally missing the point. But here's one advantage Mars does have- it's far from oth
623.
by maxander 10y ago
So, basically, this is the thing in a crime detective movie where the forensic analyst is looking at a terrible pixelated surveillance camera still and says "enhance," and the computer magically increases the resolution to reveal
624.
by maxander 10y ago
Given that the costs of global warming are talked in the trillions, this means that this silly thought experiment would actually be a rationally economical solution . Which just illustrates how terrible global warning really is, I suppose.
625.
by maxander 10y ago
I mean, if that sort of long-term mortality risk is a big factor for the colonists, things are going really well . Even if all of Musk's plans work out, living somewhere as inhospitable as Mars (not to mention falling out of the sky
626.
by maxander 10y ago
What kinds of car people use is irrelevant as long as the power grid is predominantly powered by fossil fuels. The number to watch is percentage of "green" power generation, which changes far too slowly to respond to market lurch
627.
by maxander 10y ago
I'd be curious to see a statistical analysis of how unlikely it is for there to be predictions of something like this on any given timeframe. Whenever Twitter got sold (or didn't), what are the odds that some vaguely recognizab
628.
by maxander 10y ago
I'm vaguely surprised that Android phones don't let you just look around with the camera from any sidewalk and tell you where you are based on comparisons of what it sees to known street view images. That sort of capability would
629.
by maxander 10y ago
> Co-founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, Palantir... It is a continuous marvel that Peter Thiel, nominally an outspoken and prominent libertarian, is partially responsible for one of the most insidious powers that the U.S. gove
630.
by maxander 10y ago
There are lots of streetview (or Total View or whatever) images, though. Wouldn't be surprised if done official had said streetview had to be censored and then vastly underestimated how large an undertaking that was, so there's

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